She was quiet for a minute, right down to her fingertips. “Oh.”
“You figure it out?” I said. “Because we could try to find your entrance if you did.”
“No,” she said. “God, no. The opposite. I can’t even see the back door. I have no shot of getting in. No shot.”
I couldn’t look straight in her eyes without losing it.
“Nobody wants you in there more than me,” I said. “Nobody.” That was maybe the truest thing I ever said to her, or anyone.
She didn’t say anything for a really long time.
“I never thought of drawing a city from above. I wish I had.” She looked down through our feet. “And it’s really, really quiet.”
Also true. The sound of wind burned a little bit in my ears, but everything else I was used to — cars honking and people yelling and dogs barking — had stopped.
“I can see my house,” she said. She let go of my hands and pointed, and I pretended to look, but it would have made me mess my pants, so I just watched her face, appreciating the way her forehead squinched when she was trying to find landmarks below us. “I can see Megan’s house. And school.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling all the warmth leave my fingers. “They are down there and we are up here. That is a fact.”
“It’s my whole life,” she says. “It seems so small.”
“Well, duh,” I said. “It’s far away. It’s a lot bigger up close.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. She looked up and to the left, like maybe something was written over my shoulder that would help her explain stuff, but when I turned to look, nothing was there. “I mean, everything I did or cared about is the size of, I don’t know, a piece of rice. It’s like all those drawings I made.”
“No, this is a top view,” I said.
“That’s not what I’m trying to say.” She covered her face with her hands and was still, and she started drifting away from me in this slow way.
“My life,” she said. “It was a small thing in the grand scheme. But it was everything to me. And I never did anything with it. I just sort of floated along, waiting to figure things out, and now it’s over and I’m never going to have even that little chance again, that chance to know what I was meant to do and who I was meant to be. I did what people wanted me to do, what people told me to do — parents, teachers, friends, you — and now there’s nothing left of it, nothing left of me.”
I didn’t know what to say back to her. Sometimes, when people say things that are sad and true and unfixable, there isn’t anything you can say.
But then I got a killer idea and I zoomed back toward her until we were almost touching again.
“There is something left. Want to go somewhere? Have an adventure? Do all the things you ever wanted?” If I went far enough and fast enough, maybe Xavier and Gabe wouldn’t know where to find us. And maybe they wouldn’t care. What did two lost souls matter, out of all the rest?
She punched my arm and we started spinning in a circle.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m only sixteen. My parents would —”
“They’d what?” I changed the way my body was in space so we’d stop spinning, and I looked her right in the eye. If this were a movie, this would be the part where the guy would kiss the girl. Heidi’d never been kissed before. And I knew she wanted to be. It was the one thing I could give her. And it wasn’t Heaven by any stretch. But it would be something, if I weren’t so chickenchevy.
“You’re right,” she said. And then any chance of kissing passed. I could tell from her face that she was thinking again about what it meant to be dead, to not have a future. She wasn’t thinking about kissing. And definitely not kissing me.
We started to sink back down to earth. I held her hands all the way.
“I know where I want to go,” she said. We were right under a streetlight, and her face was all kinds of shiny. “I want to see the Eiffel Tower. I don’t care of it’s pouring, even. I’ll draw its reflection in a puddle and then we can go to Buckingham Palace and I’ll draw that and —”
“Slight problem.”
“Don’t you like Paris? We could see the museums and sniff croissants and sit by the river —” She touched my field jacket.
I held up my hand to stop her right there. Not the touching part. That, I did not mind. The Paris part. Somewhere not all that far from us, a train whistle blew.
“We can go anywhere I know how to get to. Someplace I’ve been before so I can imagine it. Like camping or Six Flags or something.”
I closed my eyes for a second and wished she’d choose Six Flags because the popcorn there makes for great sniffing, and when I opened them, Howard was standing right behind her. He reached for her.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said.
Before he could lay one of his grubby fingers on her, I grabbed her wrist and we shooped like nobody’s business in the direction of the passing train. I probably should’ve warned her, because she looked like someone who’d just stepped off the Kingda Ka coaster, which has a really sick four-hundred-and-eighteen-foot drop.
“We’re on a train,” she said, when the world stopped its sliding. “We’re on a train.”
I looked around to make sure Howard hadn’t followed us.
“Let’s just find somewhere to sit, okay?” I didn’t want to tell her that Howard had just tried to make a grab for her. Hopefully, he hadn’t heard the train whistle and gotten the same idea I did.
We found an empty table in the dining car and sat across from each other. The train was moving at a good clip, all shimmying and rumbling, and the sound and movement started to take the edge off.
“You said, ‘Don’t even think about it.’ What am I not supposed to think about?”
“Watch,” I said. I slipped my hands through the salt and pepper shakers really fast. “Magic!”
That would’ve worked a lot better on the four-year-old Heidi. She put a hand on my wrist so I couldn’t do any more tricks.
“Where are we going? What are we doing?” Her eyes had the saddest tilt to them, and it seemed like as good a time as any to explain about the soul rehab program and Gabe and Xavier. For the longest time after I finished, she was quiet, sitting there by the window while the world streaked right by her head.
“Am I going to Hell, then? Is that it?”
For the first time all day, I cracked up. But I stopped when I saw the look on her face. “You? What’d you ever do bad? Creator knows I’ve seen everything. No, you’re not going to Hell. I did think you’d already be in Heaven by now. I must’ve screwed things up bad at the pond.”
Heidi leaned back against the bench just as we went through a bunch of trees that made the world look darker than ever. The only light that came through every once in a while shined from the porch lights people had left on at farmhouses. Otherwise, we were in the dark and I had no clue where we were even going.
“This is really happening, isn’t it?” she said. “I keep thinking I am going to wake up and have it all be a dream, that tomorrow, I’ll have another chance.”
Her voice went that bendy way it goes before you cry, and she stopped talking and bit her lower lip until it turned whitish. I hoped that’d keep her from springing an eye leak, but I came around to her side of the table anyway, in case she wanted to do it on my shoulder. I could always lift her head off of me in case she started leaking snot on the canvas.
The tracks sloped uphill and the train lurched. She turned toward the window so our shoulders didn’t even touch. There was a tunnel ahead, a hole cut into a mountain.
“What about you?” she said. “How long did it take you to get over being dead, and knowing you’d never get to do any of the stuff you wanted to do?”
“No point in talking about that.”
“Come on. What else are we going to talk about?”
“Truth?”
She nodded. The train whistle blew again, and the lights flickered as we hit the tunnel.
“Never thought about my future because I knew I didn’t have one.”
Heidi stared at me like I’d just sprouted horns.
“I’ve never met anyone who didn’t think about the future before.” Her face was a big question mark. Darcy Parker would’ve been proud. “It was pretty much a rule in my house. You saw how it was. Good grades. Impressive activities. Check and check. It was all so we could be successful. All I ever really wanted to do was draw, but you know what my parents thought of that. I don’t even think they noticed when I stopped showing them my stuff. But even then, I still thought about the future as this thing, this thing with possibilities, this thing that would actually happen at some point.”
She got real quiet.
I poked her in the arm a little.
“Well, it wasn’t like I wasn’t thinking about anything. Just not the future. Best I could do was have a good time as long as the ride lasted.”
She put my hand back on the table. “Did you?”
“Actually, yeah. I just didn’t realize it at the time. But what would plans for my future have done to make my life any better? What was the point? I saw what Pop’s day was like and didn’t want any part of it. He got up before sunrise. Went to work at the base. Busted his butt fixing planes. Came home. Drank beer, watched America’s Deadliest Animal Attacks or whatever on TV, fell asleep in his La-Z-Boy. On weekends, he’d fix stuff that got broke around the house or work on his model train set, which we used to do together until that one time I spilled Coke on a switch tower and he yelled at me until his voice kicked out. I kept my distance after that, and so did he. It was like I broke the switch tower and he broke what was left of us. Every so often he’d ask me about homework or getting a job, but we both knew we were just going through the motions, and that there was nothing much ahead for me, less even than he had.”
She sat there watching me and we finally blasted out of the tunnel. My nose started to sting a little bit, but I just rubbed it and kept on going. I was glad she didn’t ask me any more about Howard or rehab or Pop. I didn’t have any answers about why she couldn’t Commune with the living, or why she hadn’t flown up yet. I wished I knew where to look for the handbook.
I felt fully exhausted all of a sudden. “A life like my pop’s was gonna be as good as I could get — and probably not even that much on account of I could never live up to his way of doing things. Guy couldn’t even stand being around me.”
“You don’t really believe all that, do you? Your dad loved you.”
“Nope,” I said. “Trust me, there wasn’t a lot to love. I usually made a mess of things.”
“All parents love their kids. It’s a rule.”
“Maybe in your world. But in mine, no way. I was watching him once when you were taking a nap. He was at work, talking with his buddies, who were all going on about the dumb stuff their kids had done. His supervisor was all, ‘But your boy, he kind of won on that score, right? No offense or anything.’
“My dad got this look on his face, the one he used to get when I’d flask up really bad, where it looked like he was two parts shocked, three parts disappointed, and one part like he wanted to punch someone. And he said, ‘Yeah, guess so. Shoulda probably put “took him long enough” on his grave, right?’ I shooped out of there real fast after that. Haven’t watched him since.”
Heidi’s mouth hung open a little bit, and I tried not to stare at her lips. There was something about the way the train lights hit that top part of her lip, the part where it dipped under her nose. It was the perfect shape. I’d never noticed it before. I touched that part of my own mouth, just to see if mine matched, but I couldn’t tell.
Even though I don’t drink earthly stuff anymore, all that talking made me wish I had something from my lobby vending machine to wash the taste of the words away, like a Sermon on the Mountain Dew, only I couldn’t take Heidi with and there was no way I could leave her alone anywhere, not with Howard on the prowl.
We leaned against each other for a while, just listening to the wheels against the track. The sound was a lot bigger than what I imagined it would be when I was a kid and still allowed near Pop’s model trains. It wasn’t something that was just in your ears. It went all the way through you.
“So, rehab,” she said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but why haven’t you gotten out? Does rehab go on forever?”
I should’ve expected that she’d ask that. I’d wondered it fifty or a thousand times myself, but there wasn’t a good answer, so I was all, “Duh, because you would’ve missed me too much.”
I sort of punched her again on the arm, and that’s when I realized that was the opposite of true. I would’ve missed her. Completely. Her face did that thing where it turned red all the way out to her ears. “What about girls in rehab?”
I cracked up again. “You’ve seen me, right? I have an arrow sticking out of my forehead. I’ve seen the kind of guy girls like. Ones like the stupid vampire doll you got Megan. I am not that kind of guy. I am the guy who hands the socket wrench to the guy who fixes the Volvo that guy drives.”
She got a puzzled look on her face and then she was all, “Uh, that’s not what I meant.”
Chevy. Of course it wasn’t. I messed with the cracked button on the cuff of my jacket. That button would always be broken, no matter what.
“Nope,” I said. “No girls in rehab. Not in our section anyway.”
“So they probably wouldn’t take me, even if I had nowhere else to go,” she said. She was quiet for a while and opened her mouth a couple of times without saying anything. Then, right before I made fun of her for looking like a fish face, she dropped the bomb, a quiet one, but the words exploded all through me.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this stuff before, Jerome?”
“This stuff?”
“You know, about rehab. About the afterlife. About dying and what it was like. You just took up space in my head —”
“You never said you minded.”
“I thought you weren’t real,” she said. “I thought I was crazy.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and the look on her face gave me a prickly feeling. It crossed my mind I could sing “Freebird” or something to remind her of some of the good parts of me being with her, but before I got a chance, her eyes went woop! and got all wide, and her body started to flicker again worse than it had before. She called my name and I reached for her hand. It felt all full of static like a balloon you’ve rubbed on your head, and I held on tighter, hoping that I wasn’t hurting her.
“You’re okay,” I said. I looked in her eyes, but they didn’t look all that okay, and I hoped that was the kind of lie that wouldn’t count against me when the end came. “Just hang on. We’re going to shoop to Megan’s house. Maybe you can Commune with her, like a best friend thing.”
I didn’t actually think that was gonna work, but I didn’t know what else to do. Something was messed up, big-time, and I didn’t know how to fix it and could only hope I wasn’t gonna make it worse. The second she turned solid and warm again under my hands, I closed my eyes and took us there, hoping she’d survive the trip.
Appendix F: The Problem of Dislocated and/or Lost Souls
Although Heaven is highly organized, it is also fantastically busy. Every twelve seconds, a human dies and must be evaluated for placement in Heaven itself, in a rehabilitation program, or in one of Hell’s nine rings. And this doesn’t account for the activity in our wholly owned subsidiaries, Pet Heaven and General Animal Heaven, where creature souls by the billions flow in.
On occasion, a soul isn’t processed quickly enough, or belongs to a toddler or small child who’s unable to wait in line. On very rare occasions, souls split free from their vessels while the vessel still lives. This can happen when a soul is, for whatever reason, not adequately connected to its body. Any number of things can cause this: drug abuse, ennui, even an accident in which the body is revived after the soul completes its journey through the tunnel
of light.
If you should happen to find a dislocated soul, it is your duty to return it to your counselor, and quickly. Without protection from an earthly body or an officially recognized heavenly dimension, a soul will dissipate into the universe and be reabsorbed, never again to manifest consciousness. Soul dissipation generally occurs within twenty-four hours of corporeal separation, depending on the resilience and capacity for desire of the soul.
Your counselor has all the knowledge necessary to (a) restore a soul to its body or (b) direct it to its proper eternal destination. Your counselor is also monitoring you at all times and will be aware if harm befalls your ward. Your counselor is not allowed to intervene, however, as the ultimate disposition of your soul depends on the benevolent exercise of your free will.5
5 In other words, you’re allowed to make your own mistakes, and if you do, you’re going to go to Hell. Could we speak any more plainly?
Chapter 1, Subsection ii:
The Ten Commandments for the Dead
I. THOU SHALT NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT BEING DEAD.
II. THOU SHALT NOT ENGAGE IN DISCOURSE WITH THE LIVING.
III. THOU SHALT GIVE UP EARTHLY ATTACHMENTS.
IV. THOU SHALT HONOR THINE HEAVENLY ADVISORS.
V. THOU SHALT NOT COVET THE FOOD OR THE DRINK OF THE LIVING.
VI. THOU SHALT NOT LIE.
VII. THOU SHALT NOT UNDERMINE THE DIGNITY OF THE LIVING.
THE NEXT THING Heidi knew, they were standing in front of Megan’s house. She pressed her hands against her face, hoping to push the fog out of her head.
“Aren’t you going to go in?” Jerome sounded antsy. She lowered her hands, trying to make eye contact.
Devine Intervention Page 8
