Eyes Wide Open (aka Killing Hour)

Feel how loving its touch is. How free of pain. You’ve been in so much pain lately.

“I have been. Yes, I have.”

It would be good to be rid of the pain, just for once. To stop the voices. To stop feeling he was letting everyone down. He knew how much of a burden he was. To his parents. To everyone who had expectations of him. The absence of pain is heaven, isn’t it? Heaven . That would be nice. To finally be free of it.

Then just reach out, the angel said. Let it take you. Like the wind. Just think of heading home. That’s all it is. You can do that, can’t you?

“I think so,” he said, nodding. “I think so.”

Sucking in a breath, he stepped farther out on the edge, his pulse picking up speed. Only the cushion of darkness beneath him. The welcoming sound of the surf far below. How incredibly peaceful it all was. And those candles, so beautiful…

So this was it…

“I’m so sorry!” he shouted to the panoply of lights. To his mother and father. He knew how much this would hurt and disappoint them.

“Like an angel…” he said, shutting his eyes. A final cacophony built in his brain. He stretched out his arms wide, palms in the air.

“Like this…?”

Yes, just like that, the angel said.

Then fly.

Chapter Two

The gal in the white lace sundress was as sexy as I’d ever seen.

She had shoulder-length, sandy-blond hair, a little tangled and windswept. Eyes as blue and inviting as a Caribbean cove, the kind you could dive right into. A strap of her dress dangled loosely off her shoulder, exposing the shape of her breast, and she smiled, bashful yet unconcerned. The second I laid my eyes on her I remembered thinking, Now there’s the woman I’ve been waiting for all these years. The one I could live with forever.

And as I stumbled down across the dunes to the ocean, lugging the bottle of Veuve Clicquot and our meal, the lights from our beach house washing over her face, I said for about the millionth time in the past twenty years just how lucky I was that I had.

“Get down here,” Kathy called. “There’s not much time before I start to freeze my butt off and the whole thing’s ruined.”

“You know, a little help might do the trick,” I yelled back.

I was balancing the champagne, the bowl of fresh pasta I had just topped off with truffles and butter, and my iPod speaker. The blanket was already laid out on the sand-the “table” set, the candles lit, re-creating that night from twenty years ago.

Our wedding night.

No fancy party or trip. Just us, for a change. Both of our kids were away. The truth was, we rarely even celebrated our anniversary, not since our daughter, Sophie, was born a year later on the very same day. August 28. But this year she was already at Penn and our sixteen-year-old, Max, was at fall lacrosse camp before school began.

We were at our beach house in Amagansett, basically just a cozy cape house nestled into the Hampton dunes.

“Yow, sand crab! ” I yelped, hopping onto a foot and almost pitching the tray.

“You drop that bowl, mister, and you can forget about whatever you have in mind for later!” Kathy jumped up, taking the pasta from me and setting it on the blanket, where she had laid out a hand-printed menu, bamboo place mats, fluted champagne glasses, and candles. There were even little name cards.

I looked closer and noticed that they were from Annette’s, up in Vermont, where we’d had our wedding.

The very same name cards-with the same little blue ribbons-but this time they were inscribed with the words: “ To my wonderful husband. For 20 beautiful years .”

I have to admit, my heart crumbled just a bit on that one. “Nice touch.”

“Thought you’d enjoy that one. Sophie did the lettering. Not to mention letting us have the day.”

“Remind me later to thank her,” I said. I sat down and started to pour some champagne. “ Wait- almost forgot!” I connected the speaker to my iPod and pushed the play arrow. “My contribution!”

Bob Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonight” spread over the beach. It wasn’t really “our song”; it was played a lot back then when we started getting cozy with each other at college. I was never the big romantic or anything. Kathy always said she had a thirty-second window to hold my hand before I would let go.

“So happy anniversary,” I said. I leaned in close to kiss her.

“Say it first,” she said, keeping me at bay.

“Say what ?”

“You know damn well what…” She lifted her champagne glass with a determined glimmer in her eye. “Not like you said it back then… like you really mean it this time.”

“You mean how you were the one I wanted to honor and take care of for the rest of our lives…?”

“Yeah, right !” She chortled. “If only you had said it like that.”

What I’d said, or kind of barked at her back then, going eighty on the New York Thruway-kind of a running joke all these years-after being nudged and pressed to set a wedding date, holding off until I’d finished my residency and hooked up with a job, then further delaying until Kathy was done with hers, was something a bit more like: “Okay, how about Labor Day? Does that work for you?”

“Does that work…?” Kathy blinked back, either in disbelief or shock at having received about the lamest proposal ever. “Yeah, it kinda works…” She shrugged.

I think I drove on for another exit before I turned and noticed her pleased and satisfied smile.

“Well, it seems to have…” I wrapped my champagne glass around hers, looking in her eyes. “ Worked. We’re still here!”

The truth was, I’d come from a family of revolving divorces. My father, five-all with beautiful younger women. My mom, three. None of the marriages ever lasted more than a couple of years. In my family, whenever someone popped the question, it was more like code for saying that they wanted to split up.

“So then say it,” Kathy said. Her gaze turned serious. “For real this time.”

It was clear this wasn’t her usual horsing around. And the truth was, I’d always promised I’d make it up to her if we lasted twenty years.

So I put down my glass and pushed onto a knee. I took her hands in mine, in the way I had denied her those years before, and I fixed on those beautiful eyes and said, in a voice as true as I’d ever spoken: “If I had the chance to do it all over again-a hundred times, in a hundred different universes-I would. Each and every time. I’d spend my life with you all over again.”

Kathy gave me a look-not far from the one in the car twenty years ago-one that I thought at any second might turn into, Oh, pleeze, Jay, gimme a break