Death of a Kleptomaniac (20 page)

Being dead is a lot of work. Especially when you're in the middle of a fight with your soul's intake counselor. Deep down, I know it was rude and inappropriate to command Louise to leave, but I don't think it was a mistake. Possessing Sadie accomplished many things, and I needed Louise gone in order to do that.

I arrive at the clock room to find the door shut. I'm standing in the hallway that I walked down with all the photographs of my life. The pictures are all gone. They should save the trip down memory lane for right before your funeral. Making you take it immediately after you die is a bad idea, because you're in so much shock that you miss a lot. Your life flashes by so rapidly that it's hard to engage with all your memories. It feels like it's over before it begins.

“Louise?” I call. “Louise?”

“I'm in my office,” she answers from inside the room.

I look at the door. It would be impolite to just travel through it. “Can I come in?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says.

The tone of her voice is completely flat. She hates me. I commanded her to leave and now she wants nothing to do with me. Fine. That's fine. I don't need her guidance anymore. I've got Hilda. And a few ideas of my own about how things should work. I try to travel through the door, but I can't move beyond the hallway. I try again. And again. It's as if I'm hitting a wall. Is this some sort of trick? If Louise doesn't want me to visit, why doesn't she just say that?

“I'm stuck,” I say. “I can't get inside.”

“If you want to get inside, you can get inside,” she says in an I-don't-care-about-your-fate-anymore voice.

I push again. I try to make my foot enter the door, but it won't. I attempt another time, with my shoulder. I get so frustrated that I slam my head forward. But there's this gentle pressure, like a magnet opposing another magnet, keeping me from entering.

“The door is broken,” I say.

“The door is not broken,” Louise says.

I stretch my arms out in front of me to force my way in. Oh my god. Being stuck in the hallway is the least of my problems. I'm starting to glow. Why am I starting to glow?

“Something is happening to me,” I say, with a fair amount of urgency and dread. “I think it's bad. I'm glowing.”

Then I'm not alone anymore. I'm standing next to Louise. She's joined me in the hallway. “It's quite normal for your soul to become illuminated as your funeral approaches. As you cross, a powerful light will fire through you and deliver you to your next phase.”

“I'm going to turn into a light?” I ask. This is one more reason not to cross.

“Molly, has anybody ever told you that you worry about all the wrong things?” Louise says.

I don't want to have any additional fights with Louise. So I only mildly defend myself.

“I'm concerned that I'm stuck in a hallway and also becoming translucent. Those feel like legitimate issues to worry about.”

Louise looks so bored with me. “You still have one more moment to relive.”

“Yeah,” I say. My mind lands on the Henry kiss. Shouldn't I just relive that one again? I loved kissing Henry.

“Reliving the same moment twice is a bad idea,” Louise says. “The whole reasoning behind the life moments is that you will gain new perspectives that you can take with you.”

“So nobody cares anymore whether or not I'm having a good time? I die and all my happiness gets snuffed out?” I look down at my legs. Whoa. They are whiter than my arms. “I'm turning into some sort of awful glitter being.”

“You've officially worn me down, Molly. Go relive whatever you want to relive. Did you eat a really good piece of pizza once? Track that down. You went to SeaWorld when you were younger, right? Go there again. Maybe you can re-watch the whale act.”

“There's no need to be condescending,” I say. “I'm a dead teenager. I'm not asking for all your sympathy. But maybe just a bit more.”

“Fine, you're a dead teenager. And you are always going to be a dead teenager. Forever. But guess what? I'm a dead mother. I'm a dead daughter. I'm a dead dancer. I'm a dead sister. I'm a dead woman, Molly Weller. And I have plenty of sympathy for you. The question is, do you have any for me? Are you able to get outside of yourself long enough to care about the fate of anybody but yourself?”

I stare at her. She's trying to make me feel terrible, and it's working. I know she used to be alive too. But she's had so much more time to get used to it. She's adjusted to being dead. I'm still wrapping my mind around it.

“I know you're a good person, Molly, but you don't challenge yourself enough. You're very stuck.”

“I don't know if that's true.”

“You are literally stuck in this hallway. No soul I've ever worked with has gotten stuck in the hallway.”

I look around, first at my glowing body and then at the narrow walls of the space where I'm standing. Louise is right: I do feel stuck. I don't want to move forward. I don't want to accept my fate. Every impulse inside of me is to go back to my life. To return to the people who love me. But I don't get that option.

“I'm ready to relive my last life moment,” I say.

“SeaWorld? Or pizza?” Louise says with a yawn.

I shake my head. “Something that matters.”

I'm surprised when I hear myself say these words. Because I don't exactly know what I'll relive.

Louise looks directly at me and nods. Her face looks incredibly serious. “Everything you learn, you get to take with you, Molly.”

I hope she's right. I let my mind begin to play possible scenes I could relive, but I'm still not sure. I find myself wanting to stall for more time. “You really didn't relive any life moments?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “No. It was a mistake. I should have.”

“You just stayed next to your body?”

“I couldn't leave it,” she explains.

That's not the experience I had when I saw my body at all. Maybe this is because Louise was more connected to hers. She was a dancer, so her body was her instrument. And she'd had her body longer than I had mine. I ask a question I've wanted to ask for a while. “How old were you when you died?”

“Thirty-four.”

I imagine a child losing a mother. A sister losing a sister. A mother losing her daughter. “That's wrong.”

She shrugs. “I've accepted it.”

Now comes the other question I've been holding on to since the moment I learned Louise had once been alive. “How did you die?”

“You don't have time for this,” Louise says.

“I do. Please tell me.” Suddenly, how life was extinguished from my spirit guide matters a lot to me.

“I died in a fire,” she's says. “At a hotel. I was on my final tour with my dance company.”

I cover my mouth. This is horrific.

“A lot of us died that night,” she says. “But tragedies happen every day.”

“And they shouldn't!” I say. Shouldn't somebody be doing something about this? How can a bunch of dancers get killed in a hotel fire? That's rotten. Absolutely rotten. That shouldn't happen. Not only do I want to reject my death outright and be alive again, I want this for Louise too. I want her to be a not-dead mother, a not-dead dancer, a not-dead daughter, a not-dead sister. I'm not saying we should be immortal, but I wish we were given a little more time.

“Don't backslide. You've picked your moment to relive. Now, move into that moment.”

Louise is right. I need to do this. I think of my moment with Henry and how I was guided to a place where I began to fall in love. There must be a starting point like that for other things. Worse things. I need to go there and confront what it is about myself that I don't want to see.

“I steal and I don't understand why. It's got to come from somewhere. Take me to where it started.”

Before I can think another thought, I am in a tunnel and then I am slamming into the world again. I'm a child. Maybe four years old. And I'm with my grandmother. She is so cautious. So anxious. My grandfather must have just recently died, because I see a picture of him taped to the dashboard. I can remember my mother telling me that my grandma did this shortly after the funeral. It stayed there for a year, until one day on a road trip to Arizona, a gust of wind swept through and blew the picture into a gorge.

“You have his chin,” Grandma tells me. “A perfect profile.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Grandpa's chin.” I feel myself touching my chin with my finger. This must be a game we've played before. My grandma looks very amused.

“Why don't you wait in the car while I mail these?” She waves a handful of envelopes at me.

I fidget with the seat belt. I want to go inside. I'm a kid. I don't want to sit inside a car on a hot day.

“Can I come?” I ask, kicking with my legs. I'm sitting buckled into a car seat in back.

“You'd better wait here.” She takes the keys out of the ignition and sets them on the passenger seat. And gets out. I keep kicking with my legs. In this moment, I am young and bored and carefree. With the air conditioner off, I'm able to feel the tremendous heat of the day starting to press itself through the windows. There's a small Baggie full of cereal next to me, and I pick it up. I lick my fingertip and touch a puffed-oat piece and then carefully place it in my mouth.
Crunch.
Through the window, I see my grandma rushing to the mailbox outside the post office. She's wearing a light blue pantsuit and the whitest sneakers money will buy. Years later, my mother will tell me about all the errands I helped my grandma run following my grandpa's death. Apparently, she liked to drive around and tell me stories about him. But I can't remember him. He feels like a stranger to me now.

Then it happens. My grandma realizes that she's locked her keys in the car. And I'm stuck in here. My fingers are wet with slobber. I can't get the door to unlock. I drop the Baggie, and cereal explodes onto the floor. I use my fingers to press the release button on the seat belt, but it's old and clunky and won't budge. I keep trying.

“Open the door, Molly. You can do it,” my grandma calls. Her voice gets louder.

But I can't do it. I jam my fingers into the metal square. Trying. Trying. But it won't click open.

“Help me,” I say. I feel the adrenaline really starting to flow.

My grandma becomes frantic. “Help us! Help us!” she cries. Within two minutes, a small group of people has gathered. One is a postal employee with a thick beard. He lowers his face to the backseat window on the driver's side.

“Can you open the door?” he coos. “Can you press the button and let us inside?”

But there isn't a button. There are thin knobs on top of the door that I can't pull up. “I'm stuck!” I say, getting more and more scared.

“We should call the police,” a woman says. “It's too hot in there.”

I am sobbing in the backseat now. I gasp for air and shudder. My fears are uncontrollable. I want out. I worry that I may die inside the car. I worry that it's so hot that I might melt, even though my grandma is standing right there, just outside the car.

“Don't cry,” my grandma says. “The police are coming.”

I hear the sirens. Blue-and-red lights pulse in the background. Then there is a policeman standing next to my grandma.

“She can't unlock it?” the policeman asks.

“She's tried,” my grandma says.

I keep pressing on the buckle. It's getting hotter, and my fingers feel more slippery. I'm sweating. I see the man insert something into the door, but nothing happens. He tries again. And again. I am screaming now.

“We need to break a front window,” the policeman says. “Keep her attention in the backseat.”

I don't want them to break a window. Even at four, I'm afraid the glass will shatter on me and cut me. “No! No!” I say. I try harder to make the buckle pop open.

“When we get done here we'll go get a delicious lunch,” my grandma says.

I'm not hungry. I don't care. I feel like I'm dying.

“Help!” I say. I keep pushing on the lock. It won't open, and I can't stay trapped here. I decide to try a different door. The policeman has pulled his arm back to punch something through the window. He doesn't see me as I scamper into the front seat to unlock the door. He makes impact with the window, and tiny pieces of glass shower onto me. They cut my bare legs. They scrape across my arms and leave bloody lines.

“Oh my god!” my grandmother screams.

I'm screaming too. I've fallen into the passenger seat on top of the pebbled glass. I feel the sharp edges bite into my skin. Then a stranger's hands pull me through the opened door.

“You're okay,” the policeman says.

I do not feel okay.

Grandma races up and holds me so tightly that her shirt gets smeared with my blood. “We'll take you home. And clean you up. And take you to the store and you can get anything you like.”