Брайан Фриман - Funeral for a Friend

So many others.

Helen Danning.

Tanjy Powell.

Peach Piper.

And Andrea.

Andrea came out to see him, too. He didn’t understand why she was here. She had something in her hands, and he realized it was a suncatcher, looking vibrant in many colors against the whites, blacks, and grays of this world. She held it up to the light, and he could see images in the stained glass with a strange clarity. On her face was something he hadn’t seen in a long time. A smile. She was happy, as if somehow she’d been given a do-over for all of the things she’d missed in life.

“I should have told you,” Andrea said to him.

“Told me what?”

“What I did.”

“What did you do?”

She shook her head. “Forgive every sin.”

“I don’t understand.”

Andrea kept smiling as she waved him down the Point. “You need to keep going, Jon. There isn’t much time now. She’s on the green bench. She’s waiting for you.”

And she was.

The next moment, Stride reached the park where the road ended, frozen in black and white. The only splash of color he saw was the green bench by the bay. This was the bench that marked every crossroad in his life. The place of death, the place of new beginnings. Time had destroyed it in real life, but here, the bench looked as if it could withstand generations of winter and storms.

Cindy sat on the bench.

She looked as young and healthy as the day he’d married her, with her long, long black hair, parted in the middle and utterly straight. A sprite, hardly more than a hundred pounds. Her little nose, sharply angled like the blade of a knife. Her big brown eyes, always teasing him.

“Jonny,” she said, in a voice he’d never thought he would hear again.

He sat down next to her, drinking her in with his eyes, glorying that she was so vivid and alive. Over the years, his memories had grown blurry, and he’d had to take out pictures to remind himself of the details of her face. But here she was, back with him again. He never wanted to leave. He never wanted to see that picture fade from his mind.

“Why are you here?” Stride asked. “Why am I here?”

“Don’t you know by now?”

“Steve said this was my funeral.”

“Well, it is if you want it to be. Or maybe it’s your wake. Or maybe it’s your waking up.”

“I don’t understand.”

She made fun of him with a musical laugh. “Really, pirate eyes? You can’t figure it out? You take one bullet in the heart, and all your detective skills disappear. I’m disappointed in you, Jonny.”

Stride looked at the black-and-white world around him. “I’m dead.”

“Dead? Yes and no. I’m dead. Steve’s dead. Everyone around here is dead. You, you’re only halfway there. It’s up to you whether to stay or go.”

“Is this real?”

“What do you think, Jonny?”

He searched his broken, wounded heart for the truth. “I think I’m dreaming.”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. Who’s to say?”

“I think I was shot. I’m on an operating table with my chest cracked open. I think my heart stopped, and the doctors are trying to get it started again.”

“So what are you going to do about that? You have to make a choice.”

He looked around at the gray world of the Point, a place that he loved but that now existed only like a painting in a frame. This wasn’t his home. But then he saw his late wife in full color, exactly as she’d always been, and his heart ached. It literally ached.

His heart felt shot through with pain, over and over and over.

No heartbeat. We’re losing him.

“I don’t want to leave you behind again,” Stride said.

“I left you behind, my love. The question is whether you’re ready to do to Serena what I did to you.”

“What will happen to her?”

“What happens to anyone who suffers a terrible loss? If you give in, if you die, Serena and Cat will be left alone. Hurt, angry, devastated, the way you were after I died. But they’ll go on. You went on eventually, too.”

“It took me a long time,” Stride said.

“I know. I’m sorry about that. But you didn’t help matters, did you? I sent you Serena, and you nearly screwed it up with her. I wasn’t sure the two of you would ever get there. I can’t believe you slept with Maggie, by the way. How many times did I warn you about that?”

“Oh, hell, not you, too.”

Cindy laughed again. He’d missed that laugh so much. He wanted this moment with her to go on forever, but then she said, “It’s time to decide, Jonny.”

“I can’t.”

“Stay or go, my love. Those are the only two choices.”

“I want to stay with you,” he said.

“Then stay. Here I am. But Serena’s back there. She’s waiting for you, too.”

“I can’t leave her behind.”

“Then go.”

“How do I decide?”

Cindy leaned over and kissed him, and he could feel the touch of her lips like a jolt of electricity in his heart.

“That’s up to you,” she said. “I can’t tell you what to do.”

Another smile. Another kiss.

Another jolt that made his whole body shiver.

“Every story ends, Jonny,” Cindy said. “It’s all a question of when. So here we are. Is this the end of your story?”

Stride opened his eyes.

The first thing he felt was pain. A deep ache radiated through his entire chest. When he took a breath, a stab like the sharp prick of a knife made him wince. He blinked, trying to focus, trying to understand where he was. Lights were low, and he lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. He tried to get up, but his body immediately protested with an even worse shiver of agony.

“Hey, take it easy,” a voice said.

He looked up and saw Serena standing next to him. She sat down in a chair and took his hand. He noticed that her face was a study in contradictions. She wore a smile of pure happiness, but her eyes were glassy with tears.

“Look at you,” she went on. “All alive and everything.”

Stride croaked out a word. The breath that went with it was painful, and he felt a lingering soreness in his throat. “Hey.”

“Easy on the talking,” Serena told him. “Your chest is going to hurt for a while. If your throat hurts, too, that’s from the breathing tube. Other than that, the doctors say you’re on the road to recovery. They call it a miracle, and I don’t think they throw that word around here lightly.”

He tried to cut through the fog in his brain. “How long?”

“Almost three days.”

His head turned slowly. He could see a sofa near the window and the brightness of sunshine outside. Pillows and blankets were strewn across the sofa, along with a cafeteria tray and a half-eaten meal.

“Yeah, I’ve been here the whole time,” Serena said. “I haven’t left. You woke up a few times, but you were pretty out of it. Do you remember anything? Do you remember what happened?”

Stride shook his head. “Tell me.”

“We don’t have to do this right now. Let’s wait until you’re stronger.”

“No. I need to know. Tell me.”

She smiled at his stubbornness. “Okay. The person stalking Cat was a girl named Colleen Hunt. Actually, that’s not her real name. She took that name when she came here from Madison, where she was a suspect in at least three murders. Cat tried to get away from her at the town hall, and Colleen chased her on stage and opened fire. I fired back, and so did Brayden. Colleen was killed. It was Brayden who got her. You protected Cat — she’s fine — but you were shot in the heart, Jonny.” Her voice choked up as she tried to go on. “They had to perform an emergency thoracotomy. Basically, they cut open your whole chest cavity in order to stitch up your heart.”