I was sitting on the edge of the river, beneath the Young Street Bridge, very close to where I had just passed out. But it wasn’t a cold night anymore; it was the middle of summer, and by the angle of the sun, I guessed it couldn’t be much later than noon.
I was no longer wearing the soaked clothing from the night I tried to save Ezra, and the freezing sensation I had been feeling what seemed like only minutes before, had long since been replaced by a warmth that tingled through my body. It wasn’t the annoying kind of tingle, like when your arm falls asleep, but something more internal, emotional.
I looked up at August sitting next to me and grinned. “What are you doing here?”
He smirked and shook his head at me. “You don’t get to ask that question. You came to see me this time.”
A sense of shock came over me, and though I wasn’t afraid, the confirmation dawned on me that I must not have simply passed out; I had died.
“Did I…” I began.
“Well, you’re talking to me, aren’t you?” August asked. He looked exactly as I remembered seeing him last. He was happy and confident, not like the August I had lived with for so many years in California. “So I guess you did, yeah.”
“Shit,” I said simply, looking down at the water below. It seemed a lot more calm and placid than when I was in it, searching for Ezra. “Did I at least save him?” I asked.
“He’s going to be okay,” August stated firmly. “But to be honest, it was more Officer Hodge who saved him than you. You croaked in the middle of CPR.”
I thought about his words for a moment and tried to take solace in the fact that I had at least managed to pull Ezra from the water. Had I not dove in after him, he would have surely drowned. I mentioned this to August and told him I was okay with dying as long as Ezra had survived.
August let out a small laugh, not able to hold it back. “You’re not dead, Connor. Stop being so dramatic.”
“But you said—“ I started. “How am I here, talking to you, if I’m still alive?”
He rolled his eyes. “How were you talking to me all day yesterday? You were alive then, and I was still as dead as ever.”
I was confused, but part of me wondered if I was supposed to be. I had no idea where I was, nor how I was communicating with my dead little brother, but at the same time, I really didn’t care. We were together, sitting on the edge of the river, and that was okay with me.
“So, I’m guessing I’m going to wake up in a hospital bed pretty soon, surrounded by friends and family, telling them about how I saw the light and talked to you about the meaning of life and death,” I said.
“So. Dramatic.”
I let out a sigh, trying to think of a way to explain to him that I had every reason to be dramatic. This was some seriously supernatural phenomenon I was dealing with, not to mention the fact I had nearly just died only hours before.
“Look, it’s weird. I know it’s weird. But just rest assured that you’re going to be alright, and Ezra is going to be alright, and Mom is going to be alright. Hell, I’m even going to be alright.”
I took a look around at the beautiful scenery. “Yeah, I guess if you just hang out on a bridge all day, you’ll probably be alright,” I said confidently.
He laughed again, putting his arm around my shoulder. “Connor, this is your imagination, not mine. I’m probably floating around in Heaven with Lincoln and Gandhi, smoking cigars, and laughing about how seriously all you people down here take life.”
“Are you really in Heaven?” I asked. “I mean, is it real?”
“You’re really going to ask me that?”
The wind picked up, messing our hair and disturbing the long grass on the riverbank. The water rippled in defiance, and the bridge creaked ominously above us.
“What’s going on?” I asked, still not completely worried.
“You’re waking up,” August said. He looked sad. “You know that when you wake up, I won’t be there.”
I nodded my understanding, fighting back tears. After all, it really didn’t matter if August was dead if I could talk to him any time I wanted. However, if he was going to be gone, then he truly was gone. “You promise I’ll be okay?”
“You all will,” he said. “But I need you to do something for me.”
The wind picked up even more, causing little waves to crash against the shore. The clear, blue sky began to fill with clouds rolling in from every direction, white and fluffy at first, but quickly changing to darker shades of grey. “Anything,” I agreed over the sound of the wind.
“You have to talk to Mom. She and I, we never got the resolution we needed. But you still have a chance to change things,” he shouted over the roar of the wind. “Do you remember what you said to me under the bridge, when we were spray painting it?”
I nodded.
“The change has to start with you,” he said, staring directly into my eyes.
I took a deep breath, feeling more than a little strange inside. I knew it was my body telling me I didn’t have long left in this place, wherever I actually was. “What about Ezra?” I asked wanting to make sure I did it before it was too late.
“If you see him again, tell him that he changed my life. And tell him that he has to go on with his own. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Tell him to be brave, and to live.”
As we sat there, tears beginning to stream down my face, I could feel my own body pulling me away. I clung on as much as I could. “Any parting words?” I asked through my sobs, trying to lighten the mood. Even if I knew everything was going to be okay, I would have stayed there with my brother forever if I could.
“Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value,” August said nonchalantly, as if directing me to the nearest bathroom.
I rolled the words around in my head, trying to make sense of them, but everything was growing fuzzy, and fast. “Is that another Kurt Cobain quote?” I asked as his face turned to shock. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you throwing them out there over the past day.”
He smiled. “No, it’s Mark Twain. I can read, too, you know.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but the next thing I knew, I was no longer sitting on the riverbank with August. I was lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to IVs and listening to machines monitor my vital signs and heart rate. I was dressed in a hospital gown and tucked tightly into the bed. There was a tube in my nose.
“Good morning,” the voice said from across the room. I turned my head painfully to see Ezra in the bed next to mine. His skin was pale, and he had dark circles under his eyes. I imagined I looked equally as haggard.
When I didn’t respond to his greeting, Ezra continued to speak. “You saved my life, you know. But the problem with that is that I wanted to die.”
“Look, I…” I began.
“No, I know. I get why you did it. I would have jumped in after someone, too. But what I don’t understand is how it all went down.” He had an intrigued look on his face, as if still trying to put the missing pieces into place.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He rotated toward me in his bed, pain showing on his face. “You weren’t just some random person walking down the street who saw me jump. You’re August’s brother. We’re connected through him. How did you know I was going to be there? How did you know to come?”
I tried to think of a way to articulate my answer, but simply said, “I don’t know.”
“I thought you were him at first. I know that’s stupid, but I thought you were him and I wanted so badly for you to be him. The two of you look a lot alike.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that I resembled my brother.
“It’s not stupid,” I said. “At least not as stupid as me spending the entire day with him yesterday, even though he’s dead.”
Ezra didn’t speak. His expression told me that he had not been expecting my response, but that he was at least curious about it. I continued to explain to him everything that had happen
ed since I arrived in Aberdeen with my mother. I told him how August and I had conversed while walking around the hospital that we currently sat in. I told him how we had gone to dinner and how he had conveniently run off when the police caught us vandalizing the bridge. I then told him how our mother had broken the news to me that August had died when he fell from the bridge two days before.
“You really didn’t know he was dead?” he asked, his pain, both physical and emotional, showing on his face.
“I don’t know. I feel like I would have had to have known… How did I make it through the entire trip up here and the entire day, not knowing he was gone?” I asked.
“Our minds do crazy things to us when we don’t want to believe something,” Ezra said. “For instance, I thought jumping off that bridge would make everything alright. I thought it would somehow reunite us in the afterlife or… something.”
I sat back against my pillow and contemplated what I was about to say to Ezra, knowing it could potentially sound completely insane. “He asked me to tell you something.” I said quietly. If he hadn’t heard me, I had no plans on repeating myself.
“He did?”
“I don’t know if it’s just something I made up while I was passed out or if he really did talk to me, but he said that the hardest thing in this world is—“
“—Is to live in it.” Ezra cut me off, finishing the line for me. He covered his mouth and looked around the room as if he expected to see August leaning in the corner, casually waiting to be noticed. I could see that goose bumps had appeared on his arms. “He told me that once, when we first met. There’s no way you could have known that.”
A knot formed in my stomach that told me I was about to be sick, but I ignored it. “He wants you to be brave, and to live,” I told him.
Seeing Ezra’s face form into a small smile, with tears running down his cheeks made me smile as well. There we were, two guys who had only hours before been on the brink of death, happy and positive about what was to come next in our lives. I knew at that moment that everything was going to be okay.
Two days later, I was released from the hospital. Ezra, however, was to be kept at least a day longer due to the broken ribs he had received from the fall into the water. When he gave me the news, he said it was a small price to pay in exchange for being alive, at which point I momentarily stood from my wheelchair, smiled, and gave him a hug.
Before the nurse wheeled me out of the room and to the elevator I would take to the lobby to meet my mother, Ezra and I decided that in two weeks, I would drive back to Aberdeen, pick him up, and bring him to Anderson for Thanksgiving. After all, he had no real family in Washington, and he seemed happy to have someone to spend the holiday with.
Of course, I hadn’t broken this news to Mom, but I had a feeling that after everything, she would be alright with it.
As the elevator doors opened and the nurse pushed my chair into the sun-filled lobby, I could see my mother standing a few feet away. She instantly made her way across the room and bent down to hug me as the nurse took a step away.
“I can take him from here,” Mom said to the nurse, who nodded and walked away, leaving us alone.
She wheeled me through the front doors and into the sunlight, where in front of us I saw my car parked against the curb. “Where’s the hearse?” I asked, amazed.
She hesitated momentarily, her voice shaking when she finally did speak. “While you were recovering, I drove August home to your father so he could get preparations ready for the funeral. I decided it would be easier to drive Rusty back up here to get you.”
“Thank you,” I said, not sure what else to say.
“I wanted to stay with you the whole time, but with your brother’s body in the hearse, I…” She trailed off.
“Mom, thank you,” I said again.
The road ahead of us was going to be a long one, both literally and figuratively. We had a ten hour drive ahead of us and so much to discuss along the way. The knot formed in my stomach again, and I feared the awkward conversations and amount of crying we were about to do. But, we had to do it.
Mom helped me into the passenger’s seat and returned the wheelchair to the lobby of the hospital. When she returned, she sat down, started the ignition, and sat quietly for just a moment. A Nirvana song played on the stereo as she put the car into drive.
“Are you ready?” she asked, her voice shaking still.
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
She put the car into drive, and seconds later we were pulling out of the Grays Harbor Hospital parking lot and hitting the road to home. As she signaled and turned onto Interstate-5, I looked to her with a smile and said, completely without fear, “I think we have a lot to talk about.”
About the Author
Christopher Waltz was born in Indiana in 1987 and promptly began writing once leaving the womb. While this is a complete lie, Christopher did begin writing around age eight at which point he penned and illustrated a sequel to the film "Jumanji," and later, many short stories based on the TV show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Since that time, Christopher has continued writing and obtained a degree in secondary education from Indiana University's School of Education in 2011. He currently works as a middle school English teacher and Young Adult and Horror author.
His debut novel, Ivy League, has been reviewed as "dark and gritty" and "unique YA," and is available now. The sequel to Ivy League, Old Habits, will release October, 2015.
You can visit follow Christopher on Twitter: @christoph_waltz.
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