Or Not to Be (15 page)

Assuming they would do what I said cured a
lot of my headaches and worries. Masses of kids always did what I said, so I
didn’t have to see them as people, as individuals, only as kids to be dealt
with while I skipped eating my own lunch. It seems Pizza Boy got caught in my
radar that day. I certainly registered on his.

I try hard to sift through the chaos in
the cafeteria to remember what happened to me. It must have been Pizza Boy. He
must have had a gun. Did I make him so mad he killed me? I have a chilling
flash. “Mom, I remember something else.”

“Now, honey, it’s probably better not to
dwell on that day too much. Separation of matter from antimatter is a stressful
event.”

“Stressful?” My mother is still queen of
the understatement. It wasn’t emotionally stressful. That can’t be what she
means. It was physically stressful. Like a trillion forces pulling on a single
point. The rippage was brilliant, like the blazing white energy of burning magnesium.

“Let me tell you what I do remember,” I
insist. “You already know it, I can tell, but I just need to say this. I
remember an ambulance. Eddie is beside a bed, and a paramedic is calling for
help, and another paramedic climbs in with a tube, and Eddie yells, ‘No! No! Do
not resuscitate!’ Eddie is just kneeling there, crying. Eddie is a doctor. So
why is he crying? Then I look down, and the dead body is me. Oh, God, they
didn’t try to resuscitate me. Why not, Mom?”

“You were bleeding heavily from the main
artery in your left leg. And you had a severe concussion—probably from
falling—and you were unconscious. You had lost so much blood before anyone got
to you. They were worried about brain damage. They believed that if you
recovered, you wouldn’t run again, maybe not walk again, and there was a chance
you would be in a coma indefinitely.”

“Oh, Eddie. Poor Eddie.”

Mom is quiet for a long time while I
agonize over what I made Eddie endure—both before and after I left him.

“Mom? Are you still here?”

“Oh, Anna, couldn’t you hear me?”

“You were talking?”

“Here we go again. I’m talking, and you
can’t hear me. There’s some glitch here. Either you don’t want to hear what I
say, or a greater power is blocking us. The effect is the same: you cannot or
may not hear the details about your death from me. Your dad explained these
silent voids to me like this: the answers to some questions cannot be supplied
by anyone else. These answers must be realized by the newly dead.”

I died. I bled out. I have choices. I can find
answers hidden in something called voids. It’s all too much. “When have you
noticed these voids before?”

“When you asked about the future, those
nightmares, and your choices. Apparently, you are only permitted access to this
knowledge in some specified order so that you find the answers on your own.”

“Well, here’s my current wish list. I
don’t understand those nightmares. I haven’t a clue what you mean by choices.
And now I want to remember how I died. You’re my guide. You have to help me.”

“I’m trying, but it’s a process that you
must drive. I can push, but I can’t lead. You have to steer.”

I go to the person who was always honest
with me, who gave the best advice: my sister.

21

I make my way
back
to
my memorial service to find Michelle at the podium, shaking. No makeup left on
her pretty face. She has cried it all off. No jewelry. My invincible sister
looks fragile. She stands alone at the microphone and looks out over the heads
of the crowd. She lets the silence draw out. I wonder if she’s going to pass
out when she bows her head and closes her eyes. Quietly, she starts to sing.
It’s difficult to make out the tune, and the crowd strains to hear. I realize
before the rest of them that she’s humming the first few lines of “The Rose.”
She can never remember the words. I hum the harmony that only I can hear. But
Michelle stops abruptly, and noisy silence from all the crying engulfs the
chapel again.

She opens her eyes and looks from face to face. She looks
down at the scraps of notes in her hand, and then she says, “If Anna was here,
she would have sung the words to the song for me because I can never remember
them. Something about love and razor blades that makes your soul bleed. Anna’s
soul can’t bleed. Bleeding is for the body. What a strange line. I guess it’s
poetic and has deep meaning. But Anna and I were brought up to be analytical by
a brilliant mother. Just the facts, sir. See, Anna was my sister. She was the
other half of me.”

How did I die, Michelle? Give me a hint.

She hums again and shakes her head. “The
next line is about being afraid of dying. But Anna was never afraid of dying or
anything else. She attacked life.”

If I’d been afraid of dying, maybe I’d
still be alive. Is that what Mrs. Smithers meant? Was I reckless with my life?

Michelle doesn’t or cannot hear me. She
focuses on the scribbled words on the paper clenched in her hand. “My sister’s
favorite quote was by Jonathan Swift.” Michelle smiles, her eyes shiny with
tears. “‘May you live every day of your life.’ Yep. That’s what she’d want to
leave us with. A sound bite. An easy out. Not this jumble of pain and memories.
She’d tell us to go on without her, but to carry her with us.” She takes a
swipe at her wet nose with the palm of her hand and looks at Eddie, who shakes
his head and looks away.

I love my sister.

She continues, “It feels like Anna is gone, but I know
she’s not. Only her atoms are gone. One thing our professing mother always
taught us—in life you need your atoms. But in death, matter doesn’t matter. Let
those atoms go. Give them back so some other life form can use them. We are all
made of recycled elemental particles. Some of our carbon used to be wheat.
Before that, those same atoms were in carbon dioxide. Before that, they were
exhaled by some other animal or person or dinosaur. When we die, we simply stop
participating in the endless spiral of atom recirculation. We leave our matter
behind. Cremation has returned the atoms of my sister to the world to reuse.
That’s what she’d want.”

Maybe that’s what I wanted before I died. Now I wish I had
my atoms so I could make you hear me and talk to me, Michelle. Help me
understand.

Michelle ignores me. She hums again, still
trying to recall the lyrics of our song. “Anna was strong, and lucky to have
all the love she experienced in her life.”

She hums the next few lines and looks at
my family. “Eddie, the nights will be lonely. Bethany, the road will be long.
But, Joey, I feel like your mom is here with us to help us learn to live
without her.” Joey points a solemn nod at his aunt before he resumes looking
around the church for me.

I’m distracted by Joey and go to him. I
sit beside him. He can’t see me or feel me.

My sister pauses and shakes her head,
smiles at Eddie while tears stream from her eyes. Then with a quick nod, she
whispers, “Good-bye, Anna. I love you.”

She hums the last line from our song, and
I remember the words but I’m powerless to give them to her. And then she breaks
down and sobs her way back to her seat.

That’s enough for now. I need another
break. I wonder where Mom went.

“I’m right here.”

“How did you get here so fast?”

“I thought we went over this already,” she
answers, once again annoyed with me. “I am everywhere, at all time. So
‘getting’ to you is almost effortless. Making you aware that I’m here, wherever
‘here’ might feel like to you, takes a little of my energy.”

“Mom, this is all too hard for me. I need
to leave again.”

She catches me in my devastation. “Of
course, dear. Let’s go.”

22

We jump away again
. I’m still a bumbling amateur with this navigation at
light speed. I don’t know what I did to bring me here or whether, maybe, Mom
nudged me this way.

On the
dresser in my bedroom there’s an old, faded soccer picture of Bethany. Five
years old, shin guards, ponytail, gaping grin from missing front teeth.

The sight of the picture catalyzes a time
leap, another one out of my control.

In the autumn when Bethany was about six,
I had to leave her soccer game early to go to parent-teacher conference night.
Eddie was the assistant coach of her team. He’d run up and down the sidelines
screaming instructions for the entire game. The players didn’t listen to a word
he said. Bethany-the-Bruiser just wrestled with whoever had the ball. The games
and Eddie-the-Coach were so much fun to watch that I hated to leave.

I pulled our big white van onto the dirt
road by the field and made the first left onto Harden. A car up ahead slowed to
make a left turn and had to wait for oncoming traffic, so everyone in the line
of cars slowed down and stopped. The license plate of the car in front of me
was BL 123, which reminded me of my birthday. I was contemplating what the BL
might stand for—Birthday List, Be Lucky, Big Laugh, Broken Leg—when I caught a
glimpse in my rearview mirror of a truck coming fast behind me.

The sixteen-year-old driver of the pickup
truck didn’t see the long line of red brake lights. Was he playing with his
radio? Combing his hair? Reading a book? He was going about fifty when he
rammed the back of my van.

The rear and right side windows shattered,
and the back end of my van caved in. My chair broke, and I was flipped onto my
back. My foot came off the brake, and the van was pushed across the yellow line
in the middle of the road. As I was falling backward in my breaking seat, I saw
a red car coming at me from the other lane.

My van stopped on the other side of the
road. I was flat on my back.

A young kid came running to my car. “Lady!
Hey, lady, are you all right?”

“I don’t know. My neck hurts,” I said.

“Oh-god-oh-god-oh-god,” I heard from the
poor kid.

He disappeared and was replaced by two
older ladies. One patted a wet towel onto my forehead and said, “I live right
here, honey. Thank you for not driving into my kitchen!”

The other said, “Now you just lay still,
dear. They said an ambulance is coming for you.”

“No!” I yelled. I couldn’t go in an
ambulance. I needed Eddie. “Somebody get my husband.”

“She’s going a little bonkers in here,
Jim,” one of the voices reported to somebody else. Another head appeared, apparently
Jim. He reached in and put the car in park and pulled the keys out of the
ignition.

“Hey, little lady. You did a right good
number on your van back there. Now you need to stay quiet till help gets here.”

The crash happened many years ago before cell
phones. I handed Jim the wet towel that had fallen into my eyes and asked,
“Will you get my husband for me? Eddie Wixim. He’s right down the road at our
daughter’s soccer game.”

“Sure thing, missy. How will I know him?”

“He’s the assistant coach on the pink
team. Walking the sidelines in a neon pink soccer jersey. Yelling the whole
time.”

“All righty, sweetheart. You just sit
tight.” And he was gone.

Minutes later I heard a siren. Then
paramedics were pulling me onto a stretcher and taping down my head and chest.
Eddie’s face appeared. He looked wretched.

“I’m all right, babe. Just come with me,
okay?”

No answer.

“Eddie, who has Bethany?”

“Uh, she’s—uh—Sue will take her home.” He
kissed my forehead before he began inspecting me—my private doctor. “What happened?”

“I got hit from behind.” A large female
cop appeared at Eddie’s shoulder. She looked me over and asked the paramedic
for a minute with me.

“I know you’re hurting, ma’am, but I need
to ask you a couple questions,” she said.

“Okay.” Eddie held tight to my hand.

“Why did you stop so suddenly?”

“I didn’t. The cars in front of me were
all slowing to wait for the first car to turn left. We were almost stopped when
I got hit.”

She frowned. “Kid who hit you says you
stopped suddenly and that caused the wreck.”

“I did not! He must’ve been flying. I—none
of us stopped fast. We were never going more than fifteen miles an hour after
the last light because this first guy was slowing down right away to turn left.
The kid wasn’t paying attention.”

“Okay, I got it. One more question,
though.”

“What is it?” I asked, weary and foggy,
but tethered to Eddie. My head clouded up, and I needed a quick nap.

“What stopped you on the far side of the
road? Did you hit your brake? There aren’t any marks on the front of the van,
so we don’t know what stopped you.”