All We Know of Heaven (3 page)

Henry Colette, thirty years on the job, ten as chief, thought that maybe he was getting too old to do this any more. Getting old.

Or maybe no one was young enough for this kind of sight.

Six officers tried to shield Maureen from the eyes of all those kids—fifty or more of them by then—while the medics moved her. Her face so swollen it looked like a Halloween mask, blood black as syrup all over her, her arms limp as if connected with string. Somehow she was still talking when the medics reached her, answering their questions about where she had been—cheerleading practice for the holiday competition. Then suddenly she went quiet. The medics ramped up to crazy then.

The second ambulance went screaming past the line of kids standing there shivering—their big eyes wide as deer eyes—the girls crying openly, the boys rubbing their faces on the sleeves of their Carhartts.

Colette stood, the snow frosting his beard, and watched as a big pushing vehicle from the Cities came to move the vehicles off the road. They would wait for the snow to let up to load the wrecked truck and car and haul them away.

The kids should go,
Henry thought. “Go on now. It’s bad out,” Colette called softly to them. “There’s nothing to see here.”

But the kids stayed.

Finally, Colette shrugged and jammed his hat on his head and got into his car. He passed the single squad with two deputies hunkered down half a mile away at the roadblock. They would be there until morning, keeping any traffic off G at this stretch. “Merry Christmas now if I don’t see you,” he told Mary Folly (Denny’s older sister and, to be honest, a better cop than Denny) and her partner, Kemper, a veteran who managed to make waiting to collect his pension look

like hard duty. Kemper needed to go on a diet, and after the first of the year Collette would get Kemper running off some of that gut at the Y.

Colette sighed, u-ey’ed his squad car and headed for home. He wouldn’t stay longer than it took to explain all of this in detail to Margo; then he would head for the hospital. His place was with Bill and Jeannie now. God, he dreaded it. If he got home that night at all he’d be lucky. Or unlucky, depending on how it went.

It was possible, just possible, that Maureen would make it. He had heard her speak.

Or maybe it was only because it was Christmas and he couldn’t bear to believe anything else.

She was thirsty. Her lips were sore and swollen. She could hear them scratching against each other, taste the blood. Somehow her mouth moved without her telling it to.

Shepickedawayatthewordfor... that shiny thing. The thing on the flat beside her. What was it called?

Flash. Flashy. Watts. What. Gulls. Grease. Gus.

GUH-LUS.

And then she had to remember how you used a thing that was called, for no reason, a GUH LUS and shaped like a permanent bubble.

What was it for?

To put over things. You would put it over things. A little thing that ran. Quicky. Flicky. With long . . . wavy things . . . long legs . . . no, no long hairs . . . no whiskers! Over a mouse! You would put it over a mouse.

No.

Youwouldlookthroughthingsitat... things covered with leather, beautiful red leather. Fleather. Flowing things, flowing past the window of her bedroom. Flowing into the trees.

Boards. Bees.

Birds.

They lived in bird huts. Birdhuts.

Dannymadethemlittle birdhuts. In his ship, shop, his shipshape shop, at his own hut.

He learned how in ship class. There.

No!

It was for water! A glass was for water. For drinking water. And she was thirsty. It went together.

As soon as she’d finished with one thought she had to figure out another thought. The whole decoding thing began all over again! Every thought—every little thought—was like making a building with LEGOs, matching red to red and yellow to yellow and green to green, long to long and short to short. She wanted to scream, but it wasn’t an option. Her mouth wouldn’t let her scream. She felt as if her lips were sealed in plastic wrap.

She heard someone soaking . . . spiking— SPEAKING clearly. “You didn’t see her then. Mary Helen! She was forty pounds heavier with the fluids! Like a bag of water! Since two days before Christmas Eve. No, it’s GOOD how she looks now! It’s GOOD, Mary Helen!”

Wibbledibblewibblewhisperwhisper.

“Not just her spleen. Her skull had hairline fractures. It’s amazing that they weren’t worse fractures. People who get thrown from a car, it’s the worst thing! They usually just die. She looks good. Yes, this is what they call GOOD.”

Shushwshiperwhisperwhisper.

“I know you wouldn’t believe it was her. WE couldn’t recognize her.”

Those Mary Helen sentences were the first sentences that she heard all in one piece.

The rest was cheesy music in this weird

heaven that went up and down and around like a Ferris wheel, broken up by different voices saying, “. . . so young . . .” “. . . just asleep . . .” “. . . when she was little, do you remember the two of them with sand cupcakes?” and “. . . never one of them without the other . . .” “. . . at least she’s at peace.”

Last winter? When was winter? What was winter? Go.

Fight. Winter! Winner.

Who was she?

She was she, was she, herself. Was she Mary Helen? Mary in hell? No. She was someone else. Who was the someone she was?

She was lying on a bed. Her feet were bare, a lumpy pillow under her neck. Maybe she was at her own funeral.

Her own funeral. That was where she was.

This was an excessively creepy thought, that her eyes might be not-just-shut-but-glued-shut and stuffed with gauze to look still-alive and natural (her great-uncle was a priest and went into way too much detail about these things). But if she were dead she should be an angel able

to . . . flow? . . . around above everyone else in the room, to see if aunts and uncles and brothers and . . . other people were there crying over her.

One of the only benefits of being dead was finding out for sure who were really your . . . other people . . . and were staying for the whole thing, including the rosary, not just showing up to sob a little and then be carried out of the room by her boyfriend as she stumbled and cried out your name. If it was Leland Holtzer, she would stop crying rightawayintheparkinglotandsay, “Can you believe they didn’t close the coffin?”

Maybe it was dark because they had closed the coffin.

But what would that matter to an angel? And the truth was, maybe they didn’t need to close the coffin. Actually, she didn’t even know how she had died. Maybe she looked great. If she had to be dead, she hoped she looked great. Maybe she broke her neck cheering. It happened. She tried so hard to listen for funeral music, she exhausted herself and fell asleep.

the cross
‌

The kids crept out onto the road after the chief left. No one spoke.

Tall, slender, elegant Lelandspottedatennisshoestrung with miniature gold-and-black pom-poms and dropped to her knees in the road. She thought if she hadn’t been wearing jeans, she would have scraped her legs, she fell that hard. She wondered if anyone else noticed how hard she fell. If the road hadn’t been blocked at both ends, she’d have been a target for oncoming traffic. She was glad she didn’t care about that. It would have been too, too selfish.

“I’m going to put up a cross right here,” she said.

“Lee-Lee, they aren’t even dead!” Eric whispered, loud and shocked.

“No one could survive that!” Leland shrieked, pointing to Maureen’s Toyota, which looked as if it had been wrung out like a wet towel. The hood was smashed sideways, the wheels up off the ground. Leland knelt down again and picked up the shoe. She thought maybe she would keep it, like, for years and show her daughters someday.

Then she thought she really better put it up with the cross.

She stared at the tennis shoe, still as polished and pris tine as Coach Eddington—Eddy—insisted their tennies be. Every inch of their uniforms had to be like an ad for deter gent.
You are a representative of Bigelow right down to the tips of your toes,
she said more times than Lee-Lee or the others could count.
You’re all Eddy’s Angels, better than Charlie’s.

They rolled their eyes when she said it, but it was true.

Unlike other schools that had dance teams of twenty girls in kick lines, Bigelow was so small they had only the cheer leaders. The girls saw the way people gawked at the pom pom girls from other schools who came for away games. They acted like they were the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. But Coach Eddington had been part of a national prize winning team at Oklahoma State. So Eddy’s Angels won prizes. Bigelow was first or second in state every year. And so Leland and Sabrina Holtzer, sisters Caitlin and Quinn Smith, Britney Broussard and Brittany Wolner and Britta ny Scott, Molly Schottman, Taylor Cuddahy, and, of course, Bridget and Maureen never understood why no one re

spected them.

Why?

They worked hard. They were so much stronger even than the jock girls, never mind the wasties who stayed thin by gobbling handfuls of Dexi-Slim. And even though cheerleading was fairly yesterday in high school, it was coming on in college and on the tube. Didn’t anyone know that? But after this, even the big, ugly, fifth-year seniors who liked to get drunk and boo them from the stands would have to be respectful, Leland thought, and she immediately felt guilty. Maybe people would see them as sort of heroes now. This tragedy might make all that went with being one of them halfway worth it.

“Lee-Lee, should we try to get the coat down?” Caitlin Smith asked.

It was Brandon Hillier who climbed the tree—
that
tree, with the stuff on the trunk—to shake the jacket loose. No one could tell if it was Bridget’s or Maureen’s because they both wore an XS. The pockets were empty except for a stick of Juicy Fruit. Leland searched for a laundry mark, or any thing. But there was nothing. Just a white wool jacket with black sleeves and gold lettering. Caitlin held it close, after first checking for blood.

Caitlin Smith wondered how Danny would go on living. Bridget and Danny had been together since seventh grade. Bridget was like his world. And Maureen was like Bridget’s sister, so they were almost like three people in a family—if you didn’t count your real family, and nobody did. Caitlin knew she would never see her own sister, Quinn, if Quinn

wasn’t a cheerleader, too, because Quinn was so annoying with her French camp and her guitar, like some weird hip pie. Caitlin could not believe it when Sabrina texted them from the hospital: M IS DOA. It was impossible. They were totally messed up, but doctors could put you back together now. They had machines that worked for your heart if they had to fix your heart, even.

It was midnight, and they had a competition in the morning at seven
AM
in Ludding. Caitlin had no idea how they were going to do it with only one flyer.

“We’ll probably drop out,” she said.

“But Eddy will want us to do it for them—Maury and Bridget,” Leland answered.

“Call her,” Caitlin said. “I don’t know if it would look right.”

Caitlin stabbed in the numbers to call Sabrina instead. Her minutes were already used up, but this was an emer gency. When Sabrina picked up, Caitlin totally babbled. They were operating on Bridget. Bridget was going to make it. Nobody said anything about Maureen. Sabrina just as sumed she was dead, but she didn’t know for sure. Coach Eddington was at the hospital with lots of parents, and she had told Sabrina she had not yet made up her mind if they would compete tomorrow.

Leland swore a streak when Caitlin told her.

“We don’t care how things look,” Leland said. “We’re not in mourning. Eddy should want us to win for them.”

Caitlin wondered if Leland wanted to win for
Leland
,

because it would be in the newspaper if the squad went on to victory in spite of tragedy. It was true that lots of teams had only one flyer, and they still had Taylor.

Taylor saw the accident on TV. It was nearly one
AM
when she showed up, crashing breathless through the woods with her older sister, Rae.

By then they’d found everything they could locate in the dark and snow: three identical size-seven shoes, both girls’ gymbagswiththeircheeringpracticeclothesandbodysuits inside, one brown Ugg boot, the jacket, and Maureen’s CD case. Brandon Hillier’s father had showed up with some lumber; Brandon must have called him. Mr. Hillier came off-roading through the woods in his big-wheeled truck. Brandon took out one of Maureen’s CDs and put it in his dad’s player while some of the boys made a cross with the lumber and nails and wrapped it in reflective duct tape. The voice on the CD sang, “My life is brilliant. / My love is pure. / I saw an angel. / Of that I’m sure.” It was as lonely as the moaning of the wind.

early next morning
‌

Amber Kresky, RN, twenty-four years old, whose little sister Britney was also a cheerleader, decided to help the aides clean up the rooms.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t her job.

But she wanted to do it out of respect; and only about half the ED beds were filled, and not with people truly in danger. They were like the guy in three, who’d decided to stop taking his blood thinners and had spent the money on ice-fishing gear.

There were two thousand people in Bigelow, and it was fair to say that almost all of them knew the O’Malleys or the Flannerys from church or the school, where Mr. O’Malley had been the wrestling coach for twenty years.

The Bulldogs were a wrestling dynasty, Division Three state champions four times in the past ten years. Amber’s new husband, Mitchell, had wrestled for him. People sent Coach O’Malley so many cookies and six-packs at Christmas that Coach said if he kept it all, he’d be a four- hundred-pound drunk.

Amber smiled softly, as she pulled on a fresh pair of gloves.

Please God, bless Coach O’Malley and Mrs. O’Malley. Maureen, she heard, was out of surgery. Bridget Flan

nery was up in the OR. The surgeons were still fighting for her. It was bad, but it was anyone’s guess what would happen. The poor little things. No one could say for sure. It was like Dr. Krill and Dr. Collins always said: The first twelve hours told the tale. But Amber knew that kids that sick, even if they lived . . . This might not turn out to be a tale anyone wanted to hear the end of.