Death Notes

Death Notes

A novel by John Wesley Braswell

Copyright 2012 John Wesley Braswell

Smashwords Edition

For Beatrice who Saved my Life

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Epilogue

Chapter 1

If in the beginning God was the word, then Rebecca prayed to him or her. She prayed that word might grant her more life. She was dying much too soon, dying before she could make herself over into a woman she might actually like, respect.

She stood over her bed, clad in her pink pajamas, the ones festooned with purple and yellow leaping dolphins. At the particular moment however, unlike the dolphins, she was in no mood to leap, into bed, or anywhere.

Dying is easy, its’ living that’s hard. That is what her father had often told her. It was one of many lies he’d fed her.

At the age of forty one, her father had gone into the hospital for minor surgery, to relieve his Sleep Apnea. It was supposed to have been minor surgery but as with a lot of minor surgeries there had been complications. According to Rebecca’s mother he had nearly died. According to her father, during the surgical procedure he had in fact died.

He explained to Rebecca how he had flat lined for almost four minutes; before the surgical team, in a frenzy had snatched him back from the yawning jaws of death.

Over the years Rebecca, like most everyone else, family and friends had continually asked him, what had he remembered? What was the great and dreaded secret? In reply he would smile his enigmatic half smile that sometimes hid the truth and always shielded his own self, and say, Nothing, there was no light, or tunnel, no long dead relatives waving him toward some great beyond. He was gone, and then suddenly, he woke in the recovery ward, staring into the concerned and frowning faces of nurses and surgical assistants. Rebecca had no doubt that when he had awakened her though her father had smiled his little smile for them.

Then twenty years later after he actually did die, from a massive stroke Rebecca had gone upstairs in her parent’s house to join her mother in her parent’s bedroom. They had sat on the same bed her father had died in, days earlier, the comforter and sheets conspicuously changed from those her father had lain under just days before. She watched her mother rock back and forth gently, her strong hands busy, twisting the funeral program.

Rebecca sitting beside the distraught woman had been unsure of what to do. She had wondered, should she rub her mother’s back, place an arm around her slumped shoulders, take her hand?

With her mother it was always so hard to know what to do. In the end she had only sat next to her silently, her own still hands folded in her lap.

Mom, she asked, Was there any pain?"

Her mother had not looked up, had continued staring into the distance, her hands twisting the program into tortured shapes.

No, not this time.

This was an answer that was almost as enigmatic and unfinished as one of her father’s half smiles.

Rebecca had been taken aback. Always in response to her father’s claims of miraculous resurrection her mother had retorted with strident denials, chiding him for perpetuating such foolishness. Now did her mother also believe?

They had sat in silence for many minutes. Then Rebecca heard her mother mutter something.

What, she had asked.

Those dreams, oh those damned dreams.

What dreams mom, Rebecca asked. She looked to her mother but her mother had remained mute. So they had both sat in silence together on her parent’s bed mourning silently, and never touching.

Then years later Rebecca’s mother had died after an almost three year long struggle with cancer that she bore with stoic grit. Rebecca remembered how she had stared into her mother’s casket. Her mother’s face looked so serene. There was little evidence of the titanic struggle she had engaged in with that horrible disease. To the end, her mother had tried her best to keep up appearances. Even on her deathbed.

Rebecca had once during her mother’s darkest days thought to console her mother. Her mother’s body had pulsed with pain, one hand clutched at a sodden sheet, in a tight fist. Rebecca had reached out to touch the fist, smooth it, open it and grasp it in her own, rescue it from its’ death grip of the sheet. Her mother had flinched at the touch and moaned; her mouth tightened in a grim mirthless grin of pain. She jerked her fist away from Rebecca’s touch.

Yes, Rebecca had remembered many things as she stood in front of that casket. Then suddenly, surprisingly, she had bent forward and reached down to lightly touch her mother’s hands folded over a thin bosom. They felt cold and unyielding. However, her mother’s face remained serene, no hint of reproach. She could have been sleeping, a perfect and dreamless sleep. Rebecca now considered that maybe only the living, were doomed to dream. That’s was how she thought of it now, doomed.

Maybe thinking on it from her more mature perspective her father had not really died on that operating table, maybe it was merely a dream that hid real death, with only a glimpse of what crouched behind that dark curtain? Because, she thought, if dreams did follow you into death then eternity was not only a cruel joke but a endless descent into insanity. Her father, if he hadn’t lied had been so wrong. Neither life nor death was easy, both were equally hard and unjust.

Now, as she stood over her own bed Rebecca stared down at it, considering the distance as if from a scaly precipice, an alien cliff; it seemed a perilous place, full of horror. She almost teetered, looking down at the daunting drop. Now that she was sick and dying, her bed offered no solace.

When she was well, and that now seemed a thousand years ago, in a dim past, falling into bed, to sleep, seemed a wondrous dream. There were crisp sheets, soft and inviting and fluffed pillows, punched into the perfect shape, to caress a smooth neck, all yielding, luring. Then that slow descent wrapped in a warm cocoon of blankets and the eventual dreams, filled with pleasant images, familiar faces and always in the background, the sweet promise of an awakening to a life filled with infinite possibilities. That was what her bed, what sleep once used to represent.

Now she knew that some day or night, soon possibly, she would lay down in this bed or another like it and would not rise. Her body weighed down by the dullness of death would drown in the pillows, a final embrace, and a cold caress.

She would evacuate, and the hollowed husk her body would have become would expel the final remnants of food and drink, the bits of flotsam, she had continued to ingest in some futile attempt to resist the inevitable.

The image of her alone on the bed and already dead left Rebecca consumed with a lonely, singular misery. She turned from the bed to stare at the glass on her nightstand; the glass was unremarkable in itself was the last of a set. Gingerly she grasped it, holding its’ cool surface against the warmth of her cheek. Despite the cool feel of it, somehow she felt strangely comforted by it.

As a young woman, nursing a baby daughter, fretting over a new marriage to an under-employed husband, in his final year of college, Rebecca’s mother had visited.

Calvin and she had been living in an older garden apartment just outside of Freehold. She remembered the paint peeling on the aging sign, announcing vacancies. Underneath the sign and covering the small courtyard there had been an unwelcome carpet consisting of tired strands of grass and tufts of impudent weeds, masquerading as a lawn.

This lawn led to series of chipped brick buildings that housed small apartments. The apartments were ancient, shabby boxes, with thin sheets of walls through which the wails, cries, guffaws, sobs, moans, whimpers and screams of life unleavened, had resounded. Her mother must have been aghast and not particularly worried about showing her displeasure.

You’re drinking out of jelly jars? Her mother said, holding a jar as one held something distasteful, a soiled diaper or a soiled daughter.

Yes, it was a curt answer but said softly, almost gingerly. It was always smart to turn aside her mother’s rebukes without equal rancor.

I’m buying you proper glasses. Jesus.

Mom you know he doesn’t like people taking the Lord’s name in vain, Rebecca said. Although her mother was a dedicated church-goer, she had for some reason enjoyed demeaning Calvin’s ministry.

My God, you live like paupers.

We are paupers, Rebecca said.

At this Rebecca’s own heat began to rise and she was on the verge of turning down her mother’s offer if a gift. Her mother’s gifts always carried a heavy price anyway.

I’m getting you some decent dishes as well, unless you’re planning to eat off that horrendous floor.

Down through the years and the ebb and flow of married life, Rebecca’s mother’s gifts had been sadly mistreated. Glasses and dishes had been lost to transgressions committed by toddlers, to negligent adults with one too many drinks, to her soapy hands and to the general and ungenerous swamp of time. This glass she now held was the last remaining piece.

Rebecca had found it some months before her diagnosis. She considered it an omen. She had never sought omens when she had been well. Nevertheless now she turned it into a talisman of sorts. Every night, after she had gathered her pills, it was filled with water from the sink in the bathroom in her bedroom suite. She drank the water to still the racking coughs at night. Though empty or filled the glass remained at her bedside constantly, a sentinel. She allowed no one else to clean it for fear it might be broken. Rebecca fully realized it was her illness that caused her fear of this glass remaining unbroken. It was, she knew, the silly but unshakable belief that the glass was woven into a spell, a spell that kept her alive for some as yet unknown reason and that if it were broken the spell would be broken and she would die unfulfilled and unfinished.

However despite this talisman and her angry, bitter midnight prayers, the illness, not only festered, it grew strangling tentacles that at times constricted her chest, squeezing the air out of her until there were nights her life seemed to hang on only a series of breathless sighs.

Rebecca stared at the glass. It was stained with the gummy fingerprints of her sweaty hands, causing swirls of clouds that almost obscured the pristine water.

Holding it, this last unbroken memory of her mother she was sadly reminded of the bitter truth that her mother had never shared willingly or easily with her daughter; not even how to die.

Then finally, resolving to banish the past, if only for this night, she steeled herself for sleep.

Rebecca plucked a small white pill from the night table and held it, gazing at it uneasily. She bounced it in her hand. This pill was her escape hatch, one that allowed her to sleep. Well not really sleep; actually what occurred after ingesting it was a swift and brutal descent into involuntary unconsciousness. However sleep was not the pills only job. The pill, when it worked provided her with its’ own little gift. It nearly banished all memories of any dreams. Afterwards when she came to, there were only faint after-images, fractured montages, all imperfect and disturbing. But there would be no dreams, no true memories.

In the mornings she would wake sweating, fretful, her body coated wetly with a faint slime of fear. However there were none of those dreams that had caused her to seek out the safety and some small sort of salvation in the tiny compact body of the little white pills.

After lying in bed and covering herself in crisp sheets Rebecca now at a safe distance from the vivid dreams that so distressed her, wondered just why they had begun. She, of course, already knew the when. They had begun the night after the doctor had confided to her that her condition was terminal. She had spent most of an hour in his office, pressing him for a measure of time, an approximation of how much longer until the universe finally spurned her, spat her out like tainted fruit.

According to him it was an unfortunate truth that her disease had a sort of perverse sense of humor when it came to any kind of certainty. There might be years, more than likely though, months. He did tell her that extreme physical exertion would not only cause intense pain but might bring on an attack that could kill her even sooner. This was as close to any certainty, as much information as he would concede or dared to disclose at that time. In the end it appeared her disease’s sense of humor was not quite satire or ironic, merely black. She remembered how he had sat there, his hands clasped underneath his comfortable double chin, his eyes bland and unreadable question marks. She thought he might have continued speaking but Rebecca had not heard. If any of what he had said were either untruths or profound and prophetic, she would never know.

Unfortunately though she did find it true that when she exerted herself even a little, there was pain; pain that made her nightly racking coughs, recede into insignificance. This pain she feared. At the very least her coughs allowed her to realize that, no matter the inconvenience, she still lived. The pain from exertion however was no less than a harbinger of that final futile battle she was fated to lose. After that final pain there would be no coughs, no ragged breaths drawn from scarred, livid lungs. There would also no longer be a Rebecca.

Still some nights lying in her bed she imagined even death might be preferable, anything to make those dreams disappear. Then she could at least lapse into an eternal rest. Other nights, her fear whispered harshly, that these dreams would still follow her into eternity, haunting her afterlife.

With these dreary thoughts stirring in her tired defeated mind Rebecca tossed the pill into the back of her throat and raised the glass to her mouth swallowing hard. Then for one alarming moment Rebecca’s eyes widened as the pill and the water caught in her throat.

She felt the pill, like a tiny raft, bobbing and rolling on the waves of water in her constricted passageway, bouncing against her fleshy shoals. Rebecca ducked her head and swallowed again, so hard it hurt as she forced the pill down. Painfully it disappeared, dissolving inside her, hopefully performing its’ magic. Magic that washed away her dreams and allowed her to escape the awful reality that plagued her nights, while cheating her of the one of the few pleasures left her, an innocent sleep.

Angrily she cursed the pill for what it did and for what it took away. She so coveted a peaceful, sleep, and pleasant dreams, coveted them the way a blind woman who had once enjoyed sight might covet the views of ocean waves, or the gentle swaying of a stand of tall grass.

Carefully replacing the glass on the nightstand Rebecca bent and roughly pulled away the comforter and sheet then slid into bed before turning again to her nightstand.

Beside the glass a battered paperback sat, squatting awkwardly on it’s fanned out pages. For the past few months she had pretended to read it. However most nights her eyes, dulled by the drug, squinted as they slowly, painfully scanned the meaningless words that swam before them. Then after a while the words became nothing more than dark little insects, crawling across the pulpy off white of the paper till finally she saw no more. Those were her lucky nights.

Today however her luck was against her and before the drug had finished its work; she saw the face. Always the same face silently pleading for Rebecca to remain awake, to listen, insinuating itself into her waking life, her real life. Rebecca panicked, and struggled against the invasion, murmuring to herself that it was only a dream. Still she was sunk into that dangerous state, that gray twilight time, the time when sleep folds itself over wakefulness and both fight for dominance with neither gaining the upper hand.

Rebecca moaned aloud. Her eyes closed, she flopped over in the bed as if to turn from the face. It followed her, persistent. It was a once beautiful face, now contorted in anger, and lined with loss. In that harshly beautiful, battered face swam bright sea green eyes. They stared at her accusatorily.

Sighing, Rebecca now held in the depths of the unwanted dream stared back at the face. The woman’s blond hair had carelessly strayed over her eyes. They now peered at Rebecca as if through a gauzy curtain, reminding her crazily of the window dressings in her mother’s house.

No, Rebecca muttered.

The eyes continued to hold Rebecca.

Norma, Rebecca saw/heard the face sigh.

Rebecca tossed and moaned again, trying to hide her own face in her pillow. The eyes however would not let go their hold.

Finally conceding defeat Rebecca resolved to look, to see, to truly open up to this persistent dangerous dream, when suddenly the face dissolved into a thousand jigsaw bits of flesh and Rebecca thought she saw/heard one more muffled word, distant and fading as it fell into the void of the dying dream.

It had sounded like kelp. Kelp…? Her mind flashed a slash/cut memory of sea green eyes. Sea green kelp…? Or had the woman cried help? Help? Help? Help. She struggled for an answer, straining for the innate truth of the dream that held either Rebecca’s destruction or salvation, till finally, before the puzzle could be pieced, before an answer could be uncovered, mercifully, mercifully, all was black.

Chapter 2

The agony of dressing finally finished Rebecca slid into her slippers and slowly made her way to the kitchen. Looking down at the bunch of blouse she realized she had gotten the buttons wrong again. Shrugging she continued into the kitchen where she heard laughter.

Lenora and Calvin were standing at the counter in the center of the kitchen sharing coffee and apparently a joke. Usually Rebecca would be there with them a third co-conspirator sharing, however she was waking later and later in the morning. The pills took away the dreams but they did leave her groggy and wool headed in the mornings. She started to say to herself that the pills giveth and taketh away. But that sounded just bit to biblical and living with a minister all these years had made her shy away from anything that seemed in anyway blasphemous. She shook her heavy head and the cobwebs shook away to dust along with biblical allusions.

She finally shuffled into the kitchen wondering who might be first to notice her blouse’s buttons were askew. It was a small amusement. The dying had so few.

Morning, Rebecca said. Her voice was a croak even to her ears.

Morning Becca, Calvin said. He was the only left in the world who still called her by that name. She forgave him anyway.

All the others who had used that name were now dead or long forgotten. Rebecca had not seen childhood friends for decades and the younger relatives who called her that name were seldom seen. Rebecca never attended family reunions. She had lost touch with almost everyone. Sometimes she wondered if this caused her pain in any way. Sometimes she thought it might. However it was not a pain she felt caused undo concern.

Calvin had always told her never to regret moving above friends and family. He said just because your parents decided to live in a certain place did not mean you had to suffer childhood relationships the rest of your life.

Dear Calvin had not had many childhood friends. It was not just being the pastor’s son or so Rebecca surmised, it was his own strange often other worldly demeanor. He didn’t follow sports, was not interested in music, or popular culture. He was more than a little self righteous but that could have been the result of listening to the voices of God all these years instead of a few good drinking buddies. However he did have legions of followers now, or parishioners. That seemed to satisfy him.

Once again Rebecca shook her head in despair at her thoughts. She wasn’t being fair to Calvin. Just because she no longer loved him was no reason to dislike him. It was not worthy of a dying woman. And now it might be important to score points with whoever was keeping score on the other side of the celestial shades. She was not sure there was a heaven but at this stage it was probably smart not to upset anyone or anything unnecessarily.

Calvin noticed her blouse first. She saw him eying it. Then he lowered his eyes pretending not to see. Rebecca smiled. At this stage in their marriage she and Calvin had become the queen and king of denial.

He sipped his coffee making the little slurping noises that had irritated her for years. Rebecca pretended not to notice. She assumed they way he had pretended for years not to notice the way she ground her teeth when she slept. That was before the separate bedrooms that both found mutually acceptable and beneficial. Now all the things that needed to be said and never were had now become immaterial. It was too late. Still she hated that god dammed noise. Immediately she regretted the blasphemous curse that had rose to her mind. She reminded herself to keep hedging all bets. She silently apologized to any offended deities.

Rebecca coughed twice. They were airless desert coughs, empty of phlegm empty of life. She apologized once more.

Lenora placed her coffee cup on the counter looking concerned while Calvin stared down at a newspaper spread on the counter. He coughed once into his fist, whether in response or retort to her own cough, Rebecca could not tell. It didn’t sound dismissive. She could not be sure. Still she knew she should give him the benefit of her doubts. There was so much he didn’t know.

Looking at the two, her husband and her best friend, Rebecca considered how cozy it all seemed or must have seemed before she’d entered. However not even the old Rebecca would have been jealous. Lenora had always been a loyal and faithful friend. One who loved to laugh, who could even make a taciturn soul like Rebecca brighten. Rebecca love hearing that laugh. Staring at Rebecca’s blouse Lenora laughed and walked over to Rebecca. She began fiddling with the buttons. For one quick and potentially embarrassing moment one of her breasts escaped the blouse. Lenora laughed louder and continued fixing the blouse. Calvin never looked up.

"I knew it wasn’t buttoned right, Rebecca said.

I know.

Sleep Well? Calvin asked from his paper.

Yep.

Coffee? Lenora asked.

A little thanks.

Sit. Lenora demanded.

Lenora started for the coffee, but Rebecca held up a hand.

No, I changed my mind.

Rebecca stole a glance at Calvin who looked up from his paper and grinned. Suddenly she was furious. It angered her to know what he was thinking. Lately she had become a little imperious. But that was her prerogative. She was dying and the dying should be entitled to some prerogatives. They softened the blow of the unwanted sympathy when the inevitable became common knowledge.

Still she didn’t want the coffee. She just wanted to sit in her cozy kitchen, smell the pungent/bitter odor of fluoridated water dripping over expensive Kenyan coffee, some of the coffee still crusted inside the grinder. She just wanted to sit, listen to the comfortable shorthand of morning talk.

You hear the president’s speech?

He’s… what’s the word?

Bagel?

Too heavy.

Be late tonight, trustee meeting.

Sleep well.

I said I did.

Oh.

This is good coffee, sure?

I’m sure.

The three voices, so distinct, but still melding into a wonderful low chorus, making if not quite sense at least warm, Pleasant music. These were mornings, with her husband and her best friend, sharing coffee, murmuring inconsequential that lately had come to mean so much to Rebecca. To share these mornings meant she was still in some way living, if not wholly alive. Small talk was what people who were living engaged in so different from the portentous declarations of doctors and ministers or the legalese of coroners and morticians. That however was for the dead. She was not dead, not yet. She relaxed quiet and listening till she drifted.

Did you see it?

Huh? Rebecca asked.

In church. Some women of a certain size and age can carry it off, but not Celeste.

When the conversation sinks to gossip and dresses, I’m out, Calvin said.

Where?

Not surprisingly this was asked by Lenora. Rebecca rarely bothered to ask anymore. Still it seemed impolite not to chime in.

Yes, where to this morning?

Hospital visits.

"You must be the only minister of a mega church to still