As If I Could Forget Those Years

There were many things that Annie Marchetta was proud of.

Her good looks and the way that she could deal with people were only two things that were part of a very long list of personal achievements and accomplishments. Nobody could ever say that Annie was ordinary.

But another thing she was immensely proud of was her gift of foresight. It could not be compared with being able to see clearly into the future, but she always had the right inkling. She could predict the scores for baseball so accurately to the point where her father started placing bets as according to her predictions. This resulted in a new pair of shoes for every time she was right. And she was never wrong.

She loved and relished this gift of strong womanly intuition and made many profits out of it. Her fathers’ betting skills excelled and Annie’s mother grew to rely on her daughter for an accurate weather forecast on the days when great out door dinners were organised. Her mother called it her gift of foresight and it soon became a private joke between the whole family as they laughed and shared the delight of having a daughter with a special gift.

Yet there were two things in her life that Annie did not foresee.

Her falling in love and her death.

Annie had never considered death as a factor of her existence. She knew that it was something that would without a doubt happen, after all the only two things in life that were certain according to Mark Twain were taxes and death. But Annie lived such a life of excess and grandeur that she never thought that all of this might be over some day. She had seen people die; it wasn’t as if this was a rare sight for her. She had been in the very same room when her grandmother took her last breath, but Annie knew that dying was undignified and she vowed that she would never end up dying in the same way that her pitiful grandmother had.

After her grandmother died Annie shared this thought with her mother and three weeks later Annie Marchetta was run over by a car.

It is sad in a way that once you are a dead body lying in a morgue you suddenly are a nobody. The people who examine you have no idea who you are. Of course they know your name and what it is exactly that killed you and they may be able to cut you open and see the heart that used to pump the warm blood around your body, but they will not be able to see the emotions that used to fill that heart. They will not know what thoughts occupied your brain and what dreams and ambitions you had. They may know your blood type but they have no idea what made your blood boil or who made the blood rush to your cheeks in the form of a blush.

The doctors who were in charge of Annie’s body had no idea what it was that she had to live for, and that was a crying shame, even more so when considering that she died at the tender age of twenty, sixteen days before Christmas.

There had been many great moments in Annabel Rowan Marchetta’s life. For example the day she won a beauty pageant or the day when she was presented with her very first pair of high heels, or her graduation from high school where her whole family was present, or the day when her face was on the front cover of a magazine. All these were wonderful moments in the life of a girl who still had so much to live for because she was in love.

The boy who was the object of Annie’s affection was a boy by the name of Charles Wilhern. He was the older brother of Markus Wilhern, a boy the same age as Annie and who was destined to marry her thus with pleasing both his parents and Annie’s parents. But things rarely work out as we want them to. The Marchetta’s, who envisaged a golden future for Annie, had to learn this the hard way.

Annie had met Charles the day she first came to the Wilhern house on the Upper East Side. She had heard much about Markus’ good looks and had heard relatively little about his older brother. So when Charles opened the door for the Marchetta’s Annie instantly fell for him, thinking he was Markus. Her disappointment when she was introduced to the actual Markus was great and her heart stung a little, having always been slightly impulsive when it came to the opposite sex. But Markus was nothing on Charles, Annie declared in her mind.

So Annie did what any girl who was engaged to a man whom she was not in love with would do.

She carried on seeing Charles in secret.

No one knew of course, not even Annie’s closest friends. The Vietnamese housemaid Bun had an inkling of course, but she valued her young charge and job too much to ever divulge her suspicions to the lady of the house.

Annie kept hiding behind tales of parties and etiquette lessons; her family hardly ever saw her with Markus unless they were forced together. It was a shame really because Markus genuinely liked Annie and for his family and their good name he would have happily married her. But he always knew that somehow her heart did not belong to him.

The twenty two year old Charles Edward Wilhern was the only boy who could ever hold that claim of being the person upon who Annie Marchetta bestowed her heart. The world only existed so long as Charles did too and when he was not around the colours seemed duller and the music she heard on the radio were sad songs about loss. Yet when he was with her it was as if they were the only two people on the face of the whole globe. When she was with him all her dreams seemed so much nearer and physical. She could dare to have dreams which she had been warned of, she could dream of having that simple life that was a taboo in her own family.

With Charles was allowed to have dreams that allowed her to fly, and when he told her that he loved her that was exactly what Annie did. Her emotions flew high and she had never felt more alive than in that single moment.

But gravity held her down in the place that was a lifeless city without Charles. She was constantly pulled back down from her dreams by her duty and obligations to her family. She had to get married, but it was not to the boy who was everything to her.

The wedding to Markus was set for the second Friday of the New Year, and it was then with a panic that Annie realised it was already the first day of December.

She was kept busy over the Christmas season with arrangements for the day that would end everything for her. Annie had to choose dresses for her bridesmaids, decide on flower arrangements and every other trivial detail that came into conjunction with what was supposed to be the most beautiful day of a woman’s life. Annie had wondered if her mother knew about her and Charles and therefore all the wedding preparations were only a way to keep her busy and out of Charles’ way.

But Annie had always been headstrong and somehow she still managed to see Charles occasionally. They had agreed to see each other less to not raise suspicions but he had invited her to a party of one of his friends so they could be together away from the usual crowd.

It was sixteen days before Christmas.

On the pretence that it was a party of one of her closest girlfriends Annie was able to leave the house, dressed immaculately in a dream dress of flowing red fabric. As she got into the cab she knew that something about the party that evening was going to be special, and she drove into the city lights with optimism.

She never made it inside the party to find out that Charles was going to ask her to marry him and run away with him. She never was going to see him standing in the room full of people, waiting for the one person that made everything worth it.

But he still saw her. He saw her lying on the icy road. It was nearly impossible to tell the difference between the red blood and her red dress. By the time he had run over to her everything was too late. He never got the chance to tell her that he loved her again.

Annie never had the chance of being able to have a second short at life. She could only live on in the space between helping others and watching Charles self-destruct. During her first years as the between aid she would spend every possible day with Charles, following him and watching him. She knew it wasn’t good for her, and it wasn’t good for him. She had a feeling that because he could still feel her spiritual presence he could not move on.

She learnt to distance herself, she learnt to only ever see him once a year and always on that day when he had told her that he loved her.

He never married and he never had children. The life he had after Annie held a sense of recklessness in it, his permanent course seemed to be stuck on self-destruction. She was glad that he never married; she would have resented that fact. But she had always hoped that when the time came, she would be able to see him again and they would be together. But she resented this idea. She didn’t want to be up here with him, she wanted to be on earth with him. She wanted to live life with him. She couldn’t cope with just watching him. It was never enough.

The day that Charles died was the day that Annie had been dreading for years and it was the day that broke her heart clean in two. Watching him destroy himself had been bad enough, but then to die in such a pitiful way in a motel room at the start of October where his body was found five days later, was almost too much to handle.

She waited and waited for him to come up to see her. She kept hoping but it was all in vain.

The years felt bitter and heavy; they held her down and gave her no peace. She was always awake, she could not sleep and so her thoughts plagued her. But she had a job and she had to follow this through. It was the only way to be rid of everything and move onto a place that was different from being stuck in the limbo that had tortured her so.

She still had her dreams, and they couldn’t tie her down to this place. She would do her job and maybe some form of absolution would come in the shape of Alex Gaskarth.

There was always that faith.