This Side of Eden

I never expected to die a non-heroic death in Alaska, but then, you never expect the pilot of your airplane to slump over on the controls. And when your plane actually does crash in the middle of the wilderness, you never expect to actually survive because it would be too hard, especially when the only other survivor is your not-quite-two year old daughter. Much easier to just die in the split second when the plane hits the icy surface of water. That kind of death, at least, would have been consistent with how I thought I'd finally leave this world.

My death was supposed to be something glorious-a metaphysical reality that transcended everything I'd ever thought of or experienced. Many times, especially when I was a child, I would daydream about my death and entertain the idea that I would be some sort of hero, saving someone or sacrificing my own life for the life of another. I would dream about these things in the middle of class, or while brushing my teeth, or while eating a bowl of cereal at breakfast. Always I would die to save someone else-usually my current girlfriend. Always, I would be laying there, in my last throes of life, my lover cradling me in her arms-and always Pearl Jam's cover of "Last Kiss" was playing in the background.

I have no idea what a psychologist would say about these morbid dreams of being a hero, and really, I have no idea why I had these dreams. Maybe it was some deep desire to be a hero, or to be loved, or maybe just to be seen by others as something more than the run-of-the-mill, dorky little teenager.

When Eden came into my life my dreams took a dramatic turn. We would be in some type of auditorium, full of people-maybe watching a play or attending the opera, sometimes married, and other times we were simply lovers, sitting close, holding hands. I would squeeze her thigh, like I always do, and she would kiss my neck and my ear and then lay her head on my shoulder like she always does.

The moment shatters when we hear the doors to the theater slam open and the marching footsteps as several hooded criminals, wielding large guns, enter the auditorium. The criminals would walk right up to the stage and stop the performance.

"You are being held hostage," one of the men would announce in a thick Latin accent, his voice muffled from the ski mask pulled over his face and mouth.

"Do not try to escape," he would say, "do not try anything stupid. If your government is willing to spare you're lives by allowing Cuba to once again export cane sugar to the United States, then you can live."

If we had been attending an opera, even though the performance had stopped, the singing would still continue as dramatic background music to our intertwined fates.

While the man is talking, I am somehow able to slip away and crawl through the rafters and cat walks of the theater. Before I leave, however, I whisper my love to Eden and she nods, knowing what I have to do. We are, after all, the youngest people in attendance, and the most capable of heroics.

So I crawl through the rafters, and somehow I loosen a spotlight, connect it to a long rope and swing it to the stage-hitting one of the masked men and knocking him out of commission. I swing the light again and knock out another gunman. The others, by this time, are aware of my presence, so I swing down from the rafters and clobber another gunman, knocking the gun from his hands. Then I dive for the weapon and train it on another thug, right as the leader fires. The bullet, of course, will pummel through the air in slow motion and strike me in the chest.

Silence ensues; as people wait for the inevitable spread of blood across my white, button up shirt, I drop the gun and sink to my knees. I am sure I would be thinking about the embargo on cane sugar and the injustice of hostage situations, but mostly I would be thinking about my time with Eden coming to a close.

Faintly, I hear a scream in the distance-Eden is rushing the stage, pushing past the gunmen and suddenly appearing by my side. Her dress is conservative but sexy, sophisticated but artsy.

She cradles my head in her arms and I feel the hot tears splash down from her eyes to my face-like a warm, life-giving spring in a heavenly garden.

Darkness clouds my vision as I stare up at her and smile. You can't tell someone you love them right there, because if you love them and they love you, words don't matter and the words sometimes just get in the way. Instead she whispered through her quiet cries, "I'll be reaching for the stars with you..."

"I'm sorry," I whisper, drops of blood pooling at the corner of my mouth-but the blood never actually drains down my face because it reminds me too much of vampires, and in my mind, vampires will never be romantic.

"Don't be sorry." She whispers and kisses my ear like she always does.

"Wait for me," she says, but I can barely hear. I smile, but the strain is almost too much. No pain, just the overwhelming pressure of warmth.

Bright lights and a veil of happiness shroud my vision as the curtain closes on my life. My daydream ends as I die in her arms, comforted by something strong and unspoken.

Maybe these daydreams were a cry for love, to be needed and wanted and desired. Obviously, I didn't see myself as a hero, and wanted to be-I wanted to be a hero in her eyes, someone who would give his life for others, knowing that love transcends death. Morbid and sick as it was, that was my dream.

But when I was actually in the last throes of life, when death was staring me in the face, I was not as heroic as I pictured it. In fact, when the story of my death began, it was someone else as the hero. And that hero was saving me.

I am pretty sure that there was no background music, either-just the quiet lapping of water and the rustle of leaves in the breeze. I had a song on my mind, though, especially at that moment when I saw my wife again. She was the hero who saved me. She didn't swing on vines, or take a bullet-she lounged on a sailboat with furling white sails that were marked with splashes of color.

She says, "You didn't forget?"

I say, "How could I?"

Somehow, the quiet lapping of water on the hull of the small boat disappears, and I can no longer hear the breeze whispering through trees. The world melts away and it is just us.

Now

I squint my eyes and pray that it is over. I pray that it was quick and painless. I hope... but at that moment, I decide that prayers are futile. I had prayers roaring through my heart as the plane touched the surface of the lake, yet nothing but the worst happened.

And for some reason, I remembered something completely random. Back in college I was working for the library on campus. That particular day, I was hunched over a computer and I didn't even see Eden come in the door. Her wet lips tickled my ear and I jumped, not expecting anyone to be so close. I turned and saw her smiling tentatively at me. Her hair was cut short, about ten inches shorter than the last time I saw her. It was a tad darker and teased out at the ends.

"Do you like it?" She asked, and then bit her lower lip. I saw smudges of her trademark lip gloss transfer to her teeth-she always seemed to be getting something on or stuck in her teeth. I couldn't help but chuckle.

"You hate it, or you think I look like a clown." She said.

"It's beautiful. Different, but nice." I glanced down at her hands and saw that she was holding a fist full of hair tied tightly at the ends with rubber bands. It looked very much like a dead animal she had pulled from a drain somewhere. I motioned to the clump of hair with my eyes, my eyebrows raised.

"It's for charity," she said, smiling even bigger, "they use the hair to make wigs for cancer patients."

I nodded. It was something she'd do.

I pulled her closer, meaning to kiss her, but she sat on my lap instead and leaned into me, cuddling against my chest.

She smelled like the orange-scented body butter I had given her for her birthday.

"I love it," I whispered, "the hair I mean."

"I thought you would." She looked up at me with her big, hazel eyes and smiled.

"I decided we need to go on a trip sometime. After we finish school and stuff."

"A trip, huh? Where do you want to go?"

"Europe, maybe, or the Caribbean. Or maybe Alaska."

I smiled and held her close.

"Let's talk about it when we can pay for it, after we're done with school. You never know if you'll change your mind, and maybe you'll end up wanting to go to Africa instead!"

She nodded and smiled, sparkly pink lip-gloss on her teeth.

It's funny how little memories come back at the weirdest moments. It seemed insignificant at the time, but memories of her new haircut are keeping me sane right now. I can see her smile and taste her kiss and somehow my situation doesn't seem so bad.

My daughter, Izzie, stirs in my arms and I pull her tighter against my body. A bitter breeze picks up around us, and she shivers-more violently than before. Her body and mine are both still very wet, and it's all I can do to hold her close and hope that my warmth passes to her. She is so tiny. She looks up at me, those big hazel eyes that she got from her mother, and with her eyes she pleads for her mom, or to be warm, or some inkling of comfort.

It breaks my heart. My little girl doesn't understand why we are here, and why we'll probably die. I look back at her, and I'm reminded of a game we used to play while I fed her a bottle before putting her to bed. I would scrunch my eyes together and then she would do the same, imitating my movements. I would blink twice and then she would blink twice. She would smile and I would smile.

My little girl.

I blink once, hoping that she'll do the same. Hoping that she will forget, at least for a moment, how cold she is.

She doesn't blink, but a small smile does cross her lips, and then curls into a tighter ball, quivering against the wind. She whimpers.

Suddenly she holds up her feet so she can see them, and notices that one of her shoes has come untied. She points to the dangling shoelace and moans. She can't talk but the message is clear-the shoe goddess needs her shoes tied.

When she was really young, only a couple of months old, she hated wearing shoes. And then suddenly, from one day to the next, she fell in love and another shoe addict was born to this world. Izzie loved shoes so much that if we were in the mall, she would toddle through crowds of people to peruse a shoe store. In the morning she would bring not one, but two pair of shoes for us to put on her feet. (Recently, when she would bring two pair of shoes, I would put one pair on her hands-and she got a kick out of that. Or I would put her shoes on her feet, and then slide her feet into a pair of Eden's or my shoes. She would clomp around with two pair on her feet, or with the shoes on her hands, for several hours. Sometimes, she would even insist on wearing her shoes to bed. Izzie is the shoe princess.

And now, she points to her shoelace and I position her so I can retie the lace. When I am finished, and the shoes are again securely on her feet (she checks this by waving her feet in the air a few times) she looks up and smiles at me-bigger this time. I am glad that I can still make her happy in this moment of bleakness. She again curls into my chest, pulling her knees tight into her body, and shuts her eyes. In a few moments, she is completely asleep.

I sigh deeply, thinking that it's a miracle that we are alive, but also a curse. I look out over the blue lake that is so clear; it reminds me of scuba diving in the Caribbean. The water feels more like ice, though, and somehow that doesn't seem right. When you see clear blue water, you think of warm, white sand beaches with palm trees and colorful fish with intricate rainbow patterns. You think of piña coladas and bikinis and oyster roasts at sunset.

Not this, though, not here. The water looks like blue Jell-O, but it penetrates every pore like heated needles dipped in lemon juice. I can still feel the sting, and my bones still ache from the pressure of the cold. I can only wonder how Izzie is dealing with all this. I glance again at her face and notice that her eyelids are fluttering-she's dreaming. A nightmare probably.

Higher up on the mountains, I notice the wind picking up again. It rustles through the tall trees and swoops down toward the lake and the small, rocky clearing in which we are sitting. When the wind kisses the water's surface, it makes little ripples that curl over themselves with white tips. The gust moves across the water and I wince, anticipating the cold that will penetrate through my little girl's body.

"Why?" I whisper. At first I think I'm just talking to myself, but then I realize the target of my plea. Except the plea is more of a resignation. Just then we are overtaken by the invisible gust of wind. It picks up and blows with more force than before, and then dies down to normal. The white-tipped ripples on the lake have also faded away into the glassy stillness.

"How could you?" I ask, a little louder this time. "She's just a little girl. Me, yeah. I can see that, but Izzie?"

I get no answer. I briefly wonder if my wife has noticed us missing. I wonder where she is at this very moment and I mutter a not-profane curse under my breath.

"You think-" but I stop talking. This is getting me nowhere, and I seriously doubt anyone is listening anyway. But still, the question sears my thoughts and for the moment I relate to millions of others who probably wonder the same thing I do.

Why?

I shift my body and my skin tingles the way it does when I have the flu. My bones throb and I shiver in my wet clothing. I look at the sky above and then at the mountains surrounding us.

Nothing. We are utterly alone.

I close my eyes, but just for a minute. I know that I should probably stay awake in case a plane comes by or something. But even as those thoughts enter my mind I dismiss them. Even if a plane did come by, we would have no way to signal it. We have no way to call for help.

My eyelids shut the world out, knowing that in sleep I can escape our situation. I know that I should be awake and alert, but what does it matter anyway? If the old man in black wants to cut us down with his scythe, it's either now or later. We're going to die anyway.

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