The First Phone Call From Heaven: A Novel

by Albom, Mitch

  In Coldwater, I’m Amy Penn.

  In his office in Alpena, Phil watched the final frame of her report and smiled.

  Brilliant, he said to himself.

  This Amy Penn might make it after all.

  Jules sat at the library table, leafing through a Curious George book. Liz stood over him.

  “Do you like monkeys?”

  “They’re OK,” Jules mumbled.

  “Just OK?”

  “I like tigers better.”

  “Maybe I can find you a tiger book.”

  Jules looked up.

  “Come on,” Liz said.

  He jumped from the chair and put his palm in hers. Sully watched with mixed emotions. He loved that his son had taken a woman’s hand. He still wished it were Giselle’s.

  Before him, spread out, were the Gazette obituaries of each of the people who had supposedly called from heaven. Thanks to Maria, they were bursting with details—family history, job history, favorite vacation spots, pet expressions. Sully had been hesitant to ask for these at the Gazette offices (what reason could he give that didn’t seem like snooping?), but when he mentioned something to Liz, she went to a cabinet, pulled open two drawers, and said, “What do you need? We keep every issue here.”

  Of course, Sully realized—local paper, local library, why wouldn’t they? He entered details now on his yellow pad. The more he wrote, the more his mind drifted to the other files in Maria’s office—the transcriptions of conversations she’d had with the families. The details in those would be even greater, enough to paint a truly complete portrait of the people who died and perhaps reveal a link that Sully had been missing.

  The real mystery, of course, remained the voices themselves. Every person contacted swore those voices were real. It couldn’t be an impersonator. No one could pull that off. Was there a machine that could change the tonality of a voice? Something someone could speak through and sound like someone else?

  Sully’s cell phone vibrated. He looked at the display. Ron Jennings. He ignored it. A minute later, a text message appeared on the screen WHERE ARE YOU?

  Sully shut off the phone.

  “Dad, look.”

  Jules was holding a picture book. Its cover was a tiger.

  “That was fast,” Sully said.

  Liz grinned. “I spend a lot of time looking at these shelves.”

  Jules climbed into his chair and began leafing through the pages.

  “He’s a doll,” Liz said.

  “He is,” Sully said. “That a good book, Jule-i-o?”

  “Yeah.” He flipped the pages. “I’m gonna tell Mommy I read the whole thing.”

  Liz looked away. Sully went back to the obituaries, searching for clues to prove that death is silent.

  Bad news has no limit. We often feel it should, like a rainstorm that can’t possibly get any heavier. But a storm can always worsen, and the burdens of life can, too.

  Sully’s plane had been destroyed, his wife had been in a catastrophic accident, the recordings from the air traffic tower were indecipherable, and the man whose voice was on them—the only man who could vindicate Sully’s actions—was dead and buried, his body too mangled, they said, to even have the coffin open at his funeral.

  This was more than any one man should handle. But eight days after the crash, with Giselle’s condition still unchanged, Sully looked up to see two naval officers entering her hospital room.

  “We need you to come with us,” one of them said.

  Bad news getting worse.

  The blood report had come back from the hospital. It showed traces of alcohol in Sully’s system. Although they never mentioned this, when the investigators in the small naval office in Columbus began to ask him questions—“Take us through the events of the night before”—Sully immediately sensed it, and he felt as if a giant hammer had just come down on his stomach. In the rush of events that had spiraled him downward, he never thought about the night before the flight. He hadn’t planned on flying. He hadn’t worried about drinking. Think, think! He’d had a vodka tonic with two of his squadron mates in the hotel restaurant before going to his room, but what time was that? Was it one vodka or two? What time had he flown? The rule was, “Twelve hours from bottle to throttle” . . .

  Oh God, he thought.

  He felt his future collapsing in front of him.

  “I want a lawyer,” he said, his voice shaking.

  The Thirteenth Week

  A heavy snow descended on Coldwater and by sunrise on Thanksgiving morning, the streets were coated in a thick white layer. All around town, people stepped outside to grab a newspaper or shovel the front walk. They breathed in the cold, silent air, a balm to the hysteria of the last few weeks.

  Inside her house on Cuthbert Road, Tess tightened her robe and came into the kitchen. She hoped the snow would send the people on her lawn someplace else, and in fact, many had left for the shelter of Coldwater’s churches.

  Still, when Tess opened her front door—the sunlight bouncing brightly off the fresh white powder—at least thirty people remained, covered in blankets or cramped inside tents. She saw a baby’s crib, empty, its bottom covered in snow, the mother and child peeking out from a tent flap.

  “Good morning, Tess.”

  “God bless you, Tess.”

  “Pray with us, Tess.”

  She felt her chest well up as if she were going to cry, all these people in the cold, all these people who weren’t getting calls, who held their phones in hopes of having happen to them what was happening to her, as if miracles were contagious. She thought about her mother. The open-house Thanksgivings.

  “Come inside,” she said suddenly. Then louder, “Please! All of you! Come inside and get warm!”

  At Harvest of Hope Baptist Church, the smell of fried potatoes laid claim to the kitchen. Turkeys were being cut and distributed. Gravy was ladled from a stainless steel pot.

  Pastor Warren moved among the strangers, pouring them iced tea, offering them encouragement. Most of the volunteers were his regular congregants, who had delayed their own Thanksgiving meals to serve others. The snow had brought in more outsiders than they’d expected. Folding chairs were carried from the storeroom.

  Earlier, Warren had a phone call from Katherine Yellin. They hadn’t spoken in weeks.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, Pastor.”

  “Yes, Katherine. To you, too.”

  “Are you well, Pastor?”

  “The Lord got me up this morning—against all odds.”

  It was an old line, but he heard her chuckle. He’d almost forgotten how, before all this started, Katherine had frequently visited him—to grieve for her sister, yes, but to also seek his counsel, to study Scripture. She’d been a loyal churchgoer, and she doted on him like a family member, even drove him to the doctor once when he stubbornly fought a head cold.

  “Pastor, I’d like to help with the meal today.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you think that’s OK?”

  Warren hesitated. He’d witnessed the commotion Katherine now caused. The protesters. The TV crews.

  “Of course, my dear, we’d welcome your help normally. But I think . . .”

  A pause.

  “Never mind, I understand,” she said.

  “It’s difficult—”

  “No, no, I—”

  “Maybe we—”

  “It’s all right. I just wanted to wish you a good holiday.”

  Warren swallowed.

  “God be with you, Katherine.”

  He heard her breathe out deeply.

  “Yes, Pastor. God be with you, too.”

  All blessings do not bless the same. While the other so-called chosen ones felt a healing glow each time their loved ones spoke from heaven, Doreen, regrettably, no longer did. Her initial elation had given way to something unexpected: a heightened sadness. Even depression.

  She realized this on Thanksgiving morning, when she stood in her kitchen, doing the math for the evenin
g’s meal. In counting the names—Lucy, Randy, the two kids, me and Mel—she’d actually counted Robbie as if he were coming. But he wasn’t coming. Nothing had changed. Before he’d made contact, she had started to close the wound on his death. She had finally reached level ground with Mel, who so often in the last two years had grumbled, “Enough. Life is for the living. We gotta move on.”

  Now she’d been hurtled backward. Robbie was part of her life again. But what kind of part? The initial joy of hearing his voice had turned to an unsettling dissatisfaction. Instead of feeling reconnected with her only son, she felt his loss as palpably as she did when the news of his death arrived. An unexpected phone call here or there? A clipped conversation? A phenomenon that might disappear as quickly as it came? The awful part would still not change. Robbie was never coming home. He would never again be hunkered at the kitchen table, his hooded sweatshirt loose on his muscular young frame; he would never again stuff his mouth with milk-soaked Frosted Flakes; he would never again be sprawled across the couch, barefoot, flipping the remote from one cartoon to the next, or pull up in his old Camaro with Jessica, his pixie-haired girlfriend, their music blasting; he would never grab Doreen from behind in a mighty bear hug and rub his nose in the back of her head and say, “MommyMommyMommyMommy.”

  Heaven, everyone told her. It’s proof. Your son is in heaven. But she’d already believed that, long before she heard his voice. Somehow, heaven was more comforting when it was only in her mind.

  She fingered the phone cord and followed it to the wall. Then, abruptly, she unclipped the connector and let it drop.

  Circling the house, she disconnected every phone, wrapping the cords around the units themselves. She put them all in a box, got her coat from the closet, and drove through the snow to the Goodwill drop on Main Street.

  No more calls. No more defying nature, she told herself. There is a time for hello and a time for good-bye. It’s why the act of burying things seems natural, but the act of digging them up does not.

  Thanks largely to the navy, Sully and Giselle had lived in five different states. There was Illinois—where they met in college—Virginia, California, Florida (where Jules was born), and Michigan, suburban Detroit, where they settled after Sully joined the reserves, a good midway spot between their families.

  No matter where they were, every Thanksgiving, Sully’s parents came to visit. Now, for the first time since high school, the visit was reversed; Sully was back at the family holiday table, alongside his Uncle Theo and Aunt Martha, both in their eighties; Bill and Shirley Castle, the longtime next-door neighbors; Jules, his face covered in mashed potatoes—and Liz, from the library, whom Jules had invited last week while she was reading him Tilly the Tiger and who had accepted on the spot.

  “Is it OK?” Jules had later asked his grandmother at Sully’s insistence. “Liz is my friend.”

  “Certainly, sweetheart. How old is she?”

  “Twenty.”

  She turned, eyebrows raised, to Sully.

  “Wait till you see her hair,” he added.

  Privately, Sully was glad. Liz was like a big sister to Jules. Sully trusted her to watch him while he did his work. Anyhow, there were worse places for a kid to hang out than a library.

  Sully’s mother entered with the turkey. “Here it is!” she announced.

  “Beautiful,” said Uncle Theo.

  “Wow,” said Liz.

  “I had to order it a month in advance. You can’t count on anything at the market anymore. With all the crazies here, you go in to buy ketchup and they’re out of it.”

  “What market runs out of ketchup?” Aunt Martha said.

  “The town has gone bananas,” said Bill.

  “How about the traffic?” added his wife.

  “If it weren’t so cold, I’d walk everywhere.”

  “You said it.”

  “Bananas.”

  It went on this way, as it did at nearly every dinner table in town, families reflecting on how much Coldwater had changed since the miracles. There were complaints, head shakes, more complaints.

  But there was also talk about heaven. And faith. And God. There were more prayers said than in years past. More requests for forgiveness. The volunteers for soup kitchens far exceeded the need. The mattresses at churches far outnumbered the weary.

  Despite the traffic snarls, the long lines, or the port-a-johns now positioned on streets in town, nobody went hungry or homeless in Coldwater this Thanksgiving, a fact not recorded in anyone’s journal or reported on by any news service.

  “How about a toast?”

  The group filled its glasses with wine. Sully took the bottle from Uncle Theo, flashed a look at his parents, then passed it straight along to Aunt Martha.

  Sully would no longer drink in front of his father. Fred Harding had been in the air force during the Korean War. Sixty years later, he retained the angular crew cut of a military man and the same no-nonsense point of view. He had been proud when Sully signed up for officer training out of college. The two of them didn’t speak so much when Sully was growing up, but as he rose through the ranks of navy fliers, they found common ground in conversing about today’s equipment versus that of the Korea days, when fighter jets were something new.

  “My boy flies the F/A-18,” Fred would tell people proudly. “Nearly twice the speed of sound.”

  All that changed with Sully’s toxicology report. Fred had been furious. Any wet-eared recruit, he chided, understood the cardinal rule of bottle to throttle. It was as simple as telling time.

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “It was a couple of drinks, Dad.”

  “Twelve hours!”

  “I wasn’t planning on flying.”

  “You should have told your CO.”

  “I know, I know, you think I don’t know? It doesn’t change anything. I was fine. The controller screwed up!”

  That didn’t seem to matter—not to his father or, for a while, anyone else. When the crash first happened, people were sympathetic: the other plane had, thankfully, landed safely, Sully had endured a traumatic ejection, Giselle was clearly an innocent victim. Poor couple.

  But when the toxicology report leaked out, public perception flipped on Sully, like a wrestler slipping his hold and pinning him down. A newspaper was first to get a copy; it ran the headline WAS PILOT UNDER INFLUENCE DURING CRASH? The TV news stations followed up, changing the question to more of an accusation. Never mind that it was a trace of alcohol, that he was in no way impaired. The military, with a zero-tolerance policy, took such things seriously. And with this being the latest development (and the media always chasing the freshest scent), the backstory faded, and Sully was pushed out front as The Man To Blame. No one talked anymore about the missing flight recordings—something that never happens—or Elliot Gray fleeing the scene and causing a car crash.

  Suddenly Sully Harding was a drunken flyboy whose irresponsibility, as one cynical commentator put it, “landed his wife in a coma.”

  When he read that, Sully stopped reading altogether.

  Instead, day after day, he sat by Giselle’s bedside in a Grand Rapids hospital, where she’d been transferred to be closer to the family. He held her hand. He stroked her face. He whispered, “Stay with me, baby.” In time, her bruises faded and her skin color returned to a more natural shade, but her lithe body shriveled and her eyes remained closed.

  Months passed. Sully couldn’t work. He was bleeding money for lawyers. At first, at their urging, he’d filed a suit against the Lynton Airfield facility, but with Elliot Gray dead and the few witnesses useless, he was forced to drop that and focus on his defense. The lawyers encouraged him to go to trial; his case was solid, they said, and a jury would be sympathetic. But in truth, his case was not solid at all. In military court, the rules were quite clear. Drinking within twelve hours of flight time was a clear violation of NATOPS, the naval aviation bible. In addition, they could get him for destruction of government property. It didn
’t matter who’d screwed up in the tower, or whose wife was a tragic victim. There had been two witnesses to Sully’s drinking at the hotel restaurant. They’d attest to the hour.

  He was in hell. Or worse, purgatory. A blade hung over his head. No job, wife in a hospital, father ashamed of him, in-laws not speaking to him, son who kept asking for his mother, dreams so haunted he hated sleep, real world so haunted he hated to wake up. What mattered to him most was not what mattered to the lawyers. The critical thing was time. If he pleaded guilty, he’d serve faster and be back sooner. Sooner to Jules. Sooner to Giselle.

  Against his counsel’s wishes, he agreed to a plea deal.

  They gave him ten months.

  Sully entered prison remembering the last thing he’d said to his wife.

  I want to see you.

  I want to see you, too.

  Those words were his mantra, his meditation, his prayer. They kept him going, kept him believing, right up to the day they told him she was dead.

  When all belief died inside him, too.

  Thanksgiving night, Sully drove home with Jules already asleep in the backseat. He carried him up the stairs, laid him in bed, and let him sleep in his clothes. He went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of bourbon.

  Flopping on the couch, his stomach still full, he clicked on the TV and found a football game. He set the volume low and sank in. He wanted to forget for the rest of the night.

  Just as his eyes were closing, he thought he heard a tap. He blinked.

  “Jules?”

  Nothing. He shut his eyes—and there it was again. The door? Was there someone at the door?

  He got up, went to the keyhole, and felt his heart start to race.

  He turned the knob and pulled it open.

  Elias Rowe stood before him in a construction jacket and mustard-colored gloves.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” he said.

  The Fourteenth Week

  NEWS REPORT

  Channel 9, Alpena

  (Amy on Main Street.)