The phone rang five times before my husband’s voice-mail picked up. Jay’s dead, I thought. He’s not picking up because he’s dead. I pushed the thought away and left a cheerful message about the dinner I was cooking on the stove. Gloomy thinking wasn’t popular where we lived in Los Angeles, a city full of yoga, meditation and positive vibes. I knew my way around a lotus position by then, but I’d grown up in a place about as far away from sunny L.A. as you could get: a little coal-mining town in western Siberia.
