Page 16 of Where Are You Now
“I didn’t want you to leave without saying goodbye,” Ava said, having to force the words through her tight throat.
He took her hand. They walked to the old crab apple tree in his yard. He let go, and they both jumped up and grabbed the lowest branch, the way they’d done so many times. She swung her weight back and forth to create enough momentum to get her legs over so she could make it onto the limb. Lucas was tall and thin, agile, and he could swing up no problem. Once she’d climbed onto the bottom branch, however, they were neck-and-neck as they ascended to the top, from where they could see the whole field.
“I can’t believe my dad took that job in Charlotte,” he said, crossing his arms and leaning against the trunk of the tree. “I thought I was going to live here on the farm forever.” He angrily wiped his eye as if a bug had flown into it, but it was probably a tear.
She’d never seen him cry before.
A lump formed in her throat, and she took in his face, wanting to commit it to memory. They’d spent every day together since kindergarten. She didn’t know what she was going to do without him.
“You can write me letters, and we can send emails back and forth on our parents’ computers,” Ava said.
“It ain’t the same, and you know it.”
“I could hide in that big truck,” she whispered.
Her comment softened his scowl, which she was glad for. But she’d only made the joke to keep from crying herself.
“You’re my favorite person, you know,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion.
That was when the tears won over and fell from her eyes. “I don’t wanna walk to school without you or do science class. I’m gonna fail.”
“You ain’t gonna fail. You’re smart. Lean on your numbers, and you’ll be able to do science.”
“Yeah, I can do all that. But I still don’t want to without you. I’m gonna miss you so much.”
He reached over and wiped her tears as they straddled the large branch. Then, he leaned over and kissed her.
He’d been her best friend. She’d never felt his lips—or any for that matter—on hers before. She was glad he was the first. And as his soft breath touched her skin, she wondered why they’d waited so long. She should’ve been kissing him before today. Her chest ached with the perfection of it. Would her heart ever survive without him?
They kept in touch a lot at first, but as their high school days continued, they got busier, and the letters and notes became less frequent.
She’d needed him the most a few years later when she’d lost her dad. After that, she had no male influences in her life at all. It was then that she learned about her inner strength and how not to rely on anyone, because life could be cruel and take them without notice.
Now,at her mom’s computer, Ava shook the memory from her mind, put her sleuth skills to the test, and began her research. She typed in Lucas’s name andNashville—nothing. She searchedVanderbiltand his name, but stillnothing. She went back to the social media channels and logged in, searchingLucas Phillips, but none of the people who came up were him. Had she really seen him in Nashville? Maybe her mom had been right, and she’d dreamed the whole thing because she’d heard his name in the hospital while she was unconscious. That would be the logical explanation. She lived in the world of probability and statistics. This rationalization made sense.
But her heart told her otherwise.
Desperate to prove she wasn’t losing it, she sent a message to a few old high school acquaintances through social media, telling them she’d wanted to catch up to see what they were up to. While she chatted with each person, she casually asked if anyone knew Lucas still, telling them she thought she saw him back in Nashville, but no one had had any contact with him at all. It was as if he’d fallen off the face of the earth.
In a last-ditch effort, she sent an email through her patient portal to her nurse in New York, asking if they could pass along a message to Lucas as he’d overseen her care for a day and she wanted to connect. It was a long shot, but she was out of options.
Feeling deflated and needing another cup of coffee before she tackled the mound of work that was probably waiting for her, Ava got up from the desk. As she opened the door, she stopped at the quiet mention of her name in another room. It sounded as if her mother was talking to someone on the phone. Her voice was low. Ava strained to hear it.
“I think she’s having some sort of delusional episode. She thinks God told her to find someone from her past … Mm-hm … Yeah … Okay, thank you.”
Ava closed the door and tiptoed back to the desk. She couldn’t blame her mother for being worried. She would’ve thought the same thing before her accident. She definitelywouldn’t have been open to understanding someone who said they were hearing voices.
Ava didn’t feel crazy. She felt completely coherent, but then again, if she were having some sort of delusion, she probably wouldn’t know it, would she? She opened up a search tab, typed inpeople who have been outside of their body,and hit search. She wasn’t quite sure how to word something like that, and she had no idea if anyone else had ever had a similar experience, so she was floored when a string of results came up. She read the first entry.
Instances of people leaving their bodies are often referred to as an out-of-body experience or OBE. During an OBE, at times, many people can see their bodies from a separate viewpoint, usually while the body is under duress. These events often go hand in hand with near-death experiences or NDEs, in which a patient dies, and the patient reports that their consciousness separated from their body. When the patient is resuscitated, they will often explain that their consciousness and body became one again at the moment of their first breath. Some of these patients report having a new outlook on life or extra-sensory perception after the episode.
Ava had felt separated from her body after the accident, but she hadn’t seen anything in the way the article explained. And, as far as she knew, she hadn’t even died. She clicked a few more links and read through them, but none hit the mark. Then she stopped on a link that said “I saw darkness during my NDE …” She excitedly opened it, but it was about a terrifying experience, and hers wasn’t scary. She’d felt comforted.
If she had been in the presence of God, she surmised, what she’d experienced might be in the Bible. She searched scripture online and typed in what do we see when we die?
A string of results came up, with Second Corinthianschapter five, verses six through eight at the top. She read the passage. It gave two alternatives to describe one’s existence: a worldly reality in the body that was separated from God, or a reality that was away from the body and at home with God.Away from the body and at home with God. So if she was away from her broken self in the accident, she must have been with God. But wasn’t he in heaven? Why weren’t they in heaven?
With no clear answers, Ava clicked her way back into the patient portal to see if she could delete the message she’d sent to the nurse about Lucas, but—of course—there was no way to retract it. She rested her head on the desk, feeling overwhelmed.
