Death of a Kleptomaniac (11 page)

When I meet up with Louise again, we're back in her messy office, and I feel like a mess too. Emotionally speaking, death isn't tidy. It's disorienting. I don't know whether I should stand or sit or float. All the clocks on the wall continue to tick. Before I left to say my last words, the sound was faint, but now the ticking is louder; it's counting something down.

“Nice choice of last words,” Louise says. “Considering your circumstances, I wasn't expecting you to do this well.”

It's unsettling to hear her assume that I would do poorly. “That's not a particularly nice thing to tell a newly dead person.”

“It's just that after following you for the last six months, I wasn't sure you'd arrive with enough intention. Or direction.”

The idea that a spirit person has been tracking me through my summer vacation and junior year of high school is beyond creepy.

“You seem to be missing that my life was actually going really well,” I say. I don't know what Louise thinks she saw, but clearly she didn't catch everything. “I was making a lot of positive changes.”

“Befriending Ruthann Culpepper? Pushing away Henry Shaw?”

Louise's judgmental comments make me feel incredibly defensive. No person is perfect. Does she think she's perfect? Maybe dead people
are
perfect. I have no idea. “If I'd known that I was going to die, I would've handled a lot of things differently these last few months,” I say, trying to explain myself.

Louise sighs. “I hear that all the time.”

Her response makes me feel even more defensive. “Listen. I was backtracking like mad on the Ruthann Culpepper friendship. And I did
not
push Henry Shaw away. He had a girlfriend, Louise. A
serious
girlfriend. Her name was Melka.”

Louise looks unconvinced. She doesn't respond right away, and we just sort of stare at each other while the clocks tick. Annoyingly loud.

“So what do they mean?” I ask. “What happens now? What am I supposed to do next?”

Louise looks away and then rolls her eyes.

How rotten.
The intake counselor for my soul is rolling
her eyes at me.

“I think I need to show you something,” she says.

Thus far, everything Louise has shown me has been death-related and overwhelmingly depressing.

“You don't have a lot of time before your funeral. You really shouldn't resist,” Louise says.

The words echo through me.
My. Funeral
. They should not exist in the same sentence. Not for another eighty years.

“Ready?” Louise asks.

I consider telling her no, or demanding that she tell me more before she takes me somewhere else. But I don't. Now that I'm dead, Louise is the only person I have. I should attempt to stay on her good side for as long as possible.

“Ready,” I say. As soon as my consent is spoken, Louise pulls me into a tunnel, and moments later, a wall of green slams into me. It's a pasture. I'm on a farm.

Daylight shines so powerfully overhead that I wonder if she's taken me to a place that's actually closer to the sun. Then I hear the sound of bleating goats and mooing cows and clucking chickens.

Rather than try to guess our location, I ask. “Where
are we?”

“A farm,” Louise says.

I'm dead. On a farm. With my soul's intake counselor. On a blazingly bright day. My life feels like a puzzle and none of the pieces quite fit.

“Are my parents here?” I don't know why they'd be on a farm. Especially after learning about my death.

“This way,” Louise says.

I follow her across a dirt path to a shed surrounded by chickens. Dozens of light brown hens cluck and strut behind a fence of small wire hexagons. Louise enters the coop, and I follow.

“And this chicken coop is relevant to my funeral in
what
way?” I ask.

Louise points to a brown egg resting in a straw-lined box. I notice a small hole on the egg's side. A tiny beak flashes through it, and the egg rolls over, blocking the opening.

“If I was alive, I'd help it,” I say.

“And then you'd doom it,” Louise says.

The chick redistributes its weight inside the egg, making it roll again, uncovering its already pecked-open area. The beak continues to break out, further enlarging the hole.

“Hatching requires a tremendous amount of effort. The act of breaking out of the shell strengthens the chick's heart and lungs. If you remove the challenge and help the chick, it emerges into life undeveloped and too weak to survive.”

“That's a tough way to start life,” I say.

While alive, I don't think I ever saw a live flesh-and-feather chicken. I only encountered them in nugget or taco form. Seeing them now feels odd. Are there chickens in the afterlife?

“This is symbolic, Molly,” Louise says. “Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Not really. I try to distill it into something somewhat logical. “Death is like an eggshell? And I have to peck my way out?”

“This isn't going to translate exactly,” Louise says. “Don't think so literally.”

In the time since we've started talking, the chick has made a hole the size of a nickel. It can almost fit its head through.

“Death is like a figurative eggshell?” I ask. How does this symbolism even work? Eggs hatch to start life. Death is the end of life. There's no similarity whatsoever.

“First, Molly, you should understand that this is a period of great freedom for you. You're liberated from your body and all that pain.”

Maybe this chicken coop speech would make sense for somebody who died of a slow-progressing cancer or some other long, lingering illness, but not for me. The clucking has grown so loud that it's scattering my attention. I have to will myself to focus on Louise. “Up until the end, I was never in that much pain. And I liked having a body.” Louise's words feel like propaganda. I'm
free
? I'm
liber
ated
? No. I'm
dead
.

“This is your chance to visit the people who love you and help lessen their grief,” Louise explains. “The presence of your soul can comfort them.”

I've already tired of the coop and am ready to move on. “Okay. I absolutely want to see my family. Tell me how to do that.”

“This is where death is like the eggshell,” Louise explains.

“You're losing me,” I say.

“I'm not going to break open your shell and pull you into this world. That's your job. You emerge on your own. I just give some helpful guidance.”

“Okay,” I say, hoping that it will suddenly just occur to me how to find my family. “So I locate my loved ones and help them grieve. And is this when I'm supposed to make myself known to them by showing them signs? Maybe I fog a mirror or change a radio station or steer a dove into their path?”

Louise tries to interrupt me, but I don't let her. If she thinks I have to emerge from my shell on my own, I'll show her that I'm actually capable of doing this.

“I've seen shows about paranormal ‘hot spots.' I just need to figure out where those are. Once, I saw a show that documented a kitchen hot spot, and when you placed a person on the floor at one end of the kitchen, a spirit dragged them to the other end. In the show I saw, the homeowners actually did this so much with their toddler that it wore their linoleum down to the wooden subfloor.”

My mind races with possibilities of how I can communicate with everyone I love. Just because I died doesn't mean that I need to be severed from them. We can still connect. It's just going to be weird and one-sided. Until they die too. And join me. Wait! I wonder if Louise can tell me when everybody I love is scheduled to die. Maybe that's what the clocks mean.

Louise shakes her head. “You don't really have the ability to manipulate matter after you die. You are a soul and you will remain a soul from this point forward.”

The chick has now completely hatched from the egg. Its feathers look wet and unfluffy, and its head is too heavy for its slender neck. The bird tries to keep its balance by jerking open its wings, but the chick is so young that it trembles from its newness and just keeps falling down. It looks so weak it seems doubtful that it can survive. This was a terrible object lesson for crossing over. I am nothing like a feeble chick. Nothing.

“What about other souls who love me?” I ask. “Why aren't they here?” It's just starting to come to me that I haven't encountered any dead relatives. “Aren't I supposed to have a spirit guide? What about my grandpa?” I never met him—he died before I was born—but I've seen pictures of him. It seems like a relative should be helping me.

“That's not really how things work,” Louise says apologetically. “What you may have heard about death during life is often wrong.”

I hope Louise eventually tells me something both useful and positive. “Will I see the white light?”

People talk about seeing a white light when they die, but I feel more like I've entered a tunnel of blackness, with no light in sight.

“This is what I can tell you. You cross over during your funeral. At that time, you move to the next phase.”

“So I'm not in the next phase yet?” I'm confused. I thought the next phase was what followed death. But now I'm learning that the next phase follows the funeral. Louise is not a very communicative spirit guide. She should have made this clear from the onset. “What's
this
called?” I ask.

“You are in the process of crossing over. The actual crossing takes place at your funeral.”

I steal one last look at the stumbling chick. My ultimate destination. Louise knows what it is, but she's not telling me. How can it be ethical to withhold this from me? It's not, I conclude. I have an unethical intake counselor. Unbelievable. Maybe I can persuade her. Because I have to know my fate.

“Oh, Louise. Where will I go? Heaven? Hell?” I ask. “Please tell me.”

As I wait for her answer, a mixture of dread and fear and regret crawls through me. I suspect that her reluctance to fully disclose my fate might be related to the fact that I've inadvertently damned myself. Maybe it's because I wasn't nice enough to people. Maybe it's because I stole things. There are a considerable amount of misdeeds I could have committed that put my postdead fate in jeopardy. And who wants to level a newly dead girl's spirits by telling her that she's going straight to Hell?

“I can't tell you that. You need to focus on crossing over, not about what happens after that.”

“I need more guidance,” I argue.

“Start your journey by visiting your parents.”

Louise doesn't understand what it feels like to die. I can't imagine that watching my parents sob over my fatal accident will nourish me. But I feel ready to go and do something other than stand in a barn feeling terrible and lost.

“If I focus on them, will that show me where they are?” I ask.

“Follow your intuition,” she says.

“But I don't feel anything,” I say. And isn't intuition what led me to accept a date with Tate, which ultimately caused my death to begin with? Doesn't that mean that I have deadly intuition? That sounds like something I shouldn't be following anymore.

“You should feel something,” Louise says.

I shake my head.

“Your parents might not know about your death yet,” Louise explains.

The thought of my parents' finding out about my death is too sad for me to entertain for more than a few seconds. “This is awful.”

“It gets better.”

What is she talking about?

Then it happens. I feel something. It's like I'm being grabbed—violently. “Something is happening,” I say.

“Great!” Louise says, returning to her more upbeat demeanor. “Your parents need you.”

“But it's going to be so hard to see them again.” Panic snakes through me.

“When you come back, we can discuss your three visitations,” Louise says.

I don't have time to ask her what that even means. We're not in the same room anymore. I am racing through a tunnel, where everything is gray. Nobody else is here. Where are my parents? Maybe it's just one of them. Maybe they weren't together when they found out. In an instant, the tunnel ends and I am in the world again.
Racing. Racing.
There is sunshine and blue sky. Whatever was pulling me has stopped, and I am in a cluster of pine trees, on a patch of bare earth beside a mountain road. I don't think I've ever been here before. I stand perfectly still as a car approaches. Everything about it looks familiar.

It's 8:13 p.m. I died six hours ago, at 2:13 p.m. My parents are driving back from the hospital in Wyoming. Really, I think somebody besides my father should be driving. He's leaning on the steering wheel like he's cradling it for comfort. My mother has her eyes closed. They both look exhausted. I sit in the backseat. There are long moments of silence, and then my mother cries. She tries to muffle her sobs with her hands. When this doesn't work, she buries her face in the sleeve of her jacket. My father leans further into the steering wheel.

“A snake,” he says. “A goddamned snake.”

When my father mentions the word snake, my mother's crying intensifies. She releases sounds that remind me of a wounded animal. I put my hand on her shoulder, but she doesn't seem to notice.

“We need to read it,” my father says.

I see a folded piece of paper in my mother's hand.

“I can't,” she says. She doesn't lift her face from her sleeve. Her voice sounds soft and broken.

“But they were her last words.”

My mother raises her head. Her eyes are rimmed with a redness in a way I've never seen before. It's otherworldly. She is in such anguish that her pain extends itself to me and I can barely stay near her. “It didn't look like Molly. Beneath that sheet. That tube in her mouth.” She buries her head in her sleeve again. “She was so pale.”

“They should have taken out the tube before they showed her to us,” my father says. “We shouldn't have seen her like that.”

I'm not giving them enough comfort. Should I be trying to do something more? Fog the rearview mirror and write my name? Break something? As I ride along, it feels like nobody will be happy ever again. I'm failing.

“I'm going to pull over and we're going to read the note,” my father says. He flips on the turn signal and slows down the car.

“No,” my mother says. “It's too much.”

But my father steers over to a graveled shoulder anyway and shuts off the car. They are more than an hour away from home.

“We're her parents. It's our job to read it,” my father says, pulling the paper from her fingers.

My mother isn't objecting anymore. “I wonder if she asked for me. Sometimes children ask for their mothers.”

I feel bad. I don't want to disappoint her with my last words, but it never even crossed my mind to ask for her. I was conscious enough to realize that that would have been an absurd request.

“Ready?” he asks.

“I'm never going to be ready.”

My father unfolds Rustin's note like it's a precious historical document prone to disintegrate if mishandled. Using one hand, he wipes tears away from his eyes; using the other, he tries to keep the paper steady. He can't. He trembles as he reads aloud from it.

“‘My name is Rustin Pinch. I have been a paramedic for six years. I was with Molly when she went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. I have been with many people when they pass. Sometimes, not always, I think they know what's coming. I think Molly knew. She wasn't in any pain. She went quickly. I'm very sorry for your loss. I hope you find comfort in knowing that you were both very much in her final thoughts. These were Molly's last words.

“‘
Mom, Dad, I love you. Enjoy the twins. This wasn't
anybody's fault.
'”

My mother begins crying again. I know that no matter what I said, this would have been her reaction. After a minute of steady sobs, she blows her nose and asks, “When did you tell her about the twins?”

“I never told her,” my dad says. “Maybe you mentioned them.”

“No. I was very careful. My pregnancy was hard on her. She didn't want to hear about it. And I respected that.”

“Maybe she meant other twins,” my dad says.

“Do we know any twins?” she asks.

“Is one of her friends a twin? Is Joy a twin?”

“No.”

“Wait, Tommy Tarry is a twin,” he says.

“Who's that?” my mother asks.

“He works at the Thirsty Truck. He has a twin brother named Abe. Molly worked with Tommy a lot last summer.”

“Why would she tell us to enjoy them?”

“I don't know. I've been thinking about hiring Abe.”

My mother sniffles and shakes her head. Clearly, their grief has disoriented them.
Our twins.

“Stan, I doubt our dying daughter was concerned about staffing the second shift at the Thirsty Truck. She must've heard us talking.” My mother rubs her belly.

“I'm so sorry that you're this sad,” I say. “I'm sad too. So sad.”

I wonder how long I get to stay. Seeing the house and Hopkins again is going to destroy me. My father starts the car. I am so worried about him driving.

“We need to get home,” he says.

And just as I start to calm down and prepare for the long, depressing journey home, I feel the odd sensation of being pulled somewhere by somebody.

“No,” I say. I want to stay with my parents.

But the feeling doesn't go away. It gets stronger and stronger. If I wanted to fight it, I could. But I'm curious. The person pulling me is just as sad as my parents are. Is it my grandmother? I look at my parents again. I'll be able to visit them more, right? And they have each other. But the person who is pulling me is all alone. I feel like I should leave. Visit. Provide comfort.

So I release myself from my parents' car and am sucked into the air, high over the mountains and clouds, moving as fast as when I reentered my life through the gray tunnel. I am zooming over houses and rivers and fields. Then I see a neighborhood. It's not mine, but it looks familiar. Before I can identify where I am, I'm thrown inside a kitchen window, dragged up a short set of stairs, and placed in a dark room. The grief I'm confronting is debilitating. But I don't think it's my grandmother's place. This isn't her house. I see a bed. A desk. A person. Who is that? Oh my god. I know exactly where I am. But out of all the places to be taken second, I can't believe that I wound up here.