Abandon - Meg Cabot [5]
“Whiche’er you are, or shade or real man!”
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto I
Everyone wants to believe that there’s something else — something great — waiting for them on the other side. Paradise.
Valhalla. Heaven. Their next — hopefully less horrible — life.
It’s just that I’ve been to the other side. So I know what’s there.
And it’s not paradise. At least, not right away.
It’s a truth I’ve had to bear alone, because nothing good has happened to the few people with whom I’ve shared it.
So sometimes I just have to get out before I say — or do — something I’ll regret. Otherwise, something bad will happen.
He will happen.
Mom understood. Not about him, of course — she didn’t know about him — but about my needing to get out. That’s why she let me go.
Tearing down the hill from our new house, the breeze in my hair instantly cooling me off, all I could think about was Grandma.
“Man? What man?”
That’s what Grandma said the other day at her house when I got up off the couch, where I’d been sitting watching the Weather Channel with Uncle Chris, and followed her into the kitchen to ask her about Grandpa’s funeral…more specifically, what had happened in the cemetery afterwards.
“You know,” I said. “The man I told you about. The one with the bird.”
We’d never had a chance to speak about it again. Not since the day it happened. Not only was that day supposed to be a secret — just between us girls, Mom and me — Grandma and I had never been in the same room together again, thanks to Dad.
As the years went by, what actually happened that afternoon in the cemetery began to seem more and more like a dream. Maybe it really had been just a dream. How could any of it have actually happened? It was impossible.
Then I died.
And I realized that what I’d seen that day in the cemetery not only hadn’t been a dream, it had been the singularly most important thing that had ever happened to me in my life. Well, up until my heart stopped.
“Go outside and play for a little while,” Grandma had said. “Your mom’s busy right now. I’ll come get you when we’re done.”
She and Mom had been in the cemetery sexton’s office after the funeral, signing the last of the paperwork for Grandpa’s tomb.
Maybe I had been a little fidgety. I think I’d knocked something over on the sexton’s desk. I wouldn’t be surprised. Like my cousin Alex, who’d also been there, I’d always had a problem paying attention.
Unlike Alex, my problem resulted in being less, not more, heavily supervised. Because I was a girl, and what kind of trouble could a girl get into?
I remember Mom looking up from whatever forms she was helping Grandma to fill out. She’d smiled at me through her tears.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she’d said. “Go on outside. Just stay close. It’ll be all right.”
I had stayed close. Back then, I always listened to my mother.
I found the dove just a dozen yards or so from the cemetery sexton’s office. It was limping along the path between the tombs, one wing dragging along behind it, obviously broken. I immediately raced after it, trying to scoop it up, since I knew if I brought it back to my mom, she’d be able to help. She loved birds.
But I just ended up making things worse. The bird panicked and half flew, half leaped into the side of a nearby crypt, crashing against the bricks.
Then it just lay there. As I hurried to its side, I realized with horror that it was dead.
Naturally, I began to weep. I’d already felt pretty sad, considering the fact that I’d just been at the funeral of a grandparent I’d never met, then been kicked out of the cemetery sexton’s office for my misbehavior. Now this?
That’s when the man had come along the path. To me, a first grader, he’d seemed impossibly tall, almost a giant, even after he knelt down beside me and asked why I was crying.
Looking back, I realize he was only in his teens, hardly a man at all. But as tall as he was, and given that he was dressed all in black, he’d seemed much older to me than his actual years.
“I was t-trying to help,” I’d said, nearly incoherent with sobs, as I pointed to the bird. “She