The Final Life of Nathaniel Moon Read online

  No way. It’s got to be imagination. It’s way too early for that.

  It wasn’t a physical kick she felt, though. It was an awareness. A feeling that she wasn’t alone any more.

  Out loud, she said, “Baby? Is that you? I can feel you.”

  Chapter Two

  Dimension AG54298-M25736

  1979

  He came awake, but did not open his eyes, for they were not formed yet. His body went on about its work, turning soft cartilage into bones, and building all the organs he would eventually need to exist outside his mother’s womb. He paid this process no mind, but focused inward.

  His first thoughts were of the life he had just left. His death was still fresh in his memory. He had been an old man, skin stretched paper-thin, eyes watery, strength gone, surrounded by a family who loved him enough to let him go.

  Susan. Thank you for letting me go. I was tired of the pain. I suffered from the limited perspective of the living. I didn’t know what was next, but I was ready to find out.

  He stretched his consciousness out, looking for what had occurred between letting go of his old body and beginning to build this one. When he focused his memory, he saw his life force leave the old body and move into a dimension invisible to the living. His watched his soul wriggle and frolic like a polliwog let loose in a fast-moving stream.

  And then, he came awake, here, in his slowly building body.

  Good enough.

  He spent an unmeasured time reviewing that life. From the distance of a new life, he felt detached from the successes, the failures of what had once been so important. He dwelled on a few of his memories—his daughter’s tiny hand wrapped entirely around a single one of his fingers as they walked along the shore of a gently lapping lake; standing in the bow of his fishing boat, lost in a sunset; sitting in a café with his friends. He savored the connections with those he loved.

  He saw the times he had fallen down and failed both himself and those who loved him. He took those memories into his heart and held them tight. He wanted to carry them into this new life, so he would not repeat them. Every mistake teaches us something, but if we refuse to learn it, then it’s all for nothing.

  Beyond his most recent life was a long stretch of previous lives. He could look at any of them in as much detail as he wished, but simply skimmed through them. They were of interest to him in the same way an adult might look back on the early lessons of childhood—only in passing. He did notice patterns, though. Similar failures, similar triumphs, and made note of them.

  He stood on the precipice of something new, and he was ready.

  Inside his head, he heard a voice.

  “Baby? Is that you? I feel you.”

  Mother.

  Hello, Mother. Can you hear me?

  “Oh! I can! What? ... I didn’t expect this. Is this normal?”

  A tinkling laugh filled Mother’s mind. You are asking me questions? I am only moments old in this life.

  “I just ... I knew you were special. I’ve felt it. But, I thought every mother believed their baby was special. I didn’t expect ... this.”

  He reviewed through all his lives, from womb to death. He did not find any where he communicated with his mother before being born.

  “Are you still there? Is this all in my imagination? I think I might be losing my mind.”

  I’m here. I was searching my past lives. This is unprecedented, at least for me.

  “You can see your past lives?”

  Yes.

  “Will you always be able to see them? I don’t remember anything about any life I’ve lived before—only this one.”

  I will forget. I do not want to bring too much into this life with me, or I will limit what I can learn.

  “That makes me sad. Can you bring those memories with you if you wish?”

  Yes.

  “This ... forgetting ... is voluntary?”

  Yes.

  “Do you know other things? The secrets of the universe?”

  There are no secrets. I know. You know, or at least you have known. We forget, so we can experience this life fully.

  “Nathaniel?”

  Is that my name in this life? He felt the word—Nathaniel—settle into him, become part of who he would be. It’s a good name. Thank you.

  “Will you do something for me?”

  No answer.

  “You are already so much smarter than me, Nathaniel, not answering until you know what I want. So, here it is. Will you take part of what you know right now, and make a place inside you where you can keep it safe? Somewhere you could find it again, if you wanted? Is that even possible?”

  It is.

  “Will you do it for me? We are all alone, you and I, and I am scared. I want to protect you, but I don’t know if I will be able to.”

  Silence stretched out while Nathaniel looked at all paths that lay ahead and behind him.

  I will.

  “I only want what’s best for you.”

  Our perspectives, when it comes to that, are very different. I’m going to be quiet now. There is much to do.

  Victoria smiled inwardly, knowing what a blessing this child would be.

  Nathaniel went about the business at hand—both forgetting, and building a place within himself where he could access all that is never truly forgotten.

  Chapter Three

  1983

  Vivian Hanrahan, once known as Victoria Schmidt, sat in her cramped office, ledger books open in front of her and Nathaniel on the floor beside her, coloring. A small fan in an open window did very little to move the stultifying air. It was a little past 10:00 AM in Tubal, Arkansas, and it was already 91 degrees outside—the kind of heat that wraps around you like a thick wool blanket and makes breathing seem like too much work.

  “Doesn’t ever seem to bother you, though, does it, little man?”

  Nathaniel looked up from his coloring and said, “What, Mama?”

  “This heat.” She fanned the front of her blouse, but the air refused to stir.

  No. I like it. It feels right.

  Tubal, just north of the Louisiana state line, was an unusual landing spot for a young woman from Minnesota. It was the town she had been passing through on the way to New Orleans, when her old Mercury had given up the ghost right in front of the Get Gas Here sign in front of Murdock’s gas station and pizzeria. As it turned out, Bill Murdock also owned the wrecking yard in Tubal, and offered one hundred dollars cash for her car, which was likely more than it was worth.

  By the time the sun went down on her second day in Tubal, she was gainfully employed as a seamstress at the Creech Coat and Uniform manufacturing plant just outside the city limits. She’d been pregnant, but still walked the two miles back and forth to work each day, until she had saved enough money to buy another old beater, just before Nathaniel was born.

  Once she had a little bit of money saved, and a car again, she realized she could leave Tubal and finish her journey to Derek and Louisiana. A year had passed, though, and whatever infatuation she had once felt for him had dissipated.

  Not long after that, Cyrus Creech himself had offered her the chance to get off the sewing floor and be his executive assistant and bookkeeper. Vivian accepted, as the floor was too damned hot five months out of the year and too damn cold another five months—April and October were blissfully moderate. Also, Cyrus Creech was a genuine family man and attached none of the strings to the promotion that many bosses did.

  She almost never brought Nathaniel with her to work, but on this day, her sitter, Andi, had called her, sick with a summer flu. It had been too late to find anyone else. So, here they were, Vivian and her numbers and appointment books, Nathaniel and his colors.

  Nathaniel had been born in Tubal, which may have explained why he didn’t mind the heat and humidity. He stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on coloring the green grass in his picture, when a racket from the back of the building attracted the attention of both of them.
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  Vivian’s office was upstairs, on a catwalk that overlooked both the manufacturing floor and the shipping docks. She said, “Don’t move, Nathaniel,” and took one step outside the door of her office and peered down to see what had caused the commotion. Everything looked normal on the manufacturing floor. There were dozens of heavy-duty sewing machines operated by women with hunched backs and nimble fingers, making corduroy coats by the gross. The chaos and confusion came from the loading dock. From her viewpoint twenty feet up, Vivian could see a forklift tipped on its side, wheels still spinning. Heavy boxes had been knocked into a massive, jumbled pile.

  “Oh, God,” Vivian said. She turned, plucked Nathaniel up off the floor and hurried down the metal steps as fast as she could. At the back of the loading dock, half a dozen men were spread around the forklift, trying to lift it up, to no avail. Harry Spitton, who everyone called “Pup,” was pinned beneath it. He was unconscious, with a thin dribble of blood coming from his mouth and nose.

  Vivian didn’t bother to ask what had happened. She just took control of the situation. She shouted, “Bob! Can you use the other forklift to move this one?”

  Bob Mullen ran to the second forklift, fired it up, and maneuvered around the jumble of boxes until he was next to the tipped forklift. Two other men jumped in and fixed a strap around the forks of Bob’s forklift and the cab of the second. Bob raised the forks until the strap was tense, then backed up. He didn’t have enough torque to set it upright, but he did manage to lift the heavy machine a few inches.

  Three sets of hands grabbed Pup and pulled him out from under.

  Vivian took one look at Pup’s prone form, then spotted Hazel, a middle-aged woman she had known when she worked on the sewing floor. “Hazel! Here, watch Nathaniel for me. I’ve got to go call an ambulance.”

  Hazel reached her arms out for Nathaniel. Vivian ran back up the metal stairs. There was no phone on the manufacturing floor. Hazel let Nathaniel slip down to the ground, but kept a hold on his small hand.

  Nathaniel tipped his head to the right, so he could look around the knees of the man in front of him.

  Pup stirred a little and Bob Mullen kneeled down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Pup. Just relax. Ambulance is on its way, and we’ll get you to the hospital. You’re gonna be just fine.”

  Harry’s injuries weren’t immediately obvious. There were no bones sticking out, or pools of blood beneath him. The forklift had landed mainly on his torso, and he was struggling to draw a breath. He was deathly pale. His eyes fluttered open, and he gasped out, “Can’t breathe.”

  The crowd surrounding him looked from one to another. The extent of their medical training was a single class on mouth to mouth resuscitation that everyone had joked their way through.

  While those around him dithered, Harry opened his mouth wide, a fish on a riverbank gasping for oxygen. He tried to lift his head up, but his eyes closed again, and his head slammed back into the concrete floor, unconscious.

  At the back of the crowd, someone shouted, “Do mouth to mouth!”

  Bob, who was kneeling next to Harry, laid a hand gently on Harry’s chest and said, “I think his chest is crushed. I don’t want to make it any worse. I’m gonna wait for the ambulance.”

  “He’ll be dead by the time the danged ambulance gets here,” someone muttered. They had drawn the word ambulance out into many syllables.

  As Vivian hurried down the stairs, Hazel didn’t notice that Nathaniel had let go of her hand. He was tiny and slipped between the men and women crowded around. He walked straight up to Harry and laid his small hand lightly on his chest, just as Bob Mullen had done.

  Bad. It’s all bad inside him. Somewhere deep inside him, something unlocked, unbidden, and rose to his conscious mind. I can fix him. For a brief moment, with his hand still on Pup’s chest, Nathaniel closed his eyes and pictured him healed.

  Bob looked down and saw him then. “Hey, there, who’s this? Who do you belong to?” Bob picked Nathaniel up with one arm and looked around. “Whose kid is this?”

  Vivian hurried forward and plucked Nathaniel away from Bob. “He’s mine. Sorry.” She touched Nathaniel’s face and looked into his calm eyes. “You okay, honey?”

  Nathaniel nodded softly. Why wouldn’t I be?

  Everyone’s attention had turned to Nathaniel, and Harry lay momentarily forgotten. Forgotten until he opened his eyes and sat up. The color had returned to his face and he was breathing normally. “Holy shit, what happened to me?” Harry asked with amazement. He reached a hand up to dab at the blood around his nose and mouth.

  Around him, everyone took a half step back, looking at a ghost.

  In the distance, the whine of an ambulance siren slowly grew nearer.

  “The boxes shifted on the forklift while it was on the ramp, and the whole shootin’ match fell over, right on top of you,” Bob said. “We thought you was a goner for sure.”

  Harry patted himself up and down as if looking for a missing pack of smokes. He shook his head. “Nope. I feel fine. Never better.”

  The stares of the crowd, wide-eyed now, turned from Harry to Nathaniel. Vivian cupped her hand on the back of Nathaniel’s head and buried his face against her shoulder. “Good,” she said in Harry’s direction. “Glad you’re feeling better.” She cocked her head in the direction of the siren. “Ambulance will be here any second, though, and I want you to get checked out.”

  Harry shrugged. “Sure. No problem, but I’m pretty sure I’m fine.”

  Vivian, still holding Nathaniel against her, retreated to her office upstairs. She sat Nathaniel on her desk. He stared at her with his innocent blue eyes. “Nathaniel, honey, did you do something to that man on the ground? Did you help him?”

  Nathaniel stared at her thoughtfully for a few seconds without saying anything.

  Is this bad? You look scared.

  Finally, he nodded.

  “Do you know what you did?”

  Silence stretched for several seconds, then, “I fixed him.”

  “Do you know how you did that?”

  He shook his head. No way to explain it. “Just did it.”

  Vivian took a step back and drew a deep breath. She had waited for a sign, but after four years, she had stopped thinking about it as much. After Nathaniel had spoken to her before he was born, she had thought he might pop out of the womb speaking a dozen languages and solving advanced equations. He had been a normal baby, though, albeit what any mother would call a “good baby.” He didn’t fuss unless he was hungry, was sleeping through the night when he was only three months old, and self-soothed without a pacifier.

  As Doctor Gray had said at Nathaniel’s six month checkup, “If every baby was this good, we’d suffer from overpopulation, because everybody would want one.”

  Until that dripping hot July day, though, he had never done anything extraordinary.

  A soft tapping on the door to her office startled Vivian from her thoughts.

  “Vivian?” It was Cyrus Creech. He was a short, neat man in his mid-forties, given to dressing in linen suits and wearing hats that covered his thinning blond hair. For a time, he had also worn a wispy mustache, but his wife had soon taken care of that grooming faux pas.

  “Yes, Cyrus?”

  “So,” he drawled, “I just got in the office, there’s an ambulance in the parking lot, and I’m hearing some awful strange things.” He glanced at Nathaniel, who was once again sitting on the floor, coloring his picture. “What in the heck is going on?” Heck was the strongest curse word Cyrus ever used.

  “Honestly, I’m not sure. There was an accident on the loading dock. A forklift fell on Pup and we all thought he was hurt pretty bad, but once they lifted it off him, he seemed okay. The paramedics are checking him out to make sure.”

  Cyrus pierced her with a look, but just tapped his fingers against her door frame. “Okay, then. Find Bob Mullin, and send him up to see me, please.”

  Downstairs, the medics loaded Har
ry into the ambulance over his protests and took him off to the hospital five miles down the road in Dodge City.

  Chapter Four

  By the next day, Andi had recovered from her summer flu, so she kept Nathaniel. Shortly after Vivian settled in for the day, Cyrus Creech appeared in her doorway.

  “Viv? Can you come down to my office for a minute?”

  “Of course. I’ll grab my notepad.”

  “No need, just bring yourself.”

  Vivian stood up, smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt, and followed Cyrus down the narrow hallway to his office. The Creech Coat and Uniform building was, at best, utilitarian, and that extended to the President’s office. The floor was covered in old linoleum, and the only furniture in the office were three filing cabinets, a large wooden desk with a swivel chair behind it and two wooden chairs in front. A picture of a waving United States flag hung on the wall. It was the only decoration in the room, aside from a hinged double picture frame with Mrs. Creech and his son, Byron on one side and a picture of Jesus on the other.

  Bob Mullin was already seated in one of the wooden chairs.

  “Please, Vivian, have a seat.”

  Cyrus moved around behind the desk, and said, “Now, we have a mystery on our hands here. You told me yesterday that a forklift fell on Harry, but after a few minutes, he was okay. That’s borne out by the hospital, who said they couldn’t find one thing wrong with him.”

  “Yes, sir,” Vivian said.

  “Now, Bob, here, has a slightly different take on things. He says that right after Harry was pulled out, he laid his hand on his chest to feel for a heartbeat, and that his chest felt like a bowl of oatmeal. Isn’t that right, Bob?”

  “As best I remember it, yes sir.”

  “It’s difficult for me to reconcile how both of these things are so, even though it appears to be the case.” He nodded at Bob. “Okay, Bob. Let’s figure out what caused the accident in the first place and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  Bob nodded, glad to be dismissed, and stood up to leave.