he says. “I’m out here watching porn while my beautiful wife sleeps in the next room.”
I nudge in closer, wrap my arms around him.
“Porn’s easier, though, right?” I offer reasonably. “Isn’t that what they say? Porn’s never tired, doesn’t say no. You don’t have to satisfy porn.”
“Stop,” he says. I reach for the computer and open the web browser before he can stop me. The face of a beautiful dark-eyed woman stares back at me. But it isn’t porn; just a news article he’s been reading. A photojournalist was beaten to death in her East Village apartment, a suspected robbery gone wrong, all her equipment stolen.
“Who is she?” I ask.
He shakes his head, a beat passing before he answers. “Just someone I used to know.”
I scan the article. “She was murdered?”
He stays silent.
I feel a rush of urgency. “Jack, tell me who this is and why you’re reading about it in the middle of the night.”
He doesn’t answer, just stares straight ahead.
“Jack,” I say again. “Who is she?”
* * *
I wake up with a jolt on the stiff fabric of my couch, disoriented, reaching for him. The dream lingers, clings to my cells. Who is she? My own voice sounds back to me. I’m tangled in that strange weaving of the real, the remembered and the imagined. Jack’s scent, the feel of his arm, stays even as the shapes and shadows of the apartment he’s never seen assert themselves into my consciousness.
I reach for the dream—the woman’s face on the screen, the news article. Someone I used to know. But it’s jumbled, makes no sense. A dream? A memory? Some weird hybrid?
The couch beneath me is hard, not soft and saggy like the one in our old place. This one I bought online because I thought it looked sleek and stylish; when it arrived, it was as stiff and gray as a concrete slab. I didn’t have the energy to return it.
The television is on, the sound down so low it’s barely audible. Radar images of tomorrow’s weather swirl red and orange, a storm brewing, unseasonable heat.
Slowly, Jack, the dream begin to fade. I reach for him, but he’s sand through my fingers.
This is not new. Since his death, I vividly, urgently dream of my husband—embraces, lovemaking, his return from this place or that, maybe the store, or a business trip. The joy of his homecoming lifts my heart. These moments—though they are twisted and strange, places altered, patchworks of things that happened and didn’t—are so desperately real that I often awake thinking that my real life, the one in which Jack has been taken from me, is the nightmare.
And then, when I wake, there’s the hard, cold slap of reality: he’s gone. And that loss sinks in anew. Every single time. How I dread that crush when he’s taken from me again, when the heaviness of grief and loss settles on me once more, fresh and raw, its terrible weight pushing all the air from my chest.
I wipe away tears I didn’t even know I was crying. And I reach for the remote and let our stored pictures come up on the screen. Photos from our travels scroll—a canopy walk in Costa Rica, lava tubing in Iceland, a selfie that we took while kissing on the Cliffs of Moher. The images transfix, the girl I was, the man he was. Both of us gone. Many nights after work, this is what I do. Lie here and watch our hundreds of photos scroll silent across the screen.
It’s going to get better, Dr. Nash has told me. With time, the weight of this will lessen.
It isn’t, I want to say but don’t. How can it?
Outside my towering windows, the city glimmers.
I pull myself up, dig the new lower dosage prescription out of my bag, pour a big glass of water. Just about to drink the medication down, I pause. It sits in the palm of my hand, blue and seductive.
What if I just stopped taking them? What would happen? I should do some research. Jack wouldn’t approve of the amount of medication I’ve been taking, I know that. He wouldn’t even take Tylenol for a headache.
Or...
I remember the higher dosage Layla handed me; I grab them from the pocket of my coat, hearing her voice, always so certain: take what you need to sleep. I think about the other pills I took today. How many? What were they? How much wine did I drink?
To be truthful here, there’s not much of an internal battle. I need the utter blankness of dreamless sleep, the dream life Dr. Nash so values be damned. I need a break from grief, from my thoughts—from myself. I shake out one of the higher dosage pills. Then another. I drink them down. Just for tonight.
With images twirling around my sleepy brain, I enter the bedroom. On the bedside, the black dream journal rests by my bed. I haven’t written in it in a while, but Dr. Nash’s advice from today is still fresh in my mind. We can learn a lot about ourselves there. I flip it open, and scrawl down what I remember, but it’s faded to nearly nothing. I scribble: a dark-eyed girl on the screen. Who is she?
The pen feels so heavy in my hand.
There is no furniture in the bedroom except a low white platform bed, covered by the cloud of a down comforter, big soft pillows. I close my eyes, let the journal and pen drop to my side—pushing away thoughts of Jack, and the stranger shadowing my life, Layla, Dr. Nash. I wait for that blissful chemical slumber.
The surface beneath me is cold and hard, my head a siren of pain. Nausea claws at my stomach and the back of my throat. My shoulder aches, twisted under me. A sharply unpleasant odor invades. I don’t want to open my eyes; I squeeze them shut instead.
Where am I? I should know this.
I open them just a sliver, peering through the fog of my lashes. Silver and white, a filthy tile floor, feet walking by, high heels, sneakers, flats. Scuffling, voices. Music throbbing outside, someone laughing too loud—drunk or high.
You must be kidding me! a voice shrieks.
I push myself up. I’m in a bathroom stall, curled around a toilet bowl. That odor—it’s urine. I’m on the floor in a bathroom, in a nightclub by the sound of it. My heart starts to race, my breath ragged. I look down at myself. I am wearing a dress I don’t recognize; tight and red, strappy high heels.
Okay, okay, okay, I tell myself. Just think. Just think. What’s the last thing you remember?
Jack’s funeral beneath a cruelly pretty sky, leaning heavily on Mac, his strong arm around my waist practically the only thing holding me up. Layla holding my other hand. Mac’s whisper in my ear: It’s okay, Poppy. We’re going to get through this. All of us together. Hold on. Be strong. He’d want that. Our old apartment filled with friends, damp eyes, whispering voices; Jack’s mother, her face ashen with a tray of sandwiches wobbling in her hand; Layla taking it from her, laying it down on the table. My mother chatting with Alvaro, flirting as if this wasn’t her son-in-law’s
