Felicia

Felicia sat down on the boulder at the edge of the mountain. She thought about a thing or two, then thought about God.

Good place to do that.

Especially since she had just pushed her brother off the mountaintop.

She had watched him fall she didn’t know how many feet, but down half the face of the mountain, and the mountain was 8,000 feet high.

After a while, she could not see his falling body, so she did not see him hit the ground.

She had then stepped back from the mountain’s edge, and turning, took hold of the handles of his wheelchair. She pushed the chair off the mountain, too.

It went end over end; and after she lost sight of the chair itself, she saw light winking off it for a considerable length of time; then, nothing.

Before Felicia had pushed him, Carl had raised his arm, bending it back directly over his head to search for her hand. She took his in both of hers.

“Thank you, Felicia,” he had said. “You’re very brave.”

She had chosen not to say anything, because really, anything there was to say to her brother had been said over a lifetime together. She loved and adored him. He knew that. He loved and adored her. She knew that.

She had run full-speed toward the edge of the mountain, the wheelchair rattling over the rutted ground, and as she heard Carl take in a huge breath, she tilted the wheelchair as if it were a wheelbarrow, and out and away Carl flew.

He had not wanted to be pushed off the mountain while in his chair. He did not want the chair to accompany him downward in any way.

He had wanted to feel, for however long gravity would allow, total freedom from it. Just him. Carl. Flying free.

Since he still had use of his arms, he could have rolled himself to the edge and off; but he had feared that while he wholeheartedly wanted to fly, an animal instinct he couldn’t tame might devour his will.

Further, he knew that there was a boulder-choked ledge 15 feet down. If there wasn’t sufficient outward thrust, his body might not clear the ledge. Wouldn’t that be a pathetic mess for him, and for Felicia, to see him plump onto the ledge and have to make a torturous way over the boulders to the edge and off?

Imagine that scenario. “No, Carl,” Felicia would call from 15 feet above, “push yourself to the right. There you go. Now, work yourself up and over that tallish rock there. Good. Now, push yourself a tiny bit more and—good! YOU DID IT, CARL!”

So, no: He couldn’t rely on his arm strength to propel him past that ledge. He’d need Felicia—to do exactly what she had just done.

His flight would more accurately be called a plunge, but still (as Carl had reasoned a week before), it was still flying, it was still freedom, it would still be an amazing feeling, if only from the ribcage up.

After she had lost sight of him, Felicia spotted the bottom-of-the-snowman-shaped boulder at the edge of the mountain. She had walked over to it. Carefully. She was right on the edge.

She would sit there. Catch her breath, check in on her feelings—a phrase she had heard a celebrity on a talk show use, and which she had liked.

She discovered she felt sorrow; then segued into thinking big picture—another phrase she liked—about all this that had happened; about all that she and Carl had decided was the best thing for him; and thinking that this—this ending—would be the best thing for Carl led her to open her mind to God; more particularly, to His strange and mysterious ways.

Like, why would the idea of an assisted suicide, one that most people would find totally bonkers, land in their heads like seed and take root and bloom into what just happened? How was that not only good, but the best thing for Carl? Carl believed that the idea had come from God Himself.

Two nights before, when they were in a knotty pine motel room on the side of the highway, Carl, in his bed, tucked-in, she dropping herself exhaustedly on the bed opposite, had said:

“This is what I’ve thought, Felicia: As this will be a loving act, and as God is love, then this is God in action—loving action, Felicia. We are the instruments and proof of his loving Will.”

“Okay,” she had said, hoping this wouldn’t take long, his little speech, another little speech in another little town, as they made their way up, up, and always up, the astoundingly lengthy apron of this impossibly tall mountain. There were no mountains in Florida, and Carl had wanted a mountain.

“And,” Carl continued, “as God is in all things, and is all things, because he is the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, there is nothing that is not God. So this thought, this desire, for how I must die, and that I must, is God itself.”

“I see,” Felicia had said, rubbing her eyes, and she did, more or less. This was a lot, and today’s drive was particularly long, and grueling, but Carl was especially good at making things clear to her.

Carl had been a believer. Which pissed her off, because she wasn’t, and not because of the accident that had put Carl in his chair four years ago, when, as he drove to work, he was T-boned by a teen driver on her cell phone.

No, she didn’t believe because she just never had. The idea of a Being going to the trouble of creating this—all this that was—and deciding, This is what I want—had always sounded preposterous to her. Like, take the shape of a trash truck, she had thought. That’s what He was going for? And the idea for, and fact of, trash itself; and the fact of a coelacanth and the endlessness of stars; and the facts of a giraffe and a football; of cold and hot; of a doorknob and a fox; and the idea of color and the fact of color; of the name John; of lines; of distance; of bacteria and the idea of north; of fear and want; and braces on teeth, and billboards; and a million kinds of beauty; and a billion kinds of ugly; and of change rattling in a homeless guy’s Big Gulp cup—and that there was a reason for all these things—a desire for them, a force, that could—and would—produce them in such variety—and in such uniqueness—how could it all be wanted?

Why would all such things be wanted, in their particular shape, density, gravity, look, and filling up of space? Why were such things an outgrowth, a product, of force; of any kind of Let there be this. Let there be that?

So, she had once thought, in thinking along these lines, and in thinking about action—action she had seen—God wants a squirrel to be surprised by a cat and dart into the street to get hit by the trash truck, and the poor thing trying to live—and looking ridiculous as it struggled to get up and walk—and the trash man hurrying down to see what he might do for it, only to break his ankle as he slipped in the squirrel’s viscera—God wanted all this; had gone to the trouble of designing all this preposterousness—a word she hadn’t known as a child, but did now, as she reflected on the mountaintop about her once-upon-a-time reflection; her once-a-upon time big picture reflection.

But now, as she watched a hawk hovering in the air about twenty feet away from her, the hawk sizing her up; and now, dipping a wing and zipping away from her down a steep canyon of blue, she wondered why her brother had always given “the Lord” such regard and had actually gone to church “to worship Him”—even as his body failed.

Carl’s spirit was always willing, even as his flesh turned weak. Turned useless. Use-less.

“The Lord,” Carl had said last night, last night in the little motel room in the little town at the foot of this mountain, “will forgive me for taking my life. I know He will. Because He shaped me. He shaped my mind. He knows my limits because He gave them to me. And I’m at my limit. I can’t take anymore of life. And anyway, as I want to go to Him, as I desire being with Him, wouldn’t He, in fact, praise me? Praise my choice?”

Felicia had sat on the edge of her bed, looking at Carl, listening to him. She had gotten him ready for bed and had tucked him in, the wheelchair studying her from the corner.

She wanted to leap up and slap Carl for saying such shit. She wanted to punch him right in the face for saying such shit.

But she got into bed and said good night to Carl as if it were any other night, as if she weren’t going to push him off the top of a mountain tomorrow morning.

They had had breakfast. At Denny’s. Like hundreds of thousands were no doubt doing across the country at that very moment. They had listened to classic rock on the way upward.

They had chatted about whatever—Carl showing nothing but peaceful resolve; no nerves; no second thoughts—as Felicia pushed him up the switchback trail.

Quite often, she had had to stop for breath, or for some water, or a bite from one of her several Clif Bars. When she extended her water bottle or a freshly unwrapped Clif Bar to him, he had declined with a little shake of the head. “No, thanks.”

Strange, Felicia thought, as she surveyed the ocean of blue sky above and surrounding her, as if she were at the bottom of it, though not at the very bottom—Carl would be at the very bottom—that two people who grew up together, 10 months apart, getting the same parents and, more or less, the same experiences, the same nurture—a Carl word—should end up with such different views on such a fundamental issue like, Is there a God? And if there is—why does He do what He does—or not do what any reasonable and kind person would seek to do to help another?

Somewhere on the highway, as they rolled upward to the place where the end would begin, with Carl enjoying his Sprite that she’d gotten him in the gas station convenience store, they had fallen into a conversation—a re-visited one, really—about the cops, because sooner than later, they’d identify his body from dental records, and sooner than later, they’d come knocking on the door and saying, “You Felicia Donnelly?”

And Felicia would say, “I am.”

There would be, Carl and she believed, an either long-drawn-out thing—an investigation and trial—or a not so long drawn-out thing, which Felicia would survive. Because the cops would discover that Carl had full use of his arms; and therefore, that he could have rolled himself to the edge of the cliff and off, and, not impossibly, with enough strength to get his body out past the boulder-choked ledge. They would never be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Felicia had done any more than she would tell them she had done—and that’s roll him to the top, per his wish, and let him decide what he truly wanted to do.

She’d be set free.

And freed from Carl, which is what Carl had wanted, but not Felicia. She adored her brother. Needed him. Would miss him terribly the rest of her life now.

So, she was not free at all. She was bereft. Confined to sorrow. In fact, she didn’t feel any sense of Felicia any longer. Just sorrow. She was sorrow.

She could, of course, jump; jump from the top here and join her brother in death.

Why not do that?

She stood up.

She looked at the ocean of blue. She peered down the face of the mountain, to the very bottom of the ocean of blue, where Carl’s body now lay.

She did not believe, as her brother had, that there was any kind of afterlife. There was no magical place where the two would end up together again. She would have a terrifying fall—not a flight—down the face of the mountain and would splat and die. And that would be it, and there’d be no Carl, just as there wouldn’t be now, in her living. But in living, she’d avoid the terror of the fall and the unimaginable pain of her body going splat, and no Carl coming and lifting her up.

She turned and started down the mountain.

So. Her unbelief would save her—as Carl’s belief had liberated him.

The scenario with the cops and the justice system played out more or less as she and Carl had anticipated it would, except there was never a trial. The prosecutors saw that they’d never get a conviction, so why even try? They’d never get 12 people to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Felicia had pushed her brother off the top of a mountain. Sure, she might have been at fault for not trying to stop her brother from doing what he wanted to do, but she herself did not roll him off the mountain. He did it. He was able to do so, and he did.

Felicia went on to live another 19 years in the home Carl had bought for them a dozen years before, thanks to the money Carl had so successfully embezzled from his software company. But it was okay to do that, Carl had told her, because the head of the company was a pederast—of which Carl was sure, given the way he saw the man look at little boys all the time. Had to be a pederast, Carl told her, so, he must be punished.

In the last 19 years of her life, Felicia would travel to see famous places and famous things; to eat wonderful meals; to teach seniors at the senior center how to sew and do macramé. She had rescued various cats and dogs.

She knew joy.

And then one day, in the produce section at her local Ralphs, she slipped on a banana peel—and this is not a joke: it’s the truth—and she fell and banged her head on the edge of the avocado display cart, got a brain bleed, was triaged rather too lazily and quickly, and died from the bleed.

There was no one close enough to her to know what to do with her body.

But the lovely woman at the senior center—Maria—went to the trouble to take on the responsibility of her remains and had them cremated.

Then, Maria went to the further trouble of hiking up the mountain from which, as Felicia had lately begun to tell her (forgetting that years before, she had told Maria what I’ve told you here), she watched Carl make his choice. She had watched Carl roll himself to the edge of the mountain, take a last look around, say, “I love you, Felicia,” and push himself from the chair—and there went her brother, into the blue, a smile on his face.

“It was the most brave and beautiful thing I have ever witnessed in my life,” Felicia had told Maria, also having forgotten that at some point, not too long ago, she had told Maria that a deep, long-term anger at Carl had been the force that drove her to drive him off the mountain. He’d actually been hesitating about doing what he wanted to do. He had said, “No, Felicia! Stop!”

But, as Maria had thought these last couple of years, who could know what really happened at the top there—and why? Felicia had been losing her mental acuity for quite some time, and should have been a resident at the senior center herself. She said all kinds of things about all kinds of things.

And anyway, as Maria understood on a deep level, any time she guessed at what might have happened and why, she was only revealing how her own mind worked, and what was important for it to think about. She was ever after getting a sense of herself; not Felicia.

Now, at the top of the mountain, Maria took the urn in which Felicia lay, as it were, and in trying to get the lid off, she fumbled the urn and it fell from her hands and down 15 feet to the boulder-choked ledge, where it shattered. The ashes flew out and all over the place; all over the ledge; not any of them leaping up and into the air, in which case, maybe they would have had a chance to finally drop to the spot where Carl had landed.

Maria blinked a long time at the shattered urn, and at the ashes, now sliding off boulder tops and into the nooks and crannies and crevices among them all, disappearing.

What can I do? Maria thought.

Nothing.

She turned around and, feeling bad about this turn of events; feeling unfulfilled; feeling sad about this ending for sweet Felicia—and that this should be her bizarre fate—she made her way down the mountain.

Perhaps if we knew, were privy to, the entirety of Carl and Felicia’s lives, we could come to some reasonable, satisfying conclusions about them; could tell ourselves a reasonable story about What Carl and Felicia Meant in their being born onto the Earth. But we don’t know enough about them to do that, only this which I tell you.

The rest, as Maria would tell you, were she still alive, is just guesswork and making things fit in the particular narrative we like.

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By Paul Crehan