Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(11)

It was after eight when I finalized my itinerary. I decided not to prolong the misery of the day any longer and took two more of Tom’s sleeping pills.

I crawled into bed, but visions of white sand and mariachi bands danced through my head, making sleep impossible. I gave up and made a giant bowl of popcorn, devoured it, then logged into my social network of choice and changed my marital status to single, even though I was aware that this would set off waves that would trigger a minor social tsunami. Fine. Let everyone be worried. My failed marriage could be a smoke screen for my failing health, which I didn’t intend to inform anyone about. When my mom was dying, long-lost relatives and distant church friends crowded our home, and later the hospital, eating up the precious few hours that we had left with her. This time, it was my march into the great beyond, and I was calling the shots. The first rule of the cancer club: there was no cancer club, and therefore there would be no well-wishers rubbernecking at the scene of the tragedy, reminding themselves how fortunate they were without absorbing any real loss.

By nine, I was getting loopy—the couch was feeling not unlike an underhydrated waterbed, and when I looked in the mirror, my face seemed freakishly large—which should have been reason enough to put myself back to bed, but I kept hearing an odd noise in the background. Did the upstairs neighbors get a grandfather clock? Was that a gong?

No, it was not. It was my phone. The number was blocked, but I picked up anyway. “Nice try, Tom,” I scoffed.

“Libby?” It was Jess, O’Reilly’s wife. She was the closest thing I had to a best friend. I had trouble opening up to people I wasn’t related to or sleeping with, a problem Paul shared and attributed to our freaky twin closeness; but because our husbands had been best friends since childhood and I had known O’Reilly since high school, Jess and I warmed to each other over many, many years. I sometimes questioned our friendship, particularly when she was trying to pry into my psyche to get me to confess all the ways that I must secretly be dissatisfied, when the truth was, up until two days ago—provided Jackie wasn’t chucking something at me or I wasn’t thinking about how I was on the losing side of thirty and still didn’t have the children I had always wished for—I was pretty darn content.

But Jess was fun and easily the most stylish person I’d ever met, which made most of our outings feel sort of like sociological field trips. (Some women spent six hundred dollars on a single pair of shoes; who knew?) Now, however, I was annoyed with her because if O’Reilly knew about Tom’s true sexual preferences before I did, that meant Jess did, too.

“This is Libby,” I said, as though I didn’t know it was Jess on the other line.

“Libby, are you okay?”

“Of course, I’m okay,” I said. (I may or may not have been slurring.)

“But how are you doing?” she asked, too gently.

“How am I doing? How am I doing? My husband just told me he was imagining a manwich while he was between my legs. How do you think I’m doing, Jess?”

“Oh,” she said. I honestly think she expected me to be bubbly about it, which was more my fault than hers, since effervescent was basically my M.O.

I heard her whisper something.

“Mother trucker!” I spat. “Is Tom there right now?”

Jess didn’t respond.

“Listen, it’s nice of you to check in on me, but I’m kind of in the middle of something.” I murmured a few sweet nothings to the invisible man sitting next to me on the couch, which was now feeling like a raft on a very choppy sea. “Ooooh! You are naughty!” I cried, then hung up. Tom didn’t want to sleep with me, so it didn’t matter anyway, but in my Ambien-addled mind, I’d just made it clear to Jess, O’Reilly, and Tom that I had already moved on.

Then I got another idea, which is about the point at which things really started to go south.





SEVEN


Ty Oshira had worked with me for three years. Rather, he worked on the other side of the floor I was on, and because he was some sort of marketing genius, he had fairly regular dealings with Jackie. “And how is our lady of perpetual discontent?” he would say under his breath as he tiptoed up to my cubicle. “Full of grace!” I would respond, giggling like a schoolgirl. Ty was clever, charismatic, and—how do I put this delicately?—the hotness.

I had a crush on him, the kind that has the primary purpose of making the workday more palatable. This crush was fueled by a healthy dose of interest on his part. I’d caught him stealing glances at my rear end more than a few times, and when I finally dragged Tom to our holiday party, Ty, who was reasonably hammered, cornered me at the bar, pointed across the room to Tom, and said, “That guy is Mr. Libby Miller?” as though Tom wasn’t four inches taller than Ty and handsome in his own right.

The last year Ty and I spent as coworkers, our casual-if-flirty acquaintanceship morphed into a friendship of sorts. We would often grab coffee and occasionally had lunch when Jackie was out of town. Ty would tell me about how awful it was to be a thirty-five-year-old man still on the dating scene; I would try to assure him that married life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, so unconvincingly that he would howl with laughter and accuse me of being a lobbyist for a pro-marriage organization. He wasn’t wrong. I loved Tom and wouldn’t have dreamed of cheating on him. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t love the way Ty made me feel fresh and fascinating—a woman to be won over.