I Rated Death One Star for Coming Too Late

The first time I died, I was seventeen and it was raining. I remember the cold more than the pain. The car had gone off the coastal road just past the lighthouse turn, and the water came up through the broken window so fast that I did not have time to scream. I remember thinking, absurdly, that my shoes were new. Navy blue flats with a little gold buckle. Elara had picked them out for me the week I moved into the house, and she had smiled when she handed me the box, and I had believed her. Then the water closed over my head, and there was nothing at all. Until there was something. I woke up on a gurney in a hallway that smelled like bleach and old coffee, and a man in a navy jacket was pressing two fingers to my wrist and shouting numbers at someone I could not see. My chest ached like someone had driven a fist through it. My throat was raw. I tried to ask what had happened, but the words came out as a wet rasp, and the man leaned down and said, "You're okay. You're okay. Stay with me." I stayed. That was the first time. It was also the first time I heard my mother's voice from somewhere above me, sharp and quick, saying, "She's not supposed to be here. Do you understand what this costs us?" I did not understand then. I learned. My name is Wren Ashford. That is the name I was given when I was born, and it is the name that was taken from me when I was three years old and left at a church in a town I do not remember. I grew up in a series of rented rooms with a woman named Della who was not my mother but who fed me and taught me to read and never once told me I was a burden, even when I was. Della died when I was fifteen, and I lived in a group home for two years, and then a lawyer found me. The Ashfords were old money. Not new money, not tech money, but the kind of money that had been sitting in the same family for a hundred and forty years, tucked into trusts and foundations and a house on the cliffs above Calder Bay that had forty-two rooms and a greenhouse that smelled like lemons. They had a charity with their name on it. They had a board seat at the hospital and a wing at the museum. They had a daughter who had gone missing in 2004 and a story they told about it that made people cry. They also had a girl they had raised in my place. Elara. She was seventeen when I met her, a year older than me, with hair the color of honey and a way of standing in a doorway that made you feel like you were the one intruding. She hugged me when I arrived. She said, "I've always wanted a sister." She gave me the navy blue shoes. And then she started killing me. I did not know it at first. The first time, I thought the car had hydroplaned. The second time, I thought the pills were a mistake, that I had mixed up the bottles in the dark. The third time, I thought the gas leak was old pipes. By the fourth time, I had figured out that the Ashfords did not want me dead. They wanted something worse. They wanted me gone, and then they wanted me back. The fifth time I died, I was in the pool. Someone had drained the shallow end and filled the deep end with cold water and left the cover half-open, and I went in at night because I could not sleep and the house was too quiet. My father pulled me out. He gave me mouth-to-mouth on the tile while the pool lights flickered, and when I coughed up water, he sat back on his heels and said, "You're all right. You're all right. Don't tell your mother about the cover." The sixth time, I was in the greenhouse, and the heater had been turned up so high that the air itself felt like a hand over my face. My brother Theo found me. He carried me out and put me on the lawn and said, "Breathe, Wren, breathe," and then he looked at Elara, who was standing on the terrace with a cup of tea, and he did not say anything. That was the part I could not forgive. Not the gas. Not the water. Theo knew, and Theo did nothing. The seventh time, I stopped fighting. I was tired. I had been tired for months, the kind of tired that sits in your bones and makes everything look far away. I had started to think that maybe the problem was me. Maybe I was not built for the Ashfords, for their long dinners and their quiet cruelty and their way of making you feel like a guest in your own life. Maybe I was supposed to die at three and the universe was just correcting its mistake. So when Elara came to my room that night and held out the glass of water and said, "You look thirsty," I took it. I drank it. And then I died. I did not wake up in a hospital. I woke up somewhere else. Somewhere that smelled not like bleach but like paper and dust and something faintly sweet, like the inside of a library that had been closed for a hundred years. I was sitting in a chair. The chair was wooden and the seat was hard. Across from me was a desk, and behind the desk was a man. He was not old. He was not young. He was the kind of person you could not place, with a face that seemed to shift when you tried to look at it directly, like trying to read a word in your peripheral vision. He wore a dark suit with no tie, and he had a file open in front of him, and he did not look up when I arrived. "Wren Ashford," he said. His voice was flat. "Nineteen years, two months, eleven days." "That's wrong," I said. "I'm eighteen." He turned a page. "Your birthday was last month. You were in the hospital. No one brought a cake." I looked down at my hands. They were pale and clean and there was no IV in them, no bandage, no bruise. I was wearing the same dress I had worn to dinner the night before, a green dress that Elara had said made me look like a sick plant. I had worn it anyway. "Am I dead?" I asked. "Yes." "Okay," I said. "Okay." The man looked up then. His eyes were not black and they were not gray; they were the color of something that had been left in the sun too long. He studied me for a moment, and then he closed the file and folded his hands on top of it. "I am the reviewer for this region," he said. "My name is not important. What is important is that you have arrived at the end of your allotted time, and every person who arrives is asked to rate the service they received. It is a simple system. Five stars for a life well-timed. Fewer for less." "Rate the service," I repeated. "Yes." "Like a restaurant." "If that helps you." I thought about it. I thought about Della, who died when I was fifteen, who had been sick for a year and who had told me at the end that she was ready, that she had done what she wanted to do. I thought about the group home, and the lawyer, and the house on the cliffs. I thought about the car in the rain and the pills in the dark and the water in the pool and the air in the greenhouse. I thought about Theo on the lawn, saying breathe, and then saying nothing. "I give it one star," I said. The room went very quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of a room. A quiet like the air itself had stopped moving. The man's hands, folded on the file, did not move, but something behind his eyes did, something that had not been there a moment before. "One star," he repeated. "Yes." "You understand that most people give five." "I understand." "Most people thank me for not taking them sooner. They say they were glad for the extra time." "I'm not most people." The man leaned back in his chair. The chair did not creak. "Explain," he said. I looked at him. I was dead. There was nothing left to protect, no one left to be polite to, no house to keep quiet for. "I died seven times," I said. "Seven. And every time, they brought me back. Not because they loved me. Because they needed me alive. Because there was something they wanted, and they could not get it if I was gone. They put me in a hospital bed and they stood over me and they said, 'You are not allowed to die.'" The man's face did not change, but the room did. The walls seemed to lean in, just slightly, as if listening. "Who," he asked, "is they?" I thought about Elara's honey hair, and the navy blue shoes, and the glass of water. "My family," I said. "The Ashfords. They found me when I was seventeen and brought me home, and then they spent two years keeping me alive for reasons I still do not understand. So yes. One star. The service was late. I should have died at three." The man was silent for a long moment. Then he opened the file again. "Wren Ashford," he read. "Born at Calder Bay Memorial. Taken from a church in Rockford, age three. Returned to the Ashford family, age seventeen. Parents: Richard and Margaret Ashford. Brothers: Theo, Julian, Marcus, David, and Christopher. And Elara Ashford, born Elara Vance, adopted at age four." He turned the page. "Current cause of death," he said, "poison. Administered by Elara Ashford." I nodded. I was not surprised. I had known, somewhere, since the glass touched my lips. "You knew," the man said. "I guessed." "And you drank it anyway." "Yes." "Why?" I looked down at my hands again. They were still pale, still clean. "Because I was tired," I said. "Because I had been fighting for two years and no one was on my side. Because I thought maybe if I stopped, they would finally let me go." The man closed the file a second time. This time, he did not fold his hands. He put one palm flat on the cover and looked at me, and for the first time, his face settled into something I could read. It was not anger. It was not pity. It was something more like interest. "You are the first person in eleven years to give me one star," he said. "Do you know what happens to people who give me one star?" "No." "They get a review." I frowned. "A review of what?" "Of the service they received," he said. "You have made a complaint. The complaint will be investigated. And you will be the one to investigate it." "I'm dead." "You are dead," he agreed. "But you are also the only witness to your own life. And I have questions. Seven deaths. Seven rescues. A family that wants you alive but not well. A girl who takes your place and then takes your life. I want to know why." He stood. His chair did not scrape. He walked around the desk and stood in front of me, and he was taller than he had seemed, and his shadow fell over me like a hand. "I am going to send you back," he said. "Why?" "Because you asked for a review," he said. "And because I want to see what you do with it." I stared at him. "Back where?" "Back to the morning of the day you died," he said. "The last morning. You will have one chance. No more than one. And when you are done, you will come back here and you will tell me what you found." "And if I die again?" "Then you die again," he said. "But this time, you will know why." He reached out and touched my forehead with two fingers, and the room dissolved, and I was falling, and the last thing I heard was his voice, flat and distant, like a page turning in another room. "One star, Wren Ashford," he said. "Let us see if it was deserved."