“In This Life or Another” introduces a man dealing with life in limbo

Chapter One

Rusty, 59
Present day 
The in-between

On what started as a perfectly normal night, Rusty Wilson now lies flat on the floor of the Salt Lick, and the weirdest thing isn’t that he can’t feel anything. Or that outside, a blizzard rages where seconds ago the sky had been shot through with a full moon. Or that the crowded restaurant is now empty. The weirdest thing isn’t even the fact that he’s most likely dead and the start of his afterlife is on the floor of Yvonne’s restaurant. What makes zero sense to Rusty is that his turtle, Ike, is speaking to him.

“You’re a hero,” Ike says.

Rusty rolls his head to the side and comes eye to eye with the turtle. He thinks about the irony of dying the day before his sixtieth birthday, and the bigger irony of it happening right after he’s discovered that his father wishes his brother had lived instead of him. But such is irony, Rusty supposes.

“Actually, it’s not,” the turtle says. “Irony is like when a police station is robbed. Or when a marriage counselor files for divorce.” The turtle makes a snorting sound that might be a laugh. “Kinda funny, you know?” The little reptile turns serious. “This . . .” Ike moves his eyes along the length of Rusty’s prone figure. “This is more unfortunate. And the thing about your dad, well . . . that’s just really sad, you know?”

Rusty eyes the turtle, then turns back to staring at the ceiling. His chest is empty of a heartbeat, and he can’t feel his legs or his fingers or toes. He should be panicking or scared; nothing about this feels right. Instead, he’s numb, disconnected, like he’s taken a sedative.

“Not a sedative.” The turtle sounds apologetic. “Just a bullet.”

Nausea swirls in his stomach, his mouth waters, and Rusty closes his eyes, hoping it will pass. When it does, he opens them again: Ike has moved so close Rusty can make out his tiny nose holes. “So I’m dead.” It’s a statement because it’s really the only thing that makes sense at the moment.

The turtle doesn’t answer.

Rusty inhales and is relieved to see his chest rise. Maybe that’s a good sign.

“I like your positive attitude,” Ike says.

Rusty’s grip on this reality begins to shake, his vision doubles, and he hears raised voices—a little girl’s cries—and feels a pain so intense he can’t breathe. Remorse clogs his throat. He thinks he might be responsible for what that kid tried to do. He’s a failure even in death. He wishes he could cover his ears to block out the screams. “I’d like to move on now, please,” he tells the turtle.

Ike shakes his little diamond-shaped head, and if turtles can look exasperated, then this is it. “Sorry, Rusty, it’s not as easy as all that. There’s still choices to be made, events to review, paths to be taken. And you can’t do anything lying on the floor like that.”

The screams fade, and Rusty feels a rush of disappointment at what Ike is suggesting. The last thing he wants is a review of his life. It wasn’t all that spectacular to begin with; a second showing seems hardly necessary. Right before everything went black, he had the briefest sense of relief that at least he’d die a hero. But seeing as he’s been welcomed by a slightly annoying little turtle and not some pearly gate, he figures it wasn’t enough. Rusty pushes up from the floor. “Well then, let’s get this over with.”

Chapter Two

Rusty, 59
Two hours before

Rusty gives his dad the side-eye. Walt sits in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, a small goat balancing on his thighs. The three of them could be the start of a joke or a new sitcom. Two Men and a Goat. He taps the accelerator, taps it again, then presses down hard. His ’86 Ford F-150’s engine roars, the truck jerks forward, and the goat baas in a tone that suggests Rusty should take it easy.

Like an uninvited pygmy goat has the right to be irritated.

Unless the goat is annoyed at the knocking sound coming from the engine. Because Rusty sure is. He’s let his own truck fall into disrepair, and he’s a beloved local mechanic. Or was, once upon a time. Maybe not the beloved part.

Rusty grits his teeth. The engine is bothersome, but the letter he found only this morning is more so. He glances at the goat. His father brought the animal home without a word to Rusty, who woke up to find it standing in the kitchen, gnawing on his mother’s Bible. Rusty shooed the animal out and was inspecting the thick tome for damage when an old letter, one from his father to his long-dead brother, slipped to the floor.

Rusty shifts in his seat, tension thick in his muscles, and scrunches his nose at the smell of animal that fills the cab. “You can’t take the goat to your doctor’s appointment,” he says.

Walt grunts. “Lucia.” 

“Huh?”

“Her name is Lucia.”

Rusty grips the steering wheel. “Well, Lucia can’t go into the doctor’s office.”

Walt grunts again.

“Why’d you get it, anyway?” His parents had raised dairy cows, chickens, horses, barn cats, and a dog or two. No goats that he can remember. And certainly no goats that had been allowed inside the house.

“She was for sale.”

Rusty sighs, briefly studies his father, who, based on the tangled cloud of white around the base of his skull, hasn’t brushed his hair all day. “I found her eating Mom’s Bible this morning.” The rawness of the letter’s contents is seared behind his eyeballs. He wishes he could ignore his father’s words. He’s certainly too old to let them bother him. 

Walt holds the goat tighter to his chest. “That won’t happen again.”

Dear Gus.

Words appear on the windshield like the opening crawl of most Star Wars movies.

You should be alive. One minute you were there in the window next to your brother, and the next you were gone.

A woman’s voice speaking rapid-fire Italian fills the cab. Walt watches something on his phone, volume turned up to earsplitting. When Rusty glances at the screen, he sees two women caressing a red cashmere sweater. “Mag-li . . .” Walt mimics. “Oni.” His voice lightens. “Mag-li-oni.”

Rusty breathes through his teeth. “Dad, volume, please.”

Walt turns the sound down a hair, and Rusty tries to concentrate on the curves of the mountain road. It’s late on a winter day, and the moon is hole-punched through a darkening sky.

His father’s broken Italian continues, but it doesn’t stop Rusty’s mind from returning to the letter. Walt’s handwriting was small, neat except where the ink was splotched, and Rusty imagined him hunched over, crying as he wrote. He almost stopped reading. It was too raw, not meant for his eyes. Especially after all this time. He almost—almost—folded it up right then.

The firefighters told us it was a miracle Rusty survived. A real miracle would have been if you’d survived.

Rusty recoiled as he read. Fifty-seven years after the fire, his father’s true feelings are a punch he didn’t see coming. Only a miracle if Gus had survived. But is it surprising? Rusty rubs his cheek. A fire tore through their attic bedroom. Rusty lived and Gus was burned into a family legend who’s stalked Rusty his entire life.

“Ascoltami, Lucia!” Walt says, at a decibel that means he did not put in his hearing aids. “Il maglioni è rosso.”

“Dad, what’s with the Italian?”

The phone stops blaring. “I’m taking your mother to Italy.”

Rusty swallows. His mother’s dream was to go to Italy. One day I’ll run around Rome with no agenda, she used to say, laughing at the impossibility of it. Just like Princess Ann in Roman Holiday. She’d imagined a delayed honeymoon in Italy, but with a dairy farm to run and two young boys to raise, life got busy, and tragedy and loss turned dreams into impossibilities. So she’d settled for popcorn and movie nights with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Rusty is hit with an intense and sudden longing to talk to his mom. To get her advice about Walt. She’d know what to say. And she’d know whether Rusty should be more worried about his old man’s mental state, because this—the goat baas—is not normal. Then he thinks of the letter, and his heart hardens.

You were a good brother, and you would have grown up to be a good man. The splotches on the letter thickened. It was as close as Rusty’s ever gotten to seeing his father cry.

“And I’m going to spread her ashes on the Spanish Steps.” There’s a sharpness now to Walt’s voice, one that says, Don’t you dare tell me I can’t.

Heat swipes across Rusty’s cheeks. There was a little nest egg his mother had saved for Italy. A nest egg Rusty depleted in an attempt to pay off debt he’d accrued trying to keep his business afloat. He steals a glance at his father. Tall like Rusty, but with a more slender frame, stooped with age. There’s no way his eighty-eight-year-old father, who wears his bathrobe like a coat, is planning a trip to Italy.

The letter keeps scrolling in his mind.

I think that Rusty is still here because he’s meant to live a really big life, do something important, maybe life-changing, or miraculous, something heroic. Otherwise, what was the point of losing you?

His father’s words are lodged firmly inside his brain, and on the eve of Rusty’s sixtieth birthday, they carry particular weight. Because when Rusty takes stock of his years, they add up to nothing short of small, boring, and insignificant.

Walt’s voice invades his thoughts. “And I’m bringing Gus too.”

Rusty squeezes his jaw. Walt has lived the last fifty-seven years as though he burned up right alongside his son. His heart compresses, wringing out any sympathy that remains for his father, who carries the dead like Charon crossing the Styx.

“You can’t go to Italy.”

“Your mother saved the money—”

“I’m not taking you.” He shouldn’t speak to his father this way, but anger spikes his heart and loosens his tongue.

Walt sniffs. “I’ll go by myself. Yvonne has a travel agent friend who can help, and it’s what Mary would have wanted.” Walt strokes the goat’s sides. “And Gus too.”

Rusty is boiling inside. Gus. Gus. Gus. His brother is never far from Walt’s mind. Gus would have done this. Gus would have wanted that. According to Walt, Gus would have done all the right things; that’s the kind of legacy you get to have when you die a hero at five years old. Rusty squeezes the steering wheel, annoyed with himself. He’s too old to be jealous of a ghost. The goat noses his shoulder. Rusty swats it away. “You can’t go to Italy.” He doesn’t want to tell him about the money. Doesn’t want the look that Rusty is all too familiar with. The one he now knows means he’s a disappointment because he’s not his brother. But the letter has dusted off old feelings of inadequacy—even shame—and they wriggle like worms inside his chest.

Walt returns to silence, and for several miles, with the winter evening hardening around them, Rusty wrestles with the questions that live in a secret cave in his heart. Do you wish Gus had lived instead of me? Do you blame me for the fire?

“Dad”—his own voice surprises him—“a letter slipped out of Mom’s Bible.” He’s not accustomed to having honest conversations with Walt; Mary was the one to instigate those. Probably why there’s been so much silence between them this past year without her. He breathes in and finds he can’t stuff it down. He wants to know the truth. “It was from you to Gus and—”

Walt points out the windshield. “You should give that guy a ride.”