He was kissing her again, actually kissing her. She was real, she was back, she was his again. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said.
“Of course I’m here, silly,” she said, and her voice . . . he’d forgotten how much he loved the sound of her voice, huskier than when they first met, but so beautiful.
“You came back.”
“I’ll always come back, honey.” Then she pulled him closer and slid his shirt off his shoulders, unbuckled his belt and pulled him onto her, falling back on the bed.
“I missed you so much,” he said.
“I know, Josh. You’ve been amazing. So brave and good.”
“You can be dead if you come back like this, okay? I don’t mind, as long as I can see you.”
She laughed, kissing his cheek, mouth, neck, sliding her hands down his back, to his hips, tugging him closer, opening her legs, and she—
* * *
HE JOLTED AWAKE with a raging hard-on and only the sleeping dog next to him.
“No!” he yelled, punching the mattress. “Goddamnit!” Pebbles leaped off the bed and ran into another room, but for the love of God, Josh did not want to wake up. It was like losing her all over again.
If he was going to have a sex dream about his wife, couldn’t he at least finish it? He flopped back on the bed and closed his eyes, but he knew it was no use. He wasn’t going to fall back asleep. His erection tented the sheet. God, it was embarrassing. Ridiculous. He had a boner for his dead wife and nothing to do for it, aside from the obvious. But he didn’t want to jerk off. He’d probably cry, and the combination was too pathetic, even for him.
He closed his eyes and tried to recapture the dream, but already, it was breaking apart, like fog. The hard-on stayed.
Ridiculous.
It had seemed so real. She had seemed so real. Missing her was a gaping maw, an ache in his whole body.
The clock read 3:06 a.m. The loneliest hour in the world.
Jen said dreams were visits from the dead, but to him, it felt like torture, to have been in that dreamworld and to have to come back to find Lauren dead.
Growing up Lutheran, he’d gone to services regularly with his mom—St. Paul’s, a beautiful old church in Providence with lots of stained glass windows and hard wooden pews. It was a nice community—his mom loved the outreach and community service they did. It was good enough in that respect, but the idea of God reaching down to help here and there, of an afterlife . . . harder to swallow. Maybe it was the science geek in him. Maybe his birth father was an atheist, and it was genetic. The idea that God was waiting in the sky somewhere, deciding whether or not to answer your prayers . . . it didn’t make a lot of sense.
He remembered when he was about eight years old, and a tornado had flattened an entire Kansas town. He and his mom were watching the news report, which showed only one house standing in the entire neighborhood amid acres and acres of rubble. “It’s a miracle,” said the weeping owner about his own survival. “My wife, she was sayin’, ‘Spare us, Lord, spare us,’ and the good Lord held us in the palm of His hand and saved us.”
In the house next door, the entire family had been killed, including a six-week-old baby.
“Why didn’t God save the neighbors?” Josh asked his mother. “Didn’t they pray?” Even then, he was cynical. “I bet the baby’s parents were praying.”
“God listens,” his mother said. “But He’s not a grocer, okay? Just because you pray for something you want doesn’t mean you’re going to get it.”
“So why pray?” asked Josh.
“Why not pray?” she answered. “Eat your broccoli.” She paused. “It’s nice to think that someone else is out there, someone who loves and understands you. And God helps us all. Just maybe not in the way you think, or the way we want Him to.”
Not exactly a passionate argument for the power of prayer. Josh was twelve when he dropped the belief of God completely. Oh, church was fine—he liked the sameness of the service, the music at Christmas and Easter. He liked that his mother was so well regarded by the other parishioners. No one ever made a fuss over her lack of a spouse, and they always told him what a good kid he was.
But for him, the experience was more about the smells of candles and lemon wax, the handshake from the pastor, who had a certain celebrity about him in his robes. Josh had taken Lauren a few times when they were engaged, and a few times afterward, before she was diagnosed. He liked the cooing of the church ladies as Stephanie introduced Lauren, and he loved seeing Lauren charm everyone.
So Josh had nothing against church. He just didn’t believe in God. Or the Great Beyond.
Until Lauren had gotten sick, that was, and then he understood. There might not be any atheists in foxholes, and there were definitely no atheists in the ICU. You can’t be an atheist when your twenty-seven-year-old spouse is fighting to breathe, her eyes wide, clawing at her throat. You can’t be an atheist when you see her intubated and still. Or when they tell you there’s no cure for what she has.
He’d prayed. He asked God to forgive his earlier lack of faith. He accepted the prayers of his mother’s church friends, the prayer chain they set up for him, the rosaries Sumi Kim (a Catholic) fervently offered, the quieter, more poetic prayers of Ben (a Buddhist). Josh begged. There was nothing pretty or ceremonial about his praying, no sir. He asked God for time, for a trial drug to work, for a miracle reversal. Of course he did.
And then, after God failed to save her, when God said no to the prayers and left Josh alone in the world, lost and stunned and bereft, he became an atheist again.
It just made more sense. If anyone deserved to live, it had been Lauren.
He looked at the clock again: 3:22. With a sigh, he got up to work and give Pebbles a snack to apologize for scaring her.
* * *
A FEW DAYS after the marathon where he so distinguished himself, he asked Sarah out for dinner. A nice restaurant, one he hadn’t ever been to before, to avoid memories of Lauren. They ordered a bottle of wine, and Josh had half a glass. He’d written up a few index cards to remind him of things to ask her, because he tended to go blank when interacting with people he wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with.
How is your mother’s knee replacement working out?
How is your grandfather?
How was your vacation? Did you eat any good food? What was your favorite thing to do out there?
How is work going? It must be hard to deal with some situations. What do you do to relax?