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  Body Jumping

  Copyright © 2020 by Brenda Lowder.

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including digital storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, specific locations, and incidents are either imaginary or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  Published by Bold Wanderer Press.

  Cover design by Julianne Burke at Heart to Cover LLC.

  Editing services by Happily Editing Anns.

  www.brendalowder.com

  Acknowledgments

  So many people have encouraged me and cheered me on in my writing journey. And I’m humbled to say that many have expressed a lot of love for this book especially.

  A big thank you to my insanely talented cover artist Julianne Burke of Heart to Cover LLC, and to my fabulous editors, Ann Suhs and Ann Riza of Happily Editing Anns.

  Thank you to my dear friends and early readers Selena Darter, Amy Maclure, Heather Jenkins, Dawn Anderson, Heather Ratliff, and Jenn Chini. Thanks to my critique partners and awesome writers Jeff Lowder, Kerrie Turner, Jill Cobb, Terra Weiss, Deena Short, Shelby Van Pelt, Jenny Ling, and Eliza Peake. And thanks to my best Starbucks writing buddy Sarah Murphy, even though it’s been way too long since we’ve written at Starbucks.

  Thanks to encouraging friends Sandra Ho, Nadia Turner, and Mychelle Rucker.

  I am beyond blessed to belong to some groups of amazing and generous writers.

  Thanks to the amazing Forum Writers who have been cheerleaders of this book from the beginning, especially Sharon Pegram, Mary Beecroft, Deborah Mantella, Gary Henderson, Eleanor Egan, Jill Glascock, D’Ann Renner, Johnna Stein, Amy Williams, John Witkowski, Harmon Snipes, Gary Smith, Charly S., Robert Snipes, Peter Bein, Uchenna Okafor, Mr. Kim, Dee Huggins, Brooke Metz, Wendee VanOrder, Kathy Powers, and the late Kirk Martin.

  Thanks to my Persisters, the Romance Writers of America ® Golden Heart ® class of 2018 and their overwhelming support and generosity.

  Thanks to Georgia Romance Writers ® and the wonderful authors I’ve gotten to know through this amazing organization. I’m also in love with their annual conference, Moonlight and Magnolias.

  Thanks to the Atlanta Writers Club and their awesome conference.

  Thanks to Laurie Scheer and the fantastic writing program and conference of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  Thanks to my Moms Write group, especially Laura Taylor, Jacquie Bosma, Joanna Borseth-Ortega, Majken Selinder Nilsson, Liz Saigal, Shekeenah Reynolds, and Tara Sabo.

  Thanks to Diana A. Hicks, Kat Mizera, and Karla M. Jay for advice and encouragement.

  Additional thanks to Selena Darter and Rowboat Web Services for my website brendalowder.com.

  Thanks to the wonderful author friends who’ve inspired and helped me, especially Nicki Salcedo, Sally Kilpatrick, Tracy Solheim, Susan Carlisle, and Tanya Agler.

  Thanks to the amazing Sarra Cannon for all her wise advice and her wonderful Heart Breathings group.

  Thanks to all my family on both sides. I love you all!

  Thanks most of all to my best friend and true love, Chris, who makes every day a romantic adventure, and to our two amazing children, who provide endless topics for conversation.

  Thank you to my readers! I’m humbled and grateful that you would choose to spend time with my stories. I wish you love and everyday magic and your own happily ever after.

  For Mom

  Chapter One

  Dying sucks.

  When the Ford truck slides through the red light and smashes into my Prius, I only have time to raise my arms. As if I could block the violence of the crash—keep the wave of destruction from rolling on top of me, over me, through me, until I’m too damaged for there to be a me anymore. Glass crunches, metal grinds, truck and car shriek as they grapple for the right to exist in the same point in space.

  Then I’m gone.

  My body and I have parted ways like a pair of uncomfortable shoes at the end of a long workday—kicked off, thrown aside, discarded.

  The vehicles are still heaving, shuddering. But now the sound is muted, as if I’m hearing the last throes of the collision through noise-canceling headphones on a transatlantic flight. There is time and space, but there is also a low-level hum that makes the action a little more removed, a little less important than it should be.

  Terror washes over me at the disconnect, the separation. At what moment, in what molecule, do I exist? How am I still thinking? What am I now?

  A jolt of awareness spikes through me. I should be in pain. I’m standing on the side of the road, or maybe hovering a foot or two above it, as I watch my body get folded under the last convulsions of the colliding vehicles. I should be feeling this. The shards of metal piercing my skin, the slam of the airbag against my ribs, the safety glass raining down like fractured diamonds. Gratitude warms my spirit that I’m not feeling any of this. Is it cheating? Escaping that pain. Who is that girl in there, if I’m out here not feeling what’s happening to her?

  Elemental fear slices into me and I suck in air like I’m hyperventilating. I don’t want to feel that pain. The pain of a car accident like the one that killed my mother and almost killed me all those years ago. The car accident that was my fault.

  Of course it’s happening again. It’s only what I deserve, having escaped the first time. Nobody cheats death. Why did I think I’d get to live?

  I turn away from the sight of my twisted body. I tell myself I have nothing to do with that mangled girl. I start thinking of her as the used-to-be me.

  Emergency people come with their vehicles and urgent flurries of activity. I trail behind one EMT then the next as they try to rescue me. Scissoring through the driver’s side door of my Prius with steel cutters. Calling out to the broken girl they think is me. Trying with all of their knowledge and experience to assess, treat, save.

  I want to tell them to stop. I want to tell them it doesn’t matter. I want to tell them they’re not saving anyone. I’m out here, drifting and free, and I don’t care about what’s going to happen to that poor, folded-up girl. She’s a lost cause, obviously.

  “I’ve got a pulse!” An EMT, who resembles Aiden a little in the curve of his jaw and the bridge of his nose, yells out to the others.

  They have a pulse? How? I’m not in there anymore. I’m dead.

  Aren’t I?

  Boots slap the hard-packed dirt and carefully, carefully they move my old body from the tangled mess of metal and glass that used to be my car and onto a stretcher on the ground.

  “Got one over here too!” a blonde with a ponytail calls from the vicinity of the red truck.

  I perk up. It hadn’t occurred to me to check on the other guy. I turn from my own scene and start toward the other one, but the minute I angle away from my body, my movements are sluggish, mired.

  Floating toward my body is easy. In that direction I’m fleet and free, borne lightly on the breeze, but the second I try to get away I’m walking in quicksand. Each additional step drags at me exponentially, deepening the imaginary sand and adding snakes of invisible vines to lash around my calves and thighs, tightening against any forward motion of my spirit, any hint of escape. I pause, dread creeping over me like kudzu.

  I’m stuck with me.

  But I want to see what’s over there. How hurt the other driver is. Whether he or she is better or worse off. Whether he or she is still in their body, or if they are somehow outside of it like I am.

  I take a deep breath and for the first time notice I’m not breathing. I’m making the motions, but no air enters or exits my being. May
be I am air. Just a collection of particles hovering in the ether, this sound-dampened plane outside of all activity and importance.

  Deciding to stay here, I focus on my not-breathing. The vines and quicksand evaporate. Once again I feel light and unshackled.

  Purposely not thinking, I make a break for it.

  I’m able to peer over the edge of the truck’s dashboard before the vines and the quicksand return. There’s a man in his early twenties unconscious in the front seat, probably college-aged, probably in too much of a hurry that he just had to pass the slow-moving Honda Accord and pummel my unsuspecting Prius coming the other way. He’s bleeding from a cut above his left eyebrow, and his right arm hangs at an unnatural angle. The steering wheel is shoved up against his chest. I look around but don’t see another him hovering over his still-breathing form.

  A hook tugs at the center of my core as the vines yank me back to the shell of my former self.

  We’re on the move.

  The EMT guy pops the stretcher up onto its wheels and ushers used-to-be me toward the yawning mouth of the back of the ambulance. I stand and watch until the invisible tether pulls spirit-me inside. The man closes the doors. I sit, or make a close approximation of sitting, on the metal bench beside the stretcher. I try very hard not to look at the used-to-be me.

  Curiosity gets the better of me. I look at myself as if my body belongs to someone else.

  The twenty-nine-year-old woman’s eyes are closed. Narrow ribbons of rust-colored blood stream down her face. A jagged cut near her frizzy-blonde hairline opens to a gash larger than the others. Her arms lie limp at her sides. Her boring gray cardigan is torn and already beginning to crust around the neckline with drying blood. The edges near the waist and hips have streaks of what must be dirt or grease from the scene. Her legs are statue-still, twisted slightly to the right. Are they broken? I can’t see them to know. The rough brown skirt covers them modestly and only the distance between mid-calf and ankle is visible. Stripes of brown dirt extend down her shins to her comfortable clog-like shoes. My stomach stirs with revulsion. I’ve never really liked her—this body that used to be me—and now there’s even less to like.

  Her hand closest to me, her right hand, is clasped closed. Frozen and still. What does she think she needs to hold on to? Go, I tell her. You’re not that important. You don’t need to stay. Go find Mom. I try to touch the hand, to open it and make it stop grasping whatever it thinks it can keep. My fingers pass right through, insubstantial as air fluttering a lace curtain in an open window. Something is there, maybe, but there’s nothing to keep me from sliding through.

  “We’re losing her!”

  The medic administers CPR to jump-start her failing heart. Dr. Frankenstein trying to re-animate the dead. Or dying.

  Let me go.

  I don’t want to be here anymore.

  I don’t want to be her anymore.

  “Got her. She’s back.” The EMT wipes his forehead. He’s relieved. I want to tell him he shouldn’t be. He’s not doing me any favors by keeping me here. I’m mostly dead already.

  We arrive at the hospital, and he’s right on it, wheeling old-me into the ER and getting us some doctorly attention STAT.

  An Indian woman with a competent manner and beautiful eyes takes my chart from him. He tells her I flatlined en route. But I’m back. I’m evening out. Internal injuries, broken legs and ribs, and multiple cuts. But no longer dead.

  Lucky me. Life as a vegetable.

  I listen to them, trying to figure out my situation. Why am I outside of my body if I’m not dead anymore?

  Does this happen to everyone? I hadn’t seen a spirit-him for the driver of the Ford truck floating around his shell. Or isn’t it possible for life forces to see each other separate from their bodies?

  I flatlined, was revived, but had yet to regain consciousness. How can I? I’m out here and the used-to-be me is on a gurney, pilotless. I listen more to the professionals. Surgery will be necessary to assess the extent of the internal injuries—there’s strong belief there’ll be plenty. Broken bones will be set and repairs will be made.

  He wheels the gurney to the side of the hallway where my empty husk must await the assembly of doctors in the operating room until everyone is ready to perform more miracles.

  Another gurney is wheeled near mine. An old man with tufts of snow-white hair lies heavily upon it. I catch a flicker of movement, and my attention snaps to his face. His eyes are closed. The eyelids don’t flutter. I turn to look back at my body, and I see it again from the corner of my eye. A slight shimmer. A slight smudging in the air around him.

  There!

  I study him and don’t move. Waiting. Then I see it. His spirit, his essence, his soul or whatever he and I now are, is starting to rise out of his body. I guess I can see others who are like me.

  But he’s having trouble lifting off. He doesn’t separate straightaway like I did.

  No. He clings, nestles deep into the solid middle of his chest. His spirit hands clutch at the bars at the edge of his gurney, the outlines slightly out of step with those of his physical body.

  “Uh!” I shout inarticulately, pointing to the old man. “Somebody help him,” I tell the preoccupied hospital workers.

  They don’t hear me, but they come anyway. A short woman in scrubs rockets his gurney toward the operating room on the left, and a thin, gangly young man in sky-blue scrubs quickly pushes my body toward the operating room on the right.

  But even as they hurry, I could tell them they’re too late. The old man is leaving. I glide between the racing gurneys, watching as the old man’s spirit smudges all the edges of his body. A translucent leg pops free, and he tries to push it back in, then an arm, then a hand. His head leans up out of his head and the expression on his soul is one of bewilderment and wonder. As I watch, he sits up completely out of his body, smiles at me, and then floats toward the ceiling, disappearing before he gets there.

  Well, I’ll be damned.

  Maybe.

  Is that how it’s supposed to work?

  I try to float to the ceiling, desperate to follow him, to get to what must be the afterlife. I make it pretty high, sliding slickly through the lower part, bobbing halfway through sound-dampening tile and duct work on the other side, until I feel the now-familiar tug of my body reining me in. I roll my eyes and wait for the whoosh toward my body into the operating room on the right.

  Instead I’m jerked with whiplash-inducing speed through the closed doors of the operating room on the left…and into another life.

  Chapter Two

  I open my eyes.

  The first thing I see is the ceiling. It’s blurry, and I have to squint to make out the details of a tuft of fibrous insulation and a water stain that looks like Thor. I’m not seeing the ceiling from the perspective of high up against it and squishing halfway through like I was before. Instead, I’m lying on a hard bed, looking quite a ways up at the drop-ceiling tiles.

  The second thing I notice is that the sound is back to full volume.

  There are voices and the thud of footsteps in the hallway, the squeak of rubber-soled shoes changing direction. Snatches of conversation float to my ears, but I can’t parse the babble into words. It’s the hum of work getting done, people getting taken care of, life being lived.

  I smell antiseptic and the cool, forced scent of institutional air conditioning. Why am I not in pain? I’m not in the operating room. Post surgery, I’m probably drugged with something serious and therefore cushioned against the hurt.

  My eyes trail to the screens at my side. I’ve streamed enough medical shows to know I have a strong heartbeat, a good sinus rhythm. I can’t turn completely because of a tether—real and plastic this time—of tubing draped over my elbow. I raise my arm to look at it and feel my stomach drop past my knees.

  It is not my arm.

  Liver spots darken stretches of skin between freckles and moles. Wrinkles and grooves straddle the wrists and ring the fingers in cl
umps. The skin itself hangs from the bone with little to no padding. Rough white hairs extend from patchy forests. It’s the arm of an old man.

  White-hot panic seeps around the edges of my vision. I raise my other arm, and it’s the same story there. I hold them both before me, two well-worn, hairy arms that don’t belong to me.

  And yet, I move them.

  I quickly put my hands to my head. There’s a bald pate in the center, and soft tufts of hair stick out from either side. I’d bet anything they’re snow-white.

  I focus on the last thing I remember before waking up in this body. My spirit, my essence, the me-of-now, was being sucked into the wrong operating room following that old guy.

  Why?

  My gut seizes. My throat makes a gurgling sound of disbelief. I’m now that man, the one who was wheeled into the other operating room. The one I saw on the gurney next to me in the hallway. I don’t need to look in a mirror to know I’m right. I feel like him all over, not just the arms that I can see and the head and hair that I can touch. There are more differences in my physical body. A vacant flatness where my breasts should be. A weightiness in the width of my shoulders and the pronounced curve of my upper back against the body-heated hospital sheet. There’s something between my legs. It’s a part of me I can’t move. A weird, squidgy, flaccid presence of an unextended penis with a catheter in it and a set of loose-hanging balls lying on my left leg.

  I don’t have time to think about it. The door to my room bursts open and a gaggle of strangers crowds in.

  “Dad! I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  “Thomas! You’re sitting up already. Look, he’s sitting up!”

  “Pop, you sure gave us a scare there.”

  The voices cross over and around and through each other as an older woman and three late-twenty-somethings—two men and a woman—assemble in my room.

  I want to freak out and scream and throw something. But what good would it do? Who could fix this? I get the feeling that anyone—or thing—with the power to rectify this situation might not be on this plane of existence, let alone in this hospital.