Death of a Kleptomaniac (9 page)

Am I in the principal's office? The painted wood paneling on the walls reminds me of Mrs. Milmer's sparsely lit cave, where, depending on the student, she either doles out a punishment or reward. (My sophomore year, along with Sadie, I received a certificate for perfect attendance.) But I don't see any pictures of Mrs. Milmer's big-nosed, broad-shouldered, dark-haired family. And there aren't any degrees from her alma mater hanging on the walls.

In front of me is a large oak desk. It sure looks like Mrs. Milmer's. A scattering of papers is flung across its surface. Clearly, whoever owns this desk is overworked and overwhelmed. The weird thing is, I don't see a single pen. Only papers. I stand up and sneak a glance at the mounds of desk work. To avoid being intrusive, I don't touch anything. I'm looking to see if my name is on any of them. I mean, why am I even here? The papers all look blank.

I know I shouldn't be snooping. I'm about to sit back down when I see the corner of a nameplate. The sign says
LOUISE DAVIS
. Do I know a Louise Davis? Is she my dentist? No, that's Louise David, DDS. Isn't it? None of this makes sense, and so I sit down in my wooden chair.

I have no idea what I'm wearing. Is it a bathrobe? How did I wind up dressed in a bathrobe? I wouldn't leave the house like this. Maybe if I focus on the last place I was I can figure out how I got here. My mind is blank. If I stay alone in this room without any answers for one more minute, I am going to lose my mind. That's how panicked I feel. I need to see someone I know. My mother. I need to see my mother.

I keep searching the wood-paneled walls for answers. There isn't a single window in this room. And there aren't any doors. No. This is impossible. Maybe I've already lost my mind. Maybe I'm in a lockdown area. A clock ticks behind me. I turn and look. Wow. It's not one single clock. It's a wall of clocks. Row after row of round ticking timepieces the size of dinner plates. There's at least a hundred. They must be keeping track of every time zone on the planet. Maybe even beyond.

“Molly, I'm sorry to leave you suspended.”

A woman with dark gray hair stands behind the desk wearing a smart navy blue suit. She's not my dentist. And she's not my principal. Where did she even come from? Was she underneath the desk?

“Are you Louise Davis?” I ask.

Her eyes are gray too, and they widen in surprise when I call her by her name.

“Oh, you found the placard.”

I nod.

“For a minute I thought you were already tuning in to all the frequencies now available to you. You have a lot of gifts to explore.”

I look around the room, hoping to see presents. Maybe this is a surprise party. Except, my birthday isn't until February. Wait, is it February?

“Molly, please listen very closely to what I'm about to say.”

She walks from behind her desk toward me. For her age, I think she's quite slim and attractive, and I hope when I get older that I can look as good as she does.

“I am Louise Davis. I will be your intake officer concerning all matters of the soul. You are in the process of crossing over. I will be with you for your entire journey.”

This doesn't make much sense to me. I'm not a soul. I'm a person. I'm in high school. Why do I have an intake officer? Wait, I remember. I fell off a horse. I'm in the hospital. Louise must be a nurse. I wonder why she isn't wearing scrubs and a name tag. Maybe it's common hospital lingo to refer to people as souls.

“Please sit. Due to your sudden passing, it will take a moment for everything to catch up with you.”

“I'm already sitting.”

“Right, right, I'm running behind.”

Great. She's inept. I'm probably dealing with a flunked-out nurse. How can I tactfully get a different one?

“Shouldn't I be on a gurney? I have a head wound.”

Louise reaches into her piles of paper like she's double-checking something.

“No, nobody crosses over on a gurney.”

“How is that even possible? What kind of hospital is this?”

I realize for the first time that my head doesn't hurt. Or my butt. I mean, I'm able to sit in a wooden chair. To be honest, I feel rather pleasant all over. But I'm completely confused.

“Molly, this isn't a hospital.”

“Then I'm in the wrong place. I was in an ambulance.”

Louise shakes her head, and her no-nonsense bob swings a little.

“If this isn't a hospital, am I in some sort of clinic?” I shouldn't be. My parents have good health insurance.

“Molly, I'm sorry to inform you of this—it will most likely be catching up with you any second now—but you've died. You're in the process of crossing over from life to death. I'm Louise Davis, your intake counselor concerning all matters of the soul. I'll be helping you cross.”

“You're repeating yourself. And I don't believe you.”

Something is not right. Why is this woman lying to me? Oh my god. Maybe I've been abducted. I've heard stories about deranged infertile women who steal babies and children and teenagers. But never in a million years did I think I'd become a victim. How do I get out of here?

“Sometimes repetition helps it sink in. And you need to stop thinking about escape. You are exactly where you are supposed to be.”

As I keep looking around the room, I notice that some things do appear weird and maybe somewhat otherworldly. The clocks. The lack of an entrance. And windows. I mean, there's no light source, not even a lamp, but the room is lit well enough for me to see. Both Louise and I do seem pale and so do the ivory sofa and pine desk. We look thin, too, almost transparent. It's like everything in the room has been made out of thinly sliced pieces of bread. Even me.

“Why am I wearing a bathrobe?”

“I don't know.” Louise glances down at the papers. “My mistake.”

I look down again. I'm wearing black cotton pants and my favorite pink shirt. They were the clothes I was wearing during the accident. But I'm not wearing my borrowed boots. I just have on socks. This is so weird.

“I can't really be dead,” I say.

Louise nods. “You are.”

A variety of terrible feelings stampedes through me: panic, sadness, despair, surprise, alarm, confusion, denial. There is no way I'm dead. I don't know what it means to
be dead
or
cross over
. I've never read the Bible or been to church. I'm sixteen. How can I be dead? I was in an ambulance surrounded by a medical team. I was on my way to a hospital. People were helping me.

“But my head wound was small potatoes,” I say.

“True,” Louise says.

“So I might still pull through?” I ask, reaching for any thread of hope.

“No,” Louise says in a very flat voice. “You died.”

This answer triggers an even bigger stampede of terrible feelings. “Whoa,” I hear myself say. “Whoa.” Even though I really don't believe what I'm being told, I try to pull myself together by asking logical, anxiety-calming questions.

“Okay, Louise. Let's say that I am dead. Is this Heaven?”

Louise shakes her head. My mouth drops open, and if I had a body and was able to cry, I'd be openly weeping. This news is worse than being told that I am dead. Because apparently I didn't make it to Heaven. Which means I must be in the other place.

“No,” I say. “This can't be happening!”

I do not deserve to die
or
be sent to Hell. I'm certain.

Louise jerks her head up and looks concerned. “Don't overreact before you know what's going on.”

I walk to the clocks on the back wall. There aren't any numbers. They have words written on them. Names. People I know. Henry Shaw. Melka Klima. Tate Arnold. My parents. Before I can move closer and read more names, Louise intercepts me.

“Don't worry about the clocks,” she says. “My job is to explain things as we go. We'll get to those soon enough.”

The clocks seem important.

“Am I supposed to meet people at certain times?” I ask.

“No. No. No. Stop trying to figure it all out,” Louise says. “Relax.”

“There is no way that's happening,” I say.

“The first step in this process is that we must review your death.”

“Review my death?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“We have a special projection system. Follow me.”

Follow her? Watch my own death? “I'm not sure I want to see that, Louise.” I try to keep my voice polite, but really I'm shocked and disgusted by this arrangement.

“You must. It's required.”

How can somebody force me to watch my own death? She can't. “I'm not going.” I don't refuse to follow rules very often, but my gut tells me that I should stay where I am. What I'm being told is insane. And I don't have to follow insane rules. I just don't.

“Either you follow me right now, like a reasonable soul, or I will make you come.”

Make me come? Who does this woman think she is? “Okay. You're going to have to make me come,” I say.

Louise sighs and looks disappointed. “You're wasting time.”

But if I really am dead, which I still don't totally believe, isn't time all I've got now?

“Follow me to the viewing room,” she says.

I plan to stand still and resist all forward movement. Instead, a rope of energy wraps itself around me, constricting my arms and legs, and tugs me against my will through a wall. Then I'm in a long white hallway being dragged to the viewing room.

This must be a dream. There is no way this is happening.
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Maybe I was knocked out with some sort of anesthesia that's making me dream freaky things.

“Once you watch your own death, you'll begin to accept that your life has expired and you're about to start the next phase of your existence,” Louise says.

The hallway goes on and on.

She continued, “If you hadn't resisted, and were coming along willingly, this would be a thrilling walk down memory lane. The hallway would illuminate important moments in your life. Have you heard the phrase, I watched my life pass before my eyes?”

“Yeah,” I say. Dying didn't take away my intelligence.

“Well, you're missing that part,” Louise says.

Is it this woman's job to make me feel worse than I've ever felt in my whole entire life?

“Do you want to experience that?” she finally asks.

I don't hesitate. “Yes.” If I really am dead (which I'm not), and this is my last chance to see my life (which it can't be), then of course I want to experience that.

As soon as I say the word
yes
, the rope of energy releases its hold on me, giving me the power to move about freely. I slow my pace and watch the walls, hoping to see the movie of my life. But everything is still achingly white. The paint job is immaculate.

“Do I need to say something to make my memories appear?” I can't figure this out. I feel stunned. Shocked. Completely out of sorts.

“Be patient,” Louise urges.

Once she says that, it happens. It's not a movie, as I thought it was going to be; my life arrives in photographs. I see pictures that I don't think my mother or anybody else actually took. Gold frames form around them and they cover the hallways top to bottom. There are so many. As I move past them, I'm overwhelmed by sensations that are frozen inside those moments. Approaching a picture of my family at the beach, I swear I can smell the ocean. And as I study a picture of my third birthday, I can taste the sweet chocolate frosting buttered to the roof of my mouth. With each step I take toward the viewing room, the photos show me growing older.

“I don't remember that day,” I say, pointing to me sitting in a shopping cart. “I must have been four years old. What was special about that day?”

“Something you'll soon realize is that every day you were alive was a special day.”

It might be possible that I am dead.

In one of the photographs, I'm playing with a yellow dog. I don't recall interacting with that dog. Ever. In another I'm riding my bicycle down the sidewalk in front of my grandma's house, alongside a row of her lush red geraniums. Seeing this stirs a sadness inside me that's so sharp the only way I can shake it is by trying to think logistically.

“So everybody gets their own long white hallway? And you have to swap the photos out for every death? And every dead person gets a counselor?” I convince myself that this will feel easier if I can figure out the system.

Louise stops walking and turns around. We're not even halfway down the hallway. She tilts her head and looks concerned. “What does it matter how it works for other people? You're the dead person being given the gift of an extensive memory lane. Live it again. Feel everything. Let yourself.”

I nod at Louise like I get her point. But she doesn't understand that looking at the photos and inhabiting those memories feels just as bitter as it does sweet. As we reach the end of the wall, I see pictures so recent and familiar that it's hard to believe they're hanging in these frames.