by Linda Howard
If death turned out to be a lack of being rather than a lack of consciousness, well, then, that sucked.
“Where am I?” she snapped, unable to control her annoyance. She’d gone years without showing any temper at all, but here she was dead for just a few minutes and already she was losing control.
“You’re here,” a woman’s voice said, and abruptly Drea was there, in an actual place, though she had no idea where that place was. She stood on a rolling green lawn, with fragrant grass soft beneath her feet. The air was rich with the scents of spring, and at such a perfect temperature that it was neither warm nor chilly, but was almost indecipherable. She could hear the drone of bees, and see a bright kaleidoscope of flowers, huge beds of flowers, dotting the landscape. There were trees, and a blue sky dotted with white clouds, and a sun. There were buildings gleaming whitely in an indefinable distance. She saw all of that, and the absolute harmony of it was so beautiful it almost hurt to look around her. What she didn’t see, despite the voice she’d heard, were other people.
“I can’t see you,” she said.
“Ah, give it a moment. You came very fast. Give time a second to catch up.” With that, a woman came into view. She was about Drea’s age, slim and glowing with health, her dark hair pinned up in a haphazard way that looked completely charming. What was disconcerting was the way she came into view, because while she didn’t just appear out of nothing that was almost what happened. It was as if she had lifted aside a curtain and stepped onto a stage with Drea, parts of her becoming visible before the rest of her did.
Other people began appearing, also stepping onto the stage, and with every second that passed Drea saw more and more people, some of them there with her, others walking around and going about their own business. Nine more people joined her and the woman, standing in a loose circle around her. Were they real, or was her dying brain hallucinating? She didn’t know if she herself was real anymore. She touched herself, to see if she still had any substance or if all she had left was a sort of cellular memory of what she had been. To her surprise, though her sense of touch felt oddly off, she seemed to retain a physical body.
Another strange thing was the almost physical sense of…of peace; that was the only word that came to mind. Peace. She began to feel soothed and comforted, and safe.
Gradually she noticed something about the small group of people surrounding her. They all seemed to be her age, roughly thirty, all fit and healthy, all of them attractive even though she could see at least half of them had features that, before she died, she would have said weren’t attractive at all. Now they were. It was that simple. Her eye could make the distinction between attractive and unattractive, but her mind couldn’t. But her eyes didn’t operate independently of her brain, did they? Her brain, then, still had the ability to understand the difference between beauty and ugliness. Was her mind, then, somehow a thing separate from her brain? She had always thought mind and brain were the same thing, but…they weren’t.
Another thing. When she looked at these people, she could sense what they had been before, and that was confusing as all hell because some of them hadn’t been the same sex they were now. The woman who had spoken first was the least confusing, because her image was somehow more solid, less blurred by the overlay of a recent carnation, as if it had been a very long time since she had been anything other than exactly what she was now. Drea concentrated on her, because that gave her mind and eyes a rest. She was tired, and dealing with conflicting layers was more than she could handle right now.
“You see them,” the woman said, faint surprise in her tone, and by “them” she didn’t mean just the other people, but all their other layers of existence.
“Yeah,” said Drea. There was a wealth of communication going on here, things understood beyond what was actually said.
“So soon. You’re very observant.”
She’d had to be, to survive. All of her life she’d watched and studied, judging the best approach to take to get, first, what she needed to live—food. Later, when she was older, she’d studied people more deliberately, to decide how she might manipulate them to get what she wanted.
“Why is she here?” a man asked, not in a nasty tone but in true puzzlement. “She shouldn’t be here. Look at her.”
Drea looked down at herself, though she couldn’t honestly tell what she was wearing. Clothes, yes, but the details were so vague she knew only that they were there. Or, was he seeing the stains of her life layered over her the same way she saw their lives? The details of her life reeled through her mind and she saw them as a film of dirt overlying everything she was and did. Anger flared; she’d done the best she could to survive, and if he didn’t like it—
Just as abruptly as it had flared, her anger died and was replaced by a wash of shame. She’d never done the best she could do. She’d been very skilled at manipulating men to get what she wanted, she’d been a damn good lay, she’d used sex as a weapon, she’d lied, she’d stolen, and though she’d been very good at all of those things, none of her decisions had been based on the best of anything, except maybe the best of two bad choices. She had certainly never looked for a good choice.
She looked squarely at the man, reading him. He’d been an undertaker, she saw; he’d made a living from death, helping families through the grieving process by walking them through the traditional steps. He’d seen everything; he’d prepared bodies ranging in age from babies to the very old. He’d taken care of people whom hundreds had loved and mourned, and those no one had mourned. Death held no surprises for him, and no fear. Death was part of the natural order of things.
Because he’d seen so much, he’d long ago lost any blinders he might have had. He saw people as they were, not as they wished they had been.
He saw what she was, and he knew she was worthless. Worthless. Without worth. She had no excuses, no defense. She bowed her head, accepting that she shouldn’t be in this place of peace. She didn’t deserve it. Everything she’d ever done, everything she’d touched, was poisoned by her lack of regard for anyone except herself.
“She’s here for a reason,” said the woman, though she looked just as puzzled as the man. “Who brought her here?”
They all looked at one another, searching for answers, but there didn’t seem to be any. This was a…a tribunal of sorts, Drea thought, though not a formal one. Perhaps a better description was “gatekeeper.” Today was their turn at the gates, to guide people to their correct places.
Except this wasn’t her correct place, she thought miserably. She’d never done anything to earn this place. The ignominy of being unwelcome made her ache with embarrassment. This was the good place, and she didn’t belong here because she wasn’t good. Yet, she hadn’t come here on purpose. Maybe it was stupid of her, but she didn’t know how she’d gotten here, and she didn’t know how to leave.
It stood to reason that, if this was the good place and she didn’t belong here, then she belonged at the bad place. Perhaps the great nothing she’d expected was the bad place, the true end with no form of continuing life, but perhaps that was wishful thinking and there was a really bad place, the way the fire and brimstone preachers always said there was. She wasn’t religious, never had been. Even as a child she’d thought, Yeah, right, because her own life was proof that no compassionate spirit was holding her safe.
And maybe this wasn’t heaven the way it was traditionally imagined, maybe the setup wasn’t the same, but there was definitely goodness, and peace, so maybe this really was heaven. Or maybe this was the next life, and only those who had proven themselves worthy got to go on. For the others, like her, there was no going on, no continuity of her spirit or soul or mind.
She looked at her life again, weighed it, and found herself wanting.
“If you’ll show me how to leave,” she whispered wretchedly, “I will.”
“I would,” said the woman with some sympathy, “but someone evidently brought you here and we need to find out—”
“I did,” said a man, striding up to the group and joining the loose circle, with Drea standing in the middle. “Sorry to be late. Things happened very fast.”
The others turned to look at him. “Alban,” said the woman. “Yes, they did.” Drea wondered if Alban was his name, or a greeting. “There are extenuating circumstances?”
“There are,” he said gravely, but he smiled at Drea with piercing sweetness, and his serious dark eyes searched every detail of her face as if committing it to memory, or reaffirming some old memories.
She stared at him, knowing she’d never seen him before, but there was something so achingly familiar about him that she felt she should know him. Like everyone else there, he seemed to be about thirty, as if prime adulthood was the oldest anyone ever got. She looked for those layers that would tell her about him, but like the woman, he was mostly free of the blurring overlay of past lives. He drew her, somehow. She wanted to be close to him, wanted to touch him, yet there was nothing carnal about her longing. Pure love welled in her, poignant in its simplicity, and unconsciously she held out her hand to him.
He smiled and took her hand, and it was then that she knew. Beyond all doubt, beyond reason, she simply knew.
Tears welled in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks, but she smiled through them as she clung to her son’s hand, lifted it to her lips, brushed a gentle kiss across his knuckles. This was her son, and his name was Alban.
“Ah,” the woman said softly. “I see.”
Drea didn’t know what the woman saw, and in that moment didn’t care. After all these years of empty pain, she was holding her son’s hand and looking into his eyes and seeing the spirit that had once resided, however briefly, in her baby’s tiny form. This form wasn’t the one her baby would have had, these features weren’t what he would have grown into, but the essential part of the person…yes, this was her child, who had lived after all, just in another existence.
“She loved me,” Alban said, still smiling that perfect, radiant smile. “I could feel it, and you see how pure it was. When I was leaving her and coming back home, she tried to save me by offering her life in exchange.”
“That shit never works,” said the undertaker, in the weary, slightly cynical, but sympathetic tone of someone who had seen the same heartbreaking scene played out many times, always with the same result.
“Gregory!” said the woman in a tone that was both amused and an admonishment. To Drea she explained, “He hasn’t been here all that long, this time, so he—”
“Still remembers a lot,” Drea finished for her. She couldn’t help smiling, because Alban was smiling and holding her hand, and no matter what happened now everything was okay.
“She meant it,” said Alban, and he duplicated her action of a moment before, taking her hand to his lips and lightly kissing her fingers. “She was a child herself, just fifteen, but she loved me enough to sacrifice herself to save me. That is why I brought her here, because though there has been a lot of darkness in her life, there has also been love of the purest kind, and that deserves a second chance. I stand as witness.”
“I say yea,” said a blond woman, tall and willowy. “There was love, she wears it still. I stand as witness.”
“And I,” said a man. His layers said that he’d endured a lot, that his previous body had been bent with a painful deformity that had confined him to a wheelchair for most of his life, but here he was tall and strong and straight. “I stand as witness.”
Of the eleven people surrounding her, three thought there was no point in giving her a second chance, but even those three were free of any sense of malice. They simply thought she didn’t belong there. She didn’t resent them, because there was no room for resentment here even though there was evidently room for disagreement.
The woman stood there for a moment, her face lifted slightly to the sky, her eyes half closed as if she were listening to some song only she could hear. Then she smiled and turned to Drea. “Your mother-love, the purest form of love, has saved you,” she said. She touched Drea’s hand, the hand that still clung to Alban’s hand. “You’ve earned a second chance,” she said. “Now return, and don’t waste it.”
THE MEDIC WAS packing up his bag because there was nothing he could do, nothing that could have been done even if he’d been there when the accident happened. Blue and red and yellow lights strobed the highway above, while blindingly bright emergency lights had been rigged to shine down on the car. People were talking, radios were crackling, and the rumble of the wrecker’s engine gave a bass underlay to all the other sounds. Still, he heard something strange, something that made him stop and cock his head, listening.
“What?” asked his partner, pausing too, and looking around.
“I thought I heard something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like…sort of like this.” He demonstrated, taking a quick, shallow breath of air through his mouth.
“With all this noise, you heard something like that?”
“Yeah. Wait, there it was again. Didn’t you hear it?”
“Nope, not a thing.”
Frustrated, the medic looked around. He knew he’d heard something, twice, but what. It was coming from his left, from the direction of the wrecked car. Maybe a branch had finally snapped under the strain, or something.
They had covered the woman’s body with a blanket, draping it over her as best they could, given the fact that she was pinned to the seat with a damn tree through her chest. God, this one was bad. He tried not to let it get to him, but he knew this was one he wouldn’t forget. He didn’t want to look at the pitiful sight again, but, damn it, there was that sound for a third time and it was coming from that direction, for sure.
He stood, leaning closer to the wreckage, straining to hear. Yes, there it was. He heard it—and he saw the blanket move, as if the fabric was being sucked in a little, then blown out.
He froze, so astonished he literally couldn’t move for two long, very long seconds. “Shit!” he said explosively, when he could move again, when he could speak, and he whipped the blanket back from her face.
“What?” asked his partner again, leaping to his feet in alarm.
It was impossible. It was fucking impossible. Still, he pressed his fingers to the side of her neck, feeling for a pulse. And it was there, though he’d have sworn on his life that there hadn’t been one just minutes ago, but now he could feel the beat of life under his fingers, faint and rapid, but there.
“She’s alive!” he yelled. “God! Get a chopper in here! We got a live one!”
18
SHE SWAM IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. SHE PREFERRED “out,” because then she wasn’t aware of the pain. The pain was a bitch. It was the biggest bitch she’d ever tackled, and most of the time it kicked her ass. There were times, when the drugs were either wearing off enough to let her think but still keep the pain somewhat at bay, or when the drugs were taking hold with exactly the same result, when she knew that this was the price she had to pay for that second chance. There was no magic healing, no easy trip back to the land of the living. She had to grin and bear it, though there was no grinning and an awful lot of bearing.
Every decision she’d made in her life, every step she’d taken, had led her straight to that deserted road and the accident. That was the point at which she’d exited, and the point at which she’d been tossed back. No detours allowed, no shortcuts from dead to perfectly healed.
She remembered, with a clarity even the drugs couldn’t affect, every moment of what had happened after she died. Real time, though, was more hazy. Sometimes she would hear the nurses talking when they were in her ICU cubicle, the words drifting in and out of her brain and sometimes making sense, but just as often not. When she did understand the words, she felt a detached wonder: a tree stuck in her chest? That was ridiculous. But hadn’t she looked down and seen something like that? Her memory of that time before, or between, was fuzzy. Though if she’d had a tree stuck through
her, it would certainly explain how she felt physically, and why the agony in her chest seemed to expand to every cell of her body. She had no sense of time, of what day it was, or anything beyond the bed she was on and the unceasing battle she fought with the Great Bitch of Pain.
The nurses talked to her, too, explaining over and over what had happened to her, what they were doing, why they were doing it. She didn’t care, so long as they delivered the drugs that kept the Great Bitch at bay. Of course, there came a time—way too soon, by her way of thinking—when her surgeon ordered a decrease in the drugs. He wasn’t the one in agony, with his sternum cut in two, so what did he care? He was the one wielding the saw and scalpel, not the one on the receiving end. She had only a vague idea which of her visitors was the surgeon, but as her mind began clearing she memorized some particularly salty things she wanted to say to him. Okay, so he’d had to cut her sternum in half, but cutting her drugs in half? Bastard.
If everything she’d seen and experienced was supposed to make her sweet and forbearing now that she had a second chance, she’d already failed that test. She didn’t feel at all sweet or forbearing. She felt like someone who’d had her sternum sawed in two and her heart hauled out and used as a soccer ball.
As she gradually left the drug-induced fog, for a while she couldn’t think of anything except the Great Bitch and how she could get through the next hour, because without the full power of drugs she and the Bitch were constant companions. By then the nurses were getting her out of bed a couple of times a day, moving her to a chair so she could sit up—yeah, as if the hospital bed wouldn’t crank to a sitting position and she wouldn’t have to choke back the screams of agony every move brought. All they had to do was press a button and the head of the bed would rise and, hello, she could just lie there and ride it like a wave.
But no, she had to get up. She had to walk, if what she did could be called walking. She called it the hunched-over-in-agony shuffle, accomplished by sliding her feet instead of actually lifting them, and dealing with all the tubes and lines and needles and drains in her body, and trying to keep her ass covered at the same time because all she could wear—sort of wear—was one of those miserable cotton hospital gowns and it wasn’t even tied, just kind of draped over her with just one of her arms actually through a sleeve. What modesty she’d had was quickly abused; a hospital wasn’t the place for privacy, of any kind.
