Remember Me (13 page)

It angered me for a minute that that should make any difference, and then I started to feel a bit better. If they'd known I'd been murdered, I told myself, they would have had to turn people away at the gate. I probably would have got my picture on the front page of the paper.

My casket rested at the altar on a wooden table. Black and shiny, with gold trim and smart angles, I supposed it would do. As long as they kept it closed. I was relieved to see I wasn't on display. My family was sitting up front. I didn't want to sit near them; I didn't think I could handle it. Amanda and Jo and Mrs. Foulton, however, headed straight for them. Fortunately, Mrs. Parish decided to stay in the back where she could say her rosaries in peace. I sat beside her. Beth and Daniel were three rows up from us. If they hadn't come together, they would probably be leaving together. It was only fair, I supposed. A girl wasn't much good to a guy without a body.

Of course, he mustn't have been that crazy about me when I had a body. He must have been wondering how he could get rid of me without hurting my feelings.

I wondered if he had killed me. I didn't see Jeff Nichols anywhere, and I wondered about a lot of things.

Reverend Smith stepped to the podium.

"I would like to welcome everyone to this service on behalf of Mr. and Mrs.

Cooper, and their son, James Cooper," he said in his smooth, sympathetic voice. "We are gathered here today to pay our final respects to a wonderful young lady—Shari Cooper. It warms my heart to see how many of her friends have taken the time to remember her. She was, in all truth, a very special person. I knew her well...."

"You didn't even know what color eyes I had," I muttered, already tuning him out. My gaze wandered to the pew across from me. There was a guy about my age sitting there who looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. His clothes made me laugh. He was wearing baggy white shorts and a red T-shirt. To my funeral? At least he'd come, I thought. He must be someone from school who had loved me from afar. I wished I knew who he was.

Mrs. Parish had tuned the reverend out as well. She was praying: ten Hail Marys preceded by an Our Father and followed by a Glory Be to the Father. I knew the prayers. I had even said a few of them during my days on earth. But I doubt I had ever said them as Mrs. Parish was now—with feeling. She was whispering softly, but I found, as I turned my attention her way, that I could hear her clearly, better even than the reverend, who had a loud voice, not to mention a microphone.

There was something about her praying that began to charm me in a special way. I didn't understand it. Mrs. Parish was crushed. Her fingers trembled as she slipped from one bead to the next. Yet, as I listened, I began to feel lighter.

I would go so far as to say I felt a thrill of joy. The weird plasma in the air began to shimmer with a cool silver light. It was faint, true, but it was there, beyond question. I wondered if it was coming out of Mrs. Parish. I wanted the light to keep coming. I began to become quite engrossed in it. I closed my eyes, but still I could see it—better, in fact. My mind began to drift with the words without actually listening to them.

The meaning was unimportant, I began to realize. All that mattered was that they were being said with love. The light increased and seemed to encompass me. As the brilliance intensified, so did my peace. It was the first peace I had felt in a long time.

And then it stopped, and it was like a mountain crushing down on my soul. I opened my eyes. The light was gone. The service was over. I couldn't believe it.

We had just got there!

It should have taken at least an hour to remember how wonderful I had been.

What about my favorite song "Stairway to Heaven"? Jo could have played it on her acoustic guitar. What about my closest friends getting up and saying a few words about how much they were going to miss me? I wanted to be remembered!

People began to file out. I had no choice but to follow. A hearse was brought around front for the coffin. I stood on the chapel steps and wondered what had gone wrong with time.

Every time I closed my eyes, the hands on the clock would spin forward.

I rode to the gravesite in the hearse. It seemed the thing to do. But I sat in the front with the driver, not in the back with the black box. That was how I had begun to think of it now, a prison they would lock my body in beneath the ground while my spirit wandered alone and forsaken on the surface. I had begun to feel sad again and lonely, terribly lonely.

We lost a few people on the short trip out to the lawns, about half, actually. I couldn't blame them. They had things to do. And what the hell, Shari had been a nice girl, but she hadn't been that nice. Oh, it was awful. It was true. I had done nothing in my life that was worth remembering. Why should they remember me? I watched them unload the coffin and set it on the ground next to a pile of brown dirt and a black hole.

They had another short service. Reverend Smith read a few verses from the Bible. They were nice, but they were nothing; he just read them because he was supposed to read them.

Daniel stood next to Beth and held her hand. Mrs.

Parish and Mrs. Foulton stood next to each other and behind their daughters.

Out of the group, only Mrs. Parish was weeping.

My mom and dad were also there, of course, and Jimmy.

They looked as if time had been moving slowly for them, as if they had no more tears to shed. They held individual white roses. I liked roses; orange ones for parties and red ones for love. White ones were OK, too, I guessed. They set them on the top of the coffin at the reverend's bidding. Then the minister closed his Bible. There was a note of finality in the way he did it. People began to walk away.

The last person to leave was Jimmy. He knelt for a moment by the coffin and placed his hands palms down on the shiny black surface as if he were trying to touch me one last time. But I was standing behind him, beyond reach.

Finally, he left, and it was only minutes later that the grave diggers appeared.

They seemed to be in a hurry to get me in the ground. They came in a truck with concrete liners and ropes and pulleys. They also brought shovels. They sealed my coffin up so it would be safe from robbers and perverts, but not so safe, I thought, that it would be beyond the reach of the slimy creatures that lived deep in the soil. After they had lowered me into the ground, they began to throw shovel after shovel of dark moist earth on top of me.

"No!" I pleaded irrationally, panicking, trying to grab their arms, to stop them.

"You can't do this to me! I was just getting started! I was going to do all kinds of neat stuff!

Please don't cover me up! People will forget that I'm here!"

They buried me quickly. Eighteen years to become the person I had become and thirty minutes to disappear forever.

They threw their equipment in the back of their truck and drove away, leaving me alone and crying on top of a pile of unsettled earth that probably wouldn't give up my bones until the day the world came to an end.

"Oh, God, help me," I wept. "Please help me."

I don't know how long I sat there before I noticed the pair of sandaled feet in front of me.

I glanced up. It was the boy from the chapel with the baggy white shorts and the red T-shirt. I had been happy to see him before, but now I resented the fact that he hadn't even brought a flower to lay on my grave.

"Go to hell," I told him, looking back down.

"We're already there, wouldn't you say, Shari?"

My head snapped up. I didn't understand how I could have failed to recognize him before.

"Peter," I whispered.

CHAPTER

VIII

Y RELIEF IN that moment was wondrous. It was as glorious as my sorrow had been horrible. I don't remember jumping up and stretching out my arms, but I do remember how sweet it felt to hug him, to feel him and know that he could feel me. I think I held him for quite a long while before I let go. I was afraid he'd disappear.

"Peter," I said again, shaking my head in amazement as I finally stepped back.

He looked great, and I don't mean that he looked great for someone who had been dead a couple of years. He was as I remembered him from biology class: thin and wiry, his blond hair thick and curly, his broad smile wide and wild.

That was one thing I had missed so much about Peter when he died; the mischievous way his mouth would twist up whenever he told me something that he swore was the absolute truth and which in most cases was a complete fabrication. He had eyes as blue as my brother's but even more clear; they shone in the bright sun, although his head cast no shadow.

"You remember," he said, pleased.

"Of course I remember! God, this is incredible. I never thought I'd see you again. How are you?"

"All right. How are you?"

"Great," I said. Then I made a face and giggled. "Well, I'm OK, considering that I'm dead."

He nodded and spoke softly. "I know." Then he smiled again, but it, too, was soft. "It's good to see you, Shari."

"Yeah? Thanks. It's great to see you." I laughed, gesturing to the pile of dirt at our feet.

"So here we are. At my funeral!"

"Yeah."

"Some place to get together, huh? How was yours? Did you go?"

"Yeah. It was pretty good."

"That's good." I hadn't gone to his funeral. I had stayed home and cried. In fact, I had never gone to a funeral before, and had Peter not shown up, I would have regretted attending my own. I surveyed the cemetery. We were alone now, just us and the tombstones. It seemed much more peaceful than before. "So there is life after death, after all," I said. "It's hard to believe."

"For some people."

"Is that true?"

He shrugged, and the gesture reminded me of his brother.

"It can be."

"No. I mean, did I screw up by not believing, or what?"

He shook his head. "Not at all."

"That's a relief," I said, and I meant it. "So what's the deal? Is there really a God?"

"Sure."

I brightened. "That's neat! Where is he? Can I see him?"

"He?"

"You mean he's a she?" I said. "Oh, wow, that's far-out.

What's she like?"

"God isn't what we used to think he was like when we were alive, Shari. He isn't a he or a she."

"Is he an it?" I asked.

Peter laughed. "These are deep questions, and I don't have a lot of deep answers for you.

From what I've been able to tell, everything's much simpler than we used to think. It's so simple you can't even talk about it. God just is.

He exists.

He is everything. He is us. We are him." Peter turned away and looked over the green lawn. I could not remember where he had been buried, but I doubted it had been in the same cemetery. He added, "And that's all I know."

I thought a moment. "Why are you here?"

"To help you." A note of seriousness entered his voice.

"As long as you want my help."

"Oh, I do," I said.

"Good."

The dirt at our feet caught my eye. I hadn't forgotten what lay beneath it. "What I mean is, why are you here now?"

"And not before?"

I nodded reluctantly. "Yeah."

His expression softened, and he reached out and rubbed my shoulder. "It was hard for you, wasn't it?"

I didn't feel the tears coming. They were just there, falling silent and invisible to the ground. I wanted to fall, too, into his arms again. But I hadn't known him that well. We had never kissed. We had never gone out. I wiped at my cheek, unsure if it was damp or not.

"It was hard," I said.

Peter hastily took back his hand, almost as if he were ashamed. "I'm sorry, Shari. I couldn't come earlier."

"I understand. Well, actually, I don't understand. Why couldn't you come?"

"You hadn't asked for help," he said.

"You mean, since I've been dead, all I've had to do was ask for help and I would have gotten it?"

"Yes."

"But I didn't know that. Why didn't someone tell me?"

"You didn't ask," he said.

"But—"

"It says in the Bible, Shari, if you knock, the door shall be opened."

"Since when did you start reading the Bible?" I asked.

"I haven't actually been reading it. But your minister read that line during your service."

I had been crying a second ago, and now I burst out laughing. "That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard!"

"It's the absolute truth," he said.

"What a crazy system," I said, not sure if 1 believed him.

Then I remembered how I had cried to my mother for help when the monster had tried to eat me, and how I had been immediately transported to the safety of her bed. I peered at him curiously. "Why is it you were sent to help me?"

"I told you."

"Why you in particular?"

He hesitated. "I was available."

"Who sent you?"

The question amused him. He tugged at his red T-shirt. "I don't suppose I look like a messenger of God."

"Damn right, you don't. Why are you dressed that way?"

"This is what I was wearing when I died."

"You died riding your motorcycle," I said.

"It was a warm night."

"We don't get a change of clothing?"

"Soon you'll be able to wear whatever you want." He stepped past me then, walking to the edge of the hill where I had been buried, looking up at the sun and its glorious purple halo. At least, I thought he was looking at the sun.

When I came up at his side, I realized he had closed his eyes and that the light playing over his face had nothing to do with sunlight. There was a faint silvery luster to his skin, and it seemed to brighten as he stood there—listening, perhaps, to some interna] voice.

"Peter?"

"You can't stay here," he said.

"Where should we go?"

He opened his eyes, stared at me. "You know where to go."

"Where?" I asked.

"Where you started to go when you were in the chapel."

I was confused. "Where was that?"

"When Mrs. Parish was praying," he said.

"But I didn't go anywhere then." I paused. "Do you mean the light? I have to go into that light?"