Remember Me (9 page)

My mother and father went to talk to the nurse on duty while Jimmy stopped at a drinking fountain in the hallway leading to the examination rooms. I went with him. He didn't appear to be thirsty. He just ran the water up high for a few seconds, without leaning over for a sip, and then thrust his hands in his pockets and stared at the floor.

"Jimmy," I said. "Why won't you talk to me? Why won't you even look at me?"

He ignored me, and in desperation I reached out to grab his arm, to scream his name so loudly that they would hear it on the top floors of the building. But I choked on the word.

For an instant, my fingers appeared to go through the material of his sweatshirt. To go right into his arm. I recoiled in horror.

Jimmy rejoined my parents. The woman at the desk picked up a phone and requested a doctor somebody. The young

white-coated gentleman appeared within seconds; it seemed he had been waiting for us. I would have tried to say hello to him had I not still been in shock over my hands' newfound powers of penetration. He spoke quietly to my dad for a few seconds, and then we were off.

1 expected the doctor to lead us to one of the examination rooms, or perhaps to the critical care ward. But he immediately whisked us into an elevator and pushed the bottom button.

The doors rifled shut. My father turned to the guy in confusion.

"Why are we going down?" he asked.

"I told you, I'm just an intern," the young man said "Dr. Leeds is in charge of the case."

He added, almost ashamed, "I'd rather you saved your questions for him."

"But what's in the basement?" my father asked. And then, more reluctantly: "Is she all right?"

The intern spoke to the elevator wall. "Ask Dr. Leeds.'

Downstairs, we walked along a short, narrow hall that dead-ended in twin green metal doors. They opened from the inside just before we reached them. A white-haired man appeared and clasped my father's hand. He looked like a kindly old country doctor. I could imagine the twinkle in his eyes as he handed a little girl patient a lollipop and told her that if she took her medicine like a big girl, she would be outside and playing with her friends in no time. But now the doctor was not smiling.

The intern nodded and left.

The white and black letters on the doors said: MORGUE.

"Mr. and Mrs. Cooper," the elderly gentleman said.

"I'm Dr. Leeds. I'm afraid I have bad news for you."

"How is she?" my father asked. "Is she going to be all right?"

"No, she's not." Dr. Leeds let go of my father's hand and looked him straight in the eye.

"She's dead."

"Who's dead?" I asked.

It must have been a stupid question. The rest of my family knew the individual's name.

My father paled again, much worse than he had in the kitchen when he had picked up the phone.

My mother literally doubled over in grief. Jimmy had to grab her to keep her from passing out. I couldn't bear it. I had to turn away. When I looked back a few seconds later, my mother had somehow managed to straighten herself up, although she was crying openly now.

"I want to see her," she said.

Dr. Leeds looked concerned. "Later would be better."

"No," my mother said, wiping her damp cheek. "Now."

"Honey, please," my father said, reaching out to take her from Jimmy. My mother would have none of it.

"I'm seeing her!" she cried, brushing off both Jimmy and my father. "I have to see her."

Then she suddenly stopped, clenching her eyes shut, her whole being shaking. "My baby."

Her baby? I said to myself. My mother didn't have a baby.

She didn't even like babies.

"Would it be possible to see her?" my father asked.

"She fell four stories, headfirst, onto a cement sidewalk," Dr. Leeds said reluctantly.

"You just can't take her," my mother pleaded pitifully, her head bowed. "Jim, don't let him take your sister."

Your sister? I thought miserably.

"But I'm his sister," I whispered.

My father and Dr. Leeds exchanged uneasy glances.

Jimmy stepped forward. His eyes were still vacant, but there was a trace of life around his mouth, a flicker of strength.

"It'll be hard for us to see what happened," he said quietly. "We know that. But I think it could be harder for us to have to think what happened, without seeing her. If you know what I mean?"

Dr. Leeds considered a moment. "All right," he said finally, turning toward the green metal doors.

"Give me a

few minutes."

While waiting with my family in the bleak hallway, I started to get a funny feeling. I was already scared and confused, but this new feeling was worse. My cold splinter of fear had grown long and sharp in the last half-hour. Now it was like an icy blade that was threatening to cut my sanity in half and leave me floundering in darkness for eternity. Yes, eternity—that was the element that hit me then. Something terrible had happened, I realized, and whatever it was, it was forever.

The deduction wasn't that clever.

"Morgue," I whispered aloud to myself, to no one.

Dr. Leeds reappeared approximately five minutes later and led my family through the double green doors. Apparently everyone had gone home for the night; there were only the five of us in the morgue. And maybe, I thought with growing understanding, there were fewer.

Off to the right was an open square room stacked with rows of lockers. Only they weren't lockers. I'd seen enough police shows. They were the cubicles in which they stashed the stiffs.

Off to the left was a white-tiled wall. In the middle were three tables. The center one was occupied. There was a person there, a short dead person, lying under a thin white sheet. Dr.

Leeds stepped to the head of the table. The rest of us followed. We had asked for it, and now we had to take it.

Dr. Leeds slowly pulled down the sheet. He appeared to be starting at the head.

The first thing we saw, however, was not a head; it was a green towel, and it was stained dark and wet. The doctor had obviously just wrapped the towel around the girl's hair. I could tell it was a girl. The conversation on the other side of the green doors had made that clear enough, and a lock of her dark blond hair had peeped out from beneath the towel. There was no blood on the hair, on those particular strands, but it didn't require a great deal of imagination to see that the rest of her hair must be a disaster.

It was, of course, silly of me to wonder what kind of shampoo it would take to clean that hair when it was clear that the entire top of the girl's skull had been crushed to a pulp Even before Dr. Leeds folded down the sheet farther and revealed the girl's face—washed clean of blood;—I knew what we would see. I knew that hair. I had fought with it all my life, and now it would rest in peace forever, along with that face.

A moment later Dr. Leeds folded down the sheet, tucking it under her chin as if it were a blanket that could keep her warm. He stepped back. Her eyes were closed, thankfully, and although a ghastly black and blue patch had colored her forehead and sent bruised streaks down the sides of her cheeks almost to her mouth, death had not stolen her beauty.

You see, that's how I felt then, in the presence of a person who could have lit many lives with her beauty had she just been given the chance.

My father didn't move. My mother couldn't move. But Jimmy reached out and touched the girl's lips with the tip of his finger. It was fortunate his fingers strayed no higher. I remembered the long fall toward the sidewalk then, the fat red stars, the wave of hot wax covering the sky, my blood flowing over my open eyes. Maybe it had been Dr. Leeds who had closed them. It was good. Better she remain a sleeping beauty, I thought. I knew if Jimmy were to open them, they would no longer be the sparkling green she had told him they were, nor even the warm brown he had thought they must be. They wouldn't be beautiful. They would only be flat and colorless.

It was me lying there. Just me.

CHAPTER

VI

A. HAVE READ articles describing how hard it is to accept the death of a loved one.

How people often go through phases where they actually deny the person is really gone. I can imagine how difficult it must be. Yet I must say it is harder to accept one's own death.

As long as I stood in the morgue with my body, I could intellectually understand that the fall off Beth's balcony had killed me. But when my family left the room a few minutes later and I followed them out the green doors and back down the hall, I began to have doubts. I began to get upset, angry. I couldn't be dead, I told myself. I was too young. I had too much to do. I hadn't done anything wrong. Besides, how could I be talking with myself if there was no one left to talk to? It simply made no sense that I was dead. It was illogical.

I decided I must be dreaming.

This decision didn't last long. The death state can vary in the extreme, yet it is usually much closer to the waking state than dreaming. I didn't try pinching myself or anything silly like that. I simply paused for a moment and examined my thinking process and realized I could not be unconscious.

On the other hand, that didn't mean I couldn't help believing that someone somewhere had made a terrible mistake. I tried telling my family just that after the doctor bid them a sympathetic farewell and they climbed into the elevator.

"Hey," I said as the doors closed and we started up. "I know you can't hear me too well for some reason or other, but you've got to listen to me. That girl in there was not me.

She couldn't be me. I'm me, and I'm right here. Mom, look at me. I'm all right.

Dad, that doctor's a nice guy and all that, but I swear, he's messed me up with someone else.

Jimmy, you know I can't be dead. I wouldn't die on you." I reached out and hugged my brother. My hands did not go through his flesh this time, but they did not touch him, either. I could have been trying to hug a reflection in the mirror. "Jimmy?" I cried, pleading.

It was no use. They exited the elevator without a glance over their shoulders to make sure I had gotten off safely. But I continued to follow them. What else could I do? There was a handsome blond policeman waiting by the emergency front desk. He wanted to have a word with them. I chose not to listen. I went and sat on one of the chairs in the waiting room. A young couple were there with their three-year-old son, who had split his upper lip open. It didn't look serious.

The child was coloring in a coloring book, and the mother and father were talking about how much fun they were going to have in Hawaii on their vacation.

A few minutes later the policeman and my family started for the exit together. I had to pull myself out of my chair to go after them. I didn't have a headache or a stomachache or any other specific physical complaint. I just didn't feel well.

Outside, I realized dissension had entered the group.

Apparently Jimmy wanted to go somewhere that the others particularly the policeman—didn't want him to go. It took a moment for me to understand that he intended to go to Beth's place.

I got all excited at the idea. If we went to Beth's condo together, I thought, we would be able to figure out exactly what had happened. Then we could prove that I was really all right, and people would start seeing me again!

Jimmy finally got his way. The policeman agreed to take my parents home. My brother embraced my mother and father as he said goodbye. It was hard to look at my mother, even though I could see her much clearer than I had any right to in the dark parking lot. She just kept shaking, and I kept thinking that if she didn't stop soon, her heart would begin to skip beats, and she'd have a heart attack. I felt guilty as I ran away from my parents, chasing Jimmy as he jogged toward his car. But I had no difficulty climbing over the driver's seat into the passenger's seat when Jimmy opened his door. I was already getting good at it.

We were almost to Beth's house, coasting along the coast highway at a high speed, the ocean off to our left, when the worst possible thing happened. It was worse than seeing a pretty young girl lying on a cold morgue slab and realizing it was me. Jimmy suddenly pulled over to the side of the road and laid his head on the steering wheel and began to cry.

I had seen my brother upset before, but I had never seen him cry. I would not have thought it possible. Oh, he wasn't so tough that I couldn't imagine him breaking down. It was just that I couldn't imagine him doing it where I could see him. That was what made it all so horrible; I was here, and he was there, and there was hardly anything separating us—nothing at all, really.

Only the entire span of an uncaring universe.

"No, Shari," he whispered as he closed his eyes and sobbed in his clenched fingers. I tried to unclench them, to soothe him, but I could not. I couldn't because his sister was dead, and I was his sister, and it was only right that we should both grieve. It was then, finally and forever, that I accepted the fact that my life was over.

"Yes, Jimmy," I said and wept with him.

When we reached Beth's place, I made the mistake of letting Jimmy climb out of the car in front of me, and then, of course, I couldn't get the car door open.

Fortunately, he had left the window down, and I was able to squeeze through the space. It took me a couple of minutes, however, and by then Jimmy had already entered the complex, leaving me trapped at the front gate, unable to turn the knob or ring the bell. I realized I was a ghost. I considered trying to walk through the gate. But I had a horrible fear that I'd get stuck. I just couldn't bring myself to make the attempt.

There were a couple of police cars sitting in the visitors' parking lot. As I paced the gate area waiting for someone to appear and let me in, a blue truck pulled up and parked beside them.

But the driver didn't get out, and I started to become frustrated. I headed over to his truck to try to hurry him along.

He was a man on his way down in life. In his mid-forties, he had on a frumpy green sports coat and a wrinkled white shirt with a loosely knotted purple tie caught beneath his oversize belt. He needed a good meal. His thin brown hair was going gray, and his red wizened face had seen either too much sun or too much life. He looked burned out. He was lifting a pint of whiskey to his lips when I tapped on his window.