Chapter 1 Sample

AT LAST, BLISS

I sit in the garden, surrounded by white daisies with yellow centers, spears of blue Russian sage, and lavender-colored lilac blooms. A pinwheel of smells swirls around my face, changing colors. I’m unsure how I got here. My hands and the dirt blend—earth spreads up my arms, smelling green. Green light, chiming like bells, weaves its way toward me. My head is a balloon untethered to my body. Floating is beautiful. I am free.

The light amazes me, enveloping me in wave after wave of color. I hear a sound. My mouth, tongue, and lips frame delight in a way that seems to come from someone else. I lie back on the ground, and my body zooms toward blue, an infinite blue hovering above me, a sky of dreams.

I don’t know how long I lie there this way. Then my brain says something is wrong. I wait a while to see if it will say something else. I have a crushing headache. You have to do something, we’re in trouble, my brain warns as if it operates separately from me and knows better, as if there are two of us in here, as I always suspected. I want to say, Hello, it’s about time we met, but I don’t have any words.

I gather myself and find I’m on my knees. I pat my pockets, looking for something I immediately forget. The world is so beautiful; everything is so beautiful that I lose track of what I’m doing. Blue mountains shimmer in the distance. My entire body yearns for them. I want to absorb them, to pull them under my skin and feel their bulges reaching up into that blue sky. I sit down on my feet.

Call for help, my brain instructs. I look down at the screen of the phone in my hand. It’s blank. I can’t remember how it works. I try talking to it. I can’t remember numbers or names. “Call . . .” I sound like a crow. I look around for the bird that made that sound and accidentally touch the screen with my thumb. It awakens and says something to me, but I can’t understand it. I weep.

Ask for help, my brain urges. I hear my voice saying, “Ah, ah, ah, ah. . .”

My left arm goes limp; I fall endlessly, and my spirit lifts and surrenders. I separate from my body. This is bliss.

I hear people talking around me, moving me. I feel their urgency, their compassion. We’re all moving. A horrible blaring sound encases me. I float above them and look down at my body.

“We’re losing her,” a man says.

I want to comfort him, but I have no words and can’t move my hand.

By the light drifting into the room, it’s early morning. I wake thinking of my children in sets—sons and daughters-in-law and their children—believing they’re safe even though I can’t check on them. I was dreaming about my husband and stepmother coming back from the dead in a Jeep. Sometimes they ride together, sometimes alone. A cat slept on the engine of the vehicle after it stopped.

They seemed to be friends, and she was telling me something about him. I was supposed to pick him up, or I was not. Sometime before this, I had taken a pair of shoes, a pendant, and something else I wanted on my way to meet him. I was eager, young, and in love.

The entire neighborhood was an open-air market with goods displayed in booths with vibrantly colored awnings. Palm trees swayed above us. A woman whispered over my shoulder that it was okay to take what I wanted. Soft silk persimmon saris, piles of jade and tourmaline bracelets, necklaces of rubies and garnets, pyramids of oranges, stacks of books. Such unexpected riches.

I imagine a hospital room, the corner of a sheet folded down, light from the window forming a parallelogram of light on the floor. And then wakefulness to beeping and shouts on the hospital PA system, the nurse badgering me with questions. “Can you tell me your name?”

Someone is crying inconsolably in the hallway, and I hear the ache of it dancing with whispered consolation. Someone presses my hand, and I press back. I recognize my son’s face, and a thousand delights cascade through me—he’s born, he throws his small arms around my neck, kisses my cheek, smiles at me from across a large room, and runs toward me, saying, “I love you, Mama,”—our hearts are connected by a thousand different colored filaments all glowing now. A word finds me. Blessings. Yes, blessings. And gratitude, as rich as the dirt I sink my fingers into, as deep as the heart of the earth.

I close my eyes and find myself hanging upside down on the metal jungle gym in the next quad over, swaying above the asphalt ground below me. The world tilts, and I can understand how the universe is saddle-shaped and infinite. My sister says, “Daddy is going to die, and I don’t want to be there when he does.” A translucent blue-green wave lifts me off my feet, and I float on my back, facing the sky. Cool water embraces me and caresses my limbs.

Now I’m holding onto a thick rope bigger than the grip of my hand. Waves are coming toward me. My mother yells, “Hang on!” Then she laughs the laugh that scares me. The wave moves over my head. I keep my eyes and mouth closed. When it passes, I can breathe for a second, and then another wave, clear green and taller than the first, is on me, high above my head. I hold fast to the rope, and when the wave passes, I try to gulp air before the next one comes. I hear my mother’s laughter, louder and giddy, uncontrolled. Strong hands grasp my body. A man scoops me up and carries me to the beach. I hear him say, “What’s the matter with you?” to someone behind him. “Didn’t you see she was drowning?”

I open my eyes to my grandchildren surrounding my bed. They’re so beautiful, wearing their serious faces. I long to hold them all in my arms at once, to hear them giggling. I spread my arms, and they engulf me. I close my eyes. It’s okay now. I can go.

I find a quarter lying in the snow on the top step leading to the back of the large Tudor house on the Jesuit college campus where I work. It’s just enough for my morning coffee donation. The old priest, who meticulously keeps the alumni donation records on two-by-four index cards, updating them by hand, has a desk in the back of the building near the coffee station. He is, like me, the least of us. I say good morning to him every day.

He never turns on the overhead fluorescent light, using instead the old brass lamp that sits on the corner of his huge mahogany work surface. Light illuminates his corded hands. I go up to his desk, show him the quarter in the palm of my hand, and say, “See, Father, God loves me.”

He looks up at my face, beaming. “I always knew that.”

In the chapel, the sound of voices in close harmony fills the space to the brim until it waterfalls down the walls and leaps up as waves of joy. The sweet thread of a single soprano voice solos and light streams through stained glass windows like music, and I understand the word exalted.

Time is irrelevant. Every so often, a dear face comes close to me, and lips brush my cheek. If I could speak, I would tell them not to be afraid, but I’m tired, so tired, and I drift away.

Going sixty-five miles an hour, my car hits rubber poles stuck in the asphalt where my lane used to be. The car veers into the left lane. The steering wheel doesn’t respond to my grip. I jam my feet on the brake and clutch and watch the car float across the left lane into the metal guardrail. The front of the car collapses slowly, the guardrail coming toward me, accompanied by the screeching sound of metal against metal. My head hits the steering wheel, then the top of the partly opened window.

I open my eyes and see the steering wheel. I turn my head to the right. Searing pain shoots through my brain; my leg and hip scream. I close my eyes. Something wet trickles down my face. I touch my forehead and look at my hand. Blood, I tell myself, as if it’s someone else’s. I close my eyes again. Someone talks to me. I see a police officer sitting in the passenger seat. He says the ambulance is on the way.

“You have to call my kids,” I mumble. He asks for the number. I can’t remember my number or any numbers. I clamp down on panic and tell him my address book is in my purse. He pulls it out and asks for a name. I can’t remember any names. “You have to get to my kids,” I beg him, then close my eyes. The EMTs talk to me, saying what they’re going to do. They lift my gray sweater and put white pads on my chest. They put an IV in my arm. I’m glad I have on clean underwear. My grandmother would be pleased. I hear her telling me, “Always wear clean underwear in case something happens to you.”

As they load me into the ambulance, pain slices through me and then fear. I might die from this. My breath comes in quick spurts. The EMT sitting with me puts a hand on my shoulder and tells me, “Don’t worry, just breathe slowly. Take deep, slow breaths.” I practice what he says.

I’m floating above my body, looking down at the ambulance from the ceiling. I’m peaceful with no worries, not even tired anymore. The scream of the siren is a thousand miles away, clearing a path for someone else.

When I open my eyes, the doctor explains I’ve had a stroke. As he talks, long black lines squiggle out of his mouth, slither across the walls, and out of the door. I hear the black lines swishing through the halls, going somewhere else where someone will understand them.

My son tells me I’m going to be all right. The doctors are doing everything they can.

I smile at him. “I am. I know. I’m all right,” I try to say. I want to lift him into my arms the way I used to and feel his head on my shoulder, his soft curls brushing my cheek, feel the breath move his chest in and out against me—my beautiful boy.

I’m wearing my favorite purple jumper, and I’m lost. I’m trying to find my grandmother’s apartment. None of the buildings around me are familiar. I’ve gone too far, missed my turn. The wide street stretches out to my left, with cars, buses, and trucks whizzing by. Soot blows up from the street in a cloud and drifts toward me. Fear overpowers me. I put my hand over my mouth to keep myself from crying. I’m sure I’ve been walking for hours.

And then I see a street I recognize and turn into it. It takes me past houses I vaguely remember and then right up to my school. I wasn’t far away after all; just confused. I turn right at the alley, go through the showers, make another right at the clotheslines, and walk to my grandmother’s building. I open her door, walk into the living room, and crawl into her lap. She’s watching Queen for a Day.

“Mein Kind,” my grandmother says, hugging me against her huge, soft bosom, rocking slightly in her chair. “Shayna punim, where have you been?”

“I was lost, Grandma, lost all over the projects, but now I’ve found you.”

“Ach,” my grandmother says, “I have been lost also. It is a terrible feeling. I am so glad you found me.” She holds me tightly and kisses the top of my head while the woman on the television show jumps up and down because she has won a new washing machine.

Now I see it’s snowing pink petals. I hold my infant to my breast and, in the next instant, nestle my hand in my father’s and look up at him. I drip water from a straw into my mother’s mouth. My sister, sitting in the morning sunlight with her hands in her lap, is beautiful. I weep as each son leaves me for his future. I stand in the stirrups and gallop on a horse across a field, screaming with delight and fear. I hold my new grandson in my arms, and the whole universe moves into me, and God is real and understandable, no longer a mystery. I watch undertakers zip my husband into a body bag.

I see the entire canvas, every color, every shape, and pattern, glowing and moving, forming, and reforming. And then I see the white between the points of color and the radiant shapes of things I didn’t see before, couldn’t know, and how the brilliant surface reflects only light, all light, all being, and nothing at all.

I am everything—all sound, color, dark, soft, sharp, and falling free. I know nothing. I know everything. Light holds me. I wrench myself from bliss, blow a kiss, and wave goodbye to my grandson.

He waves back to me and says, “Bye-bye, baby.”