Lost in La La Land(4)

In the worlds created by authors there was hope.

But in the end, it was fiction. A true escape. No repercussions or costs.

In a story, nothing was like the real world where the pain was forever and getting past something was impossible. Your wounds might eventually hurt less, but they would never leave you. They would kill you slowly, a type of disrepair never to be righted. The journey in a novel was the opposite: over the minute you opened your eyes or closed the cover.

I sat back in the recliner, closing my eyes and letting my brain wander, and as always, my thoughts turned to him. In my heart of hearts, I wished someone would write the story of our love, and I could live there forever. A story that ended differently than ours had. A story that included the thousand things we had planned for and not the one thing we hadn’t.

If I were any kind of writer I might have done it.

Being a scientist, this was the closest I could get to a happy ending.

But it would never be my happy ending, not my real one.

No.

I never entered the machine.

When I started the original testing of the idea, I discovered that people with my level of loss should never enter a world where they could rekindle their lost love. My one test subject, whose children had been killed in an accident, went mad, obsessed with being inside the machine again and again and again. She lost her zest for life. She lost her desire to be in reality. She became depressed when in the real world. I knew, from the moment I turned her away for the last time, I could never enter the machine.

No, my happy ending was helping people like Lana who were lucky to have only normal amounts of boredom in their lives.

Her worst problem was her loveless marriage to her asshole husband, the mayor of New York City, Marshall Delacroix, jackass extraordinaire and not a fan of my shop, Lucid Fantasies.

Not a fan of me in general.

His wife had been a client for a year, and he had tried to stop her from coming for the last four months.

Lana was a nice woman who deserved better than someone like Marshall. She deserved a marriage like mine.

A smile crested my lips as I remembered our wedding day, our beginning.

It was perfect.

Sort of like our end.

Perfect.

Perfect irony in a perfect disaster.

Aneurisms in men married to neuroengineers were like God mocking our entire species. I had always believed in science and evolution and the big bang theory. I had always believed in the miracle of the human brain.

But the moment he ran back into the house fire to save our dog, I believed in God. I believed my love had gone there with Him—to heaven. My husband had gathered my heart with his and brought them to the safest place in the world, to be with a God I became convinced of in a matter of seconds.

I believed it because I refused to consider that my heart had died off when the house collapsed. When his heart stopped beating and his lungs no longer took in air. No, our love continued on.

My heart concluded there was no way he was gone forever. His energy hadn’t shifted into something else; he had gone somewhere and held my heart hostage there. I called it heaven and even prayed it was the sort of place that I could join him.

Lying in the chair, my mind fought the image of him forcing me out onto the lawn. His dark-blue eyes squinted in the smoke as he nodded, reassuring me our dog would run from the house. We stood there, on the damp grass of our prewar home and waited.

But she didn't come.

The last look I gave him was a fearful one. The small fire was nothing, just a kitchen fire. Had the stupid extinguisher worked he would have put it right out.

When his eyes met mine, he nodded and kissed my nose. “I’ll be right back.”

That was the last thing he ever said to me.

He ran back inside to get the dog.

Moments later, my beloved Lola, a spicy little papillon, ran out to me. She leapt into my open arms. Holding her trembling body, I watched the doorway, waiting for him to come back out. The smoke was worsening, billowing from my back door. But it didn't bring him with it. I ran for the steps but hands grabbed me, pulling me back. I should have noticed the sound of the fire trucks and the flashing red lights in the thick smoke. I should have noticed the shouting and the hoses.

But my eyes were locked on the back door.

I barely noticed when the men went in.

I did however see when they came running back out because they carried him. That was when the house collapsed. The house, my heart, and our dreams all collapsed.

They wouldn't let me see him or touch him.

They took him in an ambulance, telling me nothing.

There’s no feeling like the one of having no control over the world around you. I felt like a ghost. I wondered for a moment if I had died in the fire, if it had been worse than I thought, and I was dead and stuck to wander purgatory.

Lola and I trembled in each other’s embrace, watching everything we had loved burn to the ground.

There were lies I told myself, like if he had not run back in, I might have been able to save him. But having his well-timed aneurysm as he went inside the burning house had secured his death. There was no way everything could have happened so perfectly.

It was a perfect disaster.

It had started with the kitchen catching fire just as we began the renos on the house. And ended with the dog not running out after us. No. It ended with the aneurysm. No. It ended when I sat alone in the hallway of the hospital, clutching my dog and wishing the man speaking to me would go away. No, it hasn't ended yet, but it will. It will end with me staring at gray skies and drifting clouds.