Me & Death Read online

  I felt something heavy inside me. The feeling wasn’t about me, though. It was about Chester and this quiet doc dressed in gray. I didn’t like the heavy feeling. I went back to the soap opera.

  Tintoretta’s eyes filled the TV screen. Her pupils were like dark caves, surrounded by a forest of eyelashes. The court reporter was counting eye blinks – one for yes and two for no. The defense lawyer asked, Were you with your brother on the night in question? This was the key question because it proved the alibi. The court reporter leaned toward Tintoretta to make sure. Only, he’d eaten a hamburger with extra onions for lunch, and his breath was strong enough to make Tintoretta’s eyes water, so she blinked twice when she meant to blink once.

  Two blinks, said the court reporter. The answer to the question is, No.

  The courtroom erupted. Raven gesticulated in triumph. Brick protested and was dragged away. The judge pounded her gavel. The final shot was a close-up – Tintoretta with her eyes shut tight. We cut to a commercial about disinfectant.

  Chester raced out from behind the privacy curtain with a pink-lipped grin on his face, looking years younger. Decades, maybe. No wheelchair, no breathing tube or IV. Nothing. He waved vigorously at me, excited as hell, like a little kid getting out of school.

  My heart jumped, I was so relieved. “Hey, Chester!” I called out.

  He kept smiling, and I realized he was dead.

  “Oh, crap,” I said.

  He didn’t seem to mind being dead, though. He came right over to my chair and gave me a hug. I didn’t feel it, but that’s what he was doing. He stood in front of me with his arms outspread, taking a deep breath. Like he was showing me what he could do now, that he couldn’t do when he was alive.

  “Yeah yeah,” I said. “But are you happy?”

  He bent down so that his eyes were level with mine. And he blinked once, hard. Him and Tintoretta.

  And he vanished like that.

  I started to sob. Chester might have been better off dead than alive, but I couldn’t stop the tears. The harder I cried, the more I remembered. Chester’s ghost joined all the other ghosts I had seen on the street and in that awful hotel in the sky. I kept crying. It was like there were walls in my mind between my accident and waking up, and my tears were a flood, washing away the walls, so that I remembered everything that had happened to me since I got run over by Marcie’s mom, what I’d seen and learned and almost lost. Why did the knowledge come then? I don’t know. Maybe crying had something to do with it. Maybe it matters that you can cry for someone who isn’t you.

  They brought out the body on a gurney, Dr. Driver and Sam and the quiet doctor who’d glared at me. I remembered his name now. He was a ghost too – a Slayer. That’s why he was gray and didn’t talk. He looked angrier than usual, and I knew why. Chester wasn’t going to the Jordan Arms. He was gone, free of the earth – and Morgan was still stuck here, as he had been for three hundred years.

  Chester being free made me want to smile even though I was still crying. Morgan glowered at me. Which reminded me of how he’d failed with me. I was free too. I had my whole life ahead of me to live well in. Morgan looked so funny I started to laugh, which was a mistake because the tears and laughter got confused and I had to cough.

  Dr. Driver came over. “I have some bad news, Jim,” she said. “I’m afraid that your friend Chester is –”

  “I know,” I said, catching my breath. “I know.”

  Morgan shook a fist at me and drifted out the door. The bullet holes in the back of his shirt looked like cigarette burns.

  Ma came for me during afternoon snack time. I gave her a hug.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I’m glad to see you, Ma,” I said. “I can’t wait to go home!”

  “Huh.”

  The hospital staff didn’t know about Chester dying, so the lady with the train-whistle breath brought him a bran muffin. I thanked her and ate his along with mine.

  CHAPTER 22

  When I got home, everything was the same. Mold on the wallpaper, dirty dishes in the kitchen, rumpled sheets on my bed. Hot wind moving the curtains on my window, horns honking on Roncesvalles, TV playing downstairs.

  Everything was the same, except me. I was thinner from hospital food, and softer from no exercise, and almost bald. I had a scar on the front of my neck, and pills to take. And a mission.

  The morning after I got home, I put on shorts and sandals and a T-shirt with a picture of Bob Marley on it. Dressed to redeem. I took a twenty-dollar bill from my stash, crossed Roncy to the K Fruit Store, and bought a fifty-cent plum. The old Korean guy took my bill and made change.

  I waved it away. “Keep it,” I said. The twenty was an installment. My plan was to gradually pay him back for all the fruit I had stolen over the past year or so.

  He frowned. “Your change,” he said.

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  I bit into the plum. “Good plums,” I said. “Thank you very much.” When I turned to go, he ran after me.

  “Change,” he said, holding out the money.

  “No, no,” I said. “No change.”

  “Please take,” he said. “Please!”

  He sounded desperate.

  “Do you know who I am?” I said. “I’m the kid who steals fruit and laughs at you.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Yes! I was in an accident a couple of weeks ago. You saw me. You called me the no good one who robs your place of business. Remember? Ambulance?” He frowned. If only I spoke Korean. “You know, ambulance,” I said.

  I made a siren noise. Eeee-awwww-eeeee-awwww.

  He frowned.

  I tried it again. Sounded more like a donkey than an ambulance. We were on the sidewalk in front of his store, standing next to a display of peaches. A mom with a stroller stopped to stare at me. I felt embarrassed.

  Mr. K pulled a plastic bag from a nearby roll, put my change in the bag, and tied it up with neat, sure motions from his spider fingers.

  “Clean,” he said, holding out the bag.

  Did he think I was afraid of his dirty hands? “No, no,” I said. “That’s not it.”

  “You take!” he said, angrily now, putting the plastic bag on top of the plums and going back into the store.

  Drat. It wasn’t easy, apologizing. The lady pushed her stroller away, chatting down into it. Probably telling her kid not to grow up to be a crazy teenager.

  I took the money and tried to jog to Raf’s place. I only got about halfway there before I had to stop. My legs felt like they were made of Plasticine. I was in worse shape than I thought. Raf lived with his dad in a basement apartment on Westminster. No one answered my knock. I found a stone and scratched a J on the wall beside the basement door, low down where his dad wouldn’t look. Raf knew that meant to call me.

  I walked home down Roncy, thinking to stop in at Jerry’s and see whether Raf was there, but the place was closed. I went home.

  Muggier inside than out. Ma and Cassie were watching a soap opera (not Life After Life. You know, I never did find out what happened to Brick and Raven. Without Chester, the show wasn’t interesting) while the fan blew hot air around the living room. My sister turned her head away from me, shuddering.

  I had to remember to have a talk with Cassie.

  “Where were you, Jim?” asked Ma.

  “Out.”

  “Well,” she said and went back to the TV. Like she was going to ask me something and then forgot.

  I went upstairs and had a nap.

  Next day was a beauty – sunny, dry, clean. The very best kind of summer day. I walked down Roncy to the Goodwill store and paid two dollars for a shirt I didn’t want. I dumped the shirt in the donations bin outside the store and walked home feeling okay. I thought about doing that for the fruit store – buying a plum and then putting it back on my way out – but I figured it would take me too long to make good all I’d stolen.

  On the way home I turned down Galley Avenue. I walked
east to Sorauren, then checked back through the maze of laneways running between Galley and Pearson. I was looking for a blue Pontiac with a cracked windshield. No luck.

  I walked up to Jerry’s, but the place was closed. I stood on the corner, wondering what there was at home to drink, when Maq bumped into me. His eyes were half closed and he was bobbing his head to whatever music he was listening to. He stopped. “Sorry,” he said with a quick smile. “Wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  We hadn’t spoken in years, but I recognized him at once. And he was on my list. What a piece of luck.

  “No, Maq,” I said, blocking his path. “I’m sorry.”

  He wore a colorful shirt and tight jeans, carried a bag from the grocery store. The warm breeze ruffled his mop of red hair into a blaze. He squinted at me, pulled a wire out of his ear.

  “What was that?”

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  “For what?”

  I wondered how to tackle a delicate topic after a gap of years and decided to simply push ahead.

  “For picking a fight with you. Beating you up. For, well … for tearing your arm off.”

  I could hear the music he was listening to, faint and tinny, through the end of the headphone. Familiar music.

  “Who are you?” he asked. When I told him, his face cleared partway. He remembered who I was, but he wasn’t pleased about it.

  “Jim,” he said. “Big, bad Jim. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it. How you doing, anyway?”

  I’m good, I told him.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Real good.”

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah, maybe. Maybe you are.”

  I could see why he’d have doubts about me. I didn’t blame him. “Anyway,” I said, “I wanted to let you know I feel bad about beating you up when we were kids. That’s all.”

  “You didn’t beat me up.”

  “Well … pulling off your arm, then.”

  “Forget about that. It used to happen all the time. And, uh, thanks, Jim. You know, you do seem different. Saying sorry – you didn’t have to do that. Not after all this time.”

  He had the grocery bag on his fake arm, I saw. The hand looked much more real than I remembered. The fingers could close and everything.

  I could have walked on now, but I didn’t want to. He didn’t seem to want to either. “So, your arm used to come off a lot?”

  “Oh yeah. My papa did it himself once on the Ferris wheel, pulling me back when I wanted to look over the edge of the chair.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, he’s afraid of heights and jerked my arm too hard. Then he panicked and dropped it. It fell right beside the carney who was running the Ferris wheel. He screamed, and, well, it was all pretty embarrassing.”

  I laughed and caught myself.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “That’s okay. It’s funny now.”

  He still had one headphone in his ear. I asked him about the music he was listening to. His face brightened.

  “It’s Schubert,” he said. “You like Schubert, Jim?”

  I told him I liked the bit I could hear.

  “It’s from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, right?”

  He gave me headphones, put the song back to the beginning, and made me listen to the whole thing. Funny picture, eh? Two teenagers standing close together on the sidewalk on a sunny afternoon, headphone wires leading from my ears to his knapsack, me listening first to the music (Deedly deeedly, remember?) and then to the story he told me of a father, his doomed child, and the magical Erl King who takes the boy’s life. Cool, I said. And it was.

  He took back his headphones but didn’t put them back in.

  “Say, Jim. I’ve got some lemonade mix here. Why don’t you come to my place and have a glass? It’s not far. Just down the street, beside the public school. Come on.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Maq’s place smelled of paint, soap, and food. Nice smells. “Papa, I brought a friend home!” he called from the front hall. The word made me feel funny. He led me to the kitchen, a small room with two windows side by side. No, on closer inspection one of them was a painting. But, you know, it looked exactly like the real thing. Same size and shape, same color of the what-do-you-call-it, the wood around the glass. Same bumps on the glass. Same view of the brick wall on the house next door.

  “That is so cool,” I said.

  “It’s a trick. What the French call a trompe l’oeil. It means the eye is fooled. My dad painted it.”

  “Your dad is an amazing artist.”

  There was a chuckle from the doorway.

  “I like this friend of yours!” cried Maq’s dad. “I like him a lot!”

  “This is Jim, Papa.”

  “Allo, Jim.” He gave me a sweeping wave. He was still a big guy with a big nose, and his accent was as thick as it had been all those years ago when he’d carried Maq inside with the plastic arm dangling. He was someone you couldn’t help noticing – bigger, louder, more boisterous than anyone around. He was like a large dog in a small room.

  “Jim.” He grinned. “A smart boy. A bright boy. He knows I am an amazing artist.”

  Maq mixed the lemonade, added ice cubes, and poured. I watched carefully. He handed me my glass and smiled. “My new prosthesis,” he said, making a fist. “Just got it last month. Want me to take it off and show you?”

  “No.” Quickly.

  His papa stared at me, like he was looking underneath my skin, trying to see what I was made of. “Do you study art, Jim?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “But you understand it.”

  “I do?” I must have made a funny face because he burst out laughing. That’s a common expression, but Maq’s dad came close to doing it. He practically exploded into laughter.

  “You like my window, hey? Well, then, you understand art. You know what the artist does. He paints the soul. He paints illusion and desire, life and death and afterlife. That is what an artist does.”

  He drank his lemonade in one long swig and sighed deeply.

  “You know things, Jim,” he said. “Your face has depth in it. You see what others do not.”

  I drank.

  “I have reason, yes? You understand what I am talking about.”

  He had large yellow eyes, I noticed. Like a lion. He was totally serious.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know things.”

  “Bon, I will show you my portrait of Maq’s mother, my dead wife.”

  I turned to Maq. He shrugged.

  His dad handed the empty glass back to his son. “This poor boy never knew his mama. But me, I remember her well. I feel her presence very near. Do you know what it’s like to feel a presence you cannot see?”

  He led me to a big open room that was so bright it hummed. You couldn’t see where the light was coming from – skylights were frosted over and lightbulbs were hidden up in the ceiling – but the place was as bright as an operating room. And yet the light wasn’t harsh. I didn’t want to squint. I felt I could see better in that room. Pictures were stacked on the floor along the walls like the junk in Jerry’s store. The only piece of furniture was a table, covered in colored tubes and coffee cups. The smell of paint was very strong.

  The light seemed to concentrate, gather up its energy, and fling itself at the far wall. On that wall, hung at eye level, was a picture the size of my bedroom door.

  The fake window got to me because it looked so real, so true to life. This picture wasn’t like that. Maq’s dad hadn’t tried to make his wife look lifelike. Her face was all straight lines and way too big for her body. One of her arms came out at a funny angle, fingers splayed. She was supposed to be lying down on a couch, but the way she was painted she looked like she was floating over it, her hospital gown drooping. But she was real too. Her expression was sad, needy, intense. That was exactly how she looked. I recognized her right away. It was a picture of Denise, my Mourner. She was Maq’s mom.

  His dad was watching me. I don’t know what my
face told him, but he nodded as if he was satisfied. Then he brought out a handkerchief the size of a surrender flag and blew his nose.

  Sunlight slanted down onto the porch, making me squint. Maq sat in a swing chair. His papa stood with a heavy arm around my shoulder, talking hard. “It is fourteen years that Denise died. But I am always feeling her presence nearby. Sometimes it is like she is in the room with me. You know that feeling – being watched?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  “So I paint this picture for me, and for Maq who never knew his mother. And for her too. For her presence. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t say anything. His dad squeezed my shoulder hard. “You saw something in the picture, didn’t you? She spoke to you, my wife.”

  I nodded.

  “Pictures do that, when you know how to look at them. You have the eyes of a painter, Jim. You can see the real window, and the fake. Eh? Tell me, what did she say to you, my Denise?”

  “Well, she misses you terribly.” I caught Maq’s eye. “And she loves you more than anything in the world.”

  Maq didn’t say anything for a second. His throat slid up and down. He was swallowing. Maybe it was a lot to swallow.

  “And the picture?” asked his father. “What of that?”

  “It’s a masterpiece.”

  His smile returned like springtime.

  “Yes, it is.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Next morning I got up before anyone else in the house. The kitchen clock said 8:45. I could almost have been on time for school, if there was any school. A hot day already. Rumble of distant thunder. Made me smile to think how much Cassie was going to complain about it. I didn’t mind the heat. I took a deep breath of it, heading out the door.

  I still must have been smiling when I got to Roncy because a baba – black kerchief, sweater, cane – grinned up at me. Two teeth in her mouth, both as yellow as corn. She said something in Polish.

  “You bet,” I said.

  A lazy hornet buzzed around the plum display at the K Fruit Store this morning. I watched it for a sec. Hornets are cool but kind of scary. They seem so laid-back and droopy, barely enough energy to fly around, and then they go crazy and start stinging you. I picked a nectarine from the top of a neat pyramid and went to the back of the store to pay. Mr. K was not in charge of the cash register today. A kid – maybe his son or nephew – sat behind the cash register, reading a comic book in Korean.