The First Phone Call From Heaven: A Novel

by Albom, Mitch

“They often run nice photos.”

  “Right.”

  “We provide those, too.”

  “OK.”

  “We collect money on behalf of the Gazette and pay them at the end of each month. One less bill for the family.”

  Sully nodded. His gaze drifted.

  “Is something wrong?” Horace asked.

  “No, I just—I figured it was a reporter who wrote the obituaries.”

  Horace offered a weak smile. “We’re a small town. The Gazette is a small paper. Anyhow, no reporter could gather information better than Maria. She’s very gentle and very thorough. A real people person.”

  An odd phrase, Sully thought, coming from this guy.

  “OK, well, I’ll get it to Ron and we’re all set.”

  “Very good,” Horace said.

  He walked Sully to the door. Then, out of the blue, he placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “How are you doing, Mr. Harding?”

  Sully was so taken aback, all he could do was swallow. He looked into the man’s eyes, which seemed suddenly sympathetic. He remembered walking out of here the last time, with Giselle’s ashes held close to his chest.

  “Not so great,” he whispered.

  Horace gave his shoulder a squeeze.

  “I understand.”

  Ejecting from an airplane compresses your spine. Sully had been six foot two when he’d pulled that handle. He’d be a half inch shorter by the time he reached the ground.

  As he floated toward earth, the chair gone, the parachute open, his body ached and he felt stunned into dull observation, as if the whole world were dipped in slowly poured honey. He watched his plane impact the ground. He saw it burst into flames. His hands gripped the risers. His feet swung below him. The oxygen hose, still attached to his mask, flopped beneath his nose. Off in the distance were thick gray clouds. Everything was dreamily silent.

  Then, in an instant—whoomph—his mind rushed back, like a boxer snapping back from a blow. He yanked off the mask so he could breathe easier. His senses were on fire, his thoughts clashing like atoms.

  First, thinking like a pilot: he was alive, good; his chute had functioned, good; his plane had gone down in an unpopulated clearing, good.

  Next thinking like an officer: he had just destroyed a multimillion-dollar aircraft, bad; he would be subject to an investigation, bad; he’d be months in paperwork and reports, bad; and he still had no idea what he’d hit or the damage his own plane had done, bad.

  Simultaneously, thinking like a husband—Giselle, poor Giselle, he had to let her know he was OK, he was not burning in that fiery metal, its plume of black smoke rising. He was here, floating, a speck in the air. Had she seen him? Did anybody see him?

  What he could not know, hanging above earth, were the actions being taken by those on the ground. What he could not know was that, in the minutes that would follow, Elliot Gray, the air traffic controller, the man behind the reedy, nasal voice, would flee the tower, leaving the scene.

  What he could not know was that minutes later, Giselle, arriving late, would be in her car, on a single-lane road, and she would see the rising black smoke in the distance. And, being the wife of a pilot, she would jam down on the accelerator with the worst thoughts flashing through her mind.

  What he could not know was that the last thing his wife would say as she flew around a curve was a prayer.

  Oh, God, please, let him be safe.

  He gripped the ropes and descended toward earth.

  The radio played, a gospel station. Amy glanced out the car window as they drove by Frieda’s Diner. It was jammed, with cars parked up and down the street.

  “Good for Frieda,” Katherine said, eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel. “Before all this started, she talked to me about having to sell her house.”

  “Oh yeah?” Amy replied. Amy said “Oh yeah?” to almost anything Katherine said now.

  “And they have three kids. It would be hard to find something in her price range.”

  Katherine smiled. Her mood had improved since the last call from Diane. It came just as she prayed it would.

  “Kath . . . don’t be sad.”

  “Diane, what about these other people?”

  “They have their blessings. . . . But God has blessed us, too. We are together so you can heal . . . Knowing heaven . . . is what heals us on earth.”

  Katherine repeated the words to herself. Knowing heaven is what heals us on earth.

  “Am I the one? Have I been chosen to spread the message?”

  “Yes, sister.”

  The words left Katherine serene.

  Amy, on the other hand, grew more agitated by the day.

  She had hoped to keep a lid on this story, perhaps win an award, pique the interest of a larger market. But after the town hall meeting, that was a pipe dream. There were now at least five TV stations camped in town. Network news had been there. Network news! Amy had stood ten feet from Alan Jeremy, the famous ABC reporter, who wore jeans, a blue dress shirt, and a tie, under an expensive-looking ABC News ski parka. Any other time, she’d have gone right up to him, maybe flirted a bit. You never know how someone can help your career.

  But under these circumstances, Alan Jeremy was the competition. He had wanted to speak to Katherine, but when Katherine asked what Amy thought about that, Amy quickly suggested he might not be trustworthy. He came from New York. What was his motivation?

  “Well, then, we won’t speak to him,” Katherine said.

  “Right,” Amy said. She felt a pang of guilt. But Phil had told her, “Stay one step ahead of them. You were there first. Remember, this is our biggest story of the year.”

  Our biggest story of the year. How Amy had longed for such a chance. But it was a feeding frenzy. Network news? And here she was, still lugging around her own camera. She felt so amateurish. How insulting to get trampled by the very organizations she hoped to join.

  So she did what they could not. She glued herself to Katherine and made herself indispensable. She offered to shop for her, to make deliveries, to intercept the countless messages in her mailbox and manage the visitors on her front lawn. She acted like her friend and referred to herself as such. The last few nights, Katherine had even allowed Amy to sleep in her guest bedroom, where Amy’s suitcase was now stored.

  Today, they were going to a nearby hospital to visit a patient with advanced leukemia. He had written to Katherine asking if she would share her understanding of heaven with him. At first, Katherine wanted Pastor Warren to come, but something inside her said no, she could handle this.

  “Don’t you agree?” Katherine had asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Amy had answered.

  At the hospital, Katherine held hands with a seventy-four-year-old retired autoworker named Ben Wilkes. Withered from months of chemotherapy, his hair had thinned to strands, his cheeks were sucked in, and the lines around his mouth seemed to crack when he spoke. He was delighted that Katherine had come to see him and showed great interest in her story.

  “Your sister,” Ben asked. “Does she describe the world around her?”

  “She says it’s beautiful,” Katherine said.

  “Does she explain the rules?”

  “The rules?”

  “About who gets in.”

  Katherine smiled gently. “All who accept the Lord get in.” Diane had never actually used those words, but Katherine knew it was the right thing to say.

  “Are you sure she’s in heaven?” Ben asked, squeezing her hand tightly. “I mean no disrespect. But I so want to believe it’s true.”

  “It’s true,” Katherine said. She smiled, closed her eyes, and placed her other palm over their joined hands. “There is life after this life.”

  Ben’s mouth fell slightly open, and he inhaled weakly. Then he smiled.

  Amy, standing behind her camera, smiled too. She’d been filming the whole thing. No other station had this angle. There is life after this life.

  And a better job after th
is job.

  The next day, Ben passed away.

  Doctors were puzzled. His vital signs had been fine. His medications were the same. There was no reason to suspect a sudden demise.

  The best they could conclude was that, following Katherine’s visit, his system had “voluntarily” shut down.

  Simply put, Ben had given up.

  The Eleventh Week

  On the morning of February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent on his telephone invention. On that same day, Elisha Gray, the Illinois engineer, applied for a caveat on his own version. Many believe Gray filed first, but that improper actions between Bell’s lawyer and the patent examiner, an alcoholic who owed the lawyer money, led to Bell’s ultimate victory. His entry was listed as the fifth of the day. Gray’s was listed as thirty-ninth. Had Gray acted sooner, even by a day, his place in history might be quite different.

  Instead, centuries later, Bell still receives the credit and prestige that come with being first.

  In Coldwater, a similar jockeying had begun. According to the archdiocese, Tess Rafferty’s message from her mother, the one that caused her to drop her phone in shock, came on a Friday at 8:17 a.m., as marked by the computerized voice on her answering machine. This was nearly two hours earlier than what was previously thought to be the first call, the one claimed by Katherine Yellin, of Harvest of Hope Baptist.

  Time lines were important, the archdiocese said. While the Catholic Church was still deliberating the status of this “miracle,” it could safely say that whatever was happening to the populace of this tiny Michigan town, Tess Rafferty had been the first.

  “So what does that mean?” Samantha asked Tess when they heard about the church’s statement.

  “Nothing,” Tess said. “What difference does it make?”

  But that afternoon, when Tess pulled back the curtains, she saw the difference it made.

  Her front lawn was covered with worshippers.

  Sully held Jules’s hand as they walked to the car. The light blue plastic phone remained in the boy’s pocket.

  Sully had confronted Jules’s teacher and principal, his voice so loud he even startled himself.

  Since when, he demanded to know, was it a teacher’s place to advise a child on the afterlife? To give him a toy phone and tell him he could speak to his dead mother?

  “He just seemed so sad,” pleaded the teacher, Ramona, a short, heavyset woman in her twenties. “From the first day of school, he was so introverted. I could never get him to answer a question, not even simple math.

  “Then one day he raised his hand. Out of the blue. He said he saw on TV that people could talk to heaven. He said his Mommy was in heaven, so that meant she was alive.

  “All the other kids were just staring at him. Then one of them started laughing, and you know how kids are—they all did. And Jules just shrank in his chair and cried.”

  Sully clenched his fists. He wanted to smash something.

  “During recess, I found a toy phone in the kindergarten room. To be honest, Mr. Harding, I had planned to show him how phones were not magical. But when I called him in, he saw the phone and he smiled so fast and he asked for it so quickly and . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I just told him whatever he believed he could believe.”

  She began to cry.

  “I’m a churchgoing person,” she said.

  “Well, I’m not,” Sully said. “That’s still allowed in this town, isn’t it?”

  The principal, a serious woman in a navy wool blazer, asked if Sully wanted to file a complaint. “It is not our policy to advise on religious matters, and Miss Ramona knows that. We’re a public school.”

  Sully dropped his head. He tried to hold on to his anger, but he felt it withering. If Giselle were here, she’d touch his shoulder, her way of saying, Calm down, forgive, be nice. What was the point? A formal complaint? Then what?

  He left with a promise it would never happen again.

  In the car now, he turned to his son, his beautiful son, his soon-to-be-seven-year-old son with the wavy locks and the skinny chest and the joyful eyes of the mother he hadn’t spoken to since the day of the crash, nearly two years now. Sully wished he believed in God again, just to ask Him how He could be so cruel.

  “Can I talk to you about Mommy, kiddo?”

  “OK.”

  “You know I loved her very much.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you know she loved you more than anything in the world.”

  Jules nodded.

  “But Jule-i-o,” he said, using the nickname Giselle playfully called him, “we can’t talk to her. I wish we could but we can’t. That’s what happens when someone dies. They go away.”

  “You went away.”

  “I know.”

  “And you came back.”

  “It’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t die.”

  “Maybe Mommy didn’t, either.”

  Sully felt his eyes water.

  “She did, Jules. We don’t like it, but she did.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What do you mean, how do I know?”

  “You weren’t there.”

  Sully swallowed. He rubbed a palm over his face. He kept his gaze straight ahead because it was suddenly too hard to look at his child, who with three simple words had repeated the torture Sully put himself through every day.

  You weren’t there.

  With the black smoke of his destroyed airplane spreading in the sky above him, Sully touched the earth, keeping his legs bent and rolling to his side. The parachute, its duty done, lost its gut and flattened into the ground. The grass was damp. The sky was gunmetal gray.

  Sully unhooked his fittings, released himself from the chute, and pulled the emergency radio from his vest. He was aching, disoriented, and he wanted more than anything to speak to Giselle. But he knew military protocol. Follow procedure. Radio in. No names. The people on duty would inform her.

  “Lynton Tower, this is Firebird 304. I have ejected safely. Location is half mile southwest of airfield. Plane impacted in a clearing. Wreckage location maybe half mile farther southwest. Standing by for pickup.”

  He waited. Nothing.

  “Lynton Tower. Copy my last?”

  Nothing.

  “Lynton Tower? Nothing heard.”

  Still no response.

  “Lynton Tower?”

  Quiet.

  “Firebird 304 . . . Out.”

  What was going on? Where was the tower? He collected his chute, first trying to fold it compactly. But something stirred inside him, and as the image of a worried Giselle grew stronger, he became anxious and gathered the chute haphazardly, pulling it to his chest as if collecting large pillows. He saw a white car in the distance, heading toward the wreckage.

  Aviate. He waved his arms.

  Navigate. He ran to the road.

  Communicate. “I’m OK, I’m OK,” he yelled, as if, in some way, his wife might hear him.

  One Day Later

  NEWS REPORT

  Channel 9, Alpena

  (Amy, standing in front of Harvest of Hope Baptist Church.) AMY: They’re calling it the Coldwater miracle. After Katherine Yellin started receiving what she says are phone calls from her deceased sister, people wanted to know more. One man in particular is Ben Wilkes. He suffers from advanced leukemia.

  (Footage from the hospital.)

  BEN: Your sister? Does she describe the world around her?

  KATHERINE: She says it’s beautiful.

  (Images of Ben.)

  AMY: Doctors have told Ben he doesn’t have much hope. But Katherine’s phone calls have heightened his spirits.

  (Footage from the hospital.)

  BEN: Are you sure she’s in heaven? I mean no disrespect. But I so want to believe it’s true.

  KATHERINE: It’s true. . . . There is life after this life.

  (Amy in front of the church.)

 
AMY: While there are reports of others receiving heavenly phone calls, Katherine remains the focus of attention.

  KATHERINE: If the Lord has chosen me to spread the message, then I have to do it. I’m happy we were able to give Ben some hope today. That made me feel good.

  AMY: In Coldwater, I’m Amy Penn, Nine Action News.

  Phil stopped the tape. He looked at Anton, the station’s lawyer.

  “I don’t see how we’re liable,” Phil said.

  “We’re not,” Anton replied. “But the Yellin woman might be. She is clearly telling the patient he has nothing to fear. That footage could be used in a lawsuit.”

  Amy shifted her gaze from one man to the other—Phil with his Viking beard, Anton with his shaved head and charcoal suit. She had been summoned back to Alpena that morning. There could be a problem, she was told. Her report—hurriedly assembled, as Channel 9 could not get enough of the Coldwater story—had run the night of the hospital visit. As usual, it spread rapidly on the Internet.

  The next day, Ben died.

  Now the cyber world was on fire with finger-pointing.

  “There are protests planned,” Phil said.

  “What kind of protests?” Amy asked.

  “People who don’t believe in a heaven—or don’t want to. They claim this Ben guy killed himself over a lie.”

  “He didn’t kill himself,” Anton interjected.

  “They’re blaming Katherine?” Amy said.

  “She told him there’s life after this life—”

  “As does every religion in the world,” Anton noted.

  Phil thought about that. “So they don’t have a leg to stand on?”

  “Who knows? You can bring anything to court.”

  “Wait,” Amy said. “These protests—”

  “What is the family saying?” Anton asked.

  “Nothing yet,” Phil answered.

  “Be careful there.”

  “The protests?” Amy repeated.

  “I don’t know,” Phil said, turning back to her. “I think tomorrow. Depends on what blog you read.”

  “You’re just reporting the news,” Anton said. “Remember that.”

  “That’s right.” Phil nodded. “You’re right.” He turned again to Amy. “Go back.”