Me & Death (11 page)

“Uh,” I said.

I’d been dreaming of a dark-eyed girl who fed me grapes and offered to show me her underpants if I could say her name. Only I couldn’t think of her name. Now I was awake, with a tent pole between my legs. I was lying on my back and the sheet was the tent, if you know what I mean. I was embarrassed. My dick wasn’t, though. It moved on its own under the sheet, like it was saying,
Ta-da!

“I’m glad you’re awake, Jim,” she said. “It gives me a chance to say good-bye. I’m changing my rotation. Starting tomorrow I’ll be upstairs in the neonatal unit. You’ll be going home soon, and I won’t see you again. I’m going to miss you.”

We shook hands. Her palm felt soft and smooth. So soft.

Ta-da!
said my dick.

I closed my eyes in embarrassment … and found myself thinking about the kerchief lady’s daughter. The girl who’d had the fever. She’d been the one in my dream! She had striped underpants. And she loved grapes. And she’d kissed me. How did I know these things about her?
Somehow, that’s how. I didn’t understand, but I knew they were true.

“Marcie,” I said.

“
What
?”

I opened my eyes. I was still holding the nurse’s hand.

“It’s Bertha.” She jerked her hand away. “My name is Bertha.”

“I know,” I said. “I was thinking of someone else.”

She folded her arms across the front of her uniform.

“Oh, Jim! You’re just like all the rest of them. You’re talking to one girl and thinking of another one.”

She turned to go.

“Wait, Bertha,” I said.

“Don’t
Bertha
me!”

She yanked open my privacy curtain on her way out so that light streamed in from the corridor.

Ta-da!
said my dick. Stupid thing had no sense of timing. I shifted under the covers, turning awkwardly onto my side.

Another dream came later that night – not a good one. I was staring out a window into the dark. Something scary was approaching from behind. I couldn’t move, not even to turn and face it. The thing came closer and closer. I could feel its moist breath on the back of my neck. Whatever it was gave a strange, soft, mewing cry. I forced my head far enough around to see two eyes glowing in the dark. Then all of a sudden I was running, and the eyes
were following me. They turned into car headlights. I fell, and the headlights were on top of me. I woke up gasping.

I had twisted the covers round my feet. Straightening them out, I saw movement. What was it? I leaned over the bed but couldn’t make anything out. There was a faint smell I hadn’t noticed before. Not a hospital smell. This was more like home: rotting food, sweat, fear. Yeck.

I shivered and remembered a phrase of my ma’s. She’d be sitting in the kitchen with a drink and a smoke, and a sudden shudder would pass over her, like wind on grass.

“Someone just walked over my grave,” she’d say.

CHAPTER 21

I
stayed in hospital another week. Dr. Driver came by with her tape recorder again, but I couldn’t tell her much more about the accident. I remembered chasing Lloyd, but not why. She asked if Lloyd was a friend of mine. I said no. I asked her when my memory would come back. She told me not to get too frustrated. I’m not frustrated, I told her – just forgetful.

All this time I was noticing that Chester was going downhill. I mean, we’re all going downhill all the time, but that week Chester put on some serious speed. By Friday, he couldn’t do anything without gasping for breath, his mouth hanging open like a dog’s on a hot day. Our nurse (a new one named Sam, with braces and squeaky shoes) gave him a breathing kit and a wheelchair and took away all the cigarettes.

“One of those packs is mine,” I lied. I knew Chester would want to have an emergency supply.

“You’re too young to smoke,” Sam told me, pocketing them and squeaking off to the nursing station.

“Thanks … for trying,” Chester wheezed. Talking was hard work for him.

I put a finger to my lips. Reaching under my mattress, I pulled out a battered pack. He laughed long enough to worry me.

“You’re … holding,” he whispered, when he was through coughing.

“Yeah.”

A couple of hours later he rolled his chair over to my bed.

“Jim.”

“What?”

He dropped his eyes to my mattress.

“You want to go to the smoking lounge?” I said. I was talking about the bathroom down the hall. It was our usual place.

He nodded.

“You sure?”

“Please, Jim.”

I figured he was old enough to decide if he wanted a smoke. And I didn’t want him to beg anymore. I pushed him down the hall. His wheelchair had a basket at the back for his air tank and a pole for his drip. He didn’t talk. He was too busy breathing.

Not a big room, the bathroom. He sat in his chair, I got the toilet seat. “Careful,” he said, pointing to his air tank. “This is oxygen. Burns … like gasoline.”

He always said that.

I waited for him to turn it off, then lit up for both of us.

“I’m glad you don’t tell me I’m stupid,” he said. “I know I’m stupid. I’m eighty-three, and I been smoking since I was your age. That’s … a long time. They say I don’t stop, it’s gonna kill me. I say I’m almost dead
now. What are they saving me? A month? A week?”

It took him a long time to get this out.

“A day?” He took a drag, coughed.

“Come on, Chester, you’ll make it. When I was in my coma, I was almost dead. And I came back.”

“Yeah, but you’re a kid. You’re not supposed to die. Me, I’m due. When that angel taps me on the shoulder, I ain’t fighting.”

That afternoon Dr. Driver came to give me a last look over before letting me go home. She checked my eyes, the back of my head, and my fingertips. Her hair was in its usual ponytail. Her skin smelled clean.

I was trying to watch our soap opera, but the doctor kept interrupting. Friday is a key day for a soap, got to set the story up for the weekend. Yesterday the judge had decided to admit Tintoretta’s evidence to support her brother Brick’s alibi. Today we were in court.

“Pay attention, Jim.” Dr. Driver grabbed my chin, turned my head to face her. “You’re not better yet,” she said. “We cleared up the bleeding in your skull, and you’ve been stable for more than a week, but it’s still delicate in there. I want you to take it easy when you get home. Lots of rest. No strenuous exercise. I’m going to give you some pills. They make the blood thinner, so you’re less likely to have a seizure.”

I’d been sneaking glances at the TV over her shoulder, but I came back to her then.

“Seizure?” I said. “Like I’ll spaz out? Start rolling on the floor?”

“You hurt the back of your head, Jim. That’s the vision center of the brain. I want you to pay careful attention to your eyes when you get home. If you start seeing strange things – flashing light, for instance – go to the hospital at once.”

She gave me a school notebook with a spiral binding. “This is for you. It’s a memory book. Bits and pieces about the accident should start coming back to you soon. I want you to write them in the book. Any memory you get – a flash, a picture, a feeling – put it down. It’ll help you.”

I took the notebook.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever given me one of these before,” I said.

She reached into an inside pocket in her white coat. “Can you promise to take your pills, Jim? Take one every day. I should give them to your mom, but I figure you’ll be looking after yourself. These are free samples. Do not sell them – they’re no good to anyone but you. When you run out of pills, come back and I’ll give you more. Make sure –”

She broke off. Chester was propped up in his bed to watch the TV, but his head had fallen off to one side and he was gagging. His skin was the color of a cloudy sky. He fumbled at the breathing hose, like he was trying to pull it out.

“Nurse!” The doc leaped over my bed, ran to Chester. “Nurse!”

She pulled the privacy curtain so that I couldn’t see Chester’s side of the room anymore.

Sam the nurse hurried in pushing a cart. After her came a tall doctor who didn’t seem to be in much of a
hurry. He stopped to glare at me before gliding behind the curtain.

I felt something heavy inside me. The feeling wasn’t about me, though. It was about Chester and this quiet doc dressed in gray. I didn’t like the heavy feeling. I went back to the soap opera.

Tintoretta’s eyes filled the TV screen. Her pupils were like dark caves, surrounded by a forest of eyelashes. The court reporter was counting eye blinks – one for yes and two for no. The defense lawyer asked,
Were you with your brother on the night in question?
This was the key question because it proved the alibi. The court reporter leaned toward Tintoretta to make sure. Only, he’d eaten a hamburger with extra onions for lunch, and his breath was strong enough to make Tintoretta’s eyes water, so she blinked twice when she meant to blink once.

Two blinks
, said the court reporter.
The answer to the question is, No
.

The courtroom erupted. Raven gesticulated in triumph. Brick protested and was dragged away. The judge pounded her gavel. The final shot was a close-up – Tintoretta with her eyes shut tight. We cut to a commercial about disinfectant.

Chester raced out from behind the privacy curtain with a pink-lipped grin on his face, looking years younger. Decades, maybe. No wheelchair, no breathing tube or IV. Nothing. He waved vigorously at me, excited as hell, like a little kid getting out of school.

My heart jumped, I was so relieved. “Hey, Chester!” I called out.

He kept smiling, and I realized he was dead.

“Oh, crap,” I said.

He didn’t seem to mind being dead, though. He came right over to my chair and gave me a hug. I didn’t feel it, but that’s what he was doing. He stood in front of me with his arms outspread, taking a deep breath. Like he was showing me what he could do now, that he couldn’t do when he was alive.

“Yeah yeah,” I said. “But are you happy?”

He bent down so that his eyes were level with mine. And he blinked once, hard. Him and Tintoretta.

And he vanished like that.

I started to sob. Chester might have been better off dead than alive, but I couldn’t stop the tears. The harder I cried, the more I remembered. Chester’s ghost joined all the other ghosts I had seen on the street and in that awful hotel in the sky. I kept crying. It was like there were walls in my mind between my accident and waking up, and my tears were a flood, washing away the walls, so that I remembered everything that had happened to me since I got run over by Marcie’s mom, what I’d seen and learned and almost lost. Why did the knowledge come then? I don’t know. Maybe crying had something to do with it. Maybe it matters that you can cry for someone who isn’t you.

They brought out the body on a gurney, Dr. Driver and Sam and the quiet doctor who’d glared at me.
I remembered
his
name now. He was a ghost too – a Slayer. That’s why he was gray and didn’t talk. He looked angrier than usual, and I knew why. Chester wasn’t going to the Jordan Arms. He was gone, free of the earth – and Morgan was still stuck here, as he had been for three hundred years.

Chester being free made me want to smile even though I was still crying. Morgan glowered at me. Which reminded me of how he’d failed with me. I was free too. I had my whole life ahead of me to live well in. Morgan looked so funny I started to laugh, which was a mistake because the tears and laughter got confused and I had to cough.

Dr. Driver came over. “I have some bad news, Jim,” she said. “I’m afraid that your friend Chester is –”

“I know,” I said, catching my breath. “I know.”

Morgan shook a fist at me and drifted out the door. The bullet holes in the back of his shirt looked like cigarette burns.

Ma came for me during afternoon snack time. I gave her a hug.

“What’s that for?”

“I’m glad to see you, Ma,” I said. “I can’t
wait
to go home!”

“Huh.”

The hospital staff didn’t know about Chester dying, so the lady with the train-whistle breath brought him a bran muffin. I thanked her and ate his along with mine.

CHAPTER 22