Or Not to Be (6 page)

“And bacon, please.” Eddie took my
water-puffy hands in his strong ones and pulled me up into his arms. Still a
perfect fit. My head on his chest. His arms around my weeble body. That’s when
my water broke in a flood, all over the hardwood floor and Eddie’s favorite
slippers.

Three hours later we checked into the
hospital. I don’t remember much about that part. The labor pains lived up to their
name after the great flood. I went into my head. Eddie took care of everything
else.

My labor lasted all day long, but the
delivery was quick. I pushed for less than an hour once they let me.

“Eddie, Eddie!” I gasped his name whenever
I came up for air between the vice-grip contractions. He was right beside me.
We were in constant contact. His hands were on me, holding me, supporting me,
helping me bring our baby into the world. I had a vague memory of swearing at
him and throwing a cup of ice at his head. No. Impossible. That couldn’t have
happened. He was the center of my world.

“What? What do you need, Anna?” he
whispered in my ear.

“Just don’t let go, okay?”

“I gotcha, girl. You know I do.”

And I was pulled again over the cliff, in
the pain, in my head, all alone but gripping this strong hand that let me
squeeze the blood out of it. The song in my head was a verse from Simon and
Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock.” Eddie sang along, off-key, in my ear. My baby tried
to be born.

I tried to push him out. The doctor was
doing something down there, stretching me, telling me to push.

NOW
.

I did. I ripped in half with the pain of
that push. Eddie stopped singing and said, “Open your eyes, Anna. Don’t miss
it.” I opened my eyes and saw our baby’s head, bald and bloody, squished nose
in profile.

The doctor said, “One or two more good
pushes, Anna, and we’ll see if you have a son or daughter.”

Good
idea, I thought. Let’s get this party started.

I
pushed.

I
pushed.

I
pushed with all of the clenched muscles of my entire body. And it worked.

Our baby slipped
out, and Eddie’s voice proclaimed to the world, “He’s a
girl
!”

“He
is
?” I looked for confirmation
and saw it was true. We had a daughter. A tiny, six-pound wiggly girl whom we’d
called “him” for nine months. We named her Bethany in homage to Eddie’s
favorite grandmother Elizabeth.

It was love at
first sight for both of us, but our sweet baby girl disrupted the equilibrium
of the force field of our relationship. Instead of circling each other, Eddie
and I orbited our daughter like planets around the sun.

8

On a quiet country road
, I was deep inside my own thoughts. A Sarah McLachlan
song was playing on repeat in my mind to the thudding rhythm of my sneakers
pounding the road. Half a year before I died, I was healthy and strong, happy
and running my long loop. The cell phone Eddie made me carry was thudding
against my hip and ringing in the hand-stitched pocket of my shorts.

“Anna! You all right? You’ve been gone a
long time.” Eddie’s nagging, worried voice in my ear shattered my running zone.
The man had a ridiculous fear for my safety. He carried all of our worry. I
feared nothing.

“Eddie,
huff
, I’m fine—
huff, huff
—be home in twenty minutes.” Without breaking my
stride, I squeezed the phone back into the tiny pocket.

It rang again.

“Eddie! I’m fine!”
I yelled into it.

“Hi, Annabella!” Not Eddie this time. It
was my sister.

“’Chelle—
huff
—I’ll
call you later. Can’t talk now—
huff
—I’m
running.”

“I’m running late,
too. God, the traffic is horrible. I just got out of a stupid faculty meeting.
You would not
believe
the things these teachers do!
One guy wants help removing a picture of himself that a student posted online.
Of course, they don’t tell us the whole story. After half an hour of
complaining and whining, it finally comes out—from his principal—that he’s been
working on retrieving the picture for more than a week and has failed. The
teacher wants to take legal action.”

Huff
.
“Michelle?”

“Anyway, turns out the picture was taken
at Field Day. To make a long story short, it was ninety-five degrees and humid
as hell. This teacher is one giant man. He was dripping and sweated right
through his clothes and underwear. And when he tried to change into a dry shirt
and was bent over the trunk of his car, some smartass kid took his
picture—plumber’s crack at full moon!” She takes a break to cackle.

Huff
. “Michelle? I can’t hold my arm up while I’m
running.”
Huff
.

“Yeah, I gotta run, too. There’s a cop.
Can’t be on a cell phone while I’m driving and all that crap. Love you. ’Bye.”
And she clicked off.

| | | |

Mom’s voice interrupts my
thoughts
and somehow magically redirects
me from the past to the present. “Now your sister is on her way to your house.
Look at her. She’s a mess.”

We watch together. Michelle is driving alone
from Virginia, clothes and a pile of shampoo, shoes, and Pop-Tarts tossed into
the backseat in her rush to leave. Wadded tissues form a heap on the passenger
seat. My little sister is not looking good.

Gotta hurry. Gotta get there fast. Get
to those kids.

Damn it, Anna. Why’d you go and die,
girl? What will we do without you? Who can I call every other minute?

“Mom, are you
still here? How can I hear Michelle and everyone when they’re thinking?”

“The same way you
hear me thinking. You are linked. You can listen to the people you love.”

“Why don’t they
hear me?”

“They don’t know
they can.”

A Michelle snort.
There’s a copper, hiding. Idiot thinks we can’t see
the big butt of his car.
She thumbs her nose at him as she hits her brakes.
I’m not on my cell phone, copper.
She starts to sob.
I would be if I had a sister to call.

Damn it, Anna.

She grabs a wad of used tissues and blows
her nose with a loud honk. She wipes her eyes and tosses the wet blob over her
shoulder.

Something was up with them. Anna hasn’t
been happy lately. Wouldn’t return my calls. Hadn’t told her funny Eddie
stories that always hurt a little. Torturing her single sister with all her
lovey-husband stories—you’d think a girl as smart as Anna would have a clue
about anyone but herself.

The hell with the cop.
She hits the gas.
I’m speeding. I’m passing every car on this effing
road. I need to hug Bethy and crawl under the bed with my Joey. Those poor
kids. Eddie sounded bad. Probably nothing I can do for him, though.

| | | |

Joey hides under his bed
again with his stuffed black bear, as old as he is
and wearing thin. I’ve been dead twenty-four hours, and my house is still and
hollow without me. The sound of the ignored television echoes up from
downstairs.

“How’d we get here, Mom?” I ask.

“You did it this time,” she says.

“Not intentionally. That’s how it’s been
for me so far. I just jump around.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll develop better
control. Just focus on your son. If you brought us here, you need to be with
him.”

Joey’s eyes are closed, but he’s not
napping. His scrunched eyebrows give him away. His mouth is pulled firmly into
a scowl. He is definitely thinking, and I can hear him.

I helped Daddy make a good list before
he went to the store. I asked for Fruity Pebbles. Mommy always makes me eat Wheaties
or Cheerios or a bagel, but Daddy might let me have good cereal for breakfast.
He just nodded and wrote it on the list. I don’t know why Daddy even went to
the store. Amy and Miss Evelyn and all the ladies from church, and even mean
old Mrs. Smithers, all brought over pies and smelly casseroles today.

Daddy wanted Bethany to go with him.
I’m the only one who knows where all the stuff is, and he didn’t even ask me to
come. Daddy might get lost in that big store all alone.

Good thing Bethy didn’t go—her face is
all red and blotchy, and her hair is all messy, too. If Mommy sees her like
that she’ll make her brush her hair. Bethany told Daddy she had to finish
cleaning up the kitchen. It was already clean, and now she’s sitting on the
swing.

I think she just didn’t want to go.
Mommy calls that making excuses.

Joey lies on his
back in the semidarkness under the bed, eyes still closed in concentration.
He’s thinking about food. Any food sounds good. His belly grumbles.

I
hope Daddy hurries up with my Fruity Pebbles.

His eyes pop open when he hears noise
outside. The thump of a car door. The front door squeaks and Michelle comes in,
calling, “Joey!” He doesn’t come out from under the bed. Instead, he grins and
waits. Aunt Michelle is almost as good as Fruity Pebbles.

My Joey loves my sister because she’s fun
and funny. Knowing Michelle is with my family, in my place, gives me some
relief. She’ll take over for Bethany, feed Eddie, and hug Joey. She’ll fill my
empty spot for a while.

Michelle drops her pile of stuff in the
foyer and takes the stairs two at a time and enters Joey’s bedroom humming
Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” She lies down in a pile of crumbs by the bed and
lifts the edge of the blanket to peek under. She spills a shaft of light under
his bed, and Joey smiles at her, reaches out his hand to touch her face. Still
humming, she lays a kiss on his palm and crawls under the bed with him. She
pulls my boy into her arms.

As she kisses his soft, dirty cheeks, he
giggles and offers her his last Oreo, which she stuffs in her mouth. After a
few minutes of hugging, Michelle gets Joey to snuggle in the covers on the bed
with her. She grabs the top book in the stack by his bed and finds the bookmark
holding our page from the last night I ever read Joey to sleep—the night before
I died. That was just two days ago, but is feels like a lifetime has passed.
How long is a lifetime, anyway? Mine passed like a blink, just like the first
day of my death.

While Michelle reads about the adventures
of Bigwig, Hazel, and Fiver, Joey falls into a deep sleep in her arms. Michelle
drops the book and cries while she cradles my sleeping son.

| | | |

“
Better now,
Anna
?” my mother asks.

“I’m relieved that Michelle has my boy and
he’s not all alone under that bed waiting for me anymore.”

“Good. Then you can start to consider your
situation. Take some time. Look around on your own. Just call me if you get
lost or need a nudge back.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Watch your life. Watch your family for as
long as you like. Go back and remember the good and bad. There is no reason to
hurry here on the dead side. Just relax and absorb as much as you can.”

As suddenly as my mom appeared, she
leaves, and I know for certain I’m alone once again.

Look around. Watch my life. I can do that,
I think, but I can’t control it. I don’t know how or why, but I’m pulled back
to Eddie.

9

“
I wonder
if the dogs took away a part of my mind,” I said to Eddie. He was driving the
van. Behind us, six-month-old Joey snoozed in his car seat. We were on our way,
as a family, to pick up Bethany from her first middle school dance.

That morning when I ran, I was chased by a
small but intense dog. I stopped running, but I wasn’t scared like when I was a
little girl. My distress was comprised mainly of annoyance. I charged at the
dog, and it backed away.