A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak Read online

  “Oh, right. Next Friday?”

  “Tonight’s fine. My double is over at six.”

  He nodded and found himself smiling like a fool. Just nodding and smiling, standing in a restaurant asking the new girl out on a date.

  “All right, tonight then.”

  “It’s a date.” She hugged the coffeepot to her chest like it might leap away from her.

  “I guess so.”

  In a bold move that Walter would learn through the years was really quite out of character, Rosie leaned in to him and was about to press her soft pink lips to his cheek, where the scar licked up from his neck. The first of a million such blessings and benedictions that would pull Walter back to life.

  But just before her lips touched his flesh Walter was swept away from the Sunrise Café out on Highway 10. He was pulled away from Rosie and his salvation and dropped back into Peter’s backyard.

  “Hey!” Walter whirled trying to find Peter in the dark yard. “We weren’t finished. She was going to kiss me.” He couldn’t find the boy in the shadows. It was night. The middle of the night by the depth and texture of the quiet that filled the little backyard like wool. Walter looked up at the full moon that filled the eastern sky.

  Suddenly there was nothing Walter wanted more than to feel his wife’s lips against his again. It had been twenty years and the thought now consumed him.

  “Peter!”

  One more kiss.

  The wedding kiss? He could relive that day, but it had been a fairly chaste little number. And that night Rosie had passed out so there was no wedding night bliss to relive.

  Their first kiss. Which, if he remembered, was on their third date. Or was it second? He wasn’t sure, but the kiss stood out. Though messy, it had led to some pretty heated necking in the back row of that movie theater.

  He wanted to touch her. Feel her again. Look into her eyes and see his reflection there. He wanted to hear a bad joke…he wanted it all.

  He wanted his wife back, with the same ferocity that had led him back to the bottle after the doctor’s appointment changed their lives.

  “You have to say goodbye to her, Walter.”

  “What? No—I did that already.”

  “I understand it’s hard. You were soul mates.”

  “Please.” Walter scoffed at the notion, but inside, in his heart and his gut and his soul, he wept in agreement. We were. She was.

  “Walter, you didn’t kill her. The cancer—”

  “I signed the papers. I said okay. I didn’t stop the doctor that came in and turned off those machines. I stood there and let it all happen. My—” He stopped, realizing he was crying. Spitting. Oh, this grief. This anger. When would it go away? “She wanted to die at home and I promised I would do that. I promised I’d take care of our daughter. That I wouldn’t drink. I broke all of them, every single one.”

  “Come on.” The boy sighed heavily through his nose. “Let’s deal with this.”

  “What?”

  There was no warning. No door. No tap-tapping on Peter’s stupid fucking phone. One minute he was in the backyard, the next he was standing in hospital hallway a few feet away from himself, young but aging by the second. Grief was making a scarecrow out of him. Jennifer, young and desperate, stood in front of the scarecrow.

  “Please, Dad,” Jennifer was begging. “Please Dad, don’t take her home. Don’t—”

  “She wants to die in her bed, honey.” He was breathing, trying to be reasonable, sympathetic even, when all he wanted was to drink the entire situation away. He remembered that clearly. How weak he’d felt in the face of Rosie’s sickness, how it called to the worst of him. “I promised—”

  “But it was so fast. They still haven’t tried everything. The doctor said there was a chance she might respond—”

  “She’s dying, sweetheart.” The younger him reached out to touch her shoulder but Jennifer slapped his hand away.

  “One week.” Her eyes blazed, and he’d been scared of the anger and hate in her eyes, scared because he felt it, too. “One more week.”

  “Okay,” he promised, and he and Jennifer walked down the hallway, side by side but with a gaping crevice between them that would only get worse.

  “You broke that promise for your daughter,” Peter whispered and Walter nodded, watching himself and his daughter walk away.

  “It was for me, too. I wasn’t in any hurry to care for her at home. I didn’t know how to say goodbye to her like that. How to do the things that needed to be done for her.”

  “That’s only human,” Peter said.

  “But I was the adult,” he said. “I should have...I should have acted like it.”

  “Well, you did, didn’t you?” Peter asked. “Eventually.”

  Speechless, Walter nodded.

  One week later his beautiful wife had been on life support and he’d acted like the adult and ended it all.

  The hallway spun, the wall behind them flipped, and they were suddenly in the hospital room.

  He stood beside himself at Rosie’s deathbed.

  “No!” He bolted, ran for the door, but the boy got in his way, and for being a damn ghost he was suddenly very solid, and Walter in his rage and grief couldn’t get past him. “Don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t do this to me.”

  “You’re doing it to yourself, Walter. It’s okay. What you did, what you had to do. It was the right thing. Look at it, now. With new eyes. Please. For your own sake.”

  The right thing. That’s what he’d told himself through the grief, through Jennifer’s hate. But somehow, over the years, drowning in a sea of booze, the person who’d signed those papers became someone he hated, an entity outside of himself. Or maybe of himself—those pieces he so rarely used after her death—his reason and cold rationality, his practicality and pragmatism. Over the years the hate and grief and blame he had nowhere to put got heaped on those parts of himself he longed to deny. Much like his part in Rosie’s death.

  Yes, it had been the right thing, but that didn’t mean he hated himself any less for doing it. For getting it all wrong.

  “She won’t feel any pain?” he heard his living self ask, and slowly he turned, coming face to face with himself in this horrifying panorama.

  There were the nurses, so busy with all the little tasks that accompanied killing someone. The removal of IVs, the last administering of pain meds. All these women, who for weeks had called him by name, brought him coffee from the nurses’ station, asked after Jennifer while caring for his dying shell of a wife—now they wouldn’t even look him in the eye.

  Probably because of the way he’d dealt with Jennifer, asking her to leave if she was only going to scream at him. Shameful. If Rosie had been able she would have torn a strip off him.

  But now, when he needed someone by his side, someone to pat his hand and tell him he was doing the right thing, now the nurses were too busy to make eye contact.

  “No pain,” said the doctor with stone-faced sympathy. His cool medical reasons for taking Rosie off life support had finally convinced Walter to sign the papers, largely because he’d been unable to stand it anymore. Sitting by her bed day in and day out, watching machines force her to breathe, had worn him down to nothing—to frayed nerve endings. And Jennifer, Jennifer’s hope had been so damn tragic. She’d never seemed to understand that Rosie wasn’t going to get out of that bed. Ever.

  And when he’d told Jennifer his plans…well, it hadn’t gone well.

  Look at her, he thought, staring down at his wife. The tubes and the machines, the IVs and the monitors. None of which she’d wanted, she’d made that clear after her diagnosis. She’d wanted to die in bed, in her home.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered to Rosie, making his way between the living version of himself and one of the nurses. She was there, his wife, his soul mate, under the pale skin, the red scabs, and chafe. Her hair was gone and she’d lost too much weight, but his Rosie was there. Beautiful and sweet and dying.

  With
or without his help.

  “I should have listened to you,” he whispered, touching her hand, her face. He could feel her heartbeat, her warmth, and tears burned in his head. Thousands of them, unshed for so long. “I should have opened the bedroom window so you could smell the lilacs. I should have held your hand and dressed you in your favorite nightgown. I should have—” He choked, curling over her, pulling her body into his ghostly arms. “I should never have let it come to this. And I’m sorry I didn’t keep the rest of my promises. I’m sorry I started drinking, and Jennifer—” He couldn’t continue, not without making a mess of himself.

  “Okay,” the living version of himself said, his voice as fractured as he remembered feeling inside, a thousand pieces never to be put back together.

  Walter closed his eyes and listened to the tapping of machines, the slowing of beeps. Dying, he thought, hiding his face in her neck, smelling her despite the hospital. Despite his dying senses.

  Behind him there was a strangled gasp and he turned to face himself. Eyes full of tears, the beginning of a self-hate so powerful it would ruin the rest of his life, the living Walter stood rock still. His nostrils flared as he tried desperately to suck in enough air. Walter remembered all of it, the sensation of drowning, his inability to reach for her hand because he was frozen. Frozen in panic.

  Was he doing this? he’d wondered. Was he really killing her like this?

  Oh god, that poor man, Walter thought and he backed away from his wife, his instincts gone haywire. And slowly, carefully, unsure of the rules or what would happen if he crossed this particular dead/living line, he wrapped his arms around the grieving man in front of him.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered, soaking in his own words, letting them right certain wrongs in his gut, his heart. “You did the right thing.”

  Listening to the beeps get farther and farther apart, until there was nothing but deafening, crushing silence. Waiting for the doctor’s too-loud voice to say “Time of death, 8:38 a.m,” he held onto himself and he didn’t let go.

  Not for a long time.

  He thought of the river, the war. The bubble of champagne in a glass. The love that saved him.

  “You did the best you could,” he whispered.

  21

  Walter floated up out of the hospital, through concrete and steel beams, up into the sky, past birds and clouds, right back into Peter’s backyard. And the floating was like those dreams he’d had when he was kid. The flying dreams, the ones he woke up from convinced that something magical had happened in the night and he was now unaffected by gravity.

  The sky was starless, a thin cloud hovered over the moon, and Walter wished he could see the Milky Way. It had been a long time since he’d seen that, too many years since he took the time to notice a pretty, clear night. Slowly, while he watched, the great trail of glitter and stardust appeared across the curve of the night sky.

  Walter soon remembered that he had never seen the Northern Lights, and while he had never given them much thought while he was alive, he realized right now, four hours and however minutes dead, he wished he had seen them.

  And suddenly, low in the northern sky, there they were. The dancing brilliant green, red, and blue phantasms.

  “Well, I guess you figured it out. You’re really dead.” Peter said. “You still hungry?”

  Walter shook his head. His body was light, fluid almost. He couldn’t quite tell the difference between his flesh and the night air.

  He wondered if Rosie had felt this. If, when he had signed those papers and the plug had been pulled and the beeps of the heart rate monitor and the gasp and clang of the oxygen finally slowed and then stopped in terrible silence, if the pain and earthly disease dissolved and she became weightless.

  He hoped so. He wished he could see it. He smiled at the thought of Rosie floating, taking huge spaceman leaps into the air.

  At once Walter realized what this relived day might be. The very last time he would ever see his wife.

  Walter was used to fear; he had been scared his whole life of one thing or another. But he realized all of the long tangled ends to those fears were tied to into one knot. Walter was scared that in those endless, countless arguments with Rosie about heaven, that he had been right.

  That there was no heaven. Not for men like him.

  “What happens…after?” Walter whispered. He looked at Peter with eyes that were clear and focused in a way he wasn’t sure they had ever been.

  “After?”

  “After I relive a day?”

  “Ohhh.” Peter nodded and pursed his lips. “The heaven or hell question.”

  “Yeah.” Walter cleared his throat. “I mean, for me, what is it?”

  “Well, hell is actually quite a bit harder to get into than you humans seem to think. It takes lots more than sex before marriage and eating pork to land you in the fiery pits.”

  “But the war…? Those men—”

  Peter shook his head. “You’ve paid enough for those things.”

  Walter blinked rapidly up at the sky, but his worries were not put to bed. In life, after the war, he’d no longer believed. Surely there had to be punishment for that.

  “To get into hell, it has to be crimes against humanity sort of stuff. The vicious and evil and the—”

  “Faithless?” Walter asked.

  “Nope. Even the blind, dumb, and stupid ones get a chance at heaven.” Peter smiled and then frowned. “I called you blind and stupid, and you’ve got nothing?”

  “So,” Walter breathed, looking deep inside for those tracks in the snow. “What’s heaven?”

  “It’s what you’ve always thought it was.”

  “But what if I thought it was nothing? That it didn’t exist?”

  “Heaven is what you want.” Peter shrugged. “If that’s what you wanted…”

  Walter barely heard him over the echo of Rosie in his ears, saying that his years of faithlessness weren’t going to get him any favors when he died. She’d always laughed and said she was going to be waiting for him on a cloud somewhere dressed in her prettiest wings, and he was going to be a no-show unless he started working on believing in something. Anything.

  He had joked and wisecracked and remained…what had the kid called him? Stupid, and blind.

  So blind, and this was his payment.

  “What if I made a mistake? What if I was wrong believing what I did?”

  “I think it’s been proven a few mistakes have been made in your life. But I told you at the beginning there are no do-overs.”

  Walter scrubbed at his eyes, rubbing away the tears, and turned back to the sky, conjuring up falling stars so he wouldn’t fall onto the earth and sob.

  He watched the Northern Lights and wished that he and Rosie had been able to take Jennifer north, maybe to Minnesota.

  “We never went camping,” he said aloud. “We should have done that. Camped.”

  “Don’t do this to yourself, Walter. Don’t count your regrets.”

  “Do you have any idea how much television I watched? I mean, it was bad enough at home, but on the road. All those nights of room service and bad television. Those big beds and nice sheets, wasted on me and reruns of Hill Street Blues.” He shook his head. “Obviously, the room service was a bad idea. Rosie was a good cook, healthy stuff that didn’t taste bad, but traveling as much as I was…” He patted his chest. He shook with nerves and adrenaline. “Too many cheeseburgers.”

  “Walter…”

  “I should have made Rosie feel better about herself. More compliments. I should have listened and tried—” He linked his fingers together to stop the shaking.

  “Walter!”

  “I didn’t want to see her again, you know? I didn’t want to say goodbye all over again. And now all I want is to see her and it will be the last time, won’t it? This is it for Rosie and me. I pick a day, I go back and kiss her and hold her, and then…no more.”

  Walter turned and a young boy stood there. A young Peter, ab
out five years old.

  “You’re out of time,” the boy said in Peter’s serious way.

  Those wasted years stood around him like sentinels, markers of those times he’d run aground in his grief and faithlessness. It was laughable, those things he’d been afraid of then—love and hurt and being alone—compared to what he was now facing.

  The end. His last chance at life, at touching what had been so good and then so forgotten.

  Suddenly in the thick, moist grass that gleamed with velvet texture in the moonlight Walter saw the footprints that would lead him back home, out of the wilderness.

  “June 16, 1991.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s the day. That’s the day I want.” Walter stood. “June 16, 1991.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “No fooling around anymore Walter. I’ve got people backed up. Wandering down that hallway freaking out—”

  “I’m sure! I’m sure. Let’s just get this over with.”

  A podium erupted from the earth, and Peter twitched and was once again full-grown.

  “That’s an interesting trick,” Walter said.

  “You can do it, too,” Peter told him and opened a very small and thin laptop. But Walter wasn’t interested in tricks.

  Peter tapped a few keys and shook his head. “That day is not on your list.”

  “Does that matter?” Walter asked, suddenly panicked that in the end this would be taken away from him. “You said any day.”

  “Sure, right, fine. Any day. It just doesn’t seem to be an important one.”

  Walter smiled. “It’s important.”

  “All right, then. June 16, 1991, it is.” The contract appeared, and Peter held the paper and a pen out to Walter.

  Walter signed the contract with a shaking hand, but when Peter grabbed it Walter refused to let go. “Wait! Wait. Let me just be sure. I get the whole day and when it’s over it’s over. It’s the last time I see Rosie.”

  Peter smiled and then laughed. “I told you, Walter.” Peter leaned in close and Walter could feel his breath against his scar. “You’ve got to have a little faith.”