“He’s gone on,” she says quietly. “To someplace else. Someplace better.”
“I’m not sure I buy the whole afterlife idea.”
She stares at the sky, considering. “Then where do you think he is?”
“I don’t honestly know. Maybe he’s right here with you and me.” I snort with ironic laughter. “Now there’s a thought.” I look around and imagine what he’d say about the deep, toe-curling kiss we shared a while ago. Oddly, I have the sense he’d approve. Especially of Rebecca.
“Was Alex a spiritual person?” she asks, the blonde eyebrows drawing together in an expression of intense concentration that I find adorable.
“What do you mean, exactly?”
“Well, did he believe in God? Have faith in something bigger?” she explains, choosing her words carefully. “Someone guiding us beyond this world.”
“Oh, absolutely, yeah. I was his pet heathen,” I laugh, feeling a surge of love for him. “He never gave up on converting me. He believed in God. Jesus. All that stuff.”
She loops one arm around my neck. “But you don’t?”
It’s impossible to hold back the derision I feel. “According to the Christians, Jesus isn’t interested in my kind.” According to my father, I want to say, but keep those words inside myself. “Not a hom-o-sexual.” I imbue the word with all the southern gusto of a tent-revival preacher.
She shakes her head in denial. “Jesus came to the world. The whole world.”
Dropping my charade, I become serious again. “Alex always believed. Truly. He was passionate about his faith.” I feel something strange catch fire inside of me. “So yeah, maybe Al’s in heaven. I’d like to believe that.”
I wonder if all those kids he loved and lost at the hospital were waiting for him, when he made it there. Sometimes I even picture them forming a joyful knot around him, like a garland of flowers to crown his good deeds, all their tiny bodies pressing in. I’ve pictured him with his father, too, the man he worshipped as a child but lost too soon; I’ve pictured them together, catching up on years’ worth of lost time. That’s a lot more comforting than the notion that all his fire and vigor were simply extinguished in the blink of an eye.
“When you were in the hospital, did you think about death?” I ask her, since after all, she came close to the other side.
She stares up at the sky, contemplating. The lights of our city have created a hazy halo overhead, pressing down on our darkness. “I did have a near-death experience. Not when I was in the hospital, but…” Beside me, I feel her whole body quiver with emotion.
“Becca, tell me,” I urge, brushing my fingers through her hair, combing it back from her cheek so I can stare into her eyes.
“There was a moment, after Ben left me—he thought I was dead, you know. He left me there on the sidewalk of my apartment and I remember seeing myself from above and thinking, ‘That is so much blood. Who is that poor girl?’” She gives me a bittersweet smile. “It was like being on a Ferris wheel, where I kept going higher and higher and the world on the ground got smaller and smaller, and I couldn’t take my eyes off this tiny little woman on the ground. I felt so bad for her, losing all that blood. And then this warmth began to overtake me.” She places her palm over her chest, rubbing it. “Like nothing I’d ever felt before, and then I didn’t care about the woman anymore. All I wanted was more of the warm feeling, wrapping all around me. I heard singing, all these voices praising God and Jesus. Like millions of voices, all at once.”
She stops, swallowing, and I notice that she’s begun to breathe heavily, sucking in big gulps of air. I don’t want her asthma to kick in again. “Becca, it’s okay. We don’t have to talk about this,” I soothe, pulling her closer. She forms against me like a reedy little flower, and I feel the strong muscles in her arm—the powerful biceps that betray how hard she trains her body—as she nestles close.
Gazing up into my eyes, she whispers, “Michael, I didn’t want to come back. The feeling of love and goodness there, it was that strong.” She searches my face, and I realize that she’s never told anybody this much. “Do you understand?” she asks, and I nod mutely. “Where Alex is, it’s not like this world.”
“But you did come back.”
“I guess the whale kind of spit me back out,” she laughs, overly loud. Her near-death experience is a much bigger part of her internal world than she might have wanted me to know.
“You never told anybody about this, did you?”