Or Not to Be (3 page)

The ring of the
phone pierces our silent home. Joey charges out of his room and yells, “Is it
Mommy
?” Bethany climbs off Eddie’s lap to answer it. She
shakes her head at Joey. When she hangs up, she crumples to the cold tile floor
in the foyer and pulls my lost boy into a hug. Joey remains rigid, but his
sister isn’t lacking in the stubborn gene. She won’t let him go.

Finally, Joey puts
his head on her shoulder. Her hair smells like mine. He turns his face into her
neck and cries.

Mommy! Mommy
!

My
children are calling for me, and I am helpless, stuck. Though I know I’m the
dead one, I feel as though my entire family has died. Maybe it doesn’t matter
who dies—the separation and pain are the same. I’m separated from my family by
a force beyond my control. I’m right here beside them, but without my body I’m
light years away.

I am not fond of death so far.

4

The light
of the bright fall afternoon shines through the
windows at the back of our house and glances off Bethany’s glasses as she peels
apples, slowly, each in one long coil. She mixes butter with flour, not gently.
Clouds of the white dust waft around my kitchen. Eventually, each speck
succumbs to gravity, settling upon any horizontal surface that will stop its
fall and convert kinetic back to potential energy.

My daughter is the only functioning body
in the place. The cat sleeps on the heating vent with his long, bushy tail
shielding the day from his eyes. Joey must be under his bed again. Eddie hasn’t
moved from the blue chair yet. The stubble on his chin is graying. I imagine
his breath is deadly. He is pathetic. I should feel sympathy for him because he
looks like he could use a hug. But I don’t. I can’t yet because I don’t
understand his reaction to my death. I wish I could have hugged him and made
him smile more while I was alive, but we squandered our time together. Regrets
overwhelm me.

I watch my Eddie frown when he smells the
apples and cinnamon from the kitchen. I know he’s thinking about me, about us.
I try to stay away, but he pulls me into his thoughts with the same magnetic
intensity as when he pulled me into his arms thousands of times, still never enough,
when I lived.

Anna?

Cinnamon reminds me of you. I can’t go
into the kitchen.
With both of his
large hands, he rubs his face hard and blows out his breath.
You were so
sexy in there.

Shut up, Eddie.

I mean I was nuts about you when you
cooked things I loved, just for me. Just for me, Anna.

The man is still a jerk. He throws around
the L-word for food. So nonchalant.

That’s when I knew you loved me back.

Eddie’s the one who said we didn’t need
the L-word. We didn’t need to say it. Could he give me a sign he loved me back?

Feeding me was how you showed me, for
sure, that you were still mine.

Still yours? You didn’t even want me
around.

I was so shook up when your cooking
ability began leaking out. Remember? That’s what you called it—leaking.

I remember that day last spring when I
made those apple squares, and I burned them to a crisp. I had the oven set too
hot and forgot to set the timer. I got distracted.

I found you sitting on the kitchen
counter dripping salty tears. The whole house smelled like scorched caramel,
but the cinnamon still smelled incredible.

Cinnamon has a high thermal stability.
Sugar decomposes first. Eddie came in covered in mud from digging a drainage
ditch in the rain. He had that little-boy grin and that expectant look in his
eye, the one that says he’s hunting cookies.

There wasn’t much I could do except eat
all the nasty, charred things and keep telling you they were great—that I liked
them better that way.

What a rotten liar. But he made me laugh.

I couldn’t tell you the real reason you
were leaking because I wasn’t even supposed to know.

What did you know?

That’s when you told me you thought you
had Alzheimer’s. It became our standard joke to explain away your
absentmindedness.

He told me if I had it, I would be the
last, not the first, to know. Always so logical.

You came over for a hug, so I danced
you around the kitchen and you cried some more.

He teased me to make me smile. He said,
“If your cooking skills are going, there’s only one thing left for us to do.”

We had one of our cryptic conversations
about sex. Anna, you were always a trooper. You snorted and laughed through
your tears when I said I hoped you didn’t forget how to do
everything
I liked.

He asked how much longer his favorite
thing was going to last. The man could be funny when he gave it some effort.

You wiped your wet face on the front of
my shirt and grinned and said, “Eh, maybe a year. Fifteen months, tops. Then
you’ll have to find someone else.” Sarcasm is my friend. She used to be my
wife.

I used to be his wife.

No. I’m done here. This hurts too much. I
don’t have the strength to wallow in Eddie’s thoughts. I can’t let him pull me
back in, the bastard. He’s sad and misses me now, but he was an unforgivable
ass the last months of my life.

Just run away. That always worked for me
in life. Don’t look at Eddie crying. Let me out of his head. I couldn’t face
our problems while I was alive, and I still don’t want to because it hurts too
much. My life unraveled at the end, and I couldn’t find my way back to the good
times. I couldn’t find the source of the problem, so I blamed myself and hated
my best friend, wondering how we got stuck so far apart, taunted by memories of
how good we used to be.

| | | |

On a late summer morning
just three months before I died, I awoke without a
care in my head because my life was quite sweet before it started to rot. It
was our anniversary, and Eddie’s forehead rested against the middle of my back
right between my shoulder blades. He snored like a bear, unaware that we were
touching and that in his sleep he’d crossed the imaginary line down the center
of our bed that marked territory. My pillows, soft and deep, lay beside his
firm, unyielding foam ones. The stiff sheet, which I always hated, was crumpled
at the foot of the bed under the comforter on my side. It wasn’t yet dawn. My
coffee pot would soon gurgle to life. I fought down my brain’s insistent to-do
list and tried to slide back into sleep. That’s when Eddie’s breath shifted
perceptibly, and then he lazily stifled a yawn.

I scooted back into his lap, and his arm
came around me; his hand rested on my chest, his fingers brushed my throat.
Under the comforting weight of his arm, I synced my breathing to his and fell
back to sleep. An hour later the coffee pot did its morning spit-spit. The
sound woke me just before the molecules delighted my nose.

Eddie’s sleepy voice asked, “Want a cup in
bed?” His head still rested against my back.

“Yeah, thanks.” I rolled into the puddle
of his sleep spot and purred when he vacated the bed. I stretched and grinned
while I watched Eddie try to tiptoe as he limped on his sore runner’s ankles
into the kitchen. Smug. That’s how I felt at the start of that day. Twenty-two
years together. Two elevens. We were still together. Still strong.

Eddie came back with steaming mugs and the
newspaper. “This is all I got you for our anniversary. Read quick. The boy will
be up soon.” That’s how we did anniversaries—we blew past them. Even
Valentine’s Day was ignored. On February fifteenth every year we went to the pharmacy
together and brought home the orphaned, half-priced chocolates.

“I know. God, I miss Bethany.” Our
daughter had started college a week before, and our house was eerily still
without the tremors of her mood swings. I dug through the paper to find the
crossword. I could read later, but if our kindergartener woke too soon and
heard the newspaper crackle, he’d want to help, and he just didn’t understand
that the letters had to spell actual and very specific words. “Joey can get his
own cereal now, you know.”

“Really? I bet he spills all over the
kitchen.” Eddie crawled under the covers and nudged me back to the middle of
the bed. “I miss Bethany, too, but it sure is more peaceful without all her
drama.”

“Don’t make me feel guilty, Ed.” I folded
the paper into a precise rectangle of blank crossword, leaned back against him,
and tapped the pen on my chin. “Joey got his own breakfast by himself last
week. I found a bowl when I cleaned under his bed fort. It still had a skim of
milk in it. Ready?”

I felt his chin bump my shoulder when he
nodded. “Yep. Go.”

“One across: Phil of Genesis.”

“How many letters?”

“Seven.”

“Collins.” He rubbed the back of my neck.
“How does he pour the milk?”

“I put it in a cup for him before I go to
bed and leave it on the bottom shelf in the fridge. Two down, four letters:
cookie, starts with O.”

“Uh oh. Anna, I drank that milk last
night. Oreo. Are you sure Joey’s having cereal and not cookies?” he asked with
a snort.

“Very funny, Eddie. He wouldn’t dare.”

Eddie kissed the side of my neck between
slurps of coffee, leaving a trail of sticky. “Yeah, he would. One down is clap
because eight across is Aesop, and four down is loo.” He kissed me some more,
slowly yet greedily, on my shoulder and between my shoulder blades. He breathed
in my ear like he used to on the rose path back when he had broad shoulders and
forearms muscled like Popeye. And hair. I smiled.

“Thanks.” I wrote these in without even
bothering to read the clues. “Let me get some, will you, Ed?” I took a long
swallow of my sweet coffee and turned the paper away from his view.

“I’ll let you get some.” He unbuttoned my
nightgown and whispered, “I bet your boy is in the cookies right now. Let’s
risk it, though. It’ll give us a few more minutes.” His husky voice in my ear
said, “Alone.”

“To finish the puzzle?” I asked. I met his
eyes and felt our link through all of the fibers and cells, nerves, and
capillaries of my body. For two decades, my life was balanced and anchored by
this man. He was my friend, partner, and essential other half. He got me now,
just like he had on our first date, when he knew our future before I even knew
I liked him enough for a second date.

He laughed at me and said, “Yeah. Of
course. The puzzle. Three across is ...”

“Shut up, will you?” I whacked him with
the paper as he tackled me.

Later, I told him I was relieved that Joey
was starting to do things on his own.

“School starts in
a few weeks. Then, you know how the fall always is—crazy busy. It’ll be good
for him
and
me if he becomes more
independent and less reliant on me for everything. I won’t be around forever
and for everything. He needs to learn that.”

And in that little
instant, Eddie looked stricken. What did I say? Why did Joey growing up bother
him so?

His affectionate
playfulness evaporated. Eddie pulled away from me, and I didn’t live long
enough for him to come back this time. His funk slammed back in on our
anniversary, knocking me flat, and it sealed my best friend in an untouchable
gloom. It lanced my heart to have him so close and lose him to the vacuum while
I waited in limbo, leaving him all the power to choose us again.

Eddie left me alone, lonely and sad, and wondering when the
hell he’d make his way back. Was this my fault? Could I have prevented the
crack from widening? The same worries that kept me awake, sweating, eye
twitching, and desperate at the end of my life have tagged along to the dead
side.

That’s enough. I will not waste any more
energy worrying about Eddie. He’s not my problem anymore.

| | | |

Enticed by the good smells
from the kitchen, Joey creeps down the stairs and
climbs up on the step stool. He leans to Bethany for a hug. She starts to cry
when she hugs him back. She sits him in a pile of flour on the counter. Joey is
alarmed by her tears; now that his sister has started to cry, she can’t seem to
stop. She wipes her face on the belly of his shirt and gives him an apple slice
slathered in sugar and cinnamon.

He takes in the mess of flour and butter
she’s concocting and asks shyly, “Apple squares?” He pops the chunk of apple
into his mouth.

Bethany nods as she wipes her nose on her
sleeve and eats a slice, too. Joey thinks he can help her stop crying. He says
with a full mouth, “Hey, Bethy, hold your tongue and say apple.” He shines his
wicked grin on her.