“Mr. Peabody?” A portly, middle-aged woman in a rumpled gray suit clutching a clipboard materializes beside me. “Mr. Malcolm Peabody?”
“What?!” I look around. Where did she come from? “Who are you?”
She points to the laminated ID card pinned to her chest. “My name is Brenda.”
“Do I know you?”
“No, Mr. Peabody, you do not. But I know you.”
Now I’m confused. I don’t know where I am or how I got here. One minute I’m eating an Italian Hoagie on my son’s couch; next, I’m standing in a graveyard feeling a strange affinity for a casket suspended over a freshly dug hole. What happened in between? No clue.
I squint at Brenda’s ID card. Beneath her name is printed: Transitions, Celestial Civil Service. Terminal C.
Celestial. A shiver runs down my spine. I look down at my hands—the skin is waxy and gray. The tips of my fingers are turning white.
“Dead?”
She nods. “Dead. I’ve come to collect you.”
I eye her from head to toe. She has thick ankles. “You?”
“You were expecting some glowing angel with enormous white wings?” She laughs. “I get that a lot.”
Truth is, I don’t know what to expect. I am (or was, to be more exact) a live-in-the-moment kind of guy, but death came and went so fast there wasn’t time to think about what came next. Probably for the best. What is there to say about death except it’s The End? Finito. The Big Sleep. No more cancer, erectile dysfunction, or women whining for child support.
Yet here I am, on a bleak November day under a pale, wet sky, next to a plain pine box at the end of a row of gravesites of strangers, my body turning more translucent by the second. The green tarp covering the dirt from the hole crackles in the breeze.
Gathered by my grave are my three children (my son and daughter by my first wife, the youngest daughter by the third), a woman I can’t place, and my dog—a fat, lazy, indifferent beast my son brought to the funeral.
I scan the empty graveyard, looking for latecomers. “Where’s everybody else?”
Brenda shakes her head.
“No one?”
“Sorry.”
Figures. My co-workers at the insurance company are jerk-offs—not a word from a single one since I got cancer—and my drinking buddies are an unreliable bunch. Even if they know I’m dead, they’d be too hungover to bother with my funeral.
Thank God for my kids. Friends will let you down, but your kids? Never.
At the gravesite, my youngest places a big bouquet of bright pink cosmos held together with a satin ribbon on the ground next to my casket. She has tears in her eyes. “He was so good. Once he let me sit on his lap and drive the car. We were going for ice cream, but poor daddy. He forgot his wallet.” Her voice breaks. “I used my tooth fairy money.”
My son gives her shoulder a sympathetic squeeze.
“Sweet girl—that was a good day.” I pause, try to remember. Did I ever pay her back? I look at Brenda. She shakes her head.
I shrug, or rather, I try to shrug. My neck and shoulders have stiffened up. “No big deal. All the money in that piggybank? Funded by me anyway.”
Brenda arches an eyebrow and touches my cheek with her finger. I see myself telling my oldest daughter when she was eleven, “Alimony is for suckers. It’s like paying the mortgage on a house that burned down.”
Oh. Right. Forgot about that. I glare at Brenda. Is this how it’s going to be? You die and somebody replays every little friggin’ thing you did—or didn’t do—for all eternity? My knees lock in place.
At the gravesite, my oldest daughter clears her throat. “He never took me for ice cream—or for anything else for that matter. Occasionally he sent cards. A Christmas card came in February once.”
My son’s neck turns pink; he nudges his sister.
“It was a nice card,” she says.
“Ingrate!” I cry. “Just like her mother. How about that new Camaro I bought her?!” Or was it a used Chevy? I did buy her some car at some point, I was sure of it.
Brenda looks away.
Next, the unfamiliar woman steps forward, and I realize—with a start—she is a niece I hadn’t seen for sixty-five years. She has a kind, round face.
“I adored Uncle Malcolm. He taught me how to swim at grandma’s pool. He was so patient, held me up the whole time.” She smiles brightly. “Thanks to him, I teach the little ones now—every Saturday at the Y.”
My son looks relieved. The lines around his mouth soften.
“Yes!” I turn to Brenda, gleeful. “That’s true. I did that!”
She hesitates, then says softly, “Was that before or after you held her head under water to shut her up?” She places a hand on my arm, and I see it: the incessant talking and shrieking, the little pink bathing suit, the bubbles, the thrashing fat little legs.
I jerk away. “We were just fooling around.”
At the grave, my son stands quietly, staring at his brown shoes—the good ones he wears to weddings. My son, who took me in the final months of my life, drove me to chemo, picked my dead body up off the floor, and takes care of my thankless dog—who, I recall now, scarfed the hoagie off my dead body and lumbered across my chest to claim the couch as his own.
I search my son’s face for signs of grief but find only the tired, flat expression of a man who had cleaned death, grease spots, and dog hair off a couch.
“I thought he’d be sadder,” I say.
“Hmmm.”
“He didn’t cry when he found me. He just cleaned up.”
“Some people clean up, Mr. Peabody. That’s what they do.”
Without warning, the heart that no longer beats clenches in my chest, followed by a series of images of my son as a baby, at batting practice, graduating from high school, college, then law school, surrounded by friends and family. Everyone but me, his dad.
Brenda smiles and lays her hand on my shoulder again. The graveyard thins—I’m looking through it, into other rooms. I see my son in a grimy holding cell reserved for the Public Defenders, counseling a scared teenager in an orange jumpsuit. I see my oldest daughter—gray now, in scrubs—in a dim hospice room easing the morphine up a notch for a man in a coma, holding his hand so he won’t go out alone. She never lets them go out alone. I see the youngest at the end of a double shift, counting tip money at a sticky table, sliding half into an envelope for the homeless man outside, then texting her half-brother and sister—please, can’t we have a funeral? For him? For me?
God help me, I want in. I want to stand in those rooms and shout, Mine! These incredible human beings are mine!
“Look at them,” I say with pride. “Look what I made.”
“Your contribution’s on file, Mr. Peabody.” Brenda reads it off like a weather report. “‘Subject served, consistently, as the example of who not to become.’”
I reach for her hand. “Please!” I beg. “One more time! Touch me! Crack it back open—the rooms with the lights on, their lives. I want to see more.”
She steps back, out of reach. “Sorry, Mr. Peabody. That’s all you get. Besides,” she scans the sky, which is growing darker by the second, and checks her watch, “time to go.”
“Oh God. No. Not yet. Wait!” My voice is shrill. “Where are you taking me? Up or . . . or,” I lower my voice to a whisper, “you know,” I point to the ground, “down?”
“Oh, for St. Peter’s sake, Mr. Peabody. Why, up of course. You know, Jesus, grace, and all that. Unless—” she consults her clipboard, lips pursed, “not Catholic, are you?”
“God. No.”
“Ah!” A look of relief crosses her face. “Good. Then it’s up for you, Mr. Peabody—with a small detour.”
“Detour?”
“To Minor Adjustments, Terminal C.”
“Terminal . . . ?”
“C,” she says firmly and takes my arm with surprising gentleness. “Nothing like Purgatory. Nothing at all.”
Brenda’s voice turns to static. My vision begins to cloud. As she leads me away, I cast one last look behind me.
It has started to drizzle. My oldest daughter gives her younger half-sister an awkward hug while my son looks on, pleased. The fat dog lifts his leg on the bouquet of bright pink cosmos; my niece scratches the dog behind the ears.
The drizzle turns to rain as my vision fades to black.