I wasn’t na?ve enough to think that this strategy would work after the accident. There was no flag to capture this time. But I told myself that if I refused to hole up in Pity City and just put one foot ahead of the other, it would all get better in time.
The crash happened just about an hour southwest of Boston on a cold, crisp March day. I’d gone there to deliver a speech based on my most recent book, Twenty Choices. The audience, as usual, was made up mostly of women, many of them hoping that they still had time to make a choice that would put their lives or careers on a course closer to the ones they’d always fantasized about. I loved connecting with people at talks like this, loved the comments they offered as they had their books signed later. And it thrilled me that something I said might inspire them.
To my surprise, Paul Dunham, the paperback director for my publishing house, had sidled up to the table just as I was signing books for the last few people in line. Tall and broad-shouldered, Paul was a guy who’d played college football and looked like he had, though his face, topped by his short blond hair, had a Waspy patrician look.
He was in town on business, too, he said, staying at another hotel, and had decided on the spur of the moment to drop by. It was a chance to hear me speak, he said, plus an opportunity to check out my fan base, which would prove useful as he geared up for the paperback launch. When he invited me to dinner, I explained I had other plans that night, but I accepted his offer for a lift back to the city the next day. I thought it would be easier than taking the train.
But it hadn’t been easier at all. On a perfectly dry stretch of the Mass Turnpike, Paul had run the car off the road, smashing into a guardrail at close to seventy miles an hour. Somehow I’d managed to free myself from the air bag, stagger out of the car, and tumble hard down a ravine. Or at least that’s what I learned later. I remember nothing from the minutes before the accident and little from the time immediately after. Just hazy memories of heat and flames and dark smoke billowing from above the ravine. Sirens. Then waking later in the hospital, with a broken arm and pelvis. And finding out that Paul hadn’t survived.
I didn’t need a shrink to tell me that I was suffering from more than grief afterwards. There was guilt, too, tons of it. I had lived and Paul had died. And I still had no idea how he’d lost control of the car.
As unmoored as I felt, I saw it as part of a process. It would take time, but I’d get better, physically and mentally. Throwing myself into my work would surely aid in that. However, a month later, shortly after my life seemed to normalize again, my grief began to shape-shift into something else. The bouts of panic started, followed by stretches of numbness and lethargy. When I finally tried to write again, nothing materialized. Making words come was like trying to generate warmth on a late autumn hike when your clothes are soaked through with rain.
Finally I get up and switch on a table lamp. As I do, my eyes fall to the pad on which I scribbled notes from my dream. I pick it up and stare at the words again: “hotel room, smoke, dissolving doorknob, wall of flames.”
My recent nightmares all have the same terrifying elements, but slightly reconfigured each time, as if my brain prefers to torture me with a fresh twist each time: There’s always a hotel room I’m surprised to find myself in, the smoke and the flames, and the fact that I’m never able to escape, though the reason changes. Once it was because the door was too heavy to open. Another time because there was no door at all, just a thick, impenetrable wall.
And then I remember. There’s a detail about my dream today that I’ve neglected to write down: the unseen man calling out my name.
It’s brand-new. Until now, I’ve always been alone in the room.
I don’t think the man was Guy. The voice belonged to someone else, not a voice I can place, but not a stranger’s either, because there was nothing about the man’s presence that frightened me.
So who was he? I wonder, my heart skipping. And why was he insisting that I wait?
Chapter 3
I’m in bed asleep by the time Guy arrives home, and I stir when I feel him slipping under the covers. He spoons me and rakes his fingers lightly through my hair. I relax into the curve of his body, soothed by his touch.
When I wake in the morning, the other side of the bed is empty. From the bedside clock I see with a start that it’s nearly eight. Guy will have to split soon, and I want time with him before he goes. I close my eyes again, trying to recall if there’s been another dream, but no, nothing. Simply fuzzy, meaningless fragments in my mind.