Devine Intervention (8 page)

I
T WAS A
long walk around the mall to the main entrance, through an icy parking lot littered with cigarette butts and lined with struggling trees, but Heidi didn't mind. In truth, she felt most comfortable on the edges of things. She put a tentative hand on her hair, which went Medusa when it got wet. There was no telling the damage it could cause anyone who looked at it.

She made her way to the glass doors at the front entrance. Behind her, cars cruised the lot, looking for parking. The air smelled of food-court grease, tissue paper, and new shoes, three scents that always lifted her mood. Maybe Jerome was right. This was a good idea.

She stepped on the automatic door sensor and waited. Nothing happened. She stomped. Still nothing. She jumped. Then she remembered. These things would never work for her again. She'd have to walk through the glass.

She held her hands out in front of her and took a tentative step in case the glass affected her differently than the wooden door at home. Her hands slid right through. She felt molecules swirling around her wrists. She pulled them back. With her body stripped from her soul, nothing separated her from anything else. She was one with the universe, just like they talk about in those woo-woo shows on television at two
A.M
. She had no words to capture it. Bizarre. Mind-melting. Freaky. Was this what it felt like to belong in the world? She held her hands there, just enjoying the dance.

The glass doors
whuffed
open, and she felt sudden heat. Three boys had walked right through her, one of them wearing a puffy vest and baseball cap she'd recognize anywhere. Sully. If she'd followed him out of the assembly instead of doing the
Talentpalooza!!
tango, would she be here? Everything might have been different had she made that one choice, listened to Jerome. She wouldn't have frozen at the basketball game, might not have needed the walk, might not have fallen through the ice. She might still be alive.

The doors closed. She stole a peek at the back of Sully's jeans as he walked away and then, in her mind's eye, saw his freckle-spattered face, as though the artist who'd made him had finished the job with a good shaking of the brush. He'd walked right through her without noticing, which meant she could walk beside him without his knowledge. She could smell his shampoo, listen to the swishing music his vest made as his arms brushed the fabric. She ran through the door to catch up, wincing in
anticipation of pain she might feel passing through the glass. But it didn't hurt. She was part of the glass. It was part of her.

Then he turned and looked over his shoulder, directly through her, and laughed at something, and any courage she might have possessed evaporated. Death hadn't changed everything. He was still himself. She was still Heidi. And even though she was invisible, the thought that she wouldn't be welcome, wouldn't be what he'd want, made it impossible to keep going. And what was the point, anyway? There wasn't much of her left, not anything you could see or hold or feel.

She stopped and steadied herself. Sully and his friends flowed into the crowd. She watched them disappear, letting the voices of strangers wash over her, feeling them walk through her, seeing if she once again felt at one with the universe.

She didn't. She felt like nothing at all.

 

But at least Mrs. Fields smelled as good as Jerome promised. If she couldn't be one with the universe, merging with warm chocolate chip cookies was a good consolation prize. She leaned over the counter and felt the vapors twirl through her. Then she moved closer so she was standing in the counter, fanning the sweet, buttery warmth upward, feeling it fill her arms, her chest, her head. Eating chocolate chip cookies was good. But becoming one with them? That was something else, something infinitely better. Even after the clerk whisked away the tray and loaded the cookies into the display case, she felt
warm and silky sweet. She had to close her eyes to concentrate on it. How could Heaven even come close?

The experience left her giddy. She had to sit on a bench, taking care not to become one with its molecules and slip through to the tile floor. A group of senior citizens doing mallercise creaked by, giving her time to muster the courage to look for Sully and his friends. Eventually she found them at the food court. They sat at a metal table, facing a tray full of future heart attacks. Sully was working on a paper bowl of garlic fries, stuffing them in his mouth two and three at a time, wiping shiny fingertips on his pants every so often, the sort of thing that Heidi would call disgusting if Rory were doing it, something she wouldn't dream of doing herself.

Somehow, though, it was fine when Sully did. She wondered for a moment why she cut him all that slack, and none for herself, but she had no answer. Instead, she sat in the empty chair at his table and watched him eat, stunning herself by wishing she could be a fry, held between his fingertips, brought slowly to his mouth, as though all she needed to imagine contact with another body was to lose her own altogether.

He picked up his soda, and Heidi tried to hyperventilate out of habit. Ice cubes clicked against one another in his wax-coated cup. Beads of condensation twinkled and dripped over his fingers. He wrapped his lips around the straw and sucked until he'd drained the drink. Then he stood, wiping the salt and grease off his palms and onto his thighs. He went to the soda machine and helped himself to a refill. It was embarrassing how much she enjoyed
watching him without his knowledge. Had Jerome felt the same way about her?

On Sully's way back to the table, he slapped his hand against his hip pocket and pulled out a buzzing phone. He worked his thumb around the screen as he walked.

“Either of you guys know someone named Heidi?” he asked his friends.

She didn't dare move. Could he see her? Why was he asking about her? Did he … Could he possibly? … Maybe he liked her?

“Nope,” said the one in the blue flannel shirt. Heidi was fairly sure his name was Owen. He went to a school across town. She'd seen him at track meets. He was fast, even if he had an embarrassing tendency to make victory fingers as he crossed the finish line.

“Really tall girl? Reddish hair?” said the other boy, who was a couple of years younger. “Her brother's in my class. Why?”

“Tammy texted me. She fell through the ice at the pond this morning.”

“Tammy fell through the ice?” the other boy said.

“No, asshat. Heidi did.” Sully used his thumb and middle finger to flick his friend's forehead.

“Bummer,” Owen said. “Was she hot?”

“I don't know,” Sully said. “Can't remember her.”

“Not hot,” said the boy in Rory's class. Roger. His name was Roger. He had a blob of sour cream from his burrito on his lip. “Huge. Like a cross-dressing lumberjack.”

“Yeah, I figured I'd have remembered who she was if she was hot,” Sully said. He took the lid off his cup and
crunched a few ice cubes between his molars. “Wait. Was she the one in your talent show video?”

Heidi was drowning all over again. She reached for the edges of the table for support, but panicked and her hands flashed through. She felt weak and sick, as if someone had punched a hole in her soul. Even the food court lights seemed dimmer than they had been just a few moments before.

Sully cursed. Soda had splashed all over his lap, darkening his crotch. Ice clattered on the floor. He stood, wrapped in the laughter of his friends.

Then came the hand on her shoulder, warm and solid.

“Don't tell anyone I did that,” Jerome said. “It's against the rules.”

“The rules?”

“I can't knock shi — OW! — off tables.”

“You did that?”

Sully mopped his pants with a napkin.

“Guy's a jerk,” Jerome said. “He's Howard's soul, but Howard's in Victoria's Secret again. You'd think he'd have figured out the secret by now. There are no nipples on the womannequins.”

“How long were you standing there?” Heidi wiped her dripping nose.

“Long enough,” he said.

“Jerome?” Her voice was pebble-small and hard in her throat.

“What?” He grabbed her hand and pulled her to standing. She was glad to see he looked much better than before.
His arrow had stopped bleeding, and his face was a normal color again.

“I want to get out of here. I need some air.”

“You got it,” Jerome said.

They left Sully and his friends behind. Heidi only half noticed the bulky figure in a plaid shirt who materialized in the cafeteria just as they were leaving.

W
E WENT OUTSIDE
the mall and it was kind of darkish because the sun had gone down and most of the clouds had blown away and the sky was nothing but a cold mess of stars.

She was standing close enough to me that I could still smell the cookies on her. “Jerome,” she said. “How high have you gone?”

At first I thought she was asking me about drugs. I started to explain how there aren't any in Heaven, but that wasn't what she was talking about. She meant the flying kind. Pretty much everyone dead tries it out after they get over the shock of it all. Everyone but me. I never went much above the roof of a semi because I have this fear of heights that would give a lesser guy worse shrinkage than the cold.

But she didn't have that problem, and her feet were halfway to the second floor of the mall by the time I
noticed, so I sucked it up and hurried to catch her, because at this point the only thing worse than killing her would be losing what was left.

“What gives?” I said. My voice sounded like someone was throwing rocks at my neck. “There's this thing I have to find. We don't have time to be messing around up here.”

“What thing?” she said. “I thought I could maybe see the entrance to Heaven if I went to the sky.” She squinted.

“It's not there,” I said. I tried not to look down. “It's, uh, complicated.”

We were seriously far up. Cars looked like bugs, and every so often, the world flashed white when we went through one of the few cloud shreds still hanging around.

After a minute I said, “You know how the service entrance to Heaven was at the back of the mall?”

“I guess so. I never saw it.” Her voice sounded kind of crabby.

“I guess so, I never saw it,” I said back at her.

Then I saw the look on her face and remembered that this business wasn't all her fault. Or even mostly. I was supposed to be looking out for her.

“Look,” I said. “Heaven's sort of a trick. The front entrance is different for everyone.”

I reached my hand toward hers, and I guess she got the message because she reached the rest of the way and grabbed my fingers, and then I didn't feel so floaty up there, and I hoped she also knew I was saying sorry.

“I never actually saw it myself,” I said. “I just heard about it.”

“It seems kind of harsh to do it like that.”

“I don't think it's meant to be that way. What this angel guy, Xavier, said was that you couldn't get there if you didn't know where you were going. The back door was pretty much for us guys who had work to do on our souls. It was the service entrance, you know. The front was for people who'd figured it all out.”

“Like, people who were good all the time?”

She turned so she was facing me, and somehow our free hands ended up kind of holding each other, and we spun in a slow circle with the stars above and the world below. We were surrounded by blackness all shot up with starlight and it felt huge and cold and lonely except where our fingers touched. I hadn't touched a person like this for sixteen years. I hadn't touched a girl like this ever, unless you count that one time Darcy agreed to do the snowball with me at Skate King. I felt like I almost couldn't breathe for a minute, and I had to close my eyes until the feeling went away.

“I used to think that and it really got in my grille,” I said. “But Xavier said something like it was more about finding your purpose.” I had pretty much decided my purpose was to ignore Xavier, so I maybe wasn't getting all the details right, but I gave it my best shot with her. “I think it was going all out on something. It didn't really matter how good you got or how good you acted, as long as that something was what you gave the world. Basically, making your own heaven on earth while you were alive. That's the thing. Living the best life you can.”

She was quiet for a minute, right down to her fingertips. “Oh.”

“You figure it out?” I said. “Because we could try to find your entrance if you did.”

“No,” she said. “God, no. The opposite. I can't even see the back door. I have no shot of getting in. No shot.”

I couldn't look straight in her eyes without losing it.

“Nobody wants you in there more than me,” I said. “Nobody.” That was maybe the truest thing I ever said to her, or anyone.

She didn't say anything for a really long time.

“I never thought of drawing a city from above. I wish I had.” She looked down through our feet. “And it's really, really quiet.”

Also true. The sound of wind burned a little bit in my ears, but everything else I was used to — cars honking and people yelling and dogs barking — had stopped.

“I can see my house,” she said. She let go of my hands and pointed, and I pretended to look, but it would have made me mess my pants, so I just watched her face, appreciating the way her forehead squinched when she was trying to find landmarks below us. “I can see Megan's house. And school.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling all the warmth leave my fingers. “They are down there and we are up here. That is a fact.”

“It's my whole life,” she says. “It seems so small.”

“Well, duh,” I said. “It's far away. It's a lot bigger up close.”

“That's not what I meant,” she said. She looked up and to the left, like maybe something was written over my shoulder that would help her explain stuff, but when I turned to look, nothing was there. “I mean, everything
I did or cared about is the size of, I don't know, a piece of rice. It's like all those drawings I made.”

“No, this is a top view,” I said.

“That's not what I'm trying to say.” She covered her face with her hands and was still, and she started drifting away from me in this slow way.

“My life,” she said. “It was a small thing in the grand scheme. But it was everything to me. And I never did anything with it. I just sort of floated along, waiting to figure things out, and now it's over and I'm never going to have even that little chance again, that chance to know what I was meant to do and who I was meant to be. I did what people wanted me to do, what people told me to do — parents, teachers, friends,
you
— and now there's nothing left of it, nothing left of me.”

I didn't know what to say back to her. Sometimes, when people say things that are sad and true and unfixable, there isn't anything you can say.

But then I got a killer idea and I zoomed back toward her until we were almost touching again.

“There is something left. Want to go somewhere? Have an adventure? Do all the things you ever wanted?” If I went far enough and fast enough, maybe Xavier and Gabe wouldn't know where to find us. And maybe they wouldn't care. What did two lost souls matter, out of all the rest?

She punched my arm and we started spinning in a circle.

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said. “I'm only sixteen. My parents would —”

“They'd what?” I changed the way my body was in space so we'd stop spinning, and I looked her right in the eye. If this were a movie, this would be the part where the guy would kiss the girl. Heidi'd never been kissed before. And I knew she wanted to be. It was the one thing I could give her. And it wasn't Heaven by any stretch. But it would be something, if I weren't so chickenchevy.

“You're right,” she said. And then any chance of kissing passed. I could tell from her face that she was thinking again about what it meant to be dead, to not have a future. She wasn't thinking about kissing. And definitely not kissing me.

We started to sink back down to earth. I held her hands all the way.

“I know where I want to go,” she said. We were right under a streetlight, and her face was all kinds of shiny. “I want to see the Eiffel Tower. I don't care of it's pouring, even. I'll draw its reflection in a puddle and then we can go to Buckingham Palace and I'll draw that and —”

“Slight problem.”

“Don't you like Paris? We could see the museums and sniff croissants and sit by the river —” She touched my field jacket.

I held up my hand to stop her right there. Not the touching part. That, I did not mind. The Paris part. Somewhere not all that far from us, a train whistle blew.

“We can go anywhere I know how to get to. Someplace I've been before so I can imagine it. Like camping or Six Flags or something.”

I closed my eyes for a second and wished she'd choose
Six Flags because the popcorn there makes for great sniffing, and when I opened them, Howard was standing right behind her. He reached for her.

“Don't even think about it,” I said.

Before he could lay one of his grubby fingers on her, I grabbed her wrist and we shooped like nobody's business in the direction of the passing train. I probably should've warned her, because she looked like someone who'd just stepped off the Kingda Ka coaster, which has a really sick four-hundred-and-eighteen-foot drop.

“We're on a train,” she said, when the world stopped its sliding. “We're on a train.”

I looked around to make sure Howard hadn't followed us.

“Let's just find somewhere to sit, okay?” I didn't want to tell her that Howard had just tried to make a grab for her. Hopefully, he hadn't heard the train whistle and gotten the same idea I did.

We found an empty table in the dining car and sat across from each other. The train was moving at a good clip, all shimmying and rumbling, and the sound and movement started to take the edge off.

“You said, ‘Don't even think about it.' What am I not supposed to think about?”

“Watch,” I said. I slipped my hands through the salt and pepper shakers really fast. “Magic!”

That would've worked a lot better on the four-year-old Heidi. She put a hand on my wrist so I couldn't do any more tricks.

“Where are we going? What are we doing?” Her eyes had the saddest tilt to them, and it seemed like as good a time as any to explain about the soul rehab program and Gabe and Xavier. For the longest time after I finished, she was quiet, sitting there by the window while the world streaked right by her head.

“Am I going to Hell, then? Is that it?”

For the first time all day, I cracked up. But I stopped when I saw the look on her face. “You? What'd you ever do bad? Creator knows I've seen everything. No, you're not going to Hell. I did think you'd already be in Heaven by now. I must've screwed things up bad at the pond.”

Heidi leaned back against the bench just as we went through a bunch of trees that made the world look darker than ever. The only light that came through every once in a while shined from the porch lights people had left on at farmhouses. Otherwise, we were in the dark and I had no clue where we were even going.

“This is really happening, isn't it?” she said. “I keep thinking I am going to wake up and have it all be a dream, that tomorrow, I'll have another chance.”

Her voice went that bendy way it goes before you cry, and she stopped talking and bit her lower lip until it turned whitish. I hoped that'd keep her from springing an eye leak, but I came around to her side of the table anyway, in case she wanted to do it on my shoulder. I could always lift her head off of me in case she started leaking snot on the canvas.

The tracks sloped uphill and the train lurched. She
turned toward the window so our shoulders didn't even touch. There was a tunnel ahead, a hole cut into a mountain.

“What about you?” she said. “How long did it take you to get over being dead, and knowing you'd never get to do any of the stuff you wanted to do?”

“No point in talking about that.”

“Come on. What else are we going to talk about?”

“Truth?”

She nodded. The train whistle blew again, and the lights flickered as we hit the tunnel.

“Never thought about my future because I knew I didn't have one.”

Heidi stared at me like I'd just sprouted horns.

“I've never met anyone who didn't think about the future before.” Her face was a big question mark. Darcy Parker would've been proud. “It was pretty much a rule in my house. You saw how it was. Good grades. Impressive activities. Check and check. It was all so we could be successful. All I ever really wanted to do was draw, but you know what my parents thought of that. I don't even think they noticed when I stopped showing them my stuff. But even then, I still thought about the future as this thing, this thing with possibilities, this thing that would actually happen at some point.”

She got real quiet.

I poked her in the arm a little.

“Well, it wasn't like I wasn't thinking about anything. Just not the future. Best I could do was have a good time as long as the ride lasted.”

She put my hand back on the table. “Did you?”

“Actually, yeah. I just didn't realize it at the time. But what would plans for my future have done to make my life any better? What was the point? I saw what Pop's day was like and didn't want any part of it. He got up before sunrise. Went to work at the base. Busted his butt fixing planes. Came home. Drank beer, watched
America's Deadliest Animal Attacks
or whatever on TV, fell asleep in his La-Z-Boy. On weekends, he'd fix stuff that got broke around the house or work on his model train set, which we used to do together until that one time I spilled Coke on a switch tower and he yelled at me until his voice kicked out. I kept my distance after that, and so did he. It was like I broke the switch tower and he broke what was left of us. Every so often he'd ask me about homework or getting a job, but we both knew we were just going through the motions, and that there was nothing much ahead for me, less even than he had.”

She sat there watching me and we finally blasted out of the tunnel. My nose started to sting a little bit, but I just rubbed it and kept on going. I was glad she didn't ask me any more about Howard or rehab or Pop. I didn't have any answers about why she couldn't Commune with the living, or why she hadn't flown up yet. I wished I knew where to look for the handbook.