—
THEY WENT OUT to dinner at their favorite restaurant—the benefits were twofold: delicious chargrilled broccoli plus the discussion of Jacob’s question without having to bring it into the house with them. Jacob proposed sacrificing their summer holiday to a project of his, an idea he was developing as part of his work as a bereavement counselor. So that was it, the question he’d been building up to for weeks. Do you mind giving up your holiday to test-run my project? She was embarrassed that he felt he’d had to work up to asking her this; it was a question that would’ve been easily raised and just as easily settled with an unselfish partner. Regarding him her support was in fact unconditional and to date she’d thought she adequately expressed this; now she fought demoralization as she heard him out. His project focused on a particular type of experience that a large number of his clients reported having undergone. “To oversimplify the descriptions I’ve been given, this experience presents as . . . an implosion of memory. And as the subjects drift through the subsequent debris, they calmly develop a conviction that they do not do so alone. These presences aren’t reported as ghostly, but living ones . . . minutes, sometimes hours when the mourner feels as if they’ve either returned to a day when the deceased was still alive or the deceased has just arrived in the present time with them . . . and what’s interesting about these lapses people experience is that most of them happen under fairly similar physical conditions.”
“So you’ve put together some sort of program that induces this feeling of . . . presence?”
“Well, that’s what I’m aiming for. Of course it’d only be for mourners who need that feeling from time to time and can’t make it happen by themselves. We’re calling it ‘Presence.’ And now we’ve got some funding . . .”
“You clever thing.”
“Really it was Vi who got the funding together. She’s a bit of a whiz at that. Lots of international contacts.”
“I’m sure that’s only the tip of Vi’s iceberg.” She made a quick attempt to estimate the extent to which new information concerning the relationship between Vi and Jacob might shake her. Sam had had his affairs, and Jill had come to an understanding of them as a form of boundary setting, actions taken against a fear that any one person could or did know “everything” about you. Jill was never more aggravating than when she got busy understanding things, and yet these rationalizations of hers might not be such a big problem this time around, as she was finding that the thought of various deep, sweet secrets between Jacob and Vi had something of a mechanical effect on her. Air seeped out of her and very little came back in—she breathed as though subject to strangulation and sat on her hands to suppress tentacle-like tendencies such as thrashing about, and clinging. The more Jacob told her about the testing of his program, the more she wondered if her first misgivings hadn’t been right after all. He was genuinely willing to be a guinea pig for his own prototype, she could see that, but maybe this was also Leaving Jill, Phase 1: Practice.
—
“OK, I’LL HELP. But since I don’t know anyone else who’d ask me to spend two weeks pretending he’s no longer in the world, tell me this first: Are you really not thinking about leaving me?” she asked.
That glint of amusement again. “Get this through your head, Jill Akkerman: I’m not leaving you. And you—are you leaving me?”
“I’m not leaving you, Jacob Wallace.”
She watched him put her expression, posture, and phrasing through his lie detector. She passed. His gaze lost intensity.
“Remember that psychologist who said we had an unhealthy dependence on each other?” asked the boy who’d learned Korean along with Jill and the couple who’d eventually adopted her. Her parents had wanted to have a new family language, and Jacob had learned too, so that he could be a part of that family. He’d been an honorary Akkerman for over half his life now.
“Yeah . . . we owe our careers to him, I think. He made us want to see what his job would be like if someone did it properly.”
“He might have been right, though,” Jacob said.
“Oh?”