Page 12 of Ask for Andrea

I didn’t sleep, exactly; however, after a few days, I learned that I could zone out. And it was a little like falling asleep.

When I cleared my mind and relaxed, I could drift. It reminded me of dreaming, except I could choose what I saw. I discovered that I could call my memories up at will more easily than I ever had been able to while I was alive, in vivid detail. Everything I had ever done or seen was all there waiting for me to re-experience in a dream.

I spent a lot of time in the backyard of the house I’d grown up in. In an effort to avoid homework and bedtime, I had sometimes grabbed a blanket from the couch and slipped out the back door to the trampoline where I lay on my back, wrapped myself up, and watched the porch lights come on while the first stars twinkled to life. I could almost hear the crickets and the shuffle of our neighbor next door as he cleaned his grill, the smell of char still drifting through the air.

I thought about my last birthday, when Sharesa and I had rented an Airbnb and jet skis at Bear Lake. The way the wind felt on my face while we raced across the lake, laughing and then screaming when I stopped too quickly and the jet ski rocked then tipped us both into the freezing cold lake. We laughed so hard I was worried we weren’t going to be able to pull ourselves back up onto the jet ski.

I thought about my parents, who I hadn’t really been in touch with since I’d moved out on my own. I drifted through Christmas mornings, family dinners, movie nights, bike rides, and even some of the times I’d gotten lectured about my grades or getting home late. Even those memories felt comforting.

It was a good way to pass the time.

But once in a while, I felt myself drifting so far into a memory that it took a few seconds to reorient myself to the stark rocks and the blood-soaked ground at my feet, where my bones were scattered across the clearing.

I wasn’t sure what would happen if I wandered too far or let myself go into those memories too long or too completely. So I explored carefully.

On day five—I think it was day five anyway, there was really no way for me to tell aside from my own memory—I heard the first car. Distantly. But definitely a car.

I ran as fast as I could. In other words, I would have impressed the crap out of myself running at that kind of speed while I was alive, but it was still sort of disappointing when compared with flying. Which I still really felt like I should be able to do.

I made it to the dirt road in time to watch it crest the switchback a little farther down the hillside. The car was headed in my direction.

I stayed where I was, right in the middle of the road. Against any kind of logic I hoped that maybe they would see me, I guess. Or that I would stop the car. Or at the very least, that I would feel some kind of sensation when the car drove through me.

None of the above happened. The car kept driving—a little too fast for the bumpy dirt road. I didn’t stop the car. And it didn’t drive through me. Instead, when the car hit me, the force sort of flipped me to the side of the road. Gently. Like I was a tumbleweed or a plastic bag.

I caught a glimpse of the car’s passengers before the forest-green RAV4 disappeared into its cloud of dust. A woman and a man. Not him, thankfully. The couple were about my age. Mid-twenties. They were listening to their music turned up loud, their laughter even louder on top of it. I saw the way she looked at him as the car bounced over a rut in the dirt. Adoring. Safe. Happy to be alive and together.

The sadness filled me up. That feeling, that connection was what I had been chasing at Gracie’s. It had gotten me here. This was where my life had ended. This was what I had left. A well full of memories that stopped at twenty-three.

And that was when I saw it.

The shoe, on the side of the road.

My shoe: the one the raven had taken.

It was half propped up in a bush, the coral color already turned a dirty tan streaked with a little bit of rust that I knew was blood.

It was lying in the dip that counted as a shoulder for the road. It wasn’t exactly in plain sight. But it wasn’t hidden, either. Not like the rest of me.

Which meant that if someone looked at just the right time, they could see it too.

8. BRECIA

Boulder, Colorado

2 years before

I fucked up his computer twelve times over the next few days.

He spent an hour on the phone with Apple support and ultimately got a new computer overnighted because of it.

When that didn’t fix the problem, he brought out an electrician, who poked through the wiring in the basement and the garage, fixed a couple of loose connections, then told him it would be another $600 to dig any further.

He declined. He was moving soon. Let the next owners deal with it.

The popping sound and black screen happened when I channeled the anger, the hate, the disgust until it felt like the wave was crashing over me. It wasn’t hard to do. Not at first, with the piece of human garbage right in front of me, holed up in his basement with a Diet Coke, pretending to be buried in his job with a browser in MatchStrike open at all times. All while the little blond girls played upstairs and their mother made him food and took his empty dishes away.

Kimmie came to the basement door after the screen had gone dark for the twelfth time. Dinner time had already passed. He’d stayed in the basement, insisting he needed to catch up on work because of his “stupid computer.”

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