A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak Read online

  A Day In The Death of Walter Zawislak: A Love Story

  Molly O’Keefe

  Copyright © 2019 by Molly Fader

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  To Adam, who gave me this idea. To Robert Zawislak, dear family friend and science teacher extraordinaire - thank you for the use of your name. To the editors and writer friends who have helped make this story grow beyond what I thought I could make it. Particularly Jude.

  To Katy Dockrill for this perfect cover.

  Cam Drynan for your beautiful work on the audiobook.

  And to you reader! Thank you so much for coming along with me on this journey. I can’t tell you how much it means to me.

  Contents

  A Day In The Death Of Walter Zawislak

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Untitled

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Afterword

  A Day In The Death Of Walter Zawislak

  If, at the end of your life, you got to pick one day to relive, what day would you pick?

  * * *

  Walter Zawislak wants none of it. Not a day to relive, not a trip down memory lane through a life he wasted. His wife, Rosie, died twenty years ago, and without her he hasn’t done much living. So if it’s lights out for him, then just turn them off already and let him get some peace and quiet.

  * * *

  But Peter, the mysterious young man in charge of Walter’s afterlife, isn’t listening to Walter. In Peter’s eyes there is beauty in every day, even the bad ones. Even the really bad ones. Of which Water has had more than a few. But there are also days of bravery and heroism. Selflessness and grace.

  * * *

  And Rosie…there are lots of days of Rosie.

  * * *

  Before it’s too late for both of them, Peter has to remind Walter that there’s more to life than dying.

  1

  Walter had no idea where he was going, but he kept on, shuffling down the long gray hallway like a good soldier.

  “Hello?” His voice echoed back without reply. Customer service at St. Mike’s was slipping, if you asked him.

  Used to be you couldn’t even sneeze without a dozen nurses coming in to take your blood pressure.

  He guessed he was walking from his room, one of the cheap ward ones where he and the rest of the guys on Medicaid were pooled, but he couldn’t be sure. The drugs they’d kept him on since he was admitted were disorienting. The other night he could have sworn Matt Saunders, his next-door neighbor who died two winters ago, came into his room to fight about that ladder Walter borrowed and broke.

  This isn’t the cardiac wing. Walter was sure of that, at least. That wing had yellow and green walls, soothing colors so as to not create any undue excitement for weak tickers.

  Watercolor pictures, like the ones in the cardiac wing, hung on the walls, except these landscapes and pictures of cottages and birds were the color of slate and thunderclouds. Gray everywhere.

  Strangest damn decor he’d ever seen.

  He blinked and rubbed his runny eyes, but nothing changed. Last round of blood thinners must have screwed up his vision. His right leg throbbed, from deep inside where the scar tissue originated, out through bone and sinew like chain lightning.

  Where the heck did I leave my cane?

  Suddenly, he was aware of a high-pitched ringing in his ears. A steady squeal. He stopped walking to dig into his left ear, where it seemed to be loudest, but it didn’t help.

  Must be coming from behind one of them gray doors. Someone’s heart monitor with bad news.

  Good thing he had his slippers and that he had remembered his robe. The other day, he woke up to find a woman standing over his bed. He had been startled, or rather figured he should be startled, but the drugs took the edge off most things and when she had turned around he could see her whole dimpled backside.

  Since then he had insisted on wearing his robe at all times.

  He put a hand to his heart, startled by the ease with which things were working in his chest. The constant tightness he’d long grown used to was missing. He took a deep breath, filling the low and withered bottom third of his lungs that had been neglected since the last heart attack.

  I must be getting discharged. For once he was going to leave the hospital healthier than when he went in. A miracle.

  “Hello? Anybody home?” He knocked on one of the gray doors but not a soul answered him or poked their head out to see what the ruckus was. There must have been trouble someplace, Walter guessed. All the doctors and nurses must be working on someone behind a different gray door.

  He became increasingly weary. His feet started to drag, and the rasp and swish of the rubber soles on the linoleum accompanied him down the long hallway. He squinted again, his attention caught by the blurry shape of something green up ahead.

  The green blur eventually gained the form of a tree, a healthy and radiant ficus in a gray pot. So green it seemed to glow like the LCD readout on his bedside clock. Beside the tree was an empty chair and Walter sat down with a grateful moan.

  Better or not, he needed a rest.

  Tucking his tingling hands into the pockets of his old terry cloth robe, he noticed that what had previously been dark blue with orange–pink bleach spots had turned gray.

  He blinked. Hard. But it stayed gray.

  I’m gonna have to ask the doctor about my eyes.

  “Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you.”

  Walter jumped at the sound of another voice and turned to find a slight young man with light brown skin fumbling with an armful of files.

  “You’re early,” the young man said.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t really know—”

  “Of course not, because you’re early and I wasn’t here to greet you.” The man’s smile was razor thin and Walter got the impression things had gone wrong because he was early.

  The guy looked to be about twenty—though Walter had long since lost his ability to guess a young person’s age with any accuracy. He always guessed ten years younger. Everyone looked like a pup.

  This pup was dressed in black. What in the world had happened here at St. Mike’s? They never used to have gray walls and doctors never dressed in black.

  The place was going all new-agey.

  Can’t say as I like it.

  “Do you hear that?” Walter dug into his left ear. The ringing was making him crazy. “That ringing?”

  “You’re going to be difficult aren’t you?”

  “I’m not trying to be.”

  “Of course not. None of you ever do.” The boy sighed heavily and tapped a button on his fancy phone.

  Miraculously, the buzzing stopped.

  “That’s a good trick.” Walter smiled, trying to be amiable, hoping it would get him out of here sooner.

  “If you would follow me?” The boy gestured to the open door behind him.


  Walter shuffled after him into the small gray office and sat in a chair across from a cluttered desk. The back wall was a big window through which Walter gazed out at the brightest blue sky he had ever seen. The brilliant blue was dotted with cotton-ball clouds, as his daughter used to call them. Clouds so fluffy and white they seemed false.

  Cotton-ball clouds. He hadn’t thought of that in years.

  “Looks like a good day.” Walter squinted at the light.

  “It usually is.” The boy sat, pulling himself up tight against his desk. “Let’s see what we’ve got here…” He paged through a few more files. “You’ll have to excuse me, the holidays are always a busy time. I’m sort of swamped.”

  “What holiday?”

  The boy looked up at him with dark, nearly black eyes. “Christmas, Hanukkah, Los Posadas, Winter Solstice, the New Year.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “As a rule, no.”

  “But I was admitted just after Thanksgiving.” Walter could have sworn only a few nights had passed.

  The boy pulled out a file. “Here you are. Walter Zawislak, December 28, 2012.”

  “That’s the date?”

  “Yep.”

  “Today’s date?”

  “I think I’ve established that I don’t joke, Mr. Zawislak.”

  “It’s just…a coincidence, that’s all.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The boy flipped open the file and Walter pondered the coincidence of being released from the hospital on the same day his wife died twenty years earlier.

  “I just need to make a few changes here. We weren’t expecting you for another two days.” He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and hit the top with his thumb. “We’re still trying to iron out some of the communication problems from head office.”

  Walter couldn’t care less about communication problems and knew nothing about head office so he watched the clouds form and break behind the boy’s head. Twenty years. That made him sixty-six years old. Rosie would have been seventy and Jennifer was thirty-eight. Those years between Rosie’s death and this day stood like a wall. A dividing line. Now and Then. Before and After.

  “Now.” The boy handed him some paperwork, and his irises, Walter noticed, were now blue, the color of the sky behind him. Never seen a person with eyes like that. Must have been a trick of the lighting, or Walter’s old runny eyes.

  Where did I leave my damn glasses?

  “If you have any questions after we’re done talking then you can just refer to the FAQ sheet.”

  Walter nodded because the boy seemed to expect it.

  “We’ve had some changes in policy here due to overcrowding. People linger indefinitely because they can’t stand to leave. They feel they don’t have…” The boy twirled his hand in the air and the clouds outside the window behind him all spun apart at that moment. Strange. “…closure. Peace.”

  “I just want to go home,” Walter said, hoping the boy would cut his little discharge speech short. He knew the one at St. Mike’s by heart. “Wanting to leave is not a problem.”

  “Right. That’s why we’ve changed the policy.”

  “You’re saying the policy is that I can’t go home?”

  “No, the policy is changed because you want to go home and can’t.”

  “Why can’t I go home?”

  The boy stared at Walter for a long time and Walter, never comfortable with scrutiny, looked down at his robe and was relieved to see that it was blue again. But out of the corner of his eye the boy seemed to grow younger and lose a little of his shape, as if the outline of his face was feathering out, blurring. Walter blinked and looked back at him head-on and the boy’s features solidified.

  “I’m sorry. I am a bit out of sorts from your arrival.” The boy rubbed his forehead. “Let me start again.”

  “Please do.” Walter wished he had a watch. There was the mail and the lawn. He needed to get some flowers and head over to the cemetery. He wasn’t sure where his car was and he—

  “You’ve crossed over.”

  Walter blinked. The boy blinked back.

  “Say again.”

  “You’ve passed away. Died.”

  2

  Between them sat an odd moment of silence in which Walter could actually hear the blood in his veins. He flexed his fingers and the tingles continued. His stomach growled. He had to take a leak. Physical realities for a living person. He was no more dead than he was a bird.

  “That’s not very funny.”

  “I don’t joke.” The boy smiled, a small nervous flutter of a smile, that hit Walter like a kick in the gut.

  “What the hell are you talking about? Is this the psych ward?” He bumped the desk when he stood, sending files into the little shit’s lap.

  “Please, sir, sit down and I swear I will make this clear.”

  Walter sat, mostly because he was lightheaded.

  “People always have a hard time with the news, which is why we’ve changed the policy.”

  “The discharge policy?” He must have been taken to a different hospital, that fancy one in Milwaukee. “This isn’t St. Mike’s, is it?”

  “No, Walter, this is not St. Mike’s.”

  Walter nodded and swallowed. He felt the mechanics of his throat, the solid lump of worry and fear that refused to be swallowed.

  I’m not dead. This was another one of those dreams. Damn drugs.

  He felt foolish for having been worried. A dream would explain the gray walls and this half-baked kid. He relaxed back in his seat.

  “In the previous millennium, people could linger here after dying and watch their funerals. Watch their children grow and their spouses grieve. Most of the time, the soul gets tired of watching these things and moves on—”

  “On? On to where?”

  “I am aware you are no great believer, but let’s not be obtuse.”

  “You’re talking about Heaven?”

  “And Hell.”

  Walter grunted. Usually his dreams weren’t so damn philosophical. He swiveled in his seat hoping Dan Saunders might stumble in to talk about that ladder.

  “In any case…” The boy leaned back, putting his hands behind his head, and Walter thought he could see the blue of the sky through his black shirt. Like it was see-through, except he couldn’t see the kid’s arms. The whole thing was a little transparent.

  “We’ve always had some stragglers, people who have hung around to see what happens on Earth. Conspiracy theorists and religious fanatics mostly, but the numbers have grown. Times have gotten increasingly more difficult—heart disease, obesity, diabetes, murder, war, school shootings. People are taken from their lives before they are ready and thus don’t have peace with leaving their families, their loved ones. So they stick around and we can’t accommodate everyone anymore.”

  “Kick ‘em out.”

  The boy scowled at him, which reminded him of the puppy he’d gotten Jennifer for her seventh birthday, a fierce little thing despite its size and overgrown paws and ears.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” the boy said. “Instead, we have come up with a plan to help people gain closure and move on. Everyone has to do this. Without exception.”

  The boy paused dramatically and then, as if there had been a drum roll only he could hear, he announced: “You get to relive one day.”

  Walter’s stomach turned. Maybe he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him. That chicken thing with all the sauce was probably at the root of this.

  He pressed a hand to his chest and burped. But felt no better.

  “Honestly, Walter,” the boy said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “One whole day…most people are quite thrilled with the opportunity.”

  “Guess it depends on the day.” There were plenty of days he’d tried to forget.

  “That’s the beauty of the new system. You get to pick.” The boy held out a page to Walter. “I have selected a list of da
tes for you, including the highlights that our studies have shown are most popular. Wedding days, birth of children—”

  “I missed Jennifer’s. I was in Omaha at a conference…”

  “Right. Well, then…big promotions at work…”

  “I didn’t get mine.” Walter looked down at the list of dates that he couldn’t place in his memory and ignored that slick run of shame down his spine. “I was put in the warehouse.”

  “These things do happen,” the boy told him, and Walter wanted to ask to whom? Obviously to him, but Walter was ready to bet that he had pissed away his big moments better than most.

  “Which is why…” The boy beamed like a circuit breaker had been flicked on inside him. Walter felt the hair on his arms lift with charged static electricity. “…I’ve taken the liberty of adding a few. Sadly, people have tried to go back to the day of their own birth, but we find that only complicates things for the mother. All that awareness in a newborn’s eyes tends to lead to hysterics. And frankly, some things need to remain a mystery. But you will get a chance to sample from the dates I have selected for you before choosing which of these days to relive. It’s a highlight package, one of our finest.”

  Walter stood, shoving the paper back into the boy’s hands.

  He didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want any dream to lead him backward to reopen old wounds. He had to wake up in the morning and deal with the ghosts this dream had let out. Relive a day? Not in a million years.

  “I’ve had enough. I want out.”

  “That’s not possible.”