You Were There Too Read online

  “Five years?”

  “Off and on.”

  “What happened? When you broke up?”

  He sighs. Takes another sip of his drink. “I don’t know. It was right before I left for Australia. She didn’t want me to go. When we met I had just gotten back from my fourth trip with AGOFO—the poultry farm in Oregon—and she liked that I did it. Or said she did. Said it made me interesting. Unlike the cookie-cutter guys she’d been dating. But then it wore on her, I guess. Or she thought I would get tired of it, do it a few more times for the experience and then settle down. With her.”

  “But you didn’t want to.”

  “I guess not. Or I wouldn’t have gone to Australia.”

  We watch the bartender at the far end cut limes and toss them into a square translucent bucket.

  “One time, in college, I wanted to break up with this guy, but we lived in the same dorm. Literally right next door. So I stayed with him until summer break.”

  He jiggles his glass; the ice clinks together. “And?”

  “I’m just saying—never occurred to me to go to Australia.”

  He laughs and we order another round and I ask him about his time there. He tells me about his hosts, Albert and Bettina, and their quaint cottage on the Margaret River; her Vegemite and chip sandwiches wrapped in brown paper; his catchy chants of their hippie motto: Earth care, people fare, then share!

  As I listen to him talk, I’m a little in awe that this is his life—that he jumps from country to country experiencing the world the way others only idly talk about. Why do some people have that—the ability to grab life by the horns and ride it like a bull, hanging on for the pure exhilaration? I always wanted to be that person; I fantasized about backpacking in Europe, flitting from museum to museum, studying the greats, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking Chianti until the wee hours of the morning, dissecting art and existentialism with like-minded souls—the kinds of conversations you can only have in your twenties, when all your thoughts seem eternally fascinating and remarkable.

  But I never did.

  We fall into silence and I fiddle with the straw again. And my mind drifts back to Dr. Saltz’s office. The dreams. Oliver.

  “What next?”

  “Finland, I think. Just sent in my application, actually.”

  “That’s not really what I meant.”

  “I know.”

  We both stare into our drinks as if the remains of melted ice are tea leaves that could tell us our future.

  He pulls out his phone and taps the screen a few times.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking up that Krynchenko book.”

  I chew my bottom lip, thinking. “Do you believe in all that—the psychic stuff she was talking about?”

  “Damn. It’s out of print.” He turns his phone to me. I glance at it and then back at him, waiting. “Do I believe in all that psychic stuff,” he repeats. “No. But I didn’t believe you existed, either, when I started dreaming about you. And yet, here you are.”

  Dreaming about you. Something clicks in my brain. “What are the others about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In Dr. Saltz’s office, you said ‘most of them’ are nightmares about me dying. What are the others?”

  He doesn’t look at me. “Not nightmares.” He throws back the rest of his drink and bangs the glass back on the table.

  “Like what?” I press.

  He shifts in his seat, stares forward, seconds ticking by, and just when I think he’s not going to answer the question, he turns his face squarely toward mine. “Let’s just say you’re not married in any of them.”

  “Oh,” I breathe. I want to look away from his eyes—everything in my body impels me to look away. But it’s impossible.

  “I should go,” he says, standing abruptly. “I’m meeting Penn for one more interview before heading back.” He digs for the wallet in his back pocket and then throws two twenties on the bar top. “Can I walk you to the train station?”

  “No, no, I’m fine. I’ll probably . . . walk around or something. Maybe go to a museum.”

  “OK,” he says. We share an awkward goodbye—made even more so by the fact that we’re both clearly making a point not to touch each other.

  And then he’s gone, and instead of going back outside or to a museum, I sit there, rolling his words over in my mind. But it’s not so much the words that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s what I saw in his eyes when he said them. A flicker of something. So brief, if I had blinked I would have missed it. And I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but I knew how it felt—like the beginning of something I couldn’t name.

  Like a match had been struck.

  Chapter 15

  The first day of August, I get my period.

  I stare at the rust-colored stain in my underwear as I sit on the toilet, Harrison’s stacks of medical journals jabbing into my shoulder blades. I think of all the times in my twenties that I prayed for it to come, especially after a few blurry one-night stands where I’d be hard-pressed to come up with the man’s last name, if necessary—but even in the first couple years of my relationship with Harrison. And the relief at seeing those first streaks of red would be palpable. Like I had gotten away with something. Skated on thin ice, and just barely made it to the other side.

  Then, everything changed one morning over bacon with Harrison. And suddenly, I didn’t want my period anymore. But it came just the same. Stubbornly. Resolutely. As if my body was saying: You asked for this, remember? It took us seven months to get pregnant with our first baby, and every time my period came it was more than disappointing—it felt punitive.

  Even now—six weeks postmiscarriage—when this blood should signify a fresh start, a time to try again, it’s just a stark, ugly reminder of everything I have lost. And may never find.

  Continuing my effort to give him time, I haven’t brought up trying again with Harrison, not since our endless back-and-forth conversations the week we got the fertility results back. But it’s there, rooted firmly between us, growing thick and unruly like one of the weeds in the garden. And I fear that one day, it will get so big, we won’t be able to see our way around it.

  I slide in a tampon, change my underwear and get dressed. It’s not until I yank on a tank top that I realize I’m sweating from the effort. Why is it so freaking hot? I shuffle to the thermostat in the hallway. It reads eighty-one degrees. I punch the arrows with more force than necessary, wondering if Harrison accidentally bumped the temperature too high or turned it off altogether, and nothing happens.

  And I know: The air-conditioning is broken.

  As if the day cannot get any worse, I call three repair services and they’re all overbooked; the shortest wait time is five days. I make an appointment, text Harrison the news and slip out of the house, searching for relief. Though it’s not even ten, the air outside is just as stiflingly hot as inside, unmoving, as I make my way to the studio. I shut the door behind me and crank up the window unit as high as it will go. It rattles to life and I stand in front of the air blasting out of it until it turns ice-cold. Then I stand there a bit longer.

  When I’m finally more comfortable, I sink to the floor, the cement cool beneath my bare legs. I lean my back against the wall of unfinished Sheetrock and thumb through my phone to the IVF message boards I’ve recently become obsessed with. It started innocently enough—I was just trying to get more information, to know exactly what in vitro entailed, so when Harrison was ready we could dive right in. I took meticulous notes about each step of the procedure, the names of the various drugs used, the days of the cycle that are for follicle stimulation, egg maturation, retrieval, implantation. But when I ran across the statistic that only twenty-nine percent of first IVF rounds are successful, my heart caught in my throat. Twenty-nine percent?

  And that was w
hen I found the message boards. Women describing in excruciating detail their latest procedures—the pain and bloating of hormone injections, the cautious excitement of implantation, the agonizing two-week wait, the heartrending disappointment of a negative pregnancy test. I created a profile so I could get into the boards, but I hadn’t posted anything yet. I was a lurker, glued to the daily trials of one woman in particular, as if watching a prime-time soap opera.

  Today MissyK874 had her long-awaited doctor appointment for a pregnancy blood test. She had (of course) taken two drugstore tests, which had both been positive, but apparently with IVF, those results were unreliable thanks to the HCG hormone given for implantation. Her appointment had been at 9:15 this morning, and apparently I wasn’t the only one waiting with bated breath for the results.

  MissyK874, any news? Sending lots of baby dust!

  Fingers crossed it’s a sticky bean! We’re here for you.

  Praying for your rainbow baby.

  A text message alert pops up on my screen, blocking the message board from view. My heart revs when I see the name: Oliver. I click on it.

  Where’s my pic? You promised.

  * * *

  He texted me first—which feels important to note—two days after New York, when I wasn’t sure how we left it or if I’d talk to him again or if I should talk to him again. Two days after Harrison looked at me when he got home from work and said, “Well?” and then listened patiently as I told him every single thing that had happened in New York—everything except that flicker in Oliver’s eye. I had started to think maybe I’d imagined it. That it was just an awkward situation and I had read too much into it.

  And then Oliver texted me. It was a link to a Wikipedia article and one sentence: The Lincoln thing—it’s true. I clicked on it and scanned the page until I got to a section titled “Premonitions.”

  About ten days before he was assassinated, President Lincoln claimed to have a vivid dream in which he saw a corpse decked in funeral vestments—its face covered—in the East Room of the White House. People around him were mourning loudly, weeping and sobbing, and when he asked “Who’s dead?” a soldier responded: “The President. He was killed.”

  I reread it slowly. Once. Twice. And then texted him back: Is this supposed to make me feel better?

  Oh, right. Guess not.

  I bit off a smile, gnawing on my lip and trying to decide what to write back, when three dots appeared. And then: What about this?

  I clicked the link through to an article about a man in the UK who had a dream that he had read the name of the winner of a big horse race in a newspaper. The next day he bet on the horse—and won. And it happened eight more times in the next year.

  Now you think our dreams are somehow predicting horse races? I typed.

  Worth a shot? Maybe there’s a horse named Bag of Teeth.

  I laughed out loud and then replied: Wet Turkey Sandwich.

  Him: Falling Off Cliff

  Me: Masked Man

  Him: Locomotive

  Me: That’s actually a good racehorse name.

  Over the next couple of days, we kept texting, sending weird links and tidbits we each discovered about dreams, as if trying to top each other with the strangest one.

  Like a three-year-old American girl who would wake up some mornings asking where her lady’s maid was and calling her closet a “wardrobe” and even telling her mother—who was convinced her daughter was remembering a past life as a royal princess—to ring for breakfast.

  We swapped stories of murders being solved, a woman saved from drowning, a bank robbery prevented, all thanks to dreams.

  We shared facts. Like how dream scientists are called oneirologists. Or how twelve percent of people dream only in black-and-white. Or how dreaming was the genesis for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. Turns out, not just the plots of famous novels are attributed to dreams: also the sewing machine, the periodic table, DNA’s double-helix spiral—even Google.

  Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” after hearing it in a dream.

  God, I love the Beatles, I replied to that one.

  Who doesn’t? That’s like saying you love pizza.

  Not everyone likes pizza.

  97 percent of the world population likes pizza.

  Are you just making up facts now?

  How dare you! I’m a journalist. And then: Only 5 percent of the facts I state are made up.

  And that’s how our texts devolved into something other than talking about dreams.

  * * *

  I blink at the screen now, and then scroll through my library of pictures and find the one I’m looking for. I hold my breath, hit send and wait.

  The ellipses pop up and disappear at least four times.

  And then: Is that Keanu Reeves?

  I grin. Three days ago, out of curiosity, I downloaded the book Oliver ghostwrote for the celebrity chef Carson Flanagan and started reading it. When I told Oliver last night, he said it was only fair that I show him my work, too.

  Yep.

  I explain briefly about the mediocre theme and wait for the requisite male response—how Point Break or The Matrix is the Greatest Movie of All Time. It takes him three long minutes to type his reply and then:

  I don’t know—he was pretty amazing in The Lake House.

  I bark with laughter and it echoes off the steel garage doors. My phone buzzes in my hand.

  Send me another.

  My eyes light on the carnival painting dwarfing the easel it sits on. I snap a picture of it, but then hesitate. It feels personal, somehow. Too intimate to share, even though it originated in a dream about him. Or maybe because it was a dream about him. Or maybe it has nothing to do with the picture and everything to do with the way I feel when we’re texting: light, buzzy, eager. Eager to come up with the cleverest response. Eager for his reply. Slightly guilty for all the eagerness. It’s not like I’ve been hiding it from Harrison. He knows we’re still in touch. I even told him some of the bizarre dreams we’d uncovered in our online explorations.

  Still, I stare at the picture, and instead of hitting send, I pull up the IVF message board up. MissyK874 still hasn’t posted, so I start browsing the other threads, and get lost in the world of other women with empty bellies that long for them to be full.

  * * *

  “Wow,” Harrison says, when he’s leaning against the frame of the open studio door that night. “You’ve been busy.”

  After a few hours of sitting on the cement floor, I took note of my sore tailbone and it occurred to me that if the air wasn’t going to be fixed for five days, I needed to make it a little more comfortable in here.

  Now, I’m lying propped on my elbow on an inflated air mattress, surrounded by blankets and pillows, eyes glued to Vanna White turning letters on the flat-screen I lugged in from the den. The television casts its blue glow on everything in the dark room, including Harrison, and I study the shadows and highlights contouring his face, his square glasses, the black of his wiry beard. I teased him relentlessly when he started growing it out, so I can never admit that I like it. But I do—and not just because it evokes a certain manly ruggedness, but because it’s novel, something unexpected on a face I’ve memorized after six years. It’s not just the beard that’s different, though. He’s been running more—at least five days a week instead of three; working later. I think about our dinner at Sorelli’s—how tired he looked. No, not tired. I was with him throughout his residency—I’ve seen Harrison look tired. It’s like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. And I get a flash of guilt in my belly. Have I become so absorbed in my own grief, my own needs—the dreams, even—that I haven’t noticed what’s going on with my own husband?

  “Come here.” I extend my hand to him.

  He slips off his shoes and lies down beside me, fully clothed. He drapes
an arm over my waist, pulling me closer to him. We watch as a contestant buys a vowel. An e.

  “A watched pot never boils,” Harrison says, his breath hot on my neck.

  “Dang it—it was on the tip of my tongue.”

  “Sure it was.” I can hear the grin in his voice. I roll toward it and press my lips on his, as if I’m trying to trap the happiness. When I pull back, I look into his eyes, unsure how to phrase the question I want to ask.

  “Is everything OK with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know—you just seem different, lately.”

  I feel his body bristle. “How so?”

  “Well, the beard, I guess, for starters. You’re running more—”

  “I like running.”

  “I know, but it’s just, I don’t know—it seems like . . . I mean, I know things have been tough lately, with the baby.” My voice cracks.

  “Oh, Mia,” Harrison says, rolling onto his back, forcing the air in the mattress to shift and wobble beneath us, and pulling me with him, so that I’m splayed across his chest, making me think that it is the baby he’s sad about. I wish he would just talk to me about it. That we could share in our grief together. And then come up with a plan. A way forward. His fingers gently and methodically smooth my hair. One of my ears listens to his heartbeat. The other to Pat Sajak as he moves on to the next puzzle: A Thing.

  “I started today,” I whisper. “My period.”

  He doesn’t respond, just keeps running the pads of his fingers over my scalp.

  “Harrison,” I say, after a stretch of silence.

  His hand stills.

  “I’ve been looking into IVF.” His chest rises beneath my cheek and then falls as he exhales. “I know. I know you’re not ready yet. But I just wanted more information. It’s a pretty intense process.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “And it can take a couple of rounds—sometimes more. Only, like, twenty-nine percent are successful on the first try.”