Life and Other Near-Death Experiences (10 page)

EIGHTEEN

I would spend the rest of my vacation in solitude. After all, I had tried human connection and failed spectacularly. Sequestering myself away from all potentially irritating and/or murderous people, I reasoned, was the only way to protect what was left of my dignity and enjoy the little time I had left on my trip.

Said plan was rudely interrupted by Tom’s repeated calls. (I
did
turn the ringer off, but it was not enough to silence the repetitive buzzing or dim the screen glowing in the middle of the night as Tom phone-stalked me with a vigor he had never applied to many aspects of our marriage, including but not limited to adhering to our budget; attempting to fix things that broke in the apartment; and marital relations, particularly of the nonmissionary variety.) Seven calls later, I realized that he would not leave me in peace until I spoke with him, so the evening after my dinner with Shiloh, I finally picked up.

“Libby, why have you been avoiding me?” Tom.

“Gosh, I just don’t know, Tom.”

“Tell her you’re sorry, you idiot.” O’Reilly, hissing in the background.

“What the hell is O’Reilly doing listening in on our conversation?” Me, obviously.

“Li—” Tom.

“Listen to me, you piece of spit. If you’re going to have the balls to break up our marriage, then have the balls to deal with the fallout.”

“But I told you, I don’t want to break up our marriage.”

“He loves you, Libby!” O’Reilly.

“You’re my best friend.” Tom.

“I thought I was your best friend!” O’Reilly, who I was certain was blasted. Apparently Tom had been forced to lower his liquor standards because O’Reilly was sheltering him.

“No, Tom, I assure you that I am not. Best friends share secrets with each other.” Me, attempting to ignore my eyeballs, which had started to drip in an unfortunate way.

“I am so sorry, Libby. I never meant to hurt you.”

“He really didn’t, Libby!” O’Reilly, hollering in the distance.

“Shut up, Michael.” Jess.

“I don’t care if you’re sorry, Tom. Sorry doesn’t help at all. Please, do not call me again unless you’re able to borrow a vehicle from Marty McFly and go back in time and undo our entire relationship. Now go away.” Me. Click.

I went for a stroll on the beach to try to shake it off.
You are bigger than this, you are better than this,
I told myself, but that only made me think about Tom’s mantra phase, during which he read stack after stack of self-help books in an attempt to catapult himself out of his internship rut and into a real job. In hindsight, it occurred to me that Tom’s positive self-talk probably had very little to do with employment.

How long had he been deluding himself? The very morning of my D-day, he woke me up by kissing me and telling me he loved me. (Just thinking about it made me start to cry again. Did he suspect that he would soon tell me the truth? Was his love really guilt sandwiched in the affection that comes from spending so many years with another human being?) The whole thing was incredibly confusing. During childhood, Paul liked trucks and guns and football, all the stereotypical boy things, but we were barely into our first month of kindergarten when he proudly told my parents that he wanted to marry Michael Jackson. Our family was religious—church on Sundays, prayer before meals, memorizing large chunks of the Bible together—but though those around us were quick to condemn homosexuality, my parents never tried to convince Paul that the way he felt was wrong, so he never tried to hide who he was. Thus, the concept of coming out later in life seemed like something that happened on television.

Moreover, though Tom’s father was a mouthy drunk who didn’t hold back on his views of any and all perceived forms of sexual fornication, Tom happily flouted him in so many obvious ways—his calm demeanor, his big-city life and love of beautiful things, his alcohol aversion—that it never occurred to me Tom would feel the need to conceal such an integral aspect of himself.

While I might have given him a mouthful on the phone, I sort of felt bad for him. I
definitely
felt bad for us. If only it had happened at a time when we could have worked through it together in some sort of healthy manner—not that I would attempt to turn him straight, as I knew I was more likely to run into my mother riding a unicorn down Michigan Avenue than to expect Tom’s sexuality to be deprogrammed, like it was a DVR. But I didn’t want to hate him. I wanted to comfort him, as I had when his father showed up to his graduation party trashed, or when he was fired from his first postgrad school job after three disastrous weeks.

Correction: I wanted to
want
to comfort him.

Or perhaps this desire was the ghost of Libby past, trying to deceive me as she had so powerfully managed to do in so many aspects of my life.

Raj called on the way back from my walk. “You won’t believe this!”

“Try me.”

“You have three offers on the apartment.”

I smiled; the universe did owe me a favor. “Who offered?”

“Two couples and a single mom.”

“Excellent. Let’s go with the single mom.”

“Don’t you care what they’re offering? The mom’s offer is the lowest.”

“Get the papers drawn up.”

“You’re in charge,” he said, but I knew he was not pleased.

“I’ll up your commission to seven percent.”

Raj grunted.

“Eight.”

“Deal.”

When I returned to the beach house, I saw that Milagros had tacked a note to my door. “Spanish, six p.m.?” it read. Cocktail hour was as good a time as any, and despite my vow of solitude, I did want to learn Spanish. At least Milagros wouldn’t lecture me about the disease she didn’t know about.

I went to Milagros’s patio as instructed. Again she had a visitor; this evening it was a young woman jiggling a small girl on her knee.

“
Gracias
, Milagros,” the woman said and reached into her pocket.

Milagros waved off the woman’s attempt to slip her what looked like a bill.
“De nada, de nada,”
she insisted, and the woman hugged her and left with the little girl trailing behind.

“I was just reading Vicky’s palm,” Milagros explained. She patted the chair where the woman and her daughter had just been. “Here, sit down.”

Tentatively, I obliged.

“Now give me your hand.”

“What about our Spanish lesson?”

“We’ll get there. Now let’s see,” she said, taking my arm and unfurling the fist I didn’t realize I was making. She stared at my open palm for a minute, then ran a finger down the long line closest to my thumb. “
Esta es
—that means ‘this is.’”

“Esta es,”
I repeated.

“Good!” she said enthusiastically. “
Esta es tu linea de la vida.
Your lifeline,
mija
.”

“Okay,” I said hesitantly.

“Vida,”
she insisted. “Try saying it.”

“Vee-da.”

“Ay,”
she said.

“Ay,”
I said.

“No,” she laughed. “That’s me talking to myself. I was going to say that you have a nice, strong lifeline. Like mine,” she said, holding up her hand so I could see the deep crevice running through the maze of wrinkles that composed the map of her palm.

“Well, that can’t be accurate,” I said, taking my hand back.

“Why’s that? You don’t want to get old like Milly?”

“It’s just that I have a health condition,” I mumbled.

“Whatever it is, that hand of yours says you’re going to beat it.”

“You’re just saying that because you don’t want to make me feel bad.”

“No,” Milagros said, shaking her head. She took my hand again and stuck her pointer finger into the center of the line. “This is where you’re at in your life right now, more or less. See how there’s a break? Usually a circle or spot there means sickness, but a split like that means heartache. Your break is wide, so it’s bad, and it means a lot more than anything I would see on your love line,” she said, pointing at the swooped horizontal line across the top of my hand. “Although that does tell me that you, like me, have bad taste in men.”

I managed a small laugh, even though I was thinking about Shiloh and how icy he was as he drove me back last night.

“Now, don’t get all sad on me,
mija
.
See these?” she said, poking at almost imperceptible lines just under my pinky. “I see
niños
. Children. A happy future.”

I didn’t like the direction this was taking. “I can’t have kids.”

She gave me what Paul liked to call
the look
.
“There are ways. But enough of that. I’ll tell you more when you’re ready.” She walked inside her house and returned with two glasses of sangria, which we drank as she attempted to teach me basic greetings and how to ask for directions
en español
. I left an hour later with a promise to return in a few days for my next lesson.

Palm reading was nothing but a bunch of mumbo jumbo, the type of fortune-telling voodoo my Sunday school teachers had warned would send me straight into the arms of the devil. But what if Milagros was half-right? The heartbreak aspect was certainly accurate. What if I should have had a chance to live a long life, but that chance had been intercepted by some cruel karmic force—or a bad choice on my part? What if those long hours at the office had sent stress hormones pinballing around my body until they wreaked so much havoc that my cells began to spontaneously multiply? What if years of eschewing sweat-producing activities and ordering fries over salad had finally caught up to me? Because let’s be honest: guilt was playing on repeat in my head, and the lyrics sounded a lot like
It’s all your fault, it’s all your fault, nah nah nah nah nah, this is all your fault.

I ate dinner at home and decided to call it an early night. My stomach hurt, badly, and I was increasingly dubious about my ability to withstand pain for long periods of time. If I could ride out the rest of my vacation with the help of Advil and my new friend Ambien, perhaps Paul would find me a pain specialist in New York to help me through the worst of it. Doctors were handing out OxyContin like candy these days, weren’t they?

As I crawled into bed and waited for sleep to set in, I wondered if I really had it in me to make it through the next three weeks without assistance. I was my mother’s daughter, but as with her high cheekbones and dark hair, I had not inherited her grit or gumption. I felt that I could not handle one more bad thing, which only deepened the guilt and shame, especially when I thought about all the people in the world suffering far worse things at that very second.

I pulled the covers tight around me and tried to breathe into the pain, like I’d heard women were often advised to do during labor. I wanted insight into my mother’s experience, and now I had it. There was no one but myself to blame.

NINETEEN

After eight days in Vieques, my carnation-pink sunburn finally peeled away to reveal skin best described as “palest tan,” so I decided it was safe to sunbathe once again. I pulled on my tankini, grabbed the makings of a light lunch, and walked out my back door and onto the beach.

It was a busy Saturday, and beachgoers stretched out for a mile in either direction, while a man with a cooler on wheels strolled back and forth calling,
“Agua! Cerveza!”
I located an open spot close to the water, spread my towel across the sand, and lay back, instantly sated. The day was dazzlingly bright but not too hot, and the heat felt delicious on my skin.

I must have been there a good thirty minutes before a cloud rolled in and blocked the light. I frowned, hoping a storm wouldn’t surface before I had a chance to flip over and toast my back.

“Hey,” said the cloud.

My eyes flew open.

Shiloh laughed. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Sure you didn’t,” I said. “What brings you to my beach?”

He sat down next to me in the sand. Even behind his omnipresent shades, I could tell that he was in a good mood. “
Your
beach? Well, let’s see . . . boredom?”

I smirked. “More like you broke into my house and couldn’t find me to terrify, so you decided to wander until you spotted your target.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Seriously, though. I’m sorry about the other night. I shouldn’t have pried.”

Ah-ha. This was a pity visit. “You don’t have to feel sorry for me.”

“That’s not what I said.” The flirty combativeness he’d just been using on me had been replaced with what I felt was a too-gentle tone of voice.

“True,” I said. “Even so, I hope you know that you don’t have to check up on me. I’m fine.”

“Who’s checking up? I’m in Vieques for the next few days, and I was going to the beach anyway.”

I regarded him. He looked sincere, but as I mentioned, I no longer regarded myself as an accurate judge of character. “So why did you? Pry, I mean?”

He shrugged. “I like you, Libby. You’re not like most women I fly into the sea.”

“Har, har,” I said, though the fourteen-year-old in me was thinking,
Oh. My. Gosh. He said he likes me!

“Will you let me make it up to you? I want to show you something pretty amazing.”

“Let me guess: in your pants.”

He laughed. “Whoa, there, lady. I don’t know what kind of little boys you’ve been spending time with, but I’m not trying to trick you into doing anything smutty.”

Really? This was disappointing. At the same time, our last outing had not gone well. As I tried to come up with a reason to say no, I found myself staring at his forearms. Which were strong, and led to an equally strong pair of hands, which looked alluringly nimble. Even if he did have some kind of savior complex, I decided it was worth it to give him another chance.

“Okay,” I agreed. “What should I wear?”

“What you have on now is perfect.”

“You
are
a pervert!” I said, pulling my towel around me. I was kidding, but also aware that the only thing between him and my jiggly bits was a thin layer of fabric.

“We’re going boating. Although you should bring a T-shirt and shorts, too.” Intriguing.

“What time?”

“Um . . . let’s say six thirty. Looking forward to it.” He stood and brushed off his shorts, then began walking back toward the road.

“Hey,” I called after him.

He spun around. “What’s up?”

“I don’t even know your last name.”

He wore a mischievous grin. “So you don’t. It’s Velasquez.”

“All right, Shiloh Velasquez,” I said. “See you tonight.”

Several hours later, we were driving through a series of back roads. Neither of us spoke, but the silence wasn’t as awkward as before.

“Here we are,” he said as we pulled into a sandy lot where a few other cars were parked.

As I got out of the Jeep, I spotted some plastic kayaks propped outside a shed. Just past the shed was a row of bushes and trees, which parted in the center, revealing water not two hundred feet ahead.

“Are we going kayaking?” I asked. “Because I’m not very sporty.”

“Good, because I’m not either. The only thing I’m actually good at is flying.”

“Debatable,” I grinned.

“Your point,” he said, smiling back.

It was getting dark, and Shiloh held up a can of bug repellent and nodded toward the water. “It’s no accident that they call this place Mosquito Bay. Let me spray you.” He looked me up and down. “You’re probably going to want to take off your shirt and shorts.”

I blushed, grateful that it was nearly dark out. “Okay,” I said, and stripped down to my tankini. Goosebumps surfaced as he coated my arms and legs with the chemically cooled mist.

“Will you?” he asked, handing me the can. Then he took off his shirt, at which point my entire body began to blush. There is something extremely intimate about a man removing half his clothes, standing with his lean, tan body outstretched, and waiting for you to do something to him. Even if that something is spraying him down with an industrial-strength pesticide.

“Thanks,” he said, oblivious to the drool pooling in my mouth.

I swallowed and attempted to sound blasé. “Not a problem.”

We walked to the shed, where he handed me a red kayak and took a yellow one for himself. Then he grabbed an oar and a life jacket for each of us.

“We can just take these?”

“Yeah, the guy who runs this outfit is a buddy of mine. He’s already got a group out there, and he knows we’re coming.”

We dragged the small boats down a path to a murky-looking pond resembling the small lake my family used to vacation at. “What is this place?” I asked him.

“It’s a bay connected to the sea, but it has an entirely different ecosystem from any other body of water on the island. Than in the world, really. You’ll see,” he said as he pushed my kayak away from the shore.

This sounded vaguely ominous, but I decided to invoke old-school Libby. “Great!” I said cheerfully, and began to paddle.

The water was still and clear, and it was easy to navigate the small plastic boat. It was getting late, though; by the time we reached the center of the bay, the sun had disappeared, and the moon was barely a sliver in the sky. “Are we going to be able to find our way back?” I asked over my shoulder. That was when I realized the water around Shiloh’s kayak was sort of glowing. And—whoa—mine was, too. “What the . . . ?”

Shiloh laughed heartily. “I was wondering when you’d notice. It’s bioluminescence. The bay is filled with tiny organisms called dinoflagellates, and they glow when they’re disturbed. It works best with your body, though.” At once, I remembered what my father had told me about the bay, and how I thought he’d sounded mildly demented at the time.

“Want to get in?” he asked.

“Really?”

He nodded toward a group of kayakers on the other side of the bay, who were climbing out of their boats. “Although I can’t promise not to drown you, I promise I’ll try not to.”

I carefully lowered myself into the water. It was tepid but dense—thick, even—and my body bobbed in place with little help from the life jacket. Shiloh paddled over and tethered our kayaks together with a rope. Then he dropped out of his kayak and swam around to me, leaving a blue-green stream of bioluminescence behind him.

“When Spanish explorers first came to Vieques, they thought the glowing meant the bay was possessed by the devil, so they tried to block it off,” he said, pointing toward a narrow passage at the far end of the bay. “That trapped the leaves of the mangrove trees lining the bay, which the dinoflagellates feed off. So the organism grew stronger and brighter, and the Spanish left the whole area untouched. That’s why it’s still like this today.”

“That’s amazing,” I murmured, watching my hands glow as I lazily dog-paddled in place.

“I didn’t want you to miss it, and if you go when the moon is too full, you don’t get the full effect. Now,” he said, swimming even closer, “lie back and look up.”

As I leaned back, my legs floated to the surface, as though my entire body had been rendered weightless by this magical water. I gasped as the sky came into view. It was a deep black carpet blinking with some of the brightest, whitest stars I’d ever seen.

“Not a lot of light pollution out here,” Shiloh said. I could tell from his tone that he was pleased that I was wowed.

“And to think that they’re not even there,” I said, mostly to myself. It was my dad who first told me it was likely many, if not most, stars burn up long before we see them; all that’s really left is their light, making its way through the ether.

“That depends on how you look at it,” Shiloh said.

“How’s that?”

“Well, technically, we’re seeing balls of nuclear fusion from billions of years before we were born. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m experiencing them at this very moment, so they exist in the present. They happened in the past, but they’re still real now.”

“Huh.” I stared at the sky, thinking about space and time and my mother, who was both my past and my present, and who, for all I knew, was up there twinkling somewhere.

He asked if I knew why stars shine. I confessed that I did not.

“They’re big clusters of plasma held together by their own gravity, and they can’t help but continually crush themselves inward. Their self-destruction creates friction. Which comes to us as light.”

“I didn’t know you were into science.”

“I do make my living testing Newton’s laws of motion.”

“Touché.”

“Anyway, I like astronomy. It has a lot to tell us about the human condition.”

I wasn’t sure what he was trying to get at, though I suspected it had something to do with my cancer. But I didn’t want to ruin the moment with an explanation I didn’t want to hear, so I swam around on my back, and soon forgot all about it.

Which was incredibly easy to do. Around me, my skin glowed; above me, the sky was lit with remnants of the past. And to think that my mother had been here—she had swum in this water and seen this very sky! I could not help but feel incredibly grateful that I’d stayed alive long enough to experience it.

“Thank you for this,” I said to Shiloh quietly.

“You’re most welcome,” he said, and when he reached through the water for my hand, I gave it willingly.

I was slightly disappointed when he released my hand a few minutes later and suggested we head back. Disguising my reluctance, I agreed, and we paddled to the shore, toweled off, and got in the Jeep as though we hadn’t just had a moment. (
Which might be exactly how he was viewing the situation,
I told myself.)

“Thanks again,” I said as he pulled up in front of the beach house.

“No problem. Thanks for coming with me.” He looked at me, then back at his steering wheel.

“Okay. I’ll see you around,” I said, and let myself out before he could reach across to open my door.

“Sounds good,” he said behind me.

I could hear his Jeep idling in the driveway as I unlocked the front door, but I didn’t turn around to wave good-bye. I was tough! I was a diamond encased in an impermeable layer of shellac! I did
not
need a forty-two-year-old half-baked crush to make sweet, sweet love to me, gosh darn it.

These affirmations did not stop the tears from coming as I let myself into the empty beach house. It wasn’t even Shiloh, per se, who was the problem. It was the whole of it: the once-in-a-lifetime experience at the bay. The aching loneliness of being discarded by a husband who couldn’t even admit he’d discarded me. The end of my life, drawing nearer and nearer still.

I walked to the porch, my sandals slapping against the tile as if to remind me I was alone. I did not bother turning the lights on.

I threw myself down on the wicker sofa and watched the waves through the glass.

I put my arm across my forehead like the heroine of a Victorian novel and cried.

I cried and cried; and when that was through, I cried some more. I could feel my face swell with salt and sorrow, but I could sooner lasso a star than stop.

Then I heard a rapping on the glass window, and I peed myself—just a little.

I wiped my eyes and opened the door. “Damn it, Shiloh,” I said, trying not to sound choked up.

“Libby,” he said, and he took my puffy face between his callused hands and kissed me in a way that I had never been kissed before. It was rough. It was tender. It was absolutely, undeniably
not
the kiss of a man who didn’t truly like women.

Now, I know, I know: it’s not fair to compare the men you sleep with. Really, it’s not, even if one of those men turned out to not prefer your particular gender.

But as Shiloh picked me up and carried me back to the sofa; as he kissed me until I almost tore my clothes off for him, then took me to the bedroom and undressed us both; as he entered me and made me cry out with primal pleasure, there was no way not to acknowledge what I’d been missing.

And I thought,
Thank you, Tom.

Thank you for your awful, terrible, heartbreaking timing. Because without it, I would have never ended up in Vieques, where I would finally—dear God,
finally
—get properly laid before it was too late.