by Cliff Hicks
Randall moved with Shelly and James, shooting Bob a dirty look as he stopped at the end of the row of stacks. Bob could tell the angel had pent up frustration about something, but couldn’t really tell what it was, so he offered the angel a smug wave. The annoyed angel turned the corner, and moved out of Bob’s field of vision, leaving Bob alone in the library cul-de-sac.
“Jake’s gotten out of his quarters, huh?” Bob said to himself. He enjoyed talking to himself now and again – he found it was often the only intelligent conversation he got. “Interesting… Maybe I can do him another favor or two.”
* * * * *
It hadn’t taken Jake long to get the hang of the doors. He’d done a few to practice, going to places he remembered amazingly well. The house he’d spent most of his childhood in, which was owned by someone else now. The building he’d been working at the last few years, which had a large “For Lease!” sign out front. His apartment, except it wasn’t his any more. There was a newly married couple that had moved into the place, and none of his things were still in the apartment, except some shelving he had hung up. Apparently when they had cleaned out his place, the landlord had assumed the shelves were in there to begin with. He almost wanted to turn tangible just to tear them down, but his conscience got the better of him. It wasn’t the fault of these people. They had rented the apartment in good faith. Besides, Jake had to admit to himself the idea of being a haunting spook didn’t really seem much like his kind of deal.
He hadn’t much in the way of family left to speak of, no one in particular he wanted to peek in on. He didn’t have much of an interest in his ex or his ex best friend or how their lives were getting on without him. He didn’t know where Nathaniel lived, and to be honest, he wasn’t sure he honestly cared enough about him to see what he was up to.
Nathaniel had been his friend mostly because he hadn’t cared enough to go out and find new friends, and because he could commiserate about work with him. Nathaniel knew exactly what the horrific day-to-day was like working in a call center, but that was about all they really had in common. They’d tried talking music a few times, but found they didn’t listen to absolutely any of the same people. Nathaniel liked dumb, gross-out comedies when it came to movies, and the kind of horrific social films about a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who learned how to rap or dance or something and then everyone accepted him and told him he’d “always been” one of them. They were the kinds of films Jake told Nathaniel “just weren’t his thing,” but now he realized he’d always just been too polite to tell the younger man he thought they were utter shit. Well, he thought to himself, being dead certainly teaches you that you don’t always have to be polite.
Jake mulled that thought over for a moment, then chuckled softly. It was true; he didn’t have to be polite. He didn’t have to be delicate or soft spoken or any of the other passive-passive things he had been when he was alive. He didn’t have to be the old him. He could be the new him. He had died, gone to Heaven and then escaped Heaven. If ever there was a moment when a man could truly reinvent himself, this was it. And, to be fair, ever since he’d started breaking out of Heaven, he’d been doing that, one footstep at a time. So what would the new Jake want to do, newly back on Earth, a free pass, no rules and nothing to hold him down? Reevaluate his decisions and look at them again, he thought. He didn’t have to be polite or kind or…
Oh, that’s good, he thought.
A wry smile passed over Jake’s face, and he knew exactly where he needed to go, and whom he needed to see. Oh yes, he realized, he truly should have thought of this sooner.
He withdrew the sword hilt from his belt and snapped the blade of fire back out. He drew the blade through the air and cut himself a door. He knew this location very well, and it would be a cinch to get there. He jammed the blade in the center of the door and turned it, as cracks of fire rippled out from the sword until they reached the door lines he’d cut. The door hissed and filled with a splash of fire as Jake pulled the hilt away, letting the blade vanish before he tucked it back on his belt and stepped through the doorway, moving across the city.
He found himself outside of the familiar apartment building, and sure enough, he recognized the car in the parking spot as he walked up the familiar stairs and towards the door. He paused for a moment then stepped through the doorway, passing through the door intangibly. He had been almost tempted to turn solid and knock on the door, but he realized this would be more satisfying. And it never hurt to do a little recon before anything else.
The look of the apartment hadn’t changed much. He had expected that the pictures that had him in them would’ve been taken down, but instead there were more of them than ever. His ex-fiancée’s apartment, although a lot had changed. Before she had been a bit of a neat freak, and now the place was a disaster area. Clothes were strewn all over the place, and not a scrap of them were men’s clothes. The dining room table, once pristine and spotless, was covered in pizza boxes and fast food takeout bags. The couch was covered with them as well, except for one portion, which had been cleared so there was some place to sit. The lights were off, it being the middle of the night, but the room was still lit by the glow of the television, which was playing some late night infomercial, illuminating the apartment that barely resembled the one he remembered. Frankly, it looked more like the apartment of a college student than a successful businesswoman from an affluent family who lived in one of the nicer areas of town.
He saw her cellphone resting on the kitchen table between refuse, and he forced himself to be solid, picking it up, turning it on to see the date and time. It had been forty-five days since his death, which meant he’d spent close to three years on Heaven time. Three long, unbearable years being told to make arts and crafts, to better himself, to blend in and mesh with the rest of the flock. “Flock that,” he quietly muttered to himself with dry laughter.
The room light flicked on and Jake spun quickly, turning intangible and invisible as the phone fell through his fingers and fell onto the ground. There, standing in the doorway from the bedroom, was his ex-fiancée, Kelly, wearing a ratty nightgown that looked like it hadn’t been washed in months. Her hair was a mess, those pretty reddish-brown locks greasy and going in every direction. There were heavy crows feet under her eyes, and she looked thinner than he remembered. Her skin was even paler than he was used to. She looked like she’d had a tough time since he’d been gone, but for some reason, he just couldn’t bring himself to have any sympathy for her. Oh, that was right – the cheating. Let her have her misery, he thought to himself. Her voice was a quiet whisper, as if she was fighting back the urge to burst into tears. “Jake?” He stood there imperceptibly for a long moment as she moved into the room and over towards the kitchen table. “Am I losing my mind?” She looked down and saw her phone resting on the floor, clearly where she’d seen it fall from Jake’s fingers. She crouched down and picked up her phone from the dining room carpet. “Jesus, Jake, if you’ve come to haunt me, just get it over with, okay? I deserve it.”
“You’re goddamn right you do,” he said, as he turned solid and visible once more, standing over in the doorway she’d just been standing in a moment ago. He shook his head with disappointment, unsure what to say next. He’d been so sure coming here had been a good idea, until he’d seen the wreck both she and her place had become, and now he couldn’t think of a thing to say.
Kelly gasped quietly, staring at him as her mouth fell agape. Jake realized that the robes and halo made it clear right away that he was dead, so he was at least thankful she didn’t ask if he was dead or not. “You’ve got a halo,” she said, as one might say, “you’re quite tall,” or “do you want a hand with that?” or “you’ve been shot, should I call an ambulance?” (Jake wondered if this was part of the grieving or if she had always been this dense and he just had never noticed.)
“Mmm,” Jake agreed. “Many people get them in Heaven.” He wasn’t exactly sure why he’d come here, but to talk about his halo
certainly wasn’t high on his list of priorities. He’d thought maybe about haunting her in a sort of Dickensian scene, but the minute he’d set foot through the door, he had been fairly certain that he couldn’t do anything to this woman that she hadn’t already done to herself at this point a dozen times over. Whereas before he’d been filled with anger, now he mostly felt sympathy.
“You went to Heaven?” she asked quietly. “I thought they didn’t let suicides into Heaven…”
“Suicides? What are you talking about?” Jake’s face scrunched up a bit.
“I… I thought…” she stuttered, then moved one of the dining table chairs out to almost collapse into it. “Jake. With the accident so soon after…”
“After I caught you fucking that scum I used to call a friend?” he practically spat at her, in a quiet tone, that anger flashing back momentarily. Despite his annoyance and the outburst, he was on the whole much calmer than he expected to be. When Jake had considered how this conversation would play out, at least during that short period time when he’d been alive and thinking about it, he’d expected he would be a lot more angry, possibly throwing things and shouting. Instead he was more annoyed and cold. A lot more time had passed for him than it had for her, and things had changed. No, that wasn’t right, he thought to himself, I’ve changed. And Kelly was still thinking of him as the guy he used to be. Then again, even the old Jake wouldn’t have taken his own life. That flashed back the anger a second time, although it passed again before he spoke. “You thought I committed suicide?”
“Well, fuck, Jake, what would you think?” she moaned. She was starting to cry, shaking slightly in her chair. “Not even three hours after you find us and lose your job, you get into a car accident and get yourself killed. What was I supposed to think?” She pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, hugging them close. “You’re probably not even fucking real, so I don’t know why I’m having this conversation with you…”
“You tell me, Kelly. Why were you banging him in the first place?”
“Clay? God…” she grumbled. “It certainly wasn’t for the conversation, I can tell you that. Or the emotional support. Minute you died and I needed someone to talk to, he was the Invisible Man. I mean, the sex was good, but I think…”
“Yeah?” Jake asked. He was curious why this woman whom he’d trusted more than anyone betrayed him so cruelly. He’d certainly never been cruel to her, at least not that he could remember. His own past was a little fuzzy to him now, perhaps the result of the time spent in Heaven.
“I think it was because he had hopes and dreams, and you didn’t,” she said quietly. She tossed her cellphone back onto the table with a sigh. “You never wanted to do anything with your life.”
“I had dreams, Kelly,” Jake sighed, “you just never cared enough to ask about them.”
“Clay had plans for his life, though, Jake. He wanted to travel, he wanted to see the world, he wanted to finish law school and get a job working for a legal firm in New York City and get out of Nebraska and be somebody,” she told him, her voice warbling as she almost started to lecture him. “And you didn’t want to do any of that. You simply lived your life like you didn’t know how to make a change, or didn’t want to. I started sleeping with him a few days after we got engaged, when you told me you wanted to go Chicago for our honeymoon.”
“What’s wrong with Chicago?” Jake asked.
Kelly tossed her hands up in the air. “Nothing! Nothing’s wrong with Chicago, but my folks could afford to send us anywhere in the world for our honeymoon, and you wanted to stay close to home! You never wanted to travel, or adventure! And I’m not ready for that yet! I still want to do things with my life, Jake. I want to go places I’ve never seen before. And I certainly don’t want to live in Omaha the rest of my life, like most of the people I went to high school with! I want to be someone, someone who doesn’t take life for granted.”
Jake moved over toward the table, grabbing another chair, pulling it out to sit down in it. He made sure, however, his chair was a good distance from hers. “So why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
She put her hands on the side of her head, pushing some of her ratty hair from her face. “I tried, Jake. I promise you, I tried. I tried telling you about how you should go back to school, get another degree in something and do something for a living that you enjoyed. I even told you my parents would pay for it, but you’d just tell me about how you didn’t want to rely on my parents.”
“No, you were the one who told me you hated relying on your parents, Kelly. When we first started dating, you told me how much you liked the fact that I paid for everything, even on my meager income, when you could pay for it any time we needed it, so I bent over backwards to make sure I was doing the best I could to do that.”
“I know!” she sobbed, tears running down her face. “I know you were, but you didn’t have to, Jake! I would’ve taken my parents’ money if it meant we could be happy and enjoying our lives together out doing things, but you always seemed so damn content with sticking to the status quo.”
“And your response to a little adversity in our relationship was to go and fuck someone else.” The words came out sharper than he had intended, but the emotion behind them was genuine. People had been doing this to Jake all of his life. They figured he would lie down and just take it. But that guy had died when a telephone pole had crushed him. And this new guy had taken his place.
“You think I don’t know it was a dumb thing to do?” she shouted, clearly growing frustrated. Kelly had gone through most of her life without people yelling at her, or telling her she was wrong, and didn’t really know how to handle it. She’d convinced herself that she was a good person, so much so that even when she screwed up, it didn’t matter because she was ‘sorry’ for what she’d done, and that clearly absolved her of responsibility for those actions. “But any time we went out, I could feel guys looking at me, and it was almost as though I could tell they were thinking, ‘why is that pretty girl with that loser guy?’”
“Way to justify,” Jake snorted as he stood up, stepping behind the chair, his hands resting on the back of it.
“Don’t you get it, Jake? I wanted to stay with you, but you didn’t want me. You were only marrying me because it was just another thing you were expected to do!” She cried for a bit more before she tried to stem her tears, devolving into a mass of sniffles. “We were using each other. You were using me to fall into the stereotype of a perfect life, and I was using you to get back at my parents for... well, for being parents. We… we just took it too far.”
“Then why the hell did you say yes when I asked you to marry me in the first place?” Jake asked as he pushed the chair back beneath the table.
“Because I wanted to be wanted too. The same reason I slept with Clay.” She rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “I don’t know what I wanted, Jake. I wanted it all to make sense, and I thought… I don’t know… I thought maybe if we got married, we’d get through all of our issues. And Clay was… Clay was a mistake I just kept making even though I knew better. And when you comm… when you died, I thought I’d driven you to it, that I’d killed you, and that you were in Hell because of me.” Kelly had been brought up Irish-Catholic and took all of the religion very seriously, something that had never gone over particularly well with Jake, who’d been raised by a pair of “relaxed Jews” as his folks had described themselves growing up. “And that I’d go next. Because I deserved to.”
Jake looked up at her ceiling then closed his eyes, drawing in a long breath before letting it out. He was about to do something he’d never pegged himself for doing. He lowered his head and looked at her, the shivering, shaking, weeping mess she’d become, and walked over to her. He placed his hand on her shoulder calmly. “I didn’t commit suicide, I didn’t go to Hell, and I don’t think you are going to either, Kelly.”
She practically leapt to her feet and wrapped her arms around him, clinging to him tightly, bur
ying her face in his neck, as she started bawling again. “I’m sorry, Jake! I’m so fucking sorry!” She was pressing to him so forcefully that Jake was amazed she wasn’t breaking his ribs. She pulled her head back and turned her gaze to him so quickly, he didn’t even see the kiss coming. One second her face was lodged up against his shoulder and the next her lips were pressed against his desperately. His hands lifted to her shoulders and pushed her back firmly, leaning his head away from the kiss. She was still crying and the rejection seemed to set her off into another fit of sobs. “Please, Jake…don’t…”
He stepped away from her, extracting himself from her arms with sizable effort as she struggled to keep him from peeling away. Once out of her grasp, he turned to look at her again. “Look. Kelly. I forgive you, okay? You’re right, we were both just sort of going through the motions in a relationship that had run its course and both of us should’ve said something. But we’re done. Even if I wasn’t dead, our relationship certainly is. Nothing’s going to bring it back to life.”
