So much to say to you…so many times I wanted to tell you things, stupid, sentimental things. I love you. No one understood me ever the way you did from the first night we met. The line of hair on your stomach drove me crazy. Your mouth tasted like home. I would want to say this stuff in those last months when we were still pretending. I would come into the apartment from the rain and find you painting or wake up in the middle of the night and hear the TV in the living room and know you were awake, waiting for the pain pill to kick in. And this stuff would come bubbling up, and I would almost say it. But I knew you would know why I was saying it, that I would never come right out and say such things to you unless I knew you were dying. And you weren’t ready for us to know, ready to admit that it was true. At least that’s what you said, what we agreed. Maybe I
shouldn’t have believed you. Maybe you really did do it for me.
Jake, my darling, that would really suck.
Jason came to the apartment this morning, and I let him photograph the paintings that were finished. Someone from the gallery is supposed to come back and crate them up and take them to the gallery at some point after I get them all varnished. Jason offered to do it, of course, but I wouldn’t let him. I don’t think he realized how massive they would be. You really never said a word to him about them, did you? Thanks, baby. I love you for that. I love that no one else got to look at them standing beside you but me.
He loved them, of course. He cried from the moment he walked into the studio. He told me that he loved you and hugged me, and I think I smiled. I know I hugged him back.
He was most excited about the last one, the one you haven’t finished…that you didn’t finish. He really wanted to photograph it, too, and include it in the show. I told him no. He really fought me for it. He pointed out how good it is, that it deserves to be seen. He said the gallery would be able to charge more for it than any of the others. I said, “Because Jake dropped dead painting it?” I showed him the streak on the canvas where you fell. He looked at me like I was insane, the way people always used to look at Mama. He said I should let him take it with him right that moment just to get it out of the apartment, that it wasn’t healthy for me to hang on to it. I told him to fuck off.
After he was gone, I took all the hospital stuff and piled it on the bed—the drugs and the linens and the bedpans and all of those stupid fucking books and videos they gave us to teach us how to cope and the little green New Testament the nun gave me that last night in the hospital and all the pudding cups and gelatin and saltine crackers—all the stuff that never should have been brought into our apartment in the first place. I piled it on that ugly-ass hospital bed and shoved it out the door. When I got it out of the apartment, I rolled it down the hallway, all the way down to the stairs at the end. I slammed the metal door to the stairwell open and shoved the metal bed through it, tipped it, sent it careening down the concrete steps. It had to have sounded like an earthquake all over the building. And I was crying, sobbing, pitching a fit as I did it. I pushed it all the way to the bottom, running down and shoving it every time it stopped, four floors and eight flights, all that racket at ten o’clock at night.
And no one came to see what I was doing. Not one soul came into the stairwell, not even the superintendent. I pushed the bed outside into the alley and threw all the stuff that had fallen off of it behind it, and the only person who spoke to me at all was a crazy homeless lady. “You throwing that away?” she asked. I nodded—I must have looked as whacked out of my mind as she did. “Can I have it?” I nodded again. I stood there in the cold with no coat or shoes on, watching her go through it all, watching her suck your cherry gelatin straight from the cup.
God, baby, how did we get here? What are we doing in a place so cold? Is it cold where you are now? Is it burning hot? I can’t stop thinking about that, wondering if you’re in Hell. I don’t want to believe Hell is real. After all those years with Mama, I want to think it’s all a fake, the ravings of a bunch of crazy people just like her. But she raised me to believe it’s true, and what if she was right? Or what if she wasn’t? What if you’re nowhere at all?
I have to know. I have to find out. I know you don’t want me to, that you want me to keep living, keep waiting…but I’m not strong enough.
It’s getting colder; the snow is getting deep. If I don’t go soon, I won’t be able to get to the cemetery. I won’t leave you, baby. I will be right there.
Yours forever,
Kelsey
“I’m sorry,” Asher said, handing the letter back. “But it doesn’t change anything.”
“You read what she wrote,” Jake said. “If I don’t tell her I’m okay and that nothing that happened is her fault, she’s going to kill herself.”
“And if she does, that will be unfortunate—”
“Unfortunate?”
“But there are worse things than death,” Asher finished. “You can’t stop her. I can’t stop her. Free will is a real thing, and trying to interfere with that usually makes things worse.” He believed what he said; more than that, he knew from watching other angels who had tried to intervene in human conflicts that it was true. But the girl’s letter had touched him; her pain was raw and brutal as a death wound. “I could go see her,” he said. “I could manifest for her and give her a message. It’s not really my area, but there is precedent for that kind of thing.”
“No,” Jake said, shaking his head. “No manifestations, no angel wings—trust me, that won’t help. That really will make her worse. I’m the one who needs to go. She needs to see me.”
“And I’m telling you that can’t be done,” Asher said. “Dead people don’t go back.”
“Ghosts go back.”
“No,” Asher said. “Trust me, you don’t want anything to do with that. You don’t want a ghost anywhere close to Kelsey.”
“Why not?” Jake said. “If they’re real, why not?”
“Forget about it.”
“Tell me.” He was clutching the bars again, regardless of the pain. “Ghosts come from the other team, don’t they?”
“Most of the time, yes,” Asher said. “The fallen love guys like you. They tell you they want to help you, that they’ll let your spirit possess them so you can go back home and visit your loved ones. But it’s not you possessing them; it’s them possessing you, using your dead flesh to possess a copy of you. Once they have it, they can do whatever they want with it, and trust me, saving your wife from damnation will not be part of the plan. And you’ll still be stuck right here behind this gate with no clue what’s happening until it’s too late.”
“You said the fallen—fallen angels, right?” Jake said. “So, can you do it?”
“That’s not what I do.”
“Yeah, but you could,” Jake said. “You could go to her as me and tell her what she needs to know.”
“I wouldn’t just look like you; we’re not talking about a costume.” This was the possibility he had refused to even think about before. “I would have to use your DNA to build a perfect copy of you, not just your body but your mind, all of your memories, all of your emotions. My spirit would still be there, but it would be inside you.” For the first time, he would know exactly what it meant to be human. “I don’t do that.”