The Next Person You Meet in Heaven Page 8

  “Annie?” Dennis said, his eyes widening.

  “Hi, I was in the—”

  She stopped. Her throat tightened. Sitting in a chair, just inches away, was her mother. Her face was gaunt; her eyes were hollow. Beneath a blue sweater and tan slacks, her limbs were thinner than Annie had ever seen them, sickly thin, as if she’d been melted.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” Lorraine said weakly. She glanced at her brother. “So you don’t have to tell her after all.”

  * * *

  The cancer had attacked Lorraine quickly, and by six months it had spread past all known cures. Treatment, at this point, was more about comfort than healing.

  Annie, stunned by the sudden turn, didn’t know how to react. She felt guilty for being absent when it had happened, and obliged to give her mother whatever time she now could. A trip to the pharmacy. A coffee shop after work. Just like that, they were back in each other’s orbits. But their conversations were less about what was said than what was not.

  “How’s your tea?” Annie would ask.

  “It’s fine,” Lorraine would answer.

  “How’s school?” Lorraine would ask.

  “It’s fine,” Annie would answer.

  Neither had the strength to confront the emotions they shielded. They were polite. They pecked each other’s cheeks. Annie held the car door open and braced her mother’s arm as she walked. Perhaps if there had been more time, the wall between them would have crumbled.

  But the world does not cater to our timing.

  “I love you, Annie,” Lorraine rasped one night, as Annie handed her a plate of stir-fried vegetables.

  “Eat,” Annie said. “You need your strength.”

  “Love is strength,” Lorraine said.

  Annie touched her mother’s shoulder. She felt the sharpness of the bone as if the skin barely existed.

  Two days later, Annie’s cell phone woke her up before the alarm clock.

  “You better come to the hospital,” Dennis whispered.

  He broke down crying, and Annie broke down, too.

  * * *

  The gathering at the cemetery was small, owing to the secrecy Lorraine had draped around their lives. Only Annie, Walt, Uncle Dennis, and a few work colleagues stood by the grave as a pastor recited a prayer.

  “It’s funny,” Lorraine said now, as the scene appeared in front of them. “You always wonder about your funeral. How big? Who’ll show up? In the end it’s meaningless. You realize, once you die, that a funeral is for everyone else, not you.”

  They watched Annie, in a black dress, sobbing into her uncle’s shoulder.

  “You were so sad,” Lorraine observed.

  “Of course.”

  “Then why did you shut me out for so long?”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “I know you’re sorry. I’m asking you why?”

  “You know why.” Annie sighed. “You embarrassed me. You smothered me. Every social thing I wanted to do. Every chance to have fun. I felt like a prisoner in my own childhood.

  “I couldn’t make friends. I wasn’t allowed to do anything. Everyone thought I was weird, the girl whose mother wouldn’t let her go.” Annie lifted her left hand. “This didn’t help.”

  Lorraine looked off. The image of the cemetery faded from view.

  “What do you really know about that day?”

  “At Ruby Pier?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know anything, remember? It’s the big black hole of my life. You wouldn’t talk about it, that’s for sure. We went there on a train. We bought tickets. I woke up in the hospital, covered in bandages . . .”

  Annie felt an old anger rising. She shook her head. What was the point of anger in heaven?

  “Anyhow, that’s what I know,” she grumbled.

  “Well, I know more,” her mother said, taking Annie’s hand. “And it’s time I told you.”

  The Third Lesson

  Suddenly, they were back at Ruby Pier, under a hot summer sun. In the foreground was a long, wide boardwalk, teeming with beachgoers. Parents pushed baby strollers. Joggers and skateboarders weaved through the crowd.

  “Do I know these people?” Annie asked.

  “Look below,” her mother said.

  Under the boardwalk, Annie saw her younger mother, walking in the sand with Bob, the man from the train. Lorraine was barefoot, holding her shoes. Bob kept pulling her towards him. Lorraine pushed away playfully. Then, at one point, she glanced at her watch and looked out towards the sea. Bob turned her chin back his way and kissed her mouth hard.

  “Did you ever think about getting a moment back?” Lorraine asked, as she watched alongside her daughter. “A moment where you can’t believe how unimportant what you were doing was, and how critical the thing you missed would be?”

  Annie nodded.

  “That was mine,” her mother said. “At that moment, I was thinking of you. I remember, because my watch read 3:07. Your birthday. March seventh. I thought, ‘I should get back to Annie.’”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No,” Lorraine said, softly. “I didn’t.”

  They continued to watch Bob clutching at Lorraine, smacking kisses on her neck. He pulled her arm and they dropped to the sand.

  “I made a lot of bad choices after your father left us,” Lorraine said. “I felt unwanted, unattractive. I felt that being a single mother, men wouldn’t be interested in me. So I overdid it. I chased one after another. I wanted to change my life.”

  Annie remembered a steady stream of her mother’s paramours coming by after Annie’s bedtime. She would sneak from her room and tuck around the top of the stairs, watching her mother leave with the latest man, as a babysitter shut the door.

  “I was still young myself,” Lorraine said. “I wanted a fresh start. I wanted things I didn’t have with your father—security, affection. He chose other women over me, and I guess, deep down, I wanted to prove he was missing something.

  “That,” she said, “was foolish. Love is not revenge. It can’t be thrown like a rock. And you can’t create it to fix your problems. Forcing love is like picking a flower then insisting that it grow.”

  Beneath the boardwalk now, Bob stopped pawing Lorraine long enough to remove his jacket. He laid it down on the sand behind them. Annie noticed her younger mother cup her elbows, a sudden scared look upon her face.

  “At that moment, it hit me,” Lorraine said. “Your father had done the same thing years before when we were first together. A beach. His jacket. Lying down in the sand. That’s how it all started.

  “I realized I was doing the same foolish things I had done with him. Why did I think anything would turn out differently?”

  She looked directly at Annie. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I was so desperate to find someone new to love me, I forgot I already had the best person. You.”

  “Mom,” Annie whispered, “I didn’t know any of this.”

  Lorraine nodded. “I didn’t know much of it myself—until that day.”

  She motioned back to the boardwalk. They saw Lorraine rise quickly, grabbing her shoes. Bob looked angry, pulling at Lorraine’s legs until she broke free and ran. Bob smacked a fist into the sand, spraying it onto his pants.

  “At that point, Annie, I just wanted to gather you up, take you home, buy you ice cream. I wanted to make you the happiest girl in the world.

  “It was like a curtain had lifted. I could be done with all those men who weren’t right for me, done with the stupid flirting phone calls. I was finally seeing things straight.”

  “What happened?” Annie asked.

  Lorraine looked off. “Just because you see things straight doesn’t mean you see them in time.”

  * * *

  They watched young Lorraine hurry onto Ruby Pier. An ambulance sped past her, lights flashing. Police officers were barking into radios. Lorraine spun back and forth, confused, as crowds surged on the midway. She pushed against the tide of onlookers, past the bumpe
r cars, past the teacup ride, through the food pavilion, all the while yelling, “Annie! . . . Annie!”

  Finally, after an hour of fruitless search, Lorraine spotted a police officer talking to a park worker, a wiry young man whose shirt patch read DOMINGUEZ. They stood beside yellow barricade tape. The wiry man had tears in his eyes.

  “Can you help me?” Lorraine interrupted. “I’m sorry. I know you’re dealing with whatever’s going on. But it’s my daughter. I can’t find her. I’ve looked everywhere. I’m worried.”

  The policeman shot a glance at Dominguez.

  “What did she look like?” the officer asked.

  Lorraine described Annie. The cutoff shorts. The lime green T-shirt with a duck on the front.

  “Oh, my God,” Dominguez whispered.

  * * *

  Annie watched the heavenly sky turn a dull red.

  “That was the lowest moment of my life,” her mother said. “When my daughter most needed me, I was with a man I didn’t even care about.

  “By the time I reached the hospital, they had already started operating. I had to ask what they were doing. Me. Your mother. Asking like an outsider. I cried so hard. Not just for your pain, Annie, but for my own humiliation.

  “All those rules? All the limits and curfews I would put on you? It was all because of that day. I never wanted to make another mistake.”

  “It just made me hate you,” Annie said, softly.

  “No more than I hated myself. I didn’t protect you. I left you alone. After that, I could never think of myself as a good mother again.

  “I was so ashamed. It made me hard on you, when I was trying to be hard on me. We are blinded by our regrets, Annie. We don’t realize who else we punish while we’re punishing ourselves.”

  Annie thought for a moment. “Is that the lesson you’re here to teach me?”

  “No,” Lorraine said, quietly. “That’s me sharing my most painful secret.”

  Annie stared at her mother’s young, unblemished face, which suggested a woman still in her twenties. She felt a surge of something that had yet to visit her in the afterlife: the need to confess.

  “I have a secret, too,” Annie said.

  Annie Makes a Mistake

  She is twenty. She is pregnant. An old woman entering the doctor’s office holds the door for Annie as she leaves.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Annie says.

  “It’s all right,” the woman says.

  Annie touches her belly. It happened without planning. She and Walt were still living in the basement, their relationship running on inertia, a lack of better options making it easier to continue than quit.

  Then one day, feeling unusually fatigued, Annie went to the campus clinic. She thought she had the flu. They took a blood test. The next day she went back.

  “Well, it’s not the flu,” a doctor began.

  She spent the rest of the day hiding in the library, one hand on her stomach, the other clutching a tissue. Pregnant? she thought. She felt too depressed to move. Only when a janitor nudged her to say, “We’re closing,” did she rise and drag herself home.

  The talk with Walt was less than satisfying. After laughing nervously, then unleashing a stream of curses, he stomped up and down the steps for half an hour. He finally agreed to marry Annie for the sake of the child.

  “Before I start showing,” Annie insisted.

  “Yeah, all right,” Walt said.

  The next month, they went to a courthouse (as Lorraine and Jerry had done decades earlier) and signed some papers. Two weeks later, they made it official.

  Walt told his father.

  Annie told no one.

  Like her mother, Annie was facing unintended parenthood. Like her mother, she had a husband who was less than enthused. At times, Annie wished Lorraine were still alive. She wanted to ask her what to expect. But most of the time, she was glad her mother wasn’t there to see this. Annie couldn’t bear the disappointment. Certainly not the “Didn’t I warn you to be careful?” that she knew she would hear. Annie had become the embodiment of all of her mother’s phobias, a foolish daughter who wasn’t mindful enough and now had the obstetrician’s phone number on a sticky note in her father-in-law’s basement.

  Walt became docile, like a scolded puppy. He said little when he came home at night, opting instead to watch hours of television, his body slumped so deeply into the couch he resembled another cushion. Annie did not react. What was the point? She had come to believe that living with a man was more about tolerance than romance, and marriage was just another letdown along the way.

  * * *

  Now, back at the doctor’s office, the old woman holding the door gives Annie a smile.

  “How far along?”

  “Seven months.”

  “Won’t be long now.”

  Annie nods.

  “Well, good luck,” the woman says.

  Annie walks away. She hasn’t felt luck in a very long time.

  That night, Annie skips dinner. She decides to assemble a plastic bookcase from IKEA. As she twists, Annie feels a sharp pain in her abdomen. It doubles her over.

  “Oh, no . . .” she moans. “No . . . no . . . Walt!”

  Walt races her to the hospital. He leaves the car by the emergency entrance. The next thing Annie knows, she is on a gurney, rolling through a hallway.

  The baby comes just after midnight: a tiny boy, weighing less than three pounds. Annie doesn’t see him until hours later, inside an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit. The premature birth means the child’s lungs have not fully developed. “We need to help him breathe,” a doctor says.

  Annie sits in a blue hospital gown, staring at the incubator. Is she really a mother now? She can’t even touch her child. There are tubes to feed and medicate him, white tape that crosses his pinkish cheeks to hold a breathing device in place, and an oh-so-small blue cap over his head and ears, to keep him warm. Annie feels locked out. The apparatus is handling everything.

  As day turns to night and night again to day, she sits, unmoving, through a parade of doctors, nurses, and hospital staff.

  “Do you want to call anyone?” a nurse asks.

  “No.”

  “Do you want some coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to take a break?”

  “No.”

  What she wants to do, more than anything, is reach under the dome and grab this tiny creature and run. She thinks about her mother and the time they packed up and disappeared.

  Then, at 10:23 a.m., a monitor begins to beep, and a nurse enters, followed by another nurse, followed by a doctor. Within minutes, the incubator is being rushed out to surgery. Annie is told to wait.

  The baby never returns.

  Three days after his birth, the tiny boy dies. The doctors are grim-faced, insisting they did their best. The nurses whisper, “This is the hardest thing.” Annie remains stoic, gazing blankly at their sympathy and the now-empty room. She listens to Walt repeatedly mumble, “Oh, man, I can’t believe it.” She studies the windows and the floor and the metal sinks. She stares at inanimate objects as if boring a hole with her eyes, until hours later, when a social worker, holding a clipboard, approaches gingerly about some information needed for “the paperwork”—the paperwork meaning a death certificate.

  “What was the child’s name?” she begins.

  Annie blinks. She hadn’t chosen a name. The question feels like the hardest quiz in the world. A name. A name? For some reason, the only name she can think of is her mother’s, Lorraine, and her mouth spits out something close.

  “Laurence,” she mumbles.

  “Laurence,” the nurse repeats.

  Laurence, Annie thinks. The word hits her like a sudden spray of water. Once the baby has a name, he is real. And once he is real, he is really gone.

  “Laurence?” Annie whispers, as if asking for him.

  She breaks down sobbing and doesn’t speak for days.

  WHEN ANNIE
FINISHED telling her story, she realized she was weeping as she had wept back in that hospital. As her tears hit the ground, they created a pool that swelled into a stream, which swelled into a river, turquoise in shade, clear to the bottom. Trees appeared on the riverbank, with wide, colorful leaves that spread open like umbrellas.

  “You’ve been waiting a long time to share that with me,” Lorraine said.

  “Forever,” Annie whispered.

  “I know. I felt it.”

  “Here?”

  “Even here.”

  “I never told anyone except Uncle Dennis. I never even told Paulo. I couldn’t.”

  Lorraine looked to the trees.

  “Secrets. We think by keeping them, we’re controlling things, but all the while, they’re controlling us.”

  “The baby couldn’t breathe,” Annie said. “After the balloon crash, when they told me Paulo couldn’t breathe, I was living it all over again. I said what I wanted to say back then: ‘Take my lungs. Let me breathe for him. Just save his life.’”

  Annie turned with a pleading expression.

  “Mom. Did Paulo live? Just tell me. Please. If anyone can, you can, right?”

  Lorraine touched her cheek. “It’s not for me to know.”

  * * *

  They were quiet for a while. Lorraine dipped her hand in the river water.

  “Did I ever tell you why I named you Annie?”

  Annie shook her head.

  “A woman who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She was sixty-three. A widow. She was looking to make a name, to earn money for her old age. My grandmother used to say, ‘That old gal had courage.’ That’s what I wanted for you. Courage.”

  Annie frowned. “I guess I didn’t live up to my billing, huh?”

  Lorraine raised her eyebrows. “Oh, but you did.”

  “Mom, please. I was the opposite of courage. I ran away. I lived in a basement. I got married for the wrong reason, had a child too soon, and couldn’t even do that right. I was useless for a long time.”

  Her mother crossed her arms.

  “And then?”

  * * *

  And then, the truth was, Annie found her footing. Her marriage to Walt was annulled after Walt claimed he was coerced by the pregnancy. Papers were signed. Walt asked for his sweatpants back.