Being Dead (15 page)

The morning dragged forever. She planned to go someplace where she could be alone during her lunch break—one of the unattended displays—to talk to John one last time. And that was all that kept her going. She wouldn't let herself consider the possibility that he might be able to come to her only in the tavern.

Her loom thumped noisily, counterpoint to the whirring of Barb's spinning wheel. If she could have ripped her throbbing head off her body, she would have. Her hands shook as she poured three pills into her hand—only one more than she was supposed to take—and swallowed them without water. When she couldn't get that damn childproof cap back on, she flung it across the room. Barb watched her anxiously, but Emily pretended not to notice. Neither spoke, except to the tourists.

Four hours till lunch.

Three and a half hours.

Three hours and twenty minutes.

Three hours.

Drake came in at two hours and forty-five minutes while she was trying to demonstrate, for a family who didn't speak English, how to card wool. He gave her one of his baleful looks, but he wasn't going to say anything in front of the visitors. After about two minutes of that, Emily threw the shuttle across the room, called Drake a flatulent asshole, and strode out of the log cabin.

She left him to explain
that
to the family and went to the Shaker meetinghouse, the closest building that didn't have a regular attendant.

"John!" she called. She was shaking, afraid he couldn't hear her call, except in the tavern.

But, "Yes," he said. He was sitting on the back of one of the benches in the men's half of the room, his feet up on the pew behind.

She started to run up the aisle to him, then remembered at the last moment. She stopped, helpless, and sank to her knees and began to cry.

"Emily." He scrambled down and rushed to her, and caught himself just in time, a hand upraised just short of brushing the tear-dampened hair from her face.

"This is the last day," she said between sobs. "The museum closes in another few hours, and it won't open again until spring, and I won't be able to come here, and you won't be able to come out." Miserable, she finished, "I'll never last through the winter."

He crouched before her. "Oh, Emily," he sighed. "You will."

She realized he thought she was speaking figuratively. "I'm dying," she said. Did they know about cancer in the 1700s? They might well have called it something else. "I have a disease of the brain. That's probably"—she wasn't even sure how she meant this—"why I can see you."

He reached for her, unable to hold her but sending icicles through her shoulder where his hand passed through. "Emily," he said. "I'm so sorry."

"I need to know," she said, because otherwise—ha!—the curiosity would kill her. No, it was more than curiosity; it was wanting the world to be an orderly place. She asked, "Who shot you?"

John sighed. "A jealous husband."

Well, that was orderly, even if not quite the order she had envisioned. Everything fell into place. The world made sense after all. It was her turn to say, "Oh, John, I'm sorry."

He had his arms wrapped tight around himself. "You don't understand," he said. "I was mistaken for someone else. I was killed by mistake."

Very slowly, very carefully, Emily put her arms around him. It was like being in a lake, like trying to hold on to a cold current. For a few seconds, they managed it. Then her hand slipped through his neck, and his through her back, and they were left sitting on their heels, both of them shivering.

Behind her the door to the meetinghouse flew open. She expected John to disappear the way he had other times, but he didn't.

Behind her, her father's voice said, "Jeez, Em."

"See why I called you?" she heard Drake say. "She's been like this all weekend—talking to herself, leaving fires unattended, popping pills."

"Don't you see him?" Emily asked them, looking directly at John.

"Emily, it's all right," her father said. He took her by the shoulders and turned her around. "It's probably just the medicine. We'll get your medications balanced properly—"

She craned around and saw that John was gone. "Johnl" she called. "Come back!"

Her father was struggling out of his coat, and he got it around her shoulders. "It's her medication," he explained to Drake. "She's under a doctor's care, but there must be something wrong with the mix she's taking..." He was trying to rub warmth into her hands. "Here"—he got her to her feet—"all right now?"

"Yes," she said. Then she pushed her father into Drake, and she fled, her father's coat falling to the floor behind her.

"Emily!" she heard her father yell.

She ran across the commons, past the Ballston Spa Tavern, into the woods behind—the woods slated for great things by the board of trustees, things she knew she would never/see.

The trees in the woods were thick enough to hide her, even with most of their leaves already on the ground. Emily fought through the underbrush, slid down a slope of rocks and tree stumps, followed a frozen stream ever deeper into the woods.

I'll cross the stream,
she thought, but of course the ice was just a thin crust in October, and she went right through, so that she slipped and landed sitting in the icy water. She picked herself up and fled farther into the woods until she lost all sense of time and direction. Her wet skirt stiffened frostily, chafing against her legs.

"Emily!" she heard off and on. Her father. Norm. Strangers on bullhorns. But they were feint, distant.

Still, she kept on running, to put more distance between diem. Her plan was to wait until nighty then return to the tavern, hoping they'd give up before she would. Once she got warm, once she rested, she'd be able to think what to do next. She tripped and fell to her knees and stayed there, her teeth chattering. She'd get up as soon as she got enough energy.

But she was too tired, and she put her head down on a pile of dry leaves. She hadn't smelled leaves—really smelled them—since she'd been seven or eight. She'd forgotten how wonderful they smelled. She closed her eyes, just for a minute, just to get her strength back.

"Emily," she heard, a gentle but insistent whisper near her ear, and she groaned. "Emily, you have to go back before it's too late."

"Ifs too late already," she whispered back. "I can't move. I've frozen to the ground."

Hands grasped her shoulders, strong, solid hands that forced her to sit up, that held her close, rocking her until finally, finally, she was warm again.

They didn't find her body till spring.

N
EW
Y
ORK,
O
CTOBER
1930

Until the part where I died, my day had been going pretty well.

I'd sold all but one of my papers, I'd earned seventy-five cents in tips, and all I needed was to sell that last paper and I could go home. Then along came this swell—in suit and hat, with a briefcase—and he handed me a dollar bill.

At least thaf's what I thought it was at first. I was digging into my pocket to get him the change when I took a closer look and saw it was a twenty. I was going to ask him if he was crazy—like I'd have enough money to make change for a twenty—but when I looked up, he was already halfway down the block.

"Mister!" I called after him. "Hey, mister!"

He never even slowed down. I had to run after him, and when I caught up and told him he'd given me a twenty and I didn't have near enough to give him his change, he looked at me like I was talking Chinese.

"It's all gone," he told me in this hollow distracted voice. "All of it."

"Yeah," I said. Banks and businesses had been failing since the stock market had crashed back in October last year. The technical term was
depression.
But even as I tried to hand this guy back his twenty, he started walking again. Me, if I learned that I'd just lost all my money, the last thing I'd do with what I had left was tip a newsboy nineteen dollars and ninety-three cents for the newspaper that told me about it.

But I wasn't going to knock him down and
force
him to take his money. "Are you sure?" I yelled after him, because my mother would fret when she saw how much extra I had, demanding of me: "You're not turning into a crook, are you?" My mother had a fierce worry of her kids turning into crooks, seeing as we didn't have a father to keep us straight. But the guy kept walking, and even my mother would have to admit I'd tried.

So I was headed home—with an extra twenty dollars beyond my seventy-five cents in tips and what I'd have to pay DeMarco for the next edition. I was feeling real pleased with myself but not so cocky that I wasn't keeping an eye out. Some of the bigger boys think that jumping a newsboy is easy pickings. And I was also keeping a lookout on the street because in New York people always drive like crazy, and that's not even counting that yesterday's paper told about some guy who'd lost everything and figured life wasn't worth living anymore and had run his fancy car into a light pole.

So there I was, looking left and right on the sidewalk for toughs, and on the street for crazy drivers, checking out what was in front of me, and being alert to what was going on behind. The one direction I didn't think to look was up.

I heard a long drawn-out yell, and I had time to look up and see a guy above me, who seemed to be trying to claw his way back up the air to whatever window or roof top he was felling from. Which left him aimed rear-end-first at me.

And it was a big rear end.

I pick myself up off the sidewalk. There isn't any "Oh! I wonder what happened," or "Who could that possibly be lying on the sidewalk looking so much like me?"

My momma didn't raise no dummies.

I know right away that I'm dead.

There's a guy that looks to be about two hundred and fifty pounds lying on top of me, and he's dead, too. Even though I can see him lying there motionless on the sidewalk, at the same time I can see him sitting up, shaking his head as though to clear it "Is it too late to change my mind?" he asks. His sitting-up self's mouth moves. His other self continues to lie there. He looks like a double exposure, like a picture where someone forgot to advance the film. I must look the same, lying on the sidewalk beneath him, standing on the sidewalk several feet away, watching.

From somewhere else—from all around us and from inside us—a Voice says, "Welcome, Johnny. Welcome, Stewart."

The air is sparkly, the way it is sometimes when there's a sunny morning after the first snowfall of the year. Not that there's snow—not in October—or sun, either, for that matter. There usually isn't. We're talking New York here. But the sky is as bright and blue as some kid's Crayola drawing, and even though people are screaming and pointing and beginning to gather around, none of that bothers me, because the world is just so peaceful and beautiful.

The Voice says, "Welcome home." It's a nice voice. It's a voice like one of those classy radio announcers, friendly • and calming and soothing. Sort of like Lowell Thomas, only not so full of himself.

Even though there's just die Voice, I have the impression of arms held wide to welcome me.

Stewart—I'm assuming the fat guy's name is Stewart, since the Voice is right about me being Johnny—Stewart has to elbow his way out from die crowd of people ringing around where our bodies are. Though one or two of them glance around at his passing, looking momentarily puzzled, most of diem seem unaware of him.

"Me, too?" Stewart asks. "Am I allowed to come, too? Even though ... I ... you know..."

The Voice finishes for him, "Jumped. Yes. All who wish to come may."

This is a nice thought in theory, but I can't help but look at Stewart in a new light "You
jumped?
" I ask.

Stewart hesitates, as though worried this might be some kind of test "I changed my mind," he says, "halfway down."

"You landed on me," I protest.

"Sorry," Stewart says.

"
'Sorry'?
" I repeat. "You jump out a window, flatten me,
kill
me, and all you have to say for yourself is 'Sorry'?"

Stewart still looks like he thinks this is a test. "I'm very sorry?" He phrases it like a question, like he's wondering if
that
is the answer that will satisfy me.

The Voice takes Stewart's side. The Voice says, "Mistakes in judgment happen."

I cross my arms over my chest and glare at Stewart.

"I'd lost all my money," Stewart tells me.

"Yeah?" My mother and me, we keep our money in an old jar under a bunch of towels in the closet—all twelve dollars and thirty-five cents of it—so there won't be any losing that, unless somebody breaks in and steals it.

The Voice says, "All that is over now. You are coming home, where there is no money, no pain. This is what you were created for."

And I know the Voice is right—I have a sense of a place more wonderful than Coney Island, better than talkies at the movies, more glorious than Christmas morning when someone you love is about to open the present you got for them that you know is the one thing they want most in the world.

But even with all that, I remember the extra twenty dollars in my pocket. Sure.
Now
money doesn't count My family, which is me and my mother and my little sister, Rosie, we never had any money, even before my dad decided to go back to Ireland three years ago—from where he was supposed to send back for us, but he must of forgot. I'd always figured we weren't likely to ever get any money, and I just couldn't see that things were going to be all that different, depression or not. Then, in one moment I get as much money as my mother has been able to save in three years.

And the next moment, Stewart happens.

I find myself muttering, "It isn't fair."

"There, there," the Voice says soothingly.

"It isn't fair," I repeat.

The Voice waits. I just stand there thinking I didn't make any choices, I didn't make any mistakes—except for not looking up, of course.

"Are you saying," the Voice asks me, but not unkindly, "that you'd rather stay here and sulk?"