Hell

by Tom Lewis

  Amy always went out of her way to find something sweet and meaningful to send Sean for his birthdays. This past year it had been a small gift box of dirt from home plate of the field where he had played baseball. Another year it had been a shell she had found while wandering the shore where he had told her about his vocation.

  She knew he was an associate pastor at a small parish in Maine, where he was also teaching religious education and would be coaching the baseball team in the spring. They had exchanged teaching tips with each other, and his latest one made her laugh — “Never let them see you sweat.”

  She had just spent the weekend in Kenneth Point, and was back in New York teaching her creative writing class, when she collapsed at the front of the classroom.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Childhood's End

  “For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

  And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;”

  — Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe

  ****

  Sean was out jogging laps on the track that ran around the school’s football field when the parish secretary came running out to find him.

  “Your mom called, Sean,” she said, huffing for breath. “She said it’s important that you call her back right away.”

  Sean sprinted back to the rectory with the secretary and went upstairs to his room where he called his mom.

  It was about Amy. She had suffered a ruptured aneurysm in her brain and was in critical condition. His mom was driving down to the New York hospital with Amy’s family. She gave Sean the address of the hospital, and he booked a flight there as soon as he got off the phone.

  Sean arrived at the hospital five hours later. His mom and Amy’s parents were already there, and they exchanged warm but worried hugs. Amy had already been in surgery for six hours, and the staff had few updates at that point — only that there had been a massive amount of bleeding, and she had already suffered a second stroke.

  Sean sank down in the waiting room chair. This was real. This was really happening... On the flight over, he had been sure he would arrive there and find her sitting up in bed and complaining about the hospital food and why everyone was making such a fuss.

  But no — this was bad. This was bad on a scale like Conor. Sean just sat there with his mouth open and stared blankly at the wall across the room. There were no words. None. His mind was completely and terrifyingly numb.

  It took an hour before Sean could even lead the others in prayer. They had gone into the chapel, but the words came heavy and forced.

  A second stroke...

  Sean felt no hope. There were none of God’s love letters (hadn’t Amy told him how beautiful that term sounded?) or sweet consolations that had carried him before.

  God felt absent.

  Amy was pronounced dead at 3:08 in the morning. Sean, his mom, and Amy’s parents were still in the hospital chapel when the doctor delivered the news. It gripped Sean in another paralyzing numbness.

  Amy was dead.

  Those words. Had he really heard them? His mind was reeling.

  The Amy of picnics and strolls on the sand, of long bike rides, tailgate parties, and road trips. The moist smell of her hair in the rain, and the sweet fragrance of her perfume.

  Gone...

  That day after practice, when she had first met him on the football field. How she had been so shy, and awkward, and endearing...

  The way she blushed...

  His best friend and partner in crime.

  To the boy who always makes me smile, she had written to him on that napkin at the cafe. I love you.

  “I love you too, Amy,” he whispered to her memory through a grief too bitter for words.

  Amy was dead.

  And Sean’s childhood died with her.

  ****

  Amy’s body was returned to Kenneth Point, where she would be laid to rest near the parks where she once played.

  Her parents asked Sean if he would perform the Mass and burial, and he couldn’t imagine a greater honor. He called Father Jenkins back at his parish in Maine and told him he would need several days off. His friend had passed away, and he needed to spend some time with her family, and his. Jenkins expressed his sincerest condolences and told Sean to take as much time as he needed. He also informed Sean that one of his students, Cassie Stevens, had been in a deadly automobile accident but was expected to recover.

  Where was God in that? Sean thought to himself after their call. Amy died and Cassie lived. He had to agree with Mrs. Campos — there was something seriously disturbing about that girl. But he couldn’t think about that now. He had his best friend’s funeral to prepare for.

  Sean spent an entire day writing and rewriting her eulogy. How do you sum up the importance of someone in mere words? Amy could have done it — she was great with words — but Sean was horrible at it. He finally decided to do it as a letter addressed to her.

  “Dear Amy,” he began his delivery the next day before the packed church. “My love, my dove, my beautiful one. You were a daughter, a teacher, and a friend to many. But to me you were my best friend, my love, my confidant, my companion, my partner. You were my light in the darkest times. You were quick to laugh, quick to forgive... quick to blush,” he smiled at that one and was glad to see others in attendance also smile. Especially Amy’s mom.

  “You made life beautiful, and wonderful, and meaningful. You gave me the best years of my life, and I know that Heaven’s a better place now because you’re in it. So until we meet again, just know that I always have, and always will, love you. Sean.”

  And for the first time since he could remember, he wept.

  Amy was laid to rest in the Whispering Pines Cemetery, not far from the shore where she and Sean had their first date, and it was consoling to see so many of their old high school friends in attendance.

  Sean stuck around Capetown for another day after the funeral, just to spend some time with his family and Amy’s. After that, it was back to Capetown and this life he had made for himself.

  But something vital in him had died with Amy’s passing. Something that gave life its zest and flavor. And by the time he had attended Katie Dunne’s funeral three days later, God also felt gone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Warning

  “Then the Devil approached Him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread...’”

  It was Sean’s first day back in the classroom after returning from Amy’s funeral, and his students sensed a change in him. They had always related to him because he seemed like a big kid at heart. He wasn’t uptight like that older priest, or any of the lay teachers. He joked around in class, answered questions they had about life as a teen, and even played sports with them. But the Sean who returned that day felt distant and somber.

  There were rumors floating around that he had gone home to attend the funeral of an ex-girlfriend, and aside from the gossip that triggered, some part of him had been left behind; and it was the part that gave him life, and purpose, and made his lectures fun.

  And Sean wouldn’t have disagreed with this. He knew he was just going through the motions that day. Ever since Amy’s funeral, he’d been haunted by a torrent of what-ifs that called into question every major decision he had ever made.

  What if he and Conor hadn’t joined the Marines? Then his brother would still be alive.

  What if he had gone to college, and played sports on his scholarship?

  What if he hadn’t become a priest?

  And the biggest what-if of all — the one that curled his stomach into an agonized knot: What if he’d married Amy?

  Would she still have died? Or could they have caught her aneurysm in time to treat it?

  Could they have had their “happily ever after” together?

  “Father?” One of the students spoke.

  Sean snapped back, on
ly then realizing he had chased those what-ifs down an endless rabbit hole. It was painful to return.

  “Sorry,” Sean said. “Where were we?”

  “Jesus said in reply,” answered a student.

  Sean nodded. “Jesus said in reply, ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” He set his Bible aside and looked up at the class. “Who wants to tell us what’s going on here?”

  Becca was a pretty teen who sat in the front row, and out of all of his students, she was usually the one most engaged in the class. She had just written some notes and quickly shot up her hand.

  “Becca,” he called to her.

  “It shows that even Jesus was tempted by the Devil, but He was able to resist.”

  As he listened, something unsettling stirred within him. It was deep, and subtle, and something he couldn’t recall feeling before.

  It was a resistance.

  He shook it off.

  “I guess that’s one way you could look at it,” Sean said, “but if you take it so literally, you miss the bigger message the author was trying to convey.”

  Becca looked confused, and as Sean scanned the rest of the faces, most of them also looked confused.

  “I should probably explain what I mean by ‘bigger message,’” Sean said, and this was met by nods. “Okay, here’s an example. In this passage, I think the lesson the author wants us to take away is self-restraint. Here we have Jesus, who’s been fasting for forty days, so he has to be starved. And this guy offers him food, but Jesus resists. You see, that’s a lesson all of us can apply in our daily lives.”

  A few students got it, but most of them still looked confused. Becca raised her hand again.

  “Becca.”

  “But it uses the word ‘Devil’ to say who he was tempted by,” she said.

  Again that resistance stirred in Sean. Why was she so hung up on that word “Devil”?

  “I don’t think the author meant the literal ‘Devil,’ Becca,” Sean said. “I think it’s just a figure of speech, or a metaphor for anything that tempts us.”

  It was also Cassie’s first day at school since the accident, and she was at her desk in the back row against the window. She looked nothing like the girl her classmates had last seen. She’d washed the black dye from her hair, so it was back to its natural sandy brown color, and wore only a hint of makeup — far from the gaudy dark eyeliner she’d previously worn.

  She’d been met by lots of stares as she walked the hallway that morning, and it felt weird. Although her memories from the time of the Disturbances were fuzzy, and the lines often blurred between what was real and what had been dreamed, she did recall that nobody stared at her; they were too scared to draw attention to themselves. But with that presence inside her gone now, the students felt free to stare and sneer and crack jokes about her and wonder why they had ever been afraid of this freak.

  Not a single person said hi, or welcomed her back, or asked how she was feeling.

  She was doing her best to pay attention and stay focused in class, but her mind kept wandering back to a poem she had begun in the library earlier that morning. It was about the loneliness she was feeling, and she was calling it “The Invisible Girl.”

  Father Sean had just called on the boy who sat next to her. She was pretty sure his name was Steve, but those memories of class introductions were still fuzzy.

  “What about the other places in the Bible where it mentions the Devil?” Steve asked.

  “Just mental illness, Steve,” came Sean’s response. “Back then, if you saw someone foaming at the mouth, your first thought was demonic possession. Thankfully, today we know it as epilepsy and treat it with medications instead of a witch doctor.”

  Most of the class laughed, and Cassie looked up from her poem to see Father Sean smiling at his own joke. It struck her as odd — a priest who didn’t believe in demons? She almost raised her hand to say something but decided not to. She didn’t want Them to know she was thinking about them. And they would know.

  They were always watching.

  It was then that she noticed a peculiar tingle in her mind, and a pressure beginning to build. It was blotting out sounds and filling her ears with a tinnitus-like ring.

  As she looked around the classroom, she saw mouths moving and speaking words, but the actual sounds were distant and faded, like she was hearing them from across a great void.

  Then a scent touched her nose — it was the soft fragrance of daisies she had smelled in the cemetery. She couldn’t recall ever smelling it in here before, and a quick look around the classroom confirmed there were no daisies or any other flowers.

  Someone was watching her.

  This awareness came suddenly. It was from outside her window. She turned to look...

  The window looked out on a grass courtyard with a marble fountain in the middle and several oaks providing shade. It was surrounded on four sides by breezeways and classrooms built of red brick.

  The Little Girl from the cemetery stood on the far side of the courtyard. She was in the same white Communion dress and holding a bundle of daisies.

  She was staring right at Cassie.

  Rather than feeling confusion or alarm, Cassie felt a gentle warmth wash over her. It was calming and relaxing, and dispelled much of the morose she had felt all morning.

  “Cassie?”

  From somewhere across that great void of silence came the sound of her name. But Cassie didn’t want to let go of the peace she felt.

  “Cassie?”

  This time it came more forcefully, and sounds from the classroom came rushing back. She was met by a roomful of stares, including Father Sean, who had called her name.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Everything okay?” Sean asked.

  Shit. He’d seen her staring out the window.

  Before she could respond, a smartass named Daryl blurted out: “Uh. No.”

  The class erupted in laughter, and several kids seated around Daryl exchanged high-fives with him.

  Cassie looked around at all the laughing faces and wished there was a way she could just disappear beneath her desk.

  Sean blew into his fingers in a loud whistle to get everyone’s attention. “How about we take it easy on Cassie. Okay?”

  Most of the laughter died down at that point, but there were still a few giggles and snickers. Thankfully for Cassie, the bell rang, and everyone’s focus turned to packing up their books.

  Cassie took her time packing her books to give everyone else time to leave. As she did, she took one last look out the window. The Little Girl was gone. And the scent of daisies was also gone.

  As soon as the last student left, Cassie grabbed her backpack and walked up to Sean.

  “Hey,” she said, stopping in front of his desk. “Sorry, I got kinda lost there for a bit.”

  “No worries,” Sean said. “How are you feeling?”

  She shrugged. “Not so great. But I’m alive. So I guess that counts.”

  He smiled and gave her a nod. He could already see a massive change in her since her accident. Her defiance and that odd quality about her were gone, but there was something else too; something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “The new hair’s a good look for you,” he said.

  “Oh. Thanks. Yeah, it’s my natural color.” She actually smiled, and Sean was pretty sure it was the first time he’d seen her smile. But then it faded, and she took a deep breath before continuing.

  “I want to apologize for the way I’ve acted. There was something wrong with me, but I think I’m better now.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head. “Maybe someday, when I get it all sorted out. But I just really want you to know I’m sorry about everything. I hope you won’t hate me anymore.”

  With that, she turned and started for the door.

  “Cassie,” Sean called out to her. She stopped mid-step and turned. �
�I don’t hate you. It’s nice to meet this version of you. I hope she sticks around.”

  Cassie nodded. “Yeah. Me too.”

  ****

  See me.

  Am I really that different?

  I have cares.

  I have dreams.

  I hurt, and your smile could have cheered me.

  I ache, and your nod could have healed me.

  I mourn, and your words could have soothed me.

  I died, and your touch could have saved me.

  See me.

  — “The Invisible Girl” by Cassie Stevens

  ****

  Cassie maneuvered through the maze of students in the hallway, keeping her head low to avoid eye contact. After the ridicule she just took in class, she decided being ignored was easier than being seen. She noticed several conversations stop mid-sentence as she passed, but she still caught bits and pieces of them —

  “What’s she doing back?”

  “Someone said she died.”

  “I heard someone was killed in the crash.”

  “Why isn’t she in jail?”

  “Why couldn’t she have just stayed dead?”

  She spotted an opening in the hallway crowd and squeezed through it to the bathroom.

  She was relieved to find the bathroom empty. She walked over to the sink, splashed some water on her face, then looked in the mirror. Why did she even bother trying to look pretty that day? Nobody cared; they all hated her.

  A few tears swelled beneath her cheeks, but she fought them back. They would only give everyone another reason to pick on her.

  Voices were coming from outside the door. She quickly ducked into a stall and pulled the door shut. She stood on the toilet so her feet wouldn’t show beneath the stall’s door.

  She heard the bathroom door open and two girls enter. She recognized their voices as Tina and Cindy from her religious ed class that had just ended. She’d known them both since fifth grade, and her dad had even coached Tina’s brother on his Pee Wee league team. She and Cassie used to talk to each other in the bleachers while watching the games.