Excerpt and Giveaway: Remember the Moon by Abigail Carter

Description:

Being dead is harder than you might expect.

Clinging to life from the edge of a cliff, Jay, a beleaguered software company executive sees the possibility of rescue in the eyes of the firefighter dangling beside him, but as the car slips, Jay uses what strength he has left to utter his final words, “tell my wife to remember the moon!” The car lurches and Jay plunges toward his watery grave. He floats above his lifeless body and hears a familiar voice. “Welcome home J.J.”

Jay is reunited briefly with his father, who died when Jay, a hapless 14-year-old, unable to save his dad after a canoe accident. Instead of a heartfelt reunion, Jay’s dad introduces him to his “transporter,” Alice, the person responsible for easing Jay into a life of being dead. Death isn’t at all it’s cracked up to be.

He visits his wife Maya, who in her shock quits painting, the one thing that might comfort her and watches helplessly as his seven-year-old son Calder seems bent on joining his dad through hapless skateboarding accidents. Jay longs to tell them how much he loves them.

When Maya hires Liz, a lesbian psychic, Jay’s excited to finally give his wife his message of love. Instead, he learns her terrible secret and in anger and jealousy, leads her toward an ill-fated romance with a narcissistic, sexually deviant player she believes is “heaven sent” from Jay himself.

Maya’s grief becomes more complicated in the aftermath of another loss, and Calder’s alarming behavior prompts Jay to find a way to set them both free or risk the well-being of them all. Confronted with the decision to either follow his mortal instincts or help his wife find new love, Jay must learn to transcend everything he ever was.

Fans of The Lovely Bones and Ghost will appreciate Remember The Moon as a poignant story of everlasting love that reaches far beyond the grave.

EXCERPT 

Watching myself die, I felt no pain, no emotion, no fear. The grisly scene of my death faded and grew hazier, as if a dense fog had rolled in across the Sound, obscuring my view. The fog grew whiter and more opaque. I witnessed a unique clarity of light, like sunlight refracted through a diamond. For an instant, instead of being blinded by the light, my vision was clearer than it had ever been.     

***

My eyelids were heavy, the white noise of pavement clacking under the tires, lulling me at the end of a long day. My spat with Maya still fresh in my mind, I knew I had been driving out of spite in order to join her and Calder on this family ski weekend, but I was determined to be the dutiful husband. 

It was a clear night in February 2006, but construction for the upcoming 2010 Vancouver Olympics made the road treacherous. During a slowdown, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes for a few moments before a honk from behind jolted me into shifting gears and lurching on. I passed Horseshoe Bay and wound around steep hairpin turns in the dark, driving too fast, widening my eyes to keep them from drooping shut as the smooth hum of the car lulled me. I turned on the radio and fiddled with the tuner until I found a classic rock station playing Steely Dan’s Aja. I cranked it. 

The traffic thinned until only the odd car sped by in the opposite direction. Transfixed by the white dividing line, my eyelids fluttered shut for the briefest second. A crucial second. I missed a sharp curve, veered left across the oncoming lane, and launched through a perfectly aligned gap in the guardrail, fate having its way with me. My eyes sprang open. The arc of my ineffective coffee, suspended in time, splattered like a Pollack painting against the windshield. The car tilted downward, Steely Dan’s Aja still blasting, …there’s no return… 

The view of Howe Sound was particularly breathtaking. Tiny boats glowed against the black water. In the sky, a pale light of the crescent moon, …double helix in the sky tonight. A voice that didn’t sound like mine whispered “Oh fuck” just before the car made impact with the gnarled rocks of the coastline. The car rolled in deafening slow motion until it arrived at a precarious resting spot, teetering on the edge of the cliffside, fifty feet below the highway, a hundred feet above the water. The white edges of the waves crashed violently against the rock face. Still conscious, I couldn’t feel my legs but could see that they were crushed beneath the dash. Something warm dripped down my cheek. I tasted blood. Christ. This was bad. I thought about Maya and Calder. If I made it out of this alive, I would stop being such an asshole. God. One weekend in Whistler. Why did I make it into such a big deal?    

“You’ve gotten yourself into quite a pickle here, J.J.” My father sat beside me in his Rolling Stones T-shirt.

“Dad? What are you doing here?”

“I told Calder to warn you.” 

“He did warn me. How did he know? Am I going to die?”

“You’ve should’ve listened to your son, son.”

I yelled a dry, hoarse whisper. Shit. I was hosed. I wondered if anyone had seen me go off the road. Darkness prevailed.   

I awoke to a man’s face leaning through the broken window, swinging slightly. I glanced toward where my father had been sitting, but he was gone.

“Hey buddy! Wake up! That’s it.” I forced my eyes open. Pain constricted the movement of my legs, forcing a moan from deep in my chest. He looked away for a second and shouted, “He’s conscious!” Turning back to me he said, “Quite a mess you’ve found yourself in here. What’s your name?” 

“Jay,” I croaked. 

“OK, Jay. We’re just going to try and get a line hooked up to the car and then we’ll get you outta here, K?” I managed another nod. 

“Just don’t move. We’re going to get you—” The car lurched another few inches, tilting now at a dizzying angle. “Whoa!” The firefighter swung free, his arms waving as he tried to regain balance and I realized he was suspended from above. He grabbed onto the door handle, leaning down to peer into the window.

“Don’t move, Jay. K? Just don’t move!”

“Tell my wife I love her,” I whispered.

“You’re going to be fine, Jay. We’ll get you secured. Don’t worry.” 

“Tell her to remember the moon.”    

“Remember what?” The car slipped another inch and I could only see his torso now. “I can’t hold it!” he yelled up to the crew.

“The moon!” I yelled as loudly as I could. The car slipped away with a slight grinding of metal against rock.

“Shiiiit!” I heard the man yell. I closed my eyes and braced for the impact. A wall of water slammed into me through what was left of the windshield. The car bobbed for a minute, hood down, my entire body submerged. I gasped from the cold and sucked air into my lungs. When the trunk filled with water, my beloved Beamer and I plunged through the depths of black until my giant lead boot touched the sea bottom silently in a velvet nap of sand. My final breath escaped in tiny bubbles, jewels of iridescent light that rose, dancing languidly to the surface.    

Gaping mouth, empty eyes, floating hair, legs crushed into my giant steel clamshell – I became a grisly sea anemone. I floated underwater, looking down on my lifeless body, limp hands and hair flowing with the current, my skin glowing an alien greenish-yellow hue.    

A shape began to form in a fog – a body pushed against a thin layer of latex. A figure emerged through it, someone familiar. 

“Hey J.J. Welcome home.”

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About the author:

Abigail Carter wrote The Alchemy of Loss: A Young Widow’s Transformation (HCI, 2008) as a form of catharsis after her husband’s death in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Her work has also appeared in SELF magazine, Reader’s Digest Canada, MSN.com and MORE.com and she maintains  her blogs. Abigail is also the co-Founder of Writer.ly, an online marketplace where writers can find the people they need to publish successfully. She can be found on Facebook and on Twitter (@abigailcarter).

Abigail’s teaches memoir writing at Camp Widow, a yearly retreat for widows and at The Recovery Cafe in Seattle, a community center for people recovering from addiction. She has extensive Board experience: Executive Board of The Healing Center, a Seattle-based bereavement center for children and their parents; Executive Board, Hedgebrook, a women’s writing retreat on Whidbey Island, WA; Executive Board, The Seattle Freelances Association, a respected professional writer’s association based in Seattle; Advisory Board, University of Washington Digital Publishing Program.

Abigail moved from New Jersey to Seattle in 2005, where she now lives with her two children. 

Abigail's Blog ** The Alchemy of Loss ** Goodreads ** Facebook ** Twitter ** Pinterest

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