“Obey.” I returned a smile.
“Then that’s easy. You don’t need to see me if you understand the instructions. Hinder not the soul’s intended path unto the light … lest shards of darkness shed upon thee. What’s not to understand about that? Stop being a superhero. Boom! Problem solved.”
“No catches? Caveats? Footnotes? Clauses? No giving the blood of my firstborn with two blackbirds wrapped in blue corn husks or anything like that?”
She laughed, but it turned into a cough. A cough she didn’t cover up but rather spat in my face.
I cringed, using my sleeve to wipe the spittle.
“Don’t bring back the dead, and God will be pleased with you.”
“Why did my heart stop? When Lila coded a second time, my heart stopped.”
“Yikes!” She cringed.
“Yikes? Your answer to why my heart stopped is yikes? I’m paying you for yikes?”
She thumbed through her book and scribbled an illegible note on one of the pages. “I’ll look into this. I’ll have to consult with …”
“God?” My eyebrows slid up my forehead.
“The Keeper.”
“When do you talk to the Keeper?”
She shrugged. “When I die. My list of clarifications—questions—is getting so long I fear my earthly heart won’t restart if I dillydally too long.” She tapped her pointy fingernail on her notes. “But this feels like an important one to clarify. My best guess is you were too close to this person. It’s really a miracle you’re still alive after she took her own life.”
I nodded several times, not mentioning the gun and my intentions. “Find boring and embrace it if you like your life. Okay?”
“And if I die again, stay dead. Right?”
The woman of many lives gave me a wry grin. “Yes. A wise man would do that.”
“You’re not wise?”
She pulled her hair over her shoulder and began braiding it. “No. I’m weathered. You’re showing wisdom.”
I thought I preferred bravery. I thought I could prove to the world, to whatever god reigned over me, that I was worthy to decide who lived and who died. Maybe I even felt a bit of immortality having died and come back to life.
My time with Lila taught me just how fragile our existence was in the universe. I still didn’t understand why my peers could save lives and not suffer consequences. Perhaps God was testing me. I failed that test … or almost failed it. After all, had Evelyn not unexpectedly shown up Thanksgiving night, I would have taken that gun out back by the woodpile and pulled the trigger—given my life as a sacrifice for disobeying God, for letting Lila die, for hurting Evelyn deeply.
I stopped counting how many times she saved my life, but I realized my true indebtedness belonged to her. Every day I would live and love her and our perfectly imperfect life. I’d hang up my red ski patrol jacket and find a job where lives weren’t in danger. What? I had no idea. And it didn’t matter. We’d figure it out together.
Evelyn
Eight months later …
Losing my best friends and my mom in the same year nearly crippled me. It taught me the fragility of life. I learned I couldn’t exist in this life by holding on to the past.
There were so many things in Lila’s journal that I wanted to discuss with Ronin. Did he know she was being abused? Did he know her cancer wasn’t real? Why did he keep it from me? What exactly happened in their moment of intimacy?
However, in the days we stayed in Denver after Thanksgiving, preparing to say goodbye to our friends, I never asked him those questions. Lila begged me to forgive him, so I imagined the worst. I imagined that he knew everything and that he kept it from me. Then I imagined the reasons for not telling me. I knew they were, at their core, born of love.
Ronin loved me.
And if I loved him, truly, in a million alternate universes loved him, then I would forgive him without demanding accountability and without apology.
I chose love. Always love.
“We’re doing this.” I grinned, breathless with excitement as we handed the keys to our house over to a realtor, the same realtor who sold the building where I had Clean Art. The money from those sales gave us a new freedom to go anywhere and start over. At first we considered Vancouver, but the memories of Lila and Graham were too raw to go there.
We chose Chamonix, France where Ronin grew up. A new beginning. I hated leaving my dad, Katie, and my niece, Ansley Madeline (not Porter) Reynolds, but they not only understood, they encouraged our relocation. My loyal intern, Soapy Sophie and her mom, Nanny Sue, inherited Clean Art—and they agreed to keep the generous ski patrol discount.
“We’re doing this.” Ronin wrapped his arms around me from behind and rested his chin on my shoulder as we took one last mental picture of our first home. I shed a few tears. It held so many memories of my life, even before Ronin.
“Daddy!” Franz yelled from the car with his typical impatience. “Let’s go!” Mrs. Humphrey barked in agreement.
I turned in Ronin’s arms. He wiped my face and smiled, knowing they were happy tears.
“Three lives.”
He cocked his head, eyes narrowed.
I grinned. “You have my permission to save three lives from this day forward. Your wife and your two children. You may hinder our soul’s intended path unto the light.”
Ronin kissed my forehead. “Yes, because without you, shards of darkness would shed upon thee—me.” He interlaced his fingers with mine and led me to the car. “But really, babe, you should have said four lives. Poor Mrs. Humphrey.”
The End
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CHAPTER ONE
Nevaeh. It’s Heaven spelled backwards and the name of the girl to my right with her finger five stories up her nose. I grimace while readjusting in my chair. It has nothing to do with her disgusting habit. One of the wings to my pad is stuck to my pubic hair. Mom worries about tampons and toxic shock syndrome. It can’t be more painful than this.
The receptionist keeps glancing at us through her owlish glasses, tapping the end of her pen on her chin. “Nevaeh, do you need a tissue?” she asks.
My parents are not the weirdest parents in the world after all. Lucky me.
Roy.
Doris.
Cherish.
Wayne.
With over ten thousand baby names in the average name book, how does one settle on such horrible names?
Backwards Heaven glances over at me as if I have the answer to the receptionist’s question. I’m not the tip of her finger. How am I supposed to know what it feels like up there? After inspecting her size—smaller than me—and her yellow hair in a hundred different lengths that looks like something my mom calls a DIY, I give the receptionist a small nod.
Without moving her finger, because it might be stuck, Nevaeh mimics my nod. The receptionist holds out a box of tissues. They both stare at me. When did I get put on booger duty?
“Swayze, do you need to go potty before we leave?” Mom asks, coming out of the office where I took my tests.
Swayze. That’s me. Worst name ever—until five minutes ago when Nevaeh introduced herself and offered me a gluten-free, peanut-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, taste-free snack from her BPA-free backpack. My uncle thinks the millennials are going to ruin the world because they have no common sense, and all of their knowledge comes from the internet. He may be right, only time will tell, but then what’s my parents’ excuse? Or Nevaeh’s parents’ excuse? Common sense says you give your child a good solid name. Kids don’t want to be unique. It’s true. We just want to fit in.