In Between

by Beca Lewis

  Rachel stood, walked back to the sofa, sat down, picked up her coffee mug as if nothing had happened, leaned back into the cushions, tucking her legs under her as she always did, and said, “Okay. Tell me more about what your mom told you.”

  Bryan started to speak, his face still flushed from what happened, when he stopped and said, “They’re here.”

  Nineteen

  Connie took in the house. It reminded her of her own—locked in the past. Eddie had told her that both of Bryan’s parents had died, and he hadn’t moved on. It looked to her as if he hadn’t ever moved at all. The parallel to her own life didn’t escape her.

  The difference was, she once had a beautiful life, and then ran away from it. To Connie, Bryan looked as if he had never started living. On the other hand, the girl—the woman—on the couch, was like a bright beam of sunshine. It relieved Connie that she wouldn’t have to deal with somber Bryan on her own.

  Bryan had stood when they arrived and then stood looking like an idiot trying to decide what to do next.

  Connie had turned to Eddie and asked him if this was really the person who would help her do whatever she was supposed to be doing so she could move on.

  Eddie was already sitting by Rachel, grinning like an idiot, much to Bryan’s dismay. He gave her a simple “yep” and then reached over and held Rachel’s hand.

  Rachel looked down at her hand, wondering why it felt different.

  “Don’t do that,” Bryan said to Eddie.

  “Do what?” Rachel said, thinking he was talking to her.

  “Oh, this is a mess,” Bryan answered, looking from Connie to Eddie.

  “Could you both sit together somewhere so I can focus? And is it at all possible to make it so Rachel could see you? Assuming she wants to, of course,” he added.

  “Yes! I want to! Why did you say, ‘don’t do that?’ Were you talking to me?”

  “It’s Eddie. He’s holding your hand.”

  Rachel smiled and looked where she thought Eddie might be and said, “Oh, so sweet. Wait, how old is he?”

  “Now see, that’s the problem. Eddie looks ten, but he’s been dead for...”

  “Forty years,” Connie finished for Bryan. “Don’t look so smug, Eddie. Yes, I knew when you died. Yes, I was wrong not to come to your funeral. But how could I?”

  Rachel stood and dragged a chair across the room so she could be beside Bryan and said, “I know something is happening, and yes, it’s making me crazy, only having a feeling that something is going on. But if Eddie and Connie would sit on the couch, or float, or whatever you do together, at least I can pretend to see you. But, Bryan, you will have to tell me what they are saying. Otherwise, I have no idea how I can help.”

  Eddie sighed when Rachel had stood and taken her hand away. It had felt so good. She reminded him of his mother—when she was happy—which wasn’t often. And Rachel was right. She would not be much help if she couldn’t hear and see them.

  “Tell her to touch you when we are here, and she’ll be able to see and hear us.”

  After Bryan told her what Eddie said, Rachel tentatively reached out and put her hand on Bryan’s arm.

  “Oh!” was all she could say. Sitting on the couch was a young boy and an older woman who looked tired, bored, and scared at the same time. The boy was smiling at her, and she couldn’t help smiling back.

  “Okay,” Eddie said. “Now that’s done, let’s get down to business. Bryan, you have to help Connie change her past.”

  “I know that,” Bryan said. “What I don’t know is how I can do that.”

  Looking toward Rachel, he added, “Or we can do that. Does she go back in time somehow? Like that? Like a ghost? Like a person? And then change what is past? I’ve read enough books to know that changing the past can be dangerous. That’s assuming that it can be done.”

  “Oh, it can be,” Eddie said. “Although it’s true, that’s not usually a good idea, so it’s rarely done. But my mother, Edith,” Eddie said, giving Connie a searing look, “made me promise to help this person, and I am keeping my promise, and you are the one that will help me. And her, of course,” Eddie said, smiling at Rachel.

  Rachel smiled back. She liked this boy.

  “Cut it out, you two,” Bryan said.

  “I agree,” Connie chimed in. “Stop it. Be serious. This is my life we are talking about. Eddie, why in the world would your mother want to help me?”

  “I don’t know, missy,” Eddie snipped, still smiling at Rachel. “All she told me is that she couldn’t rest easy until you, her best friend, was free.”

  “Free? Free from what?” Connie snapped back.

  But even as she did so, she knew what her friend had meant. She hadn’t been free since that day she had made the fateful decision that brought both her and her daughter, Karla, into a life barely lived.

  “Yes, that,” Eddie said, turning to look directly at Connie.

  “She wants you to be free of the in-between. She wants you to have lived the life you were meant to live, not the one you hid away in.”

  While Connie glared at Eddie, Rachel looked back and forth between them and finally said, “Okay, here’s what I don’t understand, well there is a lot I don’t understand. But let’s start with this.

  “If Connie made a mistake that changed her life, how long ago was it? No matter when it was, how can we go back in time to help her? If there is such a thing. We either wouldn’t be born yet, or we would be like ghosts like her or something…” Rachel trailed off, thinking about how illogical it all sounded.

  Eddie stood and started pacing the room. Now that Rachel could see him, as long as she remembered to keep her hand on Bryan’s arm, it didn’t matter that he wasn’t staying still.

  “Okay, let me try to explain how the past might be changed. Think of it as a game of spider. You know the card game people play on their phones?”

  Bryan started laughing.

  “Time is like the game of spider? Are you serious?”

  Eddie glared at Bryan, “What do you know? You, like Connie here, decided to not live in the time you have had, learned nothing new, didn’t stretch out into the world and use your imagination about what you could do, or how you could be of service. Instead, you both ran away.”

  Turning to Rachel, Eddie said, “And you. You waited for this idiot to come to his senses. Would he ever if his mommy hadn’t come back to help him?

  “Life on earth is a gift. One to be lived. And yes, I can use the spider game to explain how you could change the past if you will attempt to try.”

  Twenty

  As Eddie launched into his explanation of how life and time were like the game of spider, the three people who were listening got a glimpse of what he meant.

  Rachel had often played the game, but Connie and Bryan had not. So as Eddie talked, Rachel nodded her head, while the other two tried to follow the logic of what he was saying.

  Eddie explained that spider is a card game. The player tries to line up the cards into a run, starting with the king and ending with the ace. Once that happens, that group of cards is removed from the deck.

  The game begins with a row of cards with the top card facing up. The rest of the deck sits on the side, ready to be used. The player moves the cards around, aiming for a run, but when there aren’t any more moves, a new row of cards are dealt from the stack waiting on the side. This continues until all the cards have lined up and are removed from the deck.

  But of course, sometimes the player gets stuck at the end, and there were no more chances to line up the cards.

  Eddie explained that if you play the game in an app on your phone or computer, you can correct your mistakes. You can go back a few moves. You can even go back to the beginning. Every time you go back, you can notice what you had tried before and try different combinations until one of them works.

 
; Instead of claiming failure because the cards didn’t line up correctly, one can try over and over again until everything lines up and then complete the game.

  As Eddie finished his explanation, Rachel added, “That’s assuming that you have a winning hand, which you can choose to be dealt in the app’s setting.”

  She paused a moment and added, “So in this analogy, you are saying that life is like a game, a winning game, and that you can correct mistakes until you get it right?”

  “Essentially,” Eddie answered. “Unless people give up.” Eddie stared at both Connie and Bryan.

  “And don’t have the courage to keep correcting what they are doing in life. Then it’s their fault. Because everyone has a winning hand.”

  “Eddie, I don’t think it helps to make Bryan and Connie feel bad about their choices. And in some ways, you would have to include me since I have been waiting for this idiot, as you put it.”

  Rachel smiled at Bryan as she called him an idiot, so he would know what she meant.

  “Humans get afraid, Eddie. I know you know that.”

  “Okay, I’ll leave out the blaming stuff.”

  Eddie and Rachel smiled at each other, and Bryan tried, and failed, not to feel jealous. He knew it was stupid to be jealous of a boy who had died forty years before, but it was hard not to.

  Rachel and Eddie were like two best buds without even knowing each other. He had known Rachel his entire life and didn’t have that kind of connection.

  The irony, or maybe perfection, of what was happening hit him as Eddie smiled at him, too.

  “Oh,” Bryan said, “This is not just about Connie. This is about me. And Rachel!”

  Eddie started to say, “Give this man a star,” when he remembered what Rachel had asked of him, so he more politely answered with a simple, “yes.”

  Rachel looked at Eddie, Connie, and Bryan, wondering what had brought them all together, and then had a thought. “Wait. This is happening because your mothers knew each other, isn’t it?”

  “Keep this one,” Eddie said to Bryan.

  “Yes, my mother and Bryan’s mother, Jillyan, went to school together. The two of them decided that these two—Connie and Bryan—needed a chance to live.”

  Hearing Rachel catch her breath, he added, “No, Bryan is not going to die—at least not that I know about—they meant for him to start living.”

  “When did they decide this? Before they died, or after?”

  “After. In the in-between. So when I told you that my mom asked me to help Connie, it was your mother too, Bryan. It was the two of them who came up with this plan. If they helped you discover your gift of seeing people in the in-between, and learned how to help them, you would find meaning in your life, and my mother will have helped right what she felt had gone wrong in Connie’s life.”

  No one said anything. Rachel looked back and forth between the three of them. Bryan looked as if someone had slapped him across the face and handed him a Christmas present at the same time. Connie looked like a white statue. Unmoving. Eddie had sat back on the couch, looking like a young boy and a middle-aged man in one package.

  She had so many questions for Eddie. What was the in-between? Did everyone go there at first? Why? Where did the people go after they left? Did people stay there by choice, or were they stuck? Was he still there because he promised his mother, or was there another reason too? What did he get out of it?

  And since it now involved her, what did she get out of it? Was this about her and Bryan, or was there more?

  “So many questions,” Eddie said in a tired voice. Leaning back against the old couch in a t-shirt that said, “Don’t worry, be happy,” Eddie looked exhausted.

  No wonder, Rachel thought. He is trying to bring us all into something we didn’t know existed. It must be tiring.

  When she heard the words, “It is,” in her head, she looked at Eddie, and he winked.

  Rachel realized that she shouldn’t be surprised. He probably knew what everyone was thinking. After all, he was what people called a ghost. But then, so was Connie.

  Rachel spoke, “Not sure what my role in all this is, but I have more questions. I think I see what you mean about the spider game, Eddie. Connie can go back to someplace in time—somehow, since I still don’t know that part—and do something different from what she did before, until what went wrong comes out right.”

  ‘Basically,” Eddie answered.

  “Well, if that’s true,” Rachel said, turning to Connie, “What went wrong?”

  Twenty-One

  Connie didn’t answer, not moving. If possible, she had gotten paler. With her eyes closed, Connie looked lifeless. Which Rachel realized was the point. She was lifeless, and if Eddie was telling the truth, she had been lifeless even before she died.

  Outside the window, Rachel could hear chickadees calling to each other. She knew that Bryan’s mom, Jillyan, had been a lover of birds and gardens, and Bryan had kept up that part of the house, at least.

  “They had that in common,” Eddie said. “My mother and Jillyan loved birds and gardens. But we moved away, and mom wasn’t allowed to garden at my father’s house. The gardener did it. ‘We don’t get our hands dirty,’ my father’s mother would say to my mom.

  “It was another reason mom loved coming home to visit her parents. As soon as we arrived, she would grab her gloves and head out to dig in the dirt with her mother.”

  Eddie walked over to Connie and directed his next words to her with a force that surprised even Rachel.

  “You remember that, don’t you, Connie? Mom told me about you as she worked in the garden. She told me about her friend from college. The friend who was like a sister to her and her brother, and another daughter to her parents. It’s the one thing you kept—the love of birds and gardens.

  “Did you think of my mother when you were out there working in your garden, pretending to live? Or had you forgotten her just like you forgot everything else about the life you had promised my grandparents and the women in the trailer park that you would live?

  “Did you forget all of them? Did you do it out of spite? Or was it a mistake?”

  When Connie still didn’t move, Eddie reached out and slapped her face. The slap was a surprise, but so was the fact that Eddie actually connected with her face.

  Connie reached up and held her hand to her face, looked at Eddie, and said, “You already know I didn’t do it on purpose. I was afraid. I made the wrong choice. I made a mistake.”

  Eddie backed away and stared at her. It was strange to watch a young boy confront a woman who could be his grandmother, but then Rachel knew that Eddie had long ago grown into a wise man, no matter what his form looked like now.

  “People make mistakes all the time, Connie. All. The. Time. Your mistake was not facing up to it, which surprises me. Mom told me about how when you were young you defied people to become someone. Why not do it then? Are you willing to stand up to it now?”

  “Yes. I am willing. But I don’t understand how. Assuming that I can go back in time, do I stop what happened, or what I did afterward?”

  Bryan had sat quietly, observing the group. It was so different from walking in the woods. He understood the creatures there. People confused him. It was only because it was his mother that he was willing.

  And the fact that Eddie was right. He had been a coward. It was time for him to live, and he was going to do it by helping two dead people.

  “Why not tell us the story, Connie? Then perhaps we can help you decide how far back to go. And I will be able to figure out my part in this.”

  “And mine,” Rachel added.

  Bryan turned to Rachel and corrected himself, “Our part in this.”

  ******

  As Grace poured coffee and served pastries, her mind drifted to what she had overheard that morning. She had to admit that it made h
er excited and curious. She was ready to be part of something new again.

  The past year had been quiet, at least compared to previous years. When they had all moved to Doveland, they had stirred up trouble without meaning to. There had been so many secrets uncovered, she and her friends often held daily meetings to discuss what to do.

  Now it was too quiet. Grace understood that the door to the Erda dimension had been closed, so there were no more visits between the two dimensions of Earth and Erda.

  Her husband, Eric, had returned from Erda, and passed away soon after that, having forgotten everything about his brief time in Erda. He had returned to be with her, thinking his illness was cured. Later, when he discovered that it wasn’t gone, Eric assured Grace he didn’t care. He would rather spend a day with her, then years without her.

  Grace wiped a tear from her eyes. She had been alone before Eric, and although she was alone again, it was not the same. Now, Grace knew that everything she saw or experienced with her five senses was not all there was to the world.

  Now she knew that there were other dimensions and other spaces in the universe. She had learned that people didn’t die. They simply moved somewhere else.

  Before Eric died, she had released him.

  “Don’t stay here for me,” she had said, “I’ll find you later wherever you go, just as we found each other here.”

  He had smiled, and his eyes had said thank you to her. That first night after his passing, Eric had stood at the foot of her bed and told her again that he loved her. Then he was gone. And she had never seen him again, which was what she wanted for him.

  She meant it when she told him they would find each other again. Because now she knew that’s how it worked. People always found each other again if they had agreed to it.

  So when she saw Jillyan’s boy, Bryan, apparently speaking to no one, Grace knew he wasn’t talking to the air. Someone was there. Grace knew the woman with him too, or at least she had seen her around town.