****
His eyes were closed. The sound of the birds washed over him, through him, and he knew he was happy. He liked the feeling even better than the sound of the birds, so he didn’t notice the sound had dimmed until he heard something else.
“Christy?”
He opened his eyes. It was his parents. They were wearing the same clothes. They had the same smiles on their faces. Their arms were around one another.
“It’s OK now,” his father said.
A tear slid down his mother’s cheek. “Oh, honey.” She sniffed. “We’ve been watching and waiting, trying to let you know.” Her smile broadened. She put out her hand. “Come here, Christy.”
“But, Mom, I can’t walk,” he said. His eyes widened. The sound of his voice was strange in his ears.
“That’s all over now,” his father said. “We’re here. Come with us, Christy. We’ve waited so long.”
Christy put his feet on the ground. The feeling of dirt and leaves beneath his feet was warm. He pushed himself to his feet. He looked down, and his right arm, instead of a hulk of useless flesh, was thick, his fingers long. Standing and looking at the people in front of him, he marveled that they seemed smaller somehow. He looked back at his right hand, raised it slowly, and touched the side of his face. He smiled, and under his fingers, he could feel that side of his face move the way it was supposed.
“That’s right.” His mother’s arm was still out for him. “Please.”
He took a step, then another. He stopped. “If you’re here,” he started to say, and part of him wanted to stop because the sound of his voice was so new, so strange, and so wonderful in his ears. There was no pain. Standing, moving, talking, hearing seeing – it was all joy. He swallowed. “If you’re here-“
“We’re here to take you with us,” his father said. “Like we should have so long ago.” The smile on his father’s face was beautiful, but sad. “We’ve been trying to let you know. Now, we’re here, and you’re here, and we can be together.”
He walked to them. He wrapped his arms around them. They put their arms around his shoulders. The forest was suddenly alive with the songs of the birds, with the sounds of the night. Christy and his parents stood together, crying soft tears of joy. The wind rose. As it faded, so, too, did the bird song, and the three people standing together. In a blink, a flash, the sounds had disappeared, and Christy and David and Karen, too, had faded and were gone.
Gloria would never be sure when she realized something was wrong. She remembered looking down and seeing Christy’s eyes closed, marveling at how peaceful he looked. The birds were truly carrying on tonight. For a moment, their chorus rose, then started to fade. She got the sense they were flying back to wherever they spent their whippoorwill evenings, and in the rising silence, she had a nagging sense that something was missing. Some sound.
Christy had stopped breathing.
In the ensuing panic and tumult, trying to revive him, the ambulance crew nearly losing a tire on their mile-long unpaved drive, the glare of hospital lights, Gloria almost forgot that split second before Ralph had pulled the boy out of his chair and started CPR.
Almost.
In that fraction of a second, when she understood that Christy had stopped breathing, and before she had screamed, she looked and saw a tear had slid down his right cheek.
####
From The Other Side