The Next Person You Meet in Heaven(2)

Paulo turned to Annie and said, “Hey, I made you something.” Annie smiled. He was always making her little gifts. Wooden figures. Trinkets. He had learned to carve and paint in Italy, where his family moved when he was a teen. Back then, Annie thought she would never see Paulo again. But years later, on her nursing job, she walked past a hospital wing that was under construction, and there he was, working as a carpenter.

“Hey, I know you,” he said. “You’re Annie!”

Ten months later, they were engaged.

Annie was happy at first. But as the wedding approached, she grew anxious. She began losing sleep. “Whenever I plan things, they don’t work out,” she told Paulo. He put his arm around her shoulders and reminded her that she didn’t “plan” to bump into him that day at the hospital, right?

Annie raised her eyebrows. “How do you know?”

Paulo laughed. “There’s the Annie I’m gonna marry!”

But her worry remained.



“Here,” Paulo said now, handing her a small, yellow, wiry creation, soft and fuzzy, with oval ears on top and oval feet on bottom.

“A rabbit?” Annie said.

“Uh-huh.”

“From pipe cleaners?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you get this?”

“I made it. Why?”

Annie shifted on her feet, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. She looked across the floor and saw the old man from before. His chin was thick with salty whiskers and his suit was outdated by thirty years. But his skin was what drew Annie’s attention; it was strange, almost radiant.

How do I know this man?

“Don’t you like it?”

Annie blinked. “What?”

“Your rabbit.”

“Oh. I love it. I do.”

“I do,” Paulo repeated, as if mulling it over. “We’re saying ‘I do’ a lot today.”

Annie smiled and rubbed the small creation. But something cold shot through her body.



A pipe cleaner rabbit—like the one Paulo just gave her—had been in Annie’s hands the day of the fateful accident, a gift from the whiskered old man she was seeing now at her wedding.

A man who died more than twenty years ago.

His name was Eddie. He had worked at Ruby Pier. His job was fixing rides. Every day he greased the tracks and tightened the bolts and walked the park looking and listening for trouble. He kept pipe cleaners in his work shirt pocket to twist into toy figures for the younger customers.

The day of the accident, Annie had been left alone by her mother, who’d gone off with her latest boyfriend. Eddie was gazing at the ocean when Annie approached, wearing cutoff shorts and a lime green T-shirt with a cartoon duck on the front.

“ ’Scuuuse me, Eddie Maint’nance?” she said, reading the patch on his shirt.

“Just Eddie,” he sighed.

“Eddie?”

“Hmm?”

“Can you make me …?”

She put her hands together as if praying.

“C’mon, kiddo. I don’t have all day.”

“Can you make me an animal? Can you?”

Eddie looked up playfully, as if he had to think about it. Then he took out his yellow pipe cleaners and made her a rabbit—exactly like the one Paulo had just handed her.

“Thaaaank you,” she said, dancing away.

Twelve minutes later, Eddie was dead.



The fatal incident occurred when a cart came loose from a tower drop ride called Freddy’s Free Fall, two hundred feet above the ground. The cart dangled like a dying leaf as riders were pulled to safety. Eddie, watching from below, realized a cable was somehow fraying. If it snapped, the cart would plummet.

“GET BACK!” he screamed.

The crowd below scattered.

But Annie, in the confusion, ran in the wrong direction. She cowered at the ride’s base, too frightened to budge. The cable broke. The cart dropped. It would have crushed Annie had Eddie not dived across the platform at the last instant and shoved her out of the way. Instead, the cart landed on Eddie.

It took his life.

But it took a piece of Annie as well. Her left hand. A chunk of metal broke loose upon impact and severed that hand cleanly from the bone. Some quick-thinking workers put the bloody appendage on ice, and paramedics raced Annie to the hospital, where surgeons worked for hours to repair the tendons, nerves, and arteries, grafting skin and using plates and screws to join the hand and wrist back together.

The accident made news around the state. Journalists labeled Annie “The Little Miracle of Ruby Pier.” Strangers prayed for her. Some even sought an encounter, as if, through being saved, she held a secret to immortality.

But Annie, only eight years old, remembered nothing. The shock of the events wiped her memory clean, like a flame extinguished by a strong wind. To this day, she recalled only images and flashes and a foggy sense of being carefree the day she went to Ruby Pier and being something else when she returned home. The doctors used words like conscious repression and traumatic disorder, not knowing that certain memories are for this world and certain ones only come through in the next.

But a life had been exchanged for a life.

And heaven is always watching.



“Good luck! … God bless!”