All We Know of Heaven, Page 2

  They could see other things, too.

  “Is there blood on the trunk of the tree?” Leland Holtzer asked. She was glad that she and Caitlin Smith were there. No one else could say that they actually had been there before Maureen was even taken away. The cell phone tree—and Cody Halavay’s police band radio—had alerted everyone, news racing through the air like blood through an artery. She asked again, “Is there blood on that tree?”

  “It could be just sap or something,” said Eric Kroger, the guy Leland was sort of with, though so far all they’d done was have one heavy makeout session in Britney Broussard’s rec room. She wondered if they would be going out now because this was one of those things that, if you went through it with another person, bonded you forever.

  A thing that changed you forever. And she was only sixteen. Leland shivered with horror and excitement.

  Forever, Leland thought.

  The snow kept falling as the police worked for hours past sundown. It fell so hard that Bob Haackstad, who was mighty religious, said it was like a vengeance. But the chief, Henry Colette, spoke up and asked Bob: A vengeance for what? No one did wrong here. Just two kids and a poor, tired, long-haul driver trying to get home for Christmas.

  The skid marks told it all.

  The little white Toyota had crossed the line.

  The poor truck driver was not hurt, but no one could say he hadn’t suffered.

  He was there, working right alongside them, his cigar shredded by the snow, his stubbled chin trembling. He tried to collect the debris from his rig—the headlights and the big, ornate hood ornament.

  The driver scared them at first, to be honest.

  The minute they showed up, when the gasoline was still pouring and the motors were whining and smoking, he came running up out of the ditch in the woods carrying Bridget in his arms, blood all over him. The paramedics wanted to kill him on the spot for moving her.

  Not until later did they find out that at least some the blood was from his mouth, which he’d knocked on the steering wheel jumping down from his cab. He ran down into the ditch in the woods after Bridget. She had been thrown that far from the vehicle, thirty feet or better.

  He shouldn’t have moved her.

  But after they got her on the board and assessed her, all of them were thinking the same thing, though no one was saying it, that it probably wouldn’t matter. Except for the bruises and the smears of dirty snow, the skin on Bridget’s legs was as white as her sweater was red, her lips the color of a storm cloud—dark blue. You couldn’t tell if she was blond or brunette, or a white or a black girl, or even a girl. Everything was pushed out of shape. Hat Carney, the veteran medic on call that afternoon, thought of a broken egg, or a watermelon thrown against a tree. There were no words for how awful it was. But they got a tube down her windpipe and got it working right away anyhow. They couldn’t bear not to. They started a line running Ringer’s and administered epi while they screamed through the small towns and onto the highway—talking to the docs at Anne Morrow Lindbergh Children’s Hospital and Clinics in Minneapolis all the way.

  About five minutes away, they got a thready pulse. The ambulance driver kicked the pedal and two-wheeled it into the bay.

  Back at the scene, Maureen was a sodden, broken thing being extracted by the Jaws of Life.

  The trucker watched. He asked if he was being charged with a crime.

  “Of course not,” said Henry Colette. The trucker then shocked Henry by grabbing his arms and leaning on him like he was his long-lost brother.

  He babbled out, “They crossed right in front of me, on my mother’s grave if I’m lying! They didn’t see me none! I wouldn’t ever hurt anyone. I wasn’t going but forty! All I had to get to was the Days Inn up there a mile! The snow ’n’ all! One more mile!”

  To Patrolman Denny Folly, only a few years older than the girls and about to puke, the trucker said, “I saw the blond one’s little face!”

  “They were both blond,” said Henry Colette.

  Denny Folly pointed to the tree. “That has to be hair and skin,” he said. The kid was gray. Who would clean that up, Colette thought? Not the coroner. He couldn’t just leave it there. Colette grabbed an evidence bag out of his inside pocket and packed the matter from the tree into a zipped bag with a little snow. He handed it to Denny Folly, who did disappear for a moment then into the trees.

  If Colette had a best friend apart from his wife, Margo, it was certainly Bill O’Malley. They had wrestled together at Bigelow and UM, roomed together all four years, stood up in each other’s weddings. They didn’t see each other as much now, but their four-day catfishing trip to Kentucky each spring was a sacred tradition; and Henry Colette stood godfather to one of Bill’s twin boys, the one called William Henry, who went by Colette’s own first name. Henry and Jack O’Malley were sophomores at Gustavus Adophus now, which must cost Bill a pretty penny, although Henry expected the twins had good scholarships. When the children were younger, they all went to the Boundary Waters together for a few summers. Henry Colette thought of Maury’s sweet soprano last Christmas in the pageant given by the kids making their confirmation at Holy Mother of Sorrows. She sang one of four solos: “Some children see Him dark as they….”

  Now Colette’s own voice sounded like a shovel driven through a crust of icy mud. He barked instructions to the officers: Pick that up; call this service or that. They watched as he looked over the trucker for signs that he was drunk or drugged up. The truck driver was no local: He drove for Memphis Mercury Cartage, a long way from home. He smelled of nothing but vinegar chips and blood. On some impulse, Colette took out his cell phone and called his Margo to ask if the man could stay over with them until inquiries were made, have a hot shower and a sleep in the guest room. He couldn’t bear the thought of the guy alone with his thoughts in some cheesy motel—Colette happened to know that the Days Inn was filled with Christmas travelers and there were rooms only at the Wood Haven, a low-rent, rendezvous sort of joint. He even asked Margo if she would make some doughnuts and hot coffee. Margo already had the fryer out for making the cinnamon doughnut holes the grandkids loved for late breakfast on Christmas morning.

  Colette told Denny Folly to drive the trucker, whose name was Lawrence Cooper, to his house, though he had no idea why he didn’t simply go himself. There was no point standing out in this weather after the Jaws were used to pry Maureen free from the driver’s side.

  From what Colette could see, this was going to be as bad as that night, twenty years ago, when he worked as a Berry County deputy under old Sheriff Corcoran. It was a night as tender and warm as this one was bitter. The driver of the car carrying the Cleary girls (both of them, Diane and Deborah) and their dates, who were coming home from the Teke formal at Bright Wing Country Club, hit the Fortenses’ oldest boy in his new, big, black pickup. A Dodge, if Henry Colette remembered. Not one of those kids lived. Diane was three months pregnant—secretly engaged, the way kids were twenty years ago even when they were just seniors in high school, planning to get married in a month. The top of Deborah Cleary’s head…

  Henry Colette, thirty years on the job, ten as chief, thought that maybe he was getting too old to do this anymore. Getting old.

  Or maybe no one was young enough for this kind of sight.

  Six officers tried to shield Maureen from the eyes of all those kids—fifty or more of them by then—while the medics moved her. Her face so swollen it looked like a Halloween mask, blood black as syrup all over her, her arms limp as if connected with string. Somehow she was still talking when the medics reached her, answering their questions about where she had been—cheerleading practice for the holiday competition. Then suddenly she went quiet. The medics ramped up to crazy then.

  The second ambulance went screaming past the line of kids standing there shivering—their big eyes wide as deer eyes—the girls crying openly, the boys rubbing their faces on the sleeves of their Carhartts.

  Colette stood, the snow frosting his beard,
and watched as a big pushing vehicle from the Cities came to move the vehicles off the road. They would wait for the snow to let up to load the wrecked truck and car and haul them away.

  The kids should go, Henry thought. “Go on now. It’s bad out,” Colette called softly to them. “There’s nothing to see here.”

  But the kids stayed.

  Finally, Colette shrugged and jammed his hat on his head and got into his car. He passed the single squad with two deputies hunkered down half a mile away at the roadblock. They would be there until morning, keeping any traffic off G at this stretch. “Merry Christmas now if I don’t see you,” he told Mary Folly (Denny’s older sister and, to be honest, a better cop than Denny) and her partner, Kemper, a veteran who managed to make waiting to collect his pension look like hard duty. Kemper needed to go on a diet, and after the first of the year Collette would get Kemper running off some of that gut at the Y.

  Colette sighed, u-ey’ed his squad car and headed for home. He wouldn’t stay longer than it took to explain all of this in detail to Margo; then he would head for the hospital. His place was with Bill and Jeannie now. God, he dreaded it. If he got home that night at all he’d be lucky. Or unlucky, depending on how it went.

  It was possible, just possible, that Maureen would make it. He had heard her speak.

  Or maybe it was only because it was Christmas and he couldn’t bear to believe anything else.

  She was thirsty. Her lips were sore and swollen. She could hear them scratching against each other, taste the blood. Somehow her mouth moved without her telling it to.

  She picked away at the word for…that shiny thing. The thing on the flat beside her. What was it called?

  Flash.

  Flashy.

  Watts.

  What.

  Gulls.

  Grease.

  Gus.

  GUH-LUS.

  And then she had to remember how you used a thing that was called, for no reason, a GUH-LUS and shaped like a permanent bubble.

  What was it for?

  To put over things. You would put it over things. A little thing that ran. Quicky. Flicky. With long…wavy things…long legs…no, no long hairs…no whiskers! Over a mouse! You would put it over a mouse.

  No.

  You would look through things it at…things covered with leather, beautiful red leather. Fleather. Flowing things, flowing past the window of her bedroom. Flowing into the trees.

  Boards.

  Bees.

  Birds.

  They lived in bird huts.

  Birdhuts.

  Danny made them little birdhuts. In his ship, shop, his shipshape shop, at his own hut.

  He learned how in ship class.

  There.

  No!

  It was for water! A glass was for water. For drinking water. And she was thirsty. It went together.

  As soon as she’d finished with one thought she had to figure out another thought. The whole decoding thing began all over again! Every thought—every little thought—was like making a building with LEGOs, matching red to red and yellow to yellow and green to green, long to long and short to short. She wanted to scream, but it wasn’t an option. Her mouth wouldn’t let her scream. She felt as if her lips were sealed in plastic wrap.

  She heard someone soaking…spiking—SPEAKING clearly. “You didn’t see her then. Mary Helen! She was forty pounds heavier with the fluids! Like a bag of water! Since two days before Christmas Eve. No, it’s GOOD how she looks now! It’s GOOD, Mary Helen!”

  Wibbledibblewibblewhisperwhisper.

  “Not just her spleen. Her skull had hairline fractures. It’s amazing that they weren’t worse fractures. People who get thrown from a car, it’s the worst thing! They usually just die. She looks good. Yes, this is what they call GOOD.”

  Shushwshiperwhisperwhisper.

  “I know you wouldn’t believe it was her. WE couldn’t recognize her.”

  Those Mary Helen sentences were the first sentences that she heard all in one piece.

  The rest was cheesy music in this weird heaven that went up and down and around like a Ferris wheel, broken up by different voices saying, “…so young…” “…just asleep…” “…when she was little, do you remember the two of them with sand cupcakes?” and “…never one of them without the other…” “…at least she’s at peace.”

  Last winter?

  When was winter?

  What was winter?

  Go.

  Fight.

  Winter!

  Winner.

  Who was she?

  She was she, was she, herself. Was she Mary Helen? Mary in hell? No. She was someone else. Who was the someone she was?

  She was lying on a bed. Her feet were bare, a lumpy pillow under her neck. Maybe she was at her own funeral.

  Her own funeral. That was where she was.

  This was an excessively creepy thought, that her eyes might be not-just-shut-but-glued-shut and stuffed with gauze to look still-alive and natural (her great-uncle was a priest and went into way too much detail about these things). But if she were dead she should be an angel able to…flow?…around above everyone else in the room, to see if aunts and uncles and brothers and…other people were there crying over her.

  One of the only benefits of being dead was finding out for sure who were really your…other people…and were staying for the whole thing, including the rosary, not just showing up to sob a little and then be carried out of the room by her boyfriend as she stumbled and cried out your name. If it was Leland Holtzer, she would stop crying right away in the parking lot and say, “Can you believe they didn’t close the coffin?”

  Maybe it was dark because they had closed the coffin.

  But what would that matter to an angel? And the truth was, maybe they didn’t need to close the coffin. Actually, she didn’t even know how she had died. Maybe she looked great. If she had to be dead, she hoped she looked great. Maybe she broke her neck cheering. It happened. She tried so hard to listen for funeral music, she exhausted herself and fell asleep.

  the cross

  The kids crept out onto the road after the chief left. No one spoke.

  Tall, slender, elegant Leland spotted a tennis shoe strung with miniature gold-and-black pom-poms and dropped to her knees in the road. She thought if she hadn’t been wearing jeans, she would have scraped her legs, she fell that hard. She wondered if anyone else noticed how hard she fell. If the road hadn’t been blocked at both ends, she’d have been a target for oncoming traffic. She was glad she didn’t care about that. It would have been too, too selfish.

  “I’m going to put up a cross right here,” she said.

  “Lee-Lee, they aren’t even dead!” Eric whispered, loud and shocked.

  “No one could survive that!” Leland shrieked, pointing to Maureen’s Toyota, which looked as if it had been wrung out like a wet towel. The hood was smashed sideways, the wheels up off the ground. Leland knelt down again and picked up the shoe. She thought maybe she would keep it, like, for years and show her daughters someday.

  Then she thought she really better put it up with the cross.

  She stared at the tennis shoe, still as polished and pristine as Coach Eddington—Eddy—insisted their tennies be. Every inch of their uniforms had to be like an ad for detergent. You are a representative of Bigelow right down to the tips of your toes, she said more times than Lee-Lee or the others could count. You’re all Eddy’s Angels, better than Charlie’s.

  They rolled their eyes when she said it, but it was true.

  Unlike other schools that had dance teams of twenty girls in kick lines, Bigelow was so small they had only the cheerleaders. The girls saw the way people gawked at the pompom girls from other schools who came for away games. They acted like they were the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

  But Coach Eddington had been part of a national prizewinning team at Oklahoma State. So Eddy’s Angels won prizes. Bigelow was first or second in state every year. And so Leland and Sabrina Ho
ltzer, sisters Caitlin and Quinn Smith, Britney Broussard and Brittany Wolner and Brittany Scott, Molly Schottman, Taylor Cuddahy, and, of course, Bridget and Maureen never understood why no one respected them.

  Why?

  They worked hard. They were so much stronger even than the jock girls, never mind the wasties who stayed thin by gobbling handfuls of Dexi-Slim. And even though cheerleading was fairly yesterday in high school, it was coming on in college and on the tube. Didn’t anyone know that? But after this, even the big, ugly, fifth-year seniors who liked to get drunk and boo them from the stands would have to be respectful, Leland thought, and she immediately felt guilty. Maybe people would see them as sort of heroes now. This tragedy might make all that went with being one of them halfway worth it.

  “Lee-Lee, should we try to get the coat down?” Caitlin Smith asked.

  It was Brandon Hillier who climbed the tree—that tree, with the stuff on the trunk—to shake the jacket loose. No one could tell if it was Bridget’s or Maureen’s because they both wore an XS. The pockets were empty except for a stick of Juicy Fruit. Leland searched for a laundry mark, or anything. But there was nothing. Just a white wool jacket with black sleeves and gold lettering. Caitlin held it close, after first checking for blood.

  Caitlin Smith wondered how Danny would go on living. Bridget and Danny had been together since seventh grade. Bridget was like his world. And Maureen was like Bridget’s sister, so they were almost like three people in a family—if you didn’t count your real family, and nobody did. Caitlin knew she would never see her own sister, Quinn, if Quinn wasn’t a cheerleader, too, because Quinn was so annoying with her French camp and her guitar, like some weird hippie. Caitlin could not believe it when Sabrina texted them from the hospital: M IS DOA. It was impossible. They were totally messed up, but doctors could put you back together now. They had machines that worked for your heart if they had to fix your heart, even.