Excerpt: Echo

The porch light was on, that was a good sign, he was still up. Figuring that since he was already cold, he’d shovel Tom’s sidewalk before he knocked. It’d only take a few minutes and it would let him rehearse how he would start off his conversation. “I talk to dead people. Well not talk, really. And it’s not two way. I listen to dead people. No, that doesn’t sound right either, especially since they don’t even know I’m there really. And it’s not plural, really since it’s only happened once… So far. Oh God, will it keep happening?” Ben obsessed to himself as he shoveled.

Hearing the scrape of the shovel from in the house, Tom opened the door and called out to Ben.

“Come on in before you catch your death!”

Completely stunned, as death was chiefly on his mind, Ben straightened from his stoop and stared at Tom.

“What did you say?”

“Is it so cold out there that your ears frozen off? I said come inside, you lout, I can get to the sidewalk tomorrow. What made you come all the way out here to shovel my side walk anyway?”

“Well,” Ben said. “I was in the neighborhood?”

A bark of laughter sent a plume of steam from his breath to swirl in the porch light. “In the neighborhood, were you? Just out taking a stroll in a blizzard, enjoying the arctic breeze? Well, I won’t ask how your feeling, because it’s sure that something’s gotten into you. Come on in and I’ll see if I can get whatever’s gotten into you out.”

Tom held the door open a little further and waved him in. Ben set the shovel against the house and stomped his feet on the porch before stepping into the dimly lit kitchen.

“Take off your gear here over the register.” Tom took Ben’s coat and hung it from the shoulders over the back of a kitchen chair to let it drip. Join me in the Den, I’ve a fire lit. Do you want anything hot to drink while we talk?”

“How do you know I need to talk?”

“Well I heard you talking to yourself on my walk, didn’t I? You are usually a quiet man, Ben. You have yourself worked up over something though. Come on in back and we’ll sort out what it is.” Tom lead the way into the dark wood paneling and wall to wall book shelves that lined the room. It seemed warm and inviting. It was the easiest thing in the world to pull the chair up to the fire, stick his hands and feet near the flames and feel himself warm for the first time since the episode in the prep room. Episode. What else could he possibly call it?

Tom left his spot near the desk where he’d obviously been working and pulled another chair up to the fire to sit with Ben.

“All right, bro. Tell me what brings you to my door.” Tom folded himself down into the chair and studied Ben’s face. “If it helps, I can take the collar off and offer you a beer.”

In that moment, he knew he’d simply tell Tom the whole story, even the disturbing part of putting her hair to his face, though he couldn’t understand at the time why he’d done it. He still didn’t really, but after sharing her memories that small bit of tenderness didn’t feel strange at all. Tom may not believe him. Who am I kidding? Even I don’t believe it! But somehow he had to make him understand that he wasn’t loosing his mind. Or am I? Maybe I really came here to let Tom decide if I’ve lost it or if I’m still me. “Excuse me, can you give me your professional opinion on weather or not I’ve lost my mind? No, seriously.” Okay, Ben, get a grip on yourself before you start talking to yourself aloud again!

Snapping out of it, Ben looked up at the gangly man who’d been his friend for as long as he could remember and said, “No, though I never thought I’d be saying this to the guy I used to prank Old Man Turner’s car with – it would be better if you left the collar on tonight. I could use all the help I can get.”

“This sounds serious.” Tom said, his voice rumbling with the laughter of the shared experience. “Far be it from me to equate putting bananas in the tail pipe of Mr. Turners Cadillac with whatever has put the fear of God in you tonight, but God can handle whatever it is, Ben. And like then, I’ll stand with you and we’ll take the lumps together.”

“I can’t believe you only got a slap on the wrist for that.” Ben said, referring to their prank that night on the old man’s car, as he unwound the scarf from his neck. “My dad had me giving that sour old man my allowance for a month and washing and waxing his car every week for the rest of the school year.”

“Yes, but every time you washed that car in the driveway I mowed his lawn, didn’t I? Even if my dad didn’t punish me the way yours did you, I still stood by you. You told me it was a love / hate relationship you had with that car by the time your penance was done.”

“And it’s true, I loved to hate that caddy.”

Tom laughed and tilted his head at his friend. “Yes, but that’s not what brings you here to my door at eight o’clock in the evening on a work night. What’s bothering you, Ben?”

And so, taking a deep breath, he told him all of it.

“She told you all of this then?” Like all counselors by profession, Tom was restating what he’d heard. Unwilling to call Ben a liar or follow along in the delusion, he bought himself some time to absorb what he’d heard.

“Well, no, not exactly. It’s more like I lived her life with her, some of it looking through her eyes, and other parts of it like her memories were just… there for me. If I think about her, what it was like to be her, then stuff I shouldn’t know…I know.”

Ben watched Tom as he shifted his face toward the fire in an effort to hide his reaction. He’d seen that same expression on his face as a kid when trying to hide something from his dad or the teachers it seem he and Ben were forever in trouble with.

Ben went on defensively, “You don’t think I know what you are thinking? That I’ve cracked or something?” He closed his eyes and settled a bit before going on. He couldn’t blame Tom for not understanding, after all, he couldn’t even explain it to himself very well.

“Tom, I know stuff about her. Things I couldn’t possibly know. I know the things that were important to her and the stupid stuff. Don’t look at me like that.” He stood up, paced back and forth from the window, back to the chair, and patiently tried again. “I know that her favorite movie was It’s A Wonderful Life. I know that she liked it because she is a big believer in doing the right thing, even when it costs you something; and that the theme of second chances is what motivates her in doing the job she does for a living. I know that she even feels a little like that bumbling angel, Clarence, who tries to show George how important he is to the people around him.” He made eye contact with Tom and willed him to believe him. “I know it sounds sappy, but that’s honestly how she feels about herself, no, how she FELT about herself.” Ben took a great gulp of air and followed it up with saying at last, “I know her whole life like that.”

“I know that her favorite color was sky blue, her favorite TV show of all time was Magnum PI because she had a thing for the actor, and that she would eat at Red Lobster every night of the week if she could. I know other stuff too. Stuff with her husband, but it would take much more than that beer you offered earlier to get me to talk about THAT.” His voice went soft, but he went on, afraid that if he stopped talking, Tom would think he was making it up and cut him off. So he went deeper into the more personal stuff. “I know much she weighed last week. She hated that part of the prenatal exams. I remember the sound of her baby’s heart beat at that visit too. I know that she used Winnie the Pooh to decorate the nursery, had her grandmother’s rocking chair repaired and put into that room, and I want to cry because she will never hold her baby. Me. Cry, for Pete’s sake! I didn’t even cry at my own parent’s funeral.”

Tom cleared his throat and something passed behind his eyes that Ben couldn’t name. Ben knew he was being weighed, that his whole life was being sifted through what his best friend knew of him. Eventually he reached some kind of decision because he squared his shoulders and said, “I believe you Ben. No offense, but you’ve never had that great of an imagination.”

“Gee, thanks.” The old teasing between friends was back and the tension he’d carried in his shoulders began to relax.

“Seriously though, has this ever happened to you before?”

“No. I’m more than a little freaked out, to be honest.” Ben said. He was relieved that Tom believed him, he could go back to believing in himself, the test somehow passed, and a part of him that had been holding it’s breath let it go. After all, if he couldn’t convince his best friend this had happened to him how could he ever convince anyone else? “I don’t know if it will happen again, or what it means that this happened at all. I figured that you, if anyone, might be able to help me get a grip on this. Is it from God? Did he give it to me? Will he take it away?”

“Whoa! Slow down with the questions! I know that God has given visions, written on walls, spoken through a burning bush and shown up in dreams. Who am I to say God can’t do something new or outside of our experience? I’d be real careful saying that this is from God. Even the enemy has powers at his disposal that I don’t understand.”

“You think this is from the devil?” Ben’s voice squeaked in alarm.

“Did I say that? No! Look, Ben, I don’t know where it’s come from any more than you do. It’s not like you asked for this or bargained with someone for it. In some ways you are a victim to it. Like all gifts or curses we receive though, you are going to be known for what you do with it.”

Tom let that sink in for a while before he went on. “Ben, I’ve known you your whole life. You are one of the kindest, people I know. You always have been. The bigger question you should be asking yourself, because it’s the one you are going to be judged by at the end, is this: What are you going to do with this gift now that you have it?”

“So there go my hopes for a quick absolving for responsibility.” Ben said with a dry chuckle. “Can’t you at least pray over me or something to try to have it taken away from me? I don’t ever want to go through something like that again. Don’t you have an in with The Big Guy? Can’t you do your “hoo-doo” and make like it never happened?”

“I appreciate your great trust in my abilities, Ben, but I don’t have any more powers than you do. The Big Guy, as you call him, has is own plan for your life. ‘Hoo-doo’! Ha!” Tom saw the slightly wild, scared look on Ben’s face and that sealed it for Tom. He was telling the truth as he knew it to be, fear and reaction were coming to the forefront, just as anyone would who’d experienced a trauma. “Ben, please just trust Him? Trust that He sees what is going on with you and that He won’t let you go through it alone? I can’t pretend to understand it any more than you do. But I’ll be here for you and you can talk to me about it.”

“Okay, no more pressuring you to make it all better. I guess I should thank you for not laughing in my face.”

“Oh the night is young, I’m sure I can still find things to laugh at you about.”