By BetsyG

Three little angels, all dressed in white

Tried to get to heaven on the end of a kite

But the kite string broke and down they all fell

Instead of going to Heaven, they all went to—

Wendy gave her head a shake, trying to rid it of the little tune that kept repeating itself. She was particularly annoyed that her mind had swapped the traditional bridal march with this insidious ditty on what everyone said was supposed to be the happiest day of her life. Her day. And here she was, hearing camp songs in her head instead of Ave Maria or Pachelbel’s Canon.

She knew it had to be nerves that were making her brain go into a loop with something so inane. Nerves were making her so cuckoo that she was snappish toward everyone, from her mother right on down to the flower girl. Her mother was driving her especially crazy, fussing with Wendy’s hair, moving around bobby pins on the updo that Wendy had paid a professional half a week’s salary to construct.

“But, Wendy, you don’t look comfortable,” her mother said. “You look like you’re trying to balance a stack of books on your head.” She pulled out another pin and relocated it to a spot that seemed more secure.

“Please, Mom. Stop. This hairstyle is like that game Jenga. You pull out the wrong pin and the whole thing’s going to collapse.”

“I’m not hurting anything. I’m fixing it.” She pulled out another pin. “This is the last one.”

Wendy felt the tip of the bobby pin dig into her scalp almost deep enough to give her a lobotomy.

“Ow!”

“That’s better.” Her mother gave the back of Wendy’s head a satisfied pat. “Now shake it to see if it holds.”

Wendy gave her head a little twitch. As much as she hated to admit that her mother had done anything at all right, the mound of hair did feel less vulnerable.

“It’s fine,” she said, which was the closest to a thank you she felt like offering while she was in this mood. “Are you done now? I have to put on my makeup and dress.”

Her mother pursed her lips, holding back the reaming that it seemed Wendy was due, and exited by way of the door that led to the suite’s adjoining room. As part of the Brombury estate’s wedding package, the bridal party was given the suite, which they were using to prepare for the wedding and where Wendy and Matt would spend their first night together as husband and wife. Wendy liked the room because of its view of the estate’s expansive gardens, but the décor with its four-poster mahogany bed and Colonial-style floral wallpaper was so predictable that it irritated her. She had no complaints about the service, though. Fruit baskets had been waiting in both rooms, along with several bottles of chilled champagne which her bridesmaids were working on. Wendy knew that her own well-documented inability to modulate her rate of alcohol consumption could be dangerous, so she abstained. The walk down the aisle could prove difficult enough because of nerves alone; the rectangular pools stocked with goldfish and koi on either side of the pathway into the chapel would pose a serious risk for an accident if Wendy wasn’t in top form.

The thought of the procession sent a shudder of adrenaline through her. She tried to calm herself, putting aside visions of herself lying prone among the fish in the shallow pool. It was time to work on her face.

She sat down in front of the vanity, where the countertop was covered with her newly purchased beauty supplies.

Three little devils, all dressed in red

Tried to get to heaven on the end of a thread

But the thread string broke and down they all fell

Instead of going to Heaven they all went to—

Wendy glared at herself in the vanity’s mirror. Stop it. Calm down! She took a deep breath, forced a toothy smile that looked more frightening than bride-like.

After she forced her face to relax, there was only a remnant of the ghoulish expression left when she started on her skin, layering cosmetics as instructed by the perfume-soaked assistant at the Macy’s makeup counter. First, she applied moisturizer, followed by foundation, blush, and two separate products for cheekbone emphasis. After the top layer had been applied, she didn’t recognize herself; her complexion was so flawless, she looked like she was wearing a kabuki mask.

She applied the rest of her makeup, using powders, liners, and glosses to manipulate each of her features to be more attractive than anyone could imagine they could be. When the illusion of perfection was just about complete, there was a knock at the door. Since her mother and bridesmaids would have simply barged in from the adjoining room, she knew it had to be Matt.

“Can I come in? Are you dressed yet? I’m not supposed to see you in your dress, right?”

Wendy opened the door for her fiance,  who was looking very handsome in his tux. Even without the benefit of makeup, his pulchritude was as surreal as Wendy’s, his features seemingly transformed by the romantic location and the charged atmosphere.

“I’m still in my robe,” she said, giving Matt a quick kiss. “But you could see me in my dress, anyhow. You know I’m not superstitious.”

“Oh, it’s more of a tradition than a superstition. I think it’s quaint.”

“Well, you know, some religions think you ought to see the bride before the wedding. Make sure you’re getting the right product. Men have been tricked before, you know, if you believe the stories in the bible.”

Matt laughed. “I think I’d know if someone else was substituting for you. I’d recognize that body anywhere.” He stroked Wendy’s arm through the silky fabric of her new robe, given to her by her bridesmaids at the boudoir-themed shower they’d thrown for her. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m a basket case. I’m going a million miles an hour. Have you noticed? Crazy. How about you?”

Matt shifted, wiggling uncomfortably as if his tux were too short in the crotch. “Nervous too. I was hoping you would calm me down.”

“Come here.” She held her arms out and he came to her. They held each other. “How’s that?”

Matt breathed in deep. Wendy could feel him quivering, his accelerated heartbeat shaking his body. She heard him take another breath, then another one, shorter this time, then another and another. His breathing was getting shorter and quicker until he sounded like he was hyperventilating.

Then he abruptly pulled himself out of Wendy’s embrace, gulping at the air.

“Matt! Are you okay?” Wendy said, observing his flushed color and the glimmer of sweat that had appeared on his forehead. “Come here, before you pass out. Sit on the bed.”

He complied, finding a corner of the mattress.

“Put your head between your knees.” She rubbed his back. “Do you feel any better?”

“Just give me a minute.”

Wendy thought that her touch seemed to make his body tense up, so she moved away. Maybe he needed more air. She wandered over to the window and looked out. In the distance, she could see the wedding guests coming toward the house from the parking lot, glints of flowered dresses and gaily wrapped packages, a rainbow of colors trickling toward the building where the man she was about to marry was having a breakdown.

A few guests were in the garden just below her, passing by the house on their way to the chapel where the service would be held. The women were walking clumsily on the grass, their spiked heels plunging into the thick and moist soil.

Behind her, she could hear that Matt’s breathing had slowed.

“Better now?”

He nodded.

“That’s normal, right? To be nervous like that?”

Matt’s breathing started to accelerate again, but he was able to speak between breaths. “I guess. I mean—” Big breath. “Is it? That’s—what I—was wondering when I,” another big breath, “came to see you.”

“Oh.”

He looked up. “I mean, are we doing the right thing? Do we have enough in common? Is this going to work?”

“I don’t know, Matt. I don’t know what the exact right amount to have in common is. My parents don’t have much in common. They’re compatible in a different way. They just…get along.”

“But what about…sports, for example. How are we going to get along if you don’t like sports?” His voice squeaked.

“It’s not that I hate sports. I just don’t love them like you do. But I’ll go to games or watch them on TV with you and your friends. As long as we try to share these things… That’s what matters.”

“Really? You’re sure that’s good enough?”

“To tell you the truth, Matt, no, I’m not sure. What makes a good marriage? I have no idea. What do we have going for us? Can we make a list? I don’t know if we can. I guess…the sex is good, at least.”

He shook his head. “It’s really just okay, you know. I’ve had better.”

Now Wendy’s voice started to squeak. “Really?”

“Sorry.”

“I thought you said I was the best you ever had?”

He shrugged, patted his forehead with a handkerchief. “I lied.”

Wendy pushed a lungful of air through her lips, puffing her cheeks and emitting a hissing sound. “Wow,” she said. “Just wow. I didn’t know you felt that way too.”

He looked up at her sharply. “You mean, you—?”

She nodded so hard, she shook part of her hairdo loose. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. About everything.”

He opened his mouth to object but then shrugged. “So why are we doing this? Why have we been acting like this is the right thing when we’ve both had these thoughts…?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I guess, everyone says we look so good together…”

“We are both reasonably intelligent; we have that in common.” He loosened his tie.

“Plus, you’re the right age, I’m the right age. It’s time to get moving, right? You’re the best thing I’ve found in my thirty-five years. I don’t know if I can do better.”

“So this is good enough, you mean.”

She laughed. “Exactly.”

He looked at her and smiled. “You’re great, you know.”

“Well, you’re great.” She giggled a nervous trill. “You’re great, I’m great…We’ll be great together, right?”

Then the words started coming quickly, tumbling out and falling into a pile of confusion.

“I don’t know,” Matt said. “Sometimes I think we’re together more because of circumstance and timing than because we’re really right for each other.”

Wendy nodded. “I know what you mean. And without any hard evidence as to whether the marriage will work, it just seems like we’ve been moving forward until someone presents the evidence that it won’t. Because, really, there’s no way of knowing, is there? There’s no way of knowing whether there could be something better out there or whether this is a colossal mistake or what, right?”

“Well…” He looked at her meaningfully.

She held his eye contact and smiled wistfully, her manicured hand stroking the bedspread. “You’re right. Maybe we do know. Or maybe this is just cold feet. Isn’t this what everyone goes through? It’s not like we invented uncertainty.”

“Of course not. You’re right. Everyone goes through this. And everyone goes through with it, even when they wonder if they’re making a mistake.”

“Or even if they know it is a mistake.”

Matt scratched at his chin, thinking.

“What we need are statistics. Like if 70% of all couples have these doubts, what percentage of those marriages succeed and what percentage fail? And are those percentages any different for the couples who had no doubts?”

“Those would be some pretty useful data to have, Matt. But I don’t think it exists.” She was starting to become agitated herself. She couldn’t stop her voice from getting louder and more frantic sounding. “So how does anyone know when the cold feet are legitimate and when they’re just cold feet? How do you know? How do you know?”

Wendy threw her head back as she bleated the unanswerable question. Her robe flew open, exposing her undergarments: a strapless bra, control top hose, and a pale pink thong. She was already wearing her shoes—white, silk, teetering heels.

Matt took her gently by the shoulders.

“We know, Wendy, don’t we?”

She looked up at him like a contrite child. “But what about love? Don’t we love each other?”

He shook his head. “Do we? Don’t we? I don’t know about that either. I think we love the idea of love, but is what we feel for each other love? I can’t say whether or not I feel that for you. I know I don’t feel the all-consuming passion that I can clearly identify as love.”

Wendy smiled slightly. “Is that even what love is? And if so, is that what makes a marriage work?”

A choked noise that sounded a little like a laugh came from the back of his throat. “So many questions. Not too many answers.”

They watched each other’s expressions, trying to see something in the other that would supply the certainty they were seeking. Finally, Matt pulled himself up straight and tall, broke the bloated silence.

“I’ll go out and tell them,” he said softly. “I’ll take care of it.”

Wendy nodded solemnly. “Thank you.”

He walked across the room and out the door, shutting it carefully behind him.

Wendy headed back to the vanity where she had been working on her face. She stared at herself in the mirror, touched her powdered cheek, pulled her robe closed with a shudder.

There was a knock at the door, startling her and waking her from her reverie.

“How’s it going in there?” Matt’s voice called to her cheerily. “Can I see you? Or are you in your dress yet?”

Wendy showed her teeth to her reflection. “Just putting it on now. You’ll have to wait until the ceremony.”

***

She had made it through the preparations without killing anyone. Now all the guests were seated and waiting for her big entrance. She’d walked across the lawn from the main house to the chapel, her heels sinking in the quicksand just as the guests’ had. The wind had carried her veil off her face, loosening the bangs that had been plastered away from her forehead with a combination of hairspray and one of her mother’s well-place pins. The lock hung stiffly in the middle of her forehead, curled upward, making her look like a cartoon character. She pushed the loose bit of hair back onto the top of her head, stuffed the end under the closest pin.

When she arrived at the chapel, someone cued the bridesmaids and they started to march down the aisle, practicing the stride they’d been taught by the wedding coordinator at the rehearsal the night before. And now Wendy was in the doorway. With the sun behind her, she appeared in silhouette. Then she took a step forward into the light of the room. She heard the whispers of her friends and family, of his second cousins once removed whom she’d never met. Looks beautiful… dress… hair… gorgeous. Old friends from the neighborhood—Sue Golden, Cindy Miller, Jackie Crowne—pulled out for major life events, ooh-ing, ah-ing.

She saw Matt on the dais, waiting, sweaty with nerves, but looking pleased with himself. She smiled in his general direction.

One little devil, all dressed in red

Everyone feels this way.

Tried to get to heaven on the end of a thread

Everyone must think they could be making the worst mistake of their life.

But the thread string broke

Don’t they?

And down they all fell, instead of going to heaven, they all went to—

“Do you, Matt, take Wendy…?”

Instead of going to heaven, they all went to—?

“I do.”

“Do you Wendy, take Matt…?”

Instead of going to heaven, they all went to—?

Damn. Damn that damned song. What the hell comes next?

Nothing’s final. I can always get a divorce. I can get a divorce tomorrow, even, if I really want to.

Don’t get excited, don’t get all red

Instead of going to Heaven, they all went to bed!

Right. That’s how it goes.

“I do.”

***

Editorial note: I wrote this piece before I created the more fully formed Matt character in When She Knew, so if he doesn’t quite match up, that’s why.

by BetsyG

The sound of clinking silverware, the glow of the candle in the middle of the table, and the fact that a man was gazing at her from just beyond the candle’s low, flickering light brought to Wendy’s mind a familiar, if hazy, recollection.

Wendy was on a date.

Probably anyone else would have said that she and Matt had been dating for a while, starting with their first lunch together at work. But lunch during the work day between a marketing manager and engineering director who had a project in common was not romance, despite the overtones. After a few weeks of hints and suggestions, they’d finally fumbled their way to making Friday evening dinner plans.

By the mellow light of the candle, Wendy noticed that Matt looked considerably more attractive than he did under the fluorescents at the office. She sure liked him well enough but she didn’t know what else she felt for him. After all, she’d been working with him for over a year and hadn’t considered him romantically until he’d shown interest in her. Now she wasn’t sure if that was because he wasn’t really her type or because she’d been hung up on her ex-boyfriend. She’d been mourning the death of that relationship for almost two years.

“Do you know what you’re going to have?” Matt asked.

She would have ordered the veal but she didn’t know where Matt stood on the matter of slaughtering baby cows. Anyhow, everyone knew not to order veal on a first date.

“I’m thinking of the rainbow trout.”

“That looks good. I like trout,” Matt said as he closed the menu and laid it on the table. “But I’m going to have the veal.”

Strike one, Wendy thought.

The waiter came to the table and they placed their orders, with Matt tacking on a couple of appetizers they hadn’t discussed. Both were calorie-laden items that Wendy pictured going directly to her hips. A man should know better than to order such food for his date.

Strike two.

“What do you have planned for the rest of the weekend?” Wendy said.

“I have to work tomorrow. I almost always go into the office on Saturdays. You?”

“I’ll probably catch up on a few things at home. But I like to leave Sunday pretty much free to do what I want, like go hiking.”

She meant to leave this statement as an invitation. If things went well tonight (which was looking less likely by the minute), she envisioned them climbing the scenic but teeny foothills that weren’t too far from her house.

But he quickly put the kibosh on that.

“We’re having an event at church this Sunday. Kind of a community thing after mass.”

She winced, she hoped not visibly.

“Do you go to church every week? It’s so beautiful this time of year. I’d hate to be stuck in church when the sky’s the type of blue it is in the fall.”

“Eternal damnation doesn’t take the weather into account.” He winked, but she wasn’t sure if the joke was about his religion or her lack of it.

She wanted him to elaborate. No. What she really wanted was for him to throw his head back and laugh the way he did when he knew he’d amused her. But there was no flash of his smile and no explanation about how he went only because he liked the music or to use the time as an opportunity for quiet contemplation.

Instead, he moved in closer to the candle and spoke seriously. “You don’t go to church?”

Wendy shook her head.

“You mean, you don’t believe…?”

Was he actually asking this question? First veal and now religion. Didn’t he know anything about anything?

“Do I believe in…what? In something I need to pray to? In a religion that keeps track of my sins on a scorecard?”

She knew as soon as the words came out that she’d been way too blunt and little bit nasty, much more than she’d intended. But Matt didn’t seem to take offense. Instead, he smiled serenely.

“I know what you mean. There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense to me either. But life without God makes even less sense. Do you really think all this happened by accident?” He gestured around the room, but he seemed to be pointing to the entire earth. “I don’t believe that seems possible. I believe in God.”

Strike three. You’re out of here.

Wendy gulped her wine. The date had just officially ended; she could afford to get a bit of a buzz on. In fact, getting a little drunk might be a good idea.

“Are you one of these people who believes that God has a grand scheme? That people live and die because God decides when and where everything will happen?”

Matt surprised Wendy by reaching across the table and putting his hand over hers. This seemed completely out of character but she could see that the topic of religion brought out the passion in him. She wanted to pull her hand away but she was too embarrassed by how that would come across, although she was equally embarrassed by allowing it to stay there. She made a promise to herself that once he took his hand away, she would be sure to keep her hands on her lap and out of his reach.

“To a certain extent I do believe in what you say, Wendy.” He looked into her eyes with the warmth that was the main thing about him that she’d found attractive. Until tonight.

Despite this turn of events, she still liked him, and admired the fact that he was being so reasonable in what could have been a heated exchange.

“But how can you? How can you think there’s someone—a person, if you will—up there, pulling strings?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes you just have to make a leap.”

“But…” Wendy started on what would have been a rant, then thought better of it, shook her head and looked away from him. “Forget it. Never mind.”

“I know. I’ve been in enough meetings with you to know it all has to make sense to you. But does everything have to be like that? Does everything you believe need to be justified by logic?”

The appetizers arrived just then, which Wendy hoped would provide a new topic for conversation. If not, she would use this break in the action as an opportunity to steer the subject toward work matters. When the bill came, she would pay it or at least insist on splitting it, maybe even keep the receipt to show him she’d always viewed the dinner and their relationship as strictly business.

She picked up her fork and prepared to stab at the fried calamari Matt had ordered. Matt had already had a piece on the end of his fork and pointed the morsel at her.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, what?”

“You didn’t answer.”

“Huh?”

“About whether there’s anything you believe in that defies logic.”

She looked at him, studying his earnest expression. A part of her wanted to give him what he wanted, wanted to submit to the vulnerability in his eyes. But the gulf between them was too great.

“No, Matt. There’s nothing like that. Nothing I can think of.”

His face registered what she read as profound disappointment. She felt a brief pang of regret, a fleeting desire to prove to him that she had a soul and convictions as deep as his. But it was better this way. She was sure of it.

He ate the bit of squid off his fork.

“Did you have a chance to see Roger’s new release?” he said. “Very elegant. And right on time. I think you’re going to be happy with it.”

***

On Monday, it was eight o’clock by the time Wendy got home from work. Her cat greeted her at the door, yowling to be fed. Cats are strange, Wendy thought as she reached down to stroke its silky, white fur. She really didn’t get the whole cat thing. She especially didn’t like the way Gretl seemed to view her as prey, often pouncing on her legs when she passed. “She’s playing,” the cat people explained to her when she complained about it. But she hated the beast’s sudden movement and the painless but threatening feeling of its hard teeth against her skin.

She hadn’t really known what she was signing up for when she’d taken in the cat. As was often the case, she’d leapt in without thinking it through. And now, she figured she was stuck with the thing for the next ten years or so, unless it wandered into the nearby woods and met an animal with sharper claws and more lethal teeth.

Sometimes when she came home to the cat and its unfathomable ways—the water bowl whose contents were splashed all over the kitchen floor, the runner that had been dragged out of its position in the center of the hallway and covered with white clumps of hair—she half-wished that Gretl would just disappear.

She fed the cat and sat down to a manufactured dinner she’d zapped in the microwave. After she finished scraping the last morsels of the miniscule meal from its plastic tray, Wendy retired to the living room to read the newspaper. A comforter was draped over her lap. Just as she was settling in, Gretl appeared at her feet, looking up at Wendy with giant, yellow eyes. Wendy recognized the tightening of the cat’s muscles that indicated it was poised to jump, so she moved the newspaper off her lap and held her hands out of the way. Gretl leaped onto Wendy’s lap, landing on the spot with the precision of a tightrope walker. The cat pushed its face into Wendy’s cheek, its purr rumbling like a piece of construction equipment. Wendy giggled as the buzzing pile of fur sought to meld its body with hers. She scratched the cat’s head with her nails, watched Gretl close her eyes, reveling in ecstasy.

***

The friendship between Wendy and Matt had definitely cooled. They still ate lunch together sometimes, but it seemed to Wendy that continuing to do so was part of an attempt to deny that the friendship had ever been on a romantic trajectory. Their meals together were only in the cafeteria and the subject matter always revolved around work.

Although the construction of the barrier between them had been Wendy’s desire from the moment she found out about Matt’s religious bent, she felt unsettled by it.

“The religion thing was a deal buster,” she told her friend Kim during a phone conversation shortly after the date. “There was no point pursuing a relationship after I found out about that.”

“Nobody’s perfect, Wendy. You’ll never find anyone who exactly matches what you’re looking for. You can’t really know what’s right for you, anyhow.”

“But I do. Believe me, I know.”

“Do you keep track of it all on a list or something?”

Wendy laughed, but acknowledged to herself that she really did have a list, if not on paper then pretty solidly inscribed in her mind. Didn’t everybody? Anyhow, she’d already given Matt enough leeway. The man prescribed by her list would have his own friends; a man who had no friends tended to be too reliant on her and resisted socializing with her large circle of friends. She also found that a man’s friends—both the quantity and quality—reflected his own warmth and likeability. Matt, though, apparently socialized only in the hallways of work. Wendy had continued to pursue the friendship with him even though he lacked this key quality. So it wasn’t as if she was completely inflexible.

“Well, anyway, that’s that.” Wendy said this with finality, except that she realized as soon as she said the words that she’d used the same resolute tone and those very same words many times before in conversations with her other girlfriends. In fact, she’d devoted hours of phone time to the subject of how Matt was all wrong for her and how she was glad to have ended it before it really got started.

Kim picked up on this. “You sure are thinking about this a lot. As they say, ‘I think thou doth protest too much.’”

Maybe, thought Wendy. But she couldn’t understand why. Was it because she actually liked him, this kind soul who, until the chill-producing date, had been so appreciative of her? Or was it simply because he was the only man in years that she’d had in her sights?

She didn’t know. But she knew she would struggle with it, both privately and publicly, until she figured out the answer.

***

There was a surprise guest at the team meeting on Monday. Tom Gillian, VP of Strategic Marketing and Product Development (the latest reorg had lengthened his title considerably) was there, looking decidedly out of place in his Brooks Brothers suit. With the exception of Wendy, who tried to walk the line between looking like the denizen of the sixth floor she worked on and the more casual style of the engineers she spent most of her day with, the members of the team were clad in jeans and an oddball array of tops, ranging from faded tie-dyed tee-shirts to polo shirts that were spotted with stains. Matt, as the manager, usually dressed a hair more conservatively than his people. His shirt, tee or otherwise, was always unwrinkled and in good repair.

Today, he was wearing the hunter green long-sleeved ribbed tee that was Wendy’s favorite. She could recite the shirt’s assets by heart, having found the same top in the Eddie Bauer catalog. One of its best features was how it hugged Matt’s chest and well-formed upper arms. Whenever he wore the shirt, she wondered how he developed and maintained this physique, if he had a regular regimen at the gym or if this form came naturally. She started to picture him at the gym, the muscles beneath the cotton shirt tensing into hard bulges as he worked his pecs.

While she surreptitiously evaluated his upper body, she suddenly sensed that he was looking at her. She raised her eyes to his face and they made eye contact. He smiled at her, then tipped his head in the direction of the man in the suit and raised his eyebrows in a question. She gave her shoulders a subtle shrug.

The rest of the meeting participants had gathered around the table. Matt was ready to start.

“To what do we owe the honor, Tom?”

Wendy noticed that these VPs had a way of owning the room regardless of whose meeting it was. The amount of space he was taking up—his chest puffed out like a rooster’s—was distinctly male. She could sense Matt’s reaction to him; his territory was being invaded. You don’t have to be an anthropologist, Wendy thought, to see that there were two rams in the room, preparing for battle.

“Good morning, Matt,” Tom said with forced joviality. He had a leather-bound notebook in front of him which he did not open but mindlessly stroked its surface. He looked at Wendy and nodded his head in her direction. “Wendy.”

She nodded back. “Tom.”

He sat up straight, so his head was higher than everyone else’s. “You’re going to need to change the schedule.”

Wendy’s eyebrows came together and she opened her mouth to object. Before she could say a word, Matt caught her eye and shook his head. He leaned back in his chair, rested his intertwined hands across his belly, and regarded Tom with a look of amusement.

“By how much?” he said.

“We’ve got a key customer who needs it ASAP. You need to bring in the ship date by a month.”

There was a lot of movement in the room. The engineers were agitated. Wendy could feel her face getting red. If Matt hadn’t given her the signal, she’d have exploded, even if Tom was the VP. There was no give in the schedule, not if they didn’t want to destroy the sleek product they’d spent countless hours designing and refining and that required every minute of time they’d allotted to development and testing. Besides, she knew there was no such thing as a customer that couldn’t wait a month for a new release. Even if they managed to kill themselves and deliver the product as Tom was requesting, the customer would probably leave the CD sitting on some drone’s desk in its shrink-wrapped package for a month until the next scheduled training session.

Matt smiled slightly. He opened his notebook and looked to Wendy. “We’ll need to discuss this. Wendy, do you have your copy of the features list?”

“I sure do,” she said, using the same light and friendly tone as Matt’s. She opened her notebook.

“This is going to take us a few minutes, Tom,” Matt said. He turned his attention back to Wendy. “So what do you think? What can go?”

Wendy got it. She studied the list. “Not sure. Tom, we have this new feature that’s on Roger’s plate that’s taking close to a full month for development.” Matt handed Tom a copy of the features list so he could follow along. “Number 16. If we scrap that, it wouldn’t have a ripple effect on the other features and Roger would be freed up to work on something else. There’s your month. The other way to go would be to eliminate a handful of the enhancements, say—” She scanned the paper in front of her. “E152, um… E63, 64 and 65 and, let’s see… E97. Matt, does that look like that would do it?”

Matt shook his head. “We still have to take QA into account. What if we include… E84?”

Wendy looked at him and nodded. “I hate to lose that. But that makes the most sense.” It was all she could do to keep from laughing. They were decimating the product and being so reasonable and earnest about it, Tom couldn’t raise an argument. She could see his mouth opening and closing, opening and closing.

By the time the meeting was over, they’d agreed to bring in the schedule by a week, a week Wendy knew they’d slip, which meant they’d ship the product on the original schedule. The concession was a joke, but it allowed Tom to walk away with a perceived victory. She knew he’d simply finagle to get his hands on a pre-release version anyway, so he could deliver the product to the customer and say it was there on time.

What a great meeting, she thought as she started to put papers back into her folder. She would have blown it if she’d gone head-to-head with Tom. Matt had been brilliant.

The rest of the team vacated the meeting room while she and Matt remained to collect their papers.

“Good meeting,” she said.

He gave a little laugh. “Yeah. You were great.”

“I was great? You were great.”

He laughed again. “I guess we’re members of the Mutual Admiration Society. Let’s call it a draw. We were a great team.”

Wendy felt her heart leap, a wildly inappropriate feeling for the office. Matt was looking at her with the tenderness that had originally endeared him to her. Her cheeks flushed. She wanted to say— No. This was all wrong. God, Matt suddenly looked so attractive, the way he was looking at her.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, closing her notebook. “I’ll see you next week.” She gave a quick wave and walked briskly out of the room.

***

Friday night, Wendy got home from work and changed into her play clothes. She was meeting Kim for dinner and a movie. Usually, Gretl was waiting for her at the back door when she got home, but the cat was not there.

When she returned home at around midnight, Gretl still had not shown up. Wendy opened the sliders and stood on her deck, making kissing sounds that echoed in the silent night. “Gretl!” she called softly. She searched the dark yard for the cat’s white profile. But the cat did not come.

The next morning, Wendy woke early. Gretl, having been out all night, would be ravenous. She came downstairs and looked at the back door. No Gretl.

Fine. Don’t come home. That cat was a big pain.

She opened the slider and called out, “Gretl! Gretl!”

She left the slider open and poured out some food into the cat’s bowl, expecting her to come running in at any moment. Sitting at the kitchen table, she ate her own breakfast, read the paper and drank her coffee, all the while keeping her eye on the spot where she expected the cat to appear.

There was still no sign of Gretl when she went out on her morning jog. During her run, which she usually used as an opportunity to disappear into her thoughts and revel in nature, she kept her eye out for any sign of a white animal.

When she got back to her unit, she went around to the back and searched the yard as far as the woods. At the edge of the woods, she called out the cat’s name, squinting into the thicket for any hint of the animal, perhaps a bit of fur caught on a low branch. But there was nothing.

She returned home and took a shower. “Where’s my cat?” she said out loud as she dried herself. It was noon by then. She didn’t know much about cats, but she knew Gretl and, in the months since she’d taken her in, she’d learned that it was unthinkable that the cat wouldn’t come home for more than 24 hours.

As she looked out the window at the backyard, a sense of panic suddenly came over her, bringing tears to her eyes. It was all too strange, she thought, because she didn’t care about the cat, not one bit.

Another hour passed. Wendy was trying to get through some work at the kitchen table, which was nearly impossible while she so distracted by thoughts of the missing animal. She couldn’t help but picture her beautiful cat lying in the woods, torn to pieces, an unrecognizable pile of white hair. She closed her laptop and started to cry.

Just then, she heard a mew and saw Gretl darting across the vibrant green grass toward Wendy’s porch. Wendy leapt out of her seat and opened the screen door. The cat ran in, heading directly to its food. It attacked the bits in the bowl, crunching furiously. Nothing about the cat’s appearance explained its long absence.

“Gretl! Where were you? I was so worried!” She patted the cat while it ate, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Don’t do that. Don’t you go away like that again.”

She pulled the cat away from its food despite the danger inherent in that, and picked it up, nuzzling her cheek in the cat’s fur. “Don’t go away again,” she repeated, purring the words into the animal’s neck.

The tears wouldn’t stop. She opened her eyes wide when she realized that the tears might have to do with something other than the cat.

“I’m so stupid.”

She put the cat down and it bee-lined back to its food.

“I’m so stupid, Gretl. How could I be so stupid?”

She grabbed her bag and keys, then got in her car and headed toward the office.

When she drove up to the building, she saw Matt’s car, one of only a few cars that was parked in the vast lot. She raced into the building—stopping to scrawl her name in the security guard’s log—tore up the stairs, and then fumbled with her key card to gain access to the Engineering floor.

The only light in the long hallway came from Matt’s office, at the corner at the end of the hall. She walked briskly toward his office, still out of breath from the two flights of steps she’d taken at Olympian speeds. Finally, she was at his doorway, holding the sides of the door jamb, catching her breath.

He had been facing the window, his back toward her. He turned when he heard her panting at his door, clearly surprised to see her.

She had stopped crying during the car ride, but as soon as she started to speak, she could feel herself choking up again. She fought to keep the tears down.

“I…” She was still catching her breath.

“What is it Wendy?” Matt said, his brow furrowing with concern.

She shook her head vigorously from side to side and started again. “I believe in ghosts.”

He opened his mouth and she shook her head again.

“No. I don’t…that’s not it. I…I can feel the souls…of people, you know, after they die.”

“I don’t understand.”

She pressed her hands against her stomach. “When someone dies, like at their funeral or something…” She dragged her hands up her body, over her chest, until they landed near her neck. “I can feel them…ascending. Like I’m a vessel. They go through me on the way…to…wherever. I believe that.”

“You believe that?”

She nodded. “Yes. I know it happens. I can feel it.”

He studied her, looking a bit dazed. His eyes followed the path her hands had taken up her body.

“Wow,” he said.

She smiled and wiped away a tear.

“I know. It makes no sense. It’s utterly ridiculous. But it’s true. It really happens.”

His face relaxed and he looked at her with so much kindness and empathy, Wendy felt like something inside her would break. He stood up and went to her, moving toward her until they were face-to-face. Then he brought two fingers to her cheek and wiped away her remaining tears. His other hand reached out to hers, dangling at her side. He touched her palm gently with his fingertips.

“Lunch?” he said.

She nodded, and squeezed his hand in hers.

By BetsyG

My seven-year-old son, already past believing in the tooth fairy and becoming distrustful of the stories adults tell children, asked me if I believe in Santa Claus. I was stuck for an answer. Being Jewish, we don’t celebrate Christmas so it wouldn’t destroy any illusions for him if I told him I did not. But I didn’t want him ruining it for the other children as, fact-bearing child that he is, I knew he would.

So I gave him an ambiguous answer, one that allowed for Santa’s existence. He questioned how I could perpetuate this folly and I told him that sometimes things happen that don’t make perfect sense and can’t be easily explained. Like miracles? he asked. No, I said. A miracle is when the impossible happens. I was talking about magic. Magic, I explained, is when something happens that seems like it couldn’t or shouldn’t. Magic is something implausible but not impossible, something that defies an obvious explanation.

This satisfied Alex and, except for the ongoing discussion as to whether he should get money from a tooth fairy who doesn’t exist, we seem to be done with the subject. But the conversation got me thinking. As a skeptic and a cynic, I don’t believe in a sentient God, the kind you pray to as if it had a human mind and sensibility. I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell, creations of man’s mind with no witness to their existence. Nor do I believe in miracles, in seas parting or water transmogrifying to wine. But I was not lying to Alex about magic. While I don’t extend this belief in the unexplainable to fat men delivering gifts down chimneys, I’ve seen enough strange things in my life that I have to give the phenomenon a name. Magic is the closest I can come.

Magic is different from fortuitous coincidence. Coincidence is much more common and is distinguished by the fact that, for every good and surprising thing that happens by chance, at least as many bad or mundane things happen in the same manner—we just don’t notice them. Coincidence needs no explanation; it’s just the thing that happened.

What I’m calling magic potentially could be chalked up to undefined and therefore mysterious workings of the human mind. Just as the audience of a magic act does not see the trick that makes the tiger disappear from one cage and appear in another, we can’t see all the tricks our minds are capable of.

For example, I have no musical background to speak of but, at certain creative points in my life, I have been inspired to write songs. Lacking any real knowledge of chord progressions or much of anything that might be useful for creating melodies, my songs were not very good. Each had the basic construction of a song and logic of a melody, but the songs were too simple musically and lyrically to be worth listening to. They sounded, at best, like country-western music, a genre I dislike very likely because of its simplicity.

One time, when I wasn’t thinking about writing anything at all, a song spilled out of me, words and melody at once. I can’t even say I wrote it. All I did was grab a pen and catch the thing as it came out. The song is surprisingly good, orders of magnitude better than anything I’d put effort into writing. I can imagine hearing it on the radio or as a cut on an album. It doesn’t feel like bragging to say so because there was nothing intentional about the song, that is, I didn’t struggle with what rhymes with what or whether the melody should next go up or down. The song emerged fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s head.

In a sense, the song was not truly my work. Evidence of this lies in the fact that, when the song came out, part of the chorus was missing. I spent hours trying to fill it in, much like having to cut out and paint a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The piece I created with my almost non-existent musical ability is a poor relative of the rest of the song.

Where did the song come from? What trick of the brain caused this idiot savant experience?

While you may not agree that there was any magic in this experience, you probably have no reason to doubt me when I say it happened. This story differs from anecdotes in which you are certain the teller is a liar or crazy. I use the term “lying ghost girl” to refer to that type of story, after a girl I met at summer camp who claimed her house was haunted. She immediately struck me as pathological. But I have to confess I experienced something that seems to me to teeter on the rim of the glass I call magic, with the potential of landing in a realm I can’t define.

When my son Matthew turned four, he began to turn yellow, starting in the corners of his eyes. Over the next weeks, his coloration got worse as he became ill with an undiagnosable liver disease. The results were jaundice, vomiting, and excessive sleepiness. Three weeks after the onset of the illness, Matthew became encephalitic, which is a fancy way of saying he was out of his mind. By the time he arrived by ambulance at the Pediatric ICU at Massachusetts General Hospital, he was in a coma from the toxins that his broken liver was not filtering. He had liver failure for unknown reasons, though likely caused by a random virus gone haywire in a process that medical science does not understand. He needed a liver transplant or he would die very soon—within a week.

I don’t know if I ever really believed he would die, maybe because such bad karma doesn’t happen to my family. I don’t consider it a miracle, magic, or even an unlikely coincidence that a liver became available (meaning someone died of head trauma and their family agreed to donate the organs). Matthew was just in the right place at the right time.

(However, there was more than a little irony to how he got the organ. I’m very much against having guns in the home, particularly because a young cousin of mine died from one of those I-didn’t-know-it-was-loaded accidents you read about. So it certainly was a bit bizarre that the young man whose liver saved my son’s life died from a shot to the head during an in-home accident, the type of accident that would never have occurred if I made the rules. In effect, my son’s life was saved by a gun. Reconcile that.)

Two weeks after Matthew’s transplant, he and I came home from the hospital. Among the other errands I had to catch up on, I wanted to develop the last roll of film I’d taken before Matthew got sick. On the roll were pictures from Matthew’s fourth birthday party. The photos were important to me because the healthy Matthew with the carefree life on that roll of film was gone. The new Matthew was one whose health I would now worry about, in varying degrees, forever. Additionally, the medications Matthew was taking made him look like a different child—hirsute from his anti-rejection drug, puffy from steroids. His gums were swollen and his teeth were turning gray. I wanted to hold the last visual record of my untainted child in my hand.

When I went to pick up the developed roll of film, I was alarmed by how thin the packet felt. “No charge,” the cashier said.

I opened the package and inside was a note stating that the film had been blank—probably due to being loaded incorrectly—thus the lab was unable to develop the photos. I took the negatives out of the package and held them up. Sure enough, they were blank. I was sorely disappointed, but the photos were the least of my concerns. I was much more worried about Matthew’s health—that he would go into rejection or develop one of several life-threatening infections that were common post-transplant.

Not long after I attempted to have the film developed, Matthew did acquire one such viral infection, which required him to return to the hospital for treatment. The doctors said they had never seen such a high viral load. If not contained, the disease could cause gastric bleeding and retinal scarring that could result in permanent vision loss, blindness even. I soon realized that, with all the risks associated with being a transplant recipient, the cure for liver failure was almost as worrisome as the disease.

We soon came home from the hospital again, the virus under control but requiring home infusion therapy, an IV pole now present amidst the stuffed-animals in Matthew’s bedroom. But, as I watched Matthew beat back this challenge and others, I started to believe he would be okay.

A few weeks later, I was cleaning out my car in the garage and came across the package from the undeveloped roll of film. As I opened the lid of the trash can to discard the packet, I decided to look at the negatives one more time. I pulled out a strip and could clearly see on it the images from Matthew’s birthday party. I pulled out strip after strip: all had images on them, a perfectly normal set of negatives.

I stood over the trash can screaming “Oh my God!” over and over.

I’ve searched for an explanation, because taking what happened at face value makes me the lying ghost girl. Maybe I didn’t look at the negatives carefully when I first got them and the images were there all along. (But why had the lab seen the same thing?) I wondered if the chemicals that were used were faulty and they had somehow delayed the developing process, but I didn’t really believe that was possible. Either the images were on the roll to be developed immediately, or they weren’t.

So I’m left to puzzle.

Having experienced this and other incidents makes me feel justified in being ambiguous about Santa Claus with Alex. Let him keep an open mind for a little longer than his logical nature would on its own. Maybe seeing some magic for himself will inspire him to become the man who draws back the curtain and begins to understand.