Into the Beyond
Graham helps Kayla into the double kayak, wades barefoot into the water, and hops in behind her. Their paddles slice the water in unison as they row across the lake, twinkling in the early afternoon sun. The air is heavy, laden with the pregnant pauses typical of first dates. Well, technically they’d met for coffee last week, but that had been more of a pre-date screening. When they reach a small enclave of beach on the other side of the lake, they disembark. Graham spreads a blue checkered blanket, pours wine into steel tumblers, then unpacks a picnic of cheese, meat and fruit.
Holding up his tumbler, Graham clinks it against Kayla’s.
“Here’s to beginnings,” he says, face flushing. “Sorry, is that lame? I’m still getting the hang of this.”
“Not lame. Don’t worry.” Kayla angles her body toward his. “It took me a while to get back into dating, too. After the divorce. You get used to talking to strangers about your intimate histories.”
“I’m not sure that’s something I want to get used to.” Graham lets out a dry laugh.
“It’s scary to keep telling your stories. Hoping that someone else recognizes a little piece of themselves in you.” Kayla bites her bottom lip. “But it’s even scarier not to.”
Graham nods, glances to the edge of the lake, where the soft waves kiss the sand, then back to Kayla. The wind tosses the blonde wisps of hair that frame her face, making her green eyes appear even more electric.
“Have you gone on any truly awful dates lately?” Kayla asks. “What’s your best worst date story?”
“I took a woman out dancing a few weeks ago. Attempted to, that is. She tripped on the dance floor and sprained her ankle.”
“Wow. I can’t say I’ve injured myself that badly on a date.”
“She was a good sport about it, laughed it off.”
“Was she okay?” Kayla asks as she pops a cracker with prosciutto into her mouth.
“I think so. She told me she had to stay off her ankle for a few days, but I assume she was fine. I didn’t actually see her again. Got the sense she didn’t want to keep talking to me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You know. Her texts kept petering out. Wasn’t really giving me much to go off in the conversation. She was doing the slow fade out. Ghosting – I guess is what the kids call it.”
~ ~ ~
Oh yes, I remembered that date when Graham had taken the redhead out dancing. I had idled in the air ducts above them as my husband and the woman ordered drinks then migrated onto the dance floor. He had an IPA, his typical choice, and she was drinking a mojito. The redhead was very giggly – a quality that often made me suspicious of a person – but Graham seemed to be enjoying himself. Frankly, he needed the ego boost, so I didn’t mind that she was laughing at every little thing he said. I took note of each thing she giggled at that wasn’t funny: that he had a dog named Meadow; that this was his first date arranged through an app; that he’d accidentally watched twenty hours of sports in the past week. It was this last tidbit that prompted the redhead to throw her head back in a dramatic display of hysteria. Her wavy auburn locks cascaded over her shoulders as she stuck her chest out. Graham’s eyes lit up. It had been the way he wrapped his arm around her waist after that, his fingers brushing her hip, that made me want to interfere.
As the next song started, I coiled myself around the woman’s ankles, weaving through them like a figure eight. It hadn’t been my plan to intervene, but ghosts aren’t immune to jealousy. Gathering speed in time with the music, I slithered faster and faster around the redhead’s feet. Then, the song picked up tempo again, and I shot myself out from under her toward the corner of the room. Like a rope that’s suddenly pulled taught, I threw her off balance, and she toppled to the floor.
In the middle of the dance floor, massaging her ankle, the redhead scrunched her eyebrows in a look of bewilderment. Graham scooped her up and steadied her against him as he guided her back to their booth. My envy for Graham’s affection only grew as I watched him examine her hurt ankle, touching the top of her shoulder as he spoke to her in a low, concerned tone, before walking to the bar to get her ice.
It had been so soon after I’d died. Just five short months. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her, but some subconscious urge deep inside me had lashed out. A primal instinct to keep her away from my husband. Yes, I’d wanted him to feel better, but it irked me that they could touch when I can no longer.
~ ~ ~
“Did you and your wife talk about what would happen after she passed?” Kayla asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, about you dating again, maybe marrying someday.”
Graham looks away, up at the peak of the mountain. “Yeah, we did. I hated those conversations. Lucy was the one who forced us to talk about it, and you can’t say no to a dying woman.”
A pained expression crosses Graham’s face, as if he’s remembered all over again that I’ve died.
“Lucy hoped I’d fall in love again,” Graham continues. “That’s what she said. She was trying to give me permission, I guess, to go on living life and to not feel guilty that she wasn’t in it anymore.”
“Do you?” Kayla asks. “Feel guilty?”
“A bit, yeah. It’s like survivor’s guilt. Why did whatever Powers that Be choose to take her, while I get to stay?”
The air I inhabit seizes. I cannot hold my heartache that this is how my husband feels. Heartache without a heart. I didn’t know that was possible, but my bond with Graham doesn’t end simply because I’ve left. There is no reason, no choice, to any of this. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my time in the Beyond it’s that. No all-knowing power gets to decide who stays and who goes.
I don’t know if it all comes down to randomness, but I’m starting to believe it must. I’ve met other ghosts here. Some souls who lived long, full lives into their nineties, getting to meet grandchildren and great-grandchildren, lingering on earth until nearly all their friends had passed. Then, there were other beautiful spirits who had the misfortune of getting sick when they were young or being in the wrong place at the wrong time – a car crash, an earthquake, a school shooting. It’s such a human instinct to want to believe there’s rhyme and reason. But I’m learning to let go of that impulse. There’s something about no longer having a body that makes your desire for logic sort of go out the window.
“I don’t know if I’ll feel more guilty the more milestones I reach without her,” Graham says. “Or maybe things will start to make more sense, feel more normal, as time passes. I can’t tell which is better. A life without Lucy feeling normal – that still seems wrong.”
My ghostly being twists and swirls again at his sadness. His gaze flickers towards the space where I levitate, and I wonder if he feels the little whirlpool of air I’ve created. I want to tell him that I’m here, that I’ll be there for whatever comes next. That he doesn’t have to worry about me or feel guilty.
~ ~ ~
During my battle with cancer, people called me brave and strong and tough, and – the most irritating – a fighter, as I withered away. As if I could fight hard enough and I would overcome this illness. As if I had any control over the matter. Graham had held my hand, called me beautiful though I was no longer, and listened to my theories and anxieties about what would happen on the other side. Before the cancer, neither of us held strict beliefs about death and the afterlife. But in my final months, the various energetic and spiritual therapies I’d tried had made me curious about the Beyond.
For the pain, I’d done Reiki and hypnotherapy, acupuncture and reflexology. As the End seemed to inch closer, I was assigned a therapist for terminal patients who encouraged me to look at death as a transition. I wondered if I would be able to take my memories with me. Would I be able to communicate with Graham? Appear to him in signs from the universe? And would Graham be able to speak to me when he needed to?
I died in my sleep. In a dream, I’d been walking in the woods behind the house with our dog, Meadow. As usual, Meadow sniffed something on the ground every few feet, her ears perking up and body tensing each time a squirrel scurried by or bird fluttered overhead. Then, it began to snow. The further into the woods we walked, the heavier the snow fell. Meadow was bounding ahead, pressing urgently towards something. At the far end of a snowy expanse of land lay a cluster of mountains, and Meadow halted as we approached them. As I hugged her and ran my hands down her soft white-grey fur, I understood she would leave me here.
I climbed to the peak of the tallest mountain, then ascended into the clouds through some mechanism that defied logic. This was it. Heaven, the Afterlife, Nirvana, the Beyond. It wasn’t a dark ending or the vague nothingness I had feared. It was actually quite pleasant. There were other spirits around, too, swerving past me and snaking through the clouds. I was more than my frail, failing limbs and organs, which was something I’d never understood before the Beyond.
In my first days in the Beyond, a catalog of my thoughts and memories played out across my mind’s eye. The scruffy black stray puppy I found as a child that my parents wouldn’t let me keep. The sun-dappled cliffs of the Amalfi Coast where Graham and I honeymooned. The awful fight I had with my best friend from middle school when we both had crushes on Tommy B. The day I met Graham at the art house movie theatre where I used to work. It was like they said – life flashing before my eyes – but not as quickly as the movie montage I’d imagined. Each memory lingered for a little while, letting me extract some meaning from it before the next episode hit me with a new wave of emotion.
In my six months in the Beyond, I haven’t quite figured out why I’m here, but I think I’m getting closer. As I watched Graham in those first weeks without me, wasting away on the couch while a never-ending stream of sports flashed across the TV, I assumed my purpose here was to help him through his grief. I started to play little tricks – nudges to help him out of his despair. Like weaving through the closed blinds to let some more light into the room so he might be inspired to get up from the couch. Or knocking over his beer when he placed it just close enough to the edge of the coffee table. Admittedly, this didn’t do much to propel him out of his stupor. It was his recently divorced buddy who suggested Graham put himself “back out there,” and start socializing, maybe dating again.
So, he downloaded the app. Swiping, liking, matching, messaging. Occasionally texting a woman. Eventually – after weeks of cautious scrolling and chatting – calling to arrange dates. They had all been unremarkable enough; I remembered what a hopeless slog dating could be. Graham was simply going through the motions, too. Until he met Kayla.
My husband’s first meeting with Kayla was not a tedious line of questions like the others had been. They met on the patio of a local coffee shop and drank chai lattes together on an overcast Sunday morning. He told her about my death, and Kayla spoke about her divorce. They seemed to relate to each other’s losses, the way they were both trying to make sense of a new order of life.
Part of me didn’t want a front-row seat to their kayaking date today, but I was propelled to the lake where they had planned to meet, like a magnetic force pulling me to my husband. As they launched their double kayak and paddled across the lake, something – a need to see how Graham was doing – drew me close to them.
~ ~ ~
I drift to the little meadow of grass where they are situated on the blanket, then my ghostly matter swishes away from them again. I both want and don’t want to stay and listen to the rest of their conversation, but my curiosity wins the tug-of-war. A few feet away from them, I find a spot to float.
“Did you and your wife want kids?” Kayla asks.
Your wife. I like that she calls me this. As if I’m still a force that can want and will things.
“We did. We were pregnant, actually. For a little while. We lost the baby. It happened just before Lucy’s diagnosis.” Graham glances down, plays with the edge of the picnic blanket. “She was devastated. We both were.”
Had I been devastated? Well, yes. But it was so much more than that. I remember the night it happened. The blood that stained and ruined my pink cotton pajama shorts; the bright red splotches on the bathroom floor that dried the color of rust. The twisting cramps wringing out my insides and the pills that finished off what nature had started. And then, the guilt. The heaviness of it lodged deep in my solar plexus, telling me what a terrible mother I had been.
“I’m sorry.” Kayla reaches for Graham’s hand like it’s the most natural thing in the world, strokes her thumb over his knuckles.
The air around me rattles, like a sudden burst of turbulence. Calm down, I tell myself. Don’t be jealous.
“I lost a baby once, too. Before I had Abby,” says Kayla. “I thought I’d understood how painful a miscarriage could be. But nothing prepares you for that specific kind of loss.”
The corner of Graham’s eye twitches. “I’ve been thinking about her more since Lucy’s been gone. I like to think they’re together somehow. Lucy and the baby. A girl – she was convinced we were having.”
“That’s a nice thought.” Kayla gazes right through me, out at the lake. “I wonder where that love goes sometimes. All that adoration for a person who hadn’t been born yet.”
Graham looks over Kayla’s shoulder again, his eyes almost settling on the space where I float. I’ve never seen him this reflective. Even as I was dying, the experience was too emotional, too surreal, for him to verbalize what it all meant, how it was changing him.
“We’d been planning a whole childhood for her,” he says. “Mapped out all the state parks and beaches we were going to take her to. Lucy loved a day on the water.”
Kayla nods. Her brown eyes glisten, as if tears are about to spring from them. She tells Graham about her lost baby and how on the night before her miscarriage she dreamt about the baby growing up to be an Olympic gymnast. “I felt something that night. A tug in my stomach, the start of losing her, maybe. And the dream was so vivid, so clear – a picture of who the baby was meant to be.”
I whizz over the picnic blanket to the lake and plunge under the water, suddenly feeling like a bad mother. Almost mother. Had I dreamt about our baby’s future? Envisioned what she would grow up to be? Maybe I hadn’t wanted her badly enough, or cared enough, or been obsessed enough with the idea of motherhood. Was that possible?
No – I remind myself what I’ve learned here. Randomness. That’s all. Wanting or not wanting the baby had nothing to do with it. And, I had wanted her. We’d conceived quicker than I’d expected, and I was still getting used to the idea, but of course I had wanted her.
Now, I imagine holding her in the ocean’s surf, letting the foaming white caps of the waves tickle her toes. I would have taught her to love the water, to never fear the pull of the ocean’s tide or a river’s current, or the murky depth of a lake. Am I the one who’s afraid, though? Is that why I’m still hanging on? I slither towards the middle of the lake, expanding across the water then pulling the particles of my ghostly being back in. Expanding and contracting like a slinky. Even in this fourth dimension, the water reminds me that I’m still here, skimming the edge of the earthly realm. Maybe I haven’t reached the Beyond yet.
I shoot up out of the water with more force than I intend and arch through the air. On the picnic blanket, I see Graham staring at the middle of the lake, at the place where I hover. I glide closer as he glances back at Kayla.
“Did you see that splash?” He asks her.
“Yeah. Strange.” Kayla squints in my direction. “Was that a fish?”
I wonder if she senses me there, too, feels my proximity as they speak my presence into existence. Graham cocks his head, his focus flitting over me, past me, so close to the center of my ghost. His gaze fastens on me for second and I’m certain he sees me. In that half a heartbeat, I try to convey everything I need to tell him – I’m okay here; You’ll be okay if you just keep going. Then, I feel a tug away, a pull that suctions me into the wind, higher and higher until I no longer see him.
Joanna Urban is an author and public relations strategist whose short fiction has appeared in Sunspot Lit, Discretionary Love, and Grace & Gravity, among other publications. Her work has been nominated for The Best Small Fictions anthology, and she has received awards and funding from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Leopardi Writing Conference in Italy. Joanna lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and their rescue dog.