Devine Intervention (22 page)

T
HE BOTTOM LEVEL
of Hell wasn't what I expected. It was loud. Dark. Wet. And kind of pink, like maybe it had been decorated by the love child of Elton John and a mermaid. But it was punishing, all right. I wasn't sure I could take an eternity of the kind of abuse I was getting, which I can only describe as what a chicken probably feels like when a farmer is wringing its neck.

I used to think it was worse to kill chickens with an ax because of the way they would sometimes run around without their heads. Me and Mike were once talking with this friend of my dad's who told me that he knew of a headless chicken they kept alive for a week by squirting water down its throat with an eyedropper. Fact: There was no way a chicken could live for a week getting the kind of squeeze I was getting.

It was so bad I couldn't say anything. I couldn't have sworn if I tried, which was fine because my brain was
having a hard time remembering any words, good or bad. I could hardly remember anything besides Heidi, Xavier, Gabe, and the taste of corn dogs.

For the longest time, I thought this was the Destroyer's way of making me suffer, giving me nothing to think about but the sensation of being crushed to death every sixty seconds or so.

And just when I thought things couldn't get worse, they did.

The crushing let up and my eyes were slammed with the brightest light — way brighter than the flashlight the security guard at the mall used, and that one had a setting meant to give people seizures. It was a killer light and I was cold and naked and someone was fiddling with my belly button and whipping me through the air and putting me in a cold, metal basket.

“It's a boy,” a voice said. “A perfectly healthy boy.”

I looked around to see who they were talking about, but my eyes were still melting with light. I couldn't make out anything farther away than my nose.

“Whoa! Nine pounds, fourteen ounces,” the voice said. “Let's hope this is the most trouble he ever gives you.”

Someone wrapped me in a soft blanket, and I stopped looking around to see who they were talking about. I was surrounded by people. And some of them were crying.

That's when I figured out they were talking about me. Me. Maybe if my head hadn't been squeezed so hard, I would've picked up what had happened sooner. I tried to explain that there had been some sort of mistake, that I
wasn't where I was supposed to be, that I was someone else, but the words came out all messed up.

My arms and legs pushed against the blanket they'd wrapped around me, but there was no way out and after a while I stopped struggling because I got this urge, a stronger one than I'd ever felt in all my weird, messed-up life. I didn't even know these people, but I wanted to tell them what I knew about life and chances and the nine levels and the mistakes you don't have to make. I kept trying to say it, but it came out all wrong, like a crying cat or something, and the more I talked, the more I realized I was starting to forget. With each sound I made, what I knew, what I'd learned … it was slipping away.

I felt something struggling in my chest, this wild wiggling that hurt and made me gasp until I figured out what it was. A heart. After all those years, I had one again and I couldn't tell if the darned thing was beating or breaking. Maybe a little bit of both. I hoped with all of it that Heidi had made it, or I didn't know how I'd hang on to this new life. I imagined her face and I locked the memory of it inside me as best I could, and after a while, my crying turned into squeaky hiccups and it almost felt like things were going to be okay.

“Oh,” a woman's voice said. “I think he's hungry. And just look at those beautiful brown eyes. Doesn't he look like an old soul?”

The memory of Heidi grew stronger inside of me, strong enough that I'd know her always, even if I never saw her again. And I felt the strangest thing in the air,
something better than the smell of movie theater popcorn. I felt it, and I knew what it was, even if I couldn't speak the word.

In that moment, I knew there was nothing else I had to say.

H
EIDI HEARD THE
doctor's voice before she was fully awake.

“This is a very unusual case,” the doctor said. “Ordinarily, patients who show no brain activity don't wake up, particularly when life-support measures have been terminated. They certainly don't wake up with all of their faculties intact.”

Heidi opened her eyes. It was the morning after. The sky had finished with its business of raining, and it had wrapped startling blue arms around the world, lighting everything with a silvery glow: the clock, the sink, the old television that hung from the wall, silently broadcasting the news. On the wall across from her bed were her drawings. Someone had fastened each of them, one by one, to the bulletin board–covered wall, using tiny pins that shone like stars in the sunlight. Together, the images were huge.

Her parents, Rory, and Megan sat by her bed while the doctor stood at her feet, discussing the mystery of what had happened.

“Would you say it's a miracle?” Heidi's mother asked.

Megan, now fully dressed, opened her mouth but stopped herself when she saw that Heidi was awake. Heidi shook her head and Megan nodded. There was an instant understanding between the friends that they wouldn't speak of this.

The doctor slipped the clipboard under her arm. “The lawyers would have a heart attack if they heard me say it, but we're going to have all the equipment checked out to make sure it's working properly. That seems the most likely thing to me. But you can look at this however you want.”

When they realized she was awake, the doctor departed. Heidi's family turned their full attention to her. Rory ran off to buy her some gum from a vending machine. Her dad ran a comb gently through her tangled hair, and her mother rubbed her feet, attention that would have mortified her before any of this had happened. Now, though, she didn't mind, not even when she couldn't tell whether it was her father's tears or her own sliding down her cheeks.

They did have some bad news about Jiminy. He'd been hit by a car. There was a chance he wouldn't make it. But the vet was hopeful.

Heidi didn't have to fake the look of shock she felt. He might live? After all of that?

“When I find the person who hit him,” Rory said, handing her a stick of gum, “I'm going to go Uncharted 2 on his —”

“Don't use that word, Rory,” Heidi's mother said.

“His apple?” Heidi said. She tucked the piece of gum in her mouth, savoring the cinnamon burn.

“Yeah,” Rory said. “He'll have a sorry apple.”

Heidi never told Rory whose apple he should pound into sauce. Mrs. Thorpe had done what Heidi needed her to do, and Jiminy was going to get better. She'd see to it.

She spent another day in the hospital, during which she was visited by many of her classmates, including Tammy Frohlich, who told her all about how Sully had broken his elbow and was sporting a cast that ran from his wrist to his armpit. He'd taken a spill at the mall while skateboarding in the food court. Apparently, he'd hit a patch of ice cubes.

“I'm totally going to be taking notes for Sully,” Tammy said. “Do you want me to take them for you too?”

Heidi felt the slightest twinge of envy until she noticed Tammy had a cluster of poppy seeds between her top teeth. Her heart expanded; she recognized Tammy's offer as kindness in a clumsy package. As for Sully, well, his broken elbow was funny. She wished she'd seen it happen. It seemed his guardian angel hadn't been watching. Again.

“Your drawings are awesome, Heidi,” Tammy said. “Can we print some of them in the yearbook? We'd planned to set aside a memorial page for you — no offense or anything. We could use that page for your art instead.”

Did Heidi want the world to see her tiny cities? She looked at the wall and considered her work. From a distance, you couldn't see the detail in each drawing. Together,
though, what she'd created looked interesting. Maybe even spectacular. The lights and darks made complicated patterns, and if you looked at them just so, you could imagine the many lives bubbling in the depths of the paper. So many lives, so many dreams, so much love.

“Sure,” Heidi said. “Use your favorites. I'd like that. I'd like it a lot.”

 

The day she left the hospital, she was alone in her room, missing the noise of Jerome in her head. A couple of times, she'd opened her mouth to point something out to him before she remembered he wasn't there — that he wouldn't ever be again. She couldn't keep the tears from filling her eyes, slipping down her cheeks. Her face was sticky with them and she imagined what he'd say to her.
Get up. Get out of bed. Get on with it. Whoosh!
He'd wanted her to live, even when it cost him everything he had. He'd wanted to live himself, and it was the least she could do to reenter the world.

So Heidi stood and dressed herself and, as she did, marveled in the feeling of being inside the body that belonged to her. She pulled a new shirt overhead, a gift from her mother, the sort of thing she'd never have had the guts to wear before because it fit her shape exactly. She stepped into her pants, appreciating the way her legs worked and they way they felt when covered in the soft denim of her jeans. As she slipped a pair of cotton socks over her feet, she admired the vamp toenail polish Megan had applied when Heidi was first admitted to the hospital, back before they knew she'd ever walk out again. It looked
good. Really good. Last came her favorite shoes, a pair of boots that had molded to her feet and felt like perfection to the very bottom of her soles.

She sat on the edge of the bed, looking through the window that Jerome had burst through, and she missed him fiercely. It was quiet inside her head without him, a silence that seemed to span the width of the universe, a silence nothing could ever fill. She wouldn't let herself imagine his fate, couldn't believe that he wouldn't, somehow, get one more chance. And part of her desperately wanted more time with him, time to see where that kiss might have led.

But, having tasted it just for a moment, she was beginning to understand a hard truth about what can happen when two people find each other in life. In a way, it was a lot like art. To draw someone, you have to see their edges and all the space around them. To even start to love someone, you have to know where you start and where you end. Where you are, and where you aren't, the shape you make in the world.

 

Heidi left the hospital in a wheelchair. Though she could walk and felt surprisingly good, it was a hospital rule. She planned to ditch the wheels as soon as the nurses stopped looking. The elevator stopped on the third floor, the maternity ward. The doors slid open and Heidi's family moved to the side so that another family had room to board. Heidi looked at them. The mother cradled a brand-new baby. A boy, judging by his snug blue hat. The mother too was in a wheelchair. She gently stroked the back of her
baby's tiny neck. From where she sat, Heidi had a good view of his face.

“What the —” Heidi whispered.

When the baby heard Heidi's voice, he turned to look in her direction. Those eyes. She'd know them anywhere. She wanted to reach for him, touch his tiny nose, hold his little hand, run a finger down his cheek, just marvel at him. While everyone around her practiced good elevator etiquette, staring forward, taking care to space themselves evenly, Heidi gaped, hoping for another look into the baby's eyes. A couple of times, she opened her mouth to speak. But the words wouldn't come. What could she even say? It was impossible anyway. She was probably still messed up from the drowning. But the idea filled her with a seed of hope, nonetheless.

The elevator touched down and the doors whooshed open. The air smelled of wet earth and sunshine. The baby's father pushed the mother's wheelchair up to the glass doors in the lobby. He hurried outside to get the car while the mother waited, holding the child. Heidi eased herself out of her wheelchair. Her legs still felt a bit wobbly, like she hadn't been inside them for ages. She filled her lungs, found her center, and walked slowly toward the woman, who was straining to reach the button that would open the door.

“Heidi,” her mother said. “What are you doing?” But Heidi was listening to a different voice now. Her own.

“Let me help,” she said.

The woman looked surprised and Heidi almost instantly
regretted making the offer. She'd embarrassed herself. The woman was a stranger, after all.

“Thank you,” the woman said. “You're an angel. With perfect timing. And here's our ride now.”

Heidi blushed, and though the tips of her ears turned red, she didn't mind. She took the handles of the wheelchair and helped the woman and her baby through the door. It was so bright she could hardly see anything but what was right in front of her. The wheelchair grew light as the woman eased herself out of it and walked away with the baby. Heidi felt her heart in her chest, the sun on her skin, the light in her eyes, and the earth beneath her feet, and she extended her soul out to the edges of her body, and even a bit beyond, as she took a strong, steady step into the world.