The Next Person You Meet in Heaven(26)

She looked directly at Annie. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I was so desperate to find someone new to love me, I forgot I already had the best person. You.”

“Mom,” Annie whispered, “I didn’t know any of this.”

Lorraine nodded. “I didn’t know much of it myself—until that day.”

She motioned back to the boardwalk. They saw Lorraine rise quickly, grabbing her shoes. Bob looked angry, pulling at Lorraine’s legs until she broke free and ran. Bob smacked a fist into the sand, spraying it onto his pants.

“At that point, Annie, I just wanted to gather you up, take you home, buy you ice cream. I wanted to make you the happiest girl in the world.

“It was like a curtain had lifted. I could be done with all those men who weren’t right for me, done with the stupid flirting phone calls. I was finally seeing things straight.”

“What happened?” Annie asked.

Lorraine looked off. “Just because you see things straight doesn’t mean you see them in time.”



They watched young Lorraine hurry onto Ruby Pier. An ambulance sped past her, lights flashing. Police officers were barking into radios. Lorraine spun back and forth, confused, as crowds surged on the midway. She pushed against the tide of onlookers, past the bumper cars, past the teacup ride, through the food pavilion, all the while yelling, “Annie! … Annie!”

Finally, after an hour of fruitless search, Lorraine spotted a police officer talking to a park worker, a wiry young man whose shirt patch read DOMINGUEZ. They stood beside yellow barricade tape. The wiry man had tears in his eyes.

“Can you help me?” Lorraine interrupted. “I’m sorry. I know you’re dealing with whatever’s going on. But it’s my daughter. I can’t find her. I’ve looked everywhere. I’m worried.”

The policeman shot a glance at Dominguez.

“What did she look like?” the officer asked.

Lorraine described Annie. The cutoff shorts. The lime green T-shirt with a duck on the front.

“Oh, my God,” Dominguez whispered.



Annie watched the heavenly sky turn a dull red.

“That was the lowest moment of my life,” her mother said. “When my daughter most needed me, I was with a man I didn’t even care about.

“By the time I reached the hospital, they had already started operating. I had to ask what they were doing. Me. Your mother. Asking like an outsider. I cried so hard. Not just for your pain, Annie, but for my own humiliation.

“All those rules? All the limits and curfews I would put on you? It was all because of that day. I never wanted to make another mistake.”

“It just made me hate you,” Annie said, softly.

“No more than I hated myself. I didn’t protect you. I left you alone. After that, I could never think of myself as a good mother again.

“I was so ashamed. It made me hard on you, when I was trying to be hard on me. We are blinded by our regrets, Annie. We don’t realize who else we punish while we’re punishing ourselves.”

Annie thought for a moment. “Is that the lesson you’re here to teach me?”

“No,” Lorraine said, quietly. “That’s me sharing my most painful secret.”

Annie stared at her mother’s young, unblemished face, which suggested a woman still in her twenties. She felt a surge of something that had yet to visit her in the afterlife: the need to confess.

“I have a secret, too,” Annie said.





Annie Makes a Mistake


She is twenty. She is pregnant. An old woman entering the doctor’s office holds the door for Annie as she leaves.

“You don’t have to do that,” Annie says.

“It’s all right,” the woman says.

Annie touches her belly. It happened without planning. She and Walt were still living in the basement, their relationship running on inertia, a lack of better options making it easier to continue than quit.

Then one day, feeling unusually fatigued, Annie went to the campus clinic. She thought she had the flu. They took a blood test. The next day she went back.

“Well, it’s not the flu,” a doctor began.

She spent the rest of the day hiding in the library, one hand on her stomach, the other clutching a tissue. Pregnant? she thought. She felt too depressed to move. Only when a janitor nudged her to say, “We’re closing,” did she rise and drag herself home.

The talk with Walt was less than satisfying. After laughing nervously, then unleashing a stream of curses, he stomped up and down the steps for half an hour. He finally agreed to marry Annie for the sake of the child.

“Before I start showing,” Annie insisted.

“Yeah, all right,” Walt said.

The next month, they went to a courthouse (as Lorraine and Jerry had done decades earlier) and signed some papers. Two weeks later, they made it official.

Walt told his father.

Annie told no one.

Like her mother, Annie was facing unintended parenthood. Like her mother, she had a husband who was less than enthused. At times, Annie wished Lorraine were still alive. She wanted to ask her what to expect. But most of the time, she was glad her mother wasn’t there to see this. Annie couldn’t bear the disappointment. Certainly not the “Didn’t I warn you to be careful?” that she knew she would hear. Annie had become the embodiment of all of her mother’s phobias, a foolish daughter who wasn’t mindful enough and now had the obstetrician’s phone number on a sticky note in her father-in-law’s basement.