Or Not to Be

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Or Not to Be Page 7

by Laura Lanni


  Now it is Saturday, November twelfth. Bethany isn’t at her football game. I’m not there with her. Nobody is where they’re supposed to be.

  Bethany studies the full calendars in my planner, and then rifles through the empty pages of the months to come. I think I need a planner now. Despite her tears, she picks up the pen and writes in the days she has exams and papers due in November.

  | | | |

  On the morning of college move-in day last August, I woke Joey before dawn and carried his dense little body to the van. Bethany and Eddie were almost finished loading all her clothes and books into the back. Though it was early, Bethany wore full makeup and had curled the stubby ponytail of her half-grown-out hair. The makeup contrasting with the ponytail pulled on my heart. She was trying so hard to be grown up, yet she was still our little girl. I caught Eddie’s eye.

  “After I fill up the coffee thermos, we’ll be all set,” he said. “Bethany, will you wait out here with Joey?” He grabbed my hand as he rounded the side of the van and pulled me back into the house, muttering something about needing help.

  In the kitchen, he turned to me and wrapped me in his arms. I rested my head on his chest and let him pretend he was holding me when really I was holding him up. Bethany was her dad’s girl. He would miss her, despite all of what he called “her drama.”

  “She’ll be fine, Eddie,” I said. “She’s strong and smart. We did a good job with her.”

  He rested his chin on the top of my head and said, “I know. I just can’t imagine leaving her there. All alone. It feels like we’re taking her into the woods and leaving her for the wolves.”

  “This is what kids do: they grow up and they leave. We fought so hard to get her to apply to college, and all those hours you spent with her shadowing you at work, helping her find her own way to nursing—it’ll all be worth it. She’ll be stronger for it.”

  He was quiet for a minute and then said, “She’s going to cry.”

  “No way. It takes a lot to make Bethany cry.”

  “This isn’t a lot? You watch. I’m right. It’s going to be a hard day.”

  “We’ll see. Let’s get that coffee and pack up some Pop-Tarts for a treat.” I unclenched his arms from around me and found some snacks.

  At the end of the day, Eddie was right. After we hugged her and she walked us to the van, our daughter, the new college freshman, looked stricken. When we got in the van and closed the doors and Joey suddenly understood what was happening, he started his hiccup crying and howled, “No, Bethy! Come home with us!”

  That set her off, and she stood there weeping and looking simply pathetic. Eddie opened his window and reached to her. She took his hand and said, “Just go, Daddy. I’m going to cry whether you go now or later. It doesn’t matter. Just go. I’ll be fine.”

  We pulled away with both of our children in broken pieces, Joey wailing and Bethany dripping silent tears. Eddie was strong. He laid his big hand on my thigh and left it there while I joined in and cried all the way home.

  Less than a week after we abandoned our daughter at college, Eddie entered his yearly funk and deserted me. I lived the last two months of my life without my daughter or my best friend.

  13

  Mom, Again

  Eddie holds the full glass of milk and spoon while Joey pours in a pile of chocolate syrup. The bottom inch of the glass turns brown, and still Eddie doesn’t make him stop squeezing the bottle. Joey eyes his dad, who is oblivious and staring over Joey’s head out the window.

  Still holding the syrup bottle, Joey says, “Mommy wouldn’t let me have that much chocolate,” and walks away.

  Eddie hands the glass and spoon to Bethany and then trudges to the garage to stare at his rakes and shovels. Bethany clanks the spoon in slow circles, watching the brown swirls dissolve. In one gulp, she drinks all of the dark chocolate milk down.

  I always let her put in as much syrup as she wanted.

  When she finishes drinking, she wipes away her mustache, and I see that my daughter, my firstborn, is once again crying. Mom? Where are you? I miss you.

  I know, Bethany. I miss you too. I’m right here, honey.

  She still doesn’t hear me. This is the most frustrating aspect of death: the absolute isolation from communication with my family. I am no longer a mom for my children.

  “Give her time,” my mother answers out of nowhere, or perhaps everywhere. “Bethany’s pain shields her ability to detect your presence.” Our constant friction and head-butting had the same effect when I lived. I never could breach that towering wall.

  Together we watch my daughter wander through the quiet house. She picks up the fat cat and sits in her dad’s blue chair to continue her crying.

  I can’t watch anymore. I decide it’s time to find some answers. “I have a lot of questions,” I tell my mother.

  “Of course you do. I can answer some of them, if you like,” she offers. “But most of the answers will come to you on their own. Relax and absorb. You already know more than you think you do.”

  I don’t feel like I know anything yet, but bouncing ideas off her mind always gave me strength when I was young and she’d call home from England or Africa or wherever she happened to be that month. “Let’s start with the very first thing you told me after I died. You said I could depart. Where will I depart to?”

  “It’s not a departure like leaving New York City on a train, dear. Your departure won’t take you from one place to the next. You have the power to make the choice to join the fabric of the universe.”

  “What the hell is the fabric of the universe?”

  To her credit, Mom doesn’t sound as exasperated with me in death as she often did in life. “The fabric of the universe is composed of a complex weave of space, layered with matter, sprinkled with antimatter, and bound with threads of time.” Her voice, confident and competent, is familiar and comforting, even though I cannot understand what she’s talking about. “Your consciousness, what is left of what you consider ‘me,’ was a distinct piece of the antimatter of the cosmos, which, during your life, was combined with the matter of a special, quite misunderstood region of your brain to generate the energy that was your life force.”

  Misunderstood part of my brain? Though it was tempting to follow her down this rabbit hole of questions, I had my own long list of other mysteries to solve. “So if I depart, where will I be?”

  It takes a long time to get my answer. In fact, I think she might be gone. Worlds rotate, galaxies revolve. I wait with my newfound patience, a trait recently added to my superpowers; I’d never been accused of being anything like patient before I crossed to the dead side.

  Finally, my mother says, “Everywhere.” I can hear the smile in her voice. It sounds just like when I was little, when she was always thrilled to do what she called her motherly duty—to reveal the wonders of the world to me.

  “How is that possible?” It doesn’t make a speck of sense to me, and I’m getting a bit irritated.

  Mom refuses to let me go. “As antimatter, we’re particles that act in harmony. We’ve shed the burden of our earthly matter, that body you claim to miss, and combined with the fabric of the universe where we become pure cosmic energy. That makes us virtually massless, so we may travel at light speed. It takes no time to travel this way. No time, Anna. Imagine it! We are simply everywhere, and we exist in all time.”

  “All time? No time?” No wonder she loves the dead side. My mother understands even more about everything than she did as a brilliant human during her life. But I still don’t get it. “How can there be no time?”

  “Honey, from the perspective of energy, there is no such thing as time. Think about it. On the dead side, there is no reality to the Earth concept of now.” So far, her tone is coaxing, patient, with just the slightest edge of annoyance creeping in that this might not be crystal clear to her dense daughter. “Surely you read and tried to comprehend Einstein’s theories?”

  When my mother switched to her professor
voice, it meant I had to be on my toes.

  “Of course, Professor McElveen, you made me read it in third grade.” She laughs at my whiff of sarcasm. “Time stops at light speed. Does that mean I can come back to Earth whenever I need to?”

  “You won’t need to come back; you’ll always be there, and everywhere, at all times, for all of eternity.” Her voice trails off into the immense silence that permeates the dead side, confident she has explained all that needs explaining.

  I am flabbergasted by the logical complexity, hypnotized as Mom’s intelligent voice continues, inviting my understanding. “You know our little planet is a special place. The energy of life on Earth has been successfully reproduced less than a dozen times in all of eternity in all of the billions of galaxies. During an immense majority of the millennia of our planet’s existence, our world was uninhabited by any energy-life forms at all. After the blink of the lifespan of that energy, life as we know it will cease on our little rock. But life, that special combination of matter and antimatter existing in just the perfect conditions of atmosphere, temperature, and environment, has appeared in other times and places. The trick is to glimpse life when it happens.”

  “Glimpse life when it happens? Come on, Mom. How can you use words like ‘when’ if there is no such thing as time?”

  “Good point. It is all too magnificently complex to be captured by the language of mere humans.”

  “So to recap: when I depart, I will be everywhere at all time. That’s what you said, right?”

  “That’s the raw essence of existing as pure energy, Anna. The ability to travel at light speed allows a slower passage of time. Or a stoppage of time. Or even a reversal of time.”

  I can roughly comprehend what she’s saying but need some time alone to dissect and digest it. It’s all very intriguing, and I am relieved to get some help in this confusing death saga. Still, I need a break from the science, so I change the subject and ask, “Where’s my dad?”

  “Your father chose the Earth version of heaven.” Her gentle voice indicates Mom is back again and the professor went on break. “He always loved nature and camping and gardening and having that pack of dogs with him. All that touchy-feely emotional stuff I couldn’t care less about. It’s a wonder we lived together for so long. But we are together whenever I am near Earth, which, as I’ve clearly explained, is always and never. This speed of light travel stuff is the best.” This is really still my mom, atoms or no atoms.

  “You say I need to absorb and answers will come to me, but you know I’m not a patient person.”

  “If you would just relax and try to think, you’ll remember that you do understand this.” I have exasperated and disappointed my mother in death just like I always did in life.

  “I am thinking, Mom. That’s all I seem to be able to do here. But I can’t control my thoughts, what I watch, where I go. There is no focus. I just jump around and around.” I’m frustrated. It’s hard for me to admit my confusion to my mother.

  I can feel a mom-smile and something like a hug in her voice when she says, “Try not to worry about how long things seem to take. Gaining control takes practice. You have to let yourself adjust. And when you’re truly ready to depart, you’ll know.”

  “Well, what I know for sure is that I don’t feel ready to do anything like departing, whatever the hell that means. I want to watch more of my family as their time actually passes.”

  “I understand. These things are all in your power to choose. When you have decided to depart or need to ask more questions of me, I’ll be here.”

  Mom leaves, I think. I feel alone again and a little guilty to be relieved by her absence. I get a break from the hot seat imposed by her presence. Free from her supervision, I let myself drift in time and space, curious about where and when I’ll end up, but relaxed enough to just let it happen.

  14

  Baby Foot

  The sun comes in through the sheer lacy curtains and lights the room. It’s early, but the baby usually wakes by now. Under the frilly edge of the pink blanket all that shows is the seashell bottom of a tiny foot. I put my hand on her back, just a feather of a touch, the way my mom always did to just make sure the baby was breathing. Just a little pat to make her stir and make me relax.

  But she doesn’t move.

  I reach down and rub the little foot and find it cold. I unwrap the rest of her tiny body and turn her onto her back. She is so still, like she is just sleeping. I lean down to her face and listen for breathing.

  Nothing.

  The scene plays like a slow-motion silent movie with viscous momentum. A man comes in the room. He is a grown-up version of my son. I hand the still baby to him. He begins CPR. I watch for endless minutes as he breathes into her tiny face.

  Nothing.

  We have lost another one.

  | | | |

  “Mom! Mom! What is this?” I scream into the endless void.

  “Oh, Anna, I’m sorry. Looking to the future can hurt,” she says.

  “That’s the future? I thought it was a nightmare.”

  “Quite like a nightmare.”

  “My Joey is only five, and I just saw him, and he must have been at least twenty-five.”

  “Of course, Anna, he must get older.”

  “I get that. That’s not the problem. I mean, that was horrible. But, Mom, I was there in the future. I wasn’t dead. Tell me how that’s possible.”

  “I didn’t think we’d have to get to this so soon, but you always were a questioner. Okay, get ready because you have to think. The last time we talked, you had questions about time and about your antimatter after you died. I thought you understood all of that quite well.”

  “I think I do, Mom. On Earth, time just marches on. Time stops on the dead side. There is no time. Without the constraints imposed by our faulty concept of time, we are free to travel through time just like we always travel through space. Time travel. That would explain why I could stay in slow time and watch my family in the day after my death, or speed up time to see the future. But I did not voluntarily do this. I did not speed up on purpose to see the future. It just happened.”

  “No, it did not just happen, dear. You decided to do it, whether you are aware of that or not. Light speed travel is instantaneous. The newly dead need many experiences to comprehend it and learn to navigate.”

  “Okay. Whatever. I’ll get better at it.” I’m flustered and confused. “But that’s still not the point. How was I there? What was my matter doing in the future? I mean, I thought it was just my imagination, just a nightmare, but it was real? I want to know how I was there!”

  “You must have chosen to be there,” she declares.

  “What does that mean?” I roar.

  Silence.

  Infinite silence, deep and chilling. This quiet is unfathomable to the living because on Earth, in life, when there is a quiet time that we call silence, there’s always some sound. The wind. A cricket. Breathing. A motor. Someone burps. A bird tweets. But on the dead side, in the near vacuum that is the space between the densely packed particles of planets and moons and stars, there is so much nothingness, emptiness, that it is unimaginable until it is experienced.

  Yet I can still read this silence: my mother is pissed.

  She never dealt well with confrontation. Once when the principal called from school to report that Michelle and I had cut our afternoon classes, my mom hung up on him. I need to be more circumspect in my questioning.

  “Sorry. Mom?” Where the hell did she go this time?

  Nothing. Infinite black space twinkles its suns and stars and waits along with me. It’s peaceful and tempting to just relax into it. But I need to understand. How was I alive in the future?

  “Please come back, Mom,” I beg. “I need your help here. This would make up for so many years when Michelle and I had to figure out everything for ourselves.”

  “What are you blubbering about? I always answered all of your questions!”

  “Only if yo
u were in the country to hear about them.”

  “Aw. I did travel a lot. Those were the best perks of my full professorship. Sabbaticals in Europe and Japan. That was my Earth-heaven.”

  Good, she was back. Time to charge back into it, this time without pissing her off. Tricky. I have to get her to focus. The woman is still brilliant but, oh, so exasperating.

  “I just need to ask some simple questions. Little questions. Slowly. Can you give me simple answers?”

  “I’ll try. Shoot.”

  “Have you ever traveled to the Earth future?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you do it on purpose, or did it just happen to you?”

  “I thought it was just happening at first. But after a few terrifying trips, I wanted some control over it, so I tried to figure out what I was doing to make it happen.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Well, I liked to pop in to check on you and the kids and even that awful Mr. Ed you married.”

  “Good to know,” I interrupt, “but what were you doing to make it happen?”

  “Well, you see, when you flit around at the speed of light enjoying your personal exploration of the entire universe, it’s easy to lose track of Earth time. My goodness, once I stopped back and the world was covered in a thick, black cloud. I didn’t dare go into that mess. I hoped it was the far-distant future and popped away.”

  “Tell me about this popping that you do. Do you control that?”

  “In a way, yes. I just think of where I want to be, and if I think of when I want to be, too, I usually hit it right. But if I just think of where, like Philadelphia with your dad, I could end up in the delivery room pushing out your sister. Ugh. That’s a nasty place to find yourself surprised.”

  “So, if I want to be with Eddie and Bethany, but don’t think of when, I could end up in the past, present or future?”

  “That’s right, dolly. See, you’ve been so focused on your death that you’ve been hovering within days of it. But when you asked about future travel, I figured you were onto it. I hope I warned you adequately. Peeking into the future can be appalling.”

 

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