Second Lives

by P. D. Cacek

  Sara would have screamed bloody murder if she’d seen the place, but cleaning hadn’t been much of a priority and probably would continue not to be. He would have given anything to hear her scream and call him a slob. He could let it slide a few more weeks or months or whenever.

  The elevator doors opened and an elderly couple entered. Danny stepped back and studied the cafeteria menu that had been posted on the wall to his right. Wait, what the hell?…. The menu was different. They’d changed Tuesday Taco Night to Thursdays. And Monday was Pizza Night? No, Fridays were Pizza Night. Fridays were always supposed to be Pizza Night and Thursdays were supposed to be Make Your Own Salad and Sandwich nights. He’d learned the menu by heart and there were probably a lot of people who had done the same thing. They couldn’t just change things around now.

  It wasn’t fair.

  Things, especially little things, had to stay the same or…or….

  Or you could start thinking about other things and maybe even remember what it was like to watch your baby being born and to sign the release and stand there while your wife died and then take her hand to say goodbye and feel it squeeze back. If it wasn’t for the little things you’d remember holding your daughter for the first time and hearing the word miracle repeated over and over and then having to listen to Dr. Ellison tell you the most bizarre and ludicrous story imaginable.

  About how a lost soul had reanimated your wife’s dead body.

  Bullshit. Pure, unadulterated bull-fucking-shit! Not even the Syfy Channel would have shown a movie with that plotline.

  So little things, like cafeteria menus, had to stay the same.

  The elevator doors opened and the elderly couple got off. No one got on. The doors closed.

  And now there was nothing else to do but remember.

  A week after Dr. Ellison detonated that first BS bombshell, he’d asked them – the grieving family members – to attend another meeting and Danny, poor sap that he was, thought, Okay, this is it, he’s going to say it was all just a big joke – hah, hah. It wasn’t a joke, as it turned out, but it almost started out as one.

  When the man whose partner had drowned and ‘come back’ as a Yiddish-speaking Jew saw who was going to talk to them, he’d gotten to his feet, raced across the room and tried to take a swing at the lawyer. Dr. Ellison stopped it, unfortunately, and Danny booed.

  “I don’t want to hear any more about our legal responsibilities to these people,” the drowned man’s partner said.

  “Then would you rather hear how you can help get him out of your life?”

  That shut everyone up.

  It would take a little time, the lawyer continued, but all that needed to be done was to re-establish the individuals in question (Dr. Ellison called them Travelers) legally back into society.

  How?

  Very simply, as it turned out. The government hated a vacuum almost as much as space did. If you have a person on the planet, the person needed a name and a name needed a social security number to go with it. The four deceased had names and numbers, which technically were rendered void at the time of their deaths. The fact that each body revived with a new driver only made things a bit more complicated.

  True, the Travelers could, if they so wished, continue using the body’s original owner’s name and social security number, but – and here Dr. Ellison jumped in – there were already indications that the Travelers were not comfortable with that scenario. All of them, even Timmy, the child inside the old man, were adamant about who they were.

  Which meant legalized name changes and new social security numbers, which could only be obtained with help from them, the grieving family members. Once that was completed the Travelers could begin new lives on their own.

  Have a nice day.

  Danny took a deep breath and suddenly realized the elevator wasn’t moving. The floor indicator showed that the car had returned to the sub-basement, its default when not in use.

  See what happens when the little things change?

  Danny punched the Lobby button and a few seconds later the elevator lurched upward. When the doors opened, Danny stepped out, pulling the suitcase behind him like nothing had happened.

  “Oh, looks like somebody’s going home!”

  Danny nodded at the woman at the reception desk and kept on walking. “Yeah, somebody is.”

  * * *

  “I don’t know why we need a nurse,” his mother said. “We can push the wheelchair just as easily.”

  “It’s hospital policy,” her mother answered. “A nurse has to do it.”

  “Well, let me go find one so we can get out of here. Don’t you two leave without me.”

  “Not much chance of that.”

  The women laughed and Elisabeth watched his mother, Mrs. Cortland, turn and wave as she left the room. Mrs. Cortland had asked that she be called Judy and her husband Daniel, the same way Sara’s parents asked her to call them Lillian and Bob. The informality still embarrassed her, but she said she’d try. Customs, it seemed, had changed and so must she.

  Not as if she hadn’t changed enough already.

  “I know this will be hard for all of you to understand, but….”

  Dr. Ellison, a very kind man with sad eyes, had tried to explain the unexplainable to her and the two others, without much success. She herself had shown the most immodest behavior and asked if they, all of them including the doctor himself, were inmates of an asylum – because that was the only possible conclusion she could come to.

  “If you’re asking if all of us are crazy and this is some kind of deluded fever dream,” the doctor said, “I only wish it was as simple an explanation as that, dear lady.”

  A fever dream, even one unto death, would have been easier to accept. For what he told them was impossible, yet there they were, she and the others, living proof that what should have been suitable only for the pen of Mr. H.G. Wells was, in fact, true.

  Although the good doctor had claimed there were other ‘Travelers’ (a term she came to loathe) around the world, she was one of only four, two men and two women, who had ‘manifested’ at this particular hospital. There were only three of them, however, who sat around the table in the oddly fashioned and brightly colored room. The fourth, they were told, was a little boy entombed within the body of an old man who was too fragile and weak to leave his bed.

  Dr. Ellison had used the term ‘inhabiting’ instead of ‘entombed’, but he was only being kind. When he tried to explain what had happened to them, it was obvious to Elisabeth, and possibly the others as well, that the doctor had no idea why such a thing had occurred. He called them a minor miracle, but she knew exactly what they were and there was nothing miraculous about it. They were perversions of the natural law and God’s holy ordinance.

  And she’d said so.

  The other female Traveler, a woman calling herself Christine, had at that moment, and perhaps because of what had been said, resorted to tears and general hysterics until such time as Dr. Ellison needed to summon a nurse to administer an injection. The effects on the woman were calming enough, but did little to stop her from weeping softly throughout the rest of their time in the meeting room.

  The man in the wheelchair, whose name she still could not pronounce correctly, spoke very quickly in a guttural foreign tongue, which the doctor not only seemed to know but was able to answer in kind. Elisabeth knew only as much French and Latin as were proper for a woman in her level of society (and time). Nevertheless, she could tell by the tonal quality of his words that the man was pleading with the doctor for something.

  Perhaps the man was asking to be told it was a mistake, that the transmigration of souls and unsanctified resurrection were impossible, had to be impossible, even though it seemed to be wholly and unquestionably true.

  For howsoever much Elisabeth wanted to deny it, she was alive and inhabiting the body of a dead
woman in a time a century beyond her own.

  “Dear God.”

  “Did you say something, dear?”

  Elisabeth looked up into Lillian’s soft and gently lined face. Once the pain of the incision across her abdomen – she still could not bring herself to dwell too long upon the reason for it – had passed and she was able to stand and walk without too much discomfort, she had spent an immodest amount of time staring into mirrors at the strange face she now wore, a face that, though younger and finer of features, resembled the woman who now stood before her waiting for an answer.

  “It was nothing,” Elisabeth lied. “Just a prayer.”

  “Ah.” Lillian’s eyes softened. “We aren’t particularly religious, but there are a number of wonderful churches in the neighborhood, and we’d be more than happy to take you to whichever service you’d like to attend. I believe there’s either an Episcopal or Roman Catholic church just a few blocks from the house.”

  Elisabeth nodded. “Thank you, but…I think I’d rather not attend services yet.”

  For is it not written that the damned must not enter the House of God?

  “Well, of course not until you feel up to it, dear.” Lillian touched Elisabeth’s cheek. “You’ve been through so much.”

  They stayed that way, the mother touching her dead daughter’s cheek while the trespasser sat frozen in iniquity until Danny’s mother – Judy – returned with a Negro man who was wearing what Elisabeth had come to understand were called scrubs.

  “Apparently,” Judy said, laughing, “most of the nurses were having a wheelchair race down in the cafeteria.”

  The Negro man offered them a sheepish grin. “We do it for the kids who are ambulatory. They come down to watch and cheer. Well, little lady,” he said directly to Elisabeth, meeting her eyes until it was she who looked away, “are you ready to get out of here and rejoin the big, beautiful world?”

  Elisabeth lifted her eyes cautiously. “Yes, I am. Thank you.”

  The Negro man gave her a wink – the impertinence! – as he came around to the back of the wheelchair and began pushing her from the room.

  “And away we go,” he said.

  Yes, Elisabeth thought, but to where?

  * * *

  Home, but not hers.

  Sara’s childhood home.

  “Well, what do you think of it?”

  Elisabeth pressed her trembling fingers against her lips to keep both as still as possible. The room in front of her, the room that had been given to her, smelled of freshly cut roses and windblown linen. Her mother’s house had smelled of camphor and medicinal remedies, and of damp and dread. This room, in this house, smelled of new beginnings and a life she did not deserve.

  “Is it all right?” Lillian asked. There was no mistaking the worry in her tone. “We can repaint it a different color if you’d like.”

  Elisabeth walked slowly into the room, feeling the incision along her nether parts twitch with each step and concentrating on that instead of the color of the room. The walls were the same color as the yellow primroses on the porcelain brooch her brother had given her in another life.

  She tried to keep her emotions in check, but a tear fell as she crossed the floor covered with a thick pale carpeting to brush aside a sheer white curtain from the window. The view from the second-story room looked out onto a fenced side yard filled with rosebushes and dancing butterflies. Beyond the fence was a narrow street filled with automobiles.

  “The street’s not always this busy,” Lillian said, “but it’s rush hour, you know?”

  Elisabeth did not, but nodded as if she did.

  “Is the room all right?”

  She wiped the tear from the dead woman’s cheek before turning. “This is the loveliest room I have ever seen, thank you.”

  Lillian’s chest swelled with pride. Judy, his mother, cleared her throat from the doorway.

  “I picked out the linens and bedspread.”

  Elisabeth crossed to the bed and sat down, caressing the pale yellow chenille spread. She wouldn’t have been so bold as to do such a thing in her mother’s house, but this wasn’t her mother’s house and, somehow, she felt such a showing of appreciation was expected.

  “It’s quite elegant, thank you.”

  Lillian walked into the room ahead of Judy.

  “There are extra sheets and towels in the linen closet just down the hall – remember, I pointed it out to you? Good. And there are some clothes in the closet, things Danny brought over, but we can go shopping once you feel up to it.”

  “Yes, all of us can go shopping,” Judy added quickly.

  “Of course,” Lillian said and began gesturing at objects in the room. “Now, let’s see…closet, dresser, desk, bookshelf, and since I was told you’ve become addicted to television—” She walked over to a diminutive television set sitting atop a corner hutch. “It was Sara’s from college, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.” Elisabeth shook her head. “Thank you.”

  The older woman picked up the remote control device similar to the one Elisabeth had learned to use in the hospital and placed it on the small bedside table. “In case you’d like to watch in bed.” Then she crossed the room to a door directly opposite the bed.

  “You have your own entrance to the Jack-and-Jill bathroom and….”

  “Jack and Jill?”

  Lillian smiled and Judy chuckled.

  “It means a shared bathroom. You share it with the room on the other side.”

  “Ah.”

  Elisabeth was still not fully comfortable with the concept of water closets taking the place of under-the-bed ‘necessity’ pots, but it, like the demonstrative shows of emotion and gratitude, seemed the norm. It just seemed so…inconvenient to have to rouse oneself fully from sleep in order to walk into another room to answer nature’s call. The first few days in the hospital had been made much easier thanks to the bedpans that were delivered and removed at her command, but even that little luxury hadn’t lasted long.

  Elisabeth wasn’t entirely sure she liked this new century or its ways, but she had little recourse but to live in it. Standing, she straightened the bedspread before crossing the room to follow Lillian through the Jack-and-Jill door.

  The blue-and-white tiled room sparkled and smelled of crushed lemons. To her right was a toilet and bathtub/shower combination, to her left a pale blue marble countertop on which had been set two gleaming white sink bowls and glistening silver faucets. A row of milk-glass lights clung to the wall above twin oval mirrors that reflected the image of the dead woman back to Elisabeth as she walked to the closed door at the opposite end of the room.

  “Sara— Elisabeth, wait, that’s the….”

  The warning came too late and Elisabeth opened the door onto a nursery. Sara’s husband was sitting in a white wood rocking chair cradling his daughter.

  He’d looked up at the sound of the door opening but he didn’t look at her. His eyes swept past her face – his dead wife’s face – and focused only on his mother.

  “Danny!” Judy said, pushing past Elisabeth. “I thought – we thought you were going to work.”

  His eyes remained on his mother’s face. “I was, but…. I’ll go in tonight and do some catch-up, but I wanted to…. I just want to be with Emily for a little bit.” He looked toward Lillian and again past Elisabeth without acknowledgment. “Is that okay?”

  Lillian joined them in the room. “Of course, it is, Danny. Look, I’ll have Bob move that old futon in here, you know the one, and you can stay over whenever you like. How’s that?”

  Danny nodded. “That’d be great. Thanks.”

  Then, finally, he looked at her and the look in his eyes transcended time and place. It was the same look that had been in the eyes of the man, another stranger, who’d struck her down so long ago.

 
Elisabeth held no illusions regarding Sara’s husband: he hated her and wished her dead so he could bury his wife’s body.

  “Do you mind?” he asked. “Could you just go away and leave us alone?”

  Elisabeth left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Aryeh

  Ryan took another sip of coffee and stared at the microwave’s digital timer, because if he did that, if he put all his focus on watching the blinking red numbers count down to zero, he wouldn’t be tempted to look outside.

  And God knew the last thing he wanted to do was look outside, because, if he did, he might very well lose whatever small chunk of his mind he had left.

  If any.

  So he watched and waited and sipped and when the timer beeped five times, telling him it had completed its task, Ryan set his mug down, knuckled open the microwave door, took out the quart-sized measuring cup and – carefully – poured the steaming water onto the foul-smelling dried tea that waited in the warmed cup.

  You had to be careful when pouring water for tea, because you didn’t want to agitate the leaves too much.

  It’d only taken five weeks, but he’d become an expert in the art of tea making.

  Just ask him.

  He knew, for instance, that the cup – and it had to be a cup, not a mug – had to be pre-warmed, and that the foul-smelling tea was called Oolong and that it smelled like that because, after picking, it had been allowed to wither in the sun, which caused it to ferment slightly before it was curled and twisted.