Ashton's Angel
Ashton Roberts stood on the bridge, gazing down at the swiftly moving current of the river beneath him and wondering how painful it would be when his body hit the surface of the water. Perhaps the force of the impact would sufficiently stun him, so he would not be fully conscious when he drowned.
While drowning was not the most desirable way to end one's life, Ashton's choices were somewhat limited. He had no access to a gun, fast-acting poison or a supply of sleeping pills. He didn't even have a garage, so suicide by carbon monoxide was out of the question, too. Hanging? That took far too long. He wanted his death to be quick. Other methods, most of which involved some form of self-mutilation, were immediately ruled out because Ashton thought they would be too painful.
Summoning what little courage he possessed, Ashton gingerly climbed up onto the handrail, and after a few seconds of hesitation, he forced himself to jump. When he hit the surface of the water, he felt a sharp pain in his arm. As he plunged deeper into the dark river, he wondered if he would hit the bottom.
Despite his firm resolution to commit suicide, he found himself holding his breath. He wanted to die but could not bring himself to open his mouth and breathe the cold river water into his lungs. Then, in a sudden, desperate desire for self-preservation, he started to swim for the surface. His lungs began to burn from holding his breath as he frantically tried to propel himself upward. Finally, he broke the water's surface and greedily gulped down mouthfuls of fresh air.
Having narrowly avoided drowning, Ashton was then faced with the problem of making it safely to shore. The current was strong, and he wasn't the best of swimmers. With each passing moment, he was carried further downriver.
Just as his strength was failing, he spotted a small rowboat nearby. He yelled for help and tried swimming toward it, but a cramp gripped his leg, and he went under. When he surfaced again, he saw the boat heading in his direction. The young woman at the oars tossed out a life preserver, and the exhausted man clung to it. With amazing strength for someone her size, the girl tugged on the lifeline and was able to pull him over the side and into the boat. Once Ashton was safely aboard, she took a blanket out of a large first aid chest and handed it to him.
"Take those wet clothes off and wrap yourself in this," she instructed him.
The girl turned her back while he disrobed. Then Ashton sat down, shivering, and pulled the blanket tightly around him.
"I don't know how to thank you," he said through chattering teeth and lips already turned blue with cold. "I owe you my life. If you hadn't been here, I'd be a goner for sure.
"No need to thank me," she replied with a somber face.
Ashton sat still in the boat, quietly clutching the blanket to his wet skin, as the young woman made her way to a nearby dock. She tied the boat up and helped him climb out. Then she handed him his wet clothes and asked if he had any change.
He reached into the pocket of his wet jeans and pulled out a small handful of quarters and dimes.
"There's a pay phone at the gas station three blocks from here," she announced.
"I know you think it's not necessary, but I'd like to show you my gratitude in some way."
"Like I said before, there's no need to," the girl replied and got back into the boat.
Ashton walked to the end of the dock, turned around and looked back. Both the young woman and the boat were gone.
"It was the damnedest thing," he told his friends when they gathered for drinks later in the week. "This girl appeared from out of nowhere, and then she left without a word. I wanted to buy her lunch or something, show her my gratitude in some small way, but no dice."
"Maybe she wasn't human," his friend Chuck laughed.
"What are you talking about?"
"Maybe she's an angel. 'Cause this sounds an awful lot like that old Jimmy Stewart movie—you know, the one where he jumps in the river and an angel pulls him out and shows him what the world would have been like if he'd never been born."
"Do you know who I am, Chuck?" Ashton asked with a laugh.
"Course I do! We've been friends since third grade."
"Then I'm not someone who's never been born, am I?"
Chuck looked confused, which was nothing new for him.
"I suppose not," he admitted sheepishly.
* * *
In the months that followed his unsuccessful suicide attempt, Ashton realized how foolish he had been to jump from the bridge that day.
"To think I wanted to end my life just because I lost my job," he said, remembering his desperation when he was laid off.
At the time, he thought he would never find a job with the same salary and benefits as the one he had lost. He imagined himself losing his car, not being able to pay his rent or both. But his worries were all for naught. Despite his lack of an advanced degree, he was able to find a job not only with a good starting salary but also one with generous benefits and an excellent chance for advancement.
Ashton's whole life, in fact, changed for the better beginning with the day the unknown girl fished him out of the river. He met a wonderful woman, and after a fifteen-month-long courtship, the two were married. They worked hard, saved their money and purchased a modest three-bedroom home in Fall River. A year later, Ashton's wife informed him that she was pregnant, and a year and a half after that their second child was on the way.
The couple's life remained full and happy until the eve of their fifth wedding anniversary. On that fateful day, Ashton was packing for a trip to Hawaii, and his wife had just returned from taking their two children to her mother's house.
"It's hard to believe that by this time tomorrow night, we'll be strolling on a moonlit beach in Honolulu," his wife said dreamily.
"Seven days and six nights of sun, sea and romance," he replied. "This vacation will be the honeymoon we never had."
"Don't be ridiculous," his wife laughed. "We've been on one long honeymoon for five years now."
Ashton took her in his arms and silently thanked God for sending such an angel his way.
"I'd better concentrate on packing," he said, reluctantly removing his arms from around his wife's slender waist. "I'd hate to arrive in Hawaii and realize that I left my swimming trunks or my socks in Massachusetts."
"All right, Romeo, I'll let you finish what you're doing. I'm going to go downstairs and see if I can find my camera bag."
As Ashton tried to squeeze half a dozen pairs of socks into the side pocket of his American Tourister suitcase, he heard his wife's footsteps echoing in the hall and then down the stairs to the first-floor living room. He hummed a lively tune as he took tee shirts and jeans out of his dresser drawers and packed them in his bags.
He was a happy man; he had all that he'd ever wanted from life and more. Of course, he knew there would probably be tears as well as laughter in his future, but he felt that he could handle the hard times ahead. He was not the same foolish young man who had jumped off a bridge when he'd lost his job; he was much stronger and far wiser now.
Ashton stepped into his walk-in closet and retrieved one of his suits. It might come in handy if he decided to take his wife out for a romantic dinner in a nice Hawaiian restaurant. When he returned, suit and tie in hand, he heard a movement in the hallway.
"Find your camera bag?" he called.
There was no reply.
"Honey?"
When he saw a familiar figure emerge from the shadows and appear in the doorway, Ashton dropped the suit.
"What are you doing here?" he asked with stunned disbelief.
There was a look of unspeakable sorrow on the girl's face.
"You remember me?" she asked sadly.
"Of course, I do. You saved my life, but that was almost eight years ago. How did you ever find me? And what do you want?"
"I told you then that I didn't save your life."
"Well, you can continue to be modest, but I know I'd have drowned after falling into the river if you hadn't pulled me out."
"You didn't fall in; you jumped off the bridge in an attempt to end your life."
Ashton let out an embarrassed laugh.
"How stupid of me to believe death would be preferable to facing my problems."
The girl held her hands out in front of her with her palms up. Ashton looked down and saw a wide gash on each wrist.
"Oh, my God! What have you done?"
He ran to the bathroom and got a towel to wrap around the girl's lower arms.
"That isn't necessary," she said. "There's no blood."
It was true. Frightened and confused by the girl's sudden, dramatic appearance, Ashton hadn't noticed that the wounds, although they appeared recent, were not bleeding.
"My boyfriend left me when I told him I was pregnant," the girl explained. "I was desperate. I had nowhere to go, no one I could turn to. I felt the easiest solution was to die."
"We were both wrong," Ashton declared gently, sympathizing with the girl's predicament and understanding her rash actions. "Life is worth living. We have to hold on through the hardships because things are bound to get better eventually."
The girl cast her eyes down as though ashamed to look him in the face.
"When I told my friends about you," Ashton continued, hoping to cheer the young woman up, "one of them said you were probably my guardian angel, like in the movie It's a Wonderful Life. You know the one I'm talking about, don't you? An angel shows George Bailey what the world would have been like had he never been born. Silly isn't it?"
The girl raised her head and stared directly into Ashton's eyes.
"In a way, that's what I am—an angel. But instead of showing you things as they might have been had you never been born, I have shown you what your life would have been like if you hadn't died."
Fear stabbed Ashton's heart, and he called out to his wife.
"She's not here."
Ashton shouted again, louder this time, but there was still no reply.
"The woman who would have been your wife had you not drowned yourself when you jumped off the bridge is married to an insurance salesman and lives in New Jersey."
"That's insane!"
He picked up the telephone and dialed his in-laws' number. Perhaps his wife was at their house with the kids.
"You have no children either," the girl said.
"You're lying!" he argued. "I have a son and a daughter. They're at my mother-in-law's house. She's going to watch them while my wife and I are in Hawaii."
The girl sadly but firmly shook her head.
"You jumped into the river and drowned. There was no boat or life preserver to save you. By the time you met me, you were already dead."
"That's not true!" he screamed. "Why are you doing this to me? What have I ever done to you?"
"Suicide is a mortal sin. It carries with it two penalties. The first is that you must confront the life you ended so thoughtlessly. In this way, you are punished by losing all that you would have had if you hadn't taken your life."
"You're crazy."
"The second penalty," she continued, taking no offense at his hostility, "is that, like me, you must now guide future suicides as I have guided you. You will see desperate, disconsolate people find hope and happiness only to watch them be crushed later under the weight of the truth."
Ashton ran from the room, anxious to escape the young girl's words, but as his foot crossed the bedroom door threshold, he felt himself falling. Suddenly, the modest three-bedroom house in Fall River vanished, and Ashton saw above him the outline of a bridge just as he felt his back hitting the surface of the water.
* * *
Martina Fox sat in the passenger seat of her Mercedes S63, pushed the button of her keyless ignition and lowered the power windows. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.
"That lousy bastard!" she swore. "I hope he rots in hell for all eternity."
She reached into the glove box, took out a CD and put it into the car stereo. U2's "With or Without You" started to play and brought forth a fresh torrent of tears.
"How could he leave me for that little tramp?" she cried, turning off the music. "Christ! He's old enough to be her father."
For the past several years, Martina had spent two to three hours each day trying to make herself look young and attractive for her movie producer husband. But all the aerobics classes, facelifts, liposuction and Botox treatments had been for nothing. After twenty years of marriage, her husband left her for a nineteen-year-old make-up artist from Warner Brothers.
"I should be like Betty Broderick and go over there and shoot them both!"
Eventually, the tears stopped falling. Martina's eyes began to feel heavy, and she closed them as the humming of the Mercedes' engine lulled her to sleep.
When she was awakened by the sound of the garage door opening, she panicked. Had someone phoned the police? Would they arrest her or send her to a mental institution because she'd tried to commit suicide?
A strange man opened the driver's door of the Mercedes and waited for Martina to get out. An ambulance was parked in the driveway. One of the paramedics—an extremely handsome man who had lost his wife to cancer two years earlier—looked at Martina with compassion and something more.
What an attractive woman, he thought. His interest was not lost on Martina, who suddenly realized that life might still hold some promise for her, after all.
When the paramedic covered his mouth and entered the garage to turn off the car engine, Martina turned to the man who had found her.
"Thank you," she said gratefully. "You saved my life."
"No, I didn't," the man replied sadly.
"Yes, you did. If it weren't for you, I'd still be sitting in that car."
She smiled at him briefly, and then the paramedics took her away.
Ashton Roberts felt his heart break for Martina Fox. She would soon fall in love with the handsome paramedic and realize how foolish she'd been to try to kill herself over the betrayal of her worthless husband. Eventually, she would wake up one morning and realize that she was truly happy and that she had everything in the world to live for. That would be the ill-fated day when Ashton would return, destroy her happiness and put her back behind the wheel of the Mercedes where she had died.
An angel once showed Salem what his life would be like without Godiva chocolate. It wasn't a pretty sight.
