The First Phone Call From Heaven: A Novel Page 7

  “You’d be on TV,” the man in the ski parka urged, as if trying to close a deal.

  “I’m just passing through,” Jack said, dropping two dollars on the counter and moving toward the door.

  Jason Turk unlocked the employee entrance of the Dial-Tek Phone Center. He yawned loudly. A rangy twenty-seven-year-old with a Felix the Cat tattoo on his bicep, he was exhausted from another late night playing online video games. He grabbed a can of Coke from a small refrigerator, took a few gulps, then belched, reminding himself of something his girlfriend often said: “Jason, your habits are disgusting.”

  He entered the office, pulled off his sweater, and pulled on a short-sleeved blue-and-silver work shirt that read DIAL-TEK. He leafed through yesterday’s mail. An envelope from the corporate office. Another envelope from the corporate office. A brochure for cleaning services.

  The buzzer sounded. He glanced at his watch. It was 8:10 a.m. He expected one of the delivery truck drivers. But when he opened the back door, he saw a tall guy in an old suede jacket.

  “Hi. I’m Sully. With the Gazette.”

  “Oh, right. I’m Jason.”

  “Hey.”

  “You’re new.”

  “Yeah. Started last week.”

  Didn’t look too happy about it, Jason thought.

  “Come on in.”

  “I guess we’re hoping you want to re-up for another three months—”

  “Save the pitch,” Jason said, waving his hand. “My boss already gave me the check.” He rummaged through a drawer. “What happened to the girl they sent the last couple of times? Victoria?”

  “Dunno,” Sully said.

  Too bad, Jason thought. She was cute.

  “Anyhow, here you go.” He handed Sully an envelope, marked GAZETTE: OCTOBER–DECEMBER.

  “Thanks,” Sully said.

  “No problem.” Jason swigged his Coke, then held out the can. “Mmm. You want one?”

  “I’m good. I’ll get going—”

  Bnnnpp!

  They turned.

  “What was that?” Jason asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sully said.

  Bnnnpp!

  It sounded as if a bird had flown into a glass pane. But wait. There it was again. Bnnnp! Then again. Bnnnp! Then continuous, growing louder, like a drumbeat.

  Bnnnpbnnnpbnnnpbnnnpbnnnp!

  “What the hell?” Jason mumbled. Sully followed him out to the showroom. What they saw froze them both in place: outside the store, pressed against the windows, were at least two dozen people, bundled in their coats. At the sight of Jason and Sully, they surged forward, like fish to the surface when food is tossed.

  Bnnnpbnnnpbnnnpbnnnpbnnnp!

  The two men ducked back into the office.

  “What is that about?” Sully yelled.

  “Who the hell knows?” Jason said, looking for his keys. It was still an hour before he was scheduled to open, and it wasn’t like they were having a sale or something.

  “Are you gonna let them in?”

  “I guess . . . right?”

  “You want me to stick around?”

  “No. I mean. Maybe. Yeah. Just wait in here, OK? This is so freaking weird.”

  Jason exited, keys in hand. He approached the front entrance. He hesitated. The crowd pushed in closer.

  He unlocked the door.

  “Sorry, we’re not open until—”

  The people rushed inside, bumping past him, dashing to the displays.

  “Hey, hang on!” Jason yelled.

  “Do you have this model?” shouted a man in a leather coat and gray sweatshirt. He held a printed page to Jason’s face. Jason saw the image of a woman holding up a pink phone.

  “That’s a Samsung, I think,” he said.

  “You have it? That exact one?”

  “Probably—”

  “I want all you have!”

  “No!”

  “Share them!”

  “I want one!”

  “I want three!”

  Instantly, Jason was surrounded. He felt a hand on his back, then one on his shoulder, then someone grabbing his arm and someone waving paper in his face. He was being banged from person to person, tossed in a choppy sea of bodies, and someone yelled “Wait!” and someone yelled “Give him room!” and then— “EVERYBODY BACK OFF!”

  It was Sully, now in front of Jason in a protective stance, his arms out as a shield. His screaming made the people quiet and they slid back a few inches, allowing Jason to catch his breath.

  “What’s the matter with all of you?” Sully yelled.

  “Yeah, what’s the deal?” Jason gasped, feeling braver with Sully next to him. “We’re not even open yet. What do you want?”

  A thin old woman pushed forward. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and her head was wrapped in a scarf. She appeared to be quite ill.

  “The phone,” she said, her voice scratchy. “The one that calls heaven.”

  What happened with Amy’s video was what happens with many snippets of news in the modern world. It was tossed onto the Internet and whisked into cyberspace. There was no filtering, no editing, no vetting or verifying; someone watched it, passed it on, and the process was repeated not once or twice but in tens of thousands of occurrences, in less time than it takes water to boil. The tag on the video—“Phone Call from Heaven”—accelerated its rapid spread. The shaky camerawork—including the moment when Amy stumbled and the lens went dizzy—created an aura of bizarre authenticity.

  It aired first on the Alpena news station and immediately became the most watched video in the history of the Nine Action News website, which brought Amy a congratulatory call from Phil. “Keep it coming,” he’d told her. Religious groups tagged the video, and soon images of Katherine’s face, the praying Greek woman, and the phone on the desk were being replayed countless times the world over. It was the modern-day version of the moment when Bell’s invention took the Centennial by storm—except that things moved at warp speed now.

  Within a week, Coldwater, Michigan, was the most-searched-for location on the Internet.

  Pastor Warren peeked into the sanctuary. It was nearly full with worshippers—on a Wednesday afternoon. Some had their heads in their hands, others were down on their knees. Warren noticed two men in fisherman caps swaying in prayer, but holding in their outstretched hands not a Bible or a hymnal but . . . their cell phones.

  Warren let the door close quietly. He moved back to his office, where the four other Coldwater clerics were waiting.

  “I’m sorry,” Warren said, sitting down. “I was looking at all the people.”

  “Your flock,” said Father Carroll.

  “It’s not my flock. They’re here because of a congregant’s story.”

  “They are here because of God,” Father Carroll said.

  Yes, yes, came a chorus of agreement.

  “Believers are finally coming to us, Warren, not the other way around.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “At the town meeting next week, we should emphasize this point. Use it to inspire others. Haven’t we all grown tired of chasing people to ignite their faith?”

  The other clergymen nodded their heads in agreement: “That’s right.” “He’s right.” “Amen.”

  “This resurgence, Warren, is a gift beyond whatever voices may be speaking to us from heaven—”

  “Or not,” Warren interrupted.

  “Or perhaps,” the priest responded.

  Warren studied Father Carroll’s expression. He seemed different. Calmer. Almost smiling.

  “Do you believe in this miracle, Father?”

  The clerics leaned forward. St. Vincent’s was the largest church in town. What Father Carroll thought was critical.

  “I remain . . . skeptical,” he said, his words measured. “But I have called my bishop to arrange a visit.”

  Eyes darted back and forth. This was important news.

  “With due respect, Father,” Warren said, “the two congregants .
. . they’ve been in our church for a long time. Baptist. You know this.”

  “I do.”

  “So the bishop—to be coming here—he wouldn’t be speaking with them, not as non-Catholics.”

  “That’s right.”

  Father Carroll lowered his chin. He crossed his hands in his lap. It was understood.

  There was another.

  What Father Carroll had not revealed was that two days earlier, he’d received a message on behalf of a former congregant, Tess Rafferty. Would he come to her house? It was terribly important.

  Until that point, he had dismissed these “otherworldly” claims as foolery. Fakes. The opposite would be too much to accept; that the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, had forsaken the Catholic church in revealing his eternal paradise to the living world—and had chosen the bumbling Pastor Warren over him.

  Tess Rafferty changed all that. In the kitchen of her home, which had survived a recent trial by fire, this thin woman of lapsed faith revealed that she too had been contacted from the other side—by her deceased mother, Ruth, whom Father Carroll remembered. More important, according to the calculations, her initial phone call had come around 8:20 a.m., several hours before Katherine Yellin’s.

  This was pleasing news indeed, news that Father Carroll intended to share with the anxious world.

  If earthly mortals were being contacted by souls in heaven, Tess, a Catholic, had been the first.

  On Thursday afternoon, Sully picked up Jules at school. He met him as he came out the door.

  “Hi, buddy.”

  “Hi.”

  “How was everything today?”

  “OK. Peter played with me.”

  “Peter, the kid with no front teeth?”

  “Yeah.”

  They walked to the car. Sully looked down and saw something light blue protruding from his son’s jacket pocket.

  “What you got there?”

  His son didn’t answer.

  “Jules, what’s in your pocket?”

  “Nothing.”

  Sully opened the car door. “It’s not nothing.”

  “The teacher gave it to me. Can we go home?”

  Jules crawled into the backseat and covered the pocket with his arm. Sully sighed and moved the arm out of the way.

  It was a plastic phone receiver.

  “Aw, Jules.”

  The boy grabbed for it, but Sully pulled it back.

  “It’s not yours!” Jules yelled, loud enough to draw looks from nearby parents.

  “OK, OK,” Sully said, handing it over. Jules shoved it inside his pocket.

  “Is this about Mom?”

  “No.”

  “Is that why you asked for it?”

  “No.”

  “What did your teacher tell you?”

  “She said I could talk to Mommy if I wanted to.”

  “How?”

  “I can close my eyes and use the phone.”

  “And?”

  “And maybe Mommy will call me like those other people.”

  Sully was stunned. Why would a teacher say that? Bad enough the boy was grieving. To fill him with false hope? Had this whole town gone insane? The mob at the phone store, that Internet video, the nutcases praying on Katherine Yellin’s lawn, as if she were some kind of prophet. Now this?

  “Jules, I don’t want you keeping that thing, OK?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a toy.”

  “So?”

  “It won’t work the way you want it to.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “No, you don’t!”

  Sully started the car and exhaled so hard he felt his chest sink. When they arrived at his parents’ house, Jules pulled the handle and raced out the door without looking back.

  Fifteen minutes later, Sully drove alone along Route 8, the two-lane road that connected Coldwater to the outside world. He was still steaming. He wanted to speed back to the school, grab the teacher, and holler, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Tomorrow. He’d do it tomorrow. He had to work now, collect a check from a furniture store in Moss Hill. The roads were wet after a light sleet, and he flipped on the wipers to clear the crud kicked up from passing vehicles.

  As he came around the bend to the open expanse known as Lankers Field, he saw the old sign, NOW LEAVING COLDWATER—THANK YOU FOR VISITING.

  He blinked.

  The sign had a sticker across the bottom: HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED? In the field behind it were at least a dozen RVs and trailers. There were large white tents, and thirty or forty people in winter coats milling about, some reading from books, some digging a fire pit, one playing a guitar. It looked to Sully like a religious pilgrimage—except that those were in places like the Ganges River in India, or Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Not in Lankers Field, where he used to ride his bike to set off firecrackers with his schoolmates.

  This has got to stop, Sully told himself as he slowed the car. Cult worshippers? Paranormal experts? What was next?

  He pulled the car over and rolled down the window. A middle-aged man with a hooked nose and long silver hair tied back in a ponytail took a few steps in his direction.

  “What’s going on?” Sully yelled.

  “Hello, brother,” the man said.

  “What’s all this?”

  “This is a holy place. God is speaking to his children here.”

  Sully fumed at the word children.

  “Who told you that?”

  The man took the measure of Sully’s expression, then grinned. “We can feel it. Would you like to pray with us, brother? You might feel it too.”

  “I actually live here. And you’re wrong. Nobody is speaking to anyone.”

  The man put his hands together, as if in prayer, and smiled again.

  “Jesus,” Sully mumbled.

  “Now you’re talking, brother,” the man said.

  Sully hit the accelerator and screeched away. He wanted to yell at every one of those foolish believers, the pit diggers, the guitar player, Jules’s schoolteachers, the phone customers. Wake up! he wanted to say. The living can’t speak to the dead! If they could, don’t you think I would? Wouldn’t I trade my next hundred breaths for one word from my wife? It’s not possible. There is no God who does such things. There is no miracle in Coldwater. It’s a trick of some kind, a con, a deceit, a massive hoax!

  He’d had enough. He would confront Jules’s teacher. He’d confront the whole damn school board if he had to. And something else. He would attack this phony heaven thing. Expose it as the fraud it had to be. He may have been imprisoned, he may have been disgraced, he may have been scraping by in a new, lousy life, but he still had his brain. He still knew the difference between the truth and a lie. He would do for his son—and for others dealing with real loss—what had never been done for him.

  Get to the bottom of the story.

  The Ninth Week

  Say that again.”

  “Three thousand and fourteen.”

  “From one store?”

  “One store.”

  “How many do they usually carry?”

  “Four.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  Terry Ulrich, a regional vice president for Samsung, hung up and jotted down some numbers. The Dial-Tek outlet in Coldwater, Michigan, had placed an insane order for a single model phone, the Samsung 5GH. It was not a particularly special unit. It flipped open, made calls, and, with the right plan, could connect to the Internet. But that was it. Phones today did so much more—took video, ran games. Why would one store be selling thousands of an older, lesser model?

  The answer, Terry had just been informed, was that the Samsung 5GH was the phone being used by a woman claiming to speak to heaven.

  And she’d purchased it in the Coldwater store.

  Terry ran two fingers along his chin. He looked out the window at the Chicago skyline. The profit on this order alone would be close to six figures. He sp
un back to his computer, searched the Internet, and found a series of stories about this Coldwater phenomenon. He watched a video from Nine Action News in Alpena, which he found rather hokey.

  But when he saw how many hits the videos had received, he grabbed the phone.

  “Get the guys from marketing down here. Fast.”

  Alexander Bell’s mother was deaf. When people spoke to her, they did so through a rubber ear tube. But Alexander did not. Early on, he sensed that she could better understand him if he put his mouth near her forehead and spoke in low, sonorous tones. The vibrations of his voice could be better absorbed that way—a principle that would one day be integral to his development of the telephone.

  When Giselle was in the hospital, Sully spoke to her like that, his lips close to her forehead, his lowered voice vibrating with every memory he could think of.

  Remember our first apartment? Remember the yellow sink? Remember Italy? Remember pistachio ice cream? Remember when Jules was born?

  He would go on like this, sometimes for an hour, hoping the vibrations would get through. He had always been able to make her laugh. He dreamed of finding a memory so uncontrollably funny that it stirred her from the coma and she said, “Oh, God, I remember that.”

  She never did. Sully never stopped trying. Even in prison, he would sit alone, eyes closed, reciting memories as if his thoughts could somehow fly to her hospital bed. From the day of the crash until the day she died, all he really wanted was to hear her voice.

  To hear her voice.

  It never happened.

  Which is why these Coldwater claims had irked him so much. And why, on Monday morning, he took notepads and file folders from the Gazette supply closet and purchased a small tape recorder to begin his own investigation.

  What these people were claiming, he had already tried. He had called out for Giselle. Nothing came back. There was no heaven. Dead was dead.

  It was time everyone accepted that.

  The largest indoor gathering place in Coldwater was the high school gymnasium. With the bleachers pulled out and the floor lined with folding chairs, it could seat almost two thousand People.

  By 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, every one of those seats was filled.

  A small podium had been erected against the back wall, beneath an American flag and a scarlet-and-white banner that read COLDWATER BASKETBALL—DISTRICT CHAMPIONS, 1973, 1998, 2004. Sitting on the podium were Father Carroll, Pastor Warren, and a legislator from the district, whose belly hung heavy over his belt and who wiped his forehead periodically with a handkerchief. Jack Sellers sat up there as well, wearing his police blues, a reminder that decorum would be maintained.