She wants the ability to go anywhere without a grandmother or anyone else. But she knows this will never happen. For she is here, Elsewhere, and what good is a driver's license if the only place she can use it is here?
Waking
A taxicab speeds out of nowhere. Liz flies through the air. She thinks, I will surely die.
She wakes in a hospital room, her vision bleary, her head wrapped in bandages. Her mother and father stand at her bedside, dark circles under their eyes. "Oh, Lizzie," her mother says, "we thought we'd lost you."
Two weeks later, the doctor removes her bandages. Aside from a Cshaped arc of stitches over her left ear, she is as good as new. The doctor calls it the most remarkable recovery he has ever seen.
Liz returns to school. Everyone wants to hear about Liz's near-death experience. "It's hard for me to talk about it," she says. People think Liz has become deep since her accident, but the truth is, she just doesn't remember.
On her sixteenth birthday, Liz passes her driver's license test with flying colors. Her parents buy her a brand-new car. (They don't like her riding her bicycle anymore.) Liz applies to college. She writes her admissions essay on the time she was hit by a cab and how it changed her life. She is accepted early decision to her top choice, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Liz graduates MIT with a degree in biology, and then she attends veterinary school in Florida. One day, she meets a boy, the type of boy with whom she can imagine spending the rest of her life and maybe even
"Rise and shine, Elizabeth!" Grandma Betty interrupts Liz's dream at seven the next morning.
Liz buries her head under the blankets. "Go away," she mutters, too low for Grandma Betty to hear.
Grandma Betty opens the curtains. "It's going to be a beautiful day," she says.
Liz yawns, her head still under the covers. "I'm dead. What in the world do I have to get up for?"
"That's certainly a negative way of looking at things. There's loads to do in Elsewhere," says Grandma Betty as she opens the next set of curtains. The room Liz is staying in (she can't think of it as her room; her room is back on Earth) has five windows. It reminds her of a greenhouse.
What she really wants is a small dark room with few (preferably no) windows and black walls something more appropriate to her current situation. Liz yawns as she watches Grandma Betty move onto the third window. "You don't have to open all the curtains," Liz says.
"Oh, I like a lot of light, don't you?" Grandma Betty replies.
Liz rolls her eyes. She can't believe she'll have to spend the rest of her life living with her grandmother, who is, make no mistake, an old person. Even though Grandma Betty looks like a young woman on the outside, Liz can tell she probably harbors all sorts of secret old-people tendencies.
Liz wonders what specifically Grandma Betty meant when she said there was "loads to do in Elsewhere." On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz's point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and poindess: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.
"You have your acclimation appointment at eight thirty," says Grandma Betty.
Liz removes her head from under the covers. "What's that?"
"It's a sort of orientation for the newly dead," says Grandma Betty.
"Can I wear this?" Liz indicates her white pajamas. She has been wearing them so long they are more precisely called gray pajamas. "I didn't exactly have time to pack, you know."
"You can borrow something of mine. I think we're about the same size, although you're probably a little smaller," Grandma Betty says.
Liz considers Betty for a moment. Betty has larger breasts than Liz but is slim and about Liz's height. It is somehow strange to be the same size as her grandmother.
"Just pick something from my closet, and if you need anything shortened or taken in, let me know.
I don't know if I mentioned that I'm a seamstress here," Grandma Betty says.
Liz shakes her head.
"Yeah, keeps me pretty busy. People tend to get smaller as they get younger, so they always need their clothes taken in."
"Can't they just buy new ones?" Liz asks, her brow furrowed.
"Of course, doll, I didn't mean to imply they couldn't. However, I have observed that there's less waste here, all around. And I do make new garments, too, you know. I prefer it, actually. It's more creative for me."
Liz nods and feels relieved. The idea of everyone wearing the same clothes for the rest of time was one of the more depressing things she'd thought lately.
After a shower (which Liz finds gloriously equivalent to showers on Earth), she wraps a towel around herself and goes into Grandma Betty's closet.
The closet is large and well organized. Her grandmother's clothes look expensive and well made, but a bit theatrical for Liz's taste: felt cloches and old-fashioned dresses and velvet capes and brooches and ballet slippers and ostrich feathers and patent-leather high heels and fishnet stockings and fur. Liz wonders where her grandmother goes in these garments. She further wonders if Grandma Betty owns jeans, for the only thing Liz wants to wear is jeans and a T-shirt.
She searches the closet for jeans. Aside from navy blue sailor pants, she finds nothing even close.
Completely frustrated, Liz sits down under a rack of sweaters. She imagines her messy closet back home with its twelve pairs of blue jeans. It had taken a long time to find all those jeans. She had had to try on many pairs. The thought of them makes Liz want to cry. She wonders what will happen to her jeans now. She puts her head in her hands and touches the stitches over her ear.
Even getting dressed is difficult here, Liz thinks.
"Did you find anything?" Grandma Betty asks when she comes into the closet several minutes later. In this time, Liz has not moved.
Liz looks up but doesn't answer.
"I know how you feel," Grandma Betty says.
Yeah right, Liz thinks.
"You're thinking that I don't know how you feel, but in some ways, I do. Dying at fifty isn't as different from dying at fifteen as you might think. When you're fifty, you still have a lot of things you might like to do and a lot of things you need to take care of."
"What did you die from anyway?" Liz asks.
"Breast cancer. Your mother was pregnant with you at the time."
"I know that part."
Grandma Betty smiles a sad little smile. "So, it's nice I get to meet you now. I was beside myself with disappointment that I didn't get to meet you then. I wish we'd met under slightly different circumstances, of course." She shakes her head. "You might look pretty in this." She raises the arm of a floral print dress that is not at all like something Liz would wear.
Liz shakes her head.
"Or this?" Grandma Betty points to a cashmere sweater.
"If it's the same to you, I think I'll just wear my pajamas after all."
"I understand, and you certainly won't be the first person to go to an acclimation appointment in pajamas," Grandma Betty assures her.