The Next Person You Meet in Heaven(8)

With that, she went from outside to inside. An engine car sketched around her, as if being drawn by an artist’s pen. The ceiling was low, the floor was riveted metal, and there were panels and gauges and levers everywhere. It looked like a train from the 1950s.

What kind of dream is this?

Why do I feel so light?

Where is everybody?

Something caught her eye. Up there. In the conductor’s seat. A small head bounced into view, then was gone.

“Yes!” a young voice yelled. “Yes!”

Had this been a normal dream, Annie might have run, scared of a stranger the way we are often scared while sleeping. But danger has no grip in the afterlife, and Annie continued drifting forward until she was alongside the driver’s seat. She looked down and saw something quite unexpected.

There, behind the steering console, was a young boy with caramel skin and jet-black hair, wearing a striped, short-sleeve shirt and a toy gun holster.

“Am I going too fast?” he asked.





Annie Makes a Mistake


She is six years old, walking home from school. She is accompanied, as usual, by three older kids: Warren Helms, who is eleven; his sister, Devon, who is nine; and his other sister, Lisa, who just turned eight.

“It’s called Holy Communion,” Lisa says.

“What do you do?” Annie asks.

“You go to church, you say you’re sorry, and you eat a cookie.”

“A wafer,” Warren says. “Then you get presents.”

“Lots of presents,” Devon says.

“Really?” Annie says.

“I got a bike,” Warren says.

Annie feels jealous. She likes presents. She only gets them on Christmas and her birthday now. Her mother says they have to “tighten up” since her father left.

“Can I do a communum?”

“A Communion, stupid.”

“You have to be Catholic. Are you Catholic?”

Annie shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“You’d know if you were Catholic,” Warren says.

“How?”

“You just would.”

Annie taps the sidewalk with her shoe. She feels the limits of being too young, a feeling she has often with the Helms kids, who walk her home every day. Most of her classmates are picked up by their mothers. But Annie’s mother has to work, so Annie waits at the neighbors’ until she gets home.

“Witch’s house coming up,” Warren says.

They look ahead to a small, brown, single-level home, with sagging gutters and a neglected front porch. Its paint is peeling. Its wood is rotted. The rumor is an old witch lives there and once, years ago, a kid went inside and never came out.

“Give you five dollars if you knock on her door,” Warren says.

“Not me,” Devon says.

“I don’t need it,” Lisa says. “I’m getting presents Sunday.”

“Up to you, Annie.”

Warren pulls a five-dollar bill from his pocket.

“You can buy a lot of stuff.”

Annie stops. She thinks about presents. She stares at the door.

“She’s probably not even home,” Warren says. He waves the bill. “Fiiiive bucks.”

“How many toys can I get for that?” Annie asks.

“A lot,” Devon says.

Annie pulls on her curly hair and looks down, as if deciding. Then she lets go and marches up the path until she reaches the porch. She looks back at the others. Warren makes a knocking motion.

Annie inhales. Her heart is racing. She thinks again about presents. She lifts her fist to the screen door.

Before she can make contact, it swings open and a white-haired woman in a bathrobe is staring down at her.

“What do you want?” the woman croaks.

Annie can’t move. She shakes her head as if to say, Nothing, she wants nothing. The woman looks past her to the other kids running away.

“They put you up to this?”

Annie nods.

“Can’t you talk, girl?”

Annie swallows. “I wanted presents.”

The old woman scowls.

“You shouldn’t bother people.”

Annie can’t break her gaze from the woman’s face, her long, slanted nose, her thin, cracked lips, the purplish circles under her eyes.

“Are you really a witch?” Annie asks.

The woman squints. “No,” she says. “Are you?”

Annie shakes her head.

“I’m just sick, that’s all,” the woman says. “Now go away.”

She shuts the door. Annie exhales. She turns and runs to the others down the block. When she reaches them, she repeats what the woman said.

“Deal’s off,” Warren says. “She isn’t a real witch.”

Annie’s shoulders slump.

She never gets the money.





The First Person Annie Meets in Heaven




“Am I going too fast?”

Annie stared at the boy in the striped shirt.

Where am I?

“Can’t hear you.”

Where am I—

“Can’t heaaaaarr you!”

I said—

He broke into a grin. “I can’t hear you, stupid, because you’re not talking.”