With her good paw, she reached for the latch. It clicked open. The door swung wide and she made herself jump. When she hit the hard ground below, the pain was so terrible she almost flew out of his body on impact. But she hung on, trying her best to work her way back into Jiminy. She felt clumsy and dull, like a limb that had fallen asleep, and she could feel herself seep out through his fur. She lay on the floor, fading with each passing second. The voice whispered, Just let go. Come to me.
The last scraps of the old Heidi were tempted. It would be easier to do what someone else wanted her to do. But it wasn’t what she wanted, and it wasn’t the right thing either. She gathered her courage for one last try, squeezing her essence into a sphere, tucking it deep in the hollows of Jiminy’s heart. She closed her eyes against the searchlight of pain that hunted her, and she held on until she felt ready to extend slim feelers from her soul through the fibers of Jiminy’s body. Creeping, gliding, reaching, she urged herself onward, stopping to rest as her soul encountered the worst of the wounds. She pushed past them as you might walk barefoot on broken glass. It hurt like nothing she could’ve imagined, suffering she never could’ve endured before.
During her human life, any sort of ache was a flashing red light. When she saw it, she’d stop, too afraid to venture forward. She wanted the sure thing. The green light. She didn’t know then that she could press on through the pain. She let the red swallow her and she started moving again, knowing in the deepest part of her that the pain wouldn’t consume her. It would merely change her.
And she could live with that. She had to.
At last she was firmly inside Jiminy. She rested a moment. The linoleum tiles were cool, and they smelled of disinfectant and wax. She lifted her head to see the expanse of gleaming floor beyond the plastic cone. The light bounced off it like sunbeams off a lake, and it was almost beautiful. If Corinne would steer clear a few more minutes, Heidi might actually make it out the door.
She stood and tested her weight on her injured leg. The cast was a help. The end wrapped around her paw like a boot, taking pressure off the broken bone. The lampshade around her neck would have to go, though. She thought about using the table as leverage. It was a tall, stainless steel one with a top that stuck out a good six inches, leaving a useful gap between its legs and the wall. If she could walk through the gap backward, she could force the cone off.
Getting under the tabletop was the easy part. With her leg in a cast and her chest full of cracked ribs, walking backward was close to impossible. She took a few halting steps. The effort left her shaking and breathless. But she almost didn’t mind. It was good being in a body again.
The table leg and wall caught the cone. Heidi tucked her chin and felt the plastic slide against her throat. She gagged twice, and the sound alerted all the other dogs that something interesting was happening below. A brown Chihuahua started saying, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and it took her a moment to realize she’d translated dog to English. Then the rest joined in, all of them yelling “hey!” until the inevitable happened.
Corinne returned.
The door swung open and sent a breeze up Heidi’s back, ruffling her fur. Her legs shook. It was going to hit her. She braced herself and held her breath.
“What’s going on in here?” Corinne said. “You guys have been yapping all morning.”
The door just missed her. Jiminy’s body fit neatly in the triangle of space between the door and table, a space that was now reassuringly dark.
“What the —”
Corinne had noticed the empty cage. Heidi heard quick footsteps, then the creak of the cage door and the jiggle of the handle as Corinne inspected the latch. More footsteps. Heidi imagined Corinne scanning the room, her ponytail swinging from side to side. She prayed she wouldn’t look behind the door.
Then Corinne’s retreating voice as she darted from the room. “The new dog. He’s missing!”
That’s when Heidi realized her plan had certain limits. She’d made it out of the cage, but how was she going to get out of the animal hospital? It wasn’t as if she was going to find a secret, magical doggie door leading outside. She’d have to pass the reception desk and walk through the lobby to escape through a door she could not open.
The red light flashed again in her mind, but she ignored it. She might not get out of the hospital, but she could get out of the room. One step at a time. That’s how she’d do it. She went at the cone again, willing herself not to gag. With a lurch, she freed herself. The cone slipped off and rolled across the floor. She hoped the noise wouldn’t draw Corinne back.
With the cone off, the cool air was a revelation on her face. She tipped up her nose. So many scents. It was hard to focus. She took one deep sniff and caught the odor of the outdoors: cold air, car exhaust, old corn dogs from the 7-Eleven down the street. The smell made her think of Jerome, and her borrowed heart beat faster.
She poked her head out the door into the hallway. Corinne was to her left, peering under the couch in the lobby. To her right, the vet chatted away on the telephone, giving advice on the proper treatment of some sort of intestinal parasite. Heidi looked left again. Corinne was pushing herself upright.
Should she make a run for it? Let loose a cat or two and stage a diversion? Crawl to Corinne, whimper adorably, and hope she let Heidi outside for a potty break?
There was no great choice. But before Heidi could make even a bad one, an angel materialized in front of her, wrapped in a shroud of diamond-white light.
“That’s unexpected,” she said.
“For you, maybe,” the angel replied.
Appendix G: The Ten Commandments for the Living
I. THOU SHALT HAVE COURAGE.
II. THOU SHALT BE LOYAL.
Thirty minutes left.
MY PLAN WAS to shoop to Howard’s lobby. Maybe he’d even be there working on some new invention to make someone else’s afterlife hell. Or maybe he’d be microwaving pizza rolls and decapitating stuffed animals. Whatever he was doing, maybe he’d talk to me and take pity and agree to help.
I landed outside his door and automatically looked up at the security camera. Before I knew it was there, I put honey and thumbtacks on his doorknob and got caught on tape and had to do some serious penance. I felt like giving him the one-finger salute in the camera for old times’ sake. But I didn’t. Because that would have been counterproductive, to use one of Gabe and Xavier’s favorite vocabulary words.
Instead, I pressed the doorbell and listened to Howard’s custom ringer. He’d programmed it with the Death Star theme from Star Wars. Like he’d even fit inside a storm trooper suit. The Emperor’s fat-guy robe, maybe. I counted all the way to sixty Mississippi. He didn’t answer. Either he wasn’t there or he was ignoring me on purpose.
I turned the knob. Locked. If this had been a cop show, Heidi would’ve been in the room, gagged and tied to a chair, and when she heard the doorknob rattle, she would’ve gotten a look of hope in her eyes, just before they went to a commercial for extreme-flavor chips. I let that be my inspiration. The Heidi part. I like regular chips better.
Back in my human life, Mike and I used to practice breaking into places. Open windows were easy. Smashing a window was an option, but I’d once torn the bottom of my pants climbing through one, and my dad wouldn’t buy me new jeans until I told him how I’d ripped them, and it meant I had to go to school showing everyone my London and France until the school nurse took pity and gave me a pair she said her son had outgrown, but she forgot to take the price tag off. Also? My dad made me pay to fix the basement window myself even though he couldn’t prove I did it.
Eventually, I got pretty good at breaking the sort of lock you can pop with a credit card. You slide it in the gap, massage it back and forth a bit, coax the knob, and then snock! There she goes. I first started breaking in to get into my house when I’d forgotten my key, but pretty soon, I was working my way toward cooler exploits. My dream was to be able to use those little locksmith pins that you stick in the a
ctual lock, working them one by one, until the teeth of the lock line up and smile their way to opening. A night at the arcade after hours. Sweetness.
I never had enough money to buy the actual set, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d died with them in my pocket because Howard didn’t have that kind of lock anyway. Or windows. He’d rigged up this fancy gizmo with a metal flap that slipped over the door so no one could go sliding a credit card in the gap. Instead of having a spot for a key or an awesome set of tools, the door locked with one of those calculator pads. You had to type in a code.
I might never have been good at math, but I knew the odds of my guessing the right numbers: somewhere between Vegas craps and zero. And chances are, Howard had booby-trapped it so anyone monkeying around outside, namely me, would get a bucket of cold holy water dumped on his head.
I leaned against the door and slid all the way down until I sat in a heap on the ground. There was no way I’d get through this in the, what, thirty minutes I had left. I wished I could have gone ashes to ashes, dust to dust instead of Heidi. Disappearing forever — that would be better than what I was facing. Stupid Howard. Stupid calculator lock.
Then an idea hit me like a cartoon frying pan. Calculators. I hadn’t had a lot of reason to touch them in my life, but whenever I did, there was one thing I made sure to type. 58008. If you do that and turn it upside down, it says one of the most beautiful words in the English language. There are other words you can spell with a calculator, like hello and stuff, but those were for people who were lame.
I stood and punched 58008 onto the keypad, half expecting that bucket of cold water or an explosion of pitchforks. Instead, there was a buzz and a click. The knob turned. I pushed the door open and I was in.
“Heidi?” I called out. The place was dark and smelly. I wanted to gag. We had unlimited access to incense, and even though that smells like something I can’t say, it wouldn’t have hurt his lobby one bit. I felt around for a light switch until I remembered that Howard had hooked everything up to a Clapper like the kind they used to sell on late-night TV. He had half the guys convinced that he’d invented it. As if. I clapped the lights on.
He’d made some changes since I’d last been in the place. The stuffed animals were in a trash can with their guts spilling over the edge. On his wall was an old-school chalkboard like the kind they don’t have in schools anymore, and he’d covered it with all sorts of math I didn’t understand. There was a pile of books on the floor, books by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus, names I didn’t even want to pronounce. But I found something good on his desk. His soul guardian’s handbook.
I opened it hoping I’d find something about Heidi’s situation but gave up in two seconds because the thing was so covered with Howard’s own writing, it was almost impossible to read. He’d shoved some extra pages in the back and they fell out and spiraled to the floor.
I almost lost my lunch when I saw what he’d written on one of them.
If death isn’t the end, what is?
When a soul disintegrates, does anything happen to the pieces?
Do they retain any memories?
Or is that the final nothingness?
If there is no final end, then life means nothing.
I NEED TO WATCH A SOUL DISAPPEAR.
Heidi. That’s why he wanted her. He had some idea that his existence would have meaning the second she was completely erased. I wanted to go fetal on the floor. I wanted to have never been born so I didn’t have to feel what I was feeling, that life was one long struggle you could never win. But none of that was an option. Just as I turned to leave — I couldn’t look at any more of this stuff — something hard smashed into my jaw from below. One of Howard’s keyboards, swung by one of his minions. The one named Troy. If I’d been shorter or Troy had been taller, the keyboard would’ve connected with my arrow and it would have been game over right there.
As it was, it just meant a split lip. I touched it and tasted blood. That was going to leave a mark. Probably even one you could read, the keys had gone so deep. It was a real shame I didn’t have enough time to take care of Troy. I would’ve liked to turn him into a set of luggage.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” he said. “I’m telling Howard.”
“Where is he?” I could feel my lip swelling. Pretty soon, I’d start to talk funny. There wasn’t going to be any dignity in this.
“He’s out.”
“Thank you, mathter of the obviouth.” And there was the lisp.
An alarm dinged and the two of us swung our heads around. It was Howard’s computer letting us know group was starting. That also meant Heidi’s thirty minutes were up. My soul went numb.
“You’re not leaving,” Troy said. “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”
I guess I’m not the only one who likes a cop show.
“Thut up,” I said. I looked around, hoping to find something I could use. My lip stung. I touched it and noticed the sound my jacket made. My field jacket. The one I got from my dad. The one every guy in rehab wanted, especially Howard and therefore even more especially, his minions.
I slipped it off. I hadn’t taken it off since I’d been in heaven, partly because you can only change clothes in a lobby, and partly because it was the one thing I had that still connected me to my dad. It had been his when he was in the Army, and it smelled like him and still had the shape of his arms in the sleeves. It was the last piece of hope I had that we’d be the family I wanted.
“This is all yours if you let me go to group and don’t tell anyone I’ve been in here.”
Troy’s eyes lit up like a slot machine.
“I won’t tell a soul,” he said. I left before I had to watch him put it on.
Fifteen minutes left.
SHE WAS STILL a little loopy from the anesthesia, which is why she thought at first the angel who’d materialized in front of her might be Vincent Lionheart come to life. The aura around him was that beautiful. Then he took a step closer and she realized he wasn’t Vincent. Not even close. And if he was an angel, she felt a tiny bit less sad about not getting into Heaven. The angel was homely, shaped like Mr. Potato Head, and dressed in an oversize plaid shirt that hung over a belly the size of an Easter ham. A blot of pizza sauce hung below the corner of his lower lip. His expression, simultaneously creepy and eager, made her shudder.
But his voice was friendly enough, so she decided to give him a chance. Everyone deserved that.
“I have found you at last,” he said. He pressed his hands together, as if in prayer, and bowed.
“Me? Why were you looking for me?”
“I have come for your soul,” the angel said, gesturing at her with one palm. His aura pulsed when he said soul.
So this was it. Someone was taking her to Heaven. She expected to feel happier about it. The truth was, she’d hoped that someone would be Jerome. He’d been there for every other step in her life and it felt wrong to take the last one without him.
“My soul?” She tried to keep her voice down so Corinne wouldn’t hear. She was also stalling for time. She wasn’t ready to go just yet. There had to be a way she could put Jiminy back together.
“Your soul!” the angel said. He flung his fingers wide on either side of his ribs. Jazz hands. Megan did it all the time to make Heidi laugh. But she couldn’t let herself laugh at someone who by all or at least some appearances was a messenger of God.
“Where’s Jerome?” she asked. “Did he send you?”
“Jerome is about to be sentenced to eternal damnation,” the angel said. His voice echoed magnificently. “Think of him no more.”
It was hard not to think of Jerome. Her head had been painfully empty since she’d left him. And as angry as she’d been, she still wanted to know he was okay. She wanted to hear his voice again, if only one more time. She hoped he’d forgiven her for hitting him. And she hoped he knew she’d forgiven him for everything else.
“Eternal damnation?” she sa
id, hating the way the words sounded coming out of Jiminy’s mouth. “Like, forever?”
“Oh, who cares?” the angel said. “Jerome’s a world-class ass.”
This time, his voice didn’t have the fancy echo. In fact, he sounded like he maybe had a sinus infection. He cleared his throat, and the echo returned. “And now thou shalt come with me.”
Heidi couldn’t believe it. He said “ass” and he didn’t get a shock. Maybe he was a higher-ranking angel than Jerome. If that was true, she’d have to obey him even though she wasn’t ready to leave. She felt her options go from zero to less than. She stalled for time.
“Where are we going? I don’t think the vet’s going to let us walk out of here.”
“Thou shalt leave that detail to me,” the angel intoned. He reached inside his flannel shirt and removed what looked like a television remote control. He pressed a couple of buttons, mumbling, “function, function, glow level seven,” and was instantly bathed in light that made the ones in the operating room look defective.
“Am I supposed to go into that?” Her heart thudded. Oh, God. This was it.
“Only if you want to crash into me,” the angel said. “Duh.” He shook his head and scratched again. “Humans.”
“I’m actually a dog right now.”
“Only the unimportant part,” the angel said. “In fact, we might as well ditch the pooch carcass here.”
“No! I can’t. I —” Footsteps. Corinne was coming back.
“If you don’t, it will make things so much more difficult,” the angel said.
“What things?”
She moved in for a sniff. Something was off about him, something she wanted to understand. Beneath the outer layer of pizza rolls, he didn’t have a scent. Nothing. Most people, she’d noticed, especially since she’d become a dog, smelled like something, something soul-heartening. Bread. Grass. Sweat. Shampoo. When she was close to him on the train, she noticed Jerome’s comforting musk. But this angel smelled … empty. The fur between her shoulders rose.
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