In Between

by Beca Lewis

  Edith thought it would be the perfect opportunity for Connie because she knew that Connie wanted to learn all about business, and her father was an accountant for almost everyone in town.

  It hadn’t taken much to convince Edith’s father, Ralph. He liked Connie, and although he had wanted to work with Edith, she had refused. To Edith, what her dad did was boring. Instead, she took a part-time job as a lifeguard at the town’s outdoor pool.

  Edith’s father told her to call him Ralph and even gave her a desk of her own at his office.

  Connie couldn’t believe how interesting the job was for her. Not the numbers or the filling out of spreadsheets and doing budgets, but learning how businesses worked.

  Ralph was the accountant for many of the small companies in town, and when he found out how much Connie loved to hear about how those businesses operated, he let her sit in on many of the conversations.

  It was her job to take notes, get coffee, put the papers in order, and retrieve files. None of what she did was important, but the words and what they talked about lit up Connie’s life, and for the first time that she could remember, she was entirely happy.

  Because both of their jobs were part-time, she and Edith had plenty of time to hang out by the pool, or ride bikes, or lie in the hammock in the backyard reading books. Edith’s calm and happy family life provided Connie with a new understanding of why Edith might want to choose that kind of life.

  But it didn’t change her mind about what she wanted. She wanted to be like Edith’s father. Not the family side of him. The business side.

  She wanted to run her own business, be her own boss, make her own way in life, have people talk about her because she had achieved something on her own. There would be no family life for her. She would borrow Edith’s, but not create her own.

  Seven

  The next day the boy appeared again. This time he was sitting in the grass looking at the oak tree in the backyard. At one point, when Karla was little, it had a swing attached to it. But Connie had taken it down long ago.

  Even if Karla had children of her own, she wouldn’t have brought them to her mother’s house to play. That was something that Connie knew for sure, and until now, had told herself that she didn’t care.

  Now, seeing the boy outside staring at the tree, Connie had a momentary sense of panic. Was all of this some kind of test?

  As far as she could tell, she had been dead for two weeks now, and still, there had been no contact from anyone, other than this boy, who hadn’t actually contacted her. He just appeared out of nowhere.

  Was she supposed to do something with him so she could leave this in-between place? She was dead, and she wasn’t. She was thinking, feeling, and seeing things. That was life, wasn’t it?

  Connie decided that it had to be a test. Because if that was what was happening, all she had to do was pass it. Then maybe she could move on to somewhere else.

  She didn’t know where that somewhere was, but it had to be better than the waiting and not knowing.

  I used to be good at tests, Connie thought. Even though she had no idea if she was right or not, or what the outcome would be if she passed it, Connie decided to throw herself into it.

  She would assume that the little boy was a crucial part of her test. It was time to stop moping around. She had spent too much of her life doing that. Perhaps it was time to be like she used to be—brave, confident, and sure of herself.

  Back in the trailer park, she had pretended to be those things. It had gotten her out of that life. If she did it again, perhaps it would bring her out of this in-between state.

  Taking a deep breath—out of habit because no air passed through her body—Connie moved through the kitchen door and onto the lawn. The boy stood, turned, and looked at her, nodded his head, and disappeared. Again.

  This time Connie knew that he had seen her, and a flare of hope rose in her heart. Someone had seen her. It didn’t matter that it was only a boy, and it almost didn’t matter that he kept disappearing. She had been seen. It was a beginning.

  There was nothing that she could do to bring him back. Her only choice was to wait for him to return, which meant she had to stay at the house because she had no idea if the boy was attached to the home or not.

  The house was probably part of the test too. Because just as she had never dreamed of starting a family or owning a house, she had done both.

  Yes, it was time to revisit her life. Perhaps that would give her a clue an idea of what test she was in, and how to pass it. No, that is not the right attitude, she told herself. She would ace it. She would be like she was before, not like what she had become.

  *******

  That first summer opened up a whole new world for Connie, and as a result, she decided that she would study every aspect of Edith’s life. Everything about the way they lived was entirely different from what she had known.

  The most obvious was that they had a house, not a trailer. The trailer she grew up in would have fit into their living room. Actually, Edith’s bedroom was larger than their trailer.

  Instead of a shelf to sleep on, it had twin beds and was entirely pink. When Edith first showed her the room, Connie starting laughing, partly because it was delightful in a weird way, but also to disguise the rush of envy that she felt. How many shades of pink could there be? And two beds? Why two beds?

  Edith had said that the other bed was for sleepovers. Connie had sat on one bed and wondered how life could be so different for some people. What she thought of as sleepovers were the men who fell asleep drunk on the floor of their trailer, so she had to step over them to get out, being careful not to be caught or tripped on purpose by one of them.

  To Edith, it was girls eating snacks, laughing, talking about boys, curlers in the hair, and playing Roy Orbison on the record player over and over again. It was being told by her parents to keep it down, but not really meaning it, and her brother Bill banging on the walls to be quiet but secretly enjoying that the house was filled with his sister’s beautiful friends.

  Every day that first summer was a revelation about life in a middle-class family. Connie ate food she had never heard of before, sang songs around the piano in the living room, and went to drive-in movies with Edith and Bill.

  But it was the time at Ralph’s office that showed her what she could do with her life. She learned to appreciate that knowing how businesses operated, and where their money went, gave Ralph power. Knowledge of what went on behind the scenes was essential. Ralph knew more about some people’s businesses than they knew about it themselves.

  When one of the car dealers came to Ralph, Ralph—as he insisted Connie call him—decided it would be a perfect test case for Connie to learn about how his business worked. At first, she hated it.

  The dealer’s company was a mess. He had receipts and bills in cardboard boxes. He didn’t understand where the money came from or where it went. He hadn’t filed taxes for years.

  Later, Connie realized that Ralph wanted her to see the worst of it, and had chosen that business because it made her learn by starting at the beginning. She came to love it. She only had to see what Ralph was teaching her once, and she understood. By the time the summer was over, Connie felt as if she could have run the car dealer’s business.

  Ralph had told his entire family—actually anyone that would listen—that Connie was a natural. He would bet on her being a success at anything she did. And he told her that if all else failed, which he doubted would happen, she always had a job with him. If she wanted it, after she graduated, he would make her his partner. She was that good.

  To Edith’s credit, she didn’t resent her father’s decision or feel jealous. Instead, Edith, like the rest of her family, rejoiced that Connie had found a place in their family.

  To Edith, that meant they would stay best friends forever, and that was important to her. Important enough to do wha
t Connie asked her to do, even when she didn’t want to.

  Now, Connie, hovering in her garden, unable to do anything at all, wondered if this test was about what had happened to Edith. And that it had been her fault.

  She knew it then and had told herself that she didn’t care. But perhaps she had cared after all. That thought was almost more terrifying than the knowledge that she was dead.

  Eight

  “Always running,” that should have been my motto in life, Connie thought. At first, running toward what she wanted, and then later running away from what she had done.

  “How did that go for you?” a voice asked from behind her.

  Connie grabbed her chest, thinking if she wasn’t already dead, the shock might have killed her. She whirled around to see the boy from the yard.

  “Well, not all that well, if you must know,” Connie answered with a snap of anger.

  The two of them stared at each other, sizing each other up. Once again, Connie had the feeling that she might have met the boy before. He looked vaguely familiar.

  She guessed that the boy was about ten, although she wasn’t good at figuring how old adults were, let alone children. Now that he was standing close to her, she could see he had dark blue eyes and shiny black hair. He had on jeans, sneakers, and a t-shirt that looked too big for him. She waited for him to say something. He stared back at her. Finally, giving up on the boy saying something else, she asked, “Are you dead, too?”

  The boy tilted his head to the side before replying, “Are you?”

  Despite finally having someone to talk to, Connie felt like walking away. Just what she needed, a smart ass little boy in her life. Connie hadn’t wanted to be around kids before, and now the only person who saw her was this little monster.

  But then she reminded herself that this was probably a test, and that meant she had to do something different. Feel something different.

  The boy waited while she asked herself how she felt, and Connie realized that she felt angry. Very angry. But at who, and why, she wasn’t sure. But this boy couldn’t be the focus of her anger, could he?

  So stop acting so self-righteous, she told herself.

  While all that thinking was going on, the boy stood watching her. When she cleared her throat to speak, he smiled, which disabled her good intentions, and instead, she snapped, “What are you smiling about? Do you like dead old women?”

  “Not really. And you died long before you stopped breathing.”

  Connie didn’t have a snappy answer to that one. Instead, she turned away and stared at the oak tree the way the boy had before.

  In her mind’s eye, Connie saw her daughter, Karla, sitting on the swing that hung from one of the tree’s branches and calling out to her to push her. She hadn’t.

  Instead, she had pretended not to hear her and kept her attention on pruning the rosebush that had started climbing up one of the screens in the back of the house.

  “Mom, mom,” Karla had called and then stopped.

  Looking back, Connie knew that Karla had decided that day to stop asking her mother for help.

  At the time, Connie had thought Karla was growing up and didn’t need her as much, but now she saw what had really happened. Karla had decided to find somewhere else to get the attention she needed and stop begging for it from the mother who wouldn’t give it to her.

  Turning back to the boy who had stood waiting for her, Connie asked the question she was afraid to get the answer to, “Are you here to help me?”

  “If you want it,” the boy answered.

  This time Connie didn’t turn away. “I want it.”

  “No matter what it takes or how hard it will be?”

  Connie hesitated. Could things be worse than they were? What if she failed? Would she go to some kind of hell worse than this?

  “Can you guarantee that I won’t fail at whatever this is we are doing?”

  “Can you guarantee that you will keep trying no matter what happens?”

  “Trying what?” Connie snapped back.

  The boy disappeared.

  Two days later, he came back—actually forty-nine hours and thirty-one minutes later, to be precise. Connie knew. She had stared at the kitchen clock, counting the hours, wondering if he would ever return.

  During that time, the realtor had returned with the couple looking for their starter home. After touring the house again, they made an offer. Connie knew what that meant. Her time was running out in the home.

  There was no way she would stay around and watch people take over the house. Even though she didn’t like it—never had liked it—it had been their home for many years.

  The only thing she had liked about it was the garden and the birds.

  “Please,” she asked whoever was listening, “If there is someone out there, bring the boy back. And let the people who buy this house like gardens and birds.”

  Connie’s hopes were raised when the woman had noticed the butterfly bush blooming in the yard. She had told her husband about it as they walked to their car. She knew plants. It might be okay for the garden.

  Connie knew it was a silly thing to care about. She should be more worried about her future. But what could she do about it without help? So she checked the kitchen clock every thirty minutes.

  Did people pay attention to the time when they were dead? They must. She was dead, and yet she still watched the time and counted the days.

  Did the little boy do the same thing? Did he watch the sunrise and sunsets to notice the passing of days the same way that she was doing?

  Why she bothered, she didn’t know. Nothing changed in this new way of being. She was nowhere in space and nowhere in time, and she had chased away the one and only person who could see her and who claimed he could help.

  What difference was it that he was just a kid? Finally, when she couldn’t take it any longer, she stood in the empty kitchen and yelled. “I’ll do it. Whatever it takes.”

  She could barely hear her voice as she yelled. Was it like the tree in the forest—unless someone is there to listen to it when it falls, is it soundless? If no one could hear her, was she voiceless?

  Nothing happened the first ten times she yelled it. On the eleventh try, the boy appeared, holding his hands over his ears.

  “Stop it!” He yelled back. “I heard you the first time, but you aren’t the only thing I have going on.”

  Connie just stared at him, unsure what to say or think, afraid she might offend him. Carefully she asked, “What do you mean by that? What else do you have going on?”

  The boy let out a sigh that held no breath and said, “I mean, you are not the only dead person who needs help.”

  “So you are confirming that I am dead. And that I need help,” Connie asked, smiling at him.

  She wondered if that was the first time she had smiled since she died. And then she wondered when was the last time she had smiled, dead or alive.

  Nine

  She had smiled a lot in the summer of 1965. Even now, the memory of it made her smile. That summer had been magical. There were days when she had felt as if she would split apart with happiness. While living in the trailer park, she could never have imagined feeling as happy as she had that summer.

  Each member of the family played a part in making each day perfect. Connie’s hours at Ralph’s office filled her head with thoughts about making money and becoming someone. She knew now that she would like to run her own business. Ralph encouraged that idea but suggested that she explore all her options before deciding.

  “That’s what college is for,” he told her. “It’s where you can learn how to think and discover yourself.”

  Connie didn’t want to tell him that it was not what Edith wanted from college. She thought Ralph probably already knew, and she didn’t want to probe what might be a sore spot. Besides, she was delighted
that both Bill and Edith had no desire to learn what Ralph had to teach. They were happy to have Connie take their spot.

  Edith was in her element and delighted in sharing it with Connie. Edith dragged Connie to the pool whenever she could and taught her how to swim. Connie knew how to swim, but it looked like what Edith called dog-paddling.

  Pools were entirely new to Connie. There had been a lake near her, but she had no way to get to it. Besides, the women told her to stay out of it. “It’s dirty,” was the only thing they had said.

  The pool, on the other hand, smelled like chlorine, so she felt it was clean. Forever after that, the smell of chlorine would take her back to that time. If she allowed herself, she would pretend that she was still there, living in Edith’s world.

  Her time at the pool gave her a tan and blond streaks in her hair. She liked the look. She learned to love real swimming. She enjoyed the feeling of slicing through the water. Being the person she was, she soon became addicted to swimming laps. Doing more each day was another way to achieve something.

  Edith chose a different thing to do at the pool. On her off hours, she would sit on their towel and hold court over the boys who would try to win her attention and favors.

  Connie would look over at Edith, surrounded by boys, and laugh, and Edith would wink back. What those boys didn’t know was that none of them would win Edith’s heart. They were practice sessions for Edith. She was learning more skills to win over the boys she had her sights set on, the ones back in college.

  Connie had no desire to join in that kind of game. Even if she was interested, she had many mothers back at King’s Row who would be disappointed in her.

  Because Connie was not only achieving for herself. She was doing it for them. She swore that someday she would repay them for giving her a chance at a better life. In the meantime, she had things to do. Besides, she had yet to meet any boy who wanted things more out of life than she did.