The young may die, but the old must. –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nick paused at the front door of Sunshine Terrace, an assisted living facility in the heart of Logan. Some days he rode his bike, but today he’d walked because it was still below freezing. His tires weren’t up for ice.
He’d been dreading this day for three weeks.
He was no stranger to Sunshine Terrace. When he’d first discovered his ability, this is where he came. To observe timers. To record dates and times. To learn.
It was easy to do. Visit the elderly. Read to them. Listen to their stories. The nurses and staff and volunteers always had a big smile for him. A teenage boy, volunteering and helping. How selfless. A saint in a hoodie. They didn’t know about his notebook where he kept track of names and dates—all of the dates in the future. They didn’t see him hunched over the kitchen table, reading through obituaries. He felt more like a vulture than a saint.
He hadn’t visited in months—not since Little Cowboy. Now he had other things to do. The men and women here . . . they’d lived their lives. He couldn’t save them. The ones who could be saved were elsewhere. They were on the outside of this building, not the inside. Not here, shut in their rooms that smelled of Lysol and wilted flowers and urine.
The ones who could be saved—that is where Nick would spend his time.
But not today. Today he wanted to come back to Sunshine Terrace. To discover the answer to one last question.
He pushed aside his unease and opened the door. He made his face a mask. He’d practiced hiding the emotion on his face the past few months. Two more run-ins with the police had got him thinking about lies and deception. He kept his face unconcerned. Smiling. He tucked away the true purpose of his visit in a deep corner of his mind. He would unpack it at the right time.
“Nick! Good to see you, son. How have you been?”
How have you been. Jim, the part-time receptionist, part-time handyman was too polite to ask him why he hadn’t been around lately, but the question was there. They both knew it. Nick was ready with a lie to the unasked question.
“Hey, Jim. My grades weren’t the best last semester. Mom cut out any extracurricular activities.”
Jim laughed at that—a deep and slow heh heh heh. “I remember those days. You keep studying. We’ve missed having you here.”
Nick wondered if that was true, or if they were just that desperate for volunteers. Or maybe Jim saw the same pain and loneliness in the eyes of the patrons that Nick did every time he visited. The difference was Nick could go home and not come back. He could let distance and time soften the feelings of guilt.
But this was Jim’s job. He came to this sadness every day.
“Could I see Mrs. Noles today? I didn’t get a chance to visit with her the last few times I came.”
Jim was already tsking his tongue. “Oh, I don’t think you can see Mrs. Noles. She’s in a bad way. Almost had to call the ambulance for her last night. She’s resting.”
Mrs. Noles was one of about a half-dozen names that hadn’t been crossed out of his notebook. She would pass in—his eyes darted up to the clock behind Jim—in thirty-five minutes.
“I’d like to see her, if I can,” Nick said. “Maybe she’ll wake up, and I’ll get her to laugh one last time.”
He almost winced. Even as he spoke, he realized the words were thoughtless. And he’d all but admitted he knew Mrs. Noles would soon be dead.
Jim let the words pass without comment. “She always did find you funny, that’s for sure.”
Mrs. Noles was confined to a wheelchair. She had a difficult time keeping her head up. She’d look at people with moist and distant eyes, but she never really saw them. Sometimes she mumbled, but Nick had never been able to understand her, and he didn’t think anybody else on the staff could either.
But every time she saw Nick, she’d raise a withered hand, point, and then laugh and laugh and laugh. It was loud laughter, straight from the belly. Like she was a child getting tickled.
“I won’t bother her,” Nick said. “If she’s not awake, I can just sit there. And hold her hand.”
Jim couldn’t argue with somebody who wanted to be there for another human.
Nick knew the way to her room. He stopped once to talk to another member of the staff, and once more to talk to Mrs. Reese, one of the patrons he’d visited with a few months ago. Nick lied, telling her he’d be back soon, and then kept walking down the hall.
He paused at Mrs. Noles’ door. The hesitation returned. Or perhaps it had never left. Why was he nervous? He’d seen death once before. He’d seen—
Even as he asked the question, he answered it. He hesitated because he’d seen death before. Two weeks ago. He’d seen death in all its horrible glory.
The man at church. His timer expired in four days. Nick followed him. Skipped school. Got in trouble. But still, he followed.
He’d seen the stampeding horses with Little Cowboy and had snatched the boy out of harm’s way. This time he saw death coming too but had been powerless to stop it. The pickup truck skidding on the ice, barreling into the man and two of his co-workers on their way to lunch.
Blood. Fervent screaming that Nick would never be able to unhear. Nick tried to help but only ended up covered in blood, dazed, in shock, and shaking uncontrollably on the side of the road.
But he saw something at the scene of the accident. The man lay in a snow drift, the left side of his face collapsed and broken. He saw what a life thread did when a person died.
He wanted to see it again.
He opened the door to Mrs. Noles’s room. It was dark inside with the curtain’s drawn. No TV. No radio. Muffled noises from the hall through the heavy door.
He closed the door and looked around. A few greeting cards hung on the wall above her head. A wheelchair stood folded near the foot of the bed. Mrs. Noles lay on her back, an oxygen tube resting under her nose. Nick would have thought she had already passed, except he could read the timer.
She had sixteen minutes left in this world.
He did what he said he’d do. He sat next to the bed and held her hand. He stared through the void and watched her timer and let his mind wander.
Six months ago, he understood his life. He had a lens through which he viewed the world. Now that lens had been replaced. Through the new lens, all was different and strange. He had new decisions to make. Hard ones. He based these decisions on his new ideas and an understanding of the world that nobody else shared.
Unless he ignored the timers, his life was about to change in ways he couldn’t really understand. Because he would do things that no one else would understand.
Studying Mrs. Noles’ timer, he watched as the last few minutes of her life fell away. He watched as her life thread spun past the rift, into the void. His own thread spooled past as well, twisting and turning through the space, a silent observer.
The symbols of her thread were calm . . . like Jane or Beth when he watched them sleep.
When a person slept, the symbols became quiet. Not as varied. When a person woke up, the symbols woke up as well—there were more of them—many more. They changed and danced more fervently. And when a person became agitated the symbols blossomed even more, along with the heightened emotions. When Beth threw a fit, her life thread churned with unfettered rage.
Mrs. Noles’ symbols had almost become uniform. He counted only six or seven different symbols in her life thread. Her thoughts—whatever they may be—were at peace.
Nick sat up when there was three minutes left. He leaned forward, his face a few inches from the rift. He wanted to miss nothing.
Her hand was warm in his, but there was no movement. He felt a feather of a pulse in her palm. He watched the timer drop toward zero.
Two minutes. The life thread was all but still. Two symbols spun through the space behind the rift. Insignificant variation. Not a sound in the room. Not a ticking clock. Not the hiss of air.
One minute.
Thirty seconds.
Nick watched the seconds dwindle.
Ten seconds. Five. Two. One.
Death.
There was nothing physical to mark Mrs. Noles’s end. No gasp. No death rattle. No hand squeeze. Death was identical to the last few seconds of life. It brushed by, soft as a touch.
But the life thread . . . the life thread changed.
Like a cable being thrown from a hot air balloon, the thread still spun through the void, but it was no longer . . . attached. The thread moved as it always moved, but it drifted away from the rift. Away from his own thread. Away from Mrs. Noles.
It exploded to life.
Where before there were two symbols and little fluctuation, now there were hundreds of symbols, if not thousands. They changed and danced and surged with fire and frenzy. Not even when Beth threw a fit were the symbols so . . . alive.
The symbols continued to fall away. Bright and shining, they drifted farther away from the rift. Farther from Mrs. Noles and Nick. Deep into the void, scattered like stars in a sky impossibly wide.
Nick’s breaths came fast, and he sat quietly for a time, seeking a measure of calm. He’d come with a plan. To run into the hall, yelling for help when Mrs. Noles passed. He would feign shock and surprise and sadness.
But he couldn’t disturb this tranquility. He slipped away. Out the door and down the hall. Out into the bright winter sunshine. This would be his last visit to the Sunshine Terrace. He’d learned all the place had to offer, and he grew weary of death.
He’d focus, instead, on life.
Nick had a new piece of information. Though he couldn’t say with certainty what he’d learned, he knew more than anybody else on the planet. He’d been able to peek behind the curtain and catch a glance of what happened when a soul left its body.
A hint of existence beyond this life but not a certainty.
The new knowledge didn’t give him hope. It didn’t give him peace. It was simply one more piece of death’s puzzle.
A subject he already knew too much about.
