Or Not to Be (33 page)

“No.”

“Was I alone when I died?”

“No.”

“Oh, all right, show me, Daddy.”

His ears perk up as he studies me with
intense black eyes. I stare back. Then I see the other dogs behind him. My
heart beats too fast. I sprint up the hill.

Dogs bark behind me. I run as fast as I
can. Fighting gravity. Wanting to live.

Loud barking. Blind fear.

I feel something rip into the back of my
leg. I fall hard and my head hits the pavement, and I tumble into a ditch
kicking wildly. My foot meets a muzzle with a satisfying crack. The barking
stops. I feel pain. And then there’s only nothing.

My body lies crumpled in the tall grass in
the muddy ditch by the side of the road. Blood is everywhere. Maybe I’m not all
the way dead yet. The dogs are gone. I feel blood on my leg, and my head hurts.
I go to sleep.

I hear a song. Billy Joel is singing to
me. I drift in and out of consciousness, and Billy continues to croon,
periodically floating me to the surface, loving me just the way I am. It is so
familiar. I know I’m supposed to do something when I hear this song, but I’m so
sleepy.

It gets annoying. The song won’t stop.
Somehow, I realize it’s my cell phone. Somehow I pull the bloody phone from the
pocket Eddie sewed into my shorts and find the green button.

Eddie’s voice in my ear pleads, “Anna?” He
sounds scared. Why is he scared?

“Don’t be scared, Eddie.”

He yells, “Anna! Where are you?”

“Running ... dogs ... on the hill ...”
Then I pass out again.

Eddie’s truck comes around the corner. He
jumps out and finds me in the ditch.

The air is still. So quiet. Eddie is
crying and holding me and saying, “Come back, Anna. Come back. Don’t listen to
that punk. Come back to me! Anna!” He is wailing.

The echo of “come back” rings in my ears.
Why didn’t I notice it until now?

“There’s always so much to listen to and
see and consider when you’re newly dead. It’s difficult, almost impossible, to
distinguish a single human voice through all of the turmoil. Especially when
you don’t want to hear it.” Daddy explains this as if he was telling me how to
change lanes.

“But, Daddy, this
was vital information! I needed to know how I died before I decided to depart!
I needed to know that
my
Eddie, not that young Eddie,
wanted
me back. That would’ve helped
so much. It’s not fair!”

“Yes, it is. Anna, you saw all you asked to see. You just
assumed Pizza Boy killed you. It’s over now, honey. Watch the rest of the
memorial service, and then you can find some peace.”

54

Eddie

The hospital was quiet
when I returned from my futile trip to the high
school. I skipped lunch and was making afternoon rounds when I got that dread
feeling again.

I found a phone and called the high school
like a paranoid fool, needing reassurance to calm my fear, to survive this
endless day.

“Yes, Dr. Wixim, everything here is fine.
No guns, but we have closed early because of the commotion. Didn’t Anna call
you? The kids were all upset and out of control. Parents started calling for
their kids to go home early. So we just gave up and cancelled classes for the
rest of today.” The secretary I almost puked on was more patient than I
deserved. The principal must be a genius to have found her for the front line.

I asked a colleague to finish my rounds
and left early, too. I got home that afternoon expecting and hoping to find
Anna reading on the swing or napping—her two favorite activities when she was
home alone. But she wasn’t there. Like a detective, I snooped around my own
house for clues of where my wife might be.

Her bag was by the back door, so she had
come home from school.

Her car was in the garage, so she didn’t
leave by car.

Her cell phone wasn’t in the charger and
also not in her purse, which I found in the kitchen. Interesting, where would
she go without her purse?

Then it occurred to me. I didn’t need to
figure out where she was. I could just call her cell phone. I dialed. No
answer. I left a message. “Anna? Call me back.” Two minutes later I dialed
again. No answer. I was pacing the kitchen while I dialed over and over, when I
noticed that Anna’s running shoes were missing from the shoe rack.

She was running. Where? I dialed again. It
was definitely ringing. Maybe she was ignoring it. Saw it was me and decided to
blow me off. I wasn’t exactly her favorite person these days. Please, Anna,
live through this day. Just a few more hours. Be so very careful.

I dialed again. And then it stopped
ringing. Did she answer? No sound.

I yelled, “Anna?” into the phone, helpless
and petrified. Where was she?

“Don’t be scared, Eddie.” Anna’s voice.
Weak. Far away.

“Anna! Where are you?”

“Running ... dogs ... on the hill ...” And
she was gone.

On the hill?

Oh. My. God. The dogs. The ones she was afraid
of.

I grabbed my keys and leaped into my truck
and drove the two miles to the hill where she told me she saw the dogs. I
turned the corner and screeched to a stop and jumped out of the truck.

A large German shepherd was pacing on a
driveway, looking across the road. I followed his gaze, and there she was.

My Anna.

Lying in a crooked heap.

Blood ran from a gash on her face. Her
hands and leg were covered in blood. So much blood. Too much blood for one
small woman to lose. Her life dangled by a thread that was snipped by a freak
accident. Dog bite meets head injury. Right on the edge of her space-time gap.

I pulled bandages from my medical bag and
applied pressure to the worst bleeding, which was coming from a bone-deep slash
in the back of her leg. The gash above her eye streamed blood steadily down her
lifeless face. Anna was unconscious. She didn’t even know I was there.

I checked her pulse. Weak.

Breathing. Slow.

She was fading fast.

I called 911.

Within minutes, a siren was coming. By
then she had stopped breathing, and I was performing CPR on my wife in a ditch
by the road. I was sobbing and yelling, over and over, “Come back, Anna. Come
back, Anna. Don’t listen to him, come back to me.” But she was gone. She didn’t
hear me. That damned twenty-year-old shithead!

The EMT technicians ran to us from the
ambulance and assessed her. I moved away and watched. They established what I
already knew. My Anna was gone. One of them looked up at me and asked, “We can
resuscitate? Intubate her? Try to hold her until we get back to the emergency
room and get some blood in her? Is that what you want?”

Is that what I wanted?

“Yes!” I said. A chance. Maybe it would
give her time to come back.

Anna, come back!

Then, I yelled, “No!” as he started the
tube down her throat. “No!”

If they resuscitated and succeeded in
bringing her matter, her body, back to life, it would be without her
antimatter. No soul. In a coma, indefinitely. And from what I understood from
my deaths, and from what I knew from working with dying children, if my wife
came back it would not be in a few days or weeks to a comatose body. If my Anna
came back, it would be to her body before she died. When I first arrived, she
was still breathing. That was the time she could return to.

I thought hard. Was there a hitch? Did
time stutter while I was trying to breathe life back into her? I thought so.
The disastrous whirl of dogs barking, me crying, checking her pulse, Anna
leaving, performing CPR—it was all in slow motion, then fast-forward, then
rewind. Discontinuous time. A hitch for sure. I convinced myself. Yes, there
was a glorious, hope-inducing hitch. There was nothing left for me to do but
wait.

I remembered watching my parents after I
died when I was six. I watched almost the whole next day pass by without me
there, and then I came back and
they all pulled
back to the moment of my death. Indeed, the family never seemed to have any
inkling that my death had occurred at all. So I knew Anna could still come
back. She could control time and pop back in, and I’d forget any of this ever
happened.

For the next three days, I waited in
agony. I waited for her to choose me. I waited to go back to November eleventh
and get my Anna back.

I remembered that smartass twenty-year-old Ed, that
know-it-all punk who watched my life with an air of superiority. He judged my
existence and my life with Anna and told her to stay away. To stay dead. I, in
some other parallel universe, another layer of time, had convinced my Anna not
to come back. I could ache with every atom in my being for her to return to
life, to return to me, but my antimatter told her not to.

55

Anna

My poor, sweet Eddie
stands at the podium, trying to compose himself and
continue speaking. He holds his head up and speaks in his calm bedside voice,
as though to himself.

“The last time I spoke to my wife, we
argued. I tried to keep her from going to work. I knew she should stay home.
Safe. With me. She refused.” Eddie draws in a deep breath before he confesses,
“Later that afternoon, I begged Anna to come back to me, and she refused. Again.

“On our first date, my wife Anna told me we would not be
seeing each other again. I had said something stupid about her hair and hurt
her feelings, and she milked me for a free steak dinner and intended to get
away, to never see me again.” He shakes his head and grins. “But, somehow, I
convinced her to take a walk with me. I won our first argument and lost our
last. On our first date, I even got a kiss. I was in love with Anna before she
knew me. I will be in love with her long after I die.

“How is it possible to love someone before
they know you? I can’t explain it to you. Not because I don’t know the answer,
but because you wouldn’t understand it. But that’s okay. You don’t need to
understand. I’m saying these things, in front of all of you today, but I’m not
saying them for you. Not for her friends, or her family, or even for me. No,
I’m saying all of this so Anna can hear me. I know she’s here with us. I know
she’s watching. I don’t just believe she is, or think she is. I know Anna is
here.

“Let me tell you
some things about Anna and me. We had a good marriage. She was my favorite
person and best friend. Like most married people, we had problems. But unlike
normal people, our problems were cyclic, and I knew why they were happening.
Cyclic. Every year, at the same time, I would emotionally and physically
ache—knowing that Anna might die. Knowing precisely
when
Anna might die. This year I was right, and it
happened. But I could never explain to Anna why I was so sad and desperate, so
she invented all kinds of possible scenarios to explain what she called my
funk. She thought I stopped loving her. We fell apart. She fell apart, and I
didn’t help her stay together. I didn’t love her like I should, not enough or
well enough. I didn’t take care of her like I should have—like I promised I
always would. I know she was hurt by my behavior. But I was so sad and crippled
by the thought that she might leave me. I was overwhelmed. Helpless. Hopeless.

“People say, ‘Everyone will eventually
die.’ And ‘We can’t live in perpetual fear of death.’ I would answer that I
have no fear of my own death. I know that death is not unpleasant, and the
future of our souls, our antimatter, will be incredible. I dreaded how I could
live the rest of my life without my Anna, while knowing my greatest mistake was
not convincing her that I loved her, not encouraging her to live.

“Anna, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Then, Eddie loses all control. He leans
both hands on the podium and, elbows locked, he hangs his head and cries like a
baby.

Joey’s cleats go click-clack in the
weeping church as he walks up the three marble steps to his dad. Eddie hears
him and looks up as Joey takes his hand and leads him to his seat. Eddie walks
in a trance, and Joey is his guide.

I never realized we had guides in life.