love was still within her, as fresh and powerful and shocking as it had been when she’d held him for the first time. She did not know if it had been a precious gift or a cruel punishment to have experienced that love again. Perhaps it was both.
She saw her son for what could have been a lifetime, or what could have been a few seconds. She had no concept of time. And then he was gone, and she floated near her office ceiling, above the two men working on her lifeless body. She could see a button on the floor where they had ripped open her silk shirt. She could see one of her legs splayed at a strange angle, as if she’d landed there after falling from a great height. She could see the top of another young man’s head, the white part in his dark hair revealing a tiny strawberry-shaped birthmark, the dampness of his forehead as he sent electrical pulses through her body, and somehow she felt everything he felt: his fear, his focus.
Her next conscious memory was the following day. She was back in the drab confines of her body and a tall beautiful nurse was saying, “Hello there, sleeping beauty!” It was like being returned to jail.
Except it wasn’t a nurse. This woman was the doctor who had performed her heart surgery: a quadruple bypass. In the years to come Masha often considered how her life would have been different if her heart surgeon had looked like the vast majority of heart surgeons. Her prejudices would have made her dismiss everything he had to say, no matter the accuracy. She would have put him in the same category as the gray-haired men who worked for her. She knew better than all of them. But this woman made Masha snap to attention. She felt strangely proud of her. She too was a woman at the top of her profession in a man’s world, and she was tall; it somehow mattered that she was tall like Masha. So Masha listened attentively as she talked about reducing her risk factors when it came to diet and exercise and smoking, and she listened when the doctor said, “Don’t let your heart be a casualty of your head.” She wanted Masha to understand that her state of mind was just as important as the state of her body. “When I was on the wards in my first term of cardiac surgery we had something called the ‘beard sign,’” she said. “Meaning that if one of our male patients was so miserable he couldn’t even be bothered to shave, his chances of recovery were not as good. You must take care of your whole self, Masha.” Masha shaved her legs the very next day for the first time in years. She went to the cardiac rehabilitation exercise program suggested by the doctor determined to top the class. She attacked the challenge of her health and her heart in the same way that she had once attacked challenges at work, and naturally she over-achieved beyond all expectations. “Good God,” said the surgeon when Masha went to her for her first checkup.
She never once moped. She re-created herself. She did it for the tall attractive doctor. She did it for the young man in the lake.
“My sister also had a near-death experience,” said Tony. “A horse-riding accident. After her accident, she changed. Her career. Everything about her life. She got right into gardening.” He gave Masha an uneasy look. “I didn’t like it.”
“You don’t like gardening?” said Masha, teasing a little.
He gave her a half smile, and she saw a flash of a more attractive man.
“I think I just didn’t want my sister to change,” he said. “It felt like she’d become a stranger. Maybe it felt like she’d experienced something I couldn’t understand.”
“People are frightened of what they don’t understand,” said Masha. “I never believed in life after death before that. Now I do. And I live a better life because of it.”
“Right,” said Tony. “Yeah.”
Again Masha waited.
“Anyway …” Tony exhaled and patted his thighs, as if he were done. Masha would get nothing else of interest out of him. It did not matter. The next twenty-four hours would tell her so much more about this man. He would learn things he did not know about himself.
A glorious sense of calm settled upon her as she watched him leave the room, hitching up his pants with one hand. Those last remnants