The Next Person You Meet in Heaven(25)

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?”