15
There is a new problem on Earth. Cooper is alright – a little depressed again, maybe, but slugging along just fine, and making love to Lily about seventeen times a day – but he is not the issue. It is my best friend Autumn. She is fading like the August heat.
I loved watching the love bloom between Autumn and her husband, Hank. But it was not instalove. Some things take time. They have to sink down deep and take hold. And that’s what they did, slowly at first, but faster and faster until it swamped them and changed all they knew. I set them on a path for each other, I’ll admit that much. But I couldn’t do much beyond that. They’d already flirted once or twice, but I wanted it to stick. And it did stick. After my death she was choked by heartbreak and grief, but as the summer fell into September, Autumn did the best and worst thing I’d ever observed: she resumed her life without me. It was so difficult for me to accept at first, but I also rejoiced, because she was succeeding for me in my absence. I would never walk down an aisle, get pregnant, celebrate an anniversary – but she would, and I would be right there with her. She and Hank got married within months, and as they exchanged their rings, I floated in the sky above them, smiling proudly at them and Cooper.
In the beginning they would fight every day, but now they are living in love. Now, when I visit them, the feeling I get is somehow like sitting in a parked car and staring into the eyes of someone you love while soft rain washes your windows clean. Warm, golden, quiet. And I cannot get enough.
When I stopped in on them one night, they sat in a sagging hammock on Autumn’s back porch, only feet from my family home, looking up at the sky. I turned up the stars a little brighter to let them know I was okay, and happy. They smiled. I think they knew. I hoped they did, at least.
But clouds have broken the morning sky. I saw the cancer before she did, actually. And on that morning in late February when she glanced in a mirror and saw that she did not look well, I already knew that it was too late for her. But what could I do? I could not interfere with that. With cancer. It is too much. It is not my decision to make.
At first, she seemed alright, and she hoped she would beat this. She’s fading faster, though. I can sense it. She wants to let go, and that makes her angry. And I feel awful admitting this, but selfishly, I almost want her here. I miss my friend. I miss being normal and having a companion. I want to take her to a little table in my kitchen and laugh and talk and be happy with her. Memories feel like they mean less when you have nobody to remember them with, and mine have been greatly diminished by the starving winds of death. And Autumn wants to go. She wants to move on. She has always been an inferno, but now she is the flickering glow of a candle, and she would rather flash and burn out than slowly fade into the night.
When things got really bad and she could no longer leave her bed, a doctor pulled Hank aside and leaned in close. “Things aren’t looking well,” he began with a frown, “and it would be totally understandable if you sent her to hospice. Sending her home in this state would be such a drain on you, and we know you just want to be young and enjoy yourself, so-”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Hank asked the shocked doctor.
“Uh…excuse me?”
“Where Autumn goes, I go. And I’m going home. If my wife so much as sees the front door of a hospice center, I’m grabbing her gurney and pushing it straight to my car. That girl’s gonna die with me next to her, and that’s that.”
But as Autumn fades more and more quickly, I grow so nervous about all this. About her death. Will I see her? Where will she go? And why do I make everything in the universe about myself?
Not everyone comes here. That much I know. People create their own hereafters through how they perform on Earth, a hypothesis I formed as a human that turned out to be extremely correct. One moment of heaven can stretch on forever, and one moment of hell can trap you for eternity. I suspect the world looks at you and takes into account everyone you hurt, everyone you loved, all the good you sent out, all the damage you left behind, and sort of writes your ticket based on those factors. But where will Autumn go?
Oh, I would do anything for one more day with her, just one more hour. (Yes, we still measure time as the Unliving did, when we have to. It is all we know.) I miss her so much, even more now that she is battling cancer and needs my support. Her life is slipping, waning, and yet I have gotten no sign that she will join me. The others up here turn away when I approach, too angry at what they know I will ask. Mr. Knellings stormed off when he heard my thoughts on the matter. Some souls up here have been denied reunions with their loved ones, and they are still bitter. Who would not be embittered by a lost eternity of love?
As I watch Autumn, I start to feel as lonely as I did when I was in sixth grade and got sent home for crying at school about an insult from a passing kid on the way to science lab. How odd is it that even after death, the transition to end all transitions, the move to end all moves, all I want is a friend?
Oh, the dead: the ultimate of the marginalized, the last of the denied. We are everywhere. When will you embrace us?
So I wait for an answer. And wait. And wait. Usually time is of no importance here, but I can feel Autumn’s life slipping away, unspooling like rope after you throw an anchor into the sea. Soon the anchor will hit – plonk – and will she be waiting for me when it does? I cannot be alone anymore. I cannot do this.
As I wait, I play a song I liked as a girl. Humans are capable of creating such beautiful music, and other species care nothing of music – that tells me everything I need to know. Called I’ll Be Seeing You, it’s an old-timey tune my grandma, Mam, used to play when she missed my grandfather after he died. We actually played it at her funeral, and at the time, I’d sat in the church with my arms crossed, frustrated that we had to participate in all this pomp and circumstance when Mam was already gone. She’d hated theatrics when she was alive – why did we have to sit and talk about her and cry? Why couldn’t we just let her fly?
Only now do I know that my grandparents were slow-dancing in the rafters of that church at that very moment, smiling down at their families as they drifted above our heads, reunited at long last as they swayed to their timeless teenage love song:
“I’ll be seeing you…I’ll find you in the morning sun…”
And as I watch the pastel northern lights over Norway, humming along to the melody and really starting to get sad and lonely, I suddenly notice a voice I know.
“Summer!”
I hear the biggest laugh in the world and turn around.