Near Death (3 page)

“You want to talk?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“Anything.”

She pouted. “Time’s money. I need to get back to my block.”

He had another hundred in twenties, folded and ready, as if this were planned out. She suspiciously took the money and quickly put it away in her purse. “So, start talking,” she said like a wiseacre.

He evenly told her that he was paying and he wanted
her
to talk. She shrugged and asked for a topic. To her surprise, he mentioned her birthday.

The suggestion made her uneasy. “What about it?”

“Tell me about the best birthday you ever had.”

She retrieved the cigarette from the ashtray and took a deep drag. “You’re weird, you know that?”

“Any age,” he said smoothly, “the best one you can remember, that’s what I want to hear about.”

She accepted the assignment and went quiet for a while, sorting through memories until she signaled she’d found the item by resolutely pressing her lips together. “My birthdays were always all mixed up with Halloween, their being so close to each other. When I was eight, up in Bangor, you know, my aunt and uncle had a barn back behind their place and after dinner my parents told me I was going to get cake at my aunt’s house. But instead of going inside, they took me up to the barn. And my mama opened the door and inside it was dark except that it was filled with jack-o-lanterns, all carved up with smiley faces, glowing from candles inside. And there was a big sign, Happy Birthday, Carla, and my aunt and uncles and cousins were there. And a cake too.”

He startled her by saying her name, “Carla.” Then, “How did that make you feel?”

She welled up. “It made me feel like they loved me.”

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“My mama died a few years after that.”

He said he was sorry then mumbled he was cold as he slipped on leather gloves. She hardly noticed and took a diaphragm-deep hit off her cigarette. A large cloud of exhaled smoke hit the dash and blew back into her eyes. She closed them, waiting for the irritation to pass, and in
that moment of darkness she saw the magical barn and her beaming mother again. Lost in thought, happy and sad, she reluctantly blinked and returned to the passenger seat of her john’s car.

She reopened her eyes the instant before his hands clamped down on her neck.

She felt her larynx being painfully crushed beneath his digging thumbs.

This isn’t happening
.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to end
.

The panic of air hunger set in, crowding out the pain. She couldn’t breathe in or out.

And then, she decided to give up without mounting any fight, any resistance.

She felt her arms go limp.

She was almost bewildered at the way she was abandoning her life so easily until she realized she was captive to his voice, his hypnotic voice, soothing her as he was killing her, uttering through the strain of his exertion, “Carla, listen to me. Don’t be mad and don’t be scared. Right now you are being loved as much as you’ve ever been loved. As much as the day you told me about. I’m loving you, little girl. I’m loving you. Your mother is
loving you. I know you can hear me. I want you to go to her now.”

She could see the strain in his bulging eyes, almost empathize with the exquisite pain he must be feeling in his shuddering hands, and in her final moments she was aware he was doing his best to make the last words she’d hear sound silky.

“Go to her. Go to her. Go to her.”

Then, in her last moments, she saw a man suddenly gripped by something exquisitely wonderful, something that made his face go soft and his eyes moist. “You’re the lucky one,” he said dreamily.

What are you thinking
, she wondered as she slipped into unconsciousness.

Four

England, 1988

Alex was huddled beside his older brother in the backseat of the family’s Vauxhall Cavalier. Neither dared open their mouths. He was beyond disappointment, but his father was in a different state of angry, mute agony. His mother had remained uncomfortably stiff-bodied since the moment Dickie snapped at her twenty miles back. Her crime: meekly offering her husband a packed sandwich as the dusk was overtaking them on the northbound carriageway of the M6.

The warm spring day had begun with all the hope and promise of a glorious and certain outcome. When Dickie Weller stamped into the boys’ bedroom before dawn they were already decked out in a kit of Liverpool red and white and were chafing to get on the road for the long journey to Wembley to see mighty Liverpool, league champions, go up against lowly Wimbledon for the FA Cup title.
Wimbledon
for God’s sake! Complete joke, that! How they’d managed to beat
Luton to get to the finals was anybody’s guess, but the matchup’s result was a foregone conclusion.

Still, the Wellers and scores of Liverpool supporters weren’t itching for drama. They were happy with the certainty of biding their time till their lads were cleanly victorious and forever in the record books at the end of regulation play.

In the Liverpool stands before match time, the boys had shouldered against each other, straining on their toes to get a good view of the beautiful green pitch. They listened with delight to the catcalls and opprobrium raining down on the pathetic Wimbledon blues massed on the other side of the vast, roaring, heaving stadium. Their father, big and brawny in his red cap, had waved his arm like a general surveying the opposing army and shouted loudly enough for them to hear, “Proud of your Dad, then?” and they were. “You won’t forget this day anytime soon!” he yelled.

He’d scored the four coveted midfield tickets from Boddingtons for pulling more pints of Cain’s best bitter than any other Merseyside bar owner. His Publican of the Year award hung over the mantel at the Queen’s Arms, beside the photo of a smiling brewery executive from Manchester handing him the tickets envelope. The boys always enjoyed
the butter-churn frothiness of living over their wildly popular pub, and in the run-up to Wembley they had sparked from the electricity of their father’s celebrity status.

As halftime approached, ten-year-old Alex stooped to pick up his dropped pennant just as Wimbledon’s Sanchez headed in a free kick from Wise to take a 1–0 lead. Alex jerked at the roar and saw his father’s water-freezing look of rage and his mother’s hen-clucking pout. His brother, Joe, five years senior, punched him hard in the shoulder as if the goal were his fault for looking away.

In the nervy second half, at the one-hour point, Wimbledon’s Beseant secured a place in history as the first keeper in cup finals to block a penalty shot. That was the killer. Instead of reaching a momentum-grabbing tie, Liverpool faltered and couldn’t mount enough pressure in the remaining half hour to avoid a bone-crushing loss.

At the final whistle, his father’s fists were clenched in furious disbelief at how a perfect day for the Weller clan had been perfectly and inexorably cocked up. During the long painful walk back to the car park, Alex’s eyes burned with tears. He hated the look of despair in his father’s flushed face and the brittleness of his mother’s quietude. And he resented his brother for being able to let the loss slide off him easily enough to turn the full bore
of his attention to chatting up a pair of blondies in red jerseys.

Just north of Birmingham, Alex was resting his head on the window and sleepily staring at the hypnotic chain of headlights coming at them across the divided motorway. Suddenly, he felt deceleration as his father was forced to adjust his speed to accommodate a slow-moving truck that had lumbered onto the left-hand lane from an entrance ramp. Just behind the truck, a Volvo estate car slowed and flashed its brake lights and his father pumped his own brakes a few times to keep off the Volvo’s rear end. He swore under his breath and checked his sideview mirror to see if it was safe to pull into the middle lane but it was not. A Yamaha motorcycle was ripping past their car before pulling even with the Volvo.

The driver of the Volvo had the same thought of overtaking the truck but the motorcycle must have been in his blind spot because as he changed lanes he merged directly into the bike and set off the first link in a fateful chain reaction that would ripple through time and unexpectedly alter the world—strangely.

The door panel of the Volvo kissed the rear wheel of the bike, sending the little machine careening into the
fast lane and onto the median where the rider fell off and snapped his neck. The Volvo driver reacted instinctively to the contact by sharply turning his wheel to the left. He reentered the slow lane and caught the front end of Dickie Weller’s Vauxhall hard at a catastrophic angle.

At the moment of impact, Dickie saw what was happening and loudly swore,
“Bugger me!”

Alex experienced the next several seconds in a weird slow motion. He’d once been on a plane to a family holiday in Tenerife and the sensation of the car going airborne reminded him of the moment of takeoff. His father always thought seat belt laws were an insidious part of the nanny state and none of them were belted as they began their barrel roll.

At first Alex was more fascinated than alarmed. The weightlessness and down-is-up feeling inside the spiraling cabin felt like an amusement park ride. It was only the sickening crunch of contact with the paved shoulder that jolted him into terror and then there was nothing.

Until—

The car was righted, wheels back on ground.

He was aware of pain—a brutal pain—in his left leg and a fuzzy throbbing in his head. His mother’s bucket seat had collapsed onto his lap and he felt the weight of the seat
and her body pinning him down. She was moaning, a low primitive vibration that scared him. He saw her right arm limply hanging down between the seats, blood streaming onto her pretty charm bracelet. There was no sound at all from his father. Dickie’s head was pitched forward resting against the steering wheel, his Liverpool cap miraculously in place.

For some reason all Alex could think about was his brother, who incongruously wasn’t in the car anymore.

“Joe! Joe!”

The back window was blown out and fresh night air whistled through.

The fire began with a
pop
that lifted the whole car a few inches into the air and set it bouncing back on its tires.

Petrol from the ruptured fuel lines had ignited somewhere under the driver’s seat and had spread retrograde to the tank. After the terrible rumble of the explosion, Alex felt the heat and his lungs began to fill with stinking plumes of burning gas.

Then the awful yellow and blue flames.

He tried to wriggle free but his legs were pinned and his lower body seemed fixed in concrete. The plastic on the
dash and kick panels started to sizzle like a load of bubble and squeak on the breakfast griddle.

He felt the flames licking his back, heard the sickening crinkle of his polyester jumper melting away, the sulfurous smell of vaporizing hair and a moment after the searing anguish began, everything changed.

He was no longer in the car.

He was no longer in pain.

He was floating above the motorway, looking down with an overwhelming sense of childhood curiosity.

The good old family car was pretty well bashed up and flames were licking through it. Joe was on the grassy verge, crawling away from danger. “Go on Joe!” he wanted to shout. “You can make it!” Cars were stopping and men were approaching.

The scene below blurred and went dark as if a fog had rolled in. Now he was hovering over a two-dimensional, perfectly circular disc of blackness that became three-dimensional at once. Though he could see nothing, nothing at all, he had no fear—remarkable, since he still needed a night-light to fall asleep. There was a sense of movement and narrowing, as though he were flowing through a long funnel, like motor oil during a top-up.

Now his ten-year-old body was moving with incredible speed, or maybe he was stationary and the black tunnel was moving around him. There was a sound of whooshing wind akin to a winter gale whipping in from the Irish Sea. He blinked in wonder as the indistinct walls of the tunnel began to come alive with brilliant flashes, redolent of light glinting off embedded clusters of polished diamonds.

A pinpoint of real light ahead grew larger and larger into another perfect circle, until finally he was spit out into a soft landing of pure whiteness—as comforting as emerging from a bubble bath into one of his mom’s oversized fluffy towels fresh from the dryer.

Whiteness faded into translucency and he found himself on an expanse of green terrain that seemed to yield slightly to his footsteps, though he was quite sure it wasn’t grass. The sky, if that’s what it was, was the palest blue, as though an artist had mixed a thimbleful of azure into a gallon of white.

He heard something evocative.

With a sense of excitement reminiscent of rushing down stairs on Christmas morning he moved toward the beckoning sound of gurgling water.

It didn’t look like any river he’d ever seen. In fact, it didn’t look like it was even made of water—more like
rapidly moving streams of shimmery light broken into whirlpools and jetties by a path of shiny stepping-stones. The stones stretched from bank to bank, traversing a span of fifteen yards or so, about the distance of Liverpool’s tragically blocked penalty kick.

When he first glanced across the opposite bank he saw nothing but a limitless plain of cool greenness merging with that pale-blue sky. Though featureless, it seemed to possess infinite promise and he was drawn to the other side with rising excitement.

On his second glance, he saw a man.

A big man, waving his arms wildly and happily.

“Dad?”

“Alex!” He could just hear his name over the sound of the rushing river.

“What’s happening, Dad?”

“I’m dead, son.”

“What?” He cupped his ear to better hear the reply.

“Dead!”

The word didn’t strike him as scary. He made his hands into a megaphone. “What shall I do?”

“Come over! Come to me, lad!”

Dickie was waving his arms as he had done when the boy took his first clumsy steps on the sitting room carpet or his first wobbly pedals without training wheels.