Devine Intervention (14 page)

“I dunno,” I said. I kicked some pebbles, but they stopped short of going into the pond. “It's not complaining that you threw a rock at it?”

Xavier shook his head and put his hand real light on my shoulder.

“Look at the ripples,” he said. “The rock caused all those ripples. They start out as a small ring, but given enough time, they'll reach out and travel all the way to the edge of the lake. Do you see yourself in that?”

“Which one is supposed to be me?” I asked. “Am I the rock or the ripple?”

Xavier laughed at me. Tears came out of his eyes and he squeezed my shoulder like it was a roll of soft toilet paper.

“What's so funny?” I yanked my shoulder away from his hand. I hate it when people laugh when you're not trying to be funny. That's against the rules of jokes.

“Sometimes,” he said, “you help me see things more clearly. We are all the rock. We are all the ripple.”

At the time I thought, well, glad one of us is seeing things clearly, because I am totally confused, and then I realized another thing that would have been awesome to hit: a mermaid, especially if I knocked her clamshells off.

But now I think I understand what he was getting at. I was the rock. I made the ripples. Even when the water in the pond was frozen, I created ripples. I'm also a ripple because what people do affects me.

It sort of figures that the day I learned that the things I do count for something was the last I'd have a chance to make a difference. With the handbook gone, I had a choice. I could confess to Xavier and Gabe and write my ticket to Hell. Or I could try Howard one more time. There was a chance he was bluffing. Or maybe he'd take pity on my soul.

It was my last hope for saving Heidi. My last chance for saving myself.

Knowing Howard, it didn't count for much at all.

Fifty minutes left.

H
EIDI'S EYES FLEW
open. What time was it? How long had she slept? Was she too late? She swung the cone around and found the clock. Almost eight
A.M
. Her heart lurched. She'd slept two hours, and her head still felt wrapped in a blanket of fog.

“Jerome?” she said. No one answered.

She couldn't see Jiminy's paws, but she could feel them pressed against the mesh of the cage, just as she could feel every inch of him merged with her soul: his paws, his legs, his fur, his little tail. She had never been so close to him or missed him so much. He was always happy, even when he was chasing squirrels and cars without catching them. He never thought about looking stupid, as far as she could tell. He didn't mind being his size. He was just happy to be alive in the bright, smelly world.

Maybe that was the key to a good life — the acceptance of things as they are. She wished she'd known this earlier, when there was still time.

She didn't have much left, maybe an hour or so, if the handbook was right. As strange as it was, she was glad to be inside Jiminy's body. It was partly the familiarity of it, and the hope that she'd be able to restore him to it, sparing her family a second death in as many days. But there was something more. It felt almost as if it was offering her some protection against the universe's desire to reclaim her soul.

That said, it wasn't easy staying inside. It took all her energy just to hang on. How on earth did Jiminy manage? A terrible thought struck. What if the same rules applied to animal souls? What if Jiminy only had twenty-four hours before he disappeared forever too? She had no more time to waste and couldn't spend her last moments in a cage, not when she might still make a difference for Jiminy and her family.

It would hurt, balancing on her broken front leg while she used her other paw to slide the cage open. It would be worse landing on the floor below. But she wasn't going to wait for anyone to rescue her. She'd escape. Find Jiminy. Bring him back home, back into his body, back to her family. If possible, she'd see to it that Megan got her Vincent Lionheart. After that, if there was anything left of her, she'd find Jerome and make him introduce her to his soul rehab counselors. They sounded like teachers, and teachers were almost always helpful.

With her good paw, she reached for the latch. It clicked open. The door swung wide and she made herself
jump. When she hit the hard ground below, the pain was so terrible she almost flew out of his body on impact. But she hung on, trying her best to work her way back into Jiminy. She felt clumsy and dull, like a limb that had fallen asleep, and she could feel herself seep out through his fur. She lay on the floor, fading with each passing second. The voice whispered,
Just let go. Come to me
.

The last scraps of the old Heidi were tempted. It would be easier to do what someone else wanted her to do. But it wasn't what she wanted, and it wasn't the right thing either. She gathered her courage for one last try, squeezing her essence into a sphere, tucking it deep in the hollows of Jiminy's heart. She closed her eyes against the searchlight of pain that hunted her, and she held on until she felt ready to extend slim feelers from her soul through the fibers of Jiminy's body. Creeping, gliding, reaching, she urged herself onward, stopping to rest as her soul encountered the worst of the wounds. She pushed past them as you might walk barefoot on broken glass. It hurt like nothing she could've imagined, suffering she never could've endured before.

During her human life, any sort of ache was a flashing red light. When she saw it, she'd stop, too afraid to venture forward. She wanted the sure thing. The green light. She didn't know then that she could press on through the pain. She let the red swallow her and she started moving again, knowing in the deepest part of her that the pain wouldn't consume her. It would merely change her.

And she could live with that. She had to.

At last she was firmly inside Jiminy. She rested a moment. The linoleum tiles were cool, and they smelled of disinfectant and wax. She lifted her head to see the expanse of gleaming floor beyond the plastic cone. The light bounced off it like sunbeams off a lake, and it was almost beautiful. If Corinne would steer clear a few more minutes, Heidi might actually make it out the door.

She stood and tested her weight on her injured leg. The cast was a help. The end wrapped around her paw like a boot, taking pressure off the broken bone. The lampshade around her neck would have to go, though. She thought about using the table as leverage. It was a tall, stainless steel one with a top that stuck out a good six inches, leaving a useful gap between its legs and the wall. If she could walk through the gap backward, she could force the cone off.

Getting under the tabletop was the easy part. With her leg in a cast and her chest full of cracked ribs, walking backward was close to impossible. She took a few halting steps. The effort left her shaking and breathless. But she almost didn't mind. It was good being in a body again.

The table leg and wall caught the cone. Heidi tucked her chin and felt the plastic slide against her throat. She gagged twice, and the sound alerted all the other dogs that something interesting was happening below. A brown Chihuahua started saying, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and it took her a moment to realize she'd translated dog to English. Then the rest joined in, all of them yelling “hey!” until the inevitable happened.

Corinne returned.

The door swung open and sent a breeze up Heidi's back, ruffling her fur. Her legs shook. It was going to hit her. She braced herself and held her breath.

“What's going on in here?” Corinne said. “You guys have been yapping all morning.”

The door just missed her. Jiminy's body fit neatly in the triangle of space between the door and table, a space that was now reassuringly dark.

“What the —”

Corinne had noticed the empty cage. Heidi heard quick footsteps, then the creak of the cage door and the jiggle of the handle as Corinne inspected the latch. More footsteps. Heidi imagined Corinne scanning the room, her ponytail swinging from side to side. She prayed she wouldn't look behind the door.

Then Corinne's retreating voice as she darted from the room. “The new dog. He's missing!”

That's when Heidi realized her plan had certain limits. She'd made it out of the cage, but how was she going to get out of the animal hospital? It wasn't as if she was going to find a secret, magical doggie door leading outside. She'd have to pass the reception desk and walk through the lobby to escape through a door she could not open.

The red light flashed again in her mind, but she ignored it. She might not get out of the hospital, but she could get out of the room. One step at a time. That's how she'd do it. She went at the cone again, willing herself not to gag. With a lurch, she freed herself. The cone slipped off and rolled across the floor. She hoped the noise wouldn't draw Corinne back.

With the cone off, the cool air was a revelation on her face. She tipped up her nose. So many scents. It was hard to focus. She took one deep sniff and caught the odor of the outdoors: cold air, car exhaust, old corn dogs from the 7-Eleven down the street. The smell made her think of Jerome, and her borrowed heart beat faster.

She poked her head out the door into the hallway. Corinne was to her left, peering under the couch in the lobby. To her right, the vet chatted away on the telephone, giving advice on the proper treatment of some sort of intestinal parasite. Heidi looked left again. Corinne was pushing herself upright.

Should she make a run for it? Let loose a cat or two and stage a diversion? Crawl to Corinne, whimper adorably, and hope she let Heidi outside for a potty break?

There was no great choice. But before Heidi could make even a bad one, an angel materialized in front of her, wrapped in a shroud of diamond-white light.

“That's unexpected,” she said.

“For you, maybe,” the angel replied.

Thirty minutes left.

M
Y PLAN WAS
to shoop to Howard's lobby. Maybe he'd even be there working on some new invention to make someone else's afterlife hell. Or maybe he'd be microwaving pizza rolls and decapitating stuffed animals. Whatever he was doing, maybe he'd talk to me and take pity and agree to help.

I landed outside his door and automatically looked up at the security camera. Before I knew it was there, I put honey and thumbtacks on his doorknob and got caught on tape and had to do some serious penance. I felt like giving him the one-finger salute in the camera for old times' sake. But I didn't. Because that would have been counterproductive, to use one of Gabe and Xavier's favorite vocabulary words.

Instead, I pressed the doorbell and listened to Howard's custom ringer. He'd programmed it with the Death Star theme from
Star Wars
. Like he'd even fit inside a storm trooper suit. The Emperor's fat-guy robe, maybe. I counted all the way to sixty Mississippi. He didn't answer. Either he wasn't there or he was ignoring me on purpose.

I turned the knob. Locked. If this had been a cop show, Heidi would've been in the room, gagged and tied to a chair, and when she heard the doorknob rattle, she would've gotten a look of hope in her eyes, just before they went to a commercial for extreme-flavor chips. I let that be my inspiration. The Heidi part. I like regular chips better.

Back in my human life, Mike and I used to practice breaking into places. Open windows were easy. Smashing a window was an option, but I'd once torn the bottom of my pants climbing through one, and my dad wouldn't buy me new jeans until I told him how I'd ripped them, and it meant I had to go to school showing everyone my London and France until the school nurse took pity and gave me a pair she said her son had outgrown, but she forgot to take the price tag off. Also? My dad made me pay to fix the basement window myself even though he couldn't prove I did it.

Eventually, I got pretty good at breaking the sort of lock you can pop with a credit card. You slide it in the gap, massage it back and forth a bit, coax the knob, and then
snock!
There she goes. I first started breaking in to get into my house when I'd forgotten my key, but pretty soon, I was working my way toward cooler exploits. My dream
was to be able to use those little locksmith pins that you stick in the actual lock, working them one by one, until the teeth of the lock line up and smile their way to opening. A night at the arcade after hours. Sweetness.

I never had enough money to buy the actual set, but it wouldn't have mattered if I'd died with them in my pocket because Howard didn't have that kind of lock anyway. Or windows. He'd rigged up this fancy gizmo with a metal flap that slipped over the door so no one could go sliding a credit card in the gap. Instead of having a spot for a key or an awesome set of tools, the door locked with one of those calculator pads. You had to type in a code.

I might never have been good at math, but I knew the odds of my guessing the right numbers: somewhere between Vegas craps and zero. And chances are, Howard had booby-trapped it so anyone monkeying around outside, namely me, would get a bucket of cold holy water dumped on his head.

I leaned against the door and slid all the way down until I sat in a heap on the ground. There was no way I'd get through this in the, what, thirty minutes I had left. I wished I could have gone ashes to ashes, dust to dust instead of Heidi. Disappearing forever — that would be better than what I was facing. Stupid Howard. Stupid calculator lock.

Then an idea hit me like a cartoon frying pan. Calculators. I hadn't had a lot of reason to touch them in my life, but whenever I did, there was one thing I made sure to type. 58008. If you do that and turn it upside down, it says one of the most beautiful words in the English language. There are other words you can spell
with a calculator, like
hello
and stuff, but those were for people who were lame.

I stood and punched 58008 onto the keypad, half expecting that bucket of cold water or an explosion of pitchforks. Instead, there was a buzz and a click. The knob turned. I pushed the door open and I was in.

“Heidi?” I called out. The place was dark and smelly. I wanted to gag. We had unlimited access to incense, and even though that smells like something I can't say, it wouldn't have hurt his lobby one bit. I felt around for a light switch until I remembered that Howard had hooked everything up to a Clapper like the kind they used to sell on late-night TV. He had half the guys convinced that he'd invented it. As if. I clapped the lights on.

He'd made some changes since I'd last been in the place. The stuffed animals were in a trash can with their guts spilling over the edge. On his wall was an old-school chalkboard like the kind they don't have in schools anymore, and he'd covered it with all sorts of math I didn't understand. There was a pile of books on the floor, books by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus, names I didn't even want to pronounce. But I found something good on his desk. His soul guardian's handbook.

I opened it hoping I'd find something about Heidi's situation but gave up in two seconds because the thing was so covered with Howard's own writing, it was almost impossible to read. He'd shoved some extra pages in the back and they fell out and spiraled to the floor.

I almost lost my lunch when I saw what he'd written on one of them.

 

If death isn't the end, what is?

When a soul disintegrates, does anything happen to the pieces?

Do they retain any memories?

Or is that the final nothingness?

If there is no final end, then life means nothing.

 

I NEED TO WATCH A SOUL DISAPPEAR
.

 

Heidi. That's why he wanted her. He had some idea that his existence would have meaning the second she was completely erased. I wanted to go fetal on the floor. I wanted to have never been born so I didn't have to feel what I was feeling, that life was one long struggle you could never win. But none of that was an option. Just as I turned to leave — I couldn't look at any more of this stuff — something hard smashed into my jaw from below. One of Howard's keyboards, swung by one of his minions. The one named Troy. If I'd been shorter or Troy had been taller, the keyboard would've connected with my arrow and it would have been game over right there.

As it was, it just meant a split lip. I touched it and tasted blood. That was going to leave a mark. Probably even one you could read, the keys had gone so deep. It was a real shame I didn't have enough time to take care of Troy. I would've liked to turn him into a set of luggage.

“You're not supposed to be in here,” he said. “I'm telling Howard.”

“Where is he?” I could feel my lip swelling. Pretty
soon, I'd start to talk funny. There wasn't going to be any dignity in this.

“He's out.”

“Thank you, mathter of the obviouth.” And there was the lisp.

An alarm dinged and the two of us swung our heads around. It was Howard's computer letting us know group was starting. That also meant Heidi's thirty minutes were up. My soul went numb.

“You're not leaving,” Troy said. “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”

I guess I'm not the only one who likes a cop show.

“Thut up,” I said. I looked around, hoping to find something I could use. My lip stung. I touched it and noticed the sound my jacket made. My field jacket. The one I got from my dad. The one every guy in rehab wanted, especially Howard and therefore even more especially, his minions.

I slipped it off. I hadn't taken it off since I'd been in heaven, partly because you can only change clothes in a lobby, and partly because it was the one thing I had that still connected me to my dad. It had been his when he was in the Army, and it smelled like him and still had the shape of his arms in the sleeves. It was the last piece of hope I had that we'd be the family I wanted.

“This is all yours if you let me go to group and don't tell anyone I've been in here.”

Troy's eyes lit up like a slot machine.

“I won't tell a soul,” he said. I left before I had to watch him put it on.