Or Not to Be (25 page)

“Why?”

That word was gyped out of its fourth
letter. “Don’t worry about why. Will you do it?”

The little shyster saw he had something I
wanted. His brain gears were rolling. He smiled his cat smile at me and said,
“For three cookies, no milk.”

“Deal.” I delivered the goods, he scarfed
them down, and we were moving on to toast and juice when Anna walked out of the
bedroom with a towel on her head.

She walked straight to Joey to pat down
his morning hair and wordlessly accepted the cup of coffee I had ready for her.
She was taking her first slurp, nose buried in the cup, eyes momentarily
closed, when Joey looked up at her with his grimace face. In that split second,
I regretted the absence of the milk. It would have helped to wash the chocolate
crumbs from his teeth. His mother opened her eyes and saw the remnants of
Joey’s forbidden breakfast. That’s when he began his fake whining, and he
leaned to her for a hug.

Anna wrapped one arm around him in what
appeared to be a hug, but she was just getting a firm grip on him so her free
hand could tilt up his chin. Joey was nose to nose with her when she said,
“Show me those teeth.”

I held my breath and hoped he’d keep his
mouth shut. When he giggled, my heart burst open. His mother was going to kill
me and then leave me.

With an accusing glance in my direction,
which I shamelessly avoided, Anna released Joey and grabbed her coffee cup. She
stole all the air out of the room when she marched back to the bedroom to get
dressed.

Joey and I looked at each other. He
smiled, showing big brown chunks of Oreo between each pair of his little teeth.
I couldn’t share his amusement. My plan was unraveling.

I watched in horror as Anna packed her
school bag and headed out the door. I had failed to trick my wife into staying
home, staying safe. I tried one more desperate tactic as she was starting her
car. I was going to tell her the truth. Universe be damned.

“Honey?” I said as I leaned my head in the
passenger window and boldly asked my wife to stay home with me, to stay safe
with me, to live. Breathless, I reached out across our dividing line and held
tight to her wrist while I pleaded with her to choose me. I glanced around,
scared shitless, like a fugitive on the run, and told her this day would be
dangerous. She could get hurt. She had to be careful of forces acting on her
today, every second of this interminable day. This damned day. She didn’t hear
me. She couldn’t hear me. My words spilled unheard from my lips and were sucked
into the void.

“Anna, honey, please be careful today.”
She heard that.

My wife looked at
me with a quivering chin. She wrenched her arm from my fingers and slowly,
repeatedly, shook her head at me in wonder, left eyebrow raised, surely
thinking
Why is this man such an ass?
“Enough with the
honey
crap. I’m going to work,” she said curtly as a tear crept from behind the dark
glasses that hid her eyes.

In a pained
whisper, “Good-bye, Anna,” came from my lips. Solemn, final, defeated.

She pulled down
the glasses, and her sad eyes met mine one last time. She blew out her breath
as she said, “See you tonight.
Honey
.”

And she left me.

Oh,
please,
I begged,
please let me see her tonight.

41

On April Fools’ Day
the year I was born, my mother called my dad at work
at two in the afternoon to tell him she was starting her labor and needed a
ride to the hospital. Dad was a famous jokester and was certain Mom was playing
games with him. I wasn’t due until late May.

Dad’s reply was, “Call a cab, babe.”

There was no way my mother could pull an
April Fools’ joke over on him. He had one planned for her that night. He was
going to make her get all dressed up to go out to a fancy dinner, makeup and
jewelry and all that girly stuff. Then he was going to pull into Jack’s
Drive-In and order her a hot dog and chocolate milk shake.

Dad loved April Fools’ Day. I heard his
stories every year. They were the background music while I ate my birthday
cake.

So when Mom called him, in labor for the
first time, and asked for a ride, Dad didn’t fall for her old tricks. When she
started protesting about a cab, he said, “Right. I’ll meet you at the
hospital.” Click. Dial tone.

Mom cried for a little while, and then she
called her mom and her sister and they drove her to the hospital. It wasn’t
until Dad arrived home that night and found the house empty that it occurred to
him that something was up. The phone rang as he unwound his tie.

“Jack, are you coming to the hospital or
not?” demanded his mother-in-law.

Dad snickered. He was impressed. This was
good stuff. Mom was taking this charade pretty far to have her mother call and
get in on it. Before he could reply, my grandmother said, “I told Debbie not to
get involved with you. You are never serious. Poor girl is a mess of worry over
this baby coming so early, and you ignored her.” Then she hung up.

With a jolt, my dad doubted himself. Maybe
Mom really was at the hospital. He drove like a maniac and arrived in time to
see her and beg for forgiveness before I was born.

Mom was in labor all night, and I was born
at 3:57 a.m. on April second. Premature babies back then were not expected to
live. I heard the story of the odds of my survival and my valiant struggle so
many times it’s almost like I remember it. Obviously, I lived.

When I died again six years later, my
guide on the dead side helped me look around, and I got to spend some time
reliving my birthday and my perilous loitering at the edge of my two-way
portal.

I was diagnosed with leukemia a week
before I started kindergarten. The chemotherapy treatments knocked out all of
my hair and left me physically weak, but I loved to go to school. It didn’t
matter to me if the kids thought I was a freak. One little red-haired girl
cried whenever she had to sit by me. It didn’t help that Jimmy, the biggest
bully, always made her rub my bald head and told her that it would make all her
long hair fall out. I liked getting my head rubbed. It felt good.

Kindergarten was the coolest place to be.
We colored and played and counted and learned to read. It was the best thing
that ever happened to me. Everyone around me was concerned that my life was
ending, but I don’t recall any fear of my illness. Although I was weak, I was
able to play and learn. Hug my mom. Sit on my baby brother’s head. Roll in the
wet grass with my big, smelly dog, Beau. Eat ice cream and chocolate cookies
and licorice. Life didn’t feel so different to me sick. I loved being a kid.

A week before my sixth birthday, I was
hospitalized for a dangerously high white blood count. I was still in the
hospital on April Fools’ Day, the day before my sixth birthday, so Dad stayed
with me, pulling jokes on the nurses. He had me giggling so hard I couldn’t
catch my breath when he held down the call button for Nurse Edna, but acted
surprised each time she came to the room to ask what I needed. Dad was
perfectly straight-faced when he was in a prank. The third time he hit the
button, he made me hide under the bed and he got in it. When Edna came in the
room, fuming that he wouldn’t stop calling her for nothing, he was cowering
under the sheets. When she yanked them down, he pretended to be asleep. She
shook him again and again, and he wouldn’t budge. Then she heard me laughing
under the bed and pulled me out and sat me on top of Dad.

That night I turned six years old and I
died.

Dad was devastated. I watched him for
whole days and missed him. I’d never seen him cry before.

Mom was all business after I died. She
took care of my little brother and arranged for my funeral. She angrily tossed
away my birthday cake and candles and balloons and streamers. Dad was a puddle.

Maybe because I was so young, it wasn’t
hard for me to understand the matter and antimatter stuff. It was obvious that
I didn’t have my body anymore, but I knew I was still me. I couldn’t feel
anything, and it seemed like I was flying, but I remained still most of the
time. I just hovered among my family. They didn’t seem to know I was there.
Well, I think maybe my Mom did.

At four o’clock in the afternoon on the
day after I died, the doorbell rang. My friends from kindergarten arrived for
my birthday party laden with gifts. Mom told them the party was canceled and
sent them home.

42

I was four
when Grampa died, just a few months before my little
brother Billy was born. Grampa was my pal and taught me to be quiet while we
fished. He also taught me to stay quiet when Grandma was yelling at me and to
smile when she was yelling at someone else. That’s how Grampa dealt with any
conflict. He was quiet.

Grampa was so quiet in death that I didn’t
even know he was with me when he found me on the dead side. Then, when I felt
his presence, I asked, “Grampa, is that you?”

“Yep,” he said. “What in the world are you
doing here already?”

“I don’t know. I was playing with Daddy,
and then I got here and everything was so quiet.”

“Yep,” he said, again. “I like it quiet.
But I bet you’ll find it a bit boring after time with your Dad.”

“Grampa, how come I can watch them, but
they don’t know I’m there?” One thing about Grampa, he knew everything.

“Well, boy, they don’t know you’re there
because your body doesn’t work anymore. See, you got real sick. Without a
working body, you can’t be alive anymore.”

“Oh.” I thought about it a little while and
then asked, “Your body doesn’t work either, huh?”

“Nope. Listening to Grandma complaining
all those years wore my old body out.”

“But my body wasn’t too old. I was only
just turning six.”

“That’s right. It was your birthday, eh? I
guess I should say happy birthday then.”

“Guess not. I been watching Mom, and she
threw out my happy birthday and sent my friends away.”

“Yep. That’s your mom. She can deal with
stuff if she keeps on moving. Your dad’s not doing too good, though. Did you
see him crying?”

“Uh huh. He’s real sad.”

Grampa hid in his quiet for a long time. I
watched Daddy, and I felt like I was alone. He sat by himself with the old TV
on but without the sound. He didn’t even change the channels or adjust the
bunny ear wires to make the picture better when it started to flip. Mom came
in, looked at him and turned off the TV, and he didn’t even yell at her.

Late that night when the house was dark, I
was still watching them. Mom got up from bed. She walked through the house
without turning any lights on and wasn’t even scared. She went into my bedroom
and took my blanket. Then she sat in the dark at the kitchen table. I wished I
could be with her and have her hold me like when I was little.

And then, in a flash of sparks, I
was
little. Even smaller than little. Mom was in the hospital and Daddy and Grandma
were arguing in the hallway outside her room. Mom was crying and grunting and
sometimes yelling bad words. A doctor and two nurses were talking to her,
trying to calm her, but she stayed real mad. After a while, there was different
crying in the room with Mom. It sounded sort of like a kitten. Daddy started to
go into the room, but a nurse came out fast and stopped him on her way by. Then
two more nurses ran into the room and came out with a teeny tiny baby and ran
down the hall with him. Daddy and Grandma stopped arguing.

I followed the baby.

That’s when I realized he was me.

They named me Premature. When Mom finally
pushed me out, I was blue, and the doctor was worried. But my antimatter rushed
to my body, and I started breathing and cried out. The matter was weak, though,
and the antimatter hesitated. That’s the minute they all thought that I would
die, and the nurses started running around. Down the hall in the new room there
were oxygen tents and machines. The nurses hooked up my tiny body to a
respirator, and I started to breathe with help. That’s when the antimatter,
which was hovering just above the matter, reattached, and my pulse started
again.

This was my first clear understanding of
matter and antimatter. Body and soul. I was six years young, newly dead, and
watching my own birth.

In the eight weeks after my physical
birth, the doctors wouldn’t give up on my body, and my antimatter was never far
away. Gradually my body became stronger and the antimatter didn’t dislocate
anymore. They renamed me Stable then and sent me home.