“That’s what happened,” I said. “I told you that you weren’t going to like it.”
She smoothed the napkin in her lap, took a drink, and gave me an amused look. “You’re telling me you were warned about the accident…before it happened?
I nodded for a while. “Yup.”
She fooled with her napkin some more, folded it carefully and threw it on the table, then said, “Well, if you don’t want to tell me, I’m not going to pick a fight over it. I just don’t know why you’re acting this way.”
I said, “I can only tell you what happened. Anyway, the real issue is I’m OK and I avoided the trouble. Let’s leave it at that.”
And that was the last we said about it. I did write it up later and kept it in the back of one of my school notebooks but, after a while, when I came across it, I would feel stupid and consider tearing it up. But I didn’t.
Ellen and I were married three years later, when I was out of grad school and she had her R.N. degree. We moved to New Jersey where I went to work for the Jersey Central Power and Light in Elizabeth, and she got a job in the ER in a small hospital in Westfield where we lived. We were very happy and, when she got pregnant in 1959, we looked forward to expanding our family. She continued to work until two weeks before her due date. She was healthy and felt fine, except for the normal discomfort at that point in a pregnancy.
I was supposed to attend a two-day meeting in Trenton which meant that I would have to stay overnight, since the sessions lasted well into the evening. I was reluctant to be so far away and leave her alone for so long, but my boss was not moved by my situation. So I said goodbye to Ellen in the morning, asked her again if she was going to be okay, and was assured that she had lots of resources to call on. We had good neighbors, her sister lived half an hour away, and her doctor was a personal friend. The hospital was nearby and was filled with work associates who knew of her condition. So she waved me off, telling me she was no longer a little girl. I patted her belly and told her that I had noticed that fact!
We had long since traded Penny for a 1958 Pontiac Super Chief 4-Door Sedan, and I made certain that it contained a good radio. If I thought about my experience with the voice on the radio, which I seldom did, I felt that it was somehow associated with that other radio in Penny. So, to my mind, that had been a freak occurrence which would never happen again.
I had just settled in for the hour-long drive and was about ten miles from home. I was listening to In the Mood, my favorite Glenn Miller number, when the program went off the air and was replaced by static. A cold shiver went up my spine because I was instantly back in Harrisburg, closing in on the Susquehanna Bridge. I twisted the dial, trying to get back to Glenn Miller, when the familiar voice surfaced from under the static. It said: “Return home. Now!”
This time I didn’t question it. I made a U-turn, broke the speed limit all the way home, and burst into the house. Ellen was sitting on the living room sofa reading a magazine. She almost jumped out of her skin when I slammed the door open. She looked at me in confusion and asked, “What’s wrong? What are you doing here?” Then she got an impish expression on her face, and said, “I know, you wanted to catch me with my boyfriend.”
I didn’t laugh. “Are you OK?” I asked.
She made a face as if I was asking a dumb question. “Well, I’m still here. I feel fine. What would make you come back?”
I wasn’t going to get into that right then. “I had the feeling you needed me. But I guess I was just being a worry wart. This is our first baby, and we’re both a little tense.”
I went to the sofa and kissed her on the forehead, then said, “I’m going to call the office and tell them I’m not going to be at the conference. My assistant can stand in for me.”
She gave me a funny look and got up to come with me as I turned and started for the study. That’s when I heard the thump of her body hitting the floor. I rushed to her and lifted her head, but she was unconscious and I could see blood on the front of her nightgown. In a panic, I called both the ambulance and the hospital, and in no time she was in the same ER in which she worked. A number of her friends made her priority-one. I didn’t even have time to say goodbye to her, because she was rushed to the OR where they delivered the baby by C-section and performed a hysterectomy.
Dr. Evanston, her gynecologist, came in and sat down with me in the waiting room an hour later. Wearily shoving his scrub cap back off his head, he sighed and said, “Well, that was as near a thing as I ever want to see. If the ambulance had been five minutes later, you could have lost both of them.”
I was having a hard time focusing on what he was saying. “Is she OK?” I asked anxiously.
“Yes, she’ll be fine, but she won’t be caring for your daughter for a few days.”
I broke in. “It’s a girl? Is she OK?”
“She’s perfect. She’s beautiful. They’re both good. You don’t have anything to worry about. I’m just glad you got them here in time.”
“So am I,” I said, my head spinning. I couldn’t believe what had happened. I got up and went in to see Ellen who was so drugged that she could barely open her eyes.
“How’s the baby?” she murmured. I assured her she was okay. She turned to me, her eyes closed, and whispered, “I’m glad you came home.”
I squeezed her hand and said, “So am I.”
It wasn’t until two weeks later when we were back home with our new baby, Josie Marie, that Ellen brought it up again. “Just why did you come back home? I was fine when you left, and your boss didn’t want you to miss the conference.”
I paused, staring at her and picking my words carefully. “I got a…feeling that you might need me.”
She scowled, trying to figure out what I meant. “What kind of a feeling? Are you psychic or something?”
I took a deep breath and sighed. “I might as well tell you,” I said, dreading her response. “Do you remember that Christmas when I was coming to get you in Baltimore and there was that terrible crash on the Susquehanna Bridge?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember…?”
She cut me off. “Your car radio?” I nodded. “You’re going to tell me it was your car radio again?”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “That’s what happened. Static when I should have been getting a strong signal. And then a man’s voice with three words – ‘Return home now!’ So I did a U-turn and got home in time to be here when you collapsed.”
She studied my face for a long time. “How is that possible?”
“How? Why not ask me who the guy on the radio is? I don’t know that either.” I almost laughed. “Somebody lives in my radio and alerts me when there’s some kind of danger. The voice sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t figure out who it is or where it’s coming from.”
She shook her head. “Things like this can’t happen. It’s like a warning about the future before it occurs.”
I shrugged. “I don’t understand it. But it’s worked twice now. Are we going to pretend it didn’t happen just because we don’t understand what’s going on?”
We both sat in silence for a while, pondering the mystery. Then she said, “Well, whatever it was, it saved my life.” Then she added, “And Josie’s, too.”
The voice never gave me a warning when anyone else was in the car. So no one else ever heard it, which made it harder to convince people that the “messages” were more than just lucky guesses on my part. It happened three more times in the next ten years, which eventually made Ellen a believer.
The first told me about lightning damage to the house wiring which could have caused a fire. The electrician confirmed this warning. Another was about a certain day when a rabid dog would be in the neighborhood, at a time when Josie was five and was spending much of her time outdoors. The dog was shot by a cop who happened to be passing. The third one warned me about a furnace repairman who would have checked out our house and then returned with his pals to tie us up and ransack the place. He w
as later arrested for doing the same thing in a neighbor’s home. In each case, the voice warned us of a danger that could have seriously injured one or more of us. After the fifth message, Ellen had no more doubts about our peculiar phenomenon.
There was one incident that confused me, though, one serious problem that the voice did not warn me against. And I have always wondered why that was. I was rear-ended one day by a speeding driver on one of the narrow two-lane bridges in Elizabeth, and shoved into the car ahead of me. The three of us were jammed together for an hour. An ambulance went by us in the opposite direction right after it happened with its siren screaming, but that was the last vehicle across the bridge, because traffic was halted while the emergency squads tried to sort things out. I wish I had had a warning to avoid the bridge that day, but it didn’t come. I wondered if the voice might have decided to take a vacation around that time.
So it was that when the final message came through the radio years later, when Josie was eighteen and almost through her senior year in high school, Ellen and I paid special attention to it. I reported the voice’s words to Ellen as accurately as I could. The static prelude had become a warning, so it helped me concentrate on the message and remember it precisely. This is the warning I repeated to Ellen:
Josie’s prom date is not trustworthy. He will get drunk, will drug Josie, and will assault her. She must not be allowed to go to the prom with him.
Ellen listened in open-mouthed horror. “What are we going to do?” she asked me. “How can we possibly handle this? She’ll never believe us.”
And she was right. We sat down with Josie a day later and tried to have a serious conversation about this warning. Josie had heard us talking over the years about the voice in the radio, but she had always treated it as a joke. We reminded her of the previous five messages and how they had all proven true, preventing injury to one or more of us. But she looked at us in amazement. “You want me to miss my senior prom because of a mysterious voice on the radio? You’ve got to be kidding!”
We worked on her for days, but she wouldn’t take the warning seriously. We threatened to not let her go at all, but she responded that she was already eighteen and we couldn’t stop her. We finally reached a compromise when she agreed to go with a group of stag girls and meet her date at the dance, promising never to be alone with him. I even called one of the faculty chaperones whom I happened to know well, and told her that we had reason to suspect that Josie’s date was untrustworthy, and that he might be a threat to her if he got drunk. The advisor assured us that there would be no drinking, and that the boy in question was one of the star members of the football team and a model student in the senior class. We were uneasy about the whole thing, but it was 1977, Josie was eighteen and headed for college, and there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it short of locking her up.
The girls all gathered at our house because Josie was one of the most popular members of the class, and the rest of them were thrilled to be in her group. We admired their dresses, took pictures, saw them off in several cars, and then sat down to pray that they would have a happy – and safe – prom experience.
The prom was to end at midnight, after which the girls were gathering at one of their homes for an after-prom party and sleepover. Sans boys, of course. We went to bed about 1:00 after having held our joint breaths for several hours. I slept lightly and was awake when the phone rang about 4:00. It was one of Ellen’s work associates at the hospital informing us that Josie had been admitted. We rushed to the ER and found her in one of the examining rooms. She was still in her prom dress which was torn and soiled. One of her friends was sitting by her side, holding her hand. Josie’s face was streaked with tears, and she burst into violent sobs when she saw us.
We hugged her and asked her what had happened. Her friend told us what Josie was unable to, that some of the guys had crashed the party, that the boy who was supposed to have been Josie’s date had enticed her into his car, had drugged and assaulted her, and then had dropped her off back at the girl’s house. We were interrupted by the doctor who came to perform an examination for forensic purposes.
The next few days were a nightmare. Josie stayed in the hospital overnight, then spent a week in her room out of touch with everyone. Friends brought her homework, but she wasn’t motivated to do anything. She came down for dinner but rarely said two words; she ate the rest of her meals in her room. We began to worry about her sanity. The school was very accommodating since she was an honors student, but this couldn’t go on forever, especially at the end of her senior year with an acceptance for the fall term at the University of Virginia.
Then one night a week later, she came down to dinner and announced that it was over and she was ready to go back to school. She looked at us with tear-filled eyes and said, “I thought you guys were crazy to take that radio thing seriously. But I should have listened to you. I knew it had told the truth in the past, but I just wanted to go to the prom so badly.” She started to cry, so we both got up and hugged her. She recovered quickly in the following days, testified at the trial of the boy who had attacked her, and regained her energy as she started to get ready to go off to college.
That was the last time I ever heard the voice. I didn’t know whether we lived more carefully after that, or whether the voice had simply gotten tired of running interference for us. But that whole mystery gradually faded into a foggy past and made us wonder as we got into our 80’s whether it had all really happened.
And then…
I found myself here. I don’t remember dying. I do recall being sick for a long time and having Ellen by my side acting as my private nurse. But then, when I opened my eyes once, I was here. And it startled the hell out of me. It was the biggest shock of my life. As you know, it took me a long time to accept the fact that I was still alive even though I was dead! Someone should have told me about this. Well, I guess they tried, but I wasn’t listening.
Anyway, as you know, I was assigned work to do. I had no idea that there was a place like this, and was even more surprised to discover that we still have to work on this side of reality. It was made clear to me that I was assigned my particular job specifically because I hadn’t believed all this spiritual guardian angel stuff while I was still on Earth.
You assigned me to watch over and protect my former self. I could see the man I used to be, in my familiar but recently vacated body, but I had no sense of ownership or identity with him. He was like a stranger to me, so I can refer to him only as “he,” not as “me.” Yet the aura of total love in this place made me care for him deeply, and so I did my best to fulfill my responsibilities.
I was given a list of the things that he had agreed to accomplish while on Earth. But there was also a second list – all the things which might threaten his safety and interfere with the completion of his goals. It was my job to see that those problems were dealt with, so that he could succeed and not die before the proper time.
I was able to see, as though on an immense television screen, what his family was doing at any given moment. I had to decide when, or even whether, to intervene so as to protect them all. It was essential that they complete their various missions.
I studied the papers – both his goals and all the possible problems that might intervene – and set to work. Immediately, I sensed a threat. He was driving toward Baltimore, totally oblivious of the danger ahead of him. I focused my energy as I had been instructed to do, picking my words carefully so that my thoughts could get through to him. I said:
Do not cross the bridge over the Susquehanna River. If you do, you will be involved in a serious traffic accident. There will be fatalities. The traffic will be tied up for three or more hours. Find an alternate route.
But I also had to use my discretion as to when not to interfere with events on Earth. On one occasion, I could see a problem looming before him as he approached a narrow two-lane bridge in Elizabeth. There was going to be an accident in which he would be involved. I could have remov
ed him from the scene. But I also knew that the cause of the accident would be a drunk driver behind him who was speeding recklessly. I realized that his wife, Ellen, was on duty caring for a patient in an ambulance heading across that same bridge from the opposite direction. If I had kept him off the bridge that day, the drunk driver would have crossed over and crashed head-on into Ellen’s speeding ambulance.
VII
The Lighter
He was grumbling as he drove the detour for what felt like the hundredth time. A bridge was out on the main road into town. They had been rebuilding it for eight months, and he lived on the wrong side of the construction. The only route into town now was by way of a five-mile detour that added fifteen minutes to his commute. He resented every foot of the way, since that long detour was required to get around only fifty yards of closed road. When were they ever going to open the thing? Everyone in his end of town was up in arms about it. Whenever they passed close to the new bridge, no one seemed to be working. It just sat there looking like it was finished, but guarded by enormous barriers that screamed “BRIDGE CLOSED – USE DETOUR ==>”
Because Henry was a solo dentist, he couldn’t just take a day off once in a while to avoid the inconvenience. He had staff whose salaries he had to pay along with other office expenses, and patients with whom he had to keep on good terms. But every time he drove that blasted detour, his resentment grew. Somebody ought to get sacked for their poor management and planning.
His three kids, on the other hand, got a kick out of the new way home, as they called it. It went through farm country, and they mashed their faces up against the car windows to see how many cows they could count, how many colts they could see running through the paddocks, how many tractors they could identify by color and size. It was a game to them, but Henry was sick of hearing them moo out the windows when they drove by the pastures. The kids held contests to see how many cows would turn their heads to look at them, wondering if there might be a sister bovine in the car. Jack usually won; at eleven, he was the eldest one of the trio. Brayden was nine, a quiet boy who preferred to read books rather than get his clothes soiled. RJ was the wild one of the bunch, spurred into constant noisy activity by trying to keep up with his older brothers. He was five.
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