by Jen Brooks
The woman’s hand covers my shoulder. Soothing warmth radiates down, like a soft quilt warmed by a hearth. It is not the strange half-ecstatic fever of Tess. Not icky, forced comfort but the real thing. “This is the Creator’s world. And yes, you would call it the ‘real world.’”
“Then it’s true. I’m not real.”
“Oh, honey, you exist as surely as I do. But no, you were not created here.”
I kneel at my family’s gravestone and run my fingers over the engraving. The numbers and letters bite, rough and final. My family lies beneath me. Beneath my knees. If I scoop earth for long enough, I can touch them. I pick a few blades of grass for a start. I long to see their faces so I can finally say the good-bye I was robbed of by being almost dead myself. Yet I know that after ten years they aren’t really beneath me anymore. If there is a place for souls to travel to, they’ve moved on. Otherwise, they’re just bodies turning to dust.
I want to cry, but my tear ducts are too swollen or something. Sorrow crushes me from the outside in, almost numbing in its effect. I hope this strange woman doesn’t mind, but I need to sink into this grass for a moment. Wrap myself in grief and console myself with it. I’ve wrestled with the question of visiting these graves for so long, it’s a relief to see them, really. The names are etched in stone, and somehow I’m not stricken blind by the sight of them. My family is dead, and I want them back, but I can’t change any of it.
A prayer comes to my lips, but not to God, who has taken these precious people from me. I pray to them, that they should hear me and know how sorry I am that I’ve never come to visit them until now. I whisper my love into the grass, a long stream of “I miss you I’m sorry Forgive me I want you back Please watch over me You were the best parents who ever loved a little boy with your crazy jokes and bedtime stories and car trips and camping and Remember when the blanket got torched by the campfire and Remember when you bought me the black Max Rider bike and Remember how excited we were to go to Disney World I’m so sorry we never made it I wanted to ride everything with you Tess and see all the movie characters and eat the best junk food for a week It wasn’t worth losing you I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you so much.”
If I curled up on this spot, I wonder how long it would take the earth to swallow me. Since my name’s on the grave, there is an empty space down there where I could go. Uncle Joey must have been responsible for making the choice to include me on the gravestone. I suppose he considered I’d be joining my family sooner rather than later. Which makes me wonder, “Where is my aunt’s grave?”
The woman shines her light on the next stone over.
Joseph Welch
Carrie Welch
Baby Welch
Auntie Carrie and the baby share a death date with my family. Uncle Joey’s death slate is as blank as mine. I’m sad about the “Baby.” My poor cousin didn’t live long enough to get a name, and I suppose Uncle Joey didn’t want to choose one without Auntie Carrie.
“Come, Jonathan,” the woman says. “We have one more stop before our appointment.”
Now that I’m here, I don’t want to go. “We have an appointment?”
“One more stop first.”
This woman must have gone to the same question-avoidance school as Tess, but then I remember that six-year-old Tess is in the ground. She never became a beautiful, sarcastic teenager. “Wait,” I say. “If my sister is dead, who’s the girl I’ve been talking to?”
She gives me a sad shake of the head like she feels bad for me. “She’s just another one of us.”
“Please tell me what you mean by that.”
“I will. I promise. One more stop.”
She takes my hand. I feel a little like I’m being led by the ghost of Christmas past. Only, I think it’s the ghost of Christmas future who took Scrooge to the graveyard. Plus I think the graveyard came last. The cemetery darkness morphs into neighborhood darkness lit by a goodly number of streetlamps and welcoming porch lights. The houses are small, but neat and tended. The road curves away from us in either direction but is a generous width for kids to get going a pretty good game of kickball.
The woman leads me to one of the houses, an especially well-lit one, and I can only assume she has the Tess invisibility power. I try to do it myself but can’t tell if I’m successful. Now that I know this world is the final say on real, I think since I’m not real, I might be powerless in it. I wonder, even though she’s never been a world-maker, if Kylie feels powerless in her new world. I wonder what happened to her when I disappeared from Bella Luna.
We go right up to the porch, and the blue-eyed woman opens the door and leads me inside. We must be invisible, because no one turns a head as we enter. The TV blares, and a group of mixed ages groans at some flub their baseball team made on the field.
Four young kids play in the corner with a marble machine. A motorized chain carries the marbles up, up, up to the top, where they begin their run down a complex obstacle course, spinning things and dropping through tubes while the kids watch, entranced. The baseball fans let out a cheer, and I turn to watch the replay with them. Not a grand slam, but a magnificent homer over left field’s Green Monster that scores two runs. Beer bottles and bowls of chips fill the tables in the room. Though almost everyone jumped to their feet at the hit, one older man stays planted in a huge, comfy armchair. He takes a swig of his beer. He’s wearing a baseball jersey with handwriting on it, the signatures, possibly, of the team.
The blue-eyed woman has not let go of my hand, and now tugs me along the side of the baseball scene through a doorway into the kitchen. The room contains a variety of women sitting, standing, cleaning, putting away dinner. Three older kids, maybe just shy of high school, play cards at the table. The women chat animatedly about someone’s vacation, comparing experiences, making wish lists for the future. The eldest woman shuffles clean dishes into cabinets as they come off the line of two younger women washing and drying.
Casual photographs in cheap plastic frames cover the walls. A family of four who made it to Disney World. A family of six by a lake somewhere. Two little kids with spaghetti sauce all over them. On and on the pictures stretch. Most of the people in them resemble one another. This is a family. The older man and older woman are the grandparents, and these are their children and grandchildren gathered for nothing more important, it seems, than a big dinner and a baseball game, but then one of the women pulls a box from the refrigerator and sets it on the table. A birthday cake that reads Happy April Birthdays! Lauren, Uncle Greg, Nana.
While someone calls for candles and matches, the blue-eyed woman leads me back through the living room. It’s a commercial, so everyone’s catching up on snacks and beer. One younger man, barely drinking age, makes a beer run to the kitchen.
We pass the kids with the marble machine. They’ve pulled it apart and are rebuilding the course. One kid is definitely the main engineer. The littlest one sucks his thumb and lets the others work.
The woman and I close the front door and the screen door behind us. A porch swing hangs to the left, and the woman lets my hand go to sit down on it. She pats the space beside her, so I sit too.
“Do you know why I brought you here?” she asks.
“I’m sure you didn’t mean to rub my nose in it.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“It’s the perfectly wonderful family I wish I had.”
Our feet touch the porch and rock the swing back and forth. Because my legs are longer than hers, it’s a little halting at the top of each upswing.
“You didn’t recognize any of them?”
“Was I supposed to?”
“I thought you might, but I’m not surprised you didn’t.”
“Who should I have recognized?”
“Did you notice the older gentleman in the recliner?”
“Yes.”
�
��The older woman in the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“Think about their faces. Do you remember?”
Now that she mentions it, maybe I did have a glimmer of recognition, but I thought it was me recognizing how wonderful it would be to be these people, with so much love in their house. “Are they my grandparents?” In the real world, my grandparents might still be alive.
“No, honey. I’m afraid not, but if those two people inside could see you now, they would take you in their arms as if you were one of their own.”
I don’t understand. I really don’t understand, and I’m getting tired of all these riddles and secrets and worlds. “Why would they do that if they’re not my family?”
“Because, Jonathan, you’re the reason they’re here tonight, celebrating another birthday. You saved their lives.”
“What?”
She touches me again, clasps my hand, except she is not warm this time. In a flash I’m cold, shivering, and in pain. Something drips down my face. Blood. Something stings at my chest and shoulder. Burns. My muscles are tired after pulling from seat back to seat back, climbing, as I did, up the plane, water filling from beneath me. It rises faster than I can climb. I scream with terror as it catches my feet. Everyone beneath me, including Mom and Dad and Auntie Carrie and even Tess, is submerged already. People around me are burned and frantic from the flame that tore through on impact. Smoke still fills the cabin and burns my mouth and nose and lungs. Two people, a man and a woman in the very back seat, farthest from the rising water, hang by the belts. The woman’s tears drip all over the place as she and her husband try to undo her seatbelt. His clicks open. Hers is jammed, and she blocks his path of escape. He reaches over her from his window seat, but the way her body presses on the belt, the angle of his reach, and the panic in them both makes him unable to work her free.
The plane groans as it sinks, and water catches my waist as I reach them. The rear cabin door gapes open up ahead, a little daylight coming through with the water, but no one stands in the doorway. Water gushes everywhere, swelling up from the bottom and in a waterfall from the top, soaking me, freezing me, making everything that much scarier because too much water falls into my eyes. I’m going to crawl right past those two people to get out the door. I almost do. But the woman looks up at me as I pass. Her face streaked with tears and fright. I have to help her. I reach over with my small fingers. The water inundates us, the cabin now full past the seat belt. My hands are already submerged. I can’t reach the buckle because the man’s groping hands maddeningly block the way. He withdraws for a split second, and I slip an index finger under the cap of the belt, and snap. The belt springs the woman free, and my world becomes water. There’s the door, I’m trying to reach it, but those few seconds’ pause mean the doorway has sunk deeper. Where at first water only spilled over the lip, now it pours through the whole opening, and I can’t fight the current. I hold my breath and hold on to the woman to keep from being swept back down into the cabin, and when the plane sinks entirely under, the edges of consciousness close in on me. I see the door, push off with my feet and clear it, but the surface of the harbor is too far away. The sinking plane pulls too hard.
That’s all I remember. That and the pain. Sometime later the coast guard dragged me to the surface.
My nightmares have involved seat belts lately, so this memory couldn’t have been too deeply buried. Reliving it isn’t the same as living it, but although this memory that the blue-eyed woman has pulled to the surface doesn’t come with the physical pain of burning and then almost drowning, it makes me feel burned and drowned.
“Why those two? Why didn’t I save my sister, who I thought was behind me? Or my Mom and Dad, who never made it out of their seats?”
“Come here, honey,” the woman says. She opens her arms to receive me like I’m a little boy. I slide over and lean in, and her big Grand Canyon sweatshirted arms enfold me. This grandmotherly thing she’s doing is strange and good, and again I feel like I should be crying, though no tears come. She rocks us both on the swing. Forward. Back. The chains creak. Forward. Back. Although my feet are still on the ground, I let her do the work. I let it all rest on her. “Your parents, and your aunt, were dead when the plane hit the water. Your sister climbed only a little ways before the rising water caught her.”
I know all this. I’ve been told it and I witnessed it, but part of what kept me silent and withdrawn that long remainder of third grade was the guilt. People who tragically lose loved ones know this guilt. They died. I lived.
No matter how many times Uncle Joey or anyone else reassured me that my guilt was unfounded, it never went away. This stranger beside me does not say the words “It wasn’t your fault,” but she makes it clear. I let her reassure me. My face lies against her grandmotherly chest. My body is sunk into her soft bulk. She rocks with me until the surge of guilt subsides, although, as I said before, it doesn’t change things.
“I’m glad these two made it,” I tell her. “They have a nice family.”
“Yes. They do. And you gave up ten years of life to give it to them.”
“Those two seconds couldn’t have made that much of a difference.”
“Oh, honey.” She squeezes me tight. “They certainly did.”
Inside the house something good must happen in the baseball game, because the family lets out a cheer.
“Come on,” says the woman, rousting me from the place where I’ve nestled down. “It’s time for our appointment.”
I would yawn and stretch if I weren’t so unnerved by all this. “Our appointment where?”
We walk together back down the porch steps, across the lawn, and into the street. Her pace is quicker now than it was when we arrived.
“You’re going to meet your creator.”
CHAPTER 26
THE ROOM WE ARRIVE IN is dimly lit. a nurse fusses over some equipment next to the bed. Cute little cartoon doggies cover her pink uniform. The loose pant legs sway as she steps.
My eyes are drawn to the bed. The nurse blocks the patient’s face from my view, but I can see the outline of legs under the crisp sheets. A blanket, knitted with fringe like an old-fashioned shawl, is draped over the feet. A shift in the nurse’s position, and I see a hand, fingers curled in on themselves, wrist bent forward as far as I’ve ever known a wrist to go. The only sounds are the nurse’s shuffling feet, a mechanical hum, and some soft music. Lullabies. Piano notes drifting up and down. Not the beep, beep, beep I always think of when I picture hospital scenes.
The door behind us opens, and another nurse comes in. He checks the patient’s blood pressure as the first nurse steps away to pull up the shawl-like blanket. When she does, I see the face, and although the identity is not unexpected, it’s painful for me to see.
The real Jonathan Aubrey is a hollow boy. Smaller than I am. Gaunt. Tubes snake under his covers. Both of his elbows are bent, and his crooked hands rest near his chest. He wears a hospital johnny, the ties at the neck undone and straggling along his shoulders. No tubes are attached to his face, but I think I would have preferred tubes to the half-open mouth and eyes just short of being closed. White slivers glisten under the lids that tremble as he breathes.
“I heard he signed them,” says the male nurse.
The female nurse puts a shushing finger to her lips and points to the unlit corner of the room. Someone is sitting there. He sleeps with another one of those granny blankets drawn so high on his chest that his shoeless feet lie uncovered. “Yes. They’ll do it tomorrow,” she whispers.
“Poor guy,” the male nurse says.
My heart melts. The sleeper in the chair is none other than Uncle Joey. He’s older-looking than the Uncle Joey I’ve been living with, his face drawn and lined, hair thinner at the top. Next to him is a long radiator shelf covered in stuff. Papers, folders, crates for files, a laptop closed but plugged in. To his other side is a
table piled with books. I can’t read the titles from here, but I recognize the cover of the one on top. Le Morte d’Arthur. There’s a bookmark in it. A pile of newspaper lies on the floor. A bag crammed with T-shirts pokes out from under the chair. This is not Uncle Joey’s first visit. He’s been here every single night.
The male nurse finishes his work and leaves the room. The female one apparently was stalling until he left. She now goes to the bed and places a hand on the comatose boy’s crooked arm. “Good night, Jonathan. Godspeed.” Her lips press together as she watches him for a moment. She pats him on his blanketed feet and leaves.
“Sit, Jonathan.” I jump, having forgotten about the woman who brought me here. It’s quite shocking seeing yourself in a coma that’s lasted nine years and nine months longer than you thought it did. She guides me to a chair and takes her own seat on a footstool, since there aren’t any other chairs left.
“I thought we were going to meet my creator,” I say.
She looks to the bed.
“Him?” She must be speaking in riddles again. If she’s not, I’m terribly disappointed at what her answer means.
“Yes.”
“I thought I was going to meet God.”
The woman can’t help herself—she laughs and doesn’t stifle it fast enough. Now I feel like an idiot.
“Never mind,” I say. “I know there’s no such thing as God.”
“Now wait a minute. I never said that.”
“Then why did you laugh?”
She gets all serious, really serious, and for a moment I think she’s about to tell me she’s God.
“I forgot, despite all the power you have, that you’re just a novice. I’m sorry. God means different things to different people. Meeting God means different things to different people. To me, meeting Jonathan Aubrey is very far from what I believe meeting the Creator would be like. No offense, honey.”
“None taken.” Though her laughing about it stings a bit. “How do you picture meeting God?”