“It’s okay,” Anna said. She pointed to the bodega across the street. “Go in there and tell them to call 911.”
Sam hesitated. “I don’t want to,” he said. “I can’t move. My feet are stuck. They’re stuck in the ice.”
“They aren’t stuck, Sam. There isn’t any ice, and they aren’t stuck. Go! Go now!” Anna pushed him toward the store, and Sam began to run.
Anna kneeled down by the woman’s side. “Don’t worry. Help is coming,” Anna tried to reassure her. “I’m Anna, by the way. I’ll stay with you until the ambulance gets here.” Anna took the woman’s hand.
“I’m Anna, too,” the woman said.
“I’m Anna Lee,” Anna said.
“I’m Anna Lee, too,” the woman said. The woman inhaled raggedly and coughed in a peculiar, delicate way. Anna was certain the woman’s neck was broken. Copious amounts of blood were flowing from some hole or series of holes in the woman’s body, but Anna could not see an obvious way to stop the bleeding. Anna was getting blood on her white tennis shoes, which she was fastidious about keeping white. And the other Anna Lee was getting blood everywhere, but noticeably, to Anna, on the large, floppy, pink lace bow she wore, Madonna-style, in her shiny black hair.
“Oh, that makes sense,” Anna said lightly. “There’re a lot of us. Isn’t Lee the most popular Asian surname in the world? In my union, I had to change my name to Anna Q. Lee, because you can’t have more than one person with the same name. I’m the seventh Anna Lee in Equity.”
“What’s Equity?”
“It’s the stage actor’s union.”
“You’re an actor?” the woman said. “Would I have seen you in anything?”
“Well,” Anna said. “I’ve played almost every Asian part an actress can play, but my biggest role was Connie Wong in A Chorus Line.”
“I saw that the year it opened,” the woman said. “You were good.”
“I was the third Connie Wong on Broadway, and I was the second Connie Wong in the national touring company, too. So, you didn’t see me. You probably saw Baayork Lee. Another Lee.” Anna laughed. “So many of us.”
“What does the Q. stand for?”
“Nothing,” Anna said. “It was for the union. You probably don’t want to talk about this.” Anna looked in the other Anna Lee’s eyes, which were the same golden brown, heterochromic color as her own. “Why did you…Do you mind my asking? I apologize if this is rude.”
“I didn’t know how else to leave,” the other Anna Lee said. She tried to shrug, but then her body began to spasm, and ninety long seconds later, she died. Anna stood up. She stood over the other Anna Lee’s body and began to feel giddily, vertiginously untethered from her own body. She felt as if she were seeing herself dead on that sidewalk. She knew she should stay with the other Anna’s body until the ambulance got there, but it was frigid, and she feared spending more time with the other Anna would provoke some irreversible existential crisis, and she desperately wanted to be with Sam.
She went into the bodega to find her son. She quickly scanned the aisles, but she couldn’t find him anywhere.
“Did my son come in here?” Anna said. She tried to ignore the paranoid fantasy that was forming in her mind: What if the other Anna Lee’s death had merely been a distraction so that some evil party could kidnap Sam?
“You’re the mother,” the shopkeeper said. “What a world. What a thing for a boy to see.”
“He didn’t leave, did he?”
“No, but he was quite distraught, so I gave him quarters to play the machine in the back of my store. Children love games, though the machine doesn’t make as much money for me as it once did.”
“That was very kind of you,” Anna said. “What do I owe you?”
The man waved his hand. “Please. It is hard enough to be a child in this world without women throwing themselves from buildings. How is she?”
Anna shook her head.
“What a world,” the shopkeeper said, shaking his head, too.
She walked to the back of the store, where Sam was concealed by the mammoth, cheerful shell of the Ms. Pac-Man machine. From what Anna could tell, Ms. Pac-Man was no different than Pac-Man, except that she had a bow and was a Ms., which in 1984 was an honorific that usually signified a feminist.
“Hi,” Anna said.
“Hi,” Sam said, without looking at her. “You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.”
“That’s a good philosophy,” Anna said. She concentrated on the game and tried not to hear the nearby sirens that meant the ambulance had come for the body of the other Anna Lee.
“If you eat the fruit,” Sam said, “you can kill the ghosts, but only for a little while. And if you don’t time it right, the ghosts can turn back and kill you.”
“Amazing,” Anna said. She decided that they couldn’t leave the bodega until the sidewalk had been cleared of the body of the other Anna Lee.
“And sometimes, you get an extra life. But you might kill yourself trying to get the extra life, so it’s not always worth it.”
“You’re good at this,” Anna said. Once they were able to leave the bodega, she’d splurge on a taxi, even though they were only a dozen blocks from home.
“Not yet,” Sam said. “If I had more time to practice, I could be. Darn it!” The descending chromatic wail of Ms. Pac-Man’s death. “That was my last life.” Sam looked at Anna cautiously. “What happened to her?”
“The ambulance is out there right now. They’re taking her to the hospital.”
“Will she be okay?” Sam said.
“I think so,” Anna said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. She would be okay. Dead was okay.
Sam nodded, but he had seen Anna in enough plays to know when she was lying, and he knew her well enough to know why she lied. When he lied, it was for the same reason: to protect her from that which she could not handle. “Why did she do that?” Sam asked.
“I think…” Anna said. “I think she must have been terribly blue. I think she must have had troubles in her life.”
“Do you ever get blue?”
“Yes, everyone gets blue. But I don’t think I could ever get melancholy like that, because I have you.”
Sam nodded. “If the body had landed on us, do you think we could have saved her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think we could have died?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because if we had walked a little faster, or if we hadn’t stopped to buy bananas, we could have been directly under her, and we could have died.”
“I don’t think we would have died,” Anna said.
“But if you drop a penny from the Empire State Building and it hits someone, they’ll die, right?”
“I think that’s an old wives’ tale,” Anna said. “Besides, the building she jumped from was only six stories.”
“But a body is much heavier than a penny.”