His sudden disappearance confused and scared her, especially when she thought of the intense, unspeakable feeling in his eyes. Suddenly she realized how wrong the whole thing was. She'd just talked to him on the phone last night, how could he have gotten here from L.A. so quickly? What were the odds he'd be able find her in central Philadelphia at lunch hour? From a pay phone, she called Mom's house. But she hadn't heard from him. She called their number in Concord and got their messages off the answering machine, but there was nothing from Mike. She called his mother, who said no, she hadn't heard from Mike since before he left on his trip, was everything all right?
Three hours later, she called Concord again and heard the message from the Los Angeles police. Mike had been riding in a rented car with three others from his company, the voice said, when they were hit broadside by a pickup truck that ran a red light. Two of the people in the car had been killed. One of them was Mike.
She knew it was a mistake, but it still scared her almost out of her mind. When she called LAPD and got the right person on the line, she heard the news again.
"No, there's been a mixup," she told the cop. "He's back here – I just saw him. It must be someone else."
But the policeman insisted he had personally recovered the identifica- tion from the corpse. The dead man's appearance, as he described it, was very similar to Mike's.
"Who were the other people in the car?" Cree asked, panicking now.
The names were Mike's colleagues at Imagitech. The other person killed was Terri McNamarra, Mike's fellow VP and good friend.
Cree said, "Maybe the wallets got mixed up during the accident – "
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Black. His boss – Mr. Lederman – was still conscious at the scene. He identified the body."
But but but. But she had seen him, here, alive! She had looked into his eyes!
For a full day, she refused to believe Mike had been in that car. She kept refusing, insisting there had to be a mistake – first because this couldn't happen to him, to her, to their marriage, and second because she had seen him alive in Philadelphia. She kept up the denial until she flew to L.A. to identify Mike's body herself She later determined that he'd been pronounced dead at the scene only moments before she'd seen him there on the street in Philadelphia, three thousand miles away.
Cree stopped and found her way back to New Orleans, which seemed choked with fog, unreal. She'd hoped it would be easier, but it felt as though things were breaking loose inside her chest. The pain seemed impossible, open-heart surgery without an anesthetic.
She had never encountered him again. No physically manifesting phantom, not even a sense of his presence. For a long time, she wished she could. Just one more moment together. But it didn't happen. The only ghost that remained was the one that lived in her memory and that box of photos that had to be locked away.
Later, trying to make sense out of what had happened, she went over and over the scene, trying to glean every detail. The Mike she had seen that day had not been bloody and broken, but handsome, beautiful Mike wearing the new suit he'd bought for the trip and the tie she'd given him for Christmas, the breeze making his hair do that thing that irritated him but that she liked. Did he cast a shadow? Was the background faintly visible through him? Much later, having played the sight back so many times that the memory lost its integrity, she could see it any way she chose: Yes, he cast a sharp shadow on the sidewalk, no, he didn't; yes, he was solid as anyone else on the square, no, he had a slightly misty or translucent look.
One thing she knew for sure, though: It had been Mike, Mike and no one else, who had looked into her eyes that day with that inexpressible emotion. Somehow space and time and corporeality had permitted him to visit her in the minutes after his death. Mike had sought her and found her.
Much later, she'd learned that the occurrence was among the most common paranormal experiences: the spectral visitation by a geographically remote loved one at the moment of death. The survivor's conviction that the manifestation was physically real was also typical.
Of course, the statistics didn't explain how it happened. Nor help her come to grips with it.
In the end, all she hoped was that whatever he had experienced at that moment, he had seen the smile on her face, understood it for what it was: Oh, my beautiful Mike is here, what a wonderful surprise! Hello, my sweet, how I love you. Surely that was obvious, surely he couldn't mistake it for anything else. Whatever he took wherever he went afterward, she hoped he'd remember that.
It deflected her entire life, her whole being. Suddenly she was alone and heartbroken. Every simple assumption had been smashed. The days of anything clear and straightforward had died with Mike.
She also had a huge mystery right in her face, obstinate, undeniable. To cope with that, she started doing some reading. After a while she went back to school, studying psychology, philosophy, religion, anatomy and physiology, history – whatever seemed to promise hope of an explanation.
Or was it really explanation she wanted? Cree sometimes wondered. Maybe it was more a search for a way back to Mike. She spent her life looking through windows into other dimensions of the world, and into the past, observing and interacting with the ghosts that lived there. She claimed to be a scientist, but in the end maybe it all came down to the simple hope that one day, through one of those windows, she'd see Mike again. Just one more glimpse.
The night air had turned very cool, the breeze more insistent and now heavily laden with mist. The candles had burned themselves out, and Paul Fitzpatrick had become little more than a shadow in his chair. He didn't move or speak.
Against her will, Cree found herself laughing. Each laugh hurt, an explosion in her chest that burst up and seemed to come out her aching eyes.
"What?" Paul asked warily.
"Talk about a lead balloon! Talk about ways to put the chill on a date! Oh, man! Tell him you were married to the perfect guy whose shoes nobody could fill. Yeah, and better yet, tell him the perfect guy's not really, totally, quite dead, no, you're still pretty much married to him, so good luck, bud!" It really would be funny if it didn't hurt so much.
Paul didn't say anything.
Neither of them moved for a long time, and after another little while the coarse, blowing mist turned into raindrops that pattered on the umbrella and splashed on Cree's face. They were both well soaked by the time Paul leaned forward, put his hands on his knees, and stood. He came up stiffly, as if his joints pained him.