The Holding Place

Prologue

    Michael is angry; he has every right to be. There are forty more miles remaining until we turn onto the road that leads us home. It is pouring outside and visibility is down to less than a quarter of a mile. The car hydroplanes as we speed down this empty stretch of highway.


    He is ranting about my behavior. I embarrassed him tonight, in front of his co-workers of all people. I didn’t wear or say the right things. The other wives dressed in the various designs of upper end retail while I dressed in something that looked fresh out of a Forever 21 catalogue. His observations sting but there is no argument within me. I knew what the dress code would be and the conversation that would be expected of me. I knew Michael would not have time to meet me at home to drive with me to the party. He trusted me to respect him and show up dressed and acting appropriate. I insulted him by doing just the opposite.


  Insulting him was far from my intentions. We wedded three years ago and still he does not realize that living in the fast lane is not the life I ever wanted to live. Money and material things are still a foreign concept to me. Flashy cars, expensive meals, and friends who are more concerned with paychecks instead of well-being do not impress me.


  I went to college with the ambitions of making a career in social work. Michael went to school with the dreams of big business. So many differences between us but I love him anyway. In the cutthroat world of business, I understand that impressions are everything and this extends to the family as well. I understand that Michael is angry with me and that I may cost him the promotion of the year.


He is still screaming at me, driving much too fast. I still am sitting in the front seat of the Lexus that Michael loves so much, not saying anything in return. I have to say something soon. He will not just sit there and let me take his verbal thrashing. He knows I will not stay silent for long either; I am just waiting for the moment that he lets me speak.


  The brightness of the headlights registers with me a split second before it does Michael. For a moment, my world goes in slow motion. Michael turns to me with terror illuminating his blue eyes. In the space of a few seconds, the entirety of my life plays before me. I am dancing on the feet of a man who loved me more than life itself to a Bruce Springsteen song. I am throwing my graduation cap up into the air with a class of three hundred and fifty as we all get ready to step out into the world. I am boarding the plane to the Bahamas with Michael to begin our honeymoon.  I relive the birth of my daughter Norah only a few months earlier and savor the thought that she is the most beautiful little girl in the world.


  The crunch of metal and the shattering of glass mangle my senses. Just a moment ago Michael was screaming his frustrations at me and now shards of windshield shred against my skin. The horns from both vehicles are blaring with an agonizing loudness as I come to a rest atop the hood of the car. Cold rain beats down against my body and the sting of a warm fluid enters into the corners of my eyes and mouth. Blinking furiously does nothing to dissipate the warm haze of red.


  Fire, more immense than anything I have ever experienced wracks my entire body. There is numbness from my waist down but the burning sensation in my lower abdomen is unmistakable. I can think of nothing else but the pain, it is so immense, but panic forces my mind back to my husband. Did he survive? Is he in as much pain as I am? Will he call out for me soon? Is an ambulance on the way?


  Above the howling wind sirens wail into the night. It is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. I do not know how much time has passed or any idea of how much blood I have lost.  My body is going into shock and I’m struggling to keep my mind from doing the same. The pain is slowly inching away and my mind is becoming foggier by the second.  The car rocks back and forth as the something pries away at the driver’s side door. Each jolt of the car sends a pang of incredible pain along my spine. I do not even have enough energy to moan aloud to let someone know that I am still alive. Why do they not remove me from the hood of this wrecked piece of metal?


  Through the fog a hand gently close over my own. The world is dark around me suddenly. I can no longer see anything. I recognize the hand holding my own as Michael’s, the raised scar on his palm from an old injury giving him away. He is saying something to me, but his voice is far away. Joy overcomes me, as I know that at the very least he is well enough to come to me.


  “Abigail…” an unfamiliar voice calls out to me.


  The rain is not pouring down on me anymore and the fire in my abdomen is gone.  The world is no longer dark as the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles bouncing off droplets of rain come back into view.  The crunch of metal and the shattering of glass overwhelm my senses all over again. I let out a terrified scream but it seems like the many emergency workers who surround the wreckage do not hear me. I get off the hood of the car and turn to stare at the physical shape of me that remains. It is an awful sight. My hair is a mixture of rain and blood as it cascades out from underneath me. The lower half of my body is resting in the most unnatural of positions. There are deep cuts to all areas of my core. Realization hits me hard.


  I am dead. What I am staring at is my dead body. I watch as men finally tend to me, place my body onto a gurney and cover my body with the infamous black tarp that is always a one-way ticket to the morgue.  I see Michael sitting in the back of an ambulance, a brown wool blanket draped over his shoulders. I can see where the shattered glass of the windshield cut across his face. His skin is pale and he is staring aimlessly out into the night. He is in shock as well. I have no idea if knows that I am dead or not. I start to make my way over to him, hoping beyond hope that he will be able to see me.


  “Abigail,” the unfamiliar voice calls out to me again.


  I turn around to see a man standing a few feet from me. He must be at least six feet tall, his brown hair and eyes vaguely familiar to me. I cannot quite place where I have seen this man before. He is roughly my age of twenty-eight, give or take a year or two.  He is wearing the outfit of someone who is about to go on an afternoon ride on a motorcycle.


    A nostalgic twinkle in this man’s eyes takes me all the way back to middle school. It is Blaine Marcus from the sixth grade. He sat in front of me in science class and I fell madly in love with in only the way a pre-teen girl can. He liked to play tricks on me and always asked me how cute I thought he was. He was also quite possibly the most annoying boy I had ever met. Blain grew into a handsome man since those years.


  “Blaine?” I say as I take steps to close the space between us.


  “The one and only,” he replies, flashing me a smile of white, perfect teeth. He has not changed a bit.


Blaine notices that I am beginning to inch away from him. I would love to stay and catch up with him but I have to go to where Michael is sitting. He could leave at any moment and  he will have no idea that I am okay. I am not completely gone yet.


  “He won’t see you, Abby,” he says. “Nobody here can see you anymore, me neither.”


  “No!” I screech at him. “I have to talk to him. I have to tell him how sorry I am.”


  “No Abby, you can’t. I wish I could let you but we have already taken long enough. We have to get going. “


  “Go where?”


  Blaine gave a soft laugh and directed a sympathetic smile towards me. “Where everyone goes when they die.”


  “But I’m not ready to leave yet,” I whisper.


  “Nobody ever is darlin’.”


    Blaine stretches out his hand to me as a sharp line of bright light begins to form behind him. I look behind me at Michael who is still sitting in the back of the ambulance staring aimlessly out into the stormy night. A pain grabs at my core, as I know that within a few moments I will be gone from this world and gone from the love of my life.


    The end of my life is not how I imagined it would be. I always heard stories of people coming back from the brink of death after seeing a bright white light. They feel an unimaginable amount of love and peace being wrapped around them as they are being pulled closer to oblivion and farther away from their body here on Earth. They can recall meeting loved ones who have gone on before them as if they have been waiting for that person to join them in heaven.


    I have not felt or experienced any of these things. I am feeling an emotion I have never felt before. I have watched the entire scene play out before me in agonizing slow motion. Nobody from my past is waiting for me at the pearly gates of heaven. There are no feelings of peace and love. I feel wronged and betrayed that I am no longer able to live my life without Michael and my precious daughter.


    Norah. In my confusion and panic, my mind has skipped over the one person who I love the most in this world. The unfamiliar emotion flanking my core increase ten-fold. My precious little girl will grow up without me. I panic as I mentally list all of the things she has not done yet and all of the things Michael does not yet know how to do. Who will teach him to change her diaper, potty train her, teach her to talk? He is already so awkward with her. Norah scares the living daylights out of him.


    None of this can be real. It is all too ludicrous to be real. Death is not supposed to be drawn out like this. I am not supposed to watch the pain of watching my husband lose me.  The concept is cruel and inhumane. Death is supposed to be calm and liberating; the whole point is to relieve a person of their suffering. I am being forced to watch my life be ripped from me in its prime. This is not a dream but a nightmare that is refusing to end.


    “Blaine, this is all just a horrible nightmare,” I say to him, looking to the hand that he is still extending towards me.


    Blaine lets his hand fall to his side and breathes out a long sigh. The expression on his face is a cross between sympathy and impatience. “Abby, when it happened to me it wasn’t at all what I expected either.


    One minute I was riding my bike down my favorite stretch of highway and the next I’m watching myself die. I was all alone. Be thankful your husband is allowed to be with you in your final moments. My family never had a chance to see me off. Trust me when I say this moment that we stand in’ could not be more real.”


The light behind Blaine is beginning to take the shape of a doorway. He is still reaching his hand out to me, an expectant look taking up residence on his face. I am finally beginning to let myself come to terms that all that is surrounding me is indeed real. The body covered with the black tarp in the back of the ambulance is real. The lost look on Michael’s face is real. This man, or angel, standing in the bright light before me is real.


    The fact that my time here on Earth has ended is real. Everything is all too real to even begin to process it.


I should say something to Blaine or at least take his hand, but all I can think about at this very moment is my precious little Norah. Right now she would be safely tucked away in her crib with her mobile spinning a light lullaby above her head. I would have checked on her at least five or six times just to make sure she was okay. Michael would grumble at me every time I climb back into bed because I keep waking him up. He thinks that it is okay for babies to cry and that I should leave her alone through the night. He does not understand the fears of a first time mother.


      Only six months old and she is already facing a life without her mother. There are so many things she will never know about me and so many memories that will never get to be made. All she will know about this night was how I behaved as a child at a party and my last moments were in a heated argument with her father. Will Michael tell her how much I adored her and all of the wonderful plans I had for her? Will she know that every page of her baby book is already filled, and that it was supposed to last until she was two years old? It is almost too painful to think of her but my mind refuses to turn away from the little girl who is the spitting image of me.


    “Abby, we have to go now,” Blaine says, the frankness of his words finally breaking up my thoughts.


      I look to him, tears filling the rims of my eyes. “How can I leave, Blaine?” I ask him desperately. “How can I leave behind Norah and Michael? How can I not even say good-bye?”


    “Trust me Abby; there are so many different ways to say good-bye to the ones you have to leave behind.”


      I put my hand in his, it is soft and warm. I am just having a horrible dream, it can be nothing else. Tomorrow I will wake up and Michael will be lying right beside me.