The Next Person You Meet in Heaven(27)

Walt became docile, like a scolded puppy. He said little when he came home at night, opting instead to watch hours of television, his body slumped so deeply into the couch he resembled another cushion. Annie did not react. What was the point? She had come to believe that living with a man was more about tolerance than romance, and marriage was just another letdown along the way.



Now, back at the doctor’s office, the old woman holding the door gives Annie a smile.

“How far along?”

“Seven months.”

“Won’t be long now.”

Annie nods.

“Well, good luck,” the woman says.

Annie walks away. She hasn’t felt luck in a very long time.

That night, Annie skips dinner. She decides to assemble a plastic bookcase from IKEA. As she twists, Annie feels a sharp pain in her abdomen. It doubles her over.

“Oh, no …” she moans. “No … no … Walt!”

Walt races her to the hospital. He leaves the car by the emergency entrance. The next thing Annie knows, she is on a gurney, rolling through a hallway.

The baby comes just after midnight: a tiny boy, weighing less than three pounds. Annie doesn’t see him until hours later, inside an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit. The premature birth means the child’s lungs have not fully developed. “We need to help him breathe,” a doctor says.

Annie sits in a blue hospital gown, staring at the incubator. Is she really a mother now? She can’t even touch her child. There are tubes to feed and medicate him, white tape that crosses his pinkish cheeks to hold a breathing device in place, and an oh-so-small blue cap over his head and ears, to keep him warm. Annie feels locked out. The apparatus is handling everything.

As day turns to night and night again to day, she sits, unmoving, through a parade of doctors, nurses, and hospital staff.

“Do you want to call anyone?” a nurse asks.

“No.”

“Do you want some coffee?”

“No.”

“Do you want to take a break?”

“No.”

What she wants to do, more than anything, is reach under the dome and grab this tiny creature and run. She thinks about her mother and the time they packed up and disappeared.

Then, at 10:23 a.m., a monitor begins to beep, and a nurse enters, followed by another nurse, followed by a doctor. Within minutes, the incubator is being rushed out to surgery. Annie is told to wait.

The baby never returns.

Three days after his birth, the tiny boy dies. The doctors are grim-faced, insisting they did their best. The nurses whisper, “This is the hardest thing.” Annie remains stoic, gazing blankly at their sympathy and the now-empty room. She listens to Walt repeatedly mumble, “Oh, man, I can’t believe it.” She studies the windows and the floor and the metal sinks. She stares at inanimate objects as if boring a hole with her eyes, until hours later, when a social worker, holding a clipboard, approaches gingerly about some information needed for “the paperwork”—the paperwork meaning a death certificate.

“What was the child’s name?” she begins.

Annie blinks. She hadn’t chosen a name. The question feels like the hardest quiz in the world. A name. A name? For some reason, the only name she can think of is her mother’s, Lorraine, and her mouth spits out something close.

“Laurence,” she mumbles.

“Laurence,” the nurse repeats.

Laurence, Annie thinks. The word hits her like a sudden spray of water. Once the baby has a name, he is real. And once he is real, he is really gone.

“Laurence?” Annie whispers, as if asking for him.

She breaks down sobbing and doesn’t speak for days.





WHEN ANNIE FINISHED telling her story, she realized she was weeping as she had wept back in that hospital. As her tears hit the ground, they created a pool that swelled into a stream, which swelled into a river, turquoise in shade, clear to the bottom. Trees appeared on the riverbank, with wide, colorful leaves that spread open like umbrellas.

“You’ve been waiting a long time to share that with me,” Lorraine said.

“Forever,” Annie whispered.

“I know. I felt it.”

“Here?”

“Even here.”

“I never told anyone except Uncle Dennis. I never even told Paulo. I couldn’t.”

Lorraine looked to the trees.

“Secrets. We think by keeping them, we’re controlling things, but all the while, they’re controlling us.”

“The baby couldn’t breathe,” Annie said. “After the balloon crash, when they told me Paulo couldn’t breathe, I was living it all over again. I said what I wanted to say back then: ‘Take my lungs. Let me breathe for him. Just save his life.’ ”

Annie turned with a pleading expression.

“Mom. Did Paulo live? Just tell me. Please. If anyone can, you can, right?”

Lorraine touched her cheek. “It’s not for me to know.”



They were quiet for a while. Lorraine dipped her hand in the river water.

“Did I ever tell you why I named you Annie?”

Annie shook her head.

“A woman who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She was sixty-three. A widow. She was looking to make a name, to earn money for her old age. My grandmother used to say, ‘That old gal had courage.’ That’s what I wanted for you. Courage.”