Authors: Cliff Hicks
“You’re goddamn right you do,” he said, as he turned solid and visible once more, standing over in the doorway she’d just been standing in a moment ago. He shook his head with disappointment, unsure what to say next. He’d been so sure coming here had been a good idea, until he’d seen the wreck both she and her place had become, and now he couldn’t think of a thing to say.
Kelly gasped quietly, staring at him as her mouth fell agape. Jake realized that the robes and halo made it clear right away that he was dead, so he was at least thankful she didn’t ask if he was dead or not. “You’ve got a halo,” she said, as one might say, “you’re quite tall,” or “do you want a hand with that?” or “you’ve been shot, should I call an ambulance?” (Jake wondered if this was part of the grieving or if she had always been this dense and he just had never noticed.)
“Mmm,” Jake agreed. “Many people get them in Heaven.” He wasn’t exactly sure
why
he’d come here, but to talk about his halo certainly wasn’t high on his list of priorities. He’d thought maybe about haunting her in a sort of Dickensian scene, but the minute he’d set foot through the door, he had been fairly certain that he couldn’t do anything to this woman that she hadn’t already done to herself at this point a dozen times over. Whereas before he’d been filled with anger, now he mostly felt sympathy.
“You went to Heaven?” she asked quietly. “I thought they didn’t let suicides into Heaven…”
“Suicides? What are you talking about?” Jake’s face scrunched up a bit.
“I… I thought…” she stuttered, then moved one of the dining table chairs out to almost collapse into it. “Jake. With the accident so soon after…”
“After I caught you fucking that scum I used to call a friend?” he practically spat at her, in a quiet tone, that anger flashing back momentarily. Despite his annoyance and the outburst, he was on the whole much calmer than he expected to be. When Jake had considered how this conversation would play out, at least during that short period time when he’d been alive and thinking about it, he’d expected he would be a lot more angry, possibly throwing things and shouting. Instead he was more annoyed and cold. A lot more time had passed for him than it had for her, and things had changed. No, that wasn’t right, he thought to himself,
I’ve
changed. And Kelly was still thinking of him as the guy he used to be. Then again, even the old Jake wouldn’t have taken his own life. That flashed back the anger a second time, although it passed again before he spoke. “You thought I committed suicide?”
“Well, fuck, Jake, what would you think?” she moaned. She was starting to cry, shaking slightly in her chair. “Not even three hours after you find us and lose your job, you get into a car accident and get yourself killed. What was I supposed to think?” She pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, hugging them close. “You’re probably not even fucking real, so I don’t know why I’m having this conversation with you…”
“You tell me, Kelly. Why were you banging him in the first place?”
“Clay? God…” she grumbled. “It certainly wasn’t for the conversation, I can tell you that. Or the emotional support. Minute you died and I needed someone to talk to, he was the Invisible Man. I mean, the sex was good, but I think…”
“Yeah?” Jake asked. He was curious why this woman whom he’d trusted more than anyone betrayed him so cruelly. He’d certainly never been cruel to her, at least not that he could remember. His own past was a little fuzzy to him now, perhaps the result of the time spent in Heaven.
“I think it was because he had hopes and dreams, and you didn’t,” she said quietly. She tossed her cellphone back onto the table with a sigh. “You never wanted to do anything with your life.”
“I had dreams, Kelly,” Jake sighed, “you just never cared enough to ask about them.”
“Clay had plans for his life, though, Jake. He wanted to travel, he wanted to see the world, he wanted to finish law school and get a job working for a legal firm in New York City and get out of Nebraska and be somebody,” she told him, her voice warbling as she almost started to lecture him. “And you didn’t want to do any of that. You simply lived your life like you didn’t know how to make a change, or didn’t want to. I started sleeping with him a few days after we got engaged, when you told me you wanted to go Chicago for our honeymoon.”
“What’s wrong with Chicago?” Jake asked.
Kelly tossed her hands up in the air. “Nothing! Nothing’s wrong with Chicago, but my folks could afford to send us anywhere in the world for our honeymoon, and you wanted to stay close to home! You never wanted to travel, or adventure! And I’m not ready for that yet! I still want to do things with my life, Jake. I want to go places I’ve never seen before. And I certainly don’t want to live in Omaha the rest of my life, like most of the people I went to high school with! I want to be someone, someone who doesn’t take life for granted.”
Jake moved over toward the table, grabbing another chair, pulling it out to sit down in it. He made sure, however, his chair was a good distance from hers. “So why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
She put her hands on the side of her head, pushing some of her ratty hair from her face. “I tried, Jake. I promise you, I tried. I tried telling you about how you should go back to school, get another degree in something and do something for a living that you enjoyed. I even told you my parents would pay for it, but you’d just tell me about how you didn’t want to rely on my parents.”
“No,
you
were the one who told me you hated relying on your parents, Kelly. When we first started dating, you told me how much you liked the fact that I paid for everything, even on my meager income, when you could pay for it any time we needed it, so I bent over backwards to make sure I was doing the best I could to do that.”
“I know!” she sobbed, tears running down her face. “I know you were, but you didn’t
have
to, Jake! I would’ve taken my parents’ money if it meant we could be happy and enjoying our lives together out doing things, but you always seemed so damn content with sticking to the status quo.”
“And your response to a little adversity in our relationship was to go and fuck someone else.” The words came out sharper than he had intended, but the emotion behind them was genuine. People had been doing this to Jake all of his life. They figured he would lie down and just take it. But that guy had died when a telephone pole had crushed him. And this new guy had taken his place.
“You think I don’t know it was a dumb thing to do?” she shouted, clearly growing frustrated. Kelly had gone through most of her life without people yelling at her, or telling her she was wrong, and didn’t really know how to handle it. She’d convinced herself that she was a good person, so much so that even when she screwed up, it didn’t matter because she was ‘sorry’ for what she’d done, and that clearly absolved her of responsibility for those actions. “But any time we went out, I could feel guys looking at me, and it was almost as though I could tell they were thinking, ‘why is that pretty girl with that loser guy?’”
“Way to justify,” Jake snorted as he stood up, stepping behind the chair, his hands resting on the back of it.
“Don’t you get it, Jake? I wanted to stay with you, but you didn’t want me. You were only marrying me because it was just another thing you were expected to do!” She cried for a bit more before she tried to stem her tears, devolving into a mass of sniffles. “We were using each other. You were using me to fall into the stereotype of a perfect life, and I was using you to get back at my parents for... well, for being parents. We… we just took it too far.”
“Then why the hell did you say yes when I asked you to marry me in the first place?” Jake asked as he pushed the chair back beneath the table.
“Because I wanted to be wanted too. The same reason I slept with Clay.” She rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “I don’t know what I wanted, Jake. I wanted it all to make sense, and I thought… I don’t know… I thought maybe if we got married, we’d get through all of our issues. And Clay was… Clay was a mistake I just kept making even though I knew better. And when you comm… when you died, I thought I’d driven you to it, that I’d killed you, and that you were in Hell because of me.” Kelly had been brought up Irish-Catholic and took all of the religion very seriously, something that had never gone over particularly well with Jake, who’d been raised by a pair of “relaxed Jews” as his folks had described themselves growing up. “And that I’d go next. Because I deserved to.”
Jake looked up at her ceiling then closed his eyes, drawing in a long breath before letting it out. He was about to do something he’d never pegged himself for doing. He lowered his head and looked at her, the shivering, shaking, weeping mess she’d become, and walked over to her. He placed his hand on her shoulder calmly. “I didn’t commit suicide, I didn’t go to Hell, and I don’t think you are going to either, Kelly.”
She practically leapt to her feet and wrapped her arms around him, clinging to him tightly, burying her face in his neck, as she started bawling again. “I’m sorry, Jake! I’m so fucking sorry!” She was pressing to him so forcefully that Jake was amazed she wasn’t breaking his ribs. She pulled her head back and turned her gaze to him so quickly, he didn’t even see the kiss coming. One second her face was lodged up against his shoulder and the next her lips were pressed against his desperately. His hands lifted to her shoulders and pushed her back firmly, leaning his head away from the kiss. She was still crying and the rejection seemed to set her off into another fit of sobs. “Please, Jake…don’t…”
He stepped away from her, extracting himself from her arms with sizable effort as she struggled to keep him from peeling away. Once out of her grasp, he turned to look at her again. “Look. Kelly. I forgive you, okay? You’re right, we were both just sort of going through the motions in a relationship that had run its course and both of us should’ve said something. But we’re done. Even if I wasn’t dead, our relationship certainly is. Nothing’s going to bring it back to life.”
She tried to quell her crying again, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her hand. “No no… you’re right. Besides, you’re dead. It’d never work out.” She forced a laugh out at that, and Jake forced a polite smile back in return, although it felt hollow. “So why are you here? Some kind of Wonderful Life kind of thing?” She took a few steps back and leaned against the back of her couch, wrapping her arms around herself to hug her body.
He shook his head. “No, nothing like that. You’re not suicidal, are you? You know that’s a cardinal sin, don’t you?”
“No, it’s not. I know the seven deadly sins better than you do,” she said as she moved back over and slumped back down into her chair.
“Yes it is, so clearly you don’t,” he said with a soft smile. “It’s covered under wrath.”
“My ex-boyfriend, the Jewish scholar of Catholicism,” she muttered with a genuine laugh, weak though it was. “Does it keep people from Heaven?”
“Does what?”
She paused a long moment. “Suicide.”
Jake thought back and recalled his own entry to Heaven, and the other souls they had picked up along the way, and he couldn’t help but think of the banker or businessman or whatever he was… Jake couldn’t think of his name, but distinctly remembered the man telling him he’d jumped from the building to his own death. There was no way Jake could forget the man falling
through
him. (
Eyy
yuck!
) “I guess not. When I went up to Heaven, one of the people who went up at the same time as me had committed suicide, so maybe it’s only a contributing factor.”
“Really?”
Jake shrugged slightly. “That’s what he said.”
“So if you’re not here to try and stop me from committing suicide, which I don’t think I could do any more anyway after seeing you in that horrible toga, why are you here, Jake?” Kelly said as she continued to regain her composure.
“Y’know, I’m not entirely sure, Kelly. I was in Heaven for a while… time flows differently up there than it does down here…” he continued as he paced around in a small circle, “and I realized… I didn’t fit in up there either. I spent my whole life trying to fit in on Earth, and I figured when I got to Heaven, it would be the one place I could finally fit in, only to find out I didn’t fit in there either. So I left. I guess I’m still looking for someplace to fit in.”