Infinite

Epilogue

“Is Ellie still okay?” I teased my wife. “It’s been at least twenty minutes since you checked.”

Karly flushed with embarrassment as she slid her phone back into her purse. She’d already called her parents four times to make sure that our daughter was fine. Which, of course, she was. But this was the first time we’d gone out on our own since Ellie was born, so I understood why Karly was nervous.

“Oh, yes, everything’s perfect. Just like you said it would be. If you can believe it, my dad says that my mother is on her knees squawking and making duck noises to entertain her.”

“Susannah? Please tell me he took video.”

“He did. He’s sending it to my phone. You know, I’m beginning to think this grandparent thing may buy me a free pass for having quit the real estate business.”

I smiled at my sudden sense of déjà vu. “Do you miss it?”

“No. What about you?”

“The hotel biz? Not a bit. I prefer the nonprofit world. Well, except when I see my paycheck.”

“We do okay,” Karly said.

She slipped her hand into mine as we stood by the lake. It was a clear July evening, late, with the day’s blue sky giving way to darkness. Only a handful of stars outshone the lights of the city. Crowds surrounded us up and down the lakeshore. Other couples walked hand in hand, children squealed, and joggers ran along the waterfront sidewalk. Behind us, we could hear the strains of rock music blaring from the band shell in Grant Park. Polish, Mexican, Greek, barbecue, and a hundred other ethnic food aromas mixed in the air. The Taste of Chicago festival was going on, and thousands of people were squeezed into downtown on a Saturday night. We’d come here to join the party.

And to mark an anniversary.

“Two years,” Karly said, because she could see we were thinking about the same thing. “Two years ago tonight, we nearly died in that river.”

Despite the warm air, she shivered with a memory of being under the water. I tilted up her chin and kissed her soft lips. “But we didn’t die.”

“No.”

“Do you want the truth? I wouldn’t change what happened even if I could. That night made everything better.”

“I know it did.”

“Look at me now,” I added, smiling. “I’m married to the poet laureate of River Park.”

Karly rolled her eyes. “It’s one book. We’ll be lucky if we make five hundred dollars.”

“That doesn’t matter. I’m incredibly proud of you.”

She shoved me away playfully, but I knew she was pleased. We’d spent a lot of sleepless nights while she was pregnant and after Ellie was born, and sometimes Karly would sit by the fire and murmur poems into the voice recorder on her phone. She said she didn’t know where the words came from; it was almost as if they just sprang into her head from someone else’s mind. To her surprise, when she let her father read them, he said they were good. He sent them to his publisher, who thought they were good, too.

I wasn’t surprised at all.

Karly inhaled the atmosphere of the park. She still had some pent-up energy. We’d already been here for hours, walking, kissing, talking, sampling foods, but Karly wanted to make the most of our one night of freedom. Her parents had Ellie until morning, so this was our time to be lovers again.

Her face glowed as she spied on the people around us. That had always been one of her gifts, to glory in the happiness of others. The older woman on the bench, with her head on her husband’s shoulder. The two ten-year-olds kicking a soccer ball back and forth on the grass. A street performer juggling bowling pins for tips. A woman in a purple sports bra, jogging toward us, caught up in whatever music she was listening to on her earbuds.

Different people, happy lives.

My happiness was seeing the light in my wife’s face. I saw that light when she was holding our daughter. And when she was lying next to me in bed. I saw that same kind of light in my own eyes, too, whenever I looked in the mirror. That was a new experience for me.

Peace.

“Do you want to go dancing?” Karly suggested.

“I want to do absolutely everything with you. Where should we go?”

Karly kept watching the people in the park come and go, her eyes traveling from face to face. “How about the Spybar? We can pretend we’re still young and hip.”

“The Spybar,” I murmured darkly.

I looked away at the lake, where the water glistened with reflected lights, and I tried to swallow down a moment of anxiety. Karly was too preoccupied to notice my hesitation. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my coma dreams anymore, but the very mention of the Spybar took me back to that night when music pounded in my ears and my beautiful, beautiful wife was bleeding to death in my arms.

Some moments you just can’t shake. They are with you forever. I had to remind myself that, as vivid as it was, that moment had never actually happened. It was a fantasy played out inside my head while I was lying in a hospital bed.

“Sure,” I replied. “The Spybar. Let’s go.”

Karly didn’t answer. Her stare followed the blond jogger who had passed us on the grass. The woman disappeared at a steady run toward the bright arena lights of Grant Park. I could only see the jogger’s back as she went in and out of the shadows.

“Karly? Are you okay?”

My wife came out of her trance and gave me a dazzling smile. “I’m fine.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. That was just weird.”

“What was?”

Karly shrugged. Her head swiveled again. From a distance, she eyed the jogger in the purple sports bra, who was nearly out of sight now, one more runner among hundreds in the Chicago night.

“That woman over there,” she said. “The blonde who ran past us. It was the strangest thing. I saw her as clear as anything as she went by, and I swear, she looked exactly like me.”