He spotted me and broke into a massive smile. A real dazzler, the likes of which I’d never seen him do before. “Anna. Hey, you look great!” His voice was louder than it used to be.
“Thank you.”
“Yeah. You don’t look so much like a stunned seal.”
“Did I look like a stunned seal?” I hadn’t known.
He laughed. “I wasn’t too good either, right? Dead man walking.”
I’d called him after my reading with Neris Hemming; there were a couple of questions I wanted answers to. He’d professed himself delighted to hear from me and suggested we meet for dinner.
“Right this way.” He led me into the restaurant.
“For two?” the desk girl asked.
Mitch smiled and said, “We’d prefer a booth.”
“So does everybody.”
“I guess they do,” he acknowledged, with a laugh. “But see what you can do.”
“I’ll go see,” the girl said grudgingly. “But you might have to wait.”
“That’s okay.”
He smiled again. He was flirting with her. And it was working. I thought, I’ve never met this person before.
I noticed something else. “You don’t have your kit bag! This is the first time I’ve seen you without it.”
“Really?” He barely seemed to remember. “Oh yeah,” he said slowly. “That’s right. Back then, I just about lived in the gym. Wow, that seems so long ago.”
“And you’ve spoken more in the last five minutes than in all the months I knew you.”
“I didn’t talk?”
“No.”
“But I love to talk.”
The girl was back. “Gotcha a booth.”
“For real? Thank you,” Mitch said sincerely. “Thank you so much.”
She colored. “My pleasure.”
So the real Mitch was a charmer. Who knew? My speedy reassessment of him continued apace.
After we’d ordered I said, “I have to ask you a question.”
“So ask it.”
“When you spoke to Neris Hemming did you really believe she was channeling Trish?”
“Yeah.” He hesitated. He seemed embarrassed. “You know…” He gave a short laugh. “Look. At the time, I was out of my mind. Looking back, I can see I was actually crazy. I needed to believe.” He shrugged. “Maybe she channeled Trish, maybe she didn’t. All I know is, it worked for me at the time, probably stopped me from going totally over the edge.”
“Do you remember you told me that she guessed your nicknames? Yours and Trish’s for each other. What were they?”
Another hesitation, another embarrassed little laugh. “Mitchie and Trixie.”
Mitchie and Trixie? “I could have guessed that for free.”
“Yeah. Well, like I said, it did what it needed to do at the time.”
“How do you feel now about everything?”
He thought about it, staring into the distance. “Some days it’s as bad as it ever was, sometimes it feels like day one all over again. But other days I feel good. That it’s true that her life wasn’t interrupted, but completed. And when I think that, I think I can have a life again someday, without the guilt killing me.”
“Do you still try to, you know, contact Trish?”
He shook his head. “I still talk to her and have pictures of her everywhere but I know she’s gone, and for whatever reason, I’m still here. Same goes for you. I don’t know if you’ll ever contact Aidan, but the way I see it is, you’re alive. You’ve got a life to live.”
“Maybe. Anyway, I’m not going to any more psychics,” I said. “That was just a phase.”
“Glad to hear it. Hey, are you free Sunday afternoon? I’ve got a billion great places for us to go to. How about the Immigrants in the Garment Industry Museum—that’s got some niche appeal. Or the Planetarium, they do simulated spacecraft rides. Or bingo, we could go to bingo.”
Bingo. I liked the sound of that.
100
Take a look!” Jacqui hiked up her skirt and pulled down her knickers.
I averted my eyes.
“No, look, look!” she said. “You’ll love it. I’ve had a Brazilian and something a little bit special. Can you see?”
She angled herself so that I could see beneath her massive bump; she’d had a dinky diamante rose appliquéd to her naked pubic bone. “So we’ll have something pretty to look at while I’m in labor.”
Every time she said the word labor I felt dizzy. Please, God, don’t let it be too terrible. She was due on April 23, less than two weeks away, and I was staying with her, in case it all kicked off in the middle of the night.
“And let’s face it, it’s bound to,” she said. “No one ever seems to go into labor at a nice convenient time, like a quarter to eleven on a Saturday morning. It’s always some godforsaken hour in the dead of the night.”
Her beloved LV wheelie bag stood by the door, packed with a Lulu Guinness wash bag, two Jo Malone scented candles, an iPod, several Marimekko nightdresses, a camera, a lavender eye mask, Ipo nail polish in case her mani-pedi got chipped “while I’m pushing,” a teeth-whitening treatment to fill the time because “I could be doing a lot of hanging around,” three Versace baby outfits, and her most recent scan.
The other scans were stuck up on the wall. And that reminded me of something…
Before the accident, I used to be a right hypochondriac. Not that I faked being sick, but when it happened, I was very interested in it and tried to involve Aidan in the drama. If I had, say, a toothache, I’d give him regular bulletins on my symptoms. “It’s a different kind of pain now,” I’d say. “Remember when I said it was a kind of hummy ache—well, it’s changed. More darty.” Aidan was used to me and my drama, and he’d say, “Darty, hey? That’s new.”
I’d even broken a bone about a year and a half ago; I’d been rummaging through cupboards looking for something and I turned around too quickly, cracked my finger against a drawer, and started bellyaching, “Ooh, Christ, oh God. Oh, my finger, that’s awful.”
“Sit down,” Aidan said. “Show me. Which one?”
He took my finger and—I know this sounds a little weird—he held it in his mouth. His mom used to do it for him and Kevin when they were little and now he did it for me whenever I injured a body part. (I seemed to have a very accident-prone crotch.) I shut my eyes and waited for the heat of his mouth to effect the merciful ebbing away of pain.