Breath (21 page)

“Thanks again for the chocolate,” said the blond man as he closed his guitar case.

“Are you gonna be back here?” Xander asked.

“Oh, sure.”

“So maybe I’ll see you.”

“I’m sure you will,” Death said with a smile. Whistling, he picked up his guitar case and ambled over to the tennis courts.

Xander watched him go, then went back to making a fort out of the sofa cushions.

Three minutes later, the 911 doctors charged through the lobby again, this time pushing a table with wheels. An old woman was strapped to the table, and there was a mask covering her nose and mouth. Xander watched the group rush out the front door of the tennis club.

The guitarist didn’t return.

Soon, Xander’s mother was ushering him out the door, babbling about life and death and the natural cycle and wouldn’t he like some ice cream?

Ice cream, surely. But not chocolate. That was the day Xander Atwood stopped eating chocolate, even though he couldn’t tell you why.

He’d just lost his taste for it.

On the tennis court, he finished his work (Drea LuPone, 67, massive stroke) and wondered what to do about the boy with the chocolate.

Next to him, the pale steed snorted. “Either correct the course or let him live. Just please do a steed a solid and stop obsessing.”

“I don’t obsess,” he murmured. “I ponder.”

“You say tomato . 
.
 .”

“Hush. I’m pondering.”

“You’re obsessing. You stayed in the lobby just to talk to him, when instead you could have been down here working.”

“What? I let Drea live a few minutes more than she otherwise would have. She appreciated it; she was quite the competitor.”

“Don’t you win by default when you die on the court?”

“Only if you get the point.”

“So you met him. Talked to him. Have you decided to correct the course?”

“Nope.”

“Nope, you haven’t decided, or nope, you’re not going to course-correct?”

He grinned and patted his steed. “Come on—there’s a world of people who are waiting to die.”

The pale horse sighed. “You think you’re being mysterious, but you’re really just a slacker.”

“You say tomato . 
.
 .”

Xander remembered meeting Death all those years ago at his mother’s tennis club, remembered listening to him play the guitar and then giving him a chocolate bar. Was that how all of this had started? With something as innocent as a gift given freely?

Could a single act have such repercussions?

(none saw me)

Xander almost had it. For just a moment, he saw not the human façade but the truth taking flight, a glimpse of wings beating against the sky. He thought he could hear, somewhere beneath the music, the sound of a beep—a steady rhythm, a backbeat to the melody of the guitar, to the harmony of Death’s voice.

“I formulate infinity,” Death sang, “stored deep inside of me.”

Xander felt like he was standing on the precipice of something huge, like his feet were dangling over the edge of the Grand Canyon. All he had to do was take that proverbial leap of faith, and then he’d see the truth. Or he’d plummet to his death.

It was a long, long way to fall. He stepped back from the edge and focused on the song.

Death’s long fingers moved deftly across the guitar, making music as if that was what he’d been born to do. Though Xander had long known the lyrics to “Oh Me,” this time he heard a poignancy to the words that he hadn’t been able to appreciate until this moment.

When the song ended, he waited until the last chords were lost to the wind, and then he said, “You still play well.”

“It’s not me, you know. It’s the form I’m using. He was a musician, a singer.”

“I’m aware,” Xander said dryly.

“It’s his talent, not mine. I have no such ability. My kind don’t have things like music or song,” said Death, removing the strap from around his shoulders. “But when I take the form of the dead, I can use their abilities.”

“It’s pretty cool.”

“It’s an echo,” he said, shrugging. “Nothing more.”

“Well, your echoes rock. Your singing’s gotten better.”

“It’s the same,” Death said. “That doesn’t change. I don’t change.”

“Everything changes.”

“Not me,” the Pale Rider said as he placed the guitar on the balcony floor. “Never me.”

“Of course you change. I just said that your singing got better.”

Death smiled. “That’s just your perception. Subjective reality, remember?”

“Sure, I remember,” Xander said. “This is the part where you ask me if I’m willing to take a chance that this is all in my head, right? Well, don’t bother.”

Beneath his tangle of windswept hair, Death’s eyes gleamed. “But wouldn’t that prove, once and for all, that none of this is real? What if my death is the act that pierces the veil covering your eyes?”

“How noble,” Xander said, folding his arms across his chest. “Listen to you, making your death out to be some incredible sacrifice. Is that what you want? To be the sacrificial hero of the story?”

“You called me a hero earlier, after accusing me of bravery.”

Xander felt his cheeks heat. “Yeah, well, you called yourself a fool.”

“And so I am. But we’re all the heroes of our own stories,” Death said cheerfully. “Even when we’re also fools.”

“But this isn’t a story. This is life. It’s
your
life.”

“The life of Death,” the Pale Rider boomed, sweeping his arm wide. Ted would have appreciated both the bombastic voice and the grand gesture. Hell, Ted would have taken notes. Death chuckled. “There’s a sort of symmetry there, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Xander said, “and it’s bookended nicely with the death of life. Which is what you said would happen when you die.”

“No, Xander. That’s what
you
said would happen. And I said that was one way of looking at it.”

“You’re mincing words,” Xander gritted.

“Am I, now? I’ve been told that I’d make an excellent lawyer.”

Xander frowned at him, at those twinkling blue eyes and that casual smirk that made him see red.
This isn’t about me,
he told himself.
Don’t get angry with him. He’s hurting, and he’s lashing out.

That’s what people do when they’re hurting.

“But I’m not a person,” said Death.

Xander blinked at him, then blinked again. “Mind reading’s rude.”

“Can’t help it. You’re a screamer.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your thoughts. You don’t just think them. You scream them. Your thoughts are so big, so loud, they fill the world.” Death made a show of tugging his ear. “Kind of deafening.”

“I’ll stop screaming my thoughts if you stay out of my head.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Nonplussed, Xander said, “I’ll try to stop screaming my thoughts.”

“I can work with that,” Death said. He glanced at his watch. “For a little bit, anyway. Four minutes left, Xander.”

Four minutes to convince Death not to kill himself. Four minutes to save the world. If time mattered. Which it might—there was no way to know, not until it was too late.

“Then tell me the rest of it,” Xander said, trying not to panic. He’d think of something. He had to. “Finish the boon. What made you come to my balcony tonight?”

“You already know the answer: the chocolate bar. You gave me a gift, so I owed you a gift price.”

“Yeah,” Xander said. “About that. You said that people can’t see you, not unless you want to be seen. But I saw you, back when I was a kid. Why did you let me see you?”

Death looked immensely pleased. “What do
you
think?”

Suddenly uneasy, Xander darted his gaze away. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

Xander shook his head. He didn’t know, and now he didn’t want to know. He was standing on the edge again, and he felt himself losing his balance. He shut his eyes tight.

Death said, “I was there in the tennis club to correct the course.”

Xander didn’t want to ask.

Xander had to ask.

He whispered, “What does that mean?”

He could hear the smile in Death’s voice as he replied, “It means you died, Xander.”

Xander Atwood died when he was nine months old.

He’d been feverish, so his mother put him into a tepid bath to help cool him. After the bath, she towel dried Xander and set him down on the floor so that she could get him diapered. When he didn’t move at all, she knew something was wrong.

When he didn’t respond to her touch, she started to scream.

Xander’s father raced in, told her to call 911, and then gave the baby mouth-to-mouth. By the time the paramedics arrived, Xander was breathing fine.

Tests revealed absolutely nothing: Xander had simply stopped breathing. It had been the longest sixty seconds of his parents’ lives.

For the next two months, his mom and dad slept in his bedroom, on the floor, terrified that the baby would stop breathing again and they wouldn’t hear it.

By the time Xander was thirteen months old, his parents were both back in their own bed, but they kept their door wide open—a habit they didn’t break for many years. That habit would come back to bite them when Xander was ten and he walked in on them having sex, but that was far in the future. For now, it comforted them to know that if something was wrong, they would hear it.

They never found out why Xander had died that day.

And when something wound up being very wrong, they didn’t hear a thing . 
.
 . not until it was far too late.

Every second of every day, 1.7 people die. That’s the average. Sometimes, more than one person dies at once; other times, it’s just one person.

The second that Xander Atwood died as a baby, it was one of those “just one person” times.

During that particular second, Death was a little busy.

***

Time isn’t linear for one such as Death, not unless he chooses to let it be so. Every moment is an eon; every second is an eternity. It’s part of what allows him to do what he does. It also makes it unfathomable when one such as Death is in pain. Mortals can comfort themselves by saying the pain will pass—it only feels like forever. But for creatures such as Death, that agony literally is forever.

Dying takes a little longer.

***

It’s a door slamming shut, the resonant thunder booming until it dwarfs all other sound. Deafened, he feels himself falling.

There’s a moment of panic, as always, a moment that stretches into infinity in which he’s terrified that this is all there is, that oblivion will grip him like a lover and rock him into nothingness. In that moment, he clings desperately to the He Who Was. He wants to hold on. He wants to
be.

He knows what he must do, and the knowledge crushes him. The holding on isn’t nearly as agonizing as the letting go.

He lets go.

The pain swallows him as he is erased. It takes one second and it lasts until the stars explode and the universe spirals into the void.

And then, he is rewritten.

Reborn.

He reaches out, and the universe takes his hand and anchors him. He Who Was is now He Who Is.

The first new breath is searing; the second, less so. By the third, it’s simply routine.

It’s simply life.

The moment transforms from present to past—a tense shift, a time shift, and then he returned to the here and now. He opened his eyes—new eyes, but still blue, always blue—and the first thing he saw was the pale steed.

“Well,” he said, and “well” again, fascinated by the sound of his new voice. “Well, that part’s done.”

“Groovy,” said the steed. “Buy a horse a cheeseburger?”

Xander didn’t feel his legs give out. One second, he was standing in the doorway between his living room and the balcony; the next, he was on the ground, his back against the door frame, his legs splayed out in front of him.

He’d died.

He saw it in his mind, clear as HDTV: him as a baby, lying naked on his nursery floor, not breathing, his mother screaming, his father performing mouth-to-mouth.

He could feel borrowed air inflating his lungs, feel it hissing out like a busted tire.

A sound like a screech of tires . . .

“No,” he whispered.

“Yes.”

He blinked up at Death, who was still sitting easily on the balcony railing, his elbows propped on his knees, his chin in his hands.

“You were nine months old, and you died. No official cause,” said Death, “though my money’s on SIDS, and it was only for a minute. But you were dead, Xander Atwood.”

“Then—” Xander’s voice cracked, and he worked some moisture into his throat and swallowed before he tried again. “Then why am I still here?”

“What you mean to ask is why didn’t I take you at that moment.” Death shrugged. “You happened to die at an inopportune time.”

The world had shifted five degrees to the left when Xander hadn’t been looking. Dizzy, he repeated, “Inopportune.”

“I was in the throes of my cycle beginning anew.”

Xander tried to make sense of the words, but his head was spinning and his heart was screaming and things like logic and rationality had taken a back seat the moment Death had appeared on his balcony. “So . . . I got a second chance because you were busy?”

“You could say that. The second you died, I didn’t exist.”

He blinked, and blinked again, and all he could say was, “Oh.”

“As I said, it was an inopportune time.” Another shrug. “You sort of slipped off my radar. When I figured out what had happened, I put you on my to-do list.”

Realization dawned. It was less a light bulb turning on than it was a neon spotlight in Xander’s brain.