by Sarah Beard
And then I remember the consequence for revealing my identity as a dead person.
With dread, I stand up.
I try to step into the lake to enter the portal back to Earth. But my foot doesn’t break the surface. It’s solid now. Impenetrable. I take a few more steps to make sure. Then I jump, slamming my feet against the surface. But I may as well be standing on a sheet of steel.
There’s no going back.
I sink to my knees and bow my head in anguish. What did I expect? I knew this would be my consequence, but I chose to break the rules anyway. She’s lost to me now. I’ll never see her again, not as long as she’s on Earth. My chest seems to be caving in, and an emptiness spreads inside of me, a black hole consuming every speck of light. There’s nothing more.
There’s nothing more.
omeone is stroking my hair. I want to open my eyes to see who it is, but my eyelids are too heavy. I don’t know where I am or how I got here, but everything feels foreign. Something hard and bulky is stuck to my index finger, and I’m being smothered by warmth. It’s on me and around me and shoved between every limb and joint. I try to place myself, to remember something. Anything. But it’s like I’m standing on a beach in a thick predawn mist, and I can’t see any landmarks to orient myself.
“Avery.” A whisper breaks through the mist, gentle and concerned. More stroking on my head. The hand is trembling. And then I smell something like hand sanitizer and ammonia.
“I think she’s coming around,” someone else says. A female voice I don’t recognize. And then I notice another sound. A rhythmic beeping, and a loud breath of relief.
“Avery?” This time I recognize the voice. It’s one that always gives comfort. Dad.
My eyelids crack open, catching a glimpse of my surroundings before closing again. A hospital room. Just like Mom’s. Pastel curtains and a purple upholstered chair by the window.
The woman speaks again, her voice close to me. “Her temperature is looking good, and her other vitals are stable. I think she’s going to be okay.”
Another sigh of relief from Dad. More stroking my hair. His warm hand on my arm. “I don’t know what she was doing out there.”
“Avery?” the woman says. “Do you remember what happened? What were you doing out there?”
Doing out where? My mind searches for something to ground myself to. For reality. I will the sun to rise, to burn off the mist, but it stubbornly stays hidden beneath the horizon.
I open my eyes. The nurse is pushing buttons on an IV pump, and Dad rubs my arm gently. “Sweetheart.” He sounds exhausted, stretched to his limit. “What were you doing lying in the cold water at the beach?”
Water. And then I remember lying down in the sand. Bits and pieces of memories start surfacing in my mind. My fingers on Kai’s neck, and no pulse. His hand under mine, feeling less solid than it should. Ocean water washing over my face, and my not having the strength to sit up. I squeeze my eyes shut and turn my face, burying it in my pillow. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not.
“Let’s give her some time,” the nurse says. “Why don’t you come out in the hall with me to discuss some things?”
Dad pats my arm. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
I hear their footsteps move across the room and the click of the door as it shuts behind them. Their muffled voices seep through the door from the hallway, and I catch words here and there.
Mom in the hospital too. Coping mechanisms. Hereditary. Counselor.
Maybe my worst fear is coming to pass, and I’m going crazy. Maybe I imagined the last few days. It can’t have really happened. Kai couldn’t really be dead. He couldn’t have disappeared in my arms. It’s impossible. But if it didn’t happen, that means I am losing my mind, and I can’t accept that either.
Dad comes back without the nurse and pulls up a chair beside me, taking my hand in his. “Do you want to tell me what happened?” he says.
I shake my head. I can’t piece it together in my mind, let alone put it into words. And even if I could, I would be sent straight to the psych unit because no one would believe me. I’m teetering on a fence between sanity and psychosis, between truth and delusion, and not even Dad’s sturdy hand is enough to steady me.
’ve spent the last three weeks trying to make sense of everything that happened with Kai, and I’ve made only a small amount of headway. It’s not like I can talk it out with anyone, and there’s no one to ask the millions of questions crowding my thoughts.
It’s drizzling today, and I sit curled up on a bench at the end of the deserted pier, watching swollen waves through the railing. Sitting in the rain helps me think. It shuts out the rest of the world, and the white noise drowns out the loudest of my thoughts and helps me focus on the quiet ones that are harder to hear. Usually the quiet ones are the most important.
I’ve been replaying the moments I spent with Kai, searching for clues as I see my memories in a new light. From the first time I saw him on the beach when he lent me his pocketknife to the moment he disappeared in my arms. I’ve read through his book of lyrics at least a dozen times, and I practically have all his lyrics memorized. And although I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that Kai and everything that happened with him was real, the biggest questions, how and why, remain unanswered.
Everywhere I go, I see him. At the chocolate shop, at Mom’s condo, on the beach, the pier, even in my car. I see the things he did, hear the words he said. Things that didn’t make sense before make sense now. Like his reluctance to talk about himself. Or his efforts to get me back with Tyler. His parting words the first night we had dinner, no regrets, that at the time seemed so random. His abandoning a music career despite his incredible talent.
His still heart, when I hugged him close on the beach that day.
With numbered sunsets and bated breath, he sang to me at Tyler’s party. I’ll swallow her tears; mend the unjust.
And I heard him sing in the vineyard, Forbid heaven to alter … for her, I would die but not falter.
What about the words I overheard the night we found Mom unconscious? I’m here to help Avery, he said, just for a little while.
Slowly, all the pieces fall together like scattered stars moving into alignment. He knew me. Really knew me. He knew I was hurting, knew what I needed to be healed. To know that, he must have been watching me all along, ever since his death. He must have seen how his death affected me. And somehow, he found a way to return for a time to help me.
I’m suddenly filled with a love so immense I can’t contain it. It grows and swells until it’s ripping me apart from the inside out. Tears spill down my cheeks, mingling with the warm rain. I dip my head into my arms and let them come freely.
I wonder, if he saw me before, does that mean he can see me now? I go perfectly still, trying to sense any kind of presence around me. But other than the rain tapping on my head and arms, I feel nothing. I don’t know how he was able to see me before, or how he was able to come back in the flesh for those few days. From some of the things he said and did, I get the sense he wasn’t supposed to be here at all, that he broke some rule to come and help me. That his presence here was an anomaly, and he’ll never be back again.
And then I do sense a presence. But when I turn around to see who it is, it’s not Kai. It’s Mom. She’s huddled in her raincoat, her hair soaking up the rain and getting curlier by the second.
“Your dad said I could find you out here,” she says, looking around and taking in our surroundings. She sits on the wet bench beside me. “I can appreciate the romantic setting, but what exactly are you doing out here, sitting alone in the rain?”
I shrug, sniffling a bit. “Just thinking. Trying to figure things out.”
“What a great place for thinking.” She says this with sincere enthusiasm, then closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sky, smiling as raindrops fall on her cheeks, forehead, and eyelids. It’s good to see her back to herself. “So,” she says, wiping the rain off her face and loo
king at me, blinking rapidly to keep the rain out of her eyes. “Let’s figure things out together.”
I’ve spent my whole life watching Mom trying to figure things out, so her offer doesn’t give me much hope. She must know what I’m thinking, because her smile fades and she turns to watch the rain-pocked waves for a while. I watch too, not really knowing what to say.
Finally, she says, “I’m sorry for what happened last month. So sorry.”
This is the first time either of us have brought it up. I’ve wanted to talk to her about it, but also wanted to wait until she was ready. That, and finding her lifeless body on her bedroom floor is one more thing I haven’t quite processed yet.
“I know,” I say.
She shakes her head slowly, then brings a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the rain. “I didn’t intend for that to happen. You know, to end up in the hospital. To …”
“To almost die?” I finish for her.
She looks at me, eyes tormented. “I was just … hurting. So much. I took an extra pill. But it wasn’t quite enough, so I took one more. And had a glass of wine. Or two. I don’t remember. But the next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital.” Her hand falls on my knee. “You must be so angry with me.”
I can’t be angry with her. Because there’s not much difference between what I did—lying in the cold waves and subjecting myself to hypothermia—and what she did. We were both just trying to numb our pain.
“I love you, Mom. No matter what. I’m glad you’re okay. I’m glad you’re still here with us.”
She smiles sadly and wraps an arm around my shoulder, giving me a side hug and a kiss on the cheek. She lets out a sigh of relief, of finishing a difficult task. We go back to squinting at the waves through the rain, and then she says, “Life is precious, isn’t it? It’s sad that sometimes you have to almost lose it to realize that.”
I think about Kai, how precious his life was. And how my life was so precious to him that he gave his up for it. My throat starts burning, and new tears prick my eyes. I glance over to the place where he stood beside me on this pier, where I felt his warm fingers brush my cheek, and heard him say, Have you ever thought that maybe he doesn’t regret what he did? That saving you was the crowning moment of his life?
I bite down hard on my lip, but it doesn’t stop me from bursting into tears. Mom pulls me into her arms, rubbing my back as I clutch her and sob into her neck. In all my reckless adventures, I’ve been injured countless times. Cuts, scrapes, bruises, sprains, broken bones. Some injuries take longer to recover from than others. But I don’t think I’m ever going to recover from this.
“I’m so sorry, Avery.”
She thinks this is about her. Maybe it is, a little. I don’t try to correct her, because there’s no way I can tell her what this is really about. So I just cry, and cry, and cry, putting the rain clouds to shame.
Finally Mom pulls back so she can look in my eyes. I take a stuttering breath, trying to calm myself.
“I want to live, Avery,” Mom says. “I mean, really live.” She looks at me as though she’s about to offer a challenge. “But I can’t do it alone. Help me? Embrace life with me?”
I recall all the times Kai pleaded with me to live my life to its fullest. He gave his life so you could live, he said to me on this very pier. So live.
That’s all Kai wants from me in return. So I take Mom’s hand and weave my fingers through hers. “Okay,” I say. “I will.” For my mom, for me, but most of all, for Kai.
here’s no way to measure time in Demoror. No day or night, just a fixed sky full of stars that shine so brightly it’s like a thousand small suns scattered across the sky. So I don’t know how long I’ve been wandering the shores of Demoror. All I know is I’ve never seen so much of it. Like Earth, it’s beautiful. Just in a different way. Where Earth is distorted and gritty and broken like a rock band, Demoror is flawless and smooth and clean like a symphony. The sand under my bare feet is fine and pure, no broken shells or fragments of trash like on Earth.
Up ahead, a man emerges from the silver lake. He looks disoriented, like most people do when passing from the living world for the first time. A handful of people are gathered on the shore to greet him, and he wades out of the lake into their welcoming embrace. It hurts to see, so I hurry past, tuning out their laughter and rejoicing. It makes me ache for my mom. Even now, no one can tell me where she is. So most of the time, I try not to think about her.
Since I was brought back here, I’ve seen countless people come and go through the silver lake of Demoror. Mostly people who’ve just died. Some head straight to the towering cliffs of Elysium, and some slink off to the Briar across the lake because for whatever reason, they’re most comfortable in the dark. Others hang around the shore, waiting for something. Waiting to go back to Earth while their body is healed, or waiting to receive an assignment, or waiting until they feel ready to move on to Elysium.
When I first died, I never used Demoror as my waiting place. Because every time I was here, I felt restless and out of place, as though I’d stepped into a fine restaurant wearing board shorts. So I spent all of my time between assignments with Avery. She was my home base, my Demoror. I was her silent companion. Her invisible friend. The one she talked to when she thought she was talking to only herself. The one who talked to her even when she couldn’t hear me. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone.
Now I’m alone again, but I can no longer find comfort in her company. Maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did. Maybe I made things worse for her. If I’d given her time, she probably would’ve healed on her own. She would have found happiness again. Instead, I gave her one more wound to heal from. And now I’m stuck here, with no connection to Earth, no access to the people I love. I can’t even glimpse them through the silver lake.
So I keep strolling, not knowing what else to do while I wait for Avery and Helen and Jane for the next few decades. I watch the stirrings of the water as I go, the endless procession of comings and goings reminding me of a wooden plaque that hung in one of my foster family’s living room that read in cutesy hand-painted lettering, Life never ends. It just moves from one place to the next. At the time I thought it was absurd. But who knew a stupid little plaque could hold so much truth?
And the truth is that in their own time, Avery and my sisters will move to where I am. The thought should bring me comfort, but for some reason it makes me feel like someone is twisting a knife in my heart.
The lake begins to curve after a while, and the fringes of the Briar slowly rise on the horizon like a storm cloud. I pause and look back the way I came, realizing how far I’ve traveled. When I began walking, I was near the cliffs of Elysium. Now from where I stand, their majestic height rises far above the gentle hills and crystal trees across the lake. I can just make out the shimmering, iridescent waterfall that souls pass through to enter Elysium. The one Charles always tries and fails to convince me to enter. The distance makes me feel a bit uneasy. But I can always quicken back in an instant if I want to.
Only, when I consider it, I find I have no desire to. All I feel like doing right now is moving farther away. Away from other people. Away from light. Away from anything that might require me to let go of the things I’m trying so hard to hold on to.
I look back at the Briar, feeling a strange sort of beckoning. Maybe it’s curiosity. Or maybe it’s the despair inside of me knowing it will feel more at home there than in Elysium. Whatever it is, I surrender to the pull and keep walking toward the Briar.
As I get closer, the land gets more barren. The grass grows more patchy and blanched, and I’m surprised to see rugged rocks jutting out of the sand. It’s more Earth-like on this side of the lake. It’s also colder, like late autumn in the Upper Peninsula.
I keep moving, and soon the sand turns hard and sharp, broken rocks littering the ground like shattered dishes. They jab the soles of my bare feet, and I welcome the pain. It’s feeling something. Like being alive again.
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nbsp; I feel a particularly sharp pain, so I pause and lift the sole of my foot for a look. I’m surprised to see several cuts marking the bottom of my foot. Strange. There’s no blood, of course. Not even the clear liquid of a materialized body. I shrug it off and continue. But it occurs to me that maybe the soul is made of some type of matter, only too fine for mortal eyes to see.
The Briar’s thorny vines begin encroaching on the crystal trees, like arms reaching out to capture anything light. I stop at the edge of a trench as wide as I am tall, and so deep I can’t see the bottom. This alone should stop me from going farther. But I’m already dead, so I don’t fear falling. I do wonder what would happen if I fell, but my imagination doesn’t come up with anything bad enough to worry me.
I back up a few paces, run, and leap over the trench, landing hard on the opposite side. A few more steps, and then I’m standing at the fringe of the Briar. So close that if I hold out my hand it will be sucked into the shadows.
I gaze into the black and untamed thicket, thorny bushes and gaunt trees leaning on one another as though the darkness here saps even the vegetation’s strength. Something in the shadows, in the thistles and tangled undergrowth, speaks to me. Tells me that my pain and sorrow is welcome here. That I belong here. It invites me to come in. To surrender to the shadows and dwell in them. From where I stand, it seems like such an appealing invitation.
But then I feel something else. Something rearing inside of me in resistance and objection. Experience and knowledge, gained from the life I lived on Earth. I lived in darkness as a child, and there was nothing comforting or appealing about it. Nothing that felt like home. The more I surrendered to it, the more painful it became. And I know now that there is something better than darkness.
I close my eyes and allow my thoughts to drift back to my last day with Avery. I feel her caring fingers on my face. The love, the healing that flowed from her and into me. And then I ask myself, If that’s the alternative to darkness, what am I doing here?
