We Were Birds

Astrid takes a deep breath and Fern watches as she stares out the window of the train to the rolling green hills, where beyond one can see the tiniest faint of the sparkle of the ocean.

"I can tell you right now that my story is not tragic. I swear I had a good life before this place, I swear that I wouldn't have changed anything if I could." Astrid looks over to Fern, who sees right then that Astrid is younger than she first thought. The thought almost makes Fern envious. Envious that she can be so sure. "But I can also tell you that because of my life, I am more scared than anyone to what is beyond this place, what is after this waiting room." Fern wants to laugh, for what could this confident girl have to be scared about? Then again, Fern knows more than anyone that appearances cannot be judged. She must listen to this story, she must understand what happened to Astrid if she ever wants to make her own assumptions of the girls character.

Astrid clasps her hands in her lap. "The first thing you should understand is that my mom was, and still probably is, a devout Catholic. God was her greatest companion, she followed His word without complaint, without rebellion. And for a very long while, I did as well. Until I was about thirteen, I too, believed deeply in the Catholic faith. But as I grew older, I started to doubt. My father fell ill and I prayed and he did not get better, not for a long while. My mother said it was just God's plan, that there was some reason for his prolonged sickness, but I started to wonder when nothing good seemed to come from my dad's sickness. The hospital bills continued to pile up and my mother kept praying, even when the money ran out. My father finally got better but it took a long time to pay off the bills. It was then that I simply stopped believing." Then, Astrid looks at Fern. "You're not a deeply religious person, are you."

Fern feels something like shame at not having a faith, something that she's never felt before, not really. "My father...berated often the Christian faith. I never even gave it much thought." Turning to look at Astrid, Fern realizes she had no reason to be upset. Astrid is smiling.

"After I began to give the religion that my mother clung to so eagerly more thought, I realized that I didn't even agree with half the ideas. I never really told her that I no longer believed in what she believed, I just slowly and quietly stopped attending church with her, my once dog-eared and badly worn bible stopped being pulled out as much until it started to collect dust at the bottom of my bookshelf. I abandoned the Church in the same way that I thought it had abandoned me."

The train comes to a slow stop at a station with quite a few people waiting on it. Without a word, Astrid stands up and Fern follows, almost scrambling to keep up with this strange, irridescent girl. Fern's never met anyone like Astrid before. She seems so sure of herself, her life, her death, her everything. How could this girl ever feel abandoned? Astrid looks like the only one who actually fits into death.

When the two young women get off the train, Fern takes a look around. They're near the water, but it's different when she was with Jane and Henry. The water sparkles more green here, the wind that whips is warmer and damper, more tropical. There are even a few palm trees whose large leafs shake and dance in the wind. Astrid doesn't seem in awe of this picture, not like Fern. She's still discovering everything that this place has to offer. Instead, Astrid hops down the stairs from the station, she's bouncing and Fern is running to keep up. Fern knows that Astrid's name means star in some far-off distant language. Astrid is a star herself, a tiny, brightly burning thing.

But as Fern knows, all stars burn out one day.

"My mother was severley disappointed when I stopped accompaning her to Church, but when I asked her if it upset her too much, she shook her head and told me it was my decision." Astrid smiled a tight-lipped smile at that, an ironic smile. "Of course, it wasn't like that put me on a guilt trip or anything, oh no." Her sarcasm is strong, but she continues. "But I just lived my life the way I wanted to in the years to come. My younger brother still went to Church with my mother, but my father was not as much of a believer. Instead, he stayed at the house with me and those Sunday mornings when my mother and brother were away, my father and I would go on drives around town, sometimes going to the local diner to get chocolate chip pancakes. I'd never been close with my father during my childhood, but I found I loved spending time with him."

Fern nods once. "You're lucky," she says. Astrid looks at her for a moment as if she's about to ask something, but holds her tongue.

She sighs instead. "Then, when I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. I'd been having headaches and dizzy spells for the longest time, and when I went to the doctor, he said that it had already started to invade other parts of my body." Fern tenses up and waits for Astrid's tears, but they never come. Then again, Fern shouldn't have been waiting at all. She hardly knows this girl but the one thing that is clear is that she already accepted her death. "My mom pushed me to going to Church to pray everyday for forgiveness from God. She honestly believed that it was because I stopped going to Church that I'd gotten sick. Like God had come down to smite me or something." Here, she laughs. She actually laughs.

"So that's how you died?" asks Fern, but Astrid shakes her head.

"No." Here her tone turns wistul and once again, there is regret in her eyes. "I knew I was going to die. There was no way I wasn't going to. The doctors said I had a month, maybe two, to live. They wanted to put me through intensive radiation and chemo therapy, even though the tumors had already spread." Astrid lifts up some of her long, mouse-brown hair to reveal a large bald patch. "My hair started to fall out in strange patches but the worst part was that it made me so sick. It was awful. I wasn't going to live, but they were trying to prolong my life, even though I'd accepted my death." She pauses. "So I decided to take my life, or actually, my death, into my own hands."

"You killed yourself?"

Astrid nods. "I'd been given pain medication and I knew that if I took all the pills, I'd easily die. I wrote a letter to my family explaining that I was in too much pain and was too sick and that I knew I was going to die anyway. I wanted to die on my own terms. So I did." She stops walking and looks around. "But the truth is, when I died, I didn't expect there would be something after. And now that I'm here..." her voice trails off into a choke. Now she looks on the verge of tears. "What will happen to me when I get on that train to go to the Final Stop? What comes after this place for people like me? People who never believed in a God that could make innocent father's sick, a God that could put a family into debt that they had to claw their way out..."

Fern doesn't know what to say. She never even gave it a thought. When she came here, she accepted that this was the way it was. That there was Life and there was Death. That she had finished her chapter in Life and now had moved on. She'd never thought about why there was Death. But now she'd started thinking about it and she couldn't stop. Why had she come here? What was this place? Where had it come from? Why was there a train here? Why were there houses? Was Death created by some all-powerful being or had it always existed, like the mountains or the oceans? Was it magic or science? Or was it neither? The questions, which before had seemed so insignificant in comparison to her goal - finding Quinn - now seemed all-important.

"So what do you think will happen when you get on that train?" Fern finally asks.

Astrid shrugs. "I'll tell you what I'd like to happen. I'd like to go on, just like everyone else. But God says that suicide is a mortal sin. And I can't help but feel like my mom will be very smug when she dies."

"You think this place was created by God?" questions Fern.

"I don't know, what else could it be?" The question is certainly rhetorical, because Fern doesn't have an answer. "I keep having this vision where I get on the train and I go on and suddenly I hit a gray wall. And the entire train continues to move but I just float out of it and I'm stuck here."

Fern looks around, they've walked down to the beach, but she didn't even notice. She slips out of her shoes and feels the sand between her toes. It's different sand. The sand before, with Jane and Henry, spoke of familiar places - home and piping plovers. This sand whispers of far-off places, adventures in the great beyond and the secrets of thousands and thousands of years. A gust of wind blows by and Fern can almost see it: all tropical blues, bright greens and coral pinks. It smells of coconut, banana and salt air. She's never been anywhere like this place. It makes me feel raw and new. "Being stuck here...it wouldn't be so bad, I think," says she.

Sitting down in the sand, Astrid crosses her legs. "You're waiting for someone, that's easy enough to tell. What will happen when you find them. You won't stay here. You'll go on. Everyone does. Me? What could I do. I'd stay here and see people in my life maybe, see them pass through. But if I'm stuck here, I'll watch them all pass by me." Astrid plunges her hands into the sand. When she brings them up, she has fistfulls of sand that she lets slide out a little at a time, like an erratic hourglass. She swallows. "This place seems like Heaven but for people like me, it could be Hell, couldn't it? Like my punishment for ending my own life is to make friends and watch them move on without me."

"But you don't know. What if you go on like everyone else?" asks Fern.

"But what if I don't?"

"What's the harm in trying?"

Astrid stops. "I don't know, really. I just..."

Fern finally sits down next to Astrid and buries her feet in the sand, packing it down over her now submerged toes. Then she puts her hands back and looks up at the sky. Back at the other beach the sky was crystal blue, but here, it is deeper. Warmer. Something else. "Does this place prove that there's some higher being? I don't know, maybe. Does it really matter? No. I think..." Fern stops for a moment. "I think that this place is whatever you want it to be. If you have something you need to fix, Death lets you fix it. You have a second chance here. If you don't want to believe in the God that your mother believes in, don't. If you don't want to think that this could be the end of you, don't. You've been given an opportunity." Fern scrunches up her mouth. "I don't know what I'm trying to say. I was never any good at making people feel better. All I know is this place is giving me the chance that I never had when I was alive. This place is giving me the chance to run after something, someone who I thought had gone to a place I could never follow. I feel like here I have the chance to figure things out that I never was able to when I was alive."

Astrid lies back in the sand and covers her eyes with her arm. "I'm just afraid."

Fern looks down the beach. Very far away she can see the outline of a person. A person who could be Quinn. A person who is not, Fern knows. She just knows it's not him. Where is he? Will she ever find him? What if he's gone on without her? Fern brushes sand off her legs. "So am I. But I can't afford to let my fear stop me."

"Sometimes I feel so sure that I did the right thing and that I could get on that train and go and go and nothing would stop me. But when I'm afraid, I regret it. And then I think, 'Well, what if they found some way to keep the cancer away? What if they found some way to fight it off?' There are so many things I didn't get to do in life. In my gut I know I did the right thing, but I still regret it sometimes. I try not to, because I never used to regret anything."

"My father told me that regret is what makes us human, but I try not to regret anything either."

Astrid looks at Fern carefully. "How did you die?" she asks.

Fern lays back now too and folds her arms across her chest. She thinks about this question for a long time and when she looks at Astrid, she sees Astrid's life ending by her own hand. When she look at the sky, she sees herself, lying on her father's bed, giving up. Was it any different than how Astrid went? Didn't Fern take her death into own hands? She kept saying that she'd finished that chapter of her life, she'd seen all there was to see and now she was moving on.

But...

The same emotion that she and Astrid were just talking about tugs at her heart. This place is perfect. Quinn is somewhere here and soon she'll be with him. There is no reason why she should miss Life at all. This place has everything she's never seen on it.

But it's different. Fern knows that. And for the first time in her life and death, Fern Whitelaw feels true regret.