"Are you hurt?" Grandma Betty repeats the question, looking at Liz with concern.
"What difference would it make?"
"Well," says Grandma Betty, "if you were hurt, I would take you to a healing center."
"People get hurt here?"
"Yes, although everything eventually heals when one ages backward."
"So nothing matters here, does it? I mean, nothing counts. Everything is just erased. We're all getting younger and stupider, and that's it." Liz wants to cry, but not in front of Betty, whom she doesn't even know.
"You could look at things that way, I suppose. But in my opinion, that would be a very boring and limited point of view. I would hope you haven't embraced such a bleak outlook before you've even been here a day." Cupping Liz's chin in her hand, Grandma Betty turns Liz's head so that she can see directly into her eyes. "Were you trying to kill us back there?"
"Could I?"
Grandma Betty shakes her head. "No, darling, but you certainly wouldn't have been the first person to try."
"I don't want to live here," she yells. "I don't want to be here!" Despite herself, the tears start up again.
"I know, doll, I know," Grandma Betty says. She pulls Liz into an embrace and begins to stroke Liz's hair.
"My mother strokes my hair that way," Liz says as she pulls away. She knows Grandma Betty meant to be comforting, but it only felt creepy like her mother was touching her from beyond the grave.
Grandma Betty sighs and opens the passenger-side door. "I'll drive the rest of the way home,"
she says. Her voice sounds tired and strained.
"Fine," says Liz stiffly. A moment later, she adds in a softer voice, "Just so you know, I don't usually drive this badly, and I'm not usually this, like, emotional."
"Perfectly understandable," Grandma Betty says. "I had already assumed that might be the case."
As she slides back over to the passenger seat, Liz suspects that it will be some time before Grandma Betty lets her drive again. But Liz doesn't know Grandma Betty and she is wrong. At that moment, Grandma Betty turns to her and says, "If you want, I'll teach you threepoint turns and parallel parking. I'm not sure, but I think you can still get your driver's license here."
"Here?" Liz asks.
"Here in Elsewhere." Grandma Betty pats Liz on the hand before starting the car. "Just let me know."
Liz appreciates what it must have taken Grandma Betty to even make this offer, but this isn't what she wants. For her, it's not about the threepoint turns and the parallel parking. She wants to finish driver's ed. She wants a Massachusetts state driver's license. She wants to drive aimlessly with her friends on the weekends and discover mysterious new roads in Nashua and Watertown.
She wants the ability to go anywhere without a grandmother or anyone else. But she knows this will never happen. For she is here, Elsewhere, and what good is a driver's license if the only place she can use it is here?
Waking
A taxicab speeds out of nowhere. Liz flies through the air. She thinks, I will surely die.
She wakes in a hospital room, her vision bleary, her head wrapped in bandages. Her mother and father stand at her bedside, dark circles under their eyes. "Oh, Lizzie," her mother says, "we thought we'd lost you."
Two weeks later, the doctor removes her bandages. Aside from a Cshaped arc of stitches over her left ear, she is as good as new. The doctor calls it the most remarkable recovery he has ever seen.
Liz returns to school. Everyone wants to hear about Liz's near-death experience. "It's hard for me to talk about it," she says. People think Liz has become deep since her accident, but the truth is, she just doesn't remember.
On her sixteenth birthday, Liz passes her driver's license test with flying colors. Her parents buy her a brand-new car. (They don't like her riding her bicycle anymore.) Liz applies to college. She writes her admissions essay on the time she was hit by a cab and how it changed her life. She is accepted early decision to her top choice, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Liz graduates MIT with a degree in biology, and then she attends veterinary school in Florida. One day, she meets a boy, the type of boy with whom she can imagine spending the rest of her life and maybe even
"Rise and shine, Elizabeth!" Grandma Betty interrupts Liz's dream at seven the next morning.
Liz buries her head under the blankets. "Go away," she mutters, too low for Grandma Betty to hear.
Grandma Betty opens the curtains. "It's going to be a beautiful day," she says.
Liz yawns, her head still under the covers. "I'm dead. What in the world do I have to get up for?"
"That's certainly a negative way of looking at things. There's loads to do in Elsewhere," says Grandma Betty as she opens the next set of curtains. The room Liz is staying in (she can't think of it as her room; her room is back on Earth) has five windows. It reminds her of a greenhouse.
What she really wants is a small dark room with few (preferably no) windows and black walls something more appropriate to her current situation. Liz yawns as she watches Grandma Betty move onto the third window. "You don't have to open all the curtains," Liz says.
"Oh, I like a lot of light, don't you?" Grandma Betty replies.
Liz rolls her eyes. She can't believe she'll have to spend the rest of her life living with her grandmother, who is, make no mistake, an old person. Even though Grandma Betty looks like a young woman on the outside, Liz can tell she probably harbors all sorts of secret old-people tendencies.
Liz wonders what specifically Grandma Betty meant when she said there was "loads to do in Elsewhere." On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz's point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and poindess: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.
"You have your acclimation appointment at eight thirty," says Grandma Betty.
Liz removes her head from under the covers. "What's that?"
"It's a sort of orientation for the newly dead," says Grandma Betty.
"Can I wear this?" Liz indicates her white pajamas. She has been wearing them so long they are more precisely called gray pajamas. "I didn't exactly have time to pack, you know."
"You can borrow something of mine. I think we're about the same size, although you're probably a little smaller," Grandma Betty says.
Liz considers Betty for a moment. Betty has larger breasts than Liz but is slim and about Liz's height. It is somehow strange to be the same size as her grandmother.
"Just pick something from my closet, and if you need anything shortened or taken in, let me know.
I don't know if I mentioned that I'm a seamstress here," Grandma Betty says.
Liz shakes her head.
"Yeah, keeps me pretty busy. People tend to get smaller as they get younger, so they always need their clothes taken in."
"Can't they just buy new ones?" Liz asks, her brow furrowed.
"Of course, doll, I didn't mean to imply they couldn't. However, I have observed that there's less waste here, all around. And I do make new garments, too, you know. I prefer it, actually. It's more creative for me."