Silhouettes

By E. L. Tenenbaum

A bittersweet story about family, friendship and the impact one life can have on others, no matter how young it is.

Brooke was just killed in an accident, but a part of her is still here. Seeking answers, she sets out to retrace her life and soon meets others like herself, among them, Tyler. Tyler remembers Brooke from before, and so she hesitantly gives him the one thing she never bothered to when they were alive; a chance. Together, they visit the people and places in their small beach town that once held meaning to them, developing a mutual, grudging respect as they learn to view life in different and unexpected ways.

Tyler soon decides that they must let go of their pasts if anything is to change, but Brooke can't bring herself to say goodbye just yet. As she watches the impact of her death on her loved ones, Brooke questions her desperate need to hold onto a life that's no longer hers. But how can she let go of a life she's barely begun to live?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melange Books, LLC
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781680465549

E. L. Tenenbaum

E.L. Tenenbaum is fairly certain a bookstore is really the happiest place on earth. In addition to being an author, her love for stories in different shapes and sizes has led to a degree in journalism, a stint as a script reader, and a few runs as writer/director for community musical theater. When she's not reading, or writing, she enjoys speaking at middle/high schools as a visiting author.For more information about previous/current/upcoming work follow her on social media or visit her website.

Book preview

1

My feet dangled over the side of the slick, polished-till-reflective lid of my glossy wooden casket. From there, I watched my funeral play out through the fog of distance created by the brain when it refuses to understand what it sees. I narrated in my head what would happen next even though I’d only been to one funeral in my life .

Keep calm, I repeated to myself over and over. None of this is real.

I surveyed those gathered for the service with a detached curiosity as my unnervingly vivid nightmare continued. My friends, the dance team, and a lot of my classmates were there, the boys fidgeting from all the ill-contained emotions, the girls shifting uncomfortably as their heels sank into the grass because not enough chairs had been set up for the crowd that turned out to wish me farewell from life. Many of my teachers and high school faculty members were there, too. I recognized some people from my dad’s work, his drinking buddies, my mom’s book club, our extended family. I even recognized some people from around town: the head nurse from the hospital I volunteered at and the old guy from behind the counter of the Ice Cream Parlor whose name I never remembered but who always remembered mine. Most of those present sniffled and wiped away tears that refused to stop trickling out. Some wore sunglasses to hide their reddened eyes, though everyone knew why they were wearing them. I’d never seen a grown man cry before. It was unsettling.

The sun shone down placidly from above, its warmth and light a direct contrast to the somber gathering dressed in dark clothes and darker moods. Considering the grief of the people before me, it didn’t make sense that the skies weren’t openly weeping, too.

It always rains at funerals, I thought, so this definitely can’t be real.

Eulogies and pretty speeches were said about me. About the senselessness of my death. About the brevity and promise of my life. About the possibility that never was.

Brooke was very driven, my long-time dance teacher told the assembled mourners, gripping her hand-written speech in her fist but not once referring to it, a reflection of her be-over-prepared life philosophy. She lived her life with purpose, stayed focused on her goals, and made every second a stepping stone in making the next minute count.

She said some other things, some of which elicited soft chuckles, but most of which provoked further sniffling. She went on to speak about how I had lived a full life, a puzzling statement since it was apparent we were here to mourn a life cut short. Where was the fullness in that?

My best friend Chelsea spoke, or tried to. I am—was so lucky to have you in my life, she said to my coffin between choked-back sobs. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend.

Others spoke, too, and what they said was really nice, inspiring even, but I wasn’t totally paying attention. It didn’t seem important to listen to something that wasn’t really happening. I was probably making up all those nice things about myself in my head anyway. Doesn’t everyone who imagines their own funeral hope to leave some broken hearts behind?

I watched my family closely; my parents clung to each other as rivulets of tears streamed down their newly aged and bewildered faces. They didn’t look like the happy couple I always knew them to be. Even Mom usually cried with more passion than she was showing now, her hand tightly clutching the arm of her only sister, Rosaline, who was trying to be strong despite the recurring need to wipe at her own eyes with her free hand.

They must know, I thought fiercely, they must know this is only a dream.

My younger brother, Aaron, sat stoically beside them, bravely fighting off the liquid pooling in his eyes and valiantly failing. He didn’t allow himself to break down, though there was no guarantee he wouldn’t have if there hadn’t been so many people present. I almost didn’t recognize him in the dark, stiff suit and tie someone had to have forced him into. I couldn’t think of any time he hadn’t worn clothes that weren’t…casual, or cotton, or old, or ripped. I wondered if anyone had told him the truth about this funeral, that it wasn’t real.

I felt little as I watched them all from my self-styled dais. Perhaps I should’ve felt grief or pain, but I was still swimming in a surrealistic bog of disbelief. What I was seeing seemed so real, yet I was certain I would soon wake up in my own bed wrapped in the warm cocoon of my blanket. It bothered me to see what those I cared about were going through, but how could I be torn at my absence if I was still here?

Wasn’t I?

Although, beneath it all, in the murky recesses of my memory, I vaguely remembered being blindsided just a few days ago. It was over very quickly, too fast to feel much pain, but enough to know that it had happened. My mind’s eye could see the smashed driver’s side of my car, my crooked body lying on the blood-soaked asphalt amid the shattered glass, the white headlights, the wailing sirens, and the unanswerable cries for help. I saw my coldly preserved body on a shelf in the morgue, saw my toe tagged with what remained of my identity. I saw my whitened body cleaned and dressed in my favorite turquoise summer dress, my face made up, my hair fanned out and the bracelet my grandpa left behind for me slid onto my wrist. I saw my porcelain body laid to rest in a heavy, wooden coffin, on display for anyone brave enough to look. I saw it lowered into the ground, engulfed by the darkness of its new home.

In a way, I even saw myself die.

But I didn’t feel any of it, so how could it be real?

Except, somehow, I knew that nothing was ever going to wake me from this nightmare.

Because I wasn’t dreaming at all.

I was dead.

2

Ididn’t know exactly when I knew that I was no longer alive .

It could have been at any of those moments, when I saw my body manipulated by others without feeling it and knew I had no control over any of my limbs. Or maybe it was simply when I knew it was impossible for me to be alive and see all those things. My parents wouldn’t bury me if I was still breathing, right?

Maybe that’s how I knew for sure, when they lowered my casket into the ground and the dirt rained down over it but I didn’t feel claustrophobic or afraid. I didn’t flinch from the thumping above my head or sense a sandy crunch between my teeth. Even if I didn’t feel like I was in my body, my body would have to feel the things that were happening to it.

But it didn’t, and that was a pretty big clue.

After the service, my aunt ushered my family into our car and drove them away without bothering to check if I was in, so I had to run to catch up. The ride home was silent, heavy, depressing. My mom sat up front, and I squeezed into the backseat beside my dad and my brother. At one point, my dad tried to speak, tried to say something encouraging and uplifting, but no words made it past his pale, trembling lips. I always thought my father was the wisest, strongest person I knew, but in that car, I learned that there are things that can silence him, crush the words of strength before they can give hope to others.

At home, Aunt Rosaline bustled around and took care of the myriad guests and food platters that had been brought to the house while my parents dumbly did whatever she said. There was something wrong in all this, because my aunt and dad had never gotten along very well, and now he was listening to her without comment. Eventually, the house quieted and someone found the courage to tell my aunt they’d be okay and she could go home.

After she left, my parents numbly sat on the couch and didn’t bother turning on the lights even though the room darkened with the setting sun outside. At random intervals, my father absently patted my mother’s hand, but she didn’t act like she felt it, as if she didn’t believe that the funeral she’d just been to was real, either. My dad didn’t look like he even knew he was touching her, he was probably doing it out of habit or some strange compulsion. Neither said a word.

My brother went upstairs and blasted music as loud as he could and even with the walls shaking, my parents sat without hearing it. They never let him play his music so loud because the old man who lived next door would complain. But the old man didn’t come red-faced to the door and my brother lay on his bed, oblivious to the pulsating beats that did nothing to drown his tumultuous thoughts. I soon sat next to him on his bed, but he didn’t yell at me to get out.

That was a big clue, too.

That night, I lay on my bed, but couldn’t relax. I was wondering how long this restless feeling would last when I lifted my hand and saw the opposite wall through it. I looked then at the rest of me and, for the first time, noticed that I was transparent. I tried to snuggle under the blanket, but couldn’t lift it, and anything I tried to touch passed right through me. I stood up and went to my mirror but saw no reflection looking back.

Where did I go? I asked it.

I reached out to touch my absent reflection in the silvered glass. Where were my deep emerald eyes, greener than quiet alpine lakes as my grandma used to say? I was here, but not here at the same time. I was having the ultimate out-of-body experience.

By then, I was pretty certain I was dead, but couldn’t confirm what state I was in, because while plenty of people have spoken about being almost dead, no one’s written anything about what it’s like to already be dead, not physically at least. Someone should’ve taken the time to write that stuff down somewhere between this world and the next.

The only other person I’d known who’d died young was Kayla, a girl I used to be friends with before her family moved away. I wasn’t seeing her now, but that could be because she didn’t live around here anymore. Or because a few years had passed and she had moved on to whatever the next stage was.

Which made me wonder, if I wasn’t in the real world, then which world was I in? I could see others, hear them, but they didn’t seem to see or hear me. There were no pearly gates or trumpeting angels as far I could tell. There was no fiery furnace or frozen wasteland opening under me either.

Great, I suddenly thought, of all the crazy luck a seventeen-year-old girl could be saddled with, I’ve been left to float between two worlds, neither here nor there and with no way of knowing how to change any of it.

What on earth was I supposed to do with myself now?

3

The next morning, I got up from my bed and stared a few moments at my closet, going through the preparatory rituals of the day as if it was any other morning for which I’d been jumpstarted awake with the ringing of my alarm. I never went to sleep without setting an alarm, even on weekends and days off from school when I slept in. I would wake up later, but still always had a plan for the day, down to allotting time for hanging out with friends or watching TV .

My daily schedule was very important to me; I’d freak out if someone switched things up without advance notice, and I didn’t use the alarm on my phone so I couldn’t snooze it. Instead, I’d bought an old-fashioned-looking alarm clock, one of those round ones with two silver domes on top, two black time-keeping hands, and skinny red lines to mark the alarm. Every night, it lulled me to sleep with its soft and steady ticking, a lullaby that annoyed everyone but me.

I stared now at its silent form perched on the nightstand near my bed and wondered why I was already up if it hadn’t gone off when the time on it suggested that it should have. I didn’t feel like I’d slept much, so perhaps I hadn’t yet woken up on the off chance that this was just a dream. It was only when I turned away from the closet and glanced quickly into the mirror to throw my hair into a ponytail that I remembered I was dead.

Kind of an important detail.

I turned my gaze back to my size and color-coded closet, the thought slowly dawning on me that what I wore or how I wore it wasn’t relevant anymore. As I stood there processing that newest revelation, my mind started pulling up other, intangible details of the neatly ordered clothes inside.

There were the clothes I had bought with my friends, just because we were out shopping for the day and having a good time buying matching outfits; clothes I had bought not because I liked the way they looked on me but because I liked the way they looked on the women they were tailored for in magazines and movies; clothes I had bought for dates with specific boys; clothes for dance; clothes for school; clothes for after-hours fun; for the beach; for the mall; and for hanging out at home, when I knew no one was expected over and no one would see what I was wearing. Those ones were much more worn out than the others. Actually, they were only two shirts and a pair of sweats, but I’d had them forever and they were really the most comfortable of everything. Chelsea called them my frat clothes.

This was my life in clothes.

My hand reached out to touch, but went through the deep purple dress I had bought for the homecoming dance. My mother hated the cut, but I loved the color, the material, and the cut, so I had begged and pleaded, promised and sworn, until she gave in and paid for part of it. I had felt so triumphant that night, when I glided into the gym wearing the dress I’d fought so hard for. I knew it looked good on me. Everyone around me did, too. And for that one night, nothing could make me frown.

Then I’d had it cleaned and pressed and tucked into its proper place in the back of my closet. I really wanted to touch it now, to remember the feeling of success from that one night when everything just felt right, but no matter how many times I reached for it, I couldn’t. My inability to feel the dress that was right in front of me abruptly darkened my thoughts. It seemed so hollow, the dress, the victory, it wasn’t even as pretty as I remembered. So much fight for just one night of pretty, I mused. Was it even worth it? Well, it was a good memory.

Hanging prominently just inside my closet was my new dress for prom. Another victory, but this time my mother had loved the golden-yellow dress I’d brought home. I turned away from it quickly, but not before the memories of the night of the accident came tumbling in. I had gone out to buy shoes for the dress and a car hit me as I was crossing a four-way stop intersection on my way home.

I backed away from my clothes and the closet, not wanting to see them or the memories they stirred up any longer. I backed away so much that the next thing I knew I was through the wall and standing confusedly in the hallway outside my room.

I’m dead and I can walk through walls. Right.

My brother’s door opened and he trudged down the hall in my direction, his bare feet automatically shuffling his sleepy form across the carpet to the bathroom.

Aaron, stop! I screamed, throwing my hands up to keep him from barreling into me in his bleary, half-conscious state.

He ignored me, didn’t react to my screams, as he walked past me—no, through me—to the bathroom. My body shook in disbelief and my mind refused to comprehend the possibility that physical things were passing through me, that no one could hear me, that I would never see my reflection again, and that this really was not a dream. I fought to push back the sense of horror rising in my throat like bile and told myself over and over that I would figure things out as long as I stayed calm.

Forcing myself to focus, I watched Aaron raise his hand to bang on the door, just as he had millions of times when I was alive and taking my time getting ready in the morning. He stopped suddenly, realizing the door was wide open, and then the understanding that he was waking up to one morning in one thousand and more when he wouldn’t have to yell at me to get out staggered him. His shoulders slumped and he meekly slammed the bathroom door behind him.

It didn’t look to be shaping into a very promising morning in this house so far.

By then, I’d had enough of upstairs and made a beeline for the landing of the steps. The door to my parents’ room was slightly ajar and I peeked in to see my mom still in bed, her back to the window, her body buried under the covers up to her ears. Good, I thought to myself, she needs to rest.

Downstairs, I found my dad sitting by himself on a kitchen stool, staring blankly into his coffee cup.

Good morning. The words automatically slipped out before I remembered what had happened upstairs with Aaron, remembered that I was dead and he couldn’t hear me.

The words died on my lips anyway because seeing my dad triggered a warning in me that something was not right. It took me a long moment to realize why my dad sitting alone at the counter looked so odd. Every day, at least for the seventeen years I was alive and more, my parents shared a cup of coffee in the morning before the day started. My brother and I would come downstairs half asleep, delaying our inevitable departure for school and feel like we’d intruded on something sacred. Even though we did have to be in the kitchen to grab some breakfast and pack a lunch. This was the first time in all the years of my parents’ marriage that both were home but my dad was drinking his morning coffee by himself.

I stood motionless, fascinated by a scene I hated to see but couldn’t tear my eyes away from. What did it look like when Dad drank his coffee alone?

Sad. Out of place. Unnerving.

I don’t want to see this, I said too loudly. How can you sit here without Mom?

In response, my dad continued to sit and stare at the now cold light brown liquid that was supposed to give him the boost he needed to face the day ahead. He wasn’t going into work today, so he was in no rush to get up and go anywhere at all.

My brother’s lumbering steps carried him downstairs and my dad looked up briefly.

Aaron, he said.

Aaron barely looked at him. Dad.

Dad, Aaron, I echoed softly.

Aaron mechanically poured himself an infuriatingly big bowl of cereal, mixing every flavor we had in the pantry and coating it in too much milk so it spilled over the sides in search of more room. Without fail, every time he ate cereal he would pour in flavors that didn’t make sense together and then cap it off with way too much milk. Every single time. It bugged me to the point that I always tried to get out of the kitchen before he got started. I’d rather wait an extra five minutes in the car than endure his irrationally designed breakfast of champions.

This morning, I stuck around to watch, though after the second mouthful, Aaron stopped eating and swirled his spoon around until the mismatched contents became a lumpy, soggy mess of sugar and bran. It was unsettling to see the two of them lost in their own hells, haunted by their personal memories and regrets, two once-confident men not knowing which way was up.

Dad finally noticed Aaron playing with his cereal.

You should eat something, he said plainly, flatly, without much conviction.

Yeah, Aaron replied with as monotonous and lifeless an effort as the words that prompted his own.

I wondered how long the two of them would sit like that, both with food but neither with the appetite to eat nor the will to push it away. Aaron finally forced himself to make the first move. He picked up his bowl and dumped the contents into the trash with a dull thump that seemed louder in the silence it broke.

He went back to his room and left my dad to stare into the milky dregs of his unfinished coffee.

This place was too depressing. I had to get out of here.

4

Till then, I had very little understanding of what was going on with me, but I knew there had to be some reason for the state I was in. Though I didn’t know how to explain it, I had this feeling that something was anchoring me, like I couldn’t jump because my legs were too heavy to even try. So after leaving, I went straight to my best friend’s house, hoping to find some direction there as I had so often in my life before .

Chelsea and I had met in first grade when we were stuck next to each other in a dance class neither of us wanted to be at, dressed in the dopey pink leotards our moms had forced our skinny frames into. Despite myself, I chuckled out loud, recalling that distinct memory which always stood out from the happy blur of my childhood.

Chelsea and I got over our resistance to dance of course, as soon as we learned how much fun and freeing it was to translate song and speech into movement. There was also the side benefit of discovering its bonus power years later: what guy wasn’t drawn to a girl who can dance? We danced and danced for years and now that my life was over, I could really appreciate what the real benefit was. The guy part, irrelevant; the challenge, the demand, the subjugation of my body to my will, that was worth it. That was why I had learned to love every grueling second and I tried to impress that on my team whenever we practiced a particularly demanding routine.

I meandered down the sidewalk and, out of habit, stepped aside for an old woman walking her dog. After I was well past her, I bitterly realized how unnecessary it was for me to stand aside. I could walk through walls and Aaron had walked through me, so why couldn’t I walk through other people? So when I came across a group of too-cool tweens hogging the pavement as they loudly giggled and took a plethora of selfies, I stomped right through them. I couldn’t feel it, and it did nothing to quell the anger beginning to boil inside of me, but it gave me a weird sense of satisfaction to walk through them before they could walk through me.

Soon enough, I stopped walking through people and street signs and fixedly watched the cars whizzing past me on the street. An idea was creeping up on me and I began to wonder if the very same thing that had taken my life just days ago could send me back again. Hesitantly, I stepped out into the street but just before I crossed into the white line of traffic, a car flew by and I instinctively jumped back.