Or Not to Be

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Or Not to Be Page 10

by Laura Lanni


  Fifteen minutes to go. When did I sign up to be a cop? All the science and math rattling around in my brain served no purpose on lunch duty.

  There was a commotion by the wall of windows. That meant I needed to abandon my door to investigate. Two girls were in each other’s faces and ready to brawl. Girl fights were the worst. They’d claw and scratch and pull each other’s hair and would not let go. I once saw an administrator get a bloody nose trying to break up a girl fight. At our last professional development training, we were ordered to avoid confrontation or contact with students. Basically, we were expected to wait for the kids to fight it out. The mom in me couldn’t stand that, though. I always thought of my own kids when I watched one student hurt another and felt compelled to act in their parent’s place and try my best to stop the pain. In prefight, especially with girls when they’re just warming up and yelling, I could usually break it up by yelling louder.

  In my giant teacher voice, I roared, “Girls! That’s enough!”

  My interruption made them step apart enough for me to get in the center of the battle. I knew one of them and turned to her. “Ashley, how are you doing on those hurdles this year?”

  “Fine,” she said, without taking her eyes off the other girl for an instant.

  I turned to the other young lady. “You don’t know me yet, but if you fight in the cafeteria on my lunch duty, you will never be rid of this face. Saturday after Saturday we will sit together while you do algebra problems until the end of time. Sound like fun?”

  “I thought you got expelled for fighting, not just a Saturday detention?”

  I lowered my voice and privately said to her, “I like you. You’re a smart one—too smart to fight at school. Please, go and sit down.”

  She glared at Ashley, and I thought she’d take a cheap swing. Instead, she turned on her heel and walked away, head held high. I felt myself exhale and realized I’d been holding my breath.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Wixim,” said Ashley before she sauntered the other way.

  Good fight. They both thought they won.

  This lunch duty was never going to end. I was getting hungry. No lunch for me on Fridays. There might be a crumbled granola bar at the bottom of my purse. Or maybe I could eat a spoonful of peanut butter before my last class if I could get out of the cafeteria in time to beat the crowds to my room. But I’d need a plastic spoon. I could see them across the cavernous room right beside the grumpiest cashier. Maybe I could grab one on the way back to my guard post.

  I was deep in my snack planning and making a beeline for my spoon when I heard screaming from my door. The panic on the faces of the children stunned me. Then, someone screeched, “Gun! He’s got a gun!” and hundreds of kids were all running, panicked, across the cafeteria toward the other door. The noise was deafening.

  I didn’t hear or see a gun, so whoever had one hadn’t used it yet. Instead of joining the throngs running for the far door, I ran to my door. I still didn’t see anyone with a gun. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Then I saw my pizza-not-turkey boy. He was walking fast.

  Right toward me.

  In the middle of this terror I checked my watch again.

  It was 11:11.

  20

  How Did I Die?

  “Mom, that’s all I remember. Why can’t I remember what happened next?”

  “That’s all you can remember about Pizza Boy, honey, because that’s all he let you see. I’ve watched him from here, though, and the perspective is enlightening. He was hungry and sad, lonely and so frustrated. He wanted to show you that you could not deny him what, in his mind, was rightfully his. This unfortunate young man had a terrible morning. His mom stayed out drinking all night. He rocked his baby sister until four in the morning, when she finally settled down and went to sleep. He overslept, missed the bus, and was late for his math test first period. He was assigned detention on Saturday for being late, which meant he’d be late for work and would lose some pay. He uses his own money to support his little sister when his mom doesn’t get hold of it first to spend on gin. Every aspect of his life spiraled out of his control. Your little confrontation made him snap.”

  I tried to remember his face. It was a blur. He was just another kid to deal with in the duties of my day. One hundred and eighty days, a couple thousand kids a day. It was an overwhelming zoo. Compared to the students in my classes, who I knew personally and became completely invested in, the kids who misbehaved in the hall and cafeteria were just part of the duty of my job. They weren’t encompassed in the joy of my job, the real reason I pulled my body out of bed before dark each day to come back to the brilliant students I loved. I didn’t teach the hallway kids or the lunchroom kids; I corralled them. We were all just trying to survive the best we could.

  Assuming they would do what I said cured a lot of my headaches and worries. Masses of kids always did what I said, so I didn’t have to see them as people, as individuals, only as kids to be dealt with while I skipped eating my own lunch. It seems Pizza Boy got caught in my radar that day. I certainly registered on his.

  I try hard to sift through the chaos in the cafeteria to remember what happened to me. It must have been Pizza Boy. He must have had a gun. Did I make him so mad he killed me? I have a chilling flash. “Mom, I remember something else.”

  “Now, honey, it’s probably better not to dwell on that day too much. Separation of matter from antimatter is a stressful event.”

  “Stressful?” My mother is still queen of the understatement. It wasn’t emotionally stressful. That can’t be what she means. It was physically stressful. Like a trillion forces pulling on a single point. The rippage was brilliant, like the blazing white energy of burning magnesium.

  “Let me tell you what I do remember,” I insist. “You already know it, I can tell, but I just need to say this. I remember an ambulance. Eddie is beside a bed, and a paramedic is calling for help, and another paramedic climbs in with a tube, and Eddie yells, ‘No! No! Do not resuscitate!’ Eddie is just kneeling there, crying. Eddie is a doctor. So why is he crying? Then I look down, and the dead body is me. Oh, God, they didn’t try to resuscitate me. Why not, Mom?”

  “You were bleeding heavily from the main artery in your left leg. And you had a severe concussion—probably from falling—and you were unconscious. You had lost so much blood before anyone got to you. They were worried about brain damage. They believed that if you recovered, you wouldn’t run again, maybe not walk again, and there was a chance you would be in a coma indefinitely.”

  “Oh, Eddie. Poor Eddie.”

  Mom is quiet for a long time while I agonize over what I made Eddie endure—both before and after I left him.

  “Mom? Are you still here?”

  “Oh, Anna, couldn’t you hear me?”

  “You were talking?”

  “Here we go again. I’m talking, and you can’t hear me. There’s some glitch here. Either you don’t want to hear what I say, or a greater power is blocking us. The effect is the same: you cannot or may not hear the details about your death from me. Your dad explained these silent voids to me like this: the answers to some questions cannot be supplied by anyone else. These answers must be realized by the newly dead.”

  I died. I bled out. I have choices. I can find answers hidden in something called voids. It’s all too much. “When have you noticed these voids before?”

  “When you asked about the future, those nightmares, and your choices. Apparently, you are only permitted access to this knowledge in some specified order so that you find the answers on your own.”

  “Well, here’s my current wish list. I don’t understand those nightmares. I haven’t a clue what you mean by choices. And now I want to remember how I died. You’re my guide. You have to help me.”

  “I’m trying, but it’s a process that you must drive. I can push, but I can’t lead. You have to steer.”

  I go to the person who was always honest with me, who gave the best advice: my sister.

  21<
br />
  Good-bye, My Sister

  I make my way back to my memorial service to find Michelle at the podium, shaking. No makeup left on her pretty face. She has cried it all off. No jewelry. My invincible sister looks fragile. She stands alone at the microphone and looks out over the heads of the crowd. She lets the silence draw out. I wonder if she’s going to pass out when she bows her head and closes her eyes. Quietly, she starts to sing. It’s difficult to make out the tune, and the crowd strains to hear. I realize before the rest of them that she’s humming the first few lines of “The Rose.” She can never remember the words. I hum the harmony that only I can hear. But Michelle stops abruptly, and noisy silence from all the crying engulfs the chapel again.

  She opens her eyes and looks from face to face. She looks down at the scraps of notes in her hand, and then she says, “If Anna was here, she would have sung the words to the song for me because I can never remember them. Something about love and razor blades that makes your soul bleed. Anna’s soul can’t bleed. Bleeding is for the body. What a strange line. I guess it’s poetic and has deep meaning. But Anna and I were brought up to be analytical by a brilliant mother. Just the facts, sir. See, Anna was my sister. She was the other half of me.”

  How did I die, Michelle? Give me a hint.

  She hums again and shakes her head. “The next line is about being afraid of dying. But Anna was never afraid of dying or anything else. She attacked life.”

  If I’d been afraid of dying, maybe I’d still be alive. Is that what Mrs. Smithers meant? Was I reckless with my life?

  Michelle doesn’t or cannot hear me. She focuses on the scribbled words on the paper clenched in her hand. “My sister’s favorite quote was by Jonathan Swift.” Michelle smiles, her eyes shiny with tears. “‘May you live every day of your life.’ Yep. That’s what she’d want to leave us with. A sound bite. An easy out. Not this jumble of pain and memories. She’d tell us to go on without her, but to carry her with us.” She takes a swipe at her wet nose with the palm of her hand and looks at Eddie, who shakes his head and looks away.

  I love my sister.

  She continues, “It feels like Anna is gone, but I know she’s not. Only her atoms are gone. One thing our professing mother always taught us—in life you need your atoms. But in death, matter doesn’t matter. Let those atoms go. Give them back so some other life form can use them. We are all made of recycled elemental particles. Some of our carbon used to be wheat. Before that, those same atoms were in carbon dioxide. Before that, they were exhaled by some other animal or person or dinosaur. When we die, we simply stop participating in the endless spiral of atom recirculation. We leave our matter behind. Cremation has returned the atoms of my sister to the world to reuse. That’s what she’d want.”

  Maybe that’s what I wanted before I died. Now I wish I had my atoms so I could make you hear me and talk to me, Michelle. Help me understand.

  Michelle ignores me. She hums again, still trying to recall the lyrics of our song. “Anna was strong, and lucky to have all the love she experienced in her life.”

  She hums the next few lines and looks at my family. “Eddie, the nights will be lonely. Bethany, the road will be long. But, Joey, I feel like your mom is here with us to help us learn to live without her.” Joey points a solemn nod at his aunt before he resumes looking around the church for me.

  I’m distracted by Joey and go to him. I sit beside him. He can’t see me or feel me.

  My sister pauses and shakes her head, smiles at Eddie while tears stream from her eyes. Then with a quick nod, she whispers, “Good-bye, Anna. I love you.”

  She hums the last line from our song, and I remember the words but I’m powerless to give them to her. And then she breaks down and sobs her way back to her seat.

  That’s enough for now. I need another break. I wonder where Mom went.

  “I’m right here.”

  “How did you get here so fast?”

  “I thought we went over this already,” she answers, once again annoyed with me. “I am everywhere, at all time. So ‘getting’ to you is almost effortless. Making you aware that I’m here, wherever ‘here’ might feel like to you, takes a little of my energy.”

  “Mom, this is all too hard for me. I need to leave again.”

  She catches me in my devastation. “Of course, dear. Let’s go.”

  22

  The Other Day I Died

  We jump away again. I’m still a bumbling amateur with this navigation at light speed. I don’t know what I did to bring me here or whether, maybe, Mom nudged me this way.

  On the dresser in my bedroom there’s an old, faded soccer picture of Bethany. Five years old, shin guards, ponytail, gaping grin from missing front teeth.

  The sight of the picture catalyzes a time leap, another one out of my control.

  In the autumn when Bethany was about six, I had to leave her soccer game early to go to parent-teacher conference night. Eddie was the assistant coach of her team. He’d run up and down the sidelines screaming instructions for the entire game. The players didn’t listen to a word he said. Bethany-the-Bruiser just wrestled with whoever had the ball. The games and Eddie-the-Coach were so much fun to watch that I hated to leave.

  I pulled our big white van onto the dirt road by the field and made the first left onto Harden. A car up ahead slowed to make a left turn and had to wait for oncoming traffic, so everyone in the line of cars slowed down and stopped. The license plate of the car in front of me was BL 123, which reminded me of my birthday. I was contemplating what the BL might stand for—Birthday List, Be Lucky, Big Laugh, Broken Leg—when I caught a glimpse in my rearview mirror of a truck coming fast behind me.

  The sixteen-year-old driver of the pickup truck didn’t see the long line of red brake lights. Was he playing with his radio? Combing his hair? Reading a book? He was going about fifty when he rammed the back of my van.

  The rear and right side windows shattered, and the back end of my van caved in. My chair broke, and I was flipped onto my back. My foot came off the brake, and the van was pushed across the yellow line in the middle of the road. As I was falling backward in my breaking seat, I saw a red car coming at me from the other lane.

  My van stopped on the other side of the road. I was flat on my back.

  A young kid came running to my car. “Lady! Hey, lady, are you all right?”

  “I don’t know. My neck hurts,” I said.

  “Oh-god-oh-god-oh-god,” I heard from the poor kid.

  He disappeared and was replaced by two older ladies. One patted a wet towel onto my forehead and said, “I live right here, honey. Thank you for not driving into my kitchen!”

  The other said, “Now you just lay still, dear. They said an ambulance is coming for you.”

  “No!” I yelled. I couldn’t go in an ambulance. I needed Eddie. “Somebody get my husband.”

  “She’s going a little bonkers in here, Jim,” one of the voices reported to somebody else. Another head appeared, apparently Jim. He reached in and put the car in park and pulled the keys out of the ignition.

  “Hey, little lady. You did a right good number on your van back there. Now you need to stay quiet till help gets here.”

  The crash happened many years ago before cell phones. I handed Jim the wet towel that had fallen into my eyes and asked, “Will you get my husband for me? Eddie Wixim. He’s right down the road at our daughter’s soccer game.”

  “Sure thing, missy. How will I know him?”

  “He’s the assistant coach on the pink team. Walking the sidelines in a neon pink soccer jersey. Yelling the whole time.”

  “All righty, sweetheart. You just sit tight.” And he was gone.

  Minutes later I heard a siren. Then paramedics were pulling me onto a stretcher and taping down my head and chest. Eddie’s face appeared. He looked wretched.

  “I’m all right, babe. Just come with me, okay?”

  No answer.

  “Eddie, who has Bethany?”

&nbs
p; “Uh, she’s—uh—Sue will take her home.” He kissed my forehead before he began inspecting me—my private doctor. “What happened?”

  “I got hit from behind.” A large female cop appeared at Eddie’s shoulder. She looked me over and asked the paramedic for a minute with me.

  “I know you’re hurting, ma’am, but I need to ask you a couple questions,” she said.

  “Okay.” Eddie held tight to my hand.

  “Why did you stop so suddenly?”

  “I didn’t. The cars in front of me were all slowing to wait for the first car to turn left. We were almost stopped when I got hit.”

  She frowned. “Kid who hit you says you stopped suddenly and that caused the wreck.”

  “I did not! He must’ve been flying. I—none of us stopped fast. We were never going more than fifteen miles an hour after the last light because this first guy was slowing down right away to turn left. The kid wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Okay, I got it. One more question, though.”

  “What is it?” I asked, weary and foggy, but tethered to Eddie. My head clouded up, and I needed a quick nap.

  “What stopped you on the far side of the road? Did you hit your brake? There aren’t any marks on the front of the van, so we don’t know what stopped you.”

  “Maybe I hit the brakes. I don’t remember. There was a red car coming at me when I crossed the center line. Didn’t I hit him?”

  “No, ma’am. Not a scratch on his car. You musta’ hit the brakes.”

  She nodded and started to walk away, but I stopped her. “What about the kid. Is he hurt?”

  “Nope. His airbag opened up. He didn’t feel the impact at all.”

  “He’s getting a ticket, right?”

  “We’ll see. I still have to check with a few more witnesses. Thanks for your help.” She wandered away.

 

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