The First Phone Call From Heaven: A Novel Read online

  “That’s what the producer said,” Warren replied.

  “Well.” Father Carroll put his palms together. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

  The only thing scarier than leaving a small town is never leaving it at all. Sully said that once to Giselle, explaining why he’d gone out of state for college. Back then he thought he’d never return.

  But here he was, back in Coldwater. And on Friday night, after dropping Jules at his parents’ house (“We’ll watch him tonight,” his mother said. “You relax”), Sully went to a bar called Pickles, a place he and his high school buddies used to try and sneak into. He took a corner stool and ordered whisky with beer chasers, one and another and then one more. When he’d finished drinking, he paid and walked out the door.

  He’d spent the last three days looking for work. Nothing. Next week he’d try the nearby towns. He zipped up his jacket and walked a few blocks, past countless bags of dead brown leaves awaiting collection. Off in the distance he saw lights. He heard the echo of a crowd. Not ready to go home, he walked in that direction until he reached the high school football field.

  His old team was playing—the Coldwater Hawks, in their scarlet-and-white uniforms. From the looks of things, it was not a good season. The stands were three-quarters empty, the small crowd mostly families, with kids running the steps and parents using binoculars to find their sons in the middle of a pileup.

  Sully had played football as a teenager. The Hawks weren’t any better back then. Coldwater was smaller than the other schools it played, and most years it was lucky to field a team.

  He approached the stands. He glanced at the scoreboard. Fourth quarter, Coldwater losing by three touchdowns. He dug his hands in his jacket pocket and watched a play.

  “Harding!” someone yelled.

  Sully froze. The alcohol had dulled his senses, and he’d forgotten the odds of someone recognizing him at his old school—even twenty years later. He turned his head slightly, trying to survey the crowd without being obvious. Maybe he’d imagined it. He turned back toward the field.

  “Geronimo!” someone else yelled, laughing.

  Sully swallowed. This time he didn’t turn around. He stood perfectly still for maybe a minute. Then he walked away.

  The Fifth Week

  A fire truck came roaring down Cuthbert Road, red lights splashing against the October night sky. Five men of the Coldwater First Engine Volunteer Company began their systematic attack on the flames coming from the upper floor of the Rafferty home, a three-bedroom butter-colored colonial with red wooden shutters. By the time Jack pulled up in his squad car, they had everything under control.

  Except the screaming woman.

  She had long, wavy blond hair, wore a lime green sweater, and was being restrained on the lawn by two of Jack’s guys, Ray and Dyson, who, considering the way they ducked her flailing arms, were losing the battle. They screamed at her over the spraying water.

  “It’s not safe, lady!”

  “I have to get back in!”

  “You can’t!”

  Jack stepped up. The woman was lithe and attractive, probably in her midthirties. And she was furious.

  “Let me go!”

  “Miss, I’m the police chief. What’s the—”

  “Please!” She whipped her face toward him, her eyes wild. “There’s no time! It could be burning right now!”

  Her voice was so shrill, even Jack was taken aback, and he honestly thought he’d seen every kind of reaction to flames: people sobbing in the wet grass, people howling like animals, people cursing the firemen for destroying their home with water, as if the fire were just going to put itself out.

  “Havetogetinside, havetogetinside,” the woman chanted hysterically as she strained against Dyson’s grip.

  “What’s your name, Miss?” Jack said.

  “Tess! Let me go!”

  “Tess, is this worth risking your—”

  “Yes!”

  “What’s in there?”

  “You won’t believe me!”

  “Try me!”

  She exhaled and dropped her head.

  “My phone,” she finally said. “I need it. I get calls . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. Ray and Dyson looked at each other, rolling their eyes. Jack was silent. For a moment he didn’t move. Finally, he waved at the two men—“I got this,” he said—and they were only too happy to leave the crazy lady in Jack’s authority.

  Once they’d gone, he put his hands on her shoulders and looked straight into her pale blue eyes, trying to ignore, even in distress, how beautiful she looked.

  “Where’s the phone?” he asked.

  Jack, by that point, had experienced four conversations with his dead son. They all came on Fridays, in his office at the police station, and he spoke with his body hunched over, receiver pressed to his ear.

  The shock of hearing Robbie had given way to joy, even anticipation, and each conversation made Jack more curious about his son’s surroundings.

  “It’s awesome, Dad.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “You don’t see things. . . . You’re inside them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like my childhood . . . I see it . . . So cool!”

  Robbie laughed and Jack nearly broke down. The sound of his son’s laughter. It had been so long.

  “I don’t understand, son. Tell me more.”

  “Love, Dad. Everything around me . . . love—”

  The call had ended that abruptly—all the calls had been short—and Jack stayed at his desk for an hour, just in case the phone rang again. Finally, he drove home, feeling waves of euphoria, followed by fatigue. He knew he should be sharing this with Doreen—maybe with others too. But how would that look? The police chief in a small town, telling people he’s speaking with the afterlife? Besides, a glimpse of heaven is often held close for fear of losing it, like a butterfly cupped in a child’s hands. Jack, to that point, had figured he was the only one being contacted.

  But now, approaching a house on fire, he thought about this screaming woman and her attachment to her phone, and wondered if he were not alone.

  Joy and sorrow share the water. It was a song lyric that played in Sully’s head as he pushed bubbles in the tub toward his son. The bathroom was as dated as the rest of the apartment, with penny-round tile and avocado green walls. A mirror sat on the floor, waiting for Sully to hang it.

  “I don’t wanna wash my hair, Dad.”

  “Why?”

  “The stuff gets in my eyes.”

  “You’ve got to wash it eventually.”

  “Mommy let me skip it.”

  “Always?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “We’ll skip it tonight.”

  “Yes!”

  Sully nudged the bubbles. He thought about Giselle, the way she bathed Jules as an infant, how she toweled him dry and wrapped him up in a hooded terry robe. Every movement in every muscle felt attached to how much Sully missed her.

  “Dad?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Did you say good-bye to the plane?”

  “To the plane?”

  “When you jumped out.”

  “I didn’t jump. I ejected.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “It’s just different, that’s all.”

  He caught his reflection in the mirror—mussed hair, bloodshot eyes, jawline coated with stubble. He had spent another week searching for work in the nearby towns of Moss Hill and Dunmore. People were not encouraging. Bad economy, they said. And with the lumberyard closed . . .

  He had to find a job. He’d been eleven years in the navy, one year in the reserves, and ten months in prison. Every job application had a question about criminal convictions. How could he hide that? How many people around here knew anyhow?

  He thought about that football-field screamer. Geronimo! Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing. He’d been drunk, right?


  “Do you miss your plane, Dad?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Do you miss your airplane?”

  “You don’t miss things, Jules. You miss people.”

  Jules stared at his knees, protruding from the water.

  “So you didn’t say good-bye.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “How come?”

  “It happens too fast. It happens just like that.”

  Sully removed his hand from the tub and snapped his soapy fingers. He watched the bubbles settle.

  Husband loses wife. Son loses mother. Joy and sorrow share the water.

  Just like that.

  Small towns begin with a sign. The words are as simple as the title to a story—WELCOME TO HABERVILLE, NOW ENTERING CLAWSON—but once you cross, you are inside that story, and all that you do will be part of its tale.

  Amy Penn drove past the sign VILLAGE OF COLDWATER, ESTABLISHED 1898, never realizing how, in the weeks to come, she would change it. All she knew was that her takeout coffee was long gone, the radio was static, and she had driven nearly two hours from Alpena with a constant sense of things shrinking, four lanes down to one, red lights to blinking yellow, overpass billboards to wooden signs in empty fields.

  Amy wondered why, if souls in heaven were making contact with the living, it would happen way out here. Then she thought about haunted houses. They were never in the city, right? Always some creepy, lonely place on a hill.

  She lifted her iPhone and took snapshots of Coldwater, scouting where she might set up her camera. There was a cemetery surrounded by a low brick wall. A one-garage firehouse. A library. Some stores on Lake Street were boarded up, while others seemed randomly chosen for survival: a market, a bead shop, a locksmith, a bookstore, a bank, a converted colonial home with a porch sign that read ATTORNEYS AT LAW.

  Mostly Amy passed houses, old houses, Cape Cod or ranch style, narrow asphalt driveways, small shrubs leading to front doors. She was searching for the home of a Katherine Yellin, whom she had called on the phone (her number was listed) and who sounded a little too excited as she quickly offered her address, which Amy had entered into her phone’s GPS system: 24755 Guningham Road. How ordinary an address for a miracle, Amy thought. But then, it wasn’t a miracle. It was a colossal waste of time. Do your best. Be a professional. She turned her car—marked NINE ACTION NEWS on the side—and realized that not every house on the street had a number.

  “Great,” she mumbled. “How am I going to find this place?”

  As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. When she reached the house, Katherine was on the porch, waving.

  Faith, it is said, is better than belief, because belief is when someone else does the thinking. Pastor Warren’s faith was intact. Belief was coming harder. True, attendance was up at Harvest of Hope Church, and the congregation had fresh energy. Instead of lowered heads praying for employment, people were increasingly seeking forgiveness and making promises of better behavior. Katherine’s claim of heavenly contact had inspired this.

  Yet Warren remained troubled. He had spoken to that man from the Alpena TV station (how fast the news spreads!), but when asked to explain the phenomenon, he had no response. Why would the good Lord be granting two of his members sacred contact with the hereafter? Why those two? Why now?

  He took off his reading glasses, rubbed his temples, and pushed his fingers through his fine white hair. His jowls hung loose, like an old hound dog’s. His ears and nose seemed to grow larger each year. The days of existential wrestling were long behind him, something from his time in divinity school. Not now, at eighty-two, when his fingers shook just turning the pages in a prayer book.

  Earlier in the week, he had called Katherine to his office. He informed her of the inquiry by the Alpena TV station. He suggested she be very cautious.

  “What about Elias Rowe?” she asked.

  “I haven’t heard from him since that day in services.”

  Katherine looked almost pleased.

  “Harvest of Hope was chosen for a reason, Pastor.” She stood up. “And when a church is chosen, it should lead the march of faith, not block it, don’t you think?”

  He watched her pull on her gloves. It seemed more a threat than a question.

  That night Elias stopped by Frieda’s Diner—the only Coldwater eatery open past nine in the evening. He took the corner booth and ordered a cup of beef barley soup. The place was nearly empty. He was glad. He didn’t want anyone asking him questions.

  From the moment he’d stood up in church and made his simple declaration—“I got a call, too”—he’d felt like a man on the run. At the time, he’d only wanted to say that Katherine wasn’t crazy. After all, he too had received a phone call from the other side—five of them now—and to deny it by silence seemed a sin.

  But he was not happy about his calls. They came not from a departed loved one but from an embittered former worker named Nick Joseph, a roofer who’d been with Elias for ten years. Nick liked to drink and carouse, and he would call Elias with one excuse after another for his lateness or shoddy production. He often came to job sites drunk, and Elias would send him home without pay.

  One day, Nick arrived clearly intoxicated. While on the roof, he got into a heated argument, spun wildly, and fell off, breaking an arm and injuring his back.

  When Elias was notified, he was more angry than sympathetic. He gave instructions to have Nick drug-tested—despite Nick screaming at his coworkers not to call anybody. The ambulance came. The test was given. Nick failed. As a result, he lost his workers’ compensation benefits.

  Nick never worked again. He was in and out of the hospital, constantly fighting costs due to his insurance limitations.

  A year after the accident, Nick was found dead in his basement, an apparent heart failure.

  That was eighteen months ago.

  Now, suddenly, Elias was getting phone calls.

  “Why did you do it?” the first call began.

  “Who is this?” Elias asked.

  “It’s Nick. Remember me?”

  Elias hung up, shaking. He looked at the caller ID, but there was nothing there, just the word UNKNOWN.

  A week later, in front of Josie, his customer, the phone had rung again.

  “I needed help. Why didn’t you help me? . . . God . . . forgives me. Why didn’t you?”

  “Stop. Whoever this is, don’t ever call me again!” Elias had yelled, flicking off the phone and dropping it.

  Why was this happening? Why him? Why now? A waitress brought his soup, and he swallowed a few spoonfuls, forcing an appetite he hadn’t had in weeks. Tomorrow he would change his number. Make it unlisted. If these calls were truly a sign from God, he had done his part. He had confirmed it.

  He wanted no more of this miracle.

  The Sixth Week

  Two years before he invented the telephone, Alexander Bell yelled into a dead man’s ear.

  The ear, eardrum, and related bones had been carved off a cadaver by Bell’s associate, a surgeon, so that Bell, then a young elocution teacher, could study how the eardrum carried sound. He attached a piece of straw to it, put a piece of smoked glass on the other end, and placed a funnel on the outside.

  When Bell yelled down the funnel, the eardrum vibrated, moving the straw, which marked the glass. Bell had originally hoped these markings could help his deaf students learn to speak—including his future wife, a young woman named Mabel Hubbard. But he quickly realized an even larger implication.

  If sound could vibrate an electrical current the way it did straw, then words could travel as far as electricity. All you’d need is one sort of mechanical eardrum on each end.

  A cadaver’s skull had sparked that insight. Thus the dead were already part of the telephone, two years before anyone saw one.

  The autumn leaves fall early in northern Michigan, and by mid-October the trees were bare. This gave an eerie, empty feeling to the streets of Coldwater, as if a powerful force had vacuumed through them, leav
ing the town vacant.

  It would not last.

  A few days before the rest of the world learned of Coldwater’s miracle, Jack Sellers, freshly shaved, in a crisp blue shirt, his hair combed straight back, stood inside Tess Rafferty’s charred kitchen. He watched her dump a spoonful of instant coffee into her already full cup.

  “More caffeine this way,” she said. “I try to stay awake, in case a call comes late.”

  Jack nodded. He looked around. The fire hadn’t affected the lower level so much, although smoke damage made the tan walls look like half-toasted bread. He saw an old answering machine on the counter, salvaged from the fire, and of course, Tess’s precious telephone, a beige Cortelco wall unit, returned to its place, hanging just to the left of the cabinets.

  “So you only have that one phone?”

  “It’s my mom’s old house. She liked it that way.”

  “And your calls are always on Friday, too?”

  Tess paused. “This isn’t a police investigation, is it?”

  “No, no. I’m as confused as you are.”

  Jack sipped his coffee and tried to limit how often he looked at Tess’s face. He had stopped by, he’d explained, to inspect the fire damage—in a small town like Coldwater, police and fire departments worked together—but they both knew it was a ruse. After all, he’d had her telephone retrieved from the blaze. Why would he do that unless he knew there was something special about it?

  Within fifteen minutes, they had confessed to each other. It was like sharing the world’s most impatient secret.

  “Yes,” Tess said, “my calls are only on Fridays.”

  “Always here? Never at work?”

  “I haven’t been to work. I run a day care center. The staff has been covering for me. I’ve been making up excuses. To be honest, I’ve haven’t even left the house. It’s silly. But I don’t want to miss her.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What did she say the first time? Your mother?”

  Tess smiled. “The first time was a message. The next time she wanted to tell me about heaven. The third time, I asked her what it was like, and she just kept saying, ‘It’s beautiful.’ She said the pain we suffer is a way to make us appreciate what comes next.”