I dialled Anna’s phone while I sat on the toilet, but it went right to voice message.
“Hey, Anna. It’s me. About nine-thirty. Where are you? I tried to text but you’re not responding. Call me and rescue me from my mother.”
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands. I checked for pimples and brushed my hair. I waited for Anna to return my call, but my phone didn’t so much as vibrate. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and checked to see if she’d read my text, but she hadn’t. Maybe she lost her phone or something, I reasoned. Or maybe she’s busy, like really busy, like with a boy. I ran through about ten scenarios in my head but none of them made any sense.
“Aliya!” My mother called from the living room. “You okay in there?”
I went back and watched more of the movie before I decided I should try her home phone. If I could talk to her parents I might feel better. I waited a few minutes before I got up again. Mom paused the movie. Again.
“What’s up with you? You’re like a Mexican jumping bean.”
I have no idea what a Mexican jumping bean is, but my mom compares me to one quite frequently, like whenever I move and she wants me to be still, which is a lot. She also compares me to a squirming worm and a horse with a burr under its saddle. My mom is seriously old. And weird. But I couldn’t let her know I was worried or she’d insist we drive over and check up on Anna that very minute. She believes it’s better to be safe than sorry. She also lacks a sense of personal boundaries and oversteps hers daily. I could just imagine driving up to Anna’s house and ringing the doorbell, then telling her parents we just wanted to check on Anna because she wasn’t texting me back or trolling Facebook. It would be absurd.
“I just want to put on my PJ pants,” I said. It was a lame excuse but the only one I could think of besides the bathroom, and if I went to the bathroom one more time Mom was going to insist on giving me a dose of Pepto-Bismol.
Mom sighed and hoisted herself off the couch. She headed to the kitchen and I heard the popcorn maker whirring again.
I climbed into my PJ pants as quickly as I could and at the same time called Anna’s house. The phone rang and rang but nobody picked up. I ended up leaving a lame message on the answering machine that I hoped wouldn’t alarm her parents if they picked it up first. Then I dialled again and it was busy. Maybe I called back too soon, I decided, and the machine was still working. I waited a minute and called again. When the machine answered, I hung up. Then I called again. And again. I called five times until I was confident nobody was home. Then I chastised myself for overreacting. Maybe I was more like my mother than I thought. Maybe I also lacked a clear sense of boundaries. Anna was probably out somewhere with her parents. They did that sometimes — went to dinner and a movie or to a play and dessert downtown.
Then suddenly on the last call, for some reason, somebody picked up. It was a man’s voice, but it didn’t sound familiar. He sounded panicked, though, and I panicked in return.
“Uh. Sorry. I think I have the wrong number.”
“Who were you trying to call?”
“Anna.”
“You have the right number. Who’s this?”
“Her friend, Aliya.”
“Anna can’t come to the phone right now.” The man sounded rushed. “Do you have a cell number for her parents?”
“No?”
“Her brother?”
“No. Why?”
“There’s been an emergency.”
“Who are you?” I asked, in case it was a home invader and I needed to protect Anna from halfway across the city.
“I’m Anna’s neighbour. I really can’t talk right now. Can you call back another time?”
I could hear voices in the background, but none that I recognized. I heard what sounded like a siren. My heart started to race and my pulse throbbed in my temple.
“Is Anna okay?”
“I don’t know. Please. Call back later.”
The neighbour hung up and I started to panic for real.
Anna
The bright light surprised me as much as it would the next person. I mean, I’d seen it on TV and read books about people going into the light, but I don’t think I ever really believed it existed. And yet there it was, right in front of me. In fact, it was a little too bright.
“Can someone turn down that light?” I asked. Or maybe I just thought I asked. It was hard to be sure about anything when all I could think about was the light being too bright.
“Cripes, it doesn’t have to be this bright in here, does it? Is there no consideration for the dead?” I yelled.
Damn, I thought. I didn’t yell. I’m thinking. Or I was thinking. I’m sure those were my thoughts, unless someone else is in here thinking with me. But I don’t remember anyone else being in here. How would they even get in here?
“I can’t be dead if I’m thinking, can I?” I said.
Or maybe death is just thinking, an eternity of nothing but thinking in this bright light, I reasoned.
This isn’t what I wanted.
But then I had a vague sense of being attached again, attached to that not-too-fat, not-too-ugly, completely unremarkable body. I screwed up again, I thought with a sinking feeling. But what could have gone wrong? Another jogger? Another highway guy? Another homeless dude? Surely Ray and Sam didn’t happen to walk through my bedroom and find me? Or maybe this is, like, heaven or something and I really am dead. I considered the possibility. Maybe there is another level of consciousness. I wondered if I should call out for Granny and Gramps.
All the thinking was giving me a headache so I tried to put myself back into the blackness by remembering all those pills and that red syrup. I could see red, like the backs of my eyelids when I floated on an air mattress in the pool. I felt like I was floating.
“Am I in a pool, in the sunlight somewhere?” I whispered.
But no, it couldn’t be. I had no plans to go swimming. And what’re the odds they have pools in heaven or on another plane of existence?
Shit, I’m going all new-age in death, I thought. This can’t be a good sign. Did I take the wrong pills?
The more I clawed my way back to the darkness, to the comfort of the woolly nothingness, the more I felt my senses waking up. Next thing I knew, I could feel my head cradling my thoughts, like my brain had been sucked back into my body. The more I fought to stay detached, the more I realized I was whole.
Shit! I can feel myself breathing. I can feel my arms and my legs. My feet feel cold. Oh crap, I’m still myself and if I know I’m myself and I can feel my body, I must be alive. Did I throw up after all? Am I going to wake up in a cherry-flavoured pool of pill-studded vomit? I wondered. I let my mouth come back to existence and tried to determine if I had that sour aftertaste, that lingering acidity. Whatever I tasted, it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t vomit either. My mouth felt dry and gritty and, wait, there was something there, something hard and round. It made me feel like choking.
“What the hell is in my mouth?” I tried to say.
I wanted to lift my hand to get rid of whatever was in my mouth, but I couldn’t budge it. Maybe I wasn’t so alive after all. That thought brought me hope.
Next my ears joined in and let me know they were working. I could hear a strange noise, like Darth Vader. And voices. I could hear voices, but I couldn’t hear past the breathing sounds to tell what they were talking about.
“Excuse me, whoever you are. Do you have to breathe so loudly?” I muttered.
It didn’t seem like anyone heard me. Or maybe nobody was paying attention.
Then I heard Joe’s voice. It sounded like he was crying.
I wonder if there’s been an accident? I thought. I hope Mom and Dad are okay. I hope they didn’t get in a car crash on the way to their bed and breakfast.
“Wise up, Anna. You’re the accident!” The words echoed in my hea
d. “You ruined their weekend away. Loser.”
“Did I think that or is there someone else in here thinking?” I asked again. It was very confusing being dead, or nearly dead, or whatever I was.
It was definitely Joe’s voice I could hear on the outside, beyond the heavy breathing sound. He was saying something about the bridge last summer. Then Mom was talking.
So I guess that confirms she didn’t get in an accident after all, I reasoned. But how’d she get here?
I couldn’t figure out why everyone was in my room when I was trying to die.
Mom was talking about the river.
Oh crap, I thought. They’re going to figure it out. I’m going to get caught red-handed with those pills. Then they’ll throw me into a psych ward and probably swallow the key.
The pills. I took the pills. I was sure I took them all. I remembered seeing the empty bag. I made sure my hand was empty before I fell asleep. So why were they talking about the pills?
The thoughts scrolled through my head. There was no break between one thought and the next. It was a jumble of sounds and voices and thoughts. It was so unbearable I wished I was dead. The thought was comforting until I remembered, again, that I’d been trying to kill myself in the first place.
Oh no, Joe was crying again.
“Get it together, bro!” I shouted inside my head. “I can’t stand to hear you bawling like a baby. Don’t go blaming yourself. Of course it’s not your fault. How could you possibly have known? Stop with the pity party, all of you! It’s not like I walked around with a megaphone announcing my plans to off myself. Give your heads a shake. It just doesn’t work like that. What’s wrong with you people?”
I was exhausted by the anguish in the room. If I could have gotten up, I’d have run out and thrown myself off the bridge without hesitating. I should have done it when I had the chance. I wanted everyone to stop all the stupid crying.
“God, please let me go back to the blackness,” I begged.
That’s when I felt it creep back up on me.
“That’s better,” I muttered. “Maybe this was a side trip and I get to die after all.”
The next time I started thinking again, it was clearer, too clear. I was definitely alive. There was no getting around it. I could feel my fingers and my toes. Whatever had been jammed in my mouth was gone, and thankfully someone had dimmed the lights. It was noisy though. There were voices and beeps, but Darth Vader was gone. There were footsteps coming toward me. But then they passed. There was a metallic clang and a smell that reminded me of something. What was it? That smell? Like the time I fell in the river and ended up in the hospital. Yeah, it smelled like a hospital.
“Shit,” I said. I was beginning to like swearing, something I never did much when I was alive.
“Wait,” I told myself. “I am alive. I’m in a hospital. Something definitely went wrong.”
I couldn’t escape the truth of it. I wiggled my fingers one by one, I flexed my toes. I lifted my arms, but only slightly in case someone was in the room watching or the machines started beeping. I wasn’t ready for attention. After some more testing, I determined everything on my body was working.
Eventually, I knew I’d have to open my eyes too, but I wanted to put it off as long as possible. I knew she was going to be there, no matter how long I waited. Moms have some sort of superhuman capacity for sitting in hospital chairs. Even before I found the courage to look, I tried to guess the expression on her face. Confusion, fear, anger, repulsion, pity. Pick a straw.
“Anything but the pity,” I begged. “Is there a barter system? I promise to keep myself alive if I can avoid the pity.”
But was my life worth bartering for?
I knew there was no way I could lie there forever with my eyes closed. I couldn’t hear her or smell her, but I knew she was there the way I knew I was in a hospital. It was the only thing that made sense.
I cracked my eyelids. Everything was blurry at first. Blurry and bright and it hurt when the light flooded in. Then I saw her, sitting in a chair right beside me, three feet away. She was flipping through a magazine, stopping to look at a page for a moment, then flipping to another page. She didn’t seem frantic, but she looked tired. I opened my eyelids a little wider to be sure it wasn’t a trick of the light. I wasn’t sure I fully understood what was happening. In my mind there was still a dim possibility I was in a parallel universe and this was another mother. Finally she glanced at me. Her eyes widened. I braced myself for what was going to be an unbearable bout of tears or sympathy. But instead she smiled.
What the hell is she smiling about? I wondered.
I wished I could look around the room to be sure she was looking at me. Maybe there was someone behind me she was smiling at. But then she moved close. She reached out and touched my forehead. Her touch was warm and soft and I realized I’d been feeling it in my sleep. She’d probably been caressing my head for hours each day for, well, I had no idea how many days I’d been out of it.
“Anna?” she whispered softly. She was still smiling.
I murmured “hi” but I wasn’t sure if anything came out of my mouth or if my throat just made the sound.
“I missed you,” she said. Her voice didn’t waver. I was on the lookout for any signs of fraudulent behaviour but she appeared genuinely happy.
“You’re not mad?” I tried to say, but again, I couldn’t tell if I’d said the words or not.
“Of course not,” she said so softly I wondered if I was sharing the room with someone else, maybe someone who was sleeping.
“It’s not your fault,” she added.
I was baffled. Did she think I’d accidentally drunk too much cough syrup? Did she think someone forced all those pills down my throat? Did she know about the pills?
“But the pills,” I managed to croak.
“I know,” she said.
I wondered if they were still inside me.
“Don’t worry about anything right now. The doctor said if you woke up on your own it was a good sign.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” I whispered. I needed to know she knew the truth.
“Shhhhh. Just rest now. We can talk later. I know it wasn’t an accident. But that doesn’t mean you’re to blame.”
Who else could be to blame? I wondered.
She kept her hand on my forehead and the warmth seeped through me. I was so sleepy again, I welcomed the blackness as it enclosed me.
Every time I crested reality, I woke up a little more. I became aware of more, I heard more, I stayed awake longer. I also felt more. The despair was crushing. I wasn’t sure what the future was going to bring, but none of the options I came up with brought me any comfort, especially knowing I had only three lines left to cross off my list, all of them unimaginable, even to me.
“You’re awake again?” Mom was there. I wondered if she ever left, if she ever even went to the bathroom.
“What day is it?” I asked, trying to orient myself to being alive again.
“Tuesday.”
I looked away and wanted to cry, but there weren’t any tears inside me. There hadn’t been for a couple of years. Even crying would be helpful, I thought. At least it would be something besides emptiness.
“What’s wrong with me?” I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t.
I also wanted to know what went wrong, but I was afraid to ask that too so I said nothing. I left it up to Mom to fill the void.
“Joe’s in the waiting room. He’s hoping to come in and see you now that you’re talking. Is that okay?”
I sighed. I was lying flat on my back, but I could tell my head was slightly raised. I hated to think of Joe standing there looking down at me, but I nodded anyway.
“Let me go get him,” Mom said.
I tried to wriggle myself upright, but it was hard. I had a wicked headache, which was ironic cons
idering the amount of pain medication I’d taken. Then the door sighed open and Joe eased himself into the room. He looked so fragile, I was afraid if the door banged into him he’d shatter. He edged close to me and I knew he was afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. I had days and weeks of this very same moment ahead of me, of people being afraid to get too close in case what I had was catching.
“Hey, Joe,” I muttered to break the ice. It was easier to let him off the hook than Mom.
“Hey, Anna,” he said and moved a little closer.
“Don’t worry, it’s not contagious.”
He smiled, but looked like he was about to burst into tears. I decided not to give it to him for bawling earlier, when he thought I was dead, or soon to be dead.
“Where’s Mom?”
“She went to get a coffee. She’s been here all weekend. Even some of your friends have been by.”
“Dad too?”
“Yeah, but we’re not supposed to be in here at the same time. They want you to rest as much as possible.”
“Are they pissed at me?”
Joe looked confused. “No.”
“Liar.”
“It’s true.” He crumpled up his eyebrows the way he does when he’s trying to fix a computer or reach a new level in one of his video games.
I wanted to say something sarcastic like “too bad,” but I didn’t have the heart or energy.
“Why’s Mom so happy?” I asked. I figured if I could be straight with anyone, it was Joe.
“Because you’re alive.” I couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement. It was like my brain wasn’t functioning properly and I couldn’t decipher emotions.
I almost smiled, or I felt like I should at least, to let him know I appreciated his honesty.
“Dad?”
“Anna, we’re all … relieved. We get another chance. You get another chance.”
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