Nomad's Pub

Heaven is Just Another Hell

“I just need two dresses, Mommy,” she whispered: whispered into the noise, and it heard her and quieted into silence. “Just two dresses,” she spoke again, as the silence leaned in, listening to the small voice. “One for church and one for the funeral.”

It all stopped after that; the whole world. Nothing remains the same after death, but the whole world is relative, and the whole world was her world and her world was small. It changed forever and only a few people ever even knew. Oh, her dolls knew. Each night as she gently paraded them from the foot of the bed to her pillow, her voice running softly over each name in recognition of their being—yes they knew. Her voice trembling slightly by the end when she sat with her legs tucked beneath her, tenderly kissing each one as she lay it on her pillow, and her tears soaked into their stuffing or slid down their waxen faces; they knew. And if they could hear, they would have wept, too, for hearing her broken little prayers to Jesus each night.

“Dear Jesus, I thank you for Mommy and Daddy and Lizzy and Arry and for making us a family. I thank you for taking care of us. Please take care of Teddy, too, because I think you forgot about him before and I miss him a lot. I heard people say that you decided to ‘take him home,’ Jesus, but I know he died and that’s not nice and you wouldn’t do that ‘cause I know you don’t kill little boys you made or brothers you gave me when I asked. Thank you for loving us. A-men.”

And every night the same sentiment of missing Teddy, of loving Teddy, and carefully remembering her family for fear of God forgetting them, too.

And birds kept singing to wake her each new day, and the sun rose and fell and rose and fell like ever before, and while each day made that one day further away; she never forgot it. Never.

But God, Annie decided, eventually forgot her.

She didn’t remember much of the beginning; just this vague notion of excitement. Her dad radiated it, clapping his hands a lot once he had woken her up; rubbing them together over and over again and his eyes shining like they had little flashlights behind them not unlike the ones she had stashed away under her pillow to read with. The noises of that night; the babysitter guffawing on the phone with her friends, snorting now and then with laughter. Arry’s snores on the bunk beneath her, and Lizzy’s incessant pondering aloud. Would they be two boys or two girls? Or maybe one of each? Did she think they would look alike? Would they all like each other later on?

But Lizzy never asked the question tumbling about in Annie’s head, rolling in the fogginess of her mind at night, between the fuzzy dreams and the harshness of waking reality. Would God take these babies back, too? She tasted something funny on her tongue and coughed into the depths of her pillow before falling back asleep at last.

They had started working on the welcome home banner, she and her sisters. Arry, already a perfectionist, painstakingly coloured the “y” of Mommy in with her favourite shade, purple. Lizzy’s frown furrowed a line across her brow as she puzzled whether to just write “Mommy & Babies,” or to wait until their Dad called home with the good news at last. It should have been anytime, since the sun was so high and coming so long through the windows. She even had to squint to see the part of the banner where Annie was.

But Annie was just sitting there in the middle, peeling the paper off the crayons one by one by one, her tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth.

Then came the telephone call, and Sally, the babysitter with the really pink lipstick smiling at them so big she showed all her teeth—and Annie thought of a donkey braying whenever she laughed or smiled—and saying they had a little sister named Eloise Renata Beech and the other one was still on its way. Lizzy decided that they should put the babies’ names, because names were important and they all decided they weren’t sure if Eloise and Renata went together well, but too bad. Their new sister wouldn’t know, anyways, and they’d never tell…

But then the sun was setting and they didn’t know anything about the other baby, and Sally kept looking at the clock and muttering about getting ready for something—Lizzy thought it was a boy—and Annie snuck away to her dolls, climbing quietly up the ladder and staring sorrowfully at them at the foot of her bed. Settling herself on the covers, she slowly by slowly paraded them up the bed to her pillow, kissing each one on the way until finally they were all tucked in and she could pray.

“Dear Jesus, thank you for Mommy and Daddy and Lizzy and Arry and little Ellie. Please let the other baby be a boy, and please let Daddy come home soon or call and tell us. Please make my stomach ache go away, too. Thank you. A-men.”

And she sat there for a long time, ‘til the room grew dark again and she didn’t know it, and the sound of the front door opening came to her. And she could hear Lizzy and Arry squeal, and picture them throwing themselves on him and him tossing them up in the air asking “how are my boys doing,” to which they would reply, scolding, “Oh Daddy. We’re not boys. We’re GIRLS!”

But she heard them squeal and then that silence again. That silence which almost swallowed her before, so long ago. It was back and she knew why her stomach hurt. And she kissed her dolls and hid her tears with them before crawling back down the ladder and slipping softly each dreadful step down the hall.

“Daddy?” She quavered at the doorway.

Her sisters’ sniffles greeted her.

“Daddy, what happened?”

And her dad stared at her but he stared right through her and the lights in his eyes were gone and it was just shadows and darkness looking back at her, and she was drowning in the darkness.

“Daddy, tell me, please!” she wailed, frightened.

“Sweetie,” he croaked, “Your mommy went to stay with Teddy.”

Silence. That awful, dreadful silence.

“And baby?” Annie squeaked. “The other baby?”

“Peter Lance Beech,” he said; paused. “A boy.”

“Where is he, Daddy?” she asked, her stomach sinking deeper; her fists clenching; unclenching; clenching again.

“He went with your Mommy to meet Teddy.”

And that silence; it swelled up again with the darkness and the whole world disappeared. And once more, it was just her world and it couldn’t stay dark forever and she couldn’t stay quiet for always. The birds kept singing and the sun kept rising and falling and rising again. But that darkness stayed much longer this time around, leaving not just a shadow but a smudge or stain behind: a stain like in the story of the four winds where all the scrubbing with soap in the world couldn’t get it out.

She rarely talked about her past to her schoolmates, but loved to walk alone in the rain and let the tears of heaven run down her face where her own had long since run dry; her dolls now lying forlorn and forgotten at the foot of her bed. She loved that they had moved to a city, where the noise of the streets and the businesses and the neighbors helped to drown out the silence that even still threatened to overwhelm her at home.

Her dad, he just went to work, came home; went to work; came home, and when he came home he just sat in his room at the foot of his bed, back to the door staring at nothing at all. Lizzy—boy-crazy Lizzy—long since run off and eloped; Arry buried deep in books fit more for a collegiate than a high-school junior; little lonely Ellie staying as far away from their dad as possible, always a miserable little convict in his sight. He had never lifted her up in joy, or joked of her not being a boy. Sometimes Annie hated him; hated that he had stopped living somehow; hated that he dragged them all into his darkness, too. And did he, she wondered, ever speak to Ellie at all—dear little El-belle, who always knew exactly when Annie needed a hug, and who loved to cuddle up on her lap and painstakingly sound out “One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue fish” from Dr. Seuss?

Days came and went, came and went—snow to churlish slush; to hot swirling dust; to gold and red littered avenues—and the days came and went and came some more.

By the time it happened, Annie never prayed at all.

He dropped her off as usual, in silence—her dad, that is—but he had driven faster than usual: she only had applied eyeliner (black, of course) to one eye when he pulled up to the curb and she glanced out the window, startled. Maybe she should have felt particularly queasy that morning, as she had the day Teddy had died, or the day her mom and P-t—as he had come to be called, after the family fashion—had died, too. But then again, she had never really stopped feeling slightly ill since that last day, so long ago already.

How was she to notice anymore if her stomach’s churning changed slightly in intensity?

Classes ran the same as always. She filed her nails the whole way through pre-Calc; passed notes through Economics; flipped through an “illegal” magazine tucked neatly into the pages of a textbook all before finally zoning in during English to a discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and what were the consequences of sequestering Hester as they did.

And when classes had done and a friend dropped her off, she jammed on her headphones and sat down to the keyboard at the apartment window, playing until the door opened and Ellie walked in, still wearing her tutu from lessons and carrying her ever present mini-First-Aid kit as if to save the world either by enchantment or by band-aids. Annie smiled vaguely, still playing and letting the music wash over her and carry her far away; far away before the slamming of the door on the draft jarred her back to the crumbling present and she removed the earphones and stretched slowly, unwilling to break immediately with her rest.

Ellie moved silent as ever around the living space, circling the coffee table like a restless animal in a cage or a clown that forgot her act.

“Hungry?” Annie asked suddenly, breaking into the scene.

“Uh-huh—a bit,” Ellie admitted, pausing in her rotation and then tumbling onto the hard wood floor while tugging off her tutu and pirouetting simultaneously.

“Gimme a few minutes, then” Annie stated, already trudging into the kitchen.

She pushed about the pots and pans for a few minutes, reveling in their clashing, clanging sounds before finally turning to the freezer to dig out something edible and reasonably healthy.

It took several more bangs and clanging of the pots on the stove before she realised the doorbell was ringing.

“Ellie, can you get that?”

But no Ellie. Just that eternal, blasted silence and the pangs of her irritable stomach.

Sighing, she wiped her hands and walked over to peek out the spy-glass in the door. Grey; hats; uniforms. Stomach drop and gulp and her shaking hands reached to unlock and open the door.

“Good afternoon. Is this the residence of a Mr. Nathaniel P. Beech?”

The world started to grow dark again and spin a little. She caught sight of Ellie lurking somewhere, and wished her anywhere but there to hear the news; it couldn’t be good and she knew enough of darkness without this.

But too late.

She nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“Are you his…wife?”

She could feel his eyes probing her, and wondered who would ever marry a man like her father had become but didn’t comment, just shook her head no. Poor man, it’s not like he could tell, her left hand hiding behind the door on the knob, after all. Who knew who he had to deal with regularly?

But now he was dealing with her. She wondered why and the world grew darker still.

“Daughter,” she mumbled. “I’m his daughter, Anne.”

“Miss, there’s been an accident. It seems your, ah, father was driving too fast as he entered the highway and got hit by a trailer as he merged. I’m sorry, but—” he flailed a moment for words before continuing, and Annie subconsciously counted the random hairs sticking up from his balding head, then—“he died on impact.”

Somehow the door closed and the policemen left and Annie realised Ellie was crying wildly in her arms and she wasn’t sure whether she was crying or not but she thought not. And she heard Ellie choke out that now she’d never know if Dad even liked her at all, let alone get him to love her and then she was crying, too; really and truly and surely, and like a burst dam the tears would not abate, but flowed and flooded and she was gasping for breath.

And the shadows drew like a curtain over her, shadows of smiles long erased, of baby gurglings long squelched, of a child’s faith crushed. The shadows drew over her, with the silence broken only by the sobs. And the worst thing was—she knew he had chosen to do it; knew he’d been thinking about it all these years. And Ellie knew it, too.

And the world closed in and streamed around them and they thought they would drown but they didn’t. The world is too shallow to drown in even when life knocks you down.

So the days went on and the sun rose and fell and rose again, chasing time further and further away; and Annie kept going one bitter, bleak day after another.

Now Arry, barely present before, was off in the world, lost in her life of anthropology and dissertations. Ellie, preparing for college and settling somewhere between psychology and communications, was Annie’s only companion and still intent on saving the world—people need so much, she would exclaim as she busied herself in missiological activities. Annie herself was successful enough, a paralegal at a well-established firm; plus her paintings sold occasionally and her poetry more often yet—she wished—but her world was marked not by cocktail parties or church; tinkling laughter or hallowed prayer, but the silence she now knew best and had wrapped herself in like a shroud.

Fall had come, golden and red, and the anniversary of their father’s death just past (they didn’t count: they never counted; only remembered.), and the two sisters walked slowly through the graveyard on All Saints Eve, back in the old hometown. Four graves. They had to light candles on four graves, though neither knew why they did. What were they to remember?

“I never knew any of them except Dad,” Ellie commented dryly, glancing over her shoulder as they moved away, themselves buried in well-cut trench coats that barely skimmed the ground.
.
“I know.”

“Would I have liked them, do you think,” she asked, hugging herself against the chill; against the lonely ache.

“You’d have loved them, Ellie,” Annie spoke, more softly than she had for years. “And I think,” she continued, as the sisters linked arms, “they’d have loved you.”

That silence again, so familiar now. Liked by both the same way as the rain they welcomed as the heavens opened and poured down on them suddenly.

Both turned their faces up and raised their arms, the drops washing their faces, cleaning their hands. Then they turned as one to look back at the fizzling, dying flames on the graves.

“Do you think it matters, the candles going out so soon?” Ellie asked, glancing at Annie with that same furrowed brow that spoke so much of Lizzy, and tugging a strand of her hair.

“I don’t know, El,” she answered, shrugging slightly and tipping her mouth apologetically before continuing, “Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe that’s not so important, and all that matters is that we do—that we actually do light candles for them each year.”

They walked away slowly, looking back once in a while in turn; wondering, thinking, and remembering. Maybe wishing, for a different world to be born into? Maybe thankful, for being born to each other?

And that silence thickened between them, growing uncomfortable and twitching and writhing with all the unspoken of the years until at last Ellie could stand it no longer and stopped in the middle of the crumbling sidewalk, the little trails of water rushing past her feet and her hair dripping water for each drop falling and more and faced Annie, who stopped a few steps beyond.

“Annie, wait. Why do you do it? Why do you keep going day after day if you hate it like you’ve said and it’s so awful and never, ever gets better? Why don’t you just give up or go join them, like whichever Dad did? I mean, they went to heaven…right?” Her voice trailed off.

And Annie just stared at her, as if considering something for the first time, and something reminiscent to the little girl with her tongue stuck at the corner of her mouth peeked out of her, and perhaps a memory of her prayers from so long ago ran through her mind. And she turned a little, took a step forward, then jerked back almost impatiently and looked her sister—so much a younger picture of herself and, she thought, their mom—square in the eye.

“Because,” she began slowly; deliberately: “Heaven is just another hell, where everyone sings praises to a God who kills; and I don’t want to be any further or any closer to that God than I already am in this hell, this day after day of empty motions and heartbreaks. That’s why—the only reason why—I am walking away from their graves; why I walk there and walk away from their graves every single year, and why I’ll keep coming back and keep walking away every year from now.”

They stood there, those two sisters, staring at each other under the falling skies, unconscious of all else, not moving, as though petrified by the moment, the electric crackling around them and in them.

Then, finally, Ellie broke the still.

“You know, Nee-nee,” she said softly, using the name she’d given Annie so long ago when just learning to talk, “I don’t know much about heaven or hell or a God who kills. I don’t want to. But I think the God who gave me you, gave me a little bit of heaven. You’ve been my candle all my life, you know that? And,” she continued, stepping forward and linking her arm again through her stiff sister’s, “I’ll always be yours.”

And they walked slowly, frozen and melting all at once, back through the night.

posted by Lada @ 3:23 PM