23
Time starts to bleed together, just as it did when I was getting older as a human. All my remaining loved ones are entering their middle ages, and I grow more jealous and proud than ever. Cooper celebrates one family birthday, and then two, and then three. I watch my town make and remake itself, transformed again and again by relentless human progress and destruction. And the summer after my mother’s death, Cooper and Lily sit at a public auction in a parking lot in Jacksonville Beach. A parking lot I know very well. And Lily is falling apart with panic.
The remains of the half-dismantled pier populate the closed-off parking lot: old signs, boards, even some pilings. The pier is being destroyed to make way for a bigger and better one a few blocks to the south, and the city is selling whatever they can in an attempt to raise the necessary funds. Many residents have become attached to the old dock, its wooden planks containing the memories of generations, and at least fifty people crowd the lot to buy mementos of past love.
They sit through the auction for nearly an hour. Lily does not know exactly why they are here, but she can guess.
“Now, the benches,” the auctioneer finally says, after selling pieces of the concession booth to an old man with tears in his eyes. “Any takers? If not, they’re well on their way to Beaches Metalyard!”
Cooper raises his hand, peers down the line of assorted junk. “Yeah. But I want the one from all the way at the end, at the left side. Can we arrange that?”
The auctioneer looks back at the construction workers, who shrug and then nod. “There you go.”
“Okay, then. I’ll take it.” And as I watch, my boy buys the last bench we ever sat next to as a couple. The bench where my feet glowed.
He looks down at the sandy ground, and I can tell my boy wants to break. I tell him not to, and he does not hear me. So I wish very hard, and soon, comfort washes over him. And then he does the most courageous thing in the world: he keeps going, one small step at a time.
On the way back to the car, Lily is restless and confused. Things aren’t adding up, and the sun is hot and punishing on her shoulders. So she lets the words tumble out before she can think it through.
“You just bought a fifty dollar rusty bench?” she asks as he fumbles for his keys. She looks over at him, prepared to rage, but suddenly he is so beautiful in the sun, his golden hair thrown across his forehead and his eyes shining amber in the sunlight, that all the breath leaves her lungs. She stares at him, a fool in love.
“What?” he asks, and she shakes her head.
“I just don’t understand,” she says, stepping closer. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
She crosses her arms. “I’ll say. We haven’t had sex in two weeks.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
He sighs. “You used to say we had too much sex, now it’s not enough…I can’t keep up anymore.”
“Don’t change the subject. I’m sick of you being so…dark, Cooper. It’s getting old.”
He looks at her differently, something starting to sink in. “What does that mean? …You don’t want me anymore?”
She is taken aback, once again, by his insecurity. “God, of course I want you. Anyone would want you. That’s not the issue.”
“Then what are you saying?”
She faces him, an open window. “It means you need to man up, Mr. Nichols. Be present. Deal with your life.”
Something flares in his eyes. “Don’t you dare say that to me, Lily.”
“Don’t say what?”
He turns away. “You just…you don’t know me. You don’t. You don’t know what it’s like to have had a dad who ran out, a mom who died when you were barely thirty, and a girl-” he pauses and stops himself. “Yeah, a real fucking difficult life. You can’t just wave some magic wand and make those scars go away, you know.”
She points at the ground under them. “This place has nothing to do with your childhood, or your parents, Cooper. You didn’t grow up in this town. Stop making it about that.”
He angles himself away even further. She moves closer so that she’s leaning against the car. Her face softens. “There’s something else, Cooper. There’s a reason you came here. Tell me. I want to know. Now. Because I understand more than you think I do.” She swallows. “Is it…her? Still?”
He flinches. She has never really directly mentioned me before, and it makes me feel nearly alive.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he says. He was holding onto something from his past, something he would never get back, and it baffled both of them to the point of heartbreak.
~
Over the next few months, I watch their marriage begin to unravel faster and faster, and it terrifies me witless. Outwardly, Cooper Nichols was the perfect husband. Tall, dark and handsome, he charmed all of Lily’s friends and raised her children perfectly, and privately he made love to her like a wild forest animal. But he was absent again. Even in his most romantic gestures, there was an emptiness, like a sparkling fish tank devoid of water. She was picking up on it more and more, and it did not make her happy. A few times she had even imagined leaving – packing a bag one night and driving up to the coast to Savannah, far away from her husband’s faraway gaze. But then again, where would that leave her? Middle-aged and single? And besides, she was still in love with him. She just wanted to feel his love, too.
Humans have no idea how much damage they can cause another by simply being absent and cold and sarcastic and unloving. These wounds are shallow at first, nicking and denting a person’s psyche, but before long they sink into a soul and wreck everything within a person, leaving nothing left to attack.
I float to their house of horrors and find myself watching Lily cleaning a bathroom. She does this when she is angry or depressed, it seems. Usually when she is mad she does more slamming things around than actual cleaning, but what woman doesn’t? I like to watch her go about the mundane activities that make up being a middle-aged mother and wife, and I like to put myself into the picture and imagine that being my life, my existence. What I wouldn’t give to dust the top of a cupboard while my daughter complained about fights with her roommate on the phone, what I wouldn’t sacrifice to stand guard outside the bathroom with some pink medicine while my husband lay on the floor with a bad flu. I long for the simple, I pine after the mundane. Humans do not know what a luxury it is, just to have someone to take care of. Up here it is just me and my thoughts and the stars. Nothing else.
But Lily is a perpetual worrier. Humans worry far too much in general, and she is bad even by their standards. And not just while she cleans. At night she settles down for bed, cleans herself up in the bathroom, and then collapses into her sheets, and a storm of worry known only to herself. As her family sleeps and breathes, she stares at the ceiling, worrying. What if she’s not doing well enough at all this? What if it all falls apart? What is she going to do about Cooper? What if she’s a bad mom? She’s so sure that she’s always falling short somehow. She didn’t pay the electric bill yet and her car needs new tires and, oh God, she’s fucking everything up and nobody understands but her. Mostly she worries about Cooper, though. During their worst fights, they hate each other. Falling in love is easy – getting out of love isn’t such a piece of strawberry cake. They love each other, but they know the wheels are spinning off the wagon, and what would happen if they split? What would they do, who would they love, how would they do this all over again? And in these tough moments that just makes them hate each other more, that they’ve created this situation they can’t escape from. First love was a castle in the sky. Now it felt like a prison. And they resented one another for locking the door. Why couldn’t their love just fix everything?
And on this day, something happens that kicks all this into overdrive: Lily finds “the box.” She is angrily dusting under the bed when she comes across it. She brushes it off, opens it, and then drops it onto the bed and gasps. Scattered around her were every memento of Summer and Cooper he had ever found. It contains every photo of us, every significant text we wrote each other, printed out and savored for the ages. There are leaves, restaurant menus, a lock of my hair he’d taken the day of my death…it was all there, a shrine to little girl lost. I’d seen him take it out a few times to stare at it, but the expression on his face was so furious, I’d turned away every time. I did not want to wonder why he would still be angry with me, after all these years. He talked about me to no one, and that just made things even more difficult. What was going on with him? Cooper was as much of a mystery to me in death as he was in life. Was he loving me, or mourning me? Was he thanking the world for me, or cursing it for giving me to him and then taking me away again and ruining him?
And suddenly, I feel that Lily knows: she knows that I meant more to him than he ever let on. She does not know the full story, and sometimes she tells herself she does not even want to know. But as she stares at the box, she realizes that whoever this girl was, she meant something great to Cooper. Something more than he’d ever admitted. Enough to buy a fifty-dollar bench from a falling-apart pier, apparently. Maybe even enough to haunt him forever, past the point of salvage.
“Come here, babe,” Cooper says from somewhere within their giant maze of a home. (If even a ghost has trouble keeping track of people in a house, you know it’s obnoxiously big.) I zoom in and study my boy, who is now undoubtedly a man. His temples have gone fully grey, and his posture is falling. But if anything, he looks better. He has slipped into the wisdom of old age as comfortably as a traveller slipping into a fluffy white hotel robe after a hot shower. I am amazed by him like when you discover one of your favorite old songs was by one of your favorite singers and you had no idea. He was a new discovery in an old package. That was just Cooper: he was a new surprise every day. If only I didn’t have to share him.
“Babe?” he asks, waiting. “Is something wrong?”
She stops and thinks of her husband, beautiful and quiet and gone. If only he knew that his silence was so much louder, and hurt so much worse, than all the words he wasn’t saying. Sometimes being in the presence of a removed person could be even lonelier than being alone. How much longer was he going to keep her at arm’s length?
“Nooo,” she says in a quivering voice that means something is definitely wrong. “What are you doing?”
“I’m doing SJ’s homework for her.”
“What?”
I see him shrug. “She emailed me the assignment and said she was sick.”
(Side note: she was doing vodka shots the night before with the twelfth graders, but they don’t have to know that. That’s part of the fun of being up here – I get to know what humans don’t, and I love watching them try to figure out their lives from above.)
“You’re dropping everything for that?” Lily asks. “Cooper, she’s probably lying and hung over or something. She’s got you so manipulated, I swear.”
He shrugs again. “I’d drop anything for my babies.”
She pauses, a tear rising to her eye. How can she resist that? He is such a good, kind man. A man she doesn’t deserve, even if his heart is somewhere else, his passions running elsewhere. What can she do but stay and give him love until she can’t anymore? What other option does she have? She didn’t want her kids to come from a broken shell of a home, like she had. She wanted them to come from love. So she sighs, slides the box under the bed, and goes to look for her wonderful far-away husband.
“What’s wrong?” he asks casually as she enters the kitchen, killing her with his distance, with his casual tone.
“What’s wrong?” she repeats, in disbelief that he could not know what was always troubling her. He stares at her, lost. And in love with a ghost, hating herself for it all the while, she turns and leaves the room.
I smile sadly at her and realize I love her, this woman who is living the life I always wanted. How strange it is, that I have grown to love her, and how sad it is, that I’m dying to be her and I’m already dead. I admire the way she actually puts her shoes up in her closet every night instead of flinging them into corner like I did, I admire the elegant way she applies her signature winged eyeliner every morning, I admire the way she loves and supports and comforts the great love of my life in my place. I admire for the way she watched her life fell apart before her eyes and then put on her (Chanel) work boots and dealt with it. So I try to reach out to her, to calm her. And after Cooper goes out to get their latest convertible serviced, I send her on a long walk to the sea.
Throwing away love is the stupidest thing anyone could ever do. Love will be hard some days, because it is supposed to be hard. Love wasn’t built to be easy. It doesn’t work that way. Would you walk away from a burning building, or do your best to put out the fire? Why, then, would you walk away from someone you love, just because being with them has become difficult? Love burns. What you’re supposed to do is stick around and see if you can get back to the good stuff.
Lily closes her eyes, and all at once, I send an image of what will happen if she leaves Cooper. Suddenly she is on her deathbed. Her physical pain is nothing, because her guilt is so much stronger: she is wracked with regret for living a life without Cooper. As her life fades she thinks of all the afternoons she never shared with him, all the mornings she drank coffee alone, all the matinees she drove to with no one in the passenger seat. She thinks of how badly she wants to hold his hand as death prepares to take her, and she regrets leaving more than anything she has ever regretted.
And then I show her another quick sight: the saddest place I have ever seen on Earth. And it is a warning to her. On Hart Island in the Bronx in New York City lies a cemetery for unclaimed bodies that tears me apart whenever I fly over it. Death is terrible, but it also unites. Families are called and friends rush to hospitals and aunts and uncles converge on houses where humans can cry and hug and share in their horror together. But not everyone leaves behind friends and families. Some people die in the darkness. If someone dies and the state of New York cannot find one single soul who knew the person, they bury the body at Hart Island, a vast collection of unmarked bodies, unclaimed legacies. Over one million bodies have come to rest there, and the place vibrates with misery. Because death, in its awfulness, should also be a warm time for families of the departed, a time when they are swamped with love that says We are here for you. Because grief gives meaning to a life. Up here, we are comforted and torn apart when our families cry for us, but mostly comforted. Nothing makes us feel better about being dead than sifting into a home and seeing a group of people putting on a pot of coffee on a Sunday morning and sitting around a table to tell stories about us. That some people on Earth pass away in total silence and isolation and leave behind not one friend, sister, daughter, son, parent, neighbor to claim their bodies, to walk forward and say, Yes, I knew and loved this person, and then bury them with all the honor in the world, is the saddest thing I have ever witnessed in my time in the grey area. And so I show her the cemetery to prove to her just how important it is to treasure all the humans in your life, accept all the love you can, leave behind every drop of goodwill you are capable of creating. Because you don’t want to be on Hart Island. You don’t want to be another blank government-issued grave with no spouse to weep at the grass in front of it. I can promise you this. Every month that nobody visits my grave feels like a knife in my soul.
Back on Earth, Lily Nichols opens her eyes and roars back to the present. She interprets all this as a powerful “daydream,” which is what all humans wrongly perceive messages from the dead to be. Then she turns and walks down the beach, a mind changed, a marriage saved. And I am grateful. To the human who is reading this: never let your problems become bigger than your body. Never become locked inside your own head. Step outside yourself. Walk your dog, read a book, sink into a fantasy world. Stand beside the ocean and imagine all the creatures out there in that vast pool of surging liquid that have no idea who you are and care nothing about your life and your problems and your worries. At the end of the day, you’re really nothing, and what could be more depressing and freeing and beautiful than that?
Lily’s love is repaired – for now, at least. She has not felt Cooper’s love for some time, but she has just felt my love, and she has backed away from the edge. So I wish her well, say a prayer for her soul, and soar around the moons of Saturn until my mind is on nothing but the beauty of this wide and varied and often shattering universe.