Like Water

By T. Thorn Coyle

What happens when you die? 

One day Alex was laughing on a bright summer sidewalk. Then, a Taser to the heart, he was gone.

Best friends since childhood, Alex and Jonah need to figure out how to go on –in life and in death– and how to find justice.

"These are characters attempting to love through the fire."  - Nayomi Munaweera author of What Lies Between Us

• Language: English
• Publisher: PF Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781386913207

T. Thorn Coyle

T. Thorn Coyle worked in many strange and diverse occupations before settling in to write novels. Buy them a cup of tea and perhaps they’ll tell you about it. Author of the Seashell Cove Paranormal Mystery series, The Steel Clan Saga, The Witches of Portland, and The Panther Chronicles, Thorn’s multiple non-fiction books include Sigil Magic for Writers, Artists & Other Creatives, and Evolutionary Witchcraft. Thorn's work also appears in many anthologies, magazines, and collections.  An interloper to the Pacific Northwest U.S., Thorn pays proper tribute to all the neighborhood cats, and talks to crows, squirrels, and trees.

Book preview

1

Alex

TOOK ME AWHILE to get here. This in-between space. Not the hall of light. Not the floating mist. Not exactly Oakland like I know it. I move through them all, seems like. Mostly it’s Oakland now. An in-between Oakland. Misty Oakland. And me? Feels like I’m rolling through like fog. I’m light. Lighter than I felt even while dancing. Or rocking the mic. Colors are bright, things are distinct, but like I’m watching them through a lens with resolution turned to high. And sound is slightly distorted, like things are far away, or heard through a funnel. Weird-ass shit.

Strangest thing though? No sense of smell.

After I slipped out my body on that sidewalk in front of the club, I stayed watching from above. Amber was screaming, sobbing, her arms hitting out, lashing at the air, blue dress whipping around her legs as JT tried to hold her. Comfort her. Keep her away from the cops. I could see his mouth moving, Sshhh. Amber, baby, ssshhh. Tears were rolling down his face.

And that poor kid Jabir on the ground with a cop on his back, fumbling for cuffs. I’d just been trying to help him. Intervene. He hadn’t done one damn thing. Cops just rolled up and started hassling him.

My peacekeeping skills had failed me. Never thought they’d make me dead.

People was jostling, shouting, filming. Lights flashing. One thing about the hood—first sight of po-po, the people whip their cameras out.

One cop was pumping at my heart with the heels of his hands. It was so weird to not be able to feel that. Terrance was trying to get the cop’s hands off me, get him away from me. Another cop tugged at Terrance, screaming at him, eyes terrified.

I could see their mouths moving, but there still wasn’t any sound. That came back later. Sort of.

Callie was pushing numbers on her phone. Calling an ambulance? Calling Jonah? I think I’d felt her before, reaching out to me, but everything got so confused, I’m just not sure.

By the time the paramedics showed, I was wondering if I could go back.

I tried once, when the paramedic took over from the cop, hands synchronizing as they made the switch, pumping away. Tried slipping back in through the top of my head—like Kate, that girlfriend of Callie’s talk about sometimes. Figured it was worth a shot. Something went wrong in my chest and it hurt too bad. I couldn’t get in far enough, couldn’t get past my sternum. Everything after that felt flat, distended. I tried to take a breath, like I do before I step on stage. Blacked out then, I guess, because everything just winked off. Literally. Like, nothing.

Next time I surfaced, I was floating in the morgue. Harsh light. Steel under my body. White sheet. I was glad it was just my body there, and not me. That shit looked hella cold.

The moms were crying over my body: Sherri’s dark, beautiful face all screwed up like the world was busting through her; Robin, holding on to her, tears streaming, white skin all blotchy with the pain. There was an Asian cop standing by the door. Blink. Then nothing.

Been that way ever since, winking in and out, peeping different scenes. Time is getting a little more continuous, but I’m still losing time. Long moments of it.

For awhile, I went someplace else. That white room. No. Not really a room. It felt like a big space with no walls, no ceiling, no floor. No definition. Just white. It felt okay. Like I could just float around forever.

There was a brother there, a handsome dude I vaguely recognized—like someone I’d seen before, but couldn’t place. He told me I could stick around awhile if I wanted to, that some people liked to, though others wanted to move on right away. He was pretty clear I couldn’t stay more than a month or so. Some people—powerful people, he said—got three full months, sometimes a year, to set things in order. Most of us get around a week to set things to rest. The ones that fight the hardest get almost no time at all—twenty-four hours, tops—too much risk of trouble, he said.

I asked, What about those ghosts? You know, the ones haunting houses and shit? Oh, he said, those are only partial souls, left behind, barely conscious.

They are the unlucky ones. We try to avoid that whenever possible.

The air around him was so bright it was almost blinding. If his skin and clothes weren’t dark, it would’ve been hard for me to see him at all. Most folks go on, he said, body to the earth, energy back to energy, consciousness returning to the whole until the universe is ready to recycle us into something else.

Like reincarnation, you mean?

Well, something like that, but not exactly. Nothing is wasted, I can tell you that much. Then he smiled, teeth almost as white as the space we were in.

2

Jonah

SUNLIGHT REFLECTED ON the leaves outside the picture window that rose toward the Victorian ceiling. The sycamores shook slightly in the breeze, swaying light to dark, dark to light, as the afternoon sun shifted its way westward. We used to rake up piles of just this type of leaves, he and I. We complained, but really, the work was fun. I used to love it when autumn rolled around and the leaves dropped, dried-out orangey husks, to the ground. These leaves, though, these leaves were green and pretty. The sunlight on these leaves felt like a lie.

The trees were large, having raised their canopies above the wires strung in front of the houses and apartment buildings. My eyes cruised over the mottled bark of the trunks, then back to the light on the trembling green shapes. I couldn’t keep my eyes from the glinting patterns. My mouth felt sour. Tasted bitter.

The dark leather of my favorite club chair propped me up in this room filled with art, books, and the red-and-ochre kilim rug Callie brought from Turkey. My pale fingers gripped at the dark leather instead of clutching at my crippled heart. Callie. I could hear her making tea, the sound of the electric kettle coming to boil, the clinking of a spoon in a cup.

I couldn’t have stopped them. I couldn’t avenge. I couldn’t grieve, or rage, or even want.

Except I did want. Just one thing: I wanted him back.

Wanting Alex to come back was the thing that hurt so badly I couldn’t even let myself feel it. As soon as I dropped beneath the layers of numb stupor, it was as though all my edges had been rubbed raw. I couldn’t bear to live in my own white skin. My synapses were firing out of phase: in and out. Here and now. There and then. The center could not hold, and my whole life was the plummeting gyre. I wondered if this was what Yeats was talking about, this feeling. People thought he was discussing the social order, but I wonder if he wasn’t also just heartsick with grief and the inability of one human to fix a life, to bring someone back from the dead, to make things right again: Innocence is drowned.

There was no making this right. Alex was dead for no fucking good reason and I was here, sitting in this worn-out leather club chair, whisky close at hand, staring at these leaves, avoiding phone calls from the moms, avoiding conversations with Calliah in the kitchen, avoiding my colleagues, my students, my life.

Callie would occasionally roust me out for some minor expedition to the world outside, but she couldn’t move me.

She knocked on the doorframe.

Sweetie, Robin just texted, wanting to know if we’re up for dinner.

I turned my head. So beautiful, even with that look on her face—a combination of fake bright expectation and guarding against hope. I hated that look because I knew I was the cause. But I also hated that she would care like that. She shouldn’t. She should leave me alone. Just leave me alone.

Not tonight. I’m tired. I managed a half smile. At least, I think I did. The muscles around my mouth twisted themselves into some barely familiar shape.

She cleared her throat, pushed at the dark hair that crept heavy across her forehead. Did you answer the dean’s e-mail yet? And did you reply to Fordham about doing a visit? Talking to some people?

Work. The state college. Oakland and Hayward. Fordham. New York.

Too far away.

This chair. This chair was good. I raised my glass and the scent of the whisky arrived long before the tumbler touched my lips. Warm smoke. Then caramel and smoke rolled themselves across my tongue, catching at my throat.

I couldn’t.

I could feel tears wetting my face. I felt terrified and itchy and wanted to run away. Still I sat.

Callie crouched down beside my chair, her strong runner’s thighs encased in jeans supporting her as she leaned into me. Gently lifted the glass from my hand. I heard it thunk onto the table. She gathered me toward her, breasts soft against my shoulder, one hand wrapped around my head, the other on my heart.

My body shook with sobs I never even knew were there, with sounds I never even knew a man could make. I was an animal, burrowing its way home, afraid of everything, wanting the pain to stop, wanting to find a hidden place in which to die.

3

Calliah

THE NIGHT I MET JONAH , and by the transitive property, Alex, seems like a thousand years ago, though it was only more like a dozen.

1999. The party was jammed. Even walking up the street, I could tell. Smokers crowded the stoop out front, acrid cigarette smell mixing with the richer scent of cloves. It was an ancient Victorian near the projects in San Francisco’s Western Addition. Red Hot Chili Peppers blasted through the windows.

I didn’t make it into this part of San Francisco much, but someone in the lit department had heard of some blowout party. In general, everything I needed was around campus and downtown Berkeley. We’d make occasional forays into the City, mostly sticking to the nightclubs South of Market, but I was still getting the lay of the land. I had transferred up the coast after getting my bachelor’s degree at Santa Barbara. Berkeley had the same liberal tone, albeit with more freaks, making me feel at home. The radical ’60s were past, most of the students had settled in by now, but there were still pockets of punks and radicals, and a class on Tupac Shakur.

One big change from Santa Barbara was the lack of space up here. Mostly I liked that, too. The only thing that troubled me about living in a more densely populated area was more of the residue of the people no longer with us. What some people called ghosts. What my yaya called spirits.

I could feel something in a pocket of darkness tucked next to the side gate, likely leading to one of the backyards that non-San Franciscans never knew were there. I didn’t feel anything that strongly–a tingle at the nape of my neck and a half-remembered scent of Bay Rum, I think it was. Some sort of inexpensive men’s cologne. I peered into the shadows at the side of the house.

You coming, Callie? Sally’s voice called me toward the living.

Yeah. I sprinted up the stairs, boots smacking on the old marble. This must have been some building in its early years.

The door opened, and heat and noise hit me. I scrambled out of my coat. Spring warmth during the day didn’t mean equivalent nights in the fog belt. The coat tree was brightly overloaded, with a pile of green corduroy, brocade, and black leather dropped beneath it at the base of a gorgeous hardwood staircase. Those stairs were crowded, too. This was a post–Spring Break, pre-finals party.

What do you think of Kosovo?

Deciding to hang on to my jacket, I looked around. My friends were squeezing their way down a narrow hallway toward what I assumed was the kitchen. I headed left instead.

Kosovo. The word had drifted toward me on a cloud of pot smoke.

I snaked past the interlocutors, two faces huddled close together, bodies speaking of the sex their mouths weren’t ready to get to yet. I didn’t know what I thought of Kosovo, that was for sure. It seemed light years away from me. I was taking as many seminars as possible and trying to wrap my head around German grammar. Politics seemed distant from the daily world of words in which I found myself immersed. Found myself. That was an apt description. It was as though all of it, my undergrad years, the classes taken, the kisses stolen and returned, the concerts, the papers, and now, the studying of seventeenth-century literature, was something that had just happened.

I’m not quite sure how I, such a self-directed teenager, had entered my early twenties quite this way. I had wanted to write, and now I trained myself to write about writing.

Wine, beer, or booze?

Excuse me?

Wine, beer, or booze? he asked again, pale forehead shining from the heat, brown eyes looking at me from behind small, round-framed tortoiseshell glasses. Or are you a pothead?

No. Just a lit student. Wine, please.

He poured something red into a plastic cup, then raised his own.

Clink.

Clink. I could taste the tannins, harsh on my tongue. Not my parent’s wine. I was used to that by now, but still noticed it. My friends and I used to pilfer quarter glasses of the good stuff when my parents set aside a half-finished dinner bottle for cooking later. Cooking with expensive wine. I could barely imagine it now.

I glanced around for a place to sit. Impossible. We were crammed against the drinks table in what was some sort of formal parlor. What was once likely a dining room was visible through the big open square made by retracted pocket doors. That looked even more jammed with knots of people talking, girls screeching, and deep guy voices booming. Undergrads. The graduate parties I’d been to so far were smaller, and sans the heavy party-people contingent. Grad students were all stressed, fueled by copious caffeine. Nights off, we were content to drink beer or wine and commiserate about our classes, or listen to the woes of the ones already deep into dissertations.

Literature? he was asking.

Seventeenth century.

Ha! His whole face animated with glee before he took a long sip of wine. Obscure enough for you? Sorry. Sorry. He waved an apologetic hand my way. I should know better, but I’m two cups in.

He was handsome but too dorky to try to charm me. It warmed me to him, this lack of suavity. But there was presence behind his eyes. He wasn’t just smart. There was something else there.

I’d like to say now that I knew, right then, that we were going to be something, but it actually didn’t work out that way. We talked that night, to be sure. He was studying sociology and history. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been computer science like almost everyone else I seemed to run into outside my department. We even danced a little in a shuffling, fumbling way when the press of bodies around us started doing that. It was some Madonna that got everyone grooving. Then Jay-Z. On and on.

I kept looking at him. The tortoiseshell glasses. Light brown hair curling softly outward at his neck, and falling in a heap over his forehead. I drank too much. My friends finally came and found me, wondering where I had been for the better part of two hours. They were heading for food. Was I coming?

When I got to the car, ready to pile in with the rest, I saw that he was right behind me.

We peered at one another in the harsh light of the