Devine Intervention

by Martha Brockenbrough

  Getting out of the house wouldn’t be easy. She couldn’t reach a doorknob. There was one way she might escape. One way. And it was going to hurt.

  She staggered into Rory’s room, feeling Jiminy’s limbs soften ever so slightly with each step. As usual, Rory’s window was wide open, letting in a fat stream of freezing air. She struggled onto Rory’s bed, carrying Vincent in her mouth. From there, it was a short leap out the window. A short leap with an awful landing. She breathed in. Breathed out. Inhaled once more.

  Then she jumped, landing in a scruffy patch of juniper. She’d always hated those bushes but now appreciated them with new clarity. Something doesn’t need to be beautiful to be useful. She’d dropped Vincent when she landed. Good thing he was immortal. She scooped him up with her mouth and headed for the sidewalk. Overhead, the sky rippled with charcoal clouds, and the air carried a sharp, expectant smell. Rain. Lots of it. She put her head down and began to walk, avoiding the puddles of melting snow.

  She turned toward Megan’s house but made it less than a car length before a pair of thick legs in sensible shoes blocked her way. Mrs. Thorpe, carrying a stack of letters and shiny catalogs.

  “Why, you’re back from the vet!” she said. “I must not have hit you very hard after all. But we can’t have you running around alone, can we?” She advanced toward Heidi, who shrank backward.

  “They shouldn’t leave you outside when they’re away,” she said. “You could get run over by another car. I’m going to take you inside and give them a piece of my mind when they get home.”

  She folded Heidi under her wing, pressing her against the catalogs. It hurt. But not as much as what Mrs. Thorpe did next.

  “You can’t bring your nasty little chew toy inside,” she said. “Open!”

  She slipped a finger in Heidi’s mouth and plucked Vincent Lionheart out, tossing him on the rough sidewalk. While there might have been a time in Heidi’s life that she’d let that sort of affront pass without comment, that time had passed. She no longer cared about consequences, or the good opinion of others.

  She opened her mouth. Her mouth full of sharp canine teeth. And she did exactly what it took to get Mrs. Thorpe’s attention.

  “Mrs. Thorpe,” Heidi said, using the same cadence she and Rory had perfected when telling each other ghost stories before bed. “You have been baaaad … so baaaaaaddd!”

  Coming out of Jiminy’s throat, the voice sounded truly terrifying: growly, low, full of menace. Heidi almost couldn’t believe it.

  Mrs. Thorpe yelped and dropped her onto a clump of ferns. She backed away slowly, covering her face with her hands. “What the —”

  It might have been a kindness had Heidi merely bitten her.

  Heidi stepped toward her cowering neighbor. “I represent the International Order of Mistreated Animals and come bearing a message.” She paused for effect and used the moment to gather her energy, as the pain in her belly had reached a new height. “We have been watching you, Mrs. Thorpe. You permit your large dog to bark and terrorize smaller creatures. You ran over the poor animal whose body the IOMA temporarily inhabits, without taking full responsibility for the crime. You are an evil human. Evil.”

  Mrs. Thorpe dropped her hands to her heart. Her face frilled with red and white blotches, like a giant chrysanthemum. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I’m so sorry! Please don’t hurt me!”

  Heidi’s cheeks curved into a grin. It felt great to smile like a dog, letting her teeth show and tongue hang out. Then she snapped off the happy face. No matter how good it felt, there was too much at stake. Too much, and too little time.

  “No harm will come to you, Mrs. Thorpe, if you successfully complete the tasks we have laid out. You must redeem yourself. It is not too late for you — yet.” She wished she could do that echo thing that Howard did. That was a good effect.

  “I’ll do it. Whatever you ask.”

  “We’ll need your car. On the double.” Heidi missed her thumbs. It would have been great to offer an emphatic snap.

  Mrs. Thorpe nodded. She dropped her mail on the sidewalk and put Heidi in the backseat of the Mercedes. Her hands shook so much, her keys rattled like nickels in a coffee can. It took several tries before she stuck the right one in the ignition.

  “Are you sure you don’t need me to buckle you in?” Mrs. Thorpe said.

  So now she cared about Heidi’s safety. Heidi plunked Vincent headfirst into the cup holder so she could talk. “A seat belt is unnecessary at this time.”

  She gave Mrs. Thorpe Megan’s address in the same slow, calm voice. Part of Heidi knew that talking like an NPR announcer was maybe too much. But it was fun — something that had been in distinctly short supply of late. In any case, she was glad for the ride. Huge raindrops launched themselves from the clouds, spiraling down from above, smearing the view through the windshield. The wipers thump-chunked and squeaked at full speed but couldn’t come close to keeping up with the rain. Fortunately, the ride was short, and in less than the time it took to listen to one of Mrs. Thorpe’s easy-listening tunes, they arrived at Megan’s.

  “There you go,” Mrs. Thorpe said. “Now I’ll just be on my way.”

  “Not so fast.” She might want a ride home. Maybe they could even drive around, looking for Jiminy. “Please wait until I return. We have agents watching you, and disastrous things are in store if you should attempt to depart prematurely.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Mrs. Thorpe said. “Oh my goodness, no.” She killed the engine and the car grew quiet except for the staccato rain on its roof.

  “The door,” Heidi said. “The Order expects you to open it and transport me in gentle and humane fashion to the house.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “Please carry the collectible figurine as well. I do not wish to further mar it with my teeth.”

  “Do you mean the doll?”

  Mrs. Thorpe reached into the backseat, her clothes hissing as she retrieved Vincent Lionheart. She dropped him into her purse and lifted Heidi out of the car, more carefully this time, but it still hurt. Terribly.

  Heidi tipped her face to the sky and caught a few raindrops on her tongue. They were delicious and wintry: cold, smoky, wood-drenched. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was.

  Mrs. Thorpe carried her across the stepping-stones that led to Megan’s house, depositing Heidi on a scratchy coconut-fiber welcome mat that said GO AWAY, one of Mrs. Lin’s many sarcastic decorative items. Heidi hesitated. Did she really want to do this? She could always turn around and ask for a ride home, to wait and see what would happen there. Mrs. Thorpe turned to leave.

  “Wait,” Heidi said. “I need you to ring the doorbell.”

  “Will I have to go in? I don’t even know these people and this —”

  “No. Just give me my doll and wait in the car. I won’t take long.”

  “And then what?” Mrs. Thorpe said.

  Heidi swallowed. The pain in her belly was intense, as though she’d swallowed steel wool. “I don’t know.”

  None too gently, Mrs. Thorpe inserted Vincent into Heidi’s mouth. She rang the bell, spun around, and hustled back to her car with surprising speed. Heidi turned toward the door, realizing another weakness in her plan. If Megan’s mother answered, she would take one look at the wet dog standing on her conversation piece and slam the door. Mrs. Lin was more of a cat person, to put it mildly.

  Heidi looked back over her shoulder at Mrs. Thorpe, who sat in the front seat of her warm, dry car. Before Heidi could decide whether to stay or flee, the door swung open and the decision was made for her.

  THEY DIDN’T SHOW my actual death in the video because Heaven, and especially the rehab part, has a pretty strict PG-13 policy about violence and sex, which seems majorly hypocritical when you consider all the smiting that goes on in the Bible, not to mention the question of where Cain and Abel’s wives came from.

  The video started off with a shot of Mike’s back. I guess that was the last thing I ever saw. Maybe if
I’d been shot in the heart or the liver, I’d remember more. But when you take an arrow in the head, your files get flasked up. It took a while for my mind to work right again. I sometimes wonder if maybe I got permanent brain damage.

  Anyways, Mike ran toward the porch. His hair flapped behind him. He had worked himself up to a pretty impressive speed, so it must’ve hurt when he crashed into the screen door. Bang! But he didn’t let that stop him. He shook his head a couple of times and took two crooked steps before he got going again. He disappeared into the house and came out a couple seconds later with my dad, who’d been inside dinking with his model train. He had on an undershirt and cutoffs and no shoes.

  If it hurt his feet any to run across the gravel to where I was lying, he didn’t show it. He ran and skidded down next to me like I was home base. Rocks flew everywhere, sounding like it does when you tear cardboard. He took my cheeks, one in each hand, and looked into my eyes and called my name, but I didn’t answer. I was already gone, and even if I hadn’t known how my face looked with life in it, I would’ve known from my eyes that there was nobody home.

  He laid my head down like it was an egg and he wiped a trail of blood out of my nose real gentle, without even protecting his finger with a shirt. And then he looked up at the sky like maybe he’d be able to see me up there, but of course he couldn’t. He’s not the kind of guy who sees souls, even though for a long time when I was little, I thought he saw the Devil under the hood of his car from the way he talked about it.

  He sank down next to me and held my hand and opened his mouth wide and shouted “No!” in a way that I don’t think I could forget if I tried. It hurt worse than Gabe’s reverb.

  Mike stood behind him with his face in his hands like he was ashamed, and I felt bad about that because I knew he was a lousy shot and I still let him have a go. I just didn’t think he’d miss that bad. He kept kind of walking back and forth saying “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” and if I had been my dad, I would’ve probably popped him because it is maximum annoying when someone says the same thing over and over again even if you aren’t looking at your dead kid in the gravel.

  But my dad didn’t sock him or even yell. He said, “Mike, get the phone.”

  Mike did, and when he was running toward the house, he stepped on the orange that had rolled off my head and he totally smashed it, which is pretty funny when you think about it. Mike hit the fruit after all. His timing was off. That was always the thing with him.

  He came back with the phone, and my dad called for an ambulance, which carried me away, but I didn’t get the sirens and stuff because I was already gone.

  The video cut away to my funeral.

  “How come I didn’t get to go to that?” I asked Xavier.

  “You were still being processed,” he said. “I took the footage for you.”

  “You went to my funeral?”

  “Of course,” he said. “That’s how we make final decisions about the souls we admit to our rehabilitation program.”

  There wasn’t a whole lot of people in the church, just my dad, Mike and his parents, Mrs. Domino (in her cherry skirt), Darcy Parker (who cried with her mouth open), Trip Wexler and his family, Mr. Moder, and some of Dad’s friends from work. I guess I was lucky I got any, considering. But my dad gave a nice speech. At first when I saw him standing up there on the stage part, I was afraid he was going to say everything I’d ever done wrong, because that would pretty much be the only way he could talk about me for more than five seconds.

  But he didn’t, except for a few funny things like the time we went to a wedding when I was four. I was the ring bearer and I cried because they said we’d have cake after the toast and then they handed out the cake without giving any of us toast, which I liked a whole lot better than cake with fruit in it. I was glad he didn’t tell the part about me wetting my pants when I found out before the wedding that I had to wear a suit instead of a bear costume. Darcy Parker didn’t need to know that.

  Then he said something I won’t forget, no matter where they send me.

  “My biggest fear was that Jerome would grow up and be a nothing like me.” He waited for people to laugh, but they didn’t because he isn’t a nothing. He served in the Army and can fix everything except tables, and he has visited thirty-seven states and three countries, and my mom never should’ve left, because she broke his heart. You don’t leave the people you love. Not like that.

  He took a big swallow and said, “I was hard on him when he screwed up.” I couldn’t help nodding, even though it made my arrow bounce in kind of a painful way.

  “I was real hard on him.” His voice got quieter there.

  He stopped and sucked in a big breath of air. He also mashed his lips together in a line, and for a second, he looked up into the ceiling of the church like he might see me watching. Then he swallowed again.

  “Over time, I forgot to be anything but that, and I regret it. I regret it real deep. I didn’t know enough to know what I should really be afraid of, that Jerome wouldn’t grow up at all.” He stopped talking and folded one arm across his chest, and he used his other hand to hold up his head. He was quiet for a long time, but nobody heckled him or clapped or did anything stupid. People sat there, and the silence wrapped around them like it was something heavy.

  “I’d trade places with him if I could,” Dad said.

  It sounded like he was pushing the words through a screen, because they came out kind of chopped up. I had to listen real hard to hear too. “He wasn’t perfect, but he was a good kid. He was my kid. I’m going to miss him every day of my life.”

  I had to breathe out my mouth when I was watching that. My nose was busy fighting back that pinch that comes with crying, which I wanted to do worse than I ever did over no toast at a wedding.

  I spent most of my life feeling ashamed for letting my dad down all the time. I thought there was no way he could’ve loved me, especially since my mom left on account of me wearing her out. At best, he was letting me crash at his house because we had the same last name and ears. The main reason Mike and me did stupid Chevy was ’cause I figured it didn’t matter what I did — there was no hope for me, and life would be a long train of pain until it was over and done. It was like being born with my tail was a sign that I wasn’t much different from the Devil, and I didn’t try to make things turn out any other way.

  I was wrong about there being no hope for anything better, or about the dad loving me part. He did love me. He did have hope. He was doing his best. It wasn’t perfect. But you know what? I wouldn’t have known what to do with that anyhow.

  A tear worked its way out of my eye and slid down my cheek, warm and slow. I let it hang there for a while before I pushed it away with my thumb.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why’d he say that thing about me to his supervisor? That it took me long enough to get myself killed?”

  Gabe answered.

  “Sometimes, people say things they don’t mean to cover up their true feelings. It’s how they cope. It can be the only thing that holds together the pieces of a broken heart.”

  I sat there for a couple of minutes in the chair, trying to think of something to say. I had been wrong about most everything. Figuring that out tends to take the motor out of a guy’s mouth.

  In that space of quiet, I felt something change inside me, like a river had gushed over its edges or a wall had broken down, which is probably why Xavier and Gabe had shown me all this. I turned to them, and the braveness came on strong, like I was the soldier in the war movie who was about to volunteer to crawl through a ditch full of rattlesnakes and stuff the grenade right down the enemy’s pants.

  “I gotta confess something,” I said.

  And I did.

  Starting at the point where Heidi fell through the ice, and ending at the point where she disappeared with her dog.

  Xavier and Gabe didn’t say a word. Every once in a while they looked at each other’s faces, sending secret angel messa
ges probably. But they let me finish without sending any zaps of punishment. Just when I told them Heidi’s soul had crumbled into a million bits, probably while Howard watched, there were three little beeps and a funny smell.

  Then Howard popped into the room. He was shaking real hard and looked mad. At first I thought his head was on fire, but then I caught a whiff. Incense. Gabe can’t get enough of that stuff. I wasn’t the only one in trouble, and Howard’s hair was going to reek like the inside of a hippie’s van for days.

  “I was bringing her in, I swear! She’s fine, totally fine,” Howard said. “It’s him you should be punishing, not me! NOT ME!”

  He looked back and forth between Xavier and Gabe. But I was glad he was looking at them, because that meant he couldn’t see the shock on my face. If Howard was going to bring her in, that meant she wasn’t in a bunch of pieces. At least not yet.

  Her soul was whole, it was out there, and I was gonna find it. It didn’t matter what happened to me. My own life, it was over. I’d flasked up. Even when they gave me a second chance, I’d been a crummy guardian angel, messing with her all the time instead of helping her because I thought it didn’t matter, and besides, that’s what guys do when they sort of like a girl. I should’ve followed the commandments. I should’ve taken care of her like I was supposed to.

  But I could make things right. I had a second chance with her. Maybe those horses and men in the rhyme couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for Heidi. There was hope for her. Even after all that, there was still hope.

  So yeah. I was going to save her soul and goddammit — OW! — there was nobody who could stop me and no way I was gonna mess this up. I took off running and made it two whole feet before something that felt like the hand of God stopped me in my tracks.

  I couldn’t move. What the flask!

  Xavier was holding my shirt and wouldn’t let go. Lucky I didn’t listen to my first instinct, because punching is counterproductive when you are about to start a heroic rescue mission. Actually, it’s almost always counterproductive because noses are a lot harder to hit than most people realize. They’re small and they move around. Like mice.