Page 19 of The Next Person You Meet in Heaven
With that, he pulled Annie down a hospital corridor. The ceiling rose and the windows stretched like cellophane.
“The technique my doctors used became a new standard,” the boy said. “Thanks to my ignorant chasing of a train, many future patients were healed.”
Annie noticed his improved vocabulary. She looked at the narrow bridge of his nose and the thick bangs that fell loose and unkempt.
Why do you sound so... ?
“What?”
Grown-up?
The boy smiled.
“You got me.”
Suddenly, the corridor rumbled and the two of them flipped and bounced as if shaken through a tube. The boy in the striped shirt was changing. When they dropped back down, he had morphed into a middle-aged man, his dark hair slicked back, his shoulders broad, his midsection large enough to push out a white medical coat.
What just happened?
“Remember that Bible verse? When I was a child, I spoke as a child, but now that I’m a man, la-da-da...”
You’re a doctor?
“Well, I was. Heart attack. High blood pressure. Never think doctors take care of themselves better than patients.”
He tugged on his coat and pointed to a name tag. “As I said, ‘Sameer.’ Or, if you prefer, Dr. Sameer. Titles seem kind of silly up here.
“By the way, sorry I called you stupid earlier. I picked my kid self to greet you. And I was a fairly obnoxious kid.”
Annie felt dazed. She could barely keep up. She realized this was a different hospital now; the corridors were brighter. There was newer artwork on the walls.
Where are we?
“You don’t remember?”
How could I remember? Isn’t this your memory?
“Memories intersect.”
They glided down a hallway and entered a private room. Sameer approached the patient in bed, a little girl with butterscotch curls whose left arm was bandaged from her elbow to her fingers.
“How are we doing, Annie?” he asked.
As the girl’s mouth moved, Annie felt herself answer, “I’m scared.”
Annie Makes a Mistake
She is eight years old and on the train to Ruby Pier. She wears cutoff shorts and a lime green T-shirt with a cartoon duck on the front. Her mother sits next to her, beside her latest boyfriend, Bob.
Bob has a thick mustache that covers his upper lip. Tony, the boyfriend before Bob, always wore sunglasses. Dwayne, the one before Tony, had a tattoo on his wrist. None of the boyfriends really speak to Annie. Only if she asks them something.
On the train, Bob takes her mother’s hand and plays with it, but she pushes him off, nodding towards her daughter. Annie wonders if this means her mother doesn’t like Bob.
They walk through the entrance of Ruby Pier, beneath spires and minarets and a giant arch. Annie gazes at the image of a woman in a high-collared dress holding a parasol—Ruby herself—welcoming guests to her park. After her father left, Annie and her mother came here often, just the two of them. They rode carousel horses and drank slushies and ate corn dogs. It was fun. But lately, boyfriends have been coming, too. Annie wishes it could go back to the way it was.
Her mother buys twenty tickets and warns Annie to stay away from grown-up rides like the roller coasters or Freddy’s Free Fall. Annie nods. She knows the routine. She knows the snack bar. She knows the bumper cars. She knows her mother will go away with Bob and only come back at four o’clock, asking, “Did you have fun, Annie?” But she won’t really care if Annie had fun.
By midafternoon the sun is hot, and Annie sits under a table umbrella. She is bored. The old man who fixes the rides walks past, the one with the patch on his uniform that saysEDDIEandMAINTENANCE. He sits down across the way, looking around as if studying the rides.
