Later

5

We were on the 86th Street Transverse, heading for Wave Hill in the Bronx, where one of my preschool friends was having a big birthday party. (“Talk about spoiling a kid rotten,” Mom said.) I had my present to give Lily in my lap. We went around a curve and saw a bunch of people standing in the street. The accident must have just happened. A man was lying half on the pavement and half on the sidewalk with a twisted-up bicycle beside him. Someone had put a jacket over his top half. His bottom half was wearing black bike shorts with red stripes up the sides, and a knee brace, and sneakers with blood all over them. It was on his socks and legs, too. We could hear approaching sirens.

Standing next to him was the same man in the same bike shorts and knee brace. He had white hair with blood in it. His face was caved in right down the middle, I think maybe from where he hit the curb. His nose was like in two pieces and so was his mouth.

Cars were stopping and my mother said, “Close your eyes.” It was the man lying on the ground she was looking at, of course.

“He’s dead!” I started to cry. “That man is dead!”

We stopped. We had to. Because of the other cars in front of us.

“No, he’s not,” Mom said. “He’s asleep, that’s all. It’s what happens sometimes when someone gets banged hard. He’ll be fine. Now close your eyes.”

I didn’t. The smashed-up man raised a hand and waved at me. They know when I see them. They always do.

“His face is in two pieces!”

Mom looked again to be sure, saw the man was covered down to his waist, and said, “Stop scaring yourself, Jamie. Just close your—”

“He’s there!” I pointed. My finger was trembling. Everything was trembling. “Right there, standing next to himself!”

That scared her. I could tell by the way her mouth got all tight. She laid on her horn with one hand. With the other she pushed the button that rolled down her window and started waving at the cars ahead of her. “Go!” she shouted. “Move! Stop staring at him, for Christ’s sake, this isn’t a fucking movie!”

They did, except for the one right in front of her. That guy was leaning over and taking a picture with his phone. Mom pulled up and bumped his fender. He gave her the bird. My mother backed up and pulled into the other lane to go around. I wish I’d also given him the bird, but I was too freaked out.

Mom barely missed a police car coming the other way and drove for the far side of the park as fast as she could. She was almost there when I unbuckled my seatbelt. Mom yelled at me not to do that but I did it anyway and buzzed down my window and kneeled on the seat and leaned out and blew groceries all down the side of the car. I couldn’t help it. When we got to the Central Park West side, Mom pulled over and wiped off my face with the sleeve of her blouse. She might have worn that blouse again, but if she did I don’t remember it.

“God, Jamie. You’re white as a sheet.”

“I couldn’t help it,” I said. “I never saw anyone like that before. There were bones sticking right out of his no-nose—” Then I ralphed again, but managed to get most of that one on the street instead of on our car. Plus there wasn’t as much.

She stroked my neck, ignoring someone (maybe the man who gave us the finger) who honked at us and drove around our car. “Honey, that’s just your imagination. He was covered up.”

“Not the one on the ground, the one standing beside him. He waved at me.”

She stared at me for a long time, seemed like she was going to say something, then just buckled my seatbelt. “I think maybe we should skip the party. How does that sound to you?”

“Good,” I said. “I don’t like Lily anyway. She sneaky-pinches me during Story Time.”

We went home. Mom asked me if I could keep down a cup of cocoa and I said I could. We drank cocoa together in the living room. I still had Lily’s present. It was a little doll in a sailor suit. When I gave it to Lily the next week, instead of sneaky-pinching me, she gave me a kiss right on the mouth. I got teased about that and never minded a bit.

While we were drinking our cocoa (she might have put a little something extra in hers), Mom said, “I promised myself when I was pregnant that I’d never lie to my kid, so here goes. Yeah, that guy was probably dead.” She paused. “No, he was dead. I don’t think even a bike helmet would have saved him, and I didn’t see one.”

No, he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Because if he’d been wearing it when he got hit (it was a taxi that did it, we found out), he would have been wearing it as he stood beside his body. They’re always wearing what they had on when they died.

“But you only imagined you saw his face, honey. You couldn’t have. Someone covered him up with a jacket. Someone very kind.”

“He was wearing a tee-shirt with a lighthouse on it,” I said. Then I thought of something else. It was only a little bit cheery, but after something like that, I guess you take what you can get. “At least he was pretty old.”

“Why do you say that?” She was looking at me oddly. Looking back on it, I think that was when she started to believe, at least a little bit.

“His hair was white. Except for the parts with the blood in it, that is.”

I started to cry again. My mother hugged me and rocked me and I went to sleep while she was doing it. I tell you what, there’s nothing like having a mother around when you’re thinking of scary shit.

We got the Times delivered to our door. My mother usually read it at the table in her bathrobe while we ate breakfast, but the day after the Central Park man she was reading one of her manuscripts instead. When breakfast was over, she told me to get dressed and maybe we’d ride the Circle Line, so it must have been a Saturday. I remember thinking it was the first weekend the Central Park man was dead in. That made it real all over again.

I did what she said, but first I went into her bedroom while she was in the shower. The newspaper was on the bed, open to the page where they put dead folks who are famous enough for the Times. The picture of the Central Park man was there. His name was Robert Harrison. At four I was already reading at a third-grade level, my mother was very proud of that, and there were no tough words in the headline of the story, which was all I read: CEO OF LIGHTHOUSE FOUNDATION DIES IN TRAFFIC ACCIDENT.

I saw a few more dead people after that—the saying about how in life we are in death is truer than most people know—and sometimes I said something to Mom, but mostly I didn’t because I could see it upset her. It wasn’t until Mrs. Burkett died and Mom found her rings in the closet that we really talked about it again.

That night after she left my room I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and if I did I would dream about the Central Park man with his split-open face and bones sticking out of his nose, or about my mother in her coffin, but also sitting on the steps to the pulpit, where only I could see her. But so far as I can remember, I didn’t dream about anything. I got up the next morning feeling good, and Mom was feeling good, and we joked around like we sometimes did, and she stuck my turkey on the fridge and then put a big smackeroo on it, which made me giggle, and she walked me to school, and Mrs. Tate told us about dinosaurs, and life went on for two years in the good ways it usually did. Until, that is, everything fell apart.