The Next Person You Meet in Heaven Page 4

  Annie Makes a Mistake

  She is eight years old and on the train to Ruby Pier. She wears cutoff shorts and a lime green T-shirt with a cartoon duck on the front. Her mother sits next to her, beside her latest boyfriend, Bob.

  Bob has a thick mustache that covers his upper lip. Tony, the boyfriend before Bob, always wore sunglasses. Dwayne, the one before Tony, had a tattoo on his wrist. None of the boyfriends really speak to Annie. Only if she asks them something.

  On the train, Bob takes her mother’s hand and plays with it, but she pushes him off, nodding towards her daughter. Annie wonders if this means her mother doesn’t like Bob.

  They walk through the entrance of Ruby Pier, beneath spires and minarets and a giant arch. Annie gazes at the image of a woman in a high-collared dress holding a parasol—Ruby herself—welcoming guests to her park. After her father left, Annie and her mother came here often, just the two of them. They rode carousel horses and drank slushies and ate corn dogs. It was fun. But lately, boyfriends have been coming, too. Annie wishes it could go back to the way it was.

  Her mother buys twenty tickets and warns Annie to stay away from grown-up rides like the roller coasters or Freddy’s Free Fall. Annie nods. She knows the routine. She knows the snack bar. She knows the bumper cars. She knows her mother will go away with Bob and only come back at four o’clock, asking, “Did you have fun, Annie?” But she won’t really care if Annie had fun.

  By midafternoon the sun is hot, and Annie sits under a table umbrella. She is bored. The old man who fixes the rides walks past, the one with the patch on his uniform that says EDDIE and MAINTENANCE. He sits down across the way, looking around as if studying the rides.

  Annie approaches, hoping he has pipe cleaners in his pocket.

  “’Scuuuse me, Eddie Maint’nance?”

  He sighs. “Just Eddie.”

  “Eddie?”

  “Um-hmm?”

  “Can you make me . . . ?”

  She puts her hands together as if praying.

  “C’mon, kiddo. I don’t have all day.”

  When she asks for an animal, he begins twisting yellow pipe cleaners together. He hands her a figure, shaped like a rabbit, which she takes happily and runs back to the umbrella table.

  She plays with it for a while. But soon she is bored again. It is only two o’clock. She walks to the midway and tries a game, throwing wooden rings at glass bottles. It costs her a ticket, but they give you a prize no matter what.

  After three missed tosses, she is handed a small plastic package: inside is a balsa wood airplane. She fits one piece into the other. She throws it high. It flies in a loop. She does it again.

  On her last toss, the plane glides over the heads of customers and lands on the other side of a railing, the one that blocks access to the base of Freddy’s Free Fall. Annie looks both ways. The adults tower over her.

  She slides under the rail.

  She picks up the plane.

  Then a woman screams.

  Everyone is pointing at the sky.

  SUDDENLY, it all made sense, who Sameer was, why they were in this hospital. Annie’s spirit was inside her childhood body, lying in the hospital bed, looking out through youthful eyes. She wiggled her feet, covered in yellow hospital socks.

  “You were my doctor,” Annie whispered.

  “Your voice is returning,” Sameer said.

  Annie coughed, trying to bring more heft to the words.

  “I sound like a child.”

  “You work your way along in heaven.”

  “Why am I reliving this?”

  “Because it all ties together. When I grew up, I realized how lucky I’d been. I got serious. I studied. I went to college, then medical school. I specialized in replantation.”

  Annie squinted. “Replantation?”

  “A fancy word for reconnecting body parts.”

  “So you saved my hand?”

  “Me and three other doctors. You only had a few hours. After that, it would have been too late.”

  Annie stared at her young, bandaged appendage.

  “I can’t remember the accident,” she said. “I blacked the whole thing out.”

  “Understandable.”

  “And I’m really sorry, but I don’t remember you.”

  Sameer shrugged. “Lots of kids don’t remember their doctors. Starting with the ones who delivered them.”

  * * *

  Annie studied the mature face before her, the jowls heavy with middle age, the temples flecked with gray hair. In the dark eyes, she saw the shadow of the impulsive boy.

  “If this is really heaven,” she asked, “why are you the person greeting me? Aren’t I supposed to see God? Or Jesus? Or at least someone I remember?”

  “That comes in time,” Sameer said. “But the five people you meet first are chosen for a reason. They affected you in some way on earth. Maybe you knew them. Maybe you didn’t.”

  “If I didn’t know them, how could they affect me?”

  “Ah.” He patted his hands. “Now comes the teaching part.”

  He stepped around the bed and looked through the window.

  “Tell me something, Annie. Did the world begin with your birth?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Right. Not yours. Not mine. Yet we humans make so much of ‘our’ time on earth. We measure it, we compare it, we put it on our tombstones.

  “We forget that ‘our’ time is linked to others’ times. We come from one. We return to one. That’s how a connected universe makes sense.”

  Annie looked at the white sheets and the blue blanket and the heavily bandaged hand that rested on her childhood belly. This was precisely when her life stopped making sense.

  “Did you know,” Sameer continued, “that hundreds of years ago, they used plaster and tape to reattach noses? Later they used wine and urine to preserve severed fingers. Reattaching rabbits’ ears preceded efforts on humans. And not long before I was born, Chinese doctors trying replantation were still using needles that took two days to grind down.

  “People lament that if their loved ones had been born fifty years later, they might have survived what killed them. But perhaps what killed them is what led someone to find a cure.

  “Chasing that train was the worst thing I ever did—to myself. But my doctors used their knowledge to save me. And I advanced what they did on you. We tried a technique with your hand that we had never done before, allowing better blood flow through the arteries. It worked.”

  He leaned in and touched Annie’s fingers, and she felt herself rising from inside her young body, returning to the mostly invisible form she had been before.

  “Remember this, Annie. When we build, we build on the shoulders of those who came before us. And when we fall apart, those who came before us help put us back together.”

  He removed his white lab coat and unbuttoned his shirt, far enough to yank it down over his right arm. Annie saw the squiggly scars from decades ago, now faded to a milky white.

  “Know me or not, we’re part of each other, Annie.”

  He tugged the shirt back on.

  “End of lesson.”

  Annie felt a tingling. Her left hand reappeared. For the first time in heaven, she felt pain.

  “It won’t hurt long,” Sameer said. “Just a reminder.”

  “Of my loss?” she asked.

  “Of your attachment,” he replied.

  * * *

  With that, they were back to where Annie had arrived in the afterlife, between the snowcapped mountains and the massive skyscrapers. A giant wheel of railroad track unfurled and Annie saw a train heading their way.

  “This isn’t how I pictured heaven,” she said.

  “Well,” Sameer said, “you get to pick your eternal setting. On earth, trains haunted me. I never rode one again. But there’s nothing to fear here. So I chose to flip my human existence. Now I ride this train wherever I please.”

  Annie looked at him blankly.

  “
Do you understand?” he said. “This isn’t your heaven, it’s mine.”

  The train arrived. Its doors slid open.

  “Time to go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Not ‘we,’ Annie. This stage of heaven, for me, is finished. But you have more to learn.”

  He rapped the exterior and put a foot on the step.

  “Good luck.”

  “Wait!” Annie said. “My death. I was trying to save my husband. His name is Paulo. Did he live? Just tell me. Please. Tell me if I saved him.”

  The engine roared.

  “I can’t,” Sameer said.

  Annie looked down.

  “But others are coming.”

  “What others?” Annie said.

  Before he could answer, the train whisked off. The sky turned maroon. Then everything that surrounded Annie was sucked up into the air and spilled back down in a storm of grainy sand.

  A vast brown desert surrounded her.

  And she was alone.

  Annie Makes a Mistake

  Her hand is still bandaged from the accident three weeks ago, and her arm is in a sling to keep it elevated. She sits on her bed. There is little else to do. She is not allowed outside, and her mother, for some reason, has disconnected the TV set and cut its cord with scissors.

  Annie walks to the window and sees Lorraine in the backyard, smoking. She has papers in her lap, but is staring at the laundry lines of neighboring houses. Sometimes, Annie notices, her mother has a hard time looking at her. Maybe parents want their children to be perfect. Annie studies her left hand, swollen and grotesque. She is not perfect anymore.

  She hears something from downstairs. A knocking at the door. Strange. People usually ring the bell. Annie walks down the steps and hears the knocking again, soft, tentative. She turns the knob.

  A woman is standing on the porch. She wears a bright red blazer, lip gloss, and thick pancake makeup that makes her skin a single shade.

  “Oh, wow,” the woman says. “You’re Annie, right?”

  Annie nods.

  “How’re you doing, sweetheart?”

  “OK,” Annie mumbles.

  “We’ve been worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  The woman, who keeps smiling, is motioning behind her back, as if pushing the air forward.

  “Do you know how lucky you are?” she says.

  “I don’t feel lucky,” Annie says.

  “You don’t? Well. That’s understandable. Does your arm still hurt? Say, my friend is coming. Can you tell him—and me—about what happened?”

  Annie is confused. She sees a man hurrying their way, carrying a large camera on his shoulders. She sees others behind him, running.

  “Start with what you remember,” the woman says. “You went to Ruby Pier and—”

  Annie steps back. All these people are on the porch, pushing cameras and microphones at her face. Suddenly, she feels a jerk on her shirt. Her mother steps in front of her, pushing Annie back. Annie smells the cigarette smoke on her mother’s clothes.

  “Leave us alone!” her mother yells. “I’ll call the police! I swear I will!”

  She slams the door shut. She turns her angry face towards Annie.

  “What have I told you! Do NOT answer the door! Never! Those people are vultures! Don’t ever do that again! Do you understand me?”

  Annie starts to cry. “I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . .”

  Her mother tears up. Annie runs upstairs and slams her bedroom door. This is how it is now. Every day, one of them is crying. Annie hates it. She hates her hand. She hates her bandages. She hates the way people are acting towards her. She hates whatever happened at Ruby Pier, something she can’t even remember.

  The next morning, Annie’s mother wakes her up early.

  “Come on,” she says, wearing a coat. “We’re leaving.”

  The Next Eternity

  Annie watched the sky turn to darker shades, gunmetal gray and mocha brown. Her left hand was stinging. The lightness she had experienced on her arrival was gone. She felt less like a child than a student, curious, tentative, as if she were growing up even after she died.

  Alone in the desert, she saw a small pile in the distance, the only thing on an otherwise barren landscape. She used her two hands to pull herself through the sand.

  When the pile drew close, Annie blinked to confirm what she was seeing: there, neatly stacked, were her feet, legs, arms, neck, and torso.

  Her body in pieces.

  What is going on? she thought. She tried to pull closer, but she suddenly could not. The sand wisped through her fingers like cotton candy. She looked around. A choking loneliness began to rise. Annie had felt this way often in the years after the accident, isolated, cast out, unable to do things. But why feel it here? Wasn’t heaven supposed to be the end of such pain?

  She remained still for what felt like a long time, until a distinct noise came from the flat quiet. It amplified rapidly, unrecognizable at first, then very recognizable.

  It can’t be, Annie thought. A dog bark? Yes. Then another. Then a cacophony of howls and yelps.

  Annie turned to see the sand kicking up and small dust clouds to her left and right. Quickly, an army of canines—every breed and size—encircled her, barking excitedly, grabbing at her body pieces and tossing them into the air.

  Annie put her hands to her ears. “Stop it!” she screamed. Her voice was deeper than it had been with Sameer, but it had no effect on the animals. They growled and yipped and whipped up sand everywhere.

  A brown Labrador dangled one of Annie’s feet in its jowls. “No!” Annie screamed, tugging it free. “That’s mine!” An Afghan hound, with long stringy fur, raced past with her other foot. “Give it!” she yelled, wrestling it loose.

  Suddenly, as if on cue, the dogs packed together and raced to the horizon, taking the rest of Annie’s body with them.

  “No, wait!” she heard herself yell.

  The dogs looked back, as if urging her to follow. Annie scanned the otherwise barren desert. Whatever was out there had to provide more answers than this. She placed her two loose feet in front of her. She willed herself up until it felt as if she were standing.

  “Come on,” she said to herself.

  And she began to run.

  The Second Person Annie Meets in Heaven

  Over the centuries, man has created countless depictions of the hereafter; few, if any, show the departed soul alone. Despite the ways we isolate ourselves on earth, in our final bliss, we are always with someone: the Lord, Jesus, saints, angels, loved ones. A solitary afterlife seems unimaginably grim.

  Perhaps this is why Annie chased the dog pack through heaven, without knowing where it might take her. She followed the animals up a sharp incline, over a ridge, and down into a valley. The sky above her shifted again, from mustard to plum to forest green. These colors, and all the firmament’s colors since her arrival, reflected the emotions of her life on earth, replaying as that life was replayed. But Annie could not know this.

  Instead, she continued her pursuit until the dogs broke from their pack and spread like spokes of a wheel. The ground split into a checkerboard of small green lawns, each with a door of various design, wood, metal, painted, stained, some modern, some ancient, some rectangular, some rounded at the top. The dogs sat obediently, one outside each entrance, as if waiting for someone to come through.

  “Annie,” a breathy voice said. “At last.”

  Annie spun to see an elegant old woman. She looked to be in her eighties or nineties, with thick silver hair, a sloped nose, a tucked chin, and large, sad eyes. She wore a knee-length fur coat and a necklace dotted with colorful stones.

  “Who are you?” Annie said.

  The woman seemed disappointed.

  “You don’t remember?”

  Annie studied her smiling face, the skin wrinkled and sagging.

  “Are you . . .”

  The woman cocked her head.

  “.
. . my second person?”

  “Yes.”

  Annie sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t know you, either.”

  “Well, you were having a tough time when we met.”

  “When was that? What were we doing? If you were in my life, why does none of this make sense to me?”

  “Hmm.”

  The old woman paced, as if thinking of options. Then she stopped and pointed to the blue horizon, where a car was heading towards them.

  “Let’s go for a ride.”

  * * *

  Instantly, Annie was in the passenger seat. She was alone. No one was driving. The car sped through cottony clouds and glaring sunshine. The old woman ran alongside the vehicle, peering through the window.

  “Don’t you want to get in?” Annie yelled.

  “No, it’s fine!” the woman yelled back.

  Eventually (although Annie could not measure time in heaven—it felt like everything was happening quickly yet taking forever) the car stopped. Annie got out. The old woman stood beside her, breathing heavily. There was a one-story structure by a dirt parking lot. A blue-and-white sign read PETUMAH COUNTY ANIMAL RESCUE SHELTER.

  “I remember this building,” Annie whispered. “This is where we got my dog.”

  “That’s right,” the woman said.

  “Cleo.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This was your place?”

  “At the time.”

  The old woman sat down.

  “What else do you remember?”

  * * *

  What Annie remembered was this: after living her whole life in the same house, on the same street, she and her mother abruptly left—just got in the car and sped away, their possessions in suitcases or big black garbage bags, the trunk held shut by a bungee cord.

  They drove for days, eating at gas stations or fast-food places. They slept in the car. They finally stopped in a state called Arizona, where, for a while, they lived in a roadside motel, which had pale green carpeting and a lock on the telephone.

  After that, they moved to a trailer. It sat on large blocks in a treeless park, alongside other trailers. They slept, ate, bathed, and washed their clothes inside. Their only contacts with the outside world were visits to a supermarket, the local library (to get Annie books), and a nearby hospital, where Annie had her bandages replaced and her splints adjusted. Annie still could not use her left hand; sometimes she couldn’t feel the tips of her fingers. She wondered if for the rest of her life she would have to do what she was doing now, carrying everything one-handed, using her elbow to hold things open.