the bed and hits the floor. The impact restarts her stopped heart.
Naked and comatose on the pine floorboards: that’s how Olivia’s new ex-husband finds her when he comes over in hope of a major blowout followed by make-up sex. He rushes her to the university hospital, where she revives. She’s still buzzed. Her ribs are bruised, her hand burned, and her ankle lacerated. The physician’s assistant wants a full account, which Olivia can’t give.
The feckless, distraught ex-husband leaves her in doctors’ hands. The doctors want to do some neurological assessment. They want a scan. But Olivia escapes when no one’s looking. It’s a university hospital, and everyone’s busy. She strolls out through the lobby, the picture of health. Who’s to stop her? She heads back to the boardinghouse and barricades herself in her room. Her housemates ascend to the attic to check on her, but she refuses to open the door. For two full days, she hides in the room. Each time anyone knocks, the voice inside calls out, “I’m fine!” Her housemates don’t know who to call. No sounds come from behind the door except for muffled shuffling.
Olivia sleeps and keeps still, holds her bruised ribs, and tries to remember what happened. She was dead. In those seconds while she had no pulse, large, powerful, but desperate shapes beckoned to her. They showed her something, pleading with her. But the moment she came back to life, everything vanished.
She finds her song notebook wedged behind the desk. Colored jottings re-create the tune in her head just before her electrocution. Through the tune, she retrieves much of the evening’s disaster. She sees herself parading around the renovated attic, addicted to her body. It’s like watching a zoo animal circle its cage. For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms. Even in a body’s most private moments, something else joins in. Someone spoke to her when she was dead. Used her head as a screen for disembodied thoughts. She passed through a triangular tunnel of strobing color and emerged into a clearing. There, the presences—the only thing to call them—removed her blinders and let her look through. Then she fell back into her prison body, and the incredible vistas blurred to nothing.
She thinks: Maybe I have brain damage. Several times an hour she must shut her eyes, while words move her speechless lips. Tell me what happened. What am I supposed to do, now? It takes a while before she realizes she’s praying.
SHE SKIPS ALL HER FINALS. Calls her parents to say she won’t be flying home for Christmas. Her father is baffled, then hurt. Ordinarily, she’d resort to outshouting the man. But nobody’s anger can hurt a girl who has already died. She tells him everything—her solo divorce party, her electrocution. Hiding is pointless now. Something’s watching—huge, living sentinels know who she is.
Her father sounds lost, the way she feels when she lies in bed at night, sure she’ll never retrieve what was shown to her while she was dead. Now, postmortem, she hears her father’s fear—dark undercurrents in the lawyer she never suspected. For the first time since she was a child, she wants to comfort him. “Daddy, I screwed up. I hit the wall. I need to rest.”
“Come home. You can rest here. You can’t be alone at the holidays.”
He sounds so frail. He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions. Now she wonders if he might have died, once, too.
They talk for longer than they have in years. She tells him what dying feels like. She even tries to tell him about the presences in the clearing, the ones that showed her things, though she uses words that won’t freak him. Impulses. Energy. Twice he’s on the verge of hopping in the car and driving the 650 miles to bring her back home. She talks him down. Seventy seconds of death have invested her with strange power. Everything between them has altered, as if he’s the child now and she the guardian.
She asks for something she has never asked for before. “Put Mom on for a minute. I want to talk to her.” Even her mother’s fury is Olivia’s now to know and soothe. By the end of their conversation, both women are in tears, promising each other crazy things.
SHE’S ALONE in the boardinghouse from Christmas until New Year’s. Every intoxicant she owns goes down the toilet. Her grades arrive: two Fs, a D-minus,