CHAPTER FIVE
I was also moving on and adjusting to my life in heaven. I was starting to grasp the concept of death and the afterlife more, and it made my experience more enjoyable. Jessie helped me a lot. She showed me that heaven could be fun, that it didn't all have to be tears over your death.
I also found out that miracles and amazing coincidences actually weren't coincidences - they were acts from those in heaven. I watched one day as an old woman watched her son and his family as their house caught on fire. Her son and granddaughter were on the floor, trying to find a way out of the house, but were lost in the smoke. The woman, somehow, inexplicably, gave her son a nudge in the right direction, and they found the door.
I was amazed. I had discovered something I hadn't known before - not only could we talk to the living in dreams, but we could also touch them, push them in the right direction. I asked my grandmother about it the next time that I saw her.
"Nana," I said. "Can we touch them? I saw this woman save her family's life - if we can save lives, why do people still die?" I stared at her accusingly. "How come you didn't stop me from getting hit by the car?"
"We can't do everything," Nana explained. "We're not God. We can only fix things that should be fixed. Everyone has a time to go. Your friend, Phoebe - she has predicted her own day of death. If something accidentally happens to Phoebe before then, then you may help her."
"Phoebe's really going to die on the day she said?" I asked, perplexed. "I thought that was just a joke!"
"Oh, no," Nana said seriously. "No, Phoebe is a very smart woman. What she said is real, my dear. Phoebe - well, she doesn't have what one could quite call supernatural powers, but she understands everything so much better than regular mortals. You've experience that, haven't you?"
I had. If you were wondering if I touched anyone on my away from Earth, I did. I touched Phoebe.
She was at work the moment I died, taking a break was massaging her clients. She was taking a sip of water when I floated by. I reached out and touched her. She dropped her water bottle, startled.
"What was that?" she cried, nervously. "Who's there?" She suddenly became calm, remembering - this had happened before. The day her mother died. "Who's communicating with me?" But I was already gone.
Phoebe knew, though, and she was haunted by it every day. She knew it had been me to touch her.
Soon, it had been a two months since I'd died. My friends and family were still grieving, naturally, but I wasn't on their minds every moment of every day. I took turns giving each of them dreams about me. In Rachel's, we went shopping, and her subconscious self did not realize I was dead. I was in the audience while Joey acted in Mission Impossible: 3 in his dream. And I ate dinner as a teenager with Ross and my parents. Ross's dream made me laugh out loud. He dreamed about me getting awards in school and being appreciated by my parents. I was happy to know that Ross had wanted me to get some glory.
Chandler was a different story. I got in his dreams the most, but they were the most painful. The dreams always started out nicely - we would be picnicking at the park or kissing in our bedroom, and then - he would remember. And the dream would be ruined. Chandler would wake up in tears every time.
I started to worry about Chandler. As the weeks went by, he didn't seem to recover much from the shock, from the pain. He still went home every night and wrote in my diary. He still held my clothes in his hands and looked at pictures of me. He fell behind in work, and his boss discussed firing him.
He was also very touchy whenever anyone said anything. He was talking on the phone one day with Rachel, and she suggested starting to go through my things to decide what to keep and what to give away to good will. He got angry.
"I don't think I need to do that," he snapped.
"Chandler, you shouldn't be in the apartment with all her things forever," Rachel insisted. "It's not good for you."
"Don't tell me what to do," Chandler said, and hung up. From then on, my friends were careful around him. Soon, they called him less and less. He was fine with that. He was happy to stay home and wallow in his grief.
Four months later, things had not become better. Chandler still cried for me every single night. I grew tired of watching him, and finally, in an effort to help him move on, I got into one of his dreams with a mission.
We were walking hand in hand on dark pathways, and I started talking. "Chandler, you need to move on. I'm not coming back. Get out of your pajamas and move on with your life. Go back and hang out with our friends. They want you there."
He looked at me, realization dawning on his face. "But, Monica - "
"Don't 'but' me," I said. "I'm dead. I hate seeing you so miserable. Just try, okay? Can you do that for me, honey?"
"I guess," Chandler said. Suddenly, he was gone. There was the flash of bright light, like I always saw after leaving a dream - but Chandler had not woken up. What the hell happened?
"Monica! How could you do that?" Jessie yelled. I was standing in some sort of courtroom, and Jessie was speaking to me. At a table behind her sat people that looked like judges, and behind them was a sign that read Heaven's Ordinance of Dreams.
"What?" I asked meekly.
"You know you can't tell him things like that in a dream!" Jessie said. Suddenly, I knew. There were laws, even in heaven - and I had broken one of them. You weren't allowed to tell people important things - there were no messages from heaven. Everything that happened in a dream had to come from their imagination - they had to really think about it. You could control it a little bit, but I had gone way over what I was allowed to do.
"Sorry," I said sourly.
"Sorry isn't good enough," one of the judges boomed. "Your husband will not remember that dream, and you are restricted from invading dreams until further notice!"
"What?" I cried. "You mean I can't talk to any of them?"
"No," the judge said. "Now, go." I turned and left the courtroom, and Jessie followed me.
"I'm sorry, Monica," she said softly. "But you - "
"I crossed the line," I spat. "I know, I know."
"I know you were just trying to help him."
"Thank you!" I cried. "I'm just trying to help my husband!" I yelled in the direction of the courthouse.
"Calm down, Monica," Jessie said. "They don't care. Listen, you have to let it go. You have to let the living live."
"But Chandler's not living," I said. "It's been almost five months, Jess, and he hasn't moved on at all! I mean, not that I want him to forget me, but I do want him to live, like Ross and Rachel and Joey and Phoebe. They don't think about me all the time. I know they'll never forget me, but they've realized by now that I'm dead."
"He has to grieve his own way," Jessie said.
"I have to do something," I said. "I can't just sit here right now. I'm going to go watch them.'' I left Jessie, closed my eyes, and thought, Chandler.
It was Sunday on Earth. Chandler was sitting in front of the TV, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and an old T-shirt. He wasn't really watching the television - he was staring at our wedding picture, hanging next to it. He moved his eyes from the picture to his wedding band, which was still on his finger.
God, he still hasn't taken it off, I thought. I felt a pang of pity in my non-existent heart. How could Chandler still be wearing his wedding ring? Why did he want the constant reminded of me on his finger, all the time?
Over the next few days, I watched Chandler non-stop. I could feel something, something in the air. Clouds filled my heavenly sky, great big dark clouds, warning me of terrible things to come. For my first few days on heaven, the clouds were like that all the time, but over the weeks, they'd ebbed away. But now they were back, large and black and foreboding. And I did not stop watching.
"Monica," Lilly said to me one day. "Monica, you must stop. You can't help him. Look, go have some fun! Jessie told me that Phoebe's written a fantastic new song, you should watch her."
"No," I said dully. "I'd rather watch Chandler."
"You're going to drive yourself crazy," Lilly said, shaking her head.
"Lilly, don't you watch? Don't you get sucked into it?" I demanded.
"For a while, I did," Lilly admitted. "But Monica, it's been almost five months. I've moved on. Sure, I watch sometimes, but not to feel the pain. I watched my little sister in her school play. I watch my grandmother play bingo. Fun stuff, you know? Look, Emma's crawling around like a maniac, she's almost walking - watch her! You'll feel better."
I just shook my head. "You don't understand, Lilly. You don't understand what it's like to be in love."
I went back to Chandler. It was nighttime, and he was rolling around, twisting and turning. I thought he was asleep, but then his eyes opened, and he sat up, throwing the sheets off him. He got up and walked into the kitchen, turning on the bright overhead light. He opened the cabinet and pulled out a small bottle of pills.
I remembered those pills. When he'd gone to the doctor two weeks before, the doctor had prescribed them. Chandler was still hardly sleeping, and it was hurting his performance at work and driving him nuts.
I watched as he opened the bottle and swallowed two of the pills dry. Then he went back to bed, where he stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes before falling into a deep sleep.
He slept through his alarm the next morning and woke at nine-thirty. "Oh, shit," he muttered, jumping out of bed. He dressed quickly and left the house without showering or eating. As he ran out the door, I cringed - he'd left an important report on the kitchen table.
Chandler raced into the meeting a half-hour late. "Bing," Dough said, giving him a tight smile. He couldn't get angry, not in front of these new clients. "Where have you been?"
"I am so sorry, Doug," Chandler said. "I'm sorry, I overslept."
"We'll discuss this later," Doug said. "Where's the report?"
Chandler opened his briefcase. He searched through it quickly, shuffling through the many papers - but came up empty-handed. His ears turned red and he swallowed hard.
"Doug, I am so sorry. I think - I think I left them at home," he whispered to his boss. Doug turned purple and glared at Chandler. Then he turned to the clients.
"Apparently there's been a little mix-up here. Can I have you back another time?" Doug ushered the clients out while Chandler cowered in his chair, humiliated. Doug waltzed back in, scowling.
"Bing," he growled. "I know things have been rough for you lately. But we cannot have slackers working here. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to fire you. You have until tomorrow to get your stuff out of your office." Doug left Chandler sitting, slack-jawed, in the chair. Then he listlessly stood up and walked back to his office. He packed up his few personal items in an hour.
In mortification, he said good-bye to his secretary, and left his office for the last time.
I stopped watching for a few hours. It made me wince to see how badly Chandler's life had gone down the drain. My death had destroyed him. It had been over five months, and still - still, he was as torn up as he had been during the first week.
I was contemplating going to watch someone else, leaving Chandler be for a while, when Nana appeared next to me.
"Monica," she said gravely. "You need to see this." She took me to watch Chandler, and I was horrified by what I saw.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, with the open bottle of sleeping pills next to him. He lined them up on the table - 28 in all. He looked at them, and then pulled out my diary. He ripped out a piece of paper and began to write.
I can't go on like this anymore, he wrote. I have nothing. Monica is dead. I never see my friends. I even lost my job. There is no point in living. I don't want to live anymore. I want to see the sweet emptiness of death. That is why I am writing this. Maybe, as Ross or Rachel or Joey or Phoebe goes through our things, they will find it, and they will know why I did this. I hope this doesn't hurt them. I don't think it will.
He put his pen down and closed my diary. And in that moment, I felt the brightest ray of hope I'd felt since my death.
"Nana!" I cried. "Nana, if he dies - he'll be with me! He can come be with me!" I knew it was unbelievably selfish to want Chandler to kill himself, but I thought, if Chandler wanted it, and I wanted it, it would all work out.
Nana stared at me, her mouth wide open. "So you don't know?" she asked quietly.
"Know what?"
"Monica," Nana said sadly. "If he kills himself, he won't come to heaven. You'll never see him again."
My stomach flopped. "What?" I cried.
"Suicides don't come here," Nana explained. "Their souls never leave the Earthly plain. He'll be gone forever."
"No!" I yelled. I went back to Chandler, who was holding six of the pills in his hand. "Chandler, don't do it! Please, someone stop him!"
I had seen the light. If Chandler killed himself, I would lose him. He would be gone until the end of time. I would never get to watch him again.
"Chandler, don't do it!" I cried. "Stop!"
He took the first pill.
A/N: Hi! Hope everybody had a great Christmas. left a little cliffhanger up there, didn't I? I'm so sorry this took so long, but this is my favorite chapter and I wanted it to be perfect. Was it worth the wait? Please review! Thankies bunches!
Jen