by T. L. Hines
He nodded. ‘‘We were worried . . . something was wrong.’’
‘‘That’s right, dear,’’ Linda joined in. ‘‘Do you want me to get you water or something?’’
‘‘No,’’ Ginny said, her gaze fixed on Jude. ‘‘What made you think something was wrong?’’ she asked.
‘‘You wouldn’t believe me, and it’s not important anyway.’’ He started to reach across the table to touch her hand, then stopped. ‘‘I . . . I know this sounds weird, but I need to touch you for just a minute, I think.’’
‘‘Oh, good gravy,’’ Linda blurted out. ‘‘You are a pervert. I knew it.’’ She started to open her purse.
Ginny looked calm, almost expectant. As if, on some level, she had been waiting for them to come crashing through her door. ‘‘No, wait, Linda,’’ Ginny said, eyeing Jude. ‘‘It’s okay.’’ Linda stopped but kept one hand in her purse.
Ginny put both her hands on the table and nodded at Jude.
Another headache was starting to buzz inside his skull. He wasn’t used to all this talk. In the past day he’d spoken more than he had in the past year. Even worse was the touching; it made his skin itch to think about it. Still, he needed to touch Ginny, because he needed to know.
He put his hand on top of hers. Instantly a new film-negative vision began.
In the vision, Ginny sat at her card table, writing on the pad. He could barely make out her features. The deep oranges and blacks of the vision combined to make her face look like a ghastly skull, the eyes hidden in dark ovals of black. Abruptly, in the vision, Ginny put down her pencil, reached for the bottle, poured an assortment on the table, and began stuffing them in her mouth.
The scene hyper-rewound and came to a stop on Ginny in a doctor’s office, sitting on a bench. Tears squeezed from her eyes—still sunken and hidden, even though the tears were obvious—and trickled down her face.
Yet again the scene hyper-rewound, then stopped on Ginny sitting in front of an empty canvas. She studied the canvas before tracing a streak of dark purple across it with a brush.
Suddenly the vision ended, and Jude felt like a door that had suddenly been slammed shut against a wailing storm outside. The world snapped back into focus as he shook his head, looking down at the table.
‘‘You okay?’’ Ginny asked.
‘‘You grew up in Butte. Your parents are John and Shelly. You loved playing softball in high school. Catcher.’’
‘‘All right, I’m calling the police,’’ Linda said, moving for the phone. Ginny reached out and grabbed Linda’s arm, stopping her.
‘‘Yeah, that’s all true,’’ Ginny said.
‘‘You need to know, before you do something drastic,’’ he said, his eyes dropping to the bottle of pills, ‘‘that you can tell your parents your secret. That they will love you, no matter what. That someday your painting career will go somewhere. That this—’’ he waved his hand in the air, indicating the nearly empty apartment—‘‘this isn’t who you are. It’s where you are. And that, when you think no one else is listening . . . God is.’’ The word God felt unnatural and foreign in his mouth, as if he were trying to chew on something too big. Jude was stunned even to hear himself say it. After God had taken his mother, after he’d ridiculed people for their bumbling attempts to convert him, he was now spouting the same gibberish? It didn’t make any sense.
Tears brimmed in Ginny’s eyes. ‘‘Excuse me,’’ she said, then got up from the table and went toward the bathroom.
Jude stood and caught Linda staring at him, her mouth agape. The look in her eyes was one he knew well from his previous life as everybody’s favorite life-after-death boy: part wonder, part fear. ‘‘I don’t know who you are,’’ she whispered after a few seconds, ‘‘but thank you.’’
He nodded. ‘‘Do you think she’ll be okay now?’’
‘‘I’ll make sure of it,’’ she answered.
Jude turned to head for the door again, then stopped and looked back to Linda. ‘‘I don’t know who I am, either.’’
15
FREEZING
Eight Years Ago
The third death started uneventfully enough. Jude was twenty-four then, a couple of years out of college, and still at his first job. He had earned his degree in business administration, a generic kind of diploma he knew was a big disappointment for some. His father, for one. William Allman was of the firm belief you didn’t need a piece of paper to tell you—or anyone else, for that matter—you were smart enough to do something. He didn’t have one, and he did fine for himself. He saw Jude’s desire to go to college as a sign of weakness, an admission he was somehow deficient and in need of something more.
Jude’s mother, on the other hand, nearly did a back handspring when Jude was accepted. She came from a hard family, a very hard family, and Jude would be the first one ever to attend a university. In fact, Jude had already gone further than most in the family—including his mother—just by finishing high school.
In the end, Jude’s mother probably wouldn’t have cared if he had decided to study underwater basket weaving; she brimmed with pride just to have Jude an actual, living, breathing college student.
Others, of course, had different ideas about what Jude should study. The general consensus among people who slightly knew him, and those who simply knew of him, assumed he’d declare pre-med and later head off to medical school. It was an obvious choice. The guy who had come back to life a couple of times, well, who wouldn’t want him as a doctor?
Still, he eliminated medicine early on. First, he’d always hated hospitals. Second, it would have vindicated all the people who were experts on his life, even though they’d never met him.
He received letters from some of these people occasionally. Most came from the rural parts of Nebraska, but some filtered in from out of state, as well. The writers wondered if Jude could help them by contacting a dead relative, or by telling them if aliens had mutilated cattle at so-and-so’s farm, or by healing someone who was sick and who didn’t have long to live.
Jude had never billed himself as a psychic—had, in fact, spoken as little as possible about his two deaths. But that didn’t stop other people from talking about it.
The business degree, then, was partly a stand for independence, partly a way to slide into comforting anonymity. Sure, a lot of people had business degrees. That was the point.
After graduating from college, he took his first job in South Dakota, working in the marketing department for a farm equipment manufacturer. They made the giant harvesters that mowed through grain fields across Nebraska and the Midwest each autumn. He liked the work, liked his office mates, liked being out on his own.
As an added bonus he got to leave Nebraska, and no one in South Dakota knew him as The Comeback Kid, a moniker the columnist in Jude’s hometown weekly had given him after his second death.
The town where he worked in South Dakota wasn’t far from Bingham, and he traveled home once every couple of months to see his family and a few friends. By this time, Kevin had gone to Iowa City or someplace like that to work as an engineer for a company Jude couldn’t remember. But there were a few other friends around. A few.
The holidays rolled around, and Jude’s company closed its offices between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Going home was never a question; Jude wanted to see his mother, have a few bites of her peanut butter fudge, sit in her house, and watch the snow fall softly outside.
He packed his car with a single duffle bag before hitting the interstate for what was typically a three-hour trip.
When he left his apartment in South Dakota, a light snow was falling, puffy swabs of cotton that fluttered in a kind of slow waltz. After an hour on the road, the snow changed to something heavier and wetter.
Jude turned on the radio, flipped through AM stations until he found one talking about the weather. Parts of South Dakota and Nebraska, the radio told him, were under a severe blizzard watch, and people were urged to stay indoors except for em
ergencies.
He hadn’t checked the weather or road conditions before leaving. He never did, mainly because the drive had never given him any problems before. He knew it well.
The blizzard watch proved to be well-founded. Soon Jude’s car slowed to a crawl while the storm around him clamped its jaws tight and held on. Still, Jude refused to stop; if he did that, he might not get moving again before the storm’s end. Besides, it was a regionalized storm, and he had to come out of the other side of it at some point. One more mile, he kept telling himself, and the storm would let up. Five more miles and he’d be on mostly dry roads again. That was what winter driving was all about; he’d seen it happen countless times before.
Until the car slid beneath him.
For a second it seemed as if he were on a carnival ride, a Tilt-A-Whirl maybe, but then he felt a scrape and heard a muffled chunk as the car settled into the ditch. He put the car in reverse and hit the accelerator, knowing before he tried that it was useless. He was stuck. He thought about getting out of the car, trying to dig out the snow from under his tires and give himself some traction, but dropped the idea. Many people in this situation would ruin their tires by spinning the tread off or burning all their fuel. Jude was too smart for that. He was a college graduate, wasn’t he? He was here for the duration of the storm, unless a snowplow or someone else happened by.
He hadn’t packed lots of clothes for the trip, though enough to put on a few extra layers. But when he checked his fuel gauge, he realized he wasn’t sitting in the best place: just above an eighth of a tank. Okay, so much for feeling good about being the smart college kid.
He could start the car and run its heater intermittently, but if he was here for more than a few hours, he’d be sitting with an empty tank. And it wouldn’t take long for the frigid winds whipping across South Dakota to find the cracks in his car, slide in their fingers and grab hold.
On the radio, a caller was asking some blowhard about American dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf. Jude sighed, turned off his ignition. If he were going to wait out this storm, it wouldn’t do him any good to conserve gasoline and waste his battery.
Jude slid down in his seat and tried to nap. He had no way of knowing the blizzard would be the worst one the Midwest had seen in more than a decade.
Nor did he know it would take three and a half days for his car to be found.
Jude woke up, yet again, in a hospital bed. And yet again, he needed a few moments to get his bearings.
He knew instantly what had happened. The taste in his mouth, the sickly taste of pennies at the back of his throat, told him. He had died again. Ghost images, images of the recent past, whispered in his mind, but he pushed them away. He’d never asked to go to the Other Side once, let alone three times, and he wasn’t about to dwell on its lingering aftereffects now. Other people would do plenty of that if they found out. The copper taste told him more than he wanted to know.
A nurse walked into the room, her face calm and composed until she noticed he was awake. She stopped as if hitting an invisible wall, then gave a weak smile and backed out of the room again.
Jude heard hushed whispers outside his door before a middle-aged, white-haired man walked into the room and fixed his gaze on Jude. He waited a moment, pursed his lips as if struggling to find the right words. ‘‘Let me just say,’’ said the doctor, ‘‘that I can’t explain why you’re here.’’
Jude felt a familiar draining sensation in his extremities—actually heard the blood slowing in his own veins. He knew what the doctor was about to say, and he wanted to shut him up, tell him to turn around and forget about it all. It wasn’t possible once, let alone three times.
Still, he had other things to consider. Other people to consider. If others found out, it would be mayhem. Perhaps, if he talked to the doctor, convinced him to keep all of this quiet, he might be able to get ahead of it and squash the flare-up before it became a raging fire.
‘‘Does anybody else know?’’ Jude asked the doctor, trying to seem nonchalant.
‘‘Know what?’’
‘‘That I . . . about me.’’
‘‘You came in yesterday. And when you . . . um . . . revived, and we figured out who you were, well . . .’’ He paused, filled his lungs with fresh air. ‘‘It just snowballed from there. The hospital held a press conference this morning.’’
There it was. Already he was facing a monster, a monster with giant, sharp teeth ready to grind him to nothingness.
Even worse, the doctor still had something on his mind. ‘‘When you came in, you were dead,’’ the white-haired man of medicine began. ‘‘And let me be clear here: not just clinically dead, but stone cold dead, if you don’t mind my harsh language.’’
‘‘I’ve heard it before.’’ He knew the doctor would assume he meant the language, but he really had heard it before.
‘‘You were past liver mortis, when the blood settles into the lowest parts of the body; your blood was even jelled and coagulated due to the temperature extremes. For that matter, you were past rigor mortis, when your muscles stiffen.’’ The doctor stopped, waiting, Jude assumed, for a comment or reaction. Jude simply closed his eyes and waited to ride out the wave; the doctor had to get through his epiphany, and Jude had to listen. He knew that. He didn’t like it, but he knew it.
‘‘You have no frostbite on your extremities, no lung or brain function abnormalities. As far as I can tell, you didn’t even catch a cold.
All I can say is: there must be a very good reason why you’re still here, because there are a thousand reasons why you shouldn’t be.’’
Jude kept his eyes closed.
‘‘Do you understand what all of this means?’’ the doctor asked, his voice going shrill and strident. The doctor wanted some meaning, some bit of philosophy from Jude that would put his mind at ease and restore his faith in natural order. But Jude didn’t feel like playing the part yet. He needed time to build himself up.
It was like having a broken arm. The first time, it’s a learning experience, because it’s new. The second time, it’s worse, because you remember how long it took to recover. And if you’re unlucky enough to break your arm a third time, well, you just want to chop the damn thing off and be rid of it.
Jude rolled his head toward the sound of the doctor’s voice and opened his eyes. ‘‘I have a pretty good idea, Doc.’’
The doctor stood in silence for a few moments, then looked down. ‘‘Well, if you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them,’’ he said, defeated.
‘‘Just one,’’ Jude said. ‘‘When do I get out of here?’’
Jude half expected the doctor to keep him for a few days, make him his pet project of discovery. It had happened before. But in reality the man had reacted the opposite way: he seemed eager to get rid of Jude, forget all about the incident. So, he only kept Jude for twenty-four more hours of observation before releasing him.
Jude was ready to leave, of course. Now, more than ever, hospitals had come to represent everything that was wrong in his life. And his death.
When the discharge orders came, he dressed quickly, then sat on the bed to tie his shoes. That morning on the phone, his mom had said she wanted to drive to South Dakota and meet him, but he nixed the idea. He just wanted to book a quick flight and get home. His three-hour drive had somehow stretched into a five-day nightmare, and he was ready to wake from it as soon as possible.
As he finished with his shoes, he noticed a few uniformed police officers step inside the doorway. Had he hit someone before sliding off the road? Was he getting slapped with a DUI? No, that couldn’t be, he knew.
He nodded at the officer closest to him, and the officer nodded back.
‘‘What’s up?’’ Jude asked.
‘‘Not much.’’
Jude smiled. ‘‘What I mean is, why are you here?’’
‘‘We’re to escort you to the airport.’’
Escort? ‘‘Any particular reason?’’ he asked.
The officer smiled. ‘‘Haven’t you seen?’’ he said. Jude shook his head. ‘‘A few people out there,’’ he said as he glanced at his partner.
Jude didn’t like the sound of that, but he stood. ‘‘Let’s get rolling, then.’’
Jude walked out the door with the two officers. Six more waited in the hallway. All of them avoided eye contact, but most stared when they thought he couldn’t see.
An escort of eight police officers. Not a good sign. He ran a hand across his face as he expelled a wearied sigh. ‘‘Well, let’s get this over with.’’
The policemen formed a phalanx around him and began to march down the hallway toward the swinging metal doors. Even from this distance Jude could hear people on the other side of the doors. Already he could tell the police officer’s comment about ‘‘a few people out there’’ might win a contest of understatements.
He’d been to the Other Side once again. Now it was time to face the other side of the hospital doors. He gulped in a few deep breaths, smelling and tasting the artificial, antiseptic air of the hospital. He pictured the air of the hospital drying him out like a raisin in the sun; only the fresh air outside would restore him, make him whole again. He closed his eyes for a few steps, imagining himself walking on a forest path covered with pine needles and aspen leaves, the smell of earth and dew thick and fragrant in the air around him.
They came to the doors. The policeman in the front looked through the small windows into the hospital lobby and appeared to exchange some brief communication with people on the other side.
Some sort of signal must have been given, because in a heartbeat they crashed through the doors and into chaos. Popping flashes blinded him, and everywhere he felt the yellow-hot glare of television cameras, all trying to capture the first images of Jude Allman trying to leave the hospital.
A sea of mechanized whirs, shouted questions, and jarring bodies washed over them. Jude thought of British soccer matches he’d seen, when masses of spectators joined and became one mindless beast, swaying out of control like a drunkard.
