I Woke Up Dead at the Mall Read online

  It felt as if the mall had just grown ten degrees colder. The knot of fear in my head was sort of like brain freeze. I didn’t think my day could get any worse after dying all alone (in this dress), but it had.

  Bertha looked down at her sad shoes. “You’ll see your family at your funeral and say your final goodbyes then. We don’t haunt the living. We let go, and we move on.”

  “Are you completely and totally sure that I was murdered? Really?” I repeated it louder, harsher, but she waved me away, which I hated as much as I hated having my personal space invaded.

  “I’ll meet you and the others tomorrow at our Staples store, after breakfast. You should take a bed in the Crate and Barrel for now. That serves as the girls’ dormitory for you and your roomie! Well. Good night!”

  She started to click-clack away, but I called after her. “Okay, if you won’t tell me who killed me, at least tell me what I should do now.”

  She sighed, and it looked like she was trying to remain upbeat while dealing with a fool.

  “Shop! Help yourself to whatever you need or want. Food, clothing, books, and so on. Crate and Barrel has some lovely throw pillows. You may be here for…a while. Oh. And everything is free.”

  Welcome to the Mall of the Dead.

  chapter two

  fill in the blanks

  My Bracelet Is Red

  Like the Lipstick on a Movie Star

  DEATH QUESTIONNAIRE

  Please be completely honest in your answers so that your death coach can help you to move on. We don’t know what you did back on earth. We only know how you died. We don’t know when you’re lying. But you do.

  Please note: You will not move on to heaven or hell. Heaven and hell are back on earth. Your mission now is to return there.

  chapter three

  help yourself to unlimited stuff

  When I was alive, I didn’t really care all that much about clothes. Well, I cared a medium amount. But right now, I had an urgent need to stop looking like a walking slice of fruit. I began exploring the stores available to me.

  Our floor (the Floor of the Dead?) surrounded the dizzying mallverse below. I leaned over the railing and peered into the semidarkness. The roller coasters off to my right were fast asleep. Looking around this top floor, every store was brightly lit and fully stocked. But there were no cashiers, no salespeople or customers. The only people I saw were those slow-walking ones who didn’t speak, and they never went inside any of the stores.

  I took a small wheelie suitcase and roamed the stores, seeking the necessities of life. Or death. I headed directly into Anthropologie. Hello, soft dark skinny jeans. Hello, pale blue cotton V-neck T-shirt with no words on it. Goodbye, uncomfortable, ugly, unnatural gown. Hello, strappy sandals. I don’t mind (too much) that you show my mango pedicure. Goodbye, old-lady pearl earrings. Hello, dangly silver wires. Hello, big, shiny trash can. Would you like a whole lot of mango chiffon?

  I was starting to feel like myself again.

  Now that I was dead, could I see my mother again? Where was she? Why didn’t she come greet me? I looked around as if she might be sneaking up behind me. It was a little hard to realize how much I ached to see my mom. I needed her now, more than ever.

  “Mom,” I whispered. “We’re both dead now. Please come see me? Please help me?”

  Thinking about her, I was suddenly bursting with a million questions about life, death, afterlife, God, war, ghosts, reincarnation, karma, heaven, angels, Mount Olympus, my hamster, my cat, recycling, to be or not to be, and why good things happened to bad people. I was dead. I could have the answers to everything. Tomorrow, with Bertha, I could unlock the secrets of the universe. At the Staples store.

  At Ulta, I unleashed my hair from its windswept prison. I found a brush that promised to promote shine and health in my hair. The giant mirror magnified my face to the tenth power, which is always terrifying, so I flipped it around to life-size.

  What a very normal, alive activity this was. I let myself fall into a trance as I brushed and brushed. I even started humming a little bit, which helped break the huge block of silence that surrounded me. I studied the reddish-brownish straight-as-a-pin hair that I inherited from Mom. My skin was littered with a few faint freckles that you had to be thisclose to me to see. My eyes were a grayish blue/bluish gray. I stared at my reflection and brushed. Who killed me? Why? How? And did the police catch them already? (Please!)

  Backing out of the store, I bumped into a young woman who was one of the mall walkers I had seen before. She had long straw-blond hair and was wearing a baggy oatmeal-colored dress.

  “Sorry,” I said. But she just kept walking, staring straight ahead.

  “Okay then!” I shouted. “Great talking with you. Catch you on the next lap.”

  She didn’t even slow down. Just kept walking.

  I sat down on a bench and watched the mall walkers. The next person to pass by was a woman dressed in an embarrassing Goth Girl outfit. Black hair, lips, nails, clothes, and enough eyeliner to circle the globe. Oh, honey.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “How’s it going?”

  She didn’t slow down either. Next up was a guy dressed in some kind of wizardy/Game of Thrones robe, but I let him keep walking. There was a long, oppressive silence. But then I saw him. A boy. Fresh-scrubbed, like a kid who lived on some wholesome farm. But his face held a stony sadness that took my breath away. He kept coming toward me.

  “Hey!” My voice was unrecognizably deep. It felt like sandpaper in my throat. “Just keep walking! Okay? Keep walking!” But he stopped, right in front of me. His vacant eyes fixed on me. Sort of.

  “What?” I asked him, as if I were daring him to utter a single word.

  The zombie boy’s mouth dropped open, just like The Scream. His mouth got so big, I sort of thought it might reach the floor. But then he let out a small cry, followed by two words: “No…more…”

  He looked up to the ceiling as his face turned to ash. Then his body, his arms, his legs, all dissolved into ash. He was, ever so briefly, a sculpture of ash suspended in the air. And then the ashes dropped to the floor. He was gone. The air smelled faintly like someone had just blown out birthday candles.

  I wanted to scream-cry-run, scream-cry-run, scream-cry-run. But I didn’t. I closed my eyes. Tight.

  I wanted my mom. I wanted her to hug me and tell me that everything would be okay. Wow. I hadn’t let myself long for her in so many years, and now it felt like the need was reaching out from the deepest part of me and taking over. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter.

  Maybe when I opened them, this would all be some fever dream and it would be over. I’d be back at the hotel, with my dad and Karen hovering over me, smiling in relief that I was back with them. It would be like that last scene in The Wizard of Oz. Everyone was worried about me, but now I was okay.

  I opened my eyes and looked in every direction: mall, mall, mall, mall. One huge damn mall. So I closed them again. Obviously this place was way more dangerous than Bertha had let on.

  “Murdered.” The word flashed like a beacon inside my head. Murdered. Why? Who? Why? I spoke out loud but very quietly. “I want to get out of here. I want my dad. I want my life. I want my room. I want my music, my stuffed animals, and my phone, and everything else. I even want pop quizzes and paper cuts. Help. Please.”

  I wasn’t exactly praying. Just talking. “Mom. Mommy? Are you out there somewhere? Can you hear me? Please, please help me.”

  Bertha’s words ricocheted in my skull: I had to finish the unfinished business of my life. Then again, my life was nothing but unfinished business. I was unfinishable.

  Whatever had been sustaining me so far disintegrated. The breathless shock of the new (dead) world I inhabited took a damn breath, as something inside me fell away, fragile as a robin’s egg, and I let myself tumble into tears. It was a deep, hard cry that rattled my shoulders, jackknifed my knees, and sliced me in two. I was dead. Someone had hated me enough to kill me. I felt as thin and
lost as that boy who had just turned to ash.

  The sound coming from me was a kind of keening, terrible song. Eventually I formed the word “help.” Not very loud, not very clear, but on and on. Help, help, help. I have no idea how long it took me to figure out that someone was sitting next to me, whispering, “Shhhhhh. I’ll help you.”

  I felt a cool hand on my left shoulder. It belonged to the straw-blond girl.

  “I’ll help you,” she said. “I’m awake now. Can you take me to Bertha?”

  I jumped to my feet and let out a small scream. The other walkers kept walking, but this one was smiling at me. I stood there, openmouthed and stupid.

  “Who are you?” I asked, and yes, I did sound scared. “What do you want?”

  “I’m Alice,” the girl said. “I just want to sit down.” And she did.

  “I’m Sarah,” I answered.

  “You just died. Is that right?” she asked. She looked extra-happy to be sitting. So I nodded and sat down too.

  Alice didn’t seem dangerous. She seemed pretty tame.

  She was staring at the stores around her as if she had just landed on a space station.

  “I’m fine. Really.” I used my best fake I’m-an-electronic-device voice so that I sounded more together than I felt.

  Alice was a bit dreamy, staring at her surroundings. “The last time I was awake, this was a shopping mall. But it seems bigger now. Shinier. I don’t recognize any of the names.”

  “The last time you were awake?” I asked. I didn’t need to fake calm anymore. I was calm. And curious.

  “I died a long time ago. I’ve awakened twice before. This time I really need to move on. I need to”—her eyes searched the stores, as if they carried the right words—“get over it.” Those were the words she settled on. “I have to get over it all and move on. This walking is the worst thing in the world, believe me.”

  (Here’s what I didn’t say: I just saw one of the mall walkers burst into ash, so the walking part might not be the worst thing in the world. I didn’t say that because she looked way too fragile to hear it.)

  I finally took a moment to really look at her. She should have been a figure in some tea-colored picture from Ellis Island or a PBS show my dad would want me to watch.

  “When did you die?” I asked.

  She smiled knowingly. “I died in 1933. And Bertha died twenty-two years before me.”

  “You died in the Great Depression. Bertha has been dead for over a century. I died today. We’re all here at the mall,” I said, just needing to work with some big, fat headline facts.

  “Would you mind if we went to the girls’ dormitory?” she asked. “I’ve been walking since 1999. I could use a rest.”

  The mall was dark and dreamlessly quiet, simulating nighttime, I guess. I wondered if it would do this darkness thing every night. Alice stopped in Talbots and bought (well, took) the most awful granny nightgown I’ve ever seen. Inside Crate & Barrel we made our way past patio furniture and found a collection of beds with an excessive number of blankets and throw pillows on top of them. Did Bertha put them there?

  “Perfect!” Alice exclaimed. She was pulling back the covers on a four-poster bed and settling in. “I’ve always loved sleeping here,” said Alice.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “No nightmares,” she replied. “We dead have no dreams of any kind. And after my long, walking nightmare, this is just what I need: it’s like a little taste of death. Or at least what I used to think death would be like.”

  Okay then.

  “Good night, Sarah!” Alice called out, half breath/half voice. “Sleep well.”

  I’d never been good at falling asleep in strange places. And this was by far the strangest place I’d ever been. So here I was. In bed. Awake.

  Closing my eyes, I stared into the darkness before me. To be or not to be. To sleep, perchance to dream.

  At the mall.

  chapter four

  my so-dull life

  (please feel free to skip ahead. nothing to see here.)

  This has to be some kind of mistake. No one would ever want to kill me. I wasn’t that interesting.

  I wasn’t good. I wasn’t bad. I wasn’t tall. I wasn’t short. I was that blurry face in the crowd shots. “Have a great summer” was written a hundred times in my yearbook. And that is exactly what I wanted. Here’s what I didn’t want: to be different, special, weird, odd, or in any way abnormal. Wish granted.

  My parents made a lot of money when my dad invented the super-big plastic lids for Starbucks. Hey, somebody had to invent them. After that, they had so much cash that they didn’t need to work anymore. But Dad loved work, so he and Mom started a consulting company for other people who wanted to invent stuff. (Are you totally bored yet? I am.) And guess what? That business made a ton of money. They were just money magnets. Dad used to joke that he was the brains but Mom was the magic. The clients all liked her best. And so did I.

  Mom was truly magical. She always seemed to know what I was thinking before I thought it, and she knew what was going to happen to me. She scooped me away from dangers with lightning speed. When she came to my preschool to volunteer, I showed her off to everyone like she was a movie star. She was pretty. She was kind. She smiled by default.

  On my first day of kindergarten, she took a set of Hello Kitty bandages, gave each kitty a little kiss, and then stashed them in my backpack.

  “In case you get hurt today, these already have my kisses to make you feel better,” she explained. Sure enough, at recess I skinned my knees bloody. Through my tears, I insisted that the nurse use the Hello Kitty bandages, the ones with Mom’s kisses on them. How did Mom know that I’d need them? She was magical.

  Me, I was a little kid. I ran around Washington Square Park. I played piano. Blah blah blah. Okay, here’s one exciting thing: when I was six years old, I woke up from a dream where I saw a lady in a green coat waiting for a subway, but she was wobbling and starting to lose her balance. She was in danger and just about to fall onto the tracks when I woke up.

  And then that day I saw a lady in a green coat, waiting right near Mom and me on the subway platform at West Fourth Street.

  “She’s going to fall,” I said to Mom. She looked kind of confused, so I said it again, really loud. “She’s going to fall!” Lots of people heard me.

  Sure enough, the lady started wobbling, just like I knew she would. And two guys and a teenage girl grabbed her as she started to lurch forward. They caught her. It turns out she was pregnant, with a really big belly. But instead of thanking the people who saved her, she yelled at them for being too rough. Go figure.

  That night at bedtime Mom hugged me extra tight. “You knew. When that lady almost fell, you knew. Sometimes I know things too.”

  “You do? Is that part of your magic?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if it’s magic,” she half-laughed. “And it certainly doesn’t happen all the time. But it does happen. I call it the Knowing. Have you known things before, sweetheart?”

  I sat up in bed, ready to release my one tiny secret to my favorite person in the world. “Yes! I knew when Sam was going to fall off the monkey bars, but I was too scared of him to say anything. And he fell,” I confessed.

  “And he’s okay now,” Mom assured me. “I knew when that big client of ours was going to tell us some very bad news. The Knowing is a gift. And you got it from me.”

  It was nighttime, but hearing her say that made me feel like I was bathed in sunshine. I got this Knowing thing from her. We were connected, and we always would be.

  “Do we get to know everything in the whole world?” I asked, not sure if that would be good or bad.

  “Sorry, no. For me it’s just something that comes and goes. It was stronger when I was a kid.” She spoke as if she were just figuring that out now. “I wonder what changed.”

  We knew things. Sometimes. We had the Knowing, Mom and I.

  I didn’t understand it completely. I still don’t. Bu
t that night I thought it was great.

  Of course, it wasn’t always great. In fact, sometimes it was terrible. I knew when my favorite teacher, who was pregnant, was about to lose the baby, and I couldn’t stop crying because I knew that it had already begun and she wouldn’t be able to stop it.

  Sometimes, the Knowing gave me a really bad stomachache, so Mom would cradle me in her arms and sing very quietly so that only I could hear her. She loved the Beatles and made sure that I heard every album while I was a baby. That night she sang “Blackbird.”

  And then this happened: It was a Tuesday morning in summer. I was seven years old, and I woke up knowing something very bad was about to happen to Mom. I could hear glass shattering, metal screeching. I ran out of my room, leapt downstairs, and found Dad sipping coffee.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “She’s meeting with our new client. Apparently they like her better than me!” He half-laughed, but that changed in a blink. I proceeded to throw the biggest tantrum of my life, and I was never really a tantrum thrower.

  “I don’t understand, sweetie. What’s wrong?”

  “Get her back! Now! Right now!” I screamed. I pounded his chest. “Call her! Get her home! Now!”

  He reached for the phone, maybe just to calm me down. But it was too late.

  Mom was in a taxi that was stopped at a red light. The light turned green and the taxi started to go. But some asshole in a Hummer was running his red light and slammed right into the taxi. Right into the passenger seat. Right into my mom.

  She was broken beyond repair. She lingered for a few days. Dad took her off life support. She lasted for one more day, and then she left.

  I stopped talking. I cried. I made sounds but no words.

  That night I dreamed about her so intensely, so vividly, I swore she was there in my room with me. She felt real and solid as she tried to console inconsolable me.