Reunion Beach

by Elin Hilderbrand

  He didn’t want to die.

  No, he did not. But he did. And it was not a bit frightening. It was confusing until I figured out what happened and accepted the new state I was in. Yes, it was chaotic. It might have something to do with the fact that I was shouting, “Am I dead? Will somebody answer me? Am I dead?”

  He saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

  Not exactly. I saw nothing but haze. It was then that I tried to remember every book or television show on the subject of near-death experiences. I remembered a long interview on The Sally Jessy Raphael Show that featured a psychic who wrote books, can’t remember her name but you will. She wore a wig. You said her hairdo, an explosion of weird wiglets, looked like the ones you wore to your senior prom. She came on the show and admitted that she had been dead several times. That could not have possibly been true! Say No to Tarot! Remember this lady? She spoke of voices and her mother and all that, and at the time I said to myself, I hope that’s how dying goes! Wouldn’t that be nice? But it turns out that there isn’t a band to greet you—you sort of join the souls, and everyone is everyone, all one, if I may be so blunt.

  I recall that book by the surgeon who fell off a moped, then into a coma, and when he emerged from it, wrote a book about it. You know who I mean. Remember you gave me that book as a gag gift one Christmas? You know, it was written by the brilliant surgeon who crossed over and saw goo and then a beautiful garden? I’m here now, and I still have no idea what he was talking about. There’s no goo. There’s no garden. Maybe the hospital put something in his IV and he had hallucinations. I’ve yet to see a butterfly here. Let’s get back to what people said when I died.

  He was too young.

  Maybe. Seventy years doesn’t seem old when you’re 68. Or even 65. In some ways it felt very old to me. But here’s the thing about age. Any age at time of death is too young unless you’re 115 years old. And even then . . .

  He had so much left to do.

  Not really. I pretty much said what I needed to say and tried to write what I wanted to read. In that regard, I was blessed. I made a living doing what I loved the most, and here and there, folks loved what I wrote, which was heavenly. That’s all I could do, Dot. Tell it like I saw it. And when a reader took my work into his heart, I knew it. Every single time. They were moved and their emotional reaction moved me. It was the perfect exchange. A tale well told in exchange for loyalty and affection. I would say that was close to divine.

  Love ya, Pat

  * * *

  To: DBF

  From: PC

  Why was my funeral a circus? From my point of view, it looked like the aerial shot of the Homecoming halftime show of a Clemson football game. I swore they even spelled PAT in formation on the church steps. Did they? Maybe it was your idea. You can be grand, in the best of ways. You are also a good friend. You showed up. You were there at the service. I got that one glimpse and that was enough for me. For a man who hated to put on a necktie or shoes that squeaked or, God forbid, a suit, it was something to behold. I guess all the folderol was to let people know I was important. But I never was, even on my best day, anything that bordered on important. Maybe I was slightly interesting. That’s a different kind of important, at least to the person living the life. But there you were, Dot, crying like you were at the front of the line at Lohman’s, certain they were never going to unlock the front doors to let you in for the Midnight Madness sale. You took it hard, Dot, and that got to me. I was there, now I’m here. It’s nothing to cry about.

  Love ya, Pat

  * * *

  To: DBF

  From: PC

  You wrote another novel and turned it in on time? What are you, Dottie, a literary machine? You are a summer read wind machine! You write of Lowcountry beaches and shrimp boils and cocktails on the sand—soothing beauty and Southern lady hijinks. And there’s nobody like you. I wonder if you will get to 50 books before you take the flight home. To here. I bet you’ve got a hundred more ideas for novels. My mind did not work that way. I’d think about a story for years and it would chug around inside of me like waves of dyspepsia, followed by a bout of gas that kept me pacing the floor until I passed it, after which I would sit down and write I never saw you chug but I know you did. You worked hard. You tried to make it look easy because that’s what you wanted for your reader. Profound thoughts, sure. Family dynamics, what else is there? Food, absolutely. Your love of Sullivan’s Island and the Lowcountry? You were the ambassador of soul for those tufts of land you call home that floated on the ocean off the coast of South Carolina like a discarded wedding gown tossed off the side of a cruiser. You are the queen of all that, so I’m not surprised. Queen Bee? Do I have it right?

  I heard you ripping the box open and you were shouting at Victoria to get a video for Instagram. In that moment, I was happy to be dead. Social and media are two words that should never meet, like child and actor or freak and accident. You should stop encouraging all that intrusion into your life by way of devices and get back to the basics. Everything we do is not interesting. Well, let me speak for myself. You are fascinating in your love of living and gracious dining and strong friendships. I know because I was the beneficiary of all three. Cassandra is still crying most nights. Give her a call. Will ya?

  Love ya, Pat

  * * *

  To: DBF

  From: PC

  I have recognized no one, not a single person in the incoming area. I scan the crowd, thinking, there’s gotta be someone I know coming through, which makes me wonder in a serious way if publishers, editors, publicists, and morning-show bookers go somewhere else instead of here? I hope not. I’ve heard enough stories to know that you don’t want to go there. Are you laughing now, Dot? How many times did you say Don’t go there, Pat, and I had no idea where you didn’t want me to go. We’d go round and round about the meanings of phrases and words, as though we were the experts. Maybe we were. About some things. Here’s a list. You can add to it if you wish.

  Pat and Dottie’s Areas of Expertise

  The American South

  Hush puppies

  Whiskey

  Peanut butter balls and divinity candy

  Candy apples

  Vodka

  Boiled peanuts

  Po boy sandwiches

  Hash brown potatoes

  Gingham fabric, Florsheim shoes, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

  (Well, for you, the Charleston Post and Courier. Beyond newspapers, you fancied McCall’s magazine and Life. You remember Life. The big magazine when we were kids. The one the size of a turkey platter? I don’t know how it fit in the mailman’s bag. Did it? Did he carry it separately? Must have. Remember the pictures? You’d open those big, lush pages and find photographs so huge you could walk into them. You remember.) Back to the list.

  Chryslers and Oldsmobiles and Fords

  Cornbread

  When men wore hats and women wore them, too. Hell, when everybody wore a hat when they left the house, including the children.

  Gardenias

  Magnolia leaves at Christmas (the dried ones)

  I don’t know if I ever told you, my mother made her own marshmallows. Who does that? Why do that? Only Southern women would figure out how to make a marshmallow and then spend the rest of their lives making a better one than the woman down the street. I don’t know why it surprises me. They are crafty. They knit everything from bikinis to toilet paper holders shaped like mint green top hats.

  It’s like the Sicilians down our way. They put up thousands of jars of tomatoes every August, even though a can of crushed and peeled tomatoes is cheap. Is the labor involved in crushing fifty bushels and cooking them on a hot stove and pouring them into mason jars that you’ve spent hours sterilizing commensurate to the low cost of a single can? Don’t know. Sometimes I get to thinking here.

  Love ya, Pat

  * * *

  To: DBF

  From: PC

  Dot, heard you banging your head against th
e wall in your house in New Jersey. Enough with that. Getting a movie adaptation of your book is not the little piece of heaven you hope it will be. Sometimes they make bad movies of good books, and sometimes they make great movies of crap books, and sometimes they just steal your title and make a Porno. So, go figure and don’t get yourself wrapped up in Hollywood.

  Take your head off that vintage Schumacher wallpaper, because if you keep banging your head, you will ruin the rose trellis design and then you’ll really hate yourself, more than you would if you never see a film adaptation of your books. Sit down. Listen to your old friend.

  Art is not what it used to be, and it never is what it can be.

  You are living in the world that produces too much of everything. There is too much to read, see, and do. The current state of art down below is a lot like the Mighty Cuyahoga in 1910 when they were dumping all manner of industrial waste into the river from the factory that made snow tires. The river became so infested with junk that it began to look like a burial ground instead of a waterway. They cleaned it up. They knew that beauty cannot thrive in clutter.

  Clear your head.

  Fight for your stories, but don’t expect anything beyond that feeling you get when you hold that book in your hands for the first time. You know what I’m talking about. You lift your latest novel out of the box and you can smell the ink and the glue. A sense of accomplishment washes over you, and you take it in, only to have that pleasure killed off when some jackal on Amazon gives it a one-star review. A year of work reduced to one star by a person who cannot spell your name or confuses you with another author with three names and reviews her title and not yours. But don’t fret about that either. Whether you’re getting a lousy review, or assigned one accidentally, they don’t really matter. Besides, there are many more readers who love you and your books than don’t.

  Be grateful.

  There will always be a place for you on the shelf called New Releases. It’s an honor to be there, and you know that. That will have to be enough, because, old friend, it is enough. You loved every book you wrote, whether it did well or not. Don’t live in the light of past glory. We can’t go back, and there’s a good reason for that. We shouldn’t go back. We have to work with what we have in the moment that it lives.

  The present is always better than the past.

  You can count on the present because you’re living in it, while the past is always under rewrite, and therefore open to re-interpretation, which isn’t good for anybody.

  Trust your librarian and your local bookseller.

  There was a time when there was a library where you borrowed books and a bookstore where you purchased books and that was that. The bookstore curated the new releases and the librarians chose from a catalog and bought the books they believed their patrons would read and enjoy. Curation is gone, replaced with online stores where you can buy anything you want, any hour of the day, and have it delivered. Deliveries include chili dogs, a sack of kitty litter, or the latest novel.

  I wondered what would happen to art when it was available 24/7, and now you know.

  Love ya, Pat

  * * *

  To: DBF

  From: PC

  Hey, Dot. I heard you calling. What are you doing in the hospital? I just saw a tube and figured you were in for something. I hope you didn’t go to all that trouble for a facelift. You don’t need one! Not yet. That was a joke, sister. Men don’t notice them by the way. We are missing the gene that identifies the results of plastic surgery. Don’t know why that is true. Cassandra will see a woman walking toward us, back when I was there and could walk, and she’d say under her breath: new lips or forehead like an ice rink or Law me, she’s so pulled she’ll have to change her name to Taffy. But I never saw any of that.

  When a woman walked by, I only saw the pluses and never the minuses. I saw something flutter, something move, heard a laugh, a light womanly laugh, watch her hand move like a feather through the air, saw a dainty foot, a pretty leg, a big smile, small ears. I don’t know what all I saw, but it thrilled me. I saw everything when I looked at a woman. Everything good. Everything beautiful, I hate that word, it’s so worn out with meaning from being used to describe rugs, flowers, women, and whatever else goes by that people don’t seem to have a word for.

  How is it we don’t create new words when we see something that astonishes us? Why don’t we make up new words for the things that make us feel new? I would call my wife in the morning . . . well, I would say she looks Sharoshola. She looks Sharoshola—a new English word that means tousled and down-right gorgeous. I’ll tell you what they don’t have a new word for, old friend. They don’t have a new word for dead. Dead is gone, over, finished, done. Gone and done do not rhyme so don’t write a poem with them. Dead is final. But it doesn’t feel it. Don’t know how to tell you that there’s no bad news from here. But whatever you’re doing, for whatever reason you’re in the hospital, get the hell out of there as soon as you can. If you’ve got a vein, they’ve got a tube for it. And they will insert that tube. So get the hell out of there. Take it from me. You can skip that step called pain in the life journey. Everyone should. Getting sick is not worth the time, keeps you from doing the things you want to do or should be doing.

  Love ya, Pat

  * * *

  To: DBF

  From: PC

  I haven’t heard from you, Dot. Where are you? I understand you’re busy. You probably got out of the hospital and took that new face and went to a Writer’s Conference somewhere fancy. Beware of those conferences, getting drunk with other authors will only lead to their shame and your blame. Always leave the party early, otherwise you’ll end up with the bill. Are you laughing now? You never cared about the bill, hell, neither did I. I always wondered about people who dodged the tab, how much are they saving? The cost of a Diet Coke and a highball? Everybody knows they don’t want to pay the bill when they don’t pick up a check, which makes them ungenerous, and who wants to be that at three a.m. when the bar is closing? Not a good look as you used to say. I am listening for you, expecting some little shimmer of your good self, my friend, wondering if you and Peter and the kids are all right—and wondering, too, if you’ve heard from Cassandra? She was always a toughie, even though she was born in a peppermint wrapper—but I know things are not easy for her on that side, and I’m wondering if you know something? Well, I’ll just wait to hear from you.

  Love ya, Pat

  * * *

  To: DBF

  From: PC

  I still haven’t heard from you, Dot. I see your world changing from summer to fall, but you’re not in it. This can only mean one thing. Something went wrong with the facelift. That’s a joke. You must have been sick. I wanted to explain a couple of things to you before you get here. You may have wondered about the postcards. You may be curious how I got through to you.

  You know those wet squares of paper you see on the sidewalk, the ones where the words are blurry from the rain? That’s a postcard from me. The book you pick up off the shelf and there’s a paragraph underlined, something about Anacondas in the wild? That, too, is me. The receipt you saved from a store you don’t remember going into that has a note scrawled on the backside that says soft shell crabs? That’s also me. I won’t leave them around for you any longer. You must be en route on your new journey. I am here as it unrolls before you in whatever form it takes. Trust you are not alone. Take it from someone who has settled into his knowingness as you are about to settle into yours.

  There’s a dive bar in heaven called Halo where writers go. You’d think that it was called Halo in honor of the angels that fly overhead in flocks of such congestion that it reminds some of us souls of the old flight pattern over La Guardia Airport. Actually, the bar was named by Somerset Maugham, who frequented the joint and would say Hello (Halo in his British accent) to the new arrivals.

  The name stuck even after Somerset moved on to another realm. I’ve already spent a chunk of my initial eternity in the
bar. I’m comfortable enough to remain here awhile longer until I figure out my next step. Besides, it’s such an interesting collection of souls, I find the clientele irresistible. All the questions that had dogged me for my entire working life have been answered one by one in the ebb and flow of the conversation as souls come and go. I have met my idols, most of them, and a few authors I liked in passing back on earth, I have learned to love full out and let go of all prejudices and judgments I might have had against our fellow writers. I have learned to expand my thoughts and open myself up to ideas I refused to entertain in your realm. To that end, I am embracing poetry. I am holding out to meet the poets, because I’ve always admired them.

  Poets don’t live on advances, nor do their poetry collections sell as briskly as a hot novel might. I’ve learned that I have a deep admiration and affection for those who created art for art’s sake. Wasn’t that the point of creativity? To insist, despite all obstacles, to proceed with the words, evocative and emotional, despite impediments? To write the poem knowing it may never be read? To hide the poems in the wall knowing they will never be found, but feeling that sense of fulfillment from writing it anyhow?

  I’m hoping to chat with Emily Dickinson. There’s a rumor that Emily will eventually show her soul, but so far she hasn’t made it to Halo. The bartender keeps Miss Dickinson’s favorite blackberry brandy on the shelf just in case. Even though you will never receive this postcard, I will sign off and wait for you.