Dying isn’t an option, sorry.
Vivi is up in the clouds now, though she can still make out her body lying on Kingsley. There’s a white Jeep next to her. It’s Cruz’s Jeep; he bolts out and runs to her. “Vivi!” He whips out his phone, and she hears him saying he needs an ambulance at Kingsley and Madaket. “My mom is hurt, it looks like she was hit, she’s on the ground. She needs help!”
Cruz crouches beside her, his shoulders heaving. He takes her hand. “Stay with me, Vivi, you’re not going anywhere. I need you. We all need you.”
They all need me! she thinks. Then she thinks, He called me his mom.
Vivi hears a siren in the distance. She can’t look; her poor body, and poor Cruz! Vivi turns her head away—and comes face to face with a middle-aged woman with sensibly cut ash-blond hair wearing a flowing white muumuu and a silk scarf expertly knotted around her neck.
“Hello?” Vivi says. The woman standing before her appears to be flesh and blood, and she’s holding a clipboard, like someone organizing a literary luncheon. Vivi feels like she’s about to be given her table number.
The woman is wearing reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. Whereas the scarf is elegant and looks expensive—Vivi studies the elaborate animal print in the signature shade of orange and determines it’s (excuse me!) an Hermès scarf—the glasses are of the drugstore variety. “Hello, Vivian,” the woman says. “Welcome to the Beyond. I’m Martha.”
Martha looks familiar. She reminds Vivi vaguely of…
“Of your first reader, Maribeth,” Martha says. “Yes, she’s my younger sister.”
“You have got to be joking! You’re Maribeth Schumacher’s sister?” When Vivi’s first novel, The Dune Daughters, came out, Maribeth Schumacher bought twenty copies and gave them to all her influential friends. These friends then told their friends and neighbors and sisters-in-law and so on and so on and so on—just like the infamous Fabergé shampoo commercial. In this way, Vivi’s devoted readership was born.
“I was,” Martha says. “She sent me all your books right up until I died, two summers ago. I lived in Memphis, so it was nice to read about the beach.”
Memphis; Vivi went there on tour, but she stayed out by the University of Memphis and all she remembers is Central BBQ and the gated community where she went running. She didn’t make it downtown to see Beale Street or the ducks at the Peabody Hotel. She’d told herself she’d do that next time.
Now there won’t be a next time!
“But that’s not why they assigned me to you,” Martha says. “It’s just a coincidental aside.”
“Assigned you to me?”
“I’m your Person,” Martha says. “I’m here to help you transition.”
“I think there’s been a mistake.”
“Everyone says that,” Martha says.
Vivi points to the ground where her body lies. The ambulance has arrived and Cruz is sprinting down Kingsley toward Money Pit. He’s going to tell the kids. Vivi needs to do something. Can Martha help her walk this back somehow?
She tries to peek at Martha’s clipboard. “Is there a place on your form, a box you can check, so that they save me at the hospital?”
“It’s too late,” Martha says. “You’re dead.”
“I’m dead,” Vivi says. “But I didn’t do anything wrong. How can I be dead?” She doesn’t want to sound too indignant; if there’s one thing Vivi has learned in her fifty-one years, it’s that you should always be polite to the people who can help you, such as flight attendants and anyone who works at the DMV. “Martha, can you explain, please? Am I being…punished?”
“Don’t be silly,” Martha says.
“So then why…”
“You got hit by a car,” Martha says. “It was an accident. Random bad luck.”
“But that’s not fair.”
Martha purses her lips.
“Are you about to tell me that life isn’t fair?” Vivi asks.
“Your death was particularly sudden,” Martha says. Her tone suggests there might be some wiggle room. She scans the form on her clipboard and checks a box. “And for that reason, Vivian, I’m going to grant you a seventy-five VW and a three-N.”
“Does that mean they’ll save me at the hospital?”
“No,” Martha says. “The seventy-five VW means a seventy-five-day viewing window. I’ll let you watch what happens down on Earth between now and Labor Day. And”—Martha holds up a finger—“the three-N provision gives you the use of three nudges.”
“Three nudges?”
“You can influence outcomes three times down below,” Martha says. “But you should be judicious.”
“This feels like some kind of fairy tale,” Vivi says. “Am I really dead?”
“Yes, dear.”
Vivi takes in the expert tying of Martha’s Hermès scarf. “That looks so effortless, I would have guessed you were French.”
“Well, thank you. I’m not.”
“What did you do when you were alive?”
“I was a senior vice president at FedEx.”
“Go, Martha!” Vivi says. “Lady boss!”
Martha says, “I can’t be flattered, Vivian. You will not be revived at the hospital. You’re dead. I’m granting you the summer to watch over your children and three nudges because you met such a random and sudden end. And because I like your books. You have a lot of fans up here.” Now it sounds like Martha is the one trying to do the flattering.
“Who hit me?” Vivi asks. “It wasn’t Cruz, was it?” This is too awful to even contemplate. He’s such a good kid, so brilliant, going to Dartmouth on a full ride. He’s good at everything—science, math, English. Instead of writing an essay for his college application, he wrote a poem called “Sacrifice,” about his father, Joe. Vivi’s feelings for Cruz DeSantis are just as tender and protective as they are for her own kids.
Martha shakes her head. “That, I can’t tell you.”
Martha can’t tell her because it’s not allowed or because she doesn’t know? But whatever the answer, Vivi has a more pressing question. “What happens when the summer is over?”
“You join the choir,” Martha says.
“The choir?”
“Of angels.”
“But I can’t sing,” Vivi says.
Martha releases a belly laugh. “Don’t worry,” she says. “You’ll learn. Now, come along. It’s time to go.”
“Go where?”
“To the greenroom. Please close your eyes.”
Vivi regards Martha with suspicion. “I’d rather not.”
“You’re going to have to learn to trust me,” Martha says. “I’m your Person.”
Vivi waits a beat. What choice does she have? She closes her eyes.
When she opens them, she’s in a room with one wall missing; it feels like the kind of shoebox diorama that kids make in school. Vivi blinks as she looks around; there’s a lot to take in.