All We Know of Heaven (10 page)

That she was half mad with joy was a given to God, Jean nie believed. But she knew—truly knew, perhaps as no one else knew—the icy pit in which Kitt and Mike floundered now. She knew they would find themselves standing in the middle of a room, not knowing why they were there, what they were wearing, what they held in their hands. She knew, truly knew, how it was to hope your own life would be brief; to shun the sunrise because it dared, with its beauty, to provoke your welcome; to want to enfold yourself in the coats at the back of a closet, shut out all light and sound, and breathe only long enough for your breathing to stop on its own.

In her own first days, she had tried so hard to act normal for the boys. She had dressed and brushed her teeth. She had even gone with them to Bill’s mother’s on Christmas Day, though the funeral would be the next morning. She remembered all of them sitting at the table and how some one, Bill’s father or Mary, her daughter-in-law, would try to start a conversation of some kind and how each time it would sputter out, like a candle. Jeannie didn’t even try to

join in. Finally they stopped speaking to her at all.

The morning of the funeral Jeannie had overheard Jack say on the phone, “We’re all a mess, but our mother is gut ted. I don’t know if she’ll make it.”

Reawakened to life from her own grief, she asked God for guidance down the new path opening before her. She prayed that Kitt and Mike could somehow scrape away the layers of outrage and hatred to find some measure of acceptance, for Eliza’s and Sarah’s sake. And she asked God to bless the Flannerys for their constant vigilance over Maureen.

Then she headed back up to the unit.

Supported by two nurses, Maureen was standing in her bare feet.

Standing?

When Maureen was back in the reclining chair, a physi cal therapist came, asking Maureen to push as hard as she could against the woman’s palm with one foot, then the other, over and over again. The therapist sounded like Bill with his wrestlers: “Come on, Maureen. Gut it out. Kiddo, we’re going to get you out of that bed as fast as we can. At least you still have your flexibility. You must have been a rubber band!”

And Maury, whose every gesture and expression now was a shrine to Jeannie, nodded because she understood.

She understood!

And though the hair around Maureen’s reddened face ex ploded in tendrils from the sweat of exertion, it seemed to Jeannie that the leg barely moved, that the therapist was do

ing most of the work. But the therapist said she was pleased. “No excuses,” said the PT, Shannon Stride. “This is where we’ll start. She clearly hears me. She clearly sees.

We’ll work on speech. Identifying objects. Aphasia could be a problem.”

“And that’s?”

“Trouble retrieving the names of things. It’s all in there. We have to tease it out. I’m impressed with her leg muscles. Did she run track?”

“She’s a cheerleader,” said Jeannie.

“Huh,” said the therapist, almost as though disgusted. Jeannie saw Maureen shake her head as if to say, It figures. What she always said was true. Cheerleaders got no respect. When Shannon left the room, Jeannie brushed out Maureen’s hair to plait it into a neat braid. Though it was clean, no one seemed to have brushed her hair in days. Together, she and Lorelei, the red-haired nurse who came on at three o’clock, secured Maureen’s hair out of her face, avoiding the slight surgical swelling, keeping the area

where the skin grafts were growing clear.

“Just touching her hair is like seeing the sun again for me,” said Jeannie. “I’ll never stop crying.”

“No one expects you to,” Lorelei said.

She got some nail polish from one of the nurses and they painted Maureen’s stubby nails one by one. Maureen smiled her poor, half-toothed smile.

“Than, Mom,” she said. “Is it snowing?” “No, honey,” Jeannie said.

“Than,” Maureen said again.

“Do you want to sit up or lie down.” “Sit,” she said. “Rag Mop, sit.”

Her thoughts would come to her now if she called them. They weren’t instantaneous or always exactly the ones she wanted, but they would come. Nail polish. Earlier, the pleasure of hand cream. She was happy to be alive and with her mother. It was like being born again, only born know ing you were born. Sometimes an image—of the cheer- leading squad, of her nest of pillows with their Irish lace slips hand-crocheted by Grandma—would slip across her mind like a hummingbird, so clear and so quick that Maury was not sure she’d really seen it. Childhood, she could re member all of that. Christmases, her first bike, riding on Tommy’s shoulders and touching the ceiling, the smell of leaves burning. But the past year . . .

“Do you have a Bible I can use?” Jeannie asked Lore lei. She did, but it wasn’t the one Jeannie wanted. She pre ferred her grandmother’s old King James with its “thees” and “thous”—at least outside of church.

She found Psalm 30: 2–5, her favorite since school days, on a computer Lorelei let her use:
O Lord my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me
.
O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from the grave. . . . Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

The few lines she chose seemed to say it all.

While Maureen slept, Jeannie went to the little computer room that the ward provided to email her sisters, Rose and

Grace, who still lived in her hometown, Verona, Wiscon sin, to tell them what they had probably already heard on the news.

She sent another message to Bill’s sister, Sandy. At the top she typed in the lines from Psalm 30. She added, “I think that I have loved this passage all my life because it led us to this moment. For we were cast down into the pit, Sandy. We were in the grave. And I cried out only for the strength to go on, but instead I received this magnificent gift, truly a new morning in our lives.”

When she returned to Maury’s room, Jeannie wrapped herself in a blanket and slept in the chair.

The following morning Lorelei, shrugging on her coat and about to leave, woke her gently by saying, “Mrs. O’Malley, I think you might want to look at the TV.”

Lorelei pressed the button, and the wide screen re vealed Molly, Britney, and Leland! They were being inter viewed by Matt Lauer!

“Oh my goodness!” Jeannie said. “Yeah,” Lorelei said.

“They were so completely messed up that it was impos sible to see what they really looked like,” said Leland. “I saw when the ambulance took Maureen away from the ac cident. She was totally covered in blood. Her own mother wouldn’t have known her.”

“We were just starting to get used to missing Maureen a little when we found out,” said Molly.

“It’s like we have to change our grief now. A totally dif

ferent person died. I don’t know how we can feel happy and sad at the same time,” Britney said.

“And you have started a website where people can send their thoughts and prayers and offers of help for the fami lies?” asked Matt Lauer. “I heard about this. Someone said this website has gotten more than four thousand messages already—from Israel, Australia, Italy. . . .”

“People are totally supportive of it,” said Leland. “We haven’t seen Maury yet, because she’s in rehab. But we have been sending the checks that come to us to the bank in a special fund for her that Mr. Vonnenburg created. There are actually two funds, one for her and one that was already set up for a scholarship in Maureen’s memory for a cheerleader. Now it will be in Bridget’s memory. But it’s getting to be a lot, just in a few days. We were going to send someone to a cheer- leading camp, but now it might be a college scholarship.”

“Wouldn’t that be great? Here is the address, folks, if you want to send a donation, or you can write to the blog net address called ‘These Two Girls,’ all one word and all caps . . . ,” Matt said.

A line crept across the screen with the address of the Bigelow Bank.

“You were all cheerleaders together?”

“Since eighth grade. It’s not like anything else. You get to be each other’s best friends. It’s like a family,” said Molly.

“A dysfunctional family,” Leland added. Everyone laughed.

A few seconds of the girls, videotaped in state competi

tion, flashed across the screen next.

“I thought our names weren’t released to the media,” said Jeannie, watching anxiously as she saw Maureen begin to follow the images on the screen.

“Hmm,” said Lorelei. “Not by us they weren’t.” Watching Bridget drop from her stand on the others’

shoulders into the basket of the others’ arms was an eerie moment.

“If you’re just joining us, that was Bridget Flannery, a champion cheerleader, who was killed just before Christ mas. Bridget was in an auto accident with her best friend, Maureen O’Malley. Until just three days ago, her family be lieved Bridget was alive. But it turned out that the girl they were caring for was really Maureen. This terrible mix-up has caused great joy for the O’Malleys and, understand ably, stunning grief for the Flannerys.

“We are talking now to Bridget’s and Maureen’s best friends, fellow cheerleaders from Bigelow, Minnesota. How is the school reacting? It’s a very small school, isn’t it?”

“Just four hundred kids. We don’t know how to feel. They’ll be bringing counselors to talk to any of us who want next week,” Britney said. “We’re happy, of course, but we’re sad. The whole town is, like, torn apart. We were destroyed that Maureen was dead. But now that it’s really Bridget who is dead, we have to live through this all over again. It’s not just their families. It’s all of us. This is a tragedy and a mir acle for a whole town.”

“In a moment we’ll hear from one of the paramedics

who was on the scene that night, in this strange and heart breaking case of two young Minnesota girls. Friends and families mourned at Christmas for Maureen O’Malley, only to learn after eight weeks that the girl who died was not Maureen but her best friend, Bridget Flannery. We’ll be back after the break.”

“Bug,” said Maureen.

“Oh, Maury,” said her mother. “Oh, sweetheart. Of course you didn’t know.”

But she had known.

Some part of her had known Bridget was dead.

Some part of her had reached out, and Bridget was not there. To hear them say it, though, that was different. She didn’t want to die—already did that. But live without Bridg et? Never hear Bridget call her and say, “I have the most disgustingly exciting news.” Bridget, her other self, who knew things about Maury no one would ever know, who she needed now more than ever. Maureen began to breathe harder. It was as though she couldn’t grab enough air.

She heard a murmur, felt a silvery shot of fluid slide into her arm, and fell asleep.

blog fight
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Leland, Molly, and Britney had their pictures taken with Matt and one of the female anchors, Meredith. The other one, Ann, was busy talking with an author. They got auto graphs and zippered carry bags. “Will you come back and give us an update?” a producer asked.

“Totally!” said Leland.

The girls went outside, into the bright sunshine. People behind the barricades in front of the studio’s big plate glass windows were waving to them. A boy on a bike stopped and said, “I just saw you on TV!”

When they finished taking pictures in front of the building with its rainbow logo, they were taken back to their hotel in a Lincoln Town Car. It was one of those fancy

Japanese hotels. Mrs. Broussard took advantage of the night they would be spending here to get them tickets to a musical. They ate dinner at Joe Allen’s and saw the guy who was in
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
and a famous old lady Mrs. Broussard said had the most beautiful voice of any singer on Broadway, and who had been the original Griswolda or someone in
Cats,
whatever that was.

They went shopping at Sephora and Henri Bendel, where Molly lost it and spent everything she had saved from two birthdays and two Christmases on a purse. They took a horse carriage ride through Central Park.

“I’ve been in Chicago, and how much bigger this city is just blows me away,” said Britney. They ran up and down the stairs in the Nike store. They bought CDs at a huge re cord store with five floors. Afterward they saw the show, a musical based on the Little House books, with Laura as an older woman singing, “My father built this house of logs, now trees have moved inside. The child I was comes run ning, her arms flung open wide. Oh Laura, barefoot girl, take me back with you. . . .”

It was the best time they ever had. They were totally exhausted.

They fell into bed at midnight and got up to hear more about themselves on TV as they dressed to fly home.

Molly got a hundred text messages on her cell phone from friends who saw her on TV. When Lee-Lee called home, her mother told her that somebody from
England
had called. A magazine,
Your Own UK
, wanted to interview

the girls. Somebody from Australia called in the middle of the night, too! And
People
magazine was coming next week. They wanted to try to get pictures of Maureen, and would Leland help? Britney’s dad told her a lady had called and asked him about a
movie
. But when Britney told Molly, Molly’s mouth turned down and she boringly said, “You know, maybe we should have asked the O’Malleys before we did this.”

“Didn’t I leave them, like, a hundred messages about our blog?” Leland asked.

“You can imagine why they’re not returning calls,” said Britney.

Leland flopped back in her seat.

“You know, you are so small-town. This is a national thing. This is a miracle and a huge tragedy all wrapped up in one. What were we supposed to do, refuse to talk to Matt Lauer? People care about this. And it was your idea to start the blog, smarty-pants!”

“I know it was,” Molly said. “But that was different. It was to help the O’Malleys and the Flannerys pay off their bills and stuff. Can you imagine having to pay bills for a girl who died? And I really think there should be something in Maur—I mean Bridge’s memory. And cheerleaders from all over were calling us and texting us and emailing Eddy to find out what they could do so people would hear. It was natural.”

“And you were very professional, with your little pic tures and everything. . . .” Lee-Lee egged her on.