The Next Person You Meet in Heaven Page 9

  Annie moved in with her Uncle Dennis. She stayed indoors for the first few months, lying in bed during the daylight hours. She mourned her baby. She mourned her mother. She mourned her lack of imagination about the future. What purpose could make her leave this room? Every idea seemed small, inconsequential. She was broken open.

  But broken open is still open.

  Winter turned to spring and spring approached summer. Annie began to get up earlier. From the window of her bedroom, she saw her uncle leaving for the hospital. She remembered when he first moved to Arizona; Annie was in junior high. She asked him why he left the East, where he had grown up. He said, “Your mother is my family.” Annie had wanted to say, “You’re kidding, right? You moved here for her?” But now she was glad he had. Who else would she have turned to?

  At night, she heard her uncle talking to patients on the phone. He’d answer their questions calmly. Often, at the end, he would say, “That’s what I’m here for.” That made Annie proud. He was a good and decent man, and her admiration for him grew. In time, a seed took root in her mind. That’s what I’m here for.

  One evening, she came down to the kitchen, where Dennis was watching a football game on a small TV.

  “Hey,” he said, clicking off the set.

  “Can I ask you something?” Annie said.

  “Sure.”

  “How hard is it to be a nurse?”

  * * *

  In the blue river of the afterlife, Lorraine cupped her hands and lifted water up, watching it pour through her fingers.

  “This is your heaven?” Annie asked.

  “Isn’t it beautiful? I wanted serenity, after all the conflict of my life. Here I enjoy a calm I never knew on earth.”

  “And you’ve been waiting for me all this time?”

  “What’s time between a mother and her daughter? Never too much, never enough.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “We fought a lot.”

  “I know.” She took Annie’s left hand and guided it into the water. “But is that all you remember?”

  Annie felt her fingers floating and her mind doing the same. In the water’s reflection she saw only loving scenes from her childhood, countless memories, her mother kissing her good night, unwrapping a new toy, plopping whipped cream onto pancakes, putting Annie on her first bicycle, stitching a ripped dress, sharing a tube of lipstick, pushing a button to Annie’s favorite radio station. It was as if someone unlocked a vault and all these fond recollections could be examined at once.

  “Why didn’t I feel this before?” she whispered.

  “Because we embrace our scars more than our healing,” Lorraine said. “We can recall the exact day we got hurt, but who remembers the day the wound was gone?

  “From the moment you woke up in that hospital, I was different with you, and you were different with me. You were sullen. You were mad. You fought with me constantly. You hated my restrictions. But that wasn’t the real reason for your anger, was it?”

  Lorraine reached down and clutched Annie’s fingers.

  “Can you break that last secret? Can you say the real reason for your resentment since Ruby Pier?”

  Annie choked up. Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “Because you weren’t there to save me.”

  Lorraine closed her eyes. “That’s right. Can you forgive me for that?”

  “Mom.”

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t need to hear me say it.”

  “No, I don’t,” Lorraine said, softly. “But you do.”

  Annie began to cry again, tears of release, blessed release, the expulsion of secrets bottled up for years. She realized the sacrifices Lorraine had made before and after that day at Ruby Pier, ending her marriage, giving up her home, forsaking her friends, her history, her desires, making Annie her only priority. She thought about her mother’s small funeral, and how much of Lorraine’s life had been surrendered to protect Annie’s.

  “Yes, yes, I forgive you, Mom. Of course I forgive you. I didn’t know. I love you.”

  Lorraine placed her hands together.

  “Grace?”

  “Grace.”

  “That,” Lorraine said, smiling, “is what I was here to teach you.”

  * * *

  With that, Lorraine lifted off the ground and hovered above Annie, just for a moment. Then, with a final touch of her daughter’s chin, she swelled back into the sky, until her face commanded the firmament once more.

  “It’s time to go, angel.”

  “No! Mom!”

  “You need to make your peace.”

  “But we made our peace!”

  “There’s someone else.”

  Before Annie could respond, the river rushed and heavy rains began to fall. Annie was blown sideways, all but blinded by the downpour. She felt a sudden bump on her hip. A large wooden barrel was nudging against her. She tilted its top and pulled herself safely inside. The walls were stained with a brown substance, and there were pillows all around for cushioning, old pillows that Annie guessed were from the time her namesake made her famous passage. Annie jostled to a sitting position, feeling the river rumbling beneath her.

  Then, with a jerk, the barrel surged ahead.

  She heard the storm and water crashing against rocks, louder by the second, turning ominous, thunderous. She felt something she had yet to feel in heaven: pure fear. The barrel shot over a massive waterfall, out into a moment of such thick, violent noise, it was as if God’s own voice were howling. In that rush, with nothing beneath her, Annie experienced the utter abandon of a free fall. She was helpless, beyond all control.

  As she pushed against the walls, she looked up through a spray of white water and saw her mother’s face gazing down, whispering a single word.

  “Courage.”

  SUNDAY, 2:14 P.M.

  Tolbert stepped away from the police officers, walked to the side of their car, and vomited.

  He had just seen a carnage that would stay in his mind forever. The green spacious field was scarred with burned patches. At its center lay a passenger basket, charred beyond recognition. Scattered about, in dark, torn ribbons, were the only remains of Tolbert’s once-majestic balloon.

  An eyewitness to the crash, a male jogger wearing a yellow Reebok T-shirt, had given an account to the police: “The balloon hit something in those trees and I saw a flash of fire. It came down and hit the ground and shot back up. One person fell out. One was thrown out. I guess the last one jumped. Then the whole thing burst into flames.”

  The jogger had taken video with his cell phone and had called 9-1-1. All three passengers, two men, one woman, were rushed to the university hospital.

  Tolbert’s shock wrestled with his anger. He couldn’t figure where these two customers had come from. It was so early. There had been no reservations. What was Teddy doing? I was only gone for a few hours.

  He ran his palms over his face several times, then walked back to the police.

  “If you’re done with me here, I need to get to that hospital,” he said.

  “I’ll drive you over,” an officer said.

  “All right.”

  Tolbert got in the squad car and pushed back into the seat, still grappling with this Sunday-morning tragedy, unaware of the part he had played in it.

  The Next Eternity

  The wooden barrel crashed the water’s surface and dropped in quiet submersion. Annie yanked herself through the opening into a vast greenish deep; it seemed more like a sea than the base of a waterfall. She windmilled her arms and spun her head, her hair swirling around her like tentacles. Up above, she saw a circle of light, like the fat end of a telescope. She swam towards it.

  When Annie broke the surface, her skin was instantly dry. The waters pulled back, and she found herself standing on the shore of a great gray ocean, wearing cutoff shorts and a lime green T-shirt that covered her hollow middle. The sky was a summer blue, lit to perfection—not by the sun, but by a s
ingle white star.

  Annie felt the sand beneath her feet and a soft breeze on her cheeks. As she moved up the beach a magnificent pier came into view, with gilded towers, spires, domes, a wooden roller coaster, and a parachute drop.

  It was an old amusement park, like the one Annie used to visit. It made her think about her mother. They had finally reconciled. A great weight had been lifted. Then she was gone. It felt so unfair. What was the point of heaven and its march of five people if each of them abandoned you just when solace was within reach?

  “You need to make your peace,” her mother had said. Why? With whom? Annie just wanted things to stop. She felt drained, weary, like at the end of a long, hard day.

  She took a half step and tripped over something in the sand. Looking down, she saw a stone marker. As the seawater rolled over it, two words were revealed:

  EDDIE

  MAINTENANCE

  “Hey, kid,” a gruff voice said, “you mind not standing on my grave?”

  Annie Makes a Mistake

  She is twenty-five and working in a hospital clinic. Uncle Dennis helped pay for nursing school, and Annie, to her surprise, finds the field a good fit. She always did well in science, so the medical study was painless. But her composure with patients is a revelation. She listens attentively. She pats their hands. She grins at their jokes and shows compassion for their complaints. Part of this stems from a childhood of seeking intimacy that never came. As a nurse, she is actually sought out by patients for attention, comfort, even counsel. She finds herself pleased to give it.

  Her supervisor, Beatrice, is a stout Southern woman who wears bright red lipstick and sleeveless blouses, even in winter. She has an easy sense of humor and compliments Annie on her work.

  “Patients trust you,” she says. “That’s a big deal.”

  Annie likes Beatrice. Sometimes they stay late, talking in the break room. One night, the issue of repressed memory comes up. Annie asks if Beatrice believes in that and Beatrice says she does.

  “People do all kinds of things because of stuff they don’t remember,” she says. “Half my relatives, if you ask me.”

  Annie decides to hint at her own childhood trauma.

  “Something happened when I was eight.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “An accident. A serious one. That’s where I got this.”

  She shows Beatrice her scarred hand.

  “Does it still bother you?”

  “When it’s cold. And if I don’t move the fingers—”

  “I meant whatever happened.”

  “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know what happened. I blocked it out.”

  Beatrice thinks for a moment. “There are people you can talk to about that.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” Annie bites her lip.

  “What?”

  “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “I think someone got killed.”

  Beatrice’s eyes widen. “Well, that’s a story.”

  “If I talked to someone—”

  “You’re afraid of what you’d find out?”

  Annie nods.

  “Honey, that may be why your head blocked it in the first place.”

  Beatrice puts a palm over Annie’s bad hand.

  “When you’re ready to remember, you’ll remember.”

  Annie pushes up a smile. But she wonders if Beatrice will think less of her now, a woman with a secret she won’t let herself see.

  The Fourth Person Annie Meets in Heaven

  “It ain’t really my grave.”

  Annie spun to see a squat old man standing in the sand, arms folded like flippers across his chest. He wore a pale brown uniform and a linen cap. The man from her wedding. The one she’d kept seeing.

  “I did die here,” he said. “Well, over there, in the park. The guys I worked with made that marker for my birthday. I used to call ’em ‘brickheads,’ so they gave me that brick. Buncha jokers.”

  He shrugged his thick shoulders. His hair was white, his ears were large, and his nose was flat with a crooked bridge, as if it had been broken more than once. The lines by his eyes cracked down to whiskered cheeks. They lifted now into a friendly grin.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he said, as if he knew her.

  “You were at my wedding,” Annie whispered. “You waved at me.”

  “I was kinda hoping you’d be older.”

  “Older?”

  “You’re awful young to be here.”

  “There was an accident.”

  She looked away.

  “You can tell me,” he said.

  “A balloon. It caught fire. My husband and I were in it.”

  “And?”

  “He was hurt. Really badly. He couldn’t breathe.”

  “What about you?”

  “They took one of my lungs. To save him. During the transplant, I must have . . .”

  The old man raised an eyebrow.

  “Died?”

  Annie still winced at the word. “Yes. And I don’t know what happened to my husband. All I remember is the operating room, a doctor touching my shoulders, saying, ‘See you in a little bit.’ Like I’d wake up in a few hours. But I never did.”

  “Lemme guess,” the old man said, rubbing his chin. “You been asking everyone in heaven, ‘Did my husband live? Did I save him?’”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because when I first got here, I met five people, too. And with every one of them, before I was through, I asked the same question, ’cause I couldn’t remember my last seconds on earth. ‘What happened? Did I save the little girl? Was my life a big waste?’”

  “Wait,” Annie said. “The little girl?”

  The old man set his gaze and Annie felt powerless to turn away. She locked on a cloth patch near his heart, stitched with the same two words from the beach marker.

  “‘Eddie . . . Maintenance,’” she said.

  “Little girl,” he answered back.

  He held out his beefy fingers, and Annie’s lifted to meet them involuntarily. When they made contact, she felt safer than she’d ever felt before, like a baby bird crawling beneath the shelter of a mighty wing.

  “It’s all right, kiddo,” the old man whispered. “It’s all gonna clear up now.”

  * * *

  When people suffer a near-death experience, they often say, “My whole life flashed before my eyes.” Scientists have even studied this phenomenon, aware that certain brain cortices can suffer hypoxia and blood loss, which, during a great trauma, might trigger a release of memories.

  But science only knows what it knows. And because it lacks an understanding of the next world, it cannot explain that the flash before your eyes is actually a peek behind the curtain of heaven, where your life and the lives of all you’ve touched are on the same plane, so that seeing one memory is the same as seeing them all.

  On the day of Annie’s accident, at the moment of her greatest danger, Eddie, the maintenance man at Ruby Pier, made a split-second decision: to dive across the platform of Freddy’s Free Fall and shove Annie away from a falling cart. What flashed before his eyes, just before his death, was every interaction he’d had on earth.

  Now, here in heaven, with her fingers pressed against his, Annie saw them, too.

  * * *

  She saw an infant Eddie born into poverty in the early 1920s. She saw a sparkle in his mother’s eyes, and frequent beatings from his drunken father.

  She saw a school-aged Eddie playing catch with the sideshow workers at Ruby Pier. She saw a teenaged Eddie fixing rides beside his old man. She saw Eddie bored and dreaming of a different life. She saw his father say, “Whatsa matter? Ain’t this good enough for ya?”

  She saw the night Eddie met his one true love—a girl in a yellow dress whose name was Marguerite—and how they danced to a big band at the Stardust Band Shell. She saw their romance interrupted by war, and Eddie sent to combat in the Philippines.

  She saw his platoon ca
ptured and tortured in a prison camp. She saw a daring revolt, and the killing of their tormentors. She saw Eddie burning down the huts where they’d been imprisoned. She saw him shot in the leg during their escape. She saw his return to peacetime hobbled by wounds and dark memories.

  She saw Eddie and Marguerite married and settled, deeply in love, but childless. And, upon his father’s death, she saw Eddie forced to take over the maintenance job at Ruby Pier. She saw him sitting down in his life, depressed that after years of trying to break away, he was no different than his old man, “a nobody who never done nothing,” he would say.

  She saw Marguerite, in her late forties, die from a brain tumor, and Eddie go hollow with grief. She saw him hide inside his work, crying where no one could see him, inside darkened fun houses or underneath a water slide.

  She saw Eddie visit the cemetery dutifully, through his sixties, his seventies, into his eighties, leaving flowers at Marguerite’s grave, riding home in the front of the taxi to feel less lonely.

  And she saw the final day of Eddie’s life, his eighty-third birthday, when he checked a fishing line and inspected a roller coaster and sat in a beach chair and fashioned a rabbit made of yellow pipe cleaners. Which he handed to a little girl.

  A little girl named Annie.

  “Thaaaank you, Eddie Maint’nance,” she squealed, dancing off.

  The image froze.

  “That,” Eddie said now, holding Annie’s grip, “was the last thing you said to me on earth.”

  “What happened next?” she asked.

  He let go of her hand. The image disappeared.

  “Let’s walk,” he said.

  * * *

  The ocean pulled back, as if clearing a path, and they moved along the shore. The lone star in the blue firmament lit their way. Eddie told Annie about his own journey to heaven. He told her he, too, met five people, including a sideshow worker whose skin was blue, his old army captain, and the original Ruby of Ruby Pier. By the time he was finished, nearly everything he thought about his life had changed.