The Next Person You Meet in Heaven(30)

Annie decides to hint at her own childhood trauma.

“Something happened when I was eight.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“An accident. A serious one. That’s where I got this.”

She shows Beatrice her scarred hand.

“Does it still bother you?”

“When it’s cold. And if I don’t move the fingers—”

“I meant whatever happened.”

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know what happened. I blocked it out.”

Beatrice thinks for a moment. “There are people you can talk to about that.”

“Yeah, but …” Annie bites her lip.

“What?”

“There’s something else.”

“What?”

“I think someone got killed.”

Beatrice’s eyes widen. “Well, that’s a story.”

“If I talked to someone—”

“You’re afraid of what you’d find out?”

Annie nods.

“Honey, that may be why your head blocked it in the first place.”

Beatrice puts a palm over Annie’s bad hand.

“When you’re ready to remember, you’ll remember.”

Annie pushes up a smile. But she wonders if Beatrice will think less of her now, a woman with a secret she won’t let herself see.





The Fourth Person Annie Meets in Heaven




“It ain’t really my grave.”

Annie spun to see a squat old man standing in the sand, arms folded like flippers across his chest. He wore a pale brown uniform and a linen cap. The man from her wedding. The one she’d kept seeing.

“I did die here,” he said. “Well, over there, in the park. The guys I worked with made that marker for my birthday. I used to call ’em ‘brickheads,’ so they gave me that brick. Buncha jokers.”

He shrugged his thick shoulders. His hair was white, his ears were large, and his nose was flat with a crooked bridge, as if it had been broken more than once. The lines by his eyes cracked down to whiskered cheeks. They lifted now into a friendly grin.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, as if he knew her.

“You were at my wedding,” Annie whispered. “You waved at me.”

“I was kinda hoping you’d be older.”

“Older?”

“You’re awful young to be here.”

“There was an accident.”

She looked away.

“You can tell me,” he said.

“A balloon. It caught fire. My husband and I were in it.”

“And?”

“He was hurt. Really badly. He couldn’t breathe.”

“What about you?”

“They took one of my lungs. To save him. During the transplant, I must have …”

The old man raised an eyebrow.

“Died?”

Annie still winced at the word. “Yes. And I don’t know what happened to my husband. All I remember is the operating room, a doctor touching my shoulders, saying, ‘See you in a little bit.’ Like I’d wake up in a few hours. But I never did.”

“Lemme guess,” the old man said, rubbing his chin. “You been asking everyone in heaven, ‘Did my husband live? Did I save him?’ ”

“How did you know?”

“Because when I first got here, I met five people, too. And with every one of them, before I was through, I asked the same question, ’cause I couldn’t remember my last seconds on earth. ‘What happened? Did I save the little girl? Was my life a big waste?’ ”

“Wait,” Annie said. “The little girl?”

The old man set his gaze and Annie felt powerless to turn away. She locked on a cloth patch near his heart, stitched with the same two words from the beach marker.

“ ‘Eddie … Maintenance,’ ” she said.

“Little girl,” he answered back.

He held out his beefy fingers, and Annie’s lifted to meet them involuntarily. When they made contact, she felt safer than she’d ever felt before, like a baby bird crawling beneath the shelter of a mighty wing.

“It’s all right, kiddo,” the old man whispered. “It’s all gonna clear up now.”



When people suffer a near-death experience, they often say, “My whole life flashed before my eyes.” Scientists have even studied this phenomenon, aware that certain brain cortices can suffer hypoxia and blood loss, which, during a great trauma, might trigger a release of memories.

But science only knows what it knows. And because it lacks an understanding of the next world, it cannot explain that the flash before your eyes is actually a peek behind the curtain of heaven, where your life and the lives of all you’ve touched are on the same plane, so that seeing one memory is the same as seeing them all.

On the day of Annie’s accident, at the moment of her greatest danger, Eddie, the maintenance man at Ruby Pier, made a split-second decision: to dive across the platform of Freddy’s Free Fall and shove Annie away from a falling cart. What flashed before his eyes, just before his death, was every interaction he’d had on earth.

Now, here in heaven, with her fingers pressed against his, Annie saw them, too.