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  Copyright © 2020 Beca Lewis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  Published by:

  Perception Publishing

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters in this book are fictional. However, as a writer, I have made some of the book’s characters composites of people I have met or known.

  All rights reserved.

  “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” -Ray Cummings, The Time Professor

  “Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.” -Albert Einstein

  “The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” -Albert Einstein

  One

  No one expected her to die. She wasn’t that old. She hadn’t been sick.

  One night she lay down on her bed and never got up again. Or so they said. Not to her. To each other. No one spoke to her. She tried to speak. But no one heard her. She had finally become invisible, as she had often wished to be.

  It had been a beautiful spring day. The daffodils bobbed their glorious yellow heads in the breeze, and the buds on the maple tree branches shone red in the sunlight.

  The pussy willow tree at the end of the yard spread open its soft buds against the brilliant blue sky. She had stood under it, admiring its perfection, and watched white clouds drift by, looking as if they were weaving themselves between the branches.

  Neighbors up and down the street had come outside. They were checking their lawns to see what winter had done to them, and waving, delighted to see each other on this glorious day. The children were riding their bikes down the middle of the street, confident that no cars would dare bother them.

  Spring had come. The days had lengthened, and the temperature no longer dropped below freezing at night. An easy winter had not diminished the joy of the arrival of spring.

  While the neighborhood rejoiced in a beautiful day, Connie Matthews had kept her emotions in check. Connie believed that being too happy, or too sad, was a dangerous thing.

  For Connie, that day had been good. Not great. But good. Okay. Just as life had been for the past fifty years. She woke up, made her bed, and swept the floor for any crumbs that might have escaped her careful eye the day before.

  Although Connie often left food out for the animals that visited her yard, she didn’t want a mouse coming into her house searching for food. That was not where they were supposed to be living. They had other places to live. This was her home—hers, not theirs.

  Connie hated capturing mice. At first, she had live-trapped them. But there always seemed to be more. It occurred to her that perhaps they were returning to the house. One day she dabbed a drop of red nail polish on a mouse’s tail before releasing it.

  The day she trapped that same mouse again, she had to admit that they were finding their way back to her home.

  Hating it, but knowing it was the only way, she had resorted to using traps that killed them instantly. At least she hoped so. Every time one died in the trap, Connie prayed that they would not come back and haunt her dreams.

  In high school botany class, they had been required to capture bugs, kill them, preserve them, and pin them onto boards. After two days of capturing, killing, and pinning, Connie had nightmares of the bugs flying down the tiny hallway to her room and torturing her.

  Connie was never sure who had intervened for her. Maybe she did it herself. Perhaps she had spoken up and told the teacher what was happening. She hoped that was what she did—that she had spoken up and did something instead of letting it happen to her.

  But whoever spoke to the teacher had somehow persuaded him that there was another way to study bugs. She never had to kill again. Until the mice.

  But to Connie, this was different. There was no preserving the mouse and pinning it to a board for further study. That meant it might have a chance. If there was something like life after death, perhaps it ran off to join the other mice in some other place. Maybe a place better than this one.

  So as Connie released the dead mice from the trap, she would send it off in her mind to join its friends. No need to be mad at her for doing what she had done. Her house was not made for mice.

  The morning she died, Connie had found a mouse in the trap. She had put the body near the tiny stream that ran through the small woods behind her house. She didn’t believe that the body was a mouse anymore, and maybe the hawk would enjoy a free meal. Perhaps then it would not bother her birds because it would be full of mouse instead.

  Her birds were Connie’s pride and joy. If they were in her yard, her woods, her garden, they were her birds. She watched them through the windows of her living room, and the glass door in her bedroom. She had feeders everywhere, and birdhouses, too.

  That day, her last day, she sat in the one chair in her living room and watched the bluebirds choose which house they would build a nest in. They were so indecisive. Or at least it appeared that way to Connie.

  For the last month, she had watched them try to pick a home. First, they would peek into each house and then flit over to sit on the next. Sometimes they would go inside the house, poking in their heads first, and she would think “finally.” But later, they would be house hunting again. Their indecisiveness drove Connie crazy.

  “Pick one, for heaven’s sake,” she would tell them through the window.

  While they played around choosing their homes, the house sparrow would take over the birdhouse. For the first few weeks of spring, she would pull the sparrow nests out of the box, telling the bluebirds that she couldn’t do this forever.

  She loved the bluebirds, but she hated that they didn’t stand up for themselves. She wanted them to take what was theirs. She wanted them to fight the house sparrows when they raided their nests.

  In her heart, Connie knew she had become more like the bluebirds. She could decide nothing important. She was afraid to stand up for herself. Afraid to take action. She had made herself into this timid woman. There was no one to blame but herself.

  So, instead of living the life she had once dreamed about, she worked in the garden. She would wave at the neighbors. But they knew not to come over.

  She had nothing to say. She didn’t like gossip, and she didn’t care what they did with their own lives. And since she had done nothing with hers, she had nothing to share.

  I could have done life differently, Connie thought, as she watched the people stare at the woman in the bed. The woman who looked just like her. Now that it was too late, she knew she should have. She shouldn’t have let herself be trapped like the mice in her house. Live trapped, but barely living.

  One person standing around the bed was crying. A little. She has to, Connie thought, because Karla would worry about what people would say if she didn’t feel sorrow at her mother’s death.

  But Connie knew better. Karla was relieved. Now she never had to worry about taking care of a mother she barely knew.

  Whose fault is that? Connie asked herself.

  No one needed to tell her it was her own.

  Later they would discover why she had died, but only she knew why she had not lived.

  Two

  At first, Connie thought being dead wasn’t that bad. No one talked to her, so she didn’t have to make up something to say. Since she had no desire to hang around and watch people fake how much they missed her, and there was no way she
was attending her own sad funeral, she had started walking. For a while, she loved it. She could go anywhere she wanted, and no one saw her.

  She visited the library, the coffee shop, sat in the park, and walked to her favorite garden store. It was lovely. Until it wasn’t.

  It took only a few days to realize that she was utterly alone, and that was not how she thought it was supposed to be when death arrived. Wasn’t someone supposed to meet with her and help her go someplace else?

  Wasn’t there supposed to be a light to walk towards? She had lived a reasonably exemplary life. Except for that one time, she had stayed out of trouble. If there was a heaven, shouldn’t she be going there? Eventually?

  But there was nothing. Not even another dead person to talk to. It didn’t surprise Connie that there was life after death, but the loneliness of it did. How could she be lonely? Wasn’t being alone something she had actively sought?

  It also surprised her that she missed having conversations. She spent much of her life hiding away from people so they wouldn’t bother her. Although the thought that she had kept away from people because she didn’t want to hurt them flashed through her mind, she shut it down as quickly as possible. As she always did.

  But if she had wanted not to bother people or hurt them, now her wish had come true. Maybe that’s why being dead looked like this.

  Perhaps this version of heaven was designed for her because it was what she had wanted. But being totally alone was not as pleasant as she thought it would be.

  In fact, by the end of the second day of aimless walking, Connie was desperate to find someone, anyone, to speak to. She tried tapping the people she saw on the shoulder, and when that didn’t work, she tried bumping into them.

  Once in a while, someone would shudder and look around, but that was it. She would wave at them, scream, even try walking through them, which worked—the walking through part, but not getting their attention.

  Finally, she gave up on the live people and started looking for others like her. There had to be more people that were dead and still in town the same way she was. Maybe there was a community of dead people who lived somewhere together.

  By then, Connie realized that she was willing to be part of a community of people, if only she could find them.

  She was also hungry. Or at least she thought she was. There was a strange sensation of emptiness, and she thought food might fill it. But even though she could walk up to the food she saw everywhere, she couldn’t touch it.

  Eventually, after finding no one to talk to, she decided to think about the problem logically. First, it was apparent she was dead. Yes, she had figured that out right away. Wasn’t that hard. Looking at a body lying in a bed that looked just like her made it pretty obvious.

  She was grateful that she had been wearing pajamas because she had no desire to walk around with no clothes on, which was how she used to sleep. However, even though she didn’t feel hot or cold, and no one could see her, she didn’t like it.

  Why and how she died wasn’t clear. But perhaps that wasn’t important. What was important was to find someone who could tell her what was happening to her. Maybe even show her how to change into something more presentable.

  Another few days went by, and finding no one, Connie decided to do something different. She went home. No one was there, just as it had been while she was alive.

  There was a for-sale sign on the front lawn. Karla had wasted no time getting rid of the house. When she had left it to Karla—who else would it go to—she had half hoped that Karla would come live in it.

  But obviously Karla wanted to forget their life together as quickly as possible. Inside the house, the closets were empty, and half the furniture was gone. Karla is staging the home to make it look good, Connie thought.

  Even though she had expected Karla not to care, it still hurt. Surprisingly. Although she couldn’t feel cold and heat, she could feel hunger and emotions. That didn’t seem fair. For the first time, Connie felt a touch of panic. What if this was what eternity would be like for her?

  Sitting alone in the house she used to own, Connie thought about her life, hoping that perhaps that would prime the pump somehow and allow her to move on.

  Besides, Connie thought, what else do I have to do? What if this is eternity?

  That thought terrified her, so she let herself drift back to where it had all begun—in the trailer park, stupidly called King’s Row.

  She thought back to the day she left that place. Over fifty years ago. How impossible that seemed. But now that she was dead, what did time mean anyway?

  Three

  Living in a dump like King’s Row had not dampened Connie’s thoughts of the future. At eighteen, Connie had seen a lifetime of possibilities stretched out before her. She would conquer the world.

  First college, then a career doing something important. She didn’t know what that would be yet. What she would choose wasn’t essential to know. What was important was that she would be free as a bird. A college had accepted her, and she was leaving home. Forever, as far as Connie was concerned.

  There would be no returning to the broken-down trailer she had lived in with a father who came home only long enough to see if his one and only daughter had money that he could steal or con from her.

  Connie had been earning her own money since the women in the trailer park had decided that she was old enough to watch their kids while they went out. Sometimes the women actually went some place useful, like shopping. Other times, Connie suspected they just went anywhere that wasn’t home.

  Husbands existed for some of those women, but were rarely seen. The men said they were busy trying to earn enough money to bring home. But often it was to spend on what they felt they deserved. After all, since they were the money-makers they could do what they wanted with it. In that way, the men acted like the kings of the trailer park.

  To pay Connie for babysitting, the women would squirrel away some grocery money, work at jobs their husbands didn’t know about, or sell things they made.

  Like Connie, they had learned to hide what they earned. They had come up with many creative hiding places. For a long time, a favorite spot was inside an old face cream jar. But once one husband discovered the money, they all knew. Some kind of male bonding ritual, Connie thought.

  But that didn’t stop the women. They found alternative hiding places and inventive ways to make money. They were always trying to stay ahead of everything and everyone that wanted money from them—from bill collectors to the men in their lives.

  As Connie got older, they included her in their secrets. By the time she was eighteen, she thought she understood how the world worked. And she was ready to outsmart it.

  All her life the women of King’s Row were Connie’s bedrock and her family. What they did when they left their trailers didn’t bother her. She understood that they had to find life somewhere. At least they came back. Unlike her mother. Whoever she was.

  Connie had no memory of her, and there were no pictures around the trailer to give her a clue. Connie had learned long before that asking questions of her father only earned her some form of punishment. If she was lucky, it was the silent treatment. That was preferable to other kinds.

  When she turned sixteen, the women who had known her mother told Connie that she looked like her. After that, she had often stood in front of the window, trying to see her reflection. She pretended that it wasn’t her standing there; it was her mother. What she saw wasn’t much. She wouldn’t stand out on the street with her dirty blond hair that hung to her waist.

  Looking more like her mother was probably why her father had been increasingly evil-tempered. She doubted it was because she was leaving home. She had told him, but he had paid no attention. Maybe he didn’t believe her. Or perhaps he was relieved she was going. It was hard to tell what her father felt. If anything.

  Maybe he hadn’t
considered who would keep the trailer reasonably clean, or make food for him. She had only told him her plans that one time. That’s all she owed him. Probably didn’t even owe him that. Long years of hiding from him had taught her the art of deception. So she thought that telling him once was enough. What she would never tell him was where she was going.

  But she was leaving, and her heart felt as if it would thump out of her chest she was so excited. She had been saving money to go for years. First babysitting, and then once she was old enough, she worked any job she could get.

  Despite her terrible home life, or maybe because of it, she had studied hard enough to get a decent score on her SAT because college had always been her goal. She figured that if she could get to college, she would make it out of this life, and she would never return.

  But no matter how much she worked, she knew she wouldn’t have enough for school. It didn’t matter. She knew she would go to college, anyway. Even if it meant it took her ten years to get through college—working, and paying her way as she went—she would make it.

  But one night, a miracle happened. A miracle delivered by the women of King’s Row. A miracle organized by the woman everyone called Mama Woo.

  Connie thought she was going to babysit. But when she reached the trailer, they were all waiting for her. All the women of King’s Row stood in the tiny space that passed for a living room with tears in their eyes. Connie thought something terrible had happened, and her world had shattered.

  These women had treated her like a daughter. They made sure she had clothes to wear. They told her about boys and babies.

  She wasn’t surprised that they told her to stay away from boys and even men. “You don’t want to end up like us,” they would say.

  Connie had agreed. She didn’t. So she had obeyed the women. Most people would have called the women trailer trash, but Connie knew differently. And she loved them as they loved her.