So Long, Chester Wheeler(21)

Only after we ended the call did I realize I’d had the chance to tell her she’d need to fly home—that I wasn’t staying on—and I’d gotten distracted and let it go by.

I sat on the arm of the horrible sofa and pulled up the internet browser on my phone. I typed in “Can someone with lung cancer fly?”

I clicked on the first article.

The answer was a qualified—but only slightly qualified—yes.



It’s not my intention to mislead anyone with this part of the story, but I’m at a loss regarding how best to report this next happening.

When I woke up the next morning, I went over to the house next door and found Chester Wheeler dead in his bed.

Except that never really happened at all.

In reality I went home that night, fell asleep, and the part I just described was a vivid dream. But what a dream! It was so perfectly realistic, so detailed. While the whole thing was playing out I was positive it was real, and happening just as it appeared to be happening. Usually dreams have an element of dreamlike weirdness to them, even though you might not see that until you wake up and look back on the details of it. This dream followed the down-to-earth reality of waking life to a tee.

The sights and sounds of it are still seared into my brain. Even now I can close my eyes and see the slightly open-mouthed death mask of Chester’s unshaven face as rigor mortis claimed what was left of him. I could smell the staleness of the air in his room. Feel the shock of the discovery in my belly.

I had all the thoughts and feelings anyone would have in that situation. My brain rushed in a swirl of failed directions.

I have to call Ellie. No—well, yes—but first I have to call . . . who? 9-1-1? But it’s not an emergency, because we’re not trying to prevent a man’s death. It’s already happened. Maybe just call the police and report it and ask them to send . . . ? No, maybe you don’t even call them when somebody dies of natural causes. Maybe just call the funeral home to come pick up the body. Did Ellie leave me the name of the funeral home? I’ll have to start plowing through what she left me.

Or maybe I should call her before anything else.

And then, the plainest, most affecting thought of all.

Why didn’t I just take him to Arizona?

Granted, I said the dream was perfectly realistic, but that’s not a hundred percent true. In real life I hadn’t exactly denied him the chance to go on his road trip, because no time had elapsed. If he really had died that night, death would have denied him the chance. I would only have denied him a yes answer, which at least would have been some indication that I gave a damn about his need for closure in some important relationship from his past. And that was bad enough.

But back to the feelings of the thing.

I stood there over his bed, staring down at his forever-frozen, open-eyed face, thinking, What would it have hurt you to take him?

I mean, sure, nobody spent time with Chester Wheeler on purpose, and if they could avoid it. But I had agreed to be here anyway. One way or another I was going to spend those next few days with him. Was the open road somehow worse than the dank, faintly odorous world he had created behind closed doors?

Suddenly the trip sounded like an improvement.

And, for the love of all that’s holy, it was his dying wish.

And I’ll never get a do-over.

Except I was utterly wrong, because just then I woke up. There I was, sitting up in my bed in the dark, in the opening moments of the do-over.

I sat for a time, afraid to go over to Chester’s, because maybe the dream was prophetic. Maybe I’d go over there . . .

I purposely didn’t finish the thought.

I couldn’t hear him snoring through the intercom, so I rose and dressed quickly. It was only five thirty in the morning, but I made my way next door in the dark and let myself into Chester’s house with my key.

I stuck my head through his bedroom door and listened, but heard nothing. Not even the rhythmic sound of his breathing. I turned on the light in the hall to try to see him, but his bed was still in darkness. So I took a big, deep breath and turned on the overhead light in his room.

He immediately sputtered up into his normally combative consciousness.

“Holy crap, Lewis!” he shouted. “I was sleeping. What are you doing here so early? What time is it?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Just checking in on you.”

I opened my mouth to ask him some details about this proposed trip. What would we drive? My car? Did he have a car? Could his be trusted on such a long journey? Where would we stay along the way? Who was paying for all this?

Then I closed my mouth and said nothing along those lines.

“Turn off the light and leave me alone. I wanna go back to sleep.”

“Sure. I’ll make some coffee for when you’re up.”

I slipped into the kitchen in the mostly-dark and made coffee.

Then I sat at the table drinking a cup and thinking.

I wasn’t feeling ready to tip my hand about the thing, because doing so would have been like jumping into the deep end of a pool. Once you jump, that’s it. You’ve jumped. You can’t unjump, because there’s no such thing as unjumping.

But even in that no-man’s-land of options and actions, I think it’s fair to say that I already knew which way this part of the story was going to fall.