5
Up here, not all is shaded in heartbreak and disappointment. We have fun, too. One of the coolest things about the grey area is that, although I am not directly above them, I can still watch humans, zoom in and out of the picture like when my father did when he brought me home from the hospital and then left my family a few years later. In, out, in out. There is only a limited time I can visit, but not for the reasons you may assume: it is simply too intense. How many humans can sit with a corpse for a whole day in a funeral home? It is the same for us. It gets too hard for me to watch the corpse of my life, and I am pulled away. When there are big moments, though, we can tap into all the energy and all the love and stay for indefinite amounts of time, and I am grateful for the visiting hours with my former life. Because God knows there are so many more people than just Cooper that my departure has touched, for better and for worse.
And I am not new to voyeurism, either. I can remember watching life continue as a human, especially since I used to have to watch my former crushes move on via social media. Never was there anything harder than watching someone you loved, love someone else. And technology was the cruelest periscope of all – up until now, at least. A few weeks after the boys would stop talking to me, they’d be tagged in a few pictures with a new girl, and soon they’d be moving on without me, on display in front of all our mutual frenemies. I’d be forced to watch their love progress through the looking glass, inserting myself into their status updates and their check-ins at Italian restaurants like some sick voyeur. But that cannot compare to this. It is miserable and beautiful on an entirely different level. I must watch as a direct observer, and there is nothing I can do about it. There is nothing I can do but see them live, and I will never live again. I am a fly on the wall, eternally. And it’s not like humans don’t enjoy being watched, of course. I have accessed the memories of eons’ worth of them, and one common thread seems to run through this race: whether they hated themselves or loved themselves, they were still fixated on themselves all the same. They are a particularly self-obsessed species, so much so that even when they look up at the stars, it is simply to search for signs of where their own lives are going, somehow making even the cosmos all about themselves. They call it astrology, we just call it narcissism. The social media explosion I was so keen on hating during my lifetime simply gave humans the means to obsess over themselves in a socially acceptable manner. Technology did not change humans – it just excavated and exacerbated what was already there, exposed the fossils of their behavior for them.
And as much as the dead are focused on the living, the living are focused on the dead. Sometimes the unselfish parts of me want them to forget about me. I am gone – there is nothing they can do for me from down there. So why not let me go? I cannot say how badly I want them to attend to the living ones around them while they still have time. I look at Cooper’s mother, for example, mourning her happy son she lost when I died, mourning her son period because he abandoned her the day I left, and want to scream in Cooper’s ear: help her! I look at my brother, lost and alone because of how depressed my mother became after my death, and cry celestial tears for him, while simultaneously wanting to kick my mother in the neck for doing this to him.
Don’t even get me started on the subject of my family. Death often destroys a family, even though the opposite should be true. It pushes them together in grief for a moment and then pulls them right back apart again, and the sudden distance is unbridgeable. Death becomes the center of the family’s world, their vast black sun, and they are a solar system of planets crowded together in the center around that sun, perfectly within view of one another and yet totally untouchable at the same time, both joined and separated by icy horror. Death is the ultimate distancer, even though you have been pulled so, so close to the ones you love. To look into someone’s hollow eyes and know they cry about the same person as you every night, when the darkness comes: nothing has ever been more difficult for humans to process. This truth is simply too close for them, too intimate, too personal for the spaces they create between each other. So they suffer in silence and cry in the quiet, wrenched apart by the one thing that unites them: misery. And there is nothing that can be done, not until the shadow of Death leaves, at least.
In recent months I have watched my mother behave recklessly and fall backwards in her quest to become better since I died. The second winds that are breathed into a human after a death usually stop blowing – that is the saddest thing. But she is wallowing in her Summer sadness, and so I want to help.
Tonight she is on a date with Frank, a guy from a Christian dating site. It is the first time she has left her house and slapped on makeup in weeks. She is surprised by how into it she is: he is cuter than he looked on his profile.
But just as I knew she would, my mother goes dark. You never get over the death of a child, and she probably shouldn’t even be out in public yet.
She pauses at dinner midway through a conversation about Frank’s adult son. “My daughter, she…died,” Shelly says, and I want so badly to reach out and hug her, kiss her on the head, tell her I am here. But I can’t. I am nothing.
Frank’s face falls. “Oh, God. That’s…jeez. I’m so sorry.”
He looks away as she wipes her eyes. I can sense that Frank will not be calling her after this. My mother has issues that he does not want to take on. But I sift some kindness into him and then hope for the best.
“Shelly?” he asks half an hour later, out on the sidewalk, after the check has been signed and the awkward goodbyes have been half-murmured to the hostesses. She clutches her sweater – my sweater, actually – and notices that it still smells of me. Wearing it feels like getting a soft hug and having her innards pulled out of her, all at once. She doesn’t know why she wears it – to luxuriate in the pleasure, or to burn in the pain? Both choices are equally as likely, she figures.
Like a little girl, she squeaks.
“Yes?” she says, her voice sounding more like a mouse’s than a mother’s.
“I just wanted you to know that I had a wonderful time. Really.”
“You…you did?”
In the glow of the streetlight, Frank bends down and plants a kiss on her lips, no tongue. She is confused, though: is this appropriate? Do mothers with dead daughters kiss strange men? It is a constant struggle for the left behind to figure out what is appropriate and what is not. (And here’s the final say: the dead don’t give a damn. Go dance in the rain, get drunk, kiss a stranger! We don’t care, just as long as you have fun.)
Something strange happens after this. Weirdly, I feel the kiss, too. Up here, all alone, I had almost forgotten what this felt like to be wanted. To be desired. And I remember how there was a strength embedded and transferred in desire, like someone’s lips on yours could make you go out and conquer the world in your very best dress. Shelly blushes, takes a breath. She feels that ancient battle waging within her, between what we feel and what we want. And gorgeously, she falls to want.
Frank clears his throat, moves closer again, and full-on kisses her in the late-evening blue. This love will not last, and tomorrow she will be just as lonely as she was yesterday. But right now, she is triumphant, as young and as light as a high schooler being smooched under the bleachers again.
And for a moment, just for a moment, I feel as young as my mother does.
~
I exit the scene and leave them to their business. The funny thing is that I do not feel strange, watching her. Because I was always a watcher, even as a human. Sometimes I felt as invisible down there as I am up here. Humans can sometimes be a nasty, exclusionary bunch, and I was considered “different” because of a problem with my body, rendering me invisible due to something I had no control over. So I would sit in the corner and watch the people who were excluding me from whatever they were doing. All that is different now is that I watch from above, and that I am being excluded from being alive. And I didn’t understand humans, even as a human. Never did. I am so impatient with them, so confused by the way they sit around wasting their lives. Time is an hourglass, at least by the way humans measure it, and they let the sands slip away while they sit around being terrified of their own happiness. They waste so much time being sad and full of hatred. I do not understand their prejudices against things like race and class and sex, either. From up here I can peer right through their skin, and do you know what exists under there? The same sack of bloody organs that lies within the rest of them, and beneath that, a pulsing, beating, immortal soul. The ability of humans to separate themselves and hate one another would amaze me, if it wasn’t so infuriating. Money, status, sexual preference – none of these things matter the second the last breath of air leaves their lungs. You would not believe the amount of souls I have seen begging for entry into this place, pounding on the walls of my world before they were dragged down below, and do you think their Maseratis helped them then? And on the other hand, I have seen the richest humans in the world get up here and surround themselves with mementos of their loved ones and want for nothing, and homeless arrive here and be given everything they have ever wanted for spreading love and happiness. Money and forever have nothing to do with one another. Wherever your treasure lies, make sure you’re still golden at home.
The surgeon who killed me is a different story altogether. I am not going to meddle with that until the time comes. He has created his own hell, and I suspect he will go there when he exits his Earthly one. But for several more years, he will go on and continue to wreak havoc on the Earth. But I will wait. I will watch. And when the moment comes, when justice strikes, I will rejoice.
Back to my mother. I could not come home in the beginning, when there was just the wailing. My mother wailed for me for weeks. And it wasn’t just any kind of wailing: it was the animal kind, the kind that explodes out of someone broken and shocked and terrified and hopeless, the kind that no actress in any movie could ever recreate, the kind that makes your hair stand up when you hear it and makes you think: yes, something terrible has happened. This made me so sad, because it reinforced a devastating truth I’d been avoiding: I had been reduced to yet another name in an obituary. This was the single hardest fact I ever had to cope with when I first got up here: in the eyes of the world, I was a lost cause, a missed chance, a write-off. I was both infamous and anonymous: I was “that girl who died from down the street.” Everyone had a story about me: someone’s brother had once shared a class with me, someone’s girlfriend had once served me at brunch, someone knew someone who’d dated my father in high school. But that didn’t mean they cared about me: my story had been written. All I could do now was push my family to live lives so big and useful, they would overpower the ghostly specter surrounding them.
But slowly my mother descended from her fury into some kind of numb, zombie-like state of removed shock, and this was her mindset the first night I came to see her.
While lounging in my heaven one night, I was overcome with the strongest and most simple urge I’d ever experienced: I wanted my mommy. So I closed my eyes, gathered some energy, felt something melt around me, and opened them again. And suddenly I was floating above my dark street on a cloudless, windy night. The oaks in my yard were swaying in the sea breeze, the ranch houses were lined up perfectly down my street like Lego buildings, and all was just as I had remembered when I was alive. I was wrecked and ruined and delighted to be back at my childhood home.
I turned to my yard, and I knew I was ready. Cooper had been here earlier, taking Chase for a walk with their new dog, so it was easy for me to sift back down, since his energy still lingered. (Chase wanted to name the dog Summer, and the suggestion made my mom weep. So she vetoed the name and chose Georgia instead.)
I floated back down to the house that had built me. This, too, was gloriously the same: the oak by the driveway was knobby where I’d tried to build a tree house with my father in kindergarten, and my brother’s green bike – the one he kept falling off of – still leaned along the fence. I melted through the closed front door, and I was home again – little girl gone, come home to roost. Oh, I’d missed this place so much. I’d grown up in these rooms. I winced at the old cabinet with the sharp corners I’d bumped into a million times while running outside, I smiled at the patch of carpet I’d stained with orange soda during a sleepover party with my best friend Autumn. Then I started exploring my dark house. As the moonlight kept me company, I swept silently through the cramped dining area, glided through the living room with its mismatched couches, slipped past the kitchen with the yellowing paint and the sagging cupboards. Pictures of the human version of me watched from everywhere as I slid past, but I paid no mind to them – that girl didn’t exist anymore. She was me now.
They say you can’t go home again. But now that I was back, it felt like I’d never left at all. I would love this place forever, even if was bulldozed to make way for a mini-mall in ten years. I would still come to that mall every Christmas and worship the parking lot. This ground was precious. I’d been a baby here once, and that made it holy forever. In my eyes, at least. It was home.
I absorbed the lingering scent of my mother, then braced myself to go see her. I floated down the hall, passing the open doors in slow motion, each of them leading into dark and empty rooms that had once contained my life. I peered into my own bedroom, then looked away again when I saw it had been totally unchanged since the day I died. That was a bad sign, because nobody could touch a dead person’s things until they’d gotten over their death at least a little. Then I drifted to the end of the hallway and stared into my mother’s room, and I was comforted to notice that it still smelled like dust and sunflowers. And finally, there was my mommy, crying quietly in her bed as the moon shadows danced on her floor, painting her misery in luxurious creams and greys and whites. I may have been from heaven, but I’d found a hell on Earth. Oh, Mom, I thought. I would do anything in the world to make you feel my love.
“I’m back,” I whispered aloud as I held out a hand and offered a touch she would never feel. “And I’m not leaving this time.”
Several weeks later, I visit again. I watch my mom and my brother in my kitchen, settled into a quiet weeknight. Bills are piled on the side table, dishes clog the sink, and everything is perfect. Well, not everything. I still can’t control myself. I did it again the night before – I showed my brother Chase a glimpse of myself. I couldn’t help it. I like when his thoughts wander to me – I enjoy the company. So tonight he is drawing what is on his mind: a blonde-haired girl standing at the edge of his bed, smiling, a strangely familiar facial scar snaking across her cheek.
“What are you drawing?” my mom asks as she flits between cooking dinner and filling out a crossword in the paper. She is trying to learn to cook, as I was always the chef of the family, and it is not working out. She is also trying to sharpen her mind to get a better job now that Chase is her sole responsibility. This is also not working out very well, either, but I love her so much for trying. She was the prototypical batty, absent mom, sure, but underneath that, there was something stronger. She was a cool stream running at a rapid pace: there was just more of her than other people. I admired her so much, always did. I just wish I would’ve told her that while I was still alive – now I’ll never get the chance.
“I’m drawing Summer,” he says, and she looks at him. Hearing her daughter’s voice on her son’s lips feels like getting kicked in the stomach every single time, and it will never get better. I would know. My mother wants closure on my death more than anything, but it will never come. Because my death was villain-less. I was not murdered in the night by some violent criminal, and I did not jump off a building and take myself away by my own hand. My death had occurred between shades of grey, and that is what kills her: it just sort of happened, a random collision of odds and accidents and mishaps. And how could you ever wrap your mind around something that just happened?
“Sum…Summer?” she asks, choked by a very specific sorrow that only a parent with a lost child could ever know. “You’re drawing Summer?”
“Yep. I still see her, too.”
She pulls her sweater around her shoulders, wrapping herself like a caterpillar in a cocoon, protecting her skin from the chilly possibilities in the air. “What do you mean?”
“I see her,” he says casually. “She stands in my room sometimes, watching me.”
My mother’s face disintegrates into a crumpled frown. “Oh, honey, Summer’s…”
“She tells me things,” he interrupts. “Not out loud, but…somehow.”
“…And what does she say?”
Chase shrugs. “I don’t know. She just wants me to be happy. I can feel it.”
Shelly’s eyes fill with tears, and suddenly I can sense her thoughts. She almost wants to let it in – she almost believes – but she shuns the truth at the last possible moment.
Poor little thing, she thinks. This is so hard to watch. It’s so sweet that he’s making up these fantasies, but so sad, too. Is this normal? I should ask Dr. Steinberg about grief counselors in the area…
My connection is slipping at her denial, my foothold into their kitchen fading away. I want them to mourn me, I need them to need me, but more than anything I just want to be acknowledged. “I’m here!” I want to say, and so I do it: I send the breeze of my past into my cramped kitchen.
Shelly pauses immediately. With wide eyes, she looks around. She feels me, her phantom daughter, all wrapped up in love and good wishes, right there in her kitchen. I can sense it.
But this cannot be, she thinks. I am dead, and yet she hasn’t felt my presence like this since the last morning I was ever in the house. This can’t be happening, right? And…and wait, is that my scent she smells, too? Is Shelly’s dead baby really back for a visit?
I wait and watch as my mother struggles with humanity’s age-old battle between heart and head, silently begging her to believe the impossible all the while. All I want is for her to know that I love her. But will she believe what she is feeling, or will she tell herself she is foolish, like all humans, and get back to her life, even though the chills on the back of her neck will linger for hours, a ghostly reminder of her ghostdaughter? (And on the subject of “chills:” humans don’t understand why this happens, but it is us. The more playful souls up here like to access their loved ones’ hair follicles and send a little jolt of electricity, just to say hello. We can’t do much, but we can raise your hair for you, you know.)
As I watch, my family’s cat notices me, and she sits taller and starts purring out of nowhere, a smile on her face. Animals pick up sights and sounds that are far out of reach of humans, and pets were often the first to notice my presence when I drifted into a room. Cats would bolt upright and stare right at me with wide eyes, and dogs would jump around while whining and yelping and trying desperately to tell their owners a visitor had come. My cat and I hated each other when I was alive, but she’s come to miss me, and as soon as she senses me, her purr fills the kitchen. I just wish humans would notice me, too. My family thinks they lost me. They didn’t. I’m here. I will always be right here.
But like the human she is, my mother sits taller and denies me. “That’s great, honey. Do you want sweet tea, or water?”
“Water, thanks.”
My mom reaches over, pours her son some water. And just like that, Shelly Johnson banishes the possibility that her daughter is alive and well and all around her, and gets back to her crossword.
Before I leave, though, I send my smell into the room one last time, just to bring her back to me. Her eyes fill all the way up with tears as I flee.
Oh, humans. They hope for so much. They damage almost everything they hold dear. They send love in the only ways they know how. And I love them beyond belief.
~
As the living take stock of their lives, so do the dead with their second lives. And as I fly through space to my little dreamhome on the ocean, I realize it’s official: I am now officially entranced by my former world, fascinated with it like I never was when I was alive, a child looking into a department store window at Christmas, forever on the wrong side of the glass. And this is my situation: my mother Shelly is a mess. My little brother is lost. Cooper is an absolute disaster. But I will save them all. I have to. I have to get them to hear the music again.
You don’t have to be in the grey area to hear the music, you know. The world is singing for all those who are listening. Birds are chirping and elderly neighbors are greeting each other and babies are giggling and dogs are licking their owners and loving them gently. The world radiates and vibrates with love and beauty for anyone with open eyes and ears. It’s just that nobody is ever listening or paying attention – nobody is buying tickets to the show. Especially Cooper. He is sad. And I am probably – no, undoubtedly – the reason. This is all my fault, and I need to fix it. I refuse to be another person to abandon Cooper Nichols. I will stay, no matter how hard it gets. I will get my loved ones through the trauma of my departure. I swear it on my life and my death.