Page 50 of The Next Person You Meet in Heaven
She looked away.
“You can tell me,” he said.
“A balloon. It caught fire. My husband and I were in it.”
“And?”
“He was hurt. Really badly. He couldn’t breathe.”
“What about you?”
“They took one of my lungs. To save him. During the transplant, I must have...”
The old man raised an eyebrow.
“Died?”
Annie still winced at the word. “Yes. And I don’t know what happened to my husband. All I remember is the operating room, a doctor touching my shoulders, saying, ‘See you in a little bit.’ Like I’d wake up in a few hours. But I never did.”
“Lemme guess,” the old man said, rubbing his chin.“You been asking everyone in heaven, ‘Did my husband live? Did I save him?’”
“How did you know?”
“Because when I first got here, I met five people, too. And with every one of them, before I was through, I asked the same question, ’cause I couldn’t remember my last seconds on earth. ‘What happened? Did I save the little girl? Was my life a big waste?’”
“Wait,” Annie said. “The little girl?”
The old man set his gaze and Annie felt powerless to turn away. She locked on a cloth patch near his heart, stitched with the same two words from the beach marker.
“‘Eddie... Maintenance,’” she said.
“Little girl,” he answered back.
He held out his beefy fingers, and Annie’s lifted to meet them involuntarily. When they made contact, she felt safer than she’d ever felt before, like a baby bird crawling beneath the shelter of a mighty wing.
“It’s all right, kiddo,” the old man whispered. “It’s all gonna clear up now.”
***
When people suffer a near-death experience, they often say, “My whole life flashed before my eyes.” Scientistshave even studied this phenomenon, aware that certain brain cortices can suffer hypoxia and blood loss, which, during a great trauma, might trigger a release of memories.
But science only knows what it knows. And because it lacks an understanding of the next world, it cannot explain that the flash before your eyes is actually a peek behind the curtain of heaven, where your life and the lives of all you’ve touched are on the same plane, so that seeing one memory is the same as seeing them all.
On the day of Annie’s accident, at the moment of her greatest danger, Eddie, the maintenance man at Ruby Pier, made a split-second decision: to dive across the platform of Freddy’s Free Fall and shove Annie away from a falling cart. What flashed before his eyes, just before his death, was every interaction he’d had on earth.
Now, here in heaven, with her fingers pressed against his, Annie saw them, too.
***
She saw an infant Eddie born into poverty in the early 1920s. She saw a sparkle in his mother’s eyes, and frequent beatings from his drunken father.
She saw a school-aged Eddie playing catch with thesideshow workers at Ruby Pier. She saw a teenaged Eddie fixing rides beside his old man. She saw Eddie bored and dreaming of a different life. She saw his father say, “Whatsa matter? Ain’t this good enough for ya?”
She saw the night Eddie met his one true love—a girl in a yellow dress whose name was Marguerite—and how they danced to a big band at the Stardust Band Shell. She saw their romance interrupted by war, and Eddie sent to combat in the Philippines.
She saw his platoon captured and tortured in a prison camp. She saw a daring revolt, and the killing of their tormentors. She saw Eddie burning down the huts where they’d been imprisoned. She saw him shot in the leg during their escape. She saw his return to peacetime hobbled by wounds and dark memories.
She saw Eddie and Marguerite married and settled, deeply in love, but childless. And, upon his father’s death, she saw Eddie forced to take over the maintenance job at Ruby Pier. She saw him sitting down in his life, depressed that after years of trying to break away, he was no different than his old man, “a nobody who never done nothing,” he would say.
