The Next Person You Meet in Heaven Read online

  Another slap. Annie is getting dizzy.

  “JERRY!—”

  He lets go and Annie crumbles. Her parents scream as she sobs on the floor. She hears footsteps rushing her way. Then her mother is hovering over her, blocking the light.

  The next morning, her father moves out. He slams the door as he goes. Annie knows why he’s leaving. Because she wanted that Creamsicle. That’s why he’s going away.

  The Arrival

  Blue. Everything was blue. A single shade, enveloping Annie as if she’d been painted into it. She felt extremely light and strangely curious.

  Where am I?

  What happened?

  Where is Paulo?

  She could not see any part of herself. The blue was like a blanket covering all but her eyes. Suddenly, a large seat appeared in front of her, floating about chest-high, with a tan leather cushion and a silver rail across the top. It looked like something from a plane or a bus.

  Annie instinctively went to touch it—and was shocked to see her right hand floating in front of her, unattached to anything else. No wrist. No forearm. No elbow. No shoulder. She realized the blue wasn’t covering her body. She had no body. No middle or bottom. No stomach, thighs, or feet.

  What is this?

  Where is the rest of me?

  What am I doing here?

  Then, the blue around her wiped away, like soapy water rinsed from a glass, and there were snowcapped mountains to her left and urban skyscrapers to her right. Everything was zooming by, as if she were speeding while standing still. She looked down and saw tracks passing beneath her. She heard the wail of an unmistakable sound.

  A train whistle.

  She let go of the seat. It vanished. A second seat appeared, farther ahead. She gripped that one and it vanished, too, a new one materializing, guiding her forward. Finally, she reached a compartment door with an ornate bronze handle. She pulled it down.

  With that, she went from outside to inside. An engine car sketched around her, as if being drawn by an artist’s pen. The ceiling was low, the floor was riveted metal, and there were panels and gauges and levers everywhere. It looked like a train from the 1950s.

  What kind of dream is this?

  Why do I feel so light?

  Where is everybody?

  Something caught her eye. Up there. In the conductor’s seat. A small head bounced into view, then was gone.

  “Yes!” a young voice yelled. “Yes!”

  Had this been a normal dream, Annie might have run, scared of a stranger the way we are often scared while sleeping. But danger has no grip in the afterlife, and Annie continued drifting forward until she was alongside the driver’s seat. She looked down and saw something quite unexpected.

  There, behind the steering console, was a young boy with caramel skin and jet-black hair, wearing a striped, short-sleeve shirt and a toy gun holster.

  “Am I going too fast?” he asked.

  Annie Makes a Mistake

  She is six years old, walking home from school. She is accompanied, as usual, by three older kids: Warren Helms, who is eleven; his sister, Devon, who is nine; and his other sister, Lisa, who just turned eight.

  “It’s called Holy Communion,” Lisa says.

  “What do you do?” Annie asks.

  “You go to church, you say you’re sorry, and you eat a cookie.”

  “A wafer,” Warren says.

  “Then you get presents.”

  “Lots of presents,” Devon says.

  “Really?” Annie says.

  “I got a bike,” Warren says.

  Annie feels jealous. She likes presents. She only gets them on Christmas and her birthday now. Her mother says they have to “tighten up” since her father left.

  “Can I do a communum?”

  “A Communion, stupid.”

  “You have to be Catholic. Are you Catholic?”

  Annie shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “You’d know if you were Catholic,” Warren says.

  “How?”

  “You just would.”

  Annie taps the sidewalk with her shoe. She feels the limits of being too young, a feeling she has often with the Helms kids, who walk her home every day. Most of her classmates are picked up by their mothers. But Annie’s mother has to work, so Annie waits at the neighbors’ until she gets home.

  “Witch’s house coming up,” Warren says.

  They look ahead to a small, brown, single-level home, with sagging gutters and a neglected front porch. Its paint is peeling. Its wood is rotted. The rumor is an old witch lives there and once, years ago, a kid went inside and never came out.

  “Give you five dollars if you knock on her door,” Warren says.

  “Not me,” Devon says.

  “I don’t need it,” Lisa says. “I’m getting presents Sunday.”

  “Up to you, Annie.”

  Warren pulls a five-dollar bill from his pocket.

  “You can buy a lot of stuff.”

  Annie stops. She thinks about presents. She stares at the door.

  “She’s probably not even home,” Warren says. He waves the bill. “Fiiiive bucks.”

  “How many toys can I get for that?” Annie asks.

  “A lot,” Devon says.

  Annie pulls on her curly hair and looks down, as if deciding. Then she lets go and marches up the path until she reaches the porch. She looks back at the others. Warren makes a knocking motion.

  Annie inhales. Her heart is racing. She thinks again about presents. She lifts her fist to the screen door.

  Before she can make contact, it swings open and a white-haired woman in a bathrobe is staring down at her.

  “What do you want?” the woman croaks.

  Annie can’t move. She shakes her head as if to say, Nothing, she wants nothing. The woman looks past her to the other kids running away.

  “They put you up to this?”

  Annie nods.

  “Can’t you talk, girl?”

  Annie swallows. “I wanted presents.”

  The old woman scowls.

  “You shouldn’t bother people.”

  Annie can’t break her gaze from the woman’s face, her long, slanted nose, her thin, cracked lips, the purplish circles under her eyes.

  “Are you really a witch?” Annie asks.

  The woman squints. “No,” she says. “Are you?”

  Annie shakes her head.

  “I’m just sick, that’s all,” the woman says. “Now go away.”

  She shuts the door. Annie exhales. She turns and runs to the others down the block. When she reaches them, she repeats what the woman said.

  “Deal’s off,” Warren says. “She isn’t a real witch.”

  Annie’s shoulders slump.

  She never gets the money.

  The First Person Annie Meets in Heaven

  “Am I going too fast?”

  Annie stared at the boy in the striped shirt.

  Where am I?

  “Can’t hear you.”

  Where am I—

  “Can’t heaaaaarr you!”

  I said—

  He broke into a grin. “I can’t hear you, stupid, because you’re not talking.”

  He was right. Annie had no mouth. The words she was hearing were in her mind.

  “Nobody can talk when they first arrive,” the boy said. “It makes you listen better. That’s what they told me, anyhow.”

  Who?

  “The first people I met.”

  So you can hear me?

  “What you’re thinking, yeah.”

  Who are you?

  “Sameer.”

  Why are you here?

  “I kinda have to be.”

  Where am I?

  “You still don’t know?”

  He pointed to the window and the shifting colors of the sky.

  “Heaven.”

  I died?

  “Boy, are you slow.”

  * * *

  Annie’s thoughts were spilling everywh
ere, like raindrops down a windowpane. She died? Heaven? The balloon crash? Paulo?

  Where is my body? Why am I like this?

  “I don’t know,” the boy said. “Was someone on earth taking you apart?”

  Annie thought about the transplant.

  Sort of.

  “That could do it. Hey. Watch this.”

  He pounded a flat button. The train whistle roared.

  “I love that,” he said.

  Please. I don’t belong here. I shouldn’t have . . .

  “What?”

  You know.

  “Died?”

  Yes.

  “Why not? I did.”

  But it wasn’t my time. I’m not old or sick. I’m just . . .

  “What?”

  Annie replayed her wedding night, stopping for the motorist, which led to the balloon crash, which led to the transplant, which led to this.

  A person who makes mistakes.

  “Wow,” the boy said, rolling his eyes. “Someone has self-esteem issues.”

  * * *

  With that, he pushed the wheel and the train accelerated wildly, lifting into the air, dipping, rising, turning as sharply as a race car.

  “Whoo-eee!” he yelled.

  Annie spotted a purple ocean up ahead. As the shoreline approached, she saw huge breaking waves and vast white foam.

  Wait—

  “Don’t worry. I’ve done this a buncha times.”

  He dipped the train sharply and Annie braced for impact, but none came; just silent immersion and a boysenberry shade outside the windows.

  “See?”

  Where are we going?

  “It’s more like ‘when.’”

  He pulled the wheel upwards, and they emerged from the deep into what seemed to be a new world, more earthly in its appearance. The train slowed and joined a track by the edge of a small town, with tidy older houses of white aluminum siding.

  “Get ready,” the boy said. He punched out the front glass, which flew away in a thousand shattered pieces. He yanked the brake levers and the train screeched to a halt, as he and Annie launched through the opening.

  “Whoo-hooo!” he yelled as they soared. “Cool, right?”

  Then, somehow, they were standing by the tracks, no landing, no impact.

  “Well, I thought it was cool,” he mumbled.

  * * *

  It was quiet now. The train was gone. Trees were barren and leaves covered the ground. The landscape turned a sepia patina, like an old film.

  Please, Annie thought, I don’t understand.

  “What?”

  Anything. Why I’m here. Why you’re here.

  “I’m here,” the boy said, “because when you first get to heaven, you meet five people from your time on earth. They were all in your life for a reason.”

  What kind of reason?

  “That’s what you find out. They teach you something you didn’t realize while you were alive. It helps you understand the things you went through.”

  So wait. You’re my first person?

  “Don’t sound so excited.”

  I’m sorry. It’s just—I don’t know you.

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  The boy reached up and made a sweeping motion by Annie’s eyes, and instantly, her face was back. Annie touched her cheeks.

  What did you—

  “Relax. I don’t have cooties. Now watch. This is important.”

  He pointed to the tracks. Annie’s vision was extremely sharp. Off in the distance, she saw a second train approaching, smoke coming from its stack. Beside it, a small boy was running to keep up, reaching out, stumbling, running again. Annie noticed his familiar features: black hair, caramel skin, striped shirt, cowboy holster.

  Wait. That’s you?

  “Younger and dumber,” the boy said.

  What are you doing?

  “I thought I could fly. I thought, ‘I’ll grab this train and hang on like a kite.’” He shrugged. “I was only seven.”

  The running boy made another failed lunge. The final car was about to pass. With a clenched jaw, he pumped his arms and gave a last leaping attempt. This time he hooked his fingers around a rail on the rear platform.

  But only for an instant.

  The speed of the train ripped his arm clean off his body, leaving the boy in the dirt, stunned and screaming, his shirtsleeve thickening with blood. The severed arm fell off the rail. It dropped to the gravel and reddened the stones.

  The boy looked at Annie.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  SUNDAY, 10:30 A.M.

  The man named Tolbert signed a receipt. The woman behind the counter slid a copy back his way.

  “All set,” she said.

  Tolbert waited for his wife’s car to be brought around. Earlier, at the house, he had nudged her awake.

  “I’ll be back in a bit,” he whispered.

  “Hmm?—”

  “Your tire was flat.”

  “. . . it was?”

  “I gotta buy a new one.”

  “. . . OK . . .” She rolled over. “Be careful.”

  Now, as he glanced at the walls of the auto shop, Tolbert thought about the newlyweds who had stopped to help him last night. The groom, who changed the tire in his tuxedo, said the whole thing was his wife’s idea. Nice guy. Funny guy. The incident had made Tolbert feel good about people. He didn’t always feel that way.

  A mechanic pulled up in the car.

  “Good as new. Spare’s in the trunk.”

  “Thanks,” Tolbert said.

  Once inside, Tolbert grabbed his cell phone and pressed the preset number for Teddy, his assistant.

  It went to voice mail.

  He dialed it again.

  Same thing.

  He dialed the office.

  Voice mail again.

  “Uch,” he mumbled. “That damn kid.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror, then turned the car around, heading for the balloon field instead of home, the good feeling about other people now gone.

  The First Lesson

  Annie stared at the wounded boy, lying in the gravel, missing an arm and bleeding profusely.

  Why are you showing me this? It’s awful.

  “Yeah,” Sameer said, “I never cried like that before. I sounded like a wolf.”

  Did you die?

  “I would have. But . . .”

  He pointed, and Annie saw a head poke out the train window, an older woman wearing black cat’s-eye glasses. She ducked back inside.

  The train slowed.

  People jumped off.

  They ran to the boy.

  The woman ran, too.

  She grabbed his severed arm, removed her jacket, and wrapped it tightly.

  “Let’s go to the next part,” the boy said. “This is gross.”

  * * *

  Instantly, they were in a hospital waiting room, where men smoked and women sewed and magazines on low tables were picked up without comment.

  “This is 1961,” the boy said. “That’s my mom.” He pointed to a woman in a red coat, her hands clasped against her lips. “And my pop,” he added, noting a heavily whiskered man in a brown suit, hair the same black shade as his son’s, his left leg shaking nervously. Annie saw the woman from the train. She was standing in the corner, arms crossed over her jacketless blouse.

  When a doctor emerged, everyone turned. He exhaled and said something. Then he smiled widely, and the mother and father hugged and rose to grab the doctor’s hands in gratitude.

  Everything seemed to quicken then, like a movie being fast-forwarded. There were men with cameras and flashbulbs exploding and the mother and father beside the little boy in a bed.

  “I made history,” he told Annie.

  History?

  “First successful full reattachment of a limb.” He grinned. “Pretty good for being stupid, huh?”

  Annie watched the scenes unfold, the boy putting on his jacket, posing with a football, leaving the hospit
al, all of it captured by photographers and reporters.

  Why am I seeing this?

  “Because you went through the same thing.”

  How do you know?

  “Know what?”

  What happened to me?

  “That’s easy.” He took her single hand. “I was there.”

  * * *

  With that, he pulled Annie down a hospital corridor. The ceiling rose and the windows stretched like cellophane.

  “The technique my doctors used became a new standard,” the boy said. “Thanks to my ignorant chasing of a train, many future patients were healed.”

  Annie noticed his improved vocabulary. She looked at the narrow bridge of his nose and the thick bangs that fell loose and unkempt.

  Why do you sound so . . . ?

  “What?”

  Grown-up?

  The boy smiled.

  “You got me.”

  Suddenly, the corridor rumbled and the two of them flipped and bounced as if shaken through a tube. The boy in the striped shirt was changing. When they dropped back down, he had morphed into a middle-aged man, his dark hair slicked back, his shoulders broad, his midsection large enough to push out a white medical coat.

  What just happened?

  “Remember that Bible verse? When I was a child, I spoke as a child, but now that I’m a man, la-da-da . . .”

  You’re a doctor?

  “Well, I was. Heart attack. High blood pressure. Never think doctors take care of themselves better than patients.”

  He tugged on his coat and pointed to a name tag. “As I said, ‘Sameer.’ Or, if you prefer, Dr. Sameer. Titles seem kind of silly up here.

  “By the way, sorry I called you stupid earlier. I picked my kid self to greet you. And I was a fairly obnoxious kid.”

  Annie felt dazed. She could barely keep up. She realized this was a different hospital now; the corridors were brighter. There was newer artwork on the walls.

  Where are we?

  “You don’t remember?”

  How could I remember? Isn’t this your memory?

  “Memories intersect.”

  They glided down a hallway and entered a private room. Sameer approached the patient in bed, a little girl with butterscotch curls whose left arm was bandaged from her elbow to her fingers.

  “How are we doing, Annie?” he asked.

  As the girl’s mouth moved, Annie felt herself answer, “I’m scared.”