I have no doubt it’s a signal, a message, that Peter can’t deliver any other way. I feel momentarily chilled because I’ve told him jokingly that I would probably find out he no longer wanted to be with me by coming home to find his possessions gone, and I’d never hear from him again. A vanishing. I try not to rush, but still stumble in my haste to get to the closet. His clothes are gone. I go back to the living room and finally see the tactical omissions, the gaps in the bookshelves, the holes in the stacks of CDs and DVDs, his favorite blue blanket gone from the sofa that we would huddle under on cold winter evenings. Peter has flown.
I sit down, unsure of my emotions. Am I relieved or distressed? This has been coming for a long time. What does this leave me with? Fantasies of a dead doctor. Hopes of someday finding with one person what John Taylor needed four women to satisfy.
I open my laptop and begin writing a report of my conversation this afternoon with Deborah. I stop, thinking of the three wives. Two, now, since MJ’s passing. Each of them, each of us—for now I consider myself one of the sisterhood—left alone, ultimately. But despite my sorrow for MJ, it is Helen I think of as I sit here. It’s a surprisingly cool night for September, so I go searching for a sweater, then return to my laptop. Yes, it’s Helen who haunts me now. Devoting her life to sick kids, building an independent life, then being surprised by joy. That phrase again.
And what is left to me?
The shell of an amicable but less-than-nourishing relationship—and the fear that it was as good as I can expect to get.
I drift off to sleep and begin to dream almost immediately, a lucid dream in which I know I’m dreaming but am powerless to wake up.
I am one of John Taylor’s cases, lying on the operating table, the anesthesia rendering me helpless. “When you ain’t got nothing you got nothing to lose,” John Taylor says to me, and I vaguely recognize the quotation from another master of the double negative. I am immobile, but conscious. Dr. Taylor is going to make an example of me; I am starting out with a normal face and he is going to sculpt me into something else. Something better. My life is in his hands. He is now by my side of the operating table, his face as benevolent as in his teaching videos. “This is what you deserve,” he says, and begins cutting.
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to all the people who read and commented on early drafts of this book. That includes David Renton, Mary Lang, Marilyn Lewis, Talila Baron, Frank LaPlante, Marie LaPlante, Teresa Heger, Gayle Shanks, Rich Seidner, and Mitch Rotman. My bottomless gratitude to the amazing editorial work of Corinna Barsan and Elisabeth Schmitz at Grove Atlantic and for the extraordinary sharp-eyed copyediting of Briony Everroad. And, of course, special thanks to my beloved agent at Levine-Greenberg Literary Agency, Victoria Skurnick, for her help, support, and friendship.