For these people, talking to dead relatives brought solace, and that was what Josh’s messages brought Laura, too. At first. But after a few months, she realized that his visits weren’t helping her get on with her life. Even worse, they were frightening her son. She couldn’t let Josh keep coming whenever he felt like it. So she asked him to wait for her to call him, and that worked for a few more months until Laura stopped calling. Stopped needing to.
Laura never went back to work as a real estate agent, but a year after the murder she was able to move about in the world almost like a normal person, with only the occasional panic attack. It helped that by then Josh’s killer had been apprehended. One of the last things she promised Josh was that she’d do everything in her power to see that his killer was convicted and went to prison for the rest of his life.
When Laura was getting ready to go to the courthouse to witness a pretrial motion, preparing to look her brother’s killer in the eye for the first time since the murder, she excavated months’ worth of shredded tissues that lined her purse—tissues that she’d stuffed there after the endless crying jags during sessions with her therapist. She sat through every pretrial motion, thirty-eight days of jury selection, the six-week trial, and nine days of jury deliberation. Her brother’s killer was found guilty and sentenced to eighty-five years in prison with the possibility of parole after fifty years.
It’s been twenty-five years since Josh’s death. Laura and I never did write a book together. These days, she doesn’t summon Josh, and he doesn’t come unbidden. And even though my visit with the spiritualists was a bust, I’m reluctant to brush off Josh’s visits as hallucinations or twilight sleep, the product of a vivid imagination fueled by wishful thinking. It’s intoxicating to imagine that there was more to it than that.
I described Laura’s experience to a clinical psychologist, and he used Freudian terms to explain her likely mental state. He said, “It has to do with what we call the self-reflective sense of self—the ability to step back and observe what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. When someone loses that distance, it speaks to a great likelihood of having this kind of vivid imagery. Their ego boundaries are a little permeable at the edges.”
When I asked Laura what, in retrospect, she thought had really been going on, she spoke of entirely different kinds of fissures. “I was able to perceive Josh’s spirit because I was so fragmented that his energy seeped into the cracks. As I healed, so did the cracks.”
As for me, I still believe that when someone dies, it’s game over. I also believe that whatever Laura’s experience was, it was utterly authentic. I have no trouble holding those two ideas in my head at the same time. Grief is complicated, but it’s not the end.
PLOT TWISTS
This Writer’s Life
– Jeffery Deaver –
I WAS A NERD WHEN I WAS GROWING UP.
And a nerd when the word meant something. Not like nowadays, when being a nerd comes with a billion dollars in stock options and a Silicon Valley mansion, thanks to your inventing a social network platform or an algorithm for self-driving drones. I was a true nerd, a pure nerd: pudgy, clumsy, socially inept, ignored by the cheerleaders and pom-pom girls. I owned a slide rule (look it up on Google).
There was a reason that sports team captains in school picked me last for their teams. Even on the field, I would neglect the game and daydream, composing stories about knights and orcs and cowboys and poems that went something like this:
The score is tied; three boys on base.
I see the batter’s happy face
As he grips the bat and looks my way.
All I can do is hope and pray
That he won’t hit that ball to me.
But we all know how it goes;
He swings for me and breaks my nose.
But my status as nerd didn’t really matter. I had something better than sports; I had the Glen Ellyn, Illinois, Public Library. That was where I escaped in the summers and after school, and it was there that I fell in love with books. Such miraculous little things… they could take you away from your daily cares, teach you about things you might otherwise never learn (Wikipedia and YouTube were not then even silicon gleams in an engineer’s eye). Books also brought people together. Perhaps you were a new kid at school and didn’t know a soul. Yet noticing that a fellow student across the schoolyard was holding a copy of Ray Bradbury’s short stories or The Lord of the Rings, books that you, too, loved, you had an instant invitation to friendship.
I knew then that I wanted to make my living as a writer.
How to achieve that goal, though, was a mystery.
Among the various genres I tried my hand at was poetry. I loved the fusion of meaning and the sound of words. I didn’t care much for confessional poetry and modeled my work after the likes of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, who carefully crafted and structured their poems. After much work and many postage stamps, I was able to get some work published in literary journals and, in one case, a radical political publication (though why they wanted a poem about pining lovers I never did understand). Suddenly I was a published poet. I was also, I supposed, a professional poet, since I was paid for some of my work.
I was not, however, a profitable poet.
Many of the journals publishing poems, it turned out, had a grand scheme: yes, contributors made a few pennies per word, but if you wanted more than one copy of the magazine (to, say, impress cheerleaders and pom-pom girls—which doesn’t work, by the way), you had to buy them, and they were quite expensive. One measures one’s success as a poet the same way Internet startups are gauged: not by how much money they make but by how little they lose. In my best fiscal twelve months as a poet, I believe I lost only six dollars. A banner year!
Clearly, poetry was not going to allow me to lead a writer’s life.
The mystery remained unsolved.
I decided to try combining my love of poetry with another passion: music. I would become a singer/songwriter, à la Bob Dylan or Richard Thompson. Just as I’d learned about the business of poetry, I learned several things about the profession of music. First was that the job description includes two requisite components: singer and songwriter. The writing came easily to me, and I churned out scores of lyrics. The singing… well, that was not my strong suit.
Second, and more troubling, was that I was too literary. This was brought home to me one night when I was performing as the opening act ahead of a popular folk/country singer. I was pleased to see him looking over the lead sheets of my songs—pages of the lyrics and chord changes. He pointed to something on a sheet and asked, “What’s that?”
I didn’t understand and asked him what he meant.
He said, “That little thing there.”
I replied, “Oh, a semicolon.”
A pause. “Which is what?”
I explained the punctuation mark’s vital role in the world of sentence structure.
“And you use those things in your songs?” He seemed amused.
That night proved typical: I gave a croaky, though grammatically correct, performance, while the other fellow blew the audience away with his natural talent and enviable voice.
Clearly, music was not going to help me solve the mystery of how to lead a writer’s life.