Devine Intervention (7 page)

“Heidi,” he said one more time. “Please.”

“Okay,” she said. And she meant it.

He stood and took hold of both of her hands. The color had started to return to his face. He looked into her eyes and said, “Let's hope this works.”

She opened her mouth to say, “Let's hope what works?” but before she got a single word out, the world melted into light and streaks of color, and the only thing that remained solid was the connection between their pairs of hands. Heidi thought she might very well throw up.

G
ABE CALLED
my skull phone when Heidi was inside saying good-bye to her family. He used his loud voice, which had a way of splitting my head in two.

“WHY WERE YOU NOT IN GROUP THIS MORNING?”

“Uh.”

“YOU WILL REPORT TO MY CHAMBERS IMMEDIATELY.”

“I, uh, can't right now on account of I —”

“THERE IS NO OTHER DEFINITION OF
IMMEDIATELY
. THE WORD MEANS NOW!”

So, yeah. Good thing Heidi agreed to come with. I didn't want to be the guy who stood between a girl and her last good-byes with her family and stuff, but I really needed to see if there was anything I could do to fix the situation, or at the least, slip her in the back door of Heaven while I was on my way to get my apple handed
to me in a paper sack. Once she was all settled, I could maybe talk Gabe and Xavier into giving me a do-over. I'd do a better job if I got a second chance. That was a promise.

After a pretty smooth shoop, considering it was Heidi's first time, we landed at the service entrance, which isn't as fancy as the main gate. But I'm not allowed in the front, and anyway, trumpets and hand bells would only make my headache go all the way down my neck.

“Here we are,” I said.

She was all, “Here? But we're at the mall. In the back entrance. Behind the employee parking lot.”

“Chevy,” I said.

“A Chevy? Are we going for a ride?”

“You don't see it? The glowing doors? Right under the stone angel thing? Covered with a sign that says
HAVE HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
? With the doormat that says
PLEASE WIPE YOUR SOULS
?”

“I see parked cars. I see a girl in an Orange Julius uniform trying to light a cigarette. I see a regular door with a sign that says
NO ENTRANCE FOR UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS
. There's graffiti on it that looks like a bald guy with stars for eyes.”

“Chevy,” I said.

“Jerome, don't take this the wrong way, but did that arrow give you, uh, brain damage? Because I've heard that people with head injuries sometimes repeat words at inappropriate times, and I just wanted you to know I'm not going to judge —”

“Shush. Gotta think.”

Something was pretty flasked up if she couldn't see Heaven's service entrance, which is behind the mall because it has a really convenient layout and plenty of parking if anyone needs to wheel in something big, like an enlightened circus elephant. If Heidi couldn't even see the door, there was no way I was going to get her in it, and Gabe was waiting. I substitute-cursed myself out for losing the guardian angel handbook, while I rubbernecked a bit to see if any of the other guys from group were hanging around. That would've stunk, especially if one of them was Howard.

Luckily, we were alone. Even so, I wanted to be quick about stuff. I didn't want Heidi to get the idea that anything was messed up about the situation. Or more messed up. It's bad enough finding out you're dead without knowing there's some problem with where to put your soul.

I talked fast so I could get to Gabe before my head got its wish and exploded.

“Okay, here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna go in and talk to my guy, and you're gonna walk around inside. Check out some stores. Sit on a bench and do some people watching, but be careful when you do it. Benches and chairs are just like doors, and you can fall through if you aren't paying attention. Wait, no. What you want to do is this: deep sniffing at the Mrs. Fields — seriously. It's awesome. You won't mind not being able to eat human food once you fill yourself up with high-grade cookie vapors. But you gotta do me a favor. Don't talk to anyone, especially not anyone who's dead. And if this guy named Howard comes up to you wearing an ugly-apple plaid shirt
and asks you if you're into planets and/or cats, do NOT talk to him.”

“Why not?”

“He's a psycho, that's why.”

“How long are you going to be?” She bit the corner of her lower lip.

“Probably not too long,” I said, trying to keep it casual. “You got somewhere else to go?”

“Jerome,” she said, “I don't want to be alone.” Her eyes started to get shiny, so I looked at a really dented-up car and thought about how easy it would be to pound it out with a mallet.

“I have to do this thing and it won't take hardly any time, so go sniff some cookies, okay?” I had to be tough, even though part of me wanted to go straight to Mrs. Fields with her.

She wiped her eyes. I made a fist and chucked her under the chin to show some appreciation. Then she went “Ow!” because I think she maybe bit her tongue.

For a second I wanted to be one of those guys from France or wherever so I could've kissed her on her cheek instead of chin-chucking her, because it seemed more Rico Suave than “See ya later.” But only for a second.

She grabbed my sleeve.

“Jerome,” she said, and I knew I had about two seconds to get out of there before I changed my mind. I peeled her off me and punched my code into the security pad and went through the service entrance, past the janitorial and diaper supply closet, and into my lobby. I tried not to think
about her chin or her cheek or any part of her, even though I would've loved to have brought her along, on account of she would've understood what I'm really about better than I could've explained even if I used all the words I knew.

Your rehab lobby is your own personal space, meant to help you imagine Heaven and do what you need to do to get in. My lobby is twice the size of my old bedroom. It has a lot of vending machines lining the walls, along with vintage album covers and guitars from Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison's actual leather pants, which I got mostly because by the time he died he was too fat to keep wearing them. I don't know how this is supposed to help me get into Heaven, though. It's just stuff I love. Anyway, all of those guys made it in. If you do something with your whole heart, you are forgiven a whole lot of stuff that normal people go to Hell for. If I had known this, I would have definitely kept up with my plan to become the Frogger champion of the world.

Howard says his lobby and service entrance don't look like mine, but I stopped listening when he was going on about a microwave, twenty cases of pizza rolls, computer parts, and lots of little stuffed animals with their heads switched.

A holographic picture of Gabe's head and upper body lowered from the ceiling.

“JEROME!”

My head rang like a gong.

“Dude. I am right here. You don't need to use my skull phone.”

“THIS CONVERSATION IS BEING RECORDED TO ENSURE THE INTEGRITY OF OUR INTERACTION.”

You know it's worse when they start being all official.

“Okay, fine. I'm listening.” I put my hands in my pockets in case I got the shakes. In the background, the stuff Gabe calls music was playing. When he was alive, he was all into old-school rock, and he had his earthly record collection covered by the heavenly choir, Nun of the Above, which that jerk-off Howard does sound engineering for. I'd get a monster shock if I said what I thought of their version of “Runnin' with the Devil.” Howard has no respect for guitar tone, and when Eddie Van Halen finds out what he's done to that song, there's going to be hell to pay. Literally, I hope.

“YOU WERE MARKED AS ABSENT THIS MORNING. WHAT WAS SO IMPORTANT THAT YOU DID NOT PARTICIPATE IN GROUP THERAPY?” Gabe shifted his toothpick to the other corner of his mouth.

I took one hand out of my jacket pocket and smacked myself in the forehead, in the universal “Oh, I am such a dumbapple” gesture.

But I
am
a dumbapple to hit my forehead, on account of the arrow. It took a couple seconds to absorb the pain before I could talk again. On the bright side, it wasn't hard to make a sad face for real. Gabe's shoulders shook up and down a little bit and he might have been laughing at me, but it could have been my vision, which goes haywire when someone touches the arrow.

“Dude,” I said, when I could finally talk. “I'm sorry. I forgot.”

“YOU HAVE THIS APPOINTMENT EVERY DAY AT THE SAME TIME.”

“Dude,” I said. “I'm seventeen. Cut me some slack.”

“Please don't call me
dude.
It's disrespectful,” Gabe said in his normal voice. He crossed his arms across his sweater vest. “Also, you have been seventeen for sixteen years. It's getting old, son. It's not like you can stay in rehab forever. At some point, they're going to make me send you down. I'm afraid that point might be now.”

Then he went back to the voice that would be recorded. “YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR QUOTA OF ABSENCES FOR THE TERM. IF YOU MISS ANY MORE MEETINGS, YOUR ENROLLMENT IN OUR PROGRAM WILL BE TERMINATED. PLEASE PRESS ONE TO INDICATE YOU UNDERSTAND.”

I touched my chin. That's known as “pressing one” to these people. I had to breathe out through my nose real hard so I didn't get crazy mad.

“Jerome,” Gabe said.

“What?” If he didn't bring Heidi up, I wasn't going to.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything at all? About the soul you're guarding? If you don't want to make a disclosure here, you can always refer to your handbook for guidance.”

Grown-ups can be stupid, even the professional ones assigned to deal with kids like me. No, there was nothing else I
wanted
to tell him.
Yeah, Gabe, I want to tell you I
killed my human so that you can send me down to one of the levels for the rest of eternity.

Idiot!

“Gabe? There is something else.”

He put his hands together, all prayerlike, and he tilted his head a little bit to the side, like he was posing for his stained-glass portrait.

I made my most sincere face and said, “It's important.”

He smiled and his eyes got bright, like he was a kid who'd seen Santa.

“I really, really … like your vest.”

For a second I think he believed me, and then I saw the two halves of his mustache dive down like a pair of burrowing prairie dogs. I would never admit this without feeling a red-hot pitchfork in my sitting bits, but I actually felt kind of bad. I sometimes forget that the guy is proud of his vests, which he wears on weekends. If you spent your human life wearing a religious dress and sandals instead of actual clothes made for a dude, maybe having a vest would be sweet.

“Can I go now?” I said. “I have to look after Heidi. You know, protect her soul and all that.”

He opened his mouth like he was going to say something. The toothpick hung there. That was some sticky saliva. He pulled a watch out of his pocket and looked at it. Then he put it away, made prayer hands, nodded once, and said, “YOU MAY GO IN PEACE.”

I swear he does the loud voice to rattle my skull. He knows it hurts me worse than it does the other guys. No
way was I going to return the prayer nod after that. He could mark it in my permanent record if he wanted.

Gabe disappeared in his cloud of incense, which reeked. If he were a car, his engine would need a serious tune-up.

Much as I wanted to, I couldn't shove my ringing head in a bucket of cold holy water. I couldn't sneak Heidi in the back way on account of she couldn't see it, so I had to figure out what else I could do with her. For that, I needed that handbook. The next group session was in less than a day. If I hadn't figured something out by then, I was looking — at best — at spending my eternity on Level V, Sloth, where they hand wash dirty underwear for the entire population of Hell all day, every day. The soot stains are epical. That alone was serious motivation.