Devine Intervention (17 page)

Zero minutes left.

I
DIDN'T WANT
to go to one of the nine levels, but if I had to, I figured it was better to end things quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid.

I asked Gabe straight off, “Which one?”

Because he is sort of an applemunch, he replied, “Whatever do you mean, Jerome?” Then he clamped down on the toothpick in his mouth and crossed his arms to cover most of his vest. I figured this was maybe a test, so I didn't do what I wanted to do, namely, punch his forehead, but I imagined it making a hollow noise like the sound it makes when you hit a baseball just right.
Pok!

Gabe and Xavier looked at each other. Then Xavier flattened imaginary wrinkles in his robe and said, “It is interesting, Jerome, that you have chosen this location for our meeting.”

“Interesting? If you ask me, this is the boringest room in the place.”

“Most boring,” Gabe said.

“See,” I said. “Even Gabe thinks so.”

We were in the confessional, which has no windows, no pictures, no craft tables, and not any color anywhere. It is a white box of nothing. Even the chairs are white, so you sort of look like you're floating in space. Or mayonnaise, because I'm pretty sure space is black.

Xavier made prayer hands. He tilted his head and smiled. “What I meant to say, Jerome, is that it is interesting you chose this place above all others. Particularly your usual spot.”

True enough. I usually choose the john. Not that we need one. Spiritual beings are free of that embarrassing kind of stuff, but Heaven has them anyway to make sure we're reminded of our humanity. It's not so much that Earth is a reflection of Heaven. It's the other way around, which is probably disappointing and all to the folks expecting something better in the afterlife. Anyway, it's the perfect meeting space because I can flush the toilet a lot after they get done with their speeches about how much of a flask-up I am.
Sha-boom!
It's like a television laugh track, only wetter.

I waited for somebody to say something, but they sat there like a couple of cows, blinking. I wanted to tip them. They were going to make me do all my own confessing. Why couldn't they lay it all out for me so I could nod like a man and get sent down without crying or puking? It blows to make damnation so hard on a guy.

“Would you like us to use the screens?” Gabe asked.

I nodded quick-like because I was using my throat to hold back tears. Any words that came out would've uncorked the whole thing and I did not want to go below like a wet-faced baby.

He did the finger whammy, and the screen came down and flickered to life. Pretty soon the picture was as clear as anything. Heavenly definition, that's what I'm talking about. That sort of HD isn't available yet to the living, not even in Japan.

I expected the video to start with the thing at the pond, but it didn't.

It started out with me as a kid in my playpen. It was before my mom left, and she was lying on the couch trying to sleep. I knew it was her, because I recognized her face from an envelope of pictures I once found in a closet underneath my dad's ammo when I was looking for something I could use to make a wizard suit one Halloween.

I don't know how old I was in the video, but it was old enough to have thrown all my toys and my blanket and my bottle at her. I guess I wanted her attention, but she was holding her forehead and saying things at me that most moms don't say at their kids. I must've done something to make her sad, because her face was puffy and it had that sticky look you get if you've been crying and you can't find the energy to wash off the salt and snot. I remembered the feeling I saw on my face, where my stomach stretched up around my heart with wanting, and I don't think it was me wanting my toys and blankets back.

I don't know why they showed that to me, though. Or the next video, which was of me and my dad.

I was learning to walk. I didn't have all my teeth yet. Maybe eight little squares in front and you could see them all because my mouth was open wide like my dad's, only he was saying, “One more step, little man. One more step. You can do it.”

The carpet looked a whole lot better back then, so I guess my house wasn't always the pit I remembered.

He kept on saying, “One more step,” until I had walked all the way into his arms and then he said, “You are going to be a star athlete, little man. Maybe a football player, or a hockey player, or whatever you want and your life will be —”

I couldn't hear what he said next because he was scooping me up and holding me over his head and I was laughing so hard that was all you could hear. He tossed me in the air a couple times and a little bit of spit came out of my mouth and landed on his face but he didn't care.

I wanted to ask why they were showing me this, because it didn't look like I was doing anything wrong in the movie at all. But the words wouldn't come out and I didn't want them to switch to something else. It made my old heart space feel almost full to see my dad and me playing. It was the part of my life where he thought I could be somebody, and I liked living it again, and I didn't care if Gabe and Xavier watched. It felt good for them to know that I wasn't always a screwup.

It ended. I was about to ask for it again when I saw Gabe twiddling with his toothpick. He took a notebook
out of his vest pocket and flipped through the pages until he came to one he showed Xavier.

“This?” he said. “We're not really supposed to show these scenes.”

Xavier shrugged. “What's the worst that could happen? I mean, at this point?” He held up a finger, like he wanted Gabe to wait a minute. “Let me check on the souls first.” He activated his skull phone and dialed one of the guys from rehab, using speakerphone.

“Did you locate Howard?” I heard a little buzzing sound but couldn't make out the words. Xavier's eyes had a sharp sort of worried look. He lowered the volume on his microphone and turned to Gabe.

“He's still out there. Should we activate the soul jack?”

Soul Jack? That sounded like a guy who carried an ax and a black sack perfectly sized for a human head.

“Do it,” Gabe said. “Hopefully, he hasn't figured out how to dismantle that feature yet.”

“Oh, he won't have found it, not where I put it,” Xavier said.

Xavier turned his microphone back up and said, “Thank you for your efforts. Please report back to the group facility. You may have an extra serving of manna and fifteen bonus minutes of free-will time.”

Gabe fired up the screen again.

I recognized the scene right away and felt a sharp pain in my forehead. I wondered for a minute whether I'd just been sent down. I breathed all heavy, like someone had turned up the heat, only I felt cold all the way through.

This video was something that wasn't from my life, not the part I was there for anyway. It was the part where Mike ran into my house and got my dad after the arrow thing happened. At first I was expecting Dad to be mad, but that wasn't what happened. That wasn't what happened at all.

D
URING A FAMILY
trip to Disneyland when Heidi was eight and her brother was six, their parents stepped out onto the motel balcony for some fresh air, briefly leaving them alone inside the room. Rory took the small metal key from the minibar and shoved it into the electric socket.

“Zow!” he said. “That felt great. Touch it, Heidi.”

She was suspicious. For a little kid, Rory was a sneak. He'd decapitated one of her Barbies a few months earlier, and this was after giving the doll a haircut and melting her hands with a forbidden box of matches. And then he hadn't gotten into trouble for it because he promptly came down with chicken pox, and by the time the scabs healed, (a) Heidi was also infected and (b) their parents had forgotten Barbie Armageddon.

So, while a big part of her was skeptical, another part was hoping he'd meant to make up for the death of Barbie by showing her something really neat. Jerome didn't offer
an opinion one way or the other, so she took the risk and grabbed the key.

A surge of electricity raced from her fingertips to her hair. It felt as if someone had stripped out her insides and snapped them like a wet towel. She wanted the feeling to stop, but the current had thoroughly hijacked her hand. She couldn't let go until Jerome shouted “Lean back! Lean back!” Once she finally did, the key slipped out of the socket. She was free.

The angel was hijacking her soul. Only this time, there was no Jerome around to tell her what to do, and no sweet release from letting go. Letting go meant death. Her body — Jiminy's — went rigid as she held on. She felt herself unhooking slowly from Jiminy's flesh and slipping through his cells. She resisted, but it was like trying to squeeze a handful of water. She began to trickle out, Jiminy's body stiffening each time her hold on it slipped.

The angel was relentless, grunting and trembling as he tugged. “Come to Howard,” he said. “That's right, come to Howard so we can get this over with and know, once and for all.”

She cursed her own stupidity and the brain-numbing effects of the anesthesia. Of course this was Howard. He wasn't helping her or guiding her to Heaven. He meant to do her harm. Whatever he wanted to know — it couldn't be good.

She settled in for the fight of her life. There were no handles to grasp, no poles to seize. She couldn't ask anyone for help, and every second, more strands of the mysterious substance that rooted her inside Jiminy broke. While she'd
known before what desire meant in the abstract, while she'd
wanted
things — to be liked by Sully, to be thought of as someone worth respect — she hadn't let herself experience a true desire all the way to her depths. She'd never let go of everything else in pursuit of one. She felt it now, though, a bottomless hunger, a vast wanting that was stronger than fear or reason, a force that would rather fail than be silenced.

In her old life, she'd been protecting herself. Marking time until something outside her changed. And now, that time was up. One by one, she felt her soul's threads snap. They sang inside her like a burning harp, jangling and final. She held on anyway. She clawed at the floor, trying to move Jiminy's suffering body beneath the bed, but it didn't work. She struggled to her desk, trying to wrap her one good paw around it, but it slipped off immediately.

Howard pulled and grunted. Long seconds passed. And then, with one hideous tug, her soul popped free. The room was quiet. She'd failed. Jiminy's body lay on the floor, his eyes open and dull. Vincent Lionheart lay next to him, his torso dented with tooth marks. Howard panted, his hands on his knees. Heidi was spent. The light in the room started to flicker, then fade. Her ears filled with the sound of moving water, and her essence began to crumble.

“You didn't have to make that so difficult, you know,” Howard said. “You're part of something important. A major discovery. I'm going to watch what happens when your soul disappears so that we can know, once and for all, what a final ending really is, because death isn't it. A
body dies and it rots. It feeds the soil, which grows the plants that feed new creatures. It's an endless, pointless cycle.” He stopped to mop his brow with the back of his hand. “But your soul doesn't die. It comes here and gets trapped in another endless cycle. Heaven, Hell. Rehab for a while if you're unlucky. I want to know where the rare lost soul goes when it disappears. I need to know. And it's good for you too. If you disappear, it's proof that life actually matters. Your pathetic little life, once it's gone for good, will finally mean something.”

Heidi turned to face Howard. He kept splitting in two and vibrating. She shook her head to see if she could get her eyes to track again. She wanted to launch herself at him the same way she had at Jerome, only with a thousand times more force. Her soul wasn't part of his experiment. It was hers. It did matter. It mattered to her, and that was enough.

She gathered the strength to stand, folding her fingers into fists, struggling to keep her balance, intending to land a punch the size of Alaska on his nose. She never got the chance. A small, pulsing light appeared over Howard's head. It beeped three times, and then shot a glittering web downward. The shining substance closed in on him and collapsed into a pinprick of brightness before it disappeared with a
crack
. A snake of incense reared up from the ground where his soul had stood.

The room dimmed further and her limbs started to hum and lighten. She watched the surface of her soul hands ripple. Their edges blurred and faded to a burnished gold. She dropped to her knees and crawled back toward
Jiminy's body. She reached it and fell upon it, pushing her soul back through his cells. His legs felt harder now, like a leather glove that had been left out in bad weather. She didn't know how much longer she could hang on.

One of her Pigma Microns lay on the floor. She stumbled to it and grabbed it between her teeth. Then she fished a piece of paper out of the recycling bin and scratched out a self-portrait — her first — and a message to her family, trusting that they'd find it someday.

It felt good to do that one simple thing, as though it somehow took away a bit of the pain of everything else she'd never be able to do. That her family would know how she felt, and what she believed, made her death somehow less of a tragedy. As long as they remembered, a part of her would remain alive.

She had almost no hope of finding Jiminy. Maybe Howard was right — he'd already been taken to animal heaven. She let go of her hope of restoring his soul to his body, refusing to think about the hole it left in her heart. On the ground in front of her lay Vincent Lionheart. Her last act would be to deliver him to Megan, along with a similar message to the one she left her family.

Getting out of the house wouldn't be easy. She couldn't reach a doorknob. There was one way she might escape. One way. And it was going to hurt.

She staggered into Rory's room, feeling Jiminy's limbs soften ever so slightly with each step. As usual, Rory's window was wide open, letting in a fat stream of freezing air. She struggled onto Rory's bed, carrying Vincent in her mouth. From there, it was a short leap out the window. A
short leap with an awful landing. She breathed in. Breathed out. Inhaled once more.

Then she jumped, landing in a scruffy patch of juniper. She'd always hated those bushes but now appreciated them with new clarity. Something doesn't need to be beautiful to be useful. She'd dropped Vincent when she landed. Good thing he was immortal. She scooped him up with her mouth and headed for the sidewalk. Overhead, the sky rippled with charcoal clouds, and the air carried a sharp, expectant smell. Rain. Lots of it. She put her head down and began to walk, avoiding the puddles of melting snow.

She turned toward Megan's house but made it less than a car length before a pair of thick legs in sensible shoes blocked her way. Mrs. Thorpe, carrying a stack of letters and shiny catalogs.

“Why, you're back from the vet!” she said. “I must not have hit you very hard after all. But we can't have you running around alone, can we?” She advanced toward Heidi, who shrank backward.

“They shouldn't leave you outside when they're away,” she said. “You could get run over by another car. I'm going to take you inside and give them a piece of my mind when they get home.”

She folded Heidi under her wing, pressing her against the catalogs. It hurt. But not as much as what Mrs. Thorpe did next.

“You can't bring your nasty little chew toy inside,” she said. “Open!”

She slipped a finger in Heidi's mouth and plucked Vincent Lionheart out, tossing him on the rough sidewalk.
While there might have been a time in Heidi's life that she'd let that sort of affront pass without comment, that time had passed. She no longer cared about consequences, or the good opinion of others.

She opened her mouth. Her mouth full of sharp canine teeth. And she did exactly what it took to get Mrs. Thorpe's attention.

“Mrs. Thorpe,” Heidi said, using the same cadence she and Rory had perfected when telling each other ghost stories before bed. “You have been baaaad … so baaaaaaddd!”

Coming out of Jiminy's throat, the voice sounded truly terrifying: growly, low, full of menace. Heidi almost couldn't believe it.

Mrs. Thorpe yelped and dropped her onto a clump of ferns. She backed away slowly, covering her face with her hands. “What the —”

It might have been a kindness had Heidi merely bitten her.

Heidi stepped toward her cowering neighbor. “I represent the International Order of Mistreated Animals and come bearing a message.” She paused for effect and used the moment to gather her energy, as the pain in her belly had reached a new height. “We have been watching you, Mrs. Thorpe. You permit your large dog to bark and terrorize smaller creatures. You ran over the poor animal whose body the IOMA temporarily inhabits, without taking full responsibility for the crime. You are an evil human. Evil.”

Mrs. Thorpe dropped her hands to her heart. Her face frilled with red and white blotches, like a giant
chrysanthemum. “I'm sorry!” she said. “I'm so sorry! Please don't hurt me!”

Heidi's cheeks curved into a grin. It felt great to smile like a dog, letting her teeth show and tongue hang out. Then she snapped off the happy face. No matter how good it felt, there was too much at stake. Too much, and too little time.

“No harm will come to you, Mrs. Thorpe, if you successfully complete the tasks we have laid out. You must redeem yourself. It is not too late for you — yet.” She wished she could do that echo thing that Howard did. That was a good effect.

“I'll do it. Whatever you ask.”

“We'll need your car. On the double.” Heidi missed her thumbs. It would have been great to offer an emphatic snap.

Mrs. Thorpe nodded. She dropped her mail on the sidewalk and put Heidi in the backseat of the Mercedes. Her hands shook so much, her keys rattled like nickels in a coffee can. It took several tries before she stuck the right one in the ignition.

“Are you sure you don't need me to buckle you in?” Mrs. Thorpe said.

So now she cared about Heidi's safety. Heidi plunked Vincent headfirst into the cup holder so she could talk. “A seat belt is unnecessary at this time.”

She gave Mrs. Thorpe Megan's address in the same slow, calm voice. Part of Heidi knew that talking like an NPR announcer was maybe too much. But it was fun — something that had been in distinctly short supply of late. In any case, she was glad for the ride. Huge raindrops
launched themselves from the clouds, spiraling down from above, smearing the view through the windshield. The wipers thump-chunked and squeaked at full speed but couldn't come close to keeping up with the rain. Fortunately, the ride was short, and in less than the time it took to listen to one of Mrs. Thorpe's easy-listening tunes, they arrived at Megan's.

“There you go,” Mrs. Thorpe said. “Now I'll just be on my way.”

“Not so fast.” She might want a ride home. Maybe they could even drive around, looking for Jiminy. “Please wait until I return. We have agents watching you, and disastrous things are in store if you should attempt to depart prematurely.”

“I wouldn't dream of it,” Mrs. Thorpe said. “Oh my goodness, no.” She killed the engine and the car grew quiet except for the staccato rain on its roof.

“The door,” Heidi said. “The Order expects you to open it and transport me in gentle and humane fashion to the house.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Please carry the collectible figurine as well. I do not wish to further mar it with my teeth.”

“Do you mean the doll?”

Mrs. Thorpe reached into the backseat, her clothes hissing as she retrieved Vincent Lionheart. She dropped him into her purse and lifted Heidi out of the car, more carefully this time, but it still hurt. Terribly.

Heidi tipped her face to the sky and caught a few raindrops on her tongue. They were delicious and wintry:
cold, smoky, wood-drenched. She hadn't realized how thirsty she was.

Mrs. Thorpe carried her across the stepping-stones that led to Megan's house, depositing Heidi on a scratchy coconut-fiber welcome mat that said
GO AWAY
, one of Mrs. Lin's many sarcastic decorative items. Heidi hesitated. Did she really want to do this? She could always turn around and ask for a ride home, to wait and see what would happen there. Mrs. Thorpe turned to leave.

“Wait,” Heidi said. “I need you to ring the doorbell.”

“Will I have to go in? I don't even know these people and this —”

“No. Just give me my doll and wait in the car. I won't take long.”

“And then what?” Mrs. Thorpe said.

Heidi swallowed. The pain in her belly was intense, as though she'd swallowed steel wool. “I don't know.”

None too gently, Mrs. Thorpe inserted Vincent into Heidi's mouth. She rang the bell, spun around, and hustled back to her car with surprising speed. Heidi turned toward the door, realizing another weakness in her plan. If Megan's mother answered, she would take one look at the wet dog standing on her conversation piece and slam the door. Mrs. Lin was more of a cat person, to put it mildly.