Devine Intervention

by Martha Brockenbrough

  “Hey, man,” I said, calm-like. “Let go already.”

  “JEROME!”

  Gabe used his angel voice, so I stopped trying to get away. Howard laughed, but the sound cut off like he’d been unplugged. I turned around to look. Xavier had done this move on him with the soul-jack thing, and Howard was like an ice mummy, only without the bandages or the ice. He should’ve remembered that you’re not supposed to laugh at someone during disciplinary proceedings. There are consequences to every action. It’s all about the ripples.

  “THOU SHALT NOT PROCEED WITHOUT A PLAN,” Gabe said.

  I made my hands go up to my ears, but not fast enough. Stinking reverb. My arrow started to feel weird in my head, like it was the flaming kind instead of this sweet deluxe carbon composite that you can’t set on fire even with half a bottle of lighter fluid. It didn’t exactly hurt, but it felt weird and urgent, like before a sneeze.

  I tried to play cool when I said, “I do have a plan,” but Xavier and Gabe knew I was dishing a line of Chevy. They had the faces of people with good poker hands. I had the face of a guy who needed another card to make a pair of twos.

  We sat on our white chairs and I wished I’d at least picked ones with cushions. But for once, having a tail came in handy because it gave me a sort of an idea. I explained what I wanted to do. Gabe and Xavier had expressions on like they thought my plan sucked apples, and they were probably right since I was making it up as I went.

  “It’s highly irregular,” Gabe said. He ironed his mustache with his fingers. “We’d need to get some waivers from above.”

  “Waivers?” Xavier said. “Are you sure we can’t keep this quiet?”

  “What happens when we keep secrets from an all-powerful, all-knowing being?” Gabe said. He took a fresh toothpick from his vest pocket and slipped it into his mouth. That was his tell. He’d won the round.

  Xavier brushed something I couldn’t see off of his robe. There was a super-awkward pause, like the time my shop teacher found out what I’d been doing with the jigsaw and my driver’s ed manual.

  “You’re right, of course,” Xavier said. “Secrets are unacceptable in this realm. But what if we don’t get approval?”

  “Let’s just think about the most important thing here,” Gabe said. “Are we really going to let go of these lives? Or is there a more … creative solution?”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Xavier said.

  Gabe nodded and went full beaver on the toothpick. “It’s all a matter of timing and which forms we fill out.”

  He pulled a clipboard out of the pocket on his vest, which sounds like it would go against the laws of physics, but up here at least, those are laws we don’t have to follow. He checked off boxes on a piece of paper.

  “The 1087 is the one we use when we’re asking for retroactive permission,” he said. “The 1522 could be of use with the canine.”

  He might as well have been talking about how rockets work, for all I understood. But Xavier nodded and flicked some burnt incense off of Howard, who stood there like a bad statue.

  “What happens if we don’t get permission?” he said.

  “Then we ask for forgiveness,” Gabe said.

  Xavier stopped dusting and whistled real low.

  “I’ll have Howard’s activity chart in two minutes,” Gabe said. “That’ll give me enough data to send him down to Level III for a two-week detention for deceiving the girl. He’s not going to like the microfiche, but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? Then I’ll prepare the soul maps so we can see where the dog and girl have gone. Hopefully, there’s still enough of them left that we can get a clear readout.”

  “Sounds about right,” Xavier said.

  Howard in Hell. It was what I’d always wanted, but instead of feeling happy about it, I felt like someone was folding my stomach into an origami hat, so I tuned my thoughts in to Heidi instead, hoping she was hanging in there.

  Gabe fiddled with his portable tracking device and squinted, more out of habit than anything. In Heaven, everyone can see clear. He whammy-fingered a map that showed two sets of lines zigzagging like crazy all around a street I recognized as Heidi’s. So that’s how they always knew where we were and what we’d been doing. Flask. I had no secrets from these guys. No wonder I hadn’t graduated.

  “This is where their souls have been roaming,” Gabe said. “This one — the one with lots of running back and forth — belongs to the dog. The other one, the really faint one, belongs to the girl. Her tracks have faded almost to nothing, and she’s traveling by car, so her soul’s not leaving as much residue as it otherwise would.

  “The trail will be extremely difficult to follow, even with this uploaded into your head. You’ll have to use your best judgment to figure out where it leads. Trust it, though. You’ll know when she’s near. And be quick. Even with the protection of her dog’s body, she doesn’t have much time left.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t say anything because my throat felt like it was made out of glass and would crack if I tried to talk.

  “Don’t be a hero out there,” Xavier said. “Just do it one step at a time, like we talked about. You have only one shot at this.”

  Then Xavier and Gabe started talking about me like I wasn’t there.

  “That thing in his forehead might get in the way,” Xavier said. He stuck his hand in his robe and pulled out an apple, which he polished with his wide sleeve.

  “I was hoping it would fall off on its own,” Gabe said. “Like a baby’s umbilical stump. It was on the checklist.”

  “I sometimes wonder how reliable the checklist is,” Xavier said. He wiped his lips on a little hanky that came from another pocket.

  Gabe sighed. “Let’s table this discussion until later. Tempus fugit and all.”

  I wasn’t sure what Gabe meant by “table.” The room didn’t have one. And I had no clue what a tempus fugit was. But I was glad they’d stopped talking about my arrow. It was starting to itch something fierce. If you’ve ever had a scab get hard and ripe, like a cracker, then you know that feeling. It comes with a voice. A voice that is all, Pick it! Yank it right off! Probably won’t even bleed!

  There was no way I was going to do that. That thing hurt like a motherflasker when anyone touched it. I’d learned to keep my hands away from the goods, like you have to do in the 7-Eleven so they don’t accuse you of taking the five-finger discount.

  “Um, guys?” I said. “I think I should probably get going. Heidi needs me.”

  Xavier and Gabe looked at each other. If they weren’t angels, I would say it was a sneaky look.

  Gabe said, “We’re going to bless you, Jerome.”

  And Xavier said, “Yes, and if you want to close your eyes to receive the blessing, you may.”

  “What if I don’t want to?” When I was alive, anytime someone said, “Close your eyes, Jerome,” I usually ended up with my head in the toilet and my underwear yanked up to my shoulders.

  “We’re not going to give you a wedgie,” Xavier said. “Or a swirly.”

  Have I said he can read minds? It’s creepy.

  I closed my eyes and waited for Gabe to start the prayer. Then I felt a sandal on my chest and a whomping yank in the middle of my head and then there was a sucking noise and a pop like someone had opened a can of soda, and then a fizzy white explosion of pain.

  I said things that made my sensor go off like a box of firecrackers, which made my head feel like it was one of those dinger things on the inside of a huge bell, all smacked and vibrating. For what felt like hours but was probably less time than it takes a halfway decent car to go from zero to 80, I let the pain have its way with my soul. It wasn’t like I deserved anything less, considering.

  The pain stopped when Gabe put his hand on my forehead. I realized I was lying on the ground and there was slobber coming out of my mouth.

  “See,” Gabe said. “He was ready.”

  He took his clipboard and a pen out and made a check mark.

/>   “He’s shown selflessness,” Xavier said. “And courage. But I admit — I still didn’t think it was going to work.” He pulled floss out of his pocket and went to town on his teeth.

  “Honestly,” Gabe said, “neither did I. I thought he was still holding on to too much anger. And a teeny tiny part of me thinks that the tip of the arrow was magnetically attracted to the skull phone. That bit was maybe our fault.”

  He did this little heh-heh-heh laugh. So did Xavier.

  “Bneh,” I said.

  “Pardon?” Xavier said.

  It took a minute for my words to come back. It was all pain carbonation. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it dripping on the floor.

  “That hurt,” I said. I put my hand on my forehead. I wasn’t going to fiddle with the hole or anything, but I was curious about the size of it and whether I was going to have to stick something in there to make people not stare, like maybe a rock or a quarter, depending.

  “Why isn’t there a hole?” I said.

  “Did you want a hole?” Xavier said. “Most people appreciate their improved physical appearance after rehab.”

  “After rehab? You mean —”

  “Yes,” Gabe said. “You’ve graduated, Jerome.”

  My hands went all numbly-tingly for a second. At first I was thinking that all you had to do to graduate was kill your human. But then I figured it out. I needed to put myself on the line to save her. In being willing to save someone else, I’d saved myself.

  “So I get to go to Heaven right now?” I said. All quiet-like, I reached behind me for my tail, the thing that made me think for my whole life I was nothing more than a devil. That was gone too. “But what about Heidi?”

  “You could,” Gabe said. “It’s right through that door.”

  Great. The first time I didn’t need special pants, and I was about to have to wear a robe forever. I looked where he was pointing. Sure enough, a door I’d never seen before was there, twinkling a little bit around the edges, like someone had outlined it with glitter glue. Alls I had to do was cross the room and open it, and I’d be there. It was maybe ten steps away.

  Ten steps I couldn’t — wouldn’t — take.

  “That’s pretty stupid,” I said. Gabe and Xavier looked like they’d swallowed something spicy. “Why would I want to go to Heaven now, you motherflaskers? I gotta go help Heidi before it’s too late.” There was a little schloop sound and the door disappeared. “Hey. Is that coming back?”

  “It wasn’t really a door to Heaven,” Xavier said. “It was one last test. You passed. You don’t actually have a choice even though we were required by Heavenly law to give you the illusion of one as a final test of your soul. You have to save this girl.”

  No one ever tells you this when you’re alive, but angels can be real applehats.

  “What if I’d gone through that door?” I said. “What would’ve happened to me? What would’ve happened to Heidi?”

  Gabe stuck a fresh toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “For your sake, it’s a good thing you didn’t go through the door. Knowing Xavier, he would have stopped you, even if interference of that sort is a code violation.”

  “But what about Heidi?” I said. “Is this gonna work?”

  “We don’t want you to get your hopes up, Jerome,” Xavier said. “Sometimes, souls are just … lost. Nobody likes it, but in the grand scheme of things, considering the billions of souls there are in the universe, the occasional evaporation of one or two still means we have an unparalleled record when it comes to the promotion and endurance of life, human and otherwise.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off.

  “Lost?” I didn’t like the look on his face or the feeling in my stomach. I had to get going.

  “You’re going to need my nuts,” Xavier said. He reached into his robe and I almost hurled because I didn’t want to touch anything that personal. But then he handed me a sack of actual nuts from his lobby and I got his drift. They were bait. And maybe a nice snack afterward. “Whatever you do, don’t let the squirrel actually eat one.”

  Time slowed down as I got myself ready to shoop out of the room. I heard Gabe and Xavier whisper to each other. They sounded weird and slow, like the way people do on TV when a kidnapper is trying to disguise his voice. But it did help me pick up most of what they were saying.

  “Should we tell him all the details of her condition?” Xavier said.

  “No,” Gabe said. “He has to discover that on his own.”

  “If he does succeed,” Xavier said, “what’s going to happen to him?”

  “We’ll invoke the Easter clause,” Gabe said, which made me think he was mixing up Santa and the Easter Bunny. Maybe my head was still fizzing from the arrow yank. “It’s what Jerome really wants anyway. More than all this.”

  “Won’t that be dangerous?” Xavier said. “I mean —”

  I tried to slow down my shoop a minute so I could keep listening, but once you’ve started, it’s hard to change gears. Their words kept fading out, like an AM radio in the rain.

  “He’s broken every commandment. So has the girl.”

  “Those are the commandments for the dead, Xavier,” Gabe said. “For the —”

  Then my shoop was done and time speeded up and I couldn’t hear them anymore and even if I could, I didn’t get what they were talking about. But I didn’t care about it any more than a rat cares about roller skates. I’d lived. I’d died. I’d seen the borders of Heaven and Hell. The truth was, I didn’t fit in anywhere, and the one person in the world who needed me had only a little time left before her soul turned into dust. If there was any way I could stop that from happening, I would.

  I hoped the squirrel would understand.

  Appendix G: The Ten Commandments for the Living

  I. THOU SHALT HAVE COURAGE.

  II. THOU SHALT BE LOYAL.

  III. THOU SHALT TELL THE TRUTH.

  IV. THOU SHALT HAVE FAITH IN THYSELF AND OTHERS.

  V. THOU SHALT FORGIVE.

  VI. THOU SHALT BE HUMBLE.

  MEGAN STOOD AT the door, damp-haired, wearing her favorite striped shirt.

  “Oh my God! Jiminy! What are you doing here? Good thing my mom’s at her psychic ladies’ circle or you’d be halfway home, courtesy of a swift kick from one of her Birkenstocks.”

  She took a closer look at the doll sticking out of Heidi’s mouth. “Oh no! Bad dog, Jiminy! Drop!” Heidi dropped Vincent on Mrs. Lin’s Tibetan rug. “How did you get this? Was it Heidi’s? She never told me she —” Her gaze traveled to the cast and she changed her tone. “Hey, buddy. Aw, what happened to your leg?”

  Without waiting for an answer, because who would, from a dog, Megan carried Heidi down the hall. The pain was overwhelming, but Heidi knew she wouldn’t have to hang on that much longer. She’d already exceeded her soul’s time limit, and Jiminy’s body was fading fast. Megan laid her on the bed, and Heidi sank into the soft, clean blankets. The scent of geranium laundry soap glazed the aching parts of Heidi, taking the sharp bits off the pain, infusing her soul with the illusion that it was still a thing of substance.

  Heidi looked up. Megan was wiping Vincent Lionheart down with a tissue. Two tears raced each other down the sides of her nose. A plaintive sound escaped her mouth, and Heidi covered her nose with her paw.

  “What’s wrong, boy? Are you hurting?” Megan sat lightly on the bed next to Heidi, scratching behind her ears. “You miss her too, don’t you?” she said. “Is that why you came to visit? This is hard, really hard. But it probably won’t be all that much longer.”

  Heidi’s ears pricked up. How could Megan know that? Was it that obvious that Jiminy was dying, or were Megan’s psychic powers actually developing? Heidi felt a powerful urge to tell her everything that had happened so they could sift the mystery together the way they used to examine and polish every facet of the daily school dramas.

  Words expanded in her throat, threatening to rise out of her mouth. But the sound
of her voice was so awful and the truth so upsetting, Heidi couldn’t let herself do it. Megan didn’t need to know what had happened. She needed to know she’d been a good friend, sometimes goofy and embarrassing, but always loyal, always beloved.

  Heidi lifted her head — Jiminy’s head — and rested it in Megan’s lap, staring into her eyes and into that part of Megan that had seen something worth caring about in her. She sent a message of love and felt her heart shift, like the final piece of a puzzle snapping into place, and a sad and sweet sensation overwhelmed her, the feeling she got when she turned the last page of a good book.

  The phone rang. Megan glanced at it over her shoulder. She sighed and slipped Heidi’s head gently off her lap.

  “Hello?” Then came a brief silence. Her face blanched as she whispered into the phone. “Okay. Can’t — I’ll — I’ll be here.”

  She returned to the bed, curling around Jiminy’s body.

  “That was the call, Jiminy.” She buried her face in Jiminy’s fur. “Heidi … she’s brain-dead. They’re taking her off life support in half an hour. They told me I could be there, but I don’t think I can handle it. I’m not that strong. I’m going to send her psychic messages instead.” She sat up, closed her eyes, and pressed her fingers to her temples.

  For a moment, Heidi was in such shock she couldn’t feel her legs, let alone move them. She wasn’t dead. She hadn’t drowned for good. They must have revived her body after her soul came loose, and now, because she’d been roaming with Jerome, sniffing cookie essence, riding trains, and trying to keep Jiminy’s corpse alive, her own real self was about to be unplugged from the machines sustaining it.

  She’d been stupid. So stupid. She felt the way she did when she was playing a board game with Rory at the moment she’d taken her hand from the piece she’d just moved and instantaneously realized she’d made a terrible, unfixable mistake.

  Her ears filled with a strange, limping thump, like the sound of a basketball on a court. It was a heartbeat. Jiminy’s. Meanwhile, her own was beating its last somewhere halfway across town. She’d be there for her final moment, or she’d die trying. She had no hope that her soul was strong enough to reenter her body so that the two parts of her could leave the world together; she prayed only that Jiminy’s body was strong enough to carry her the last few steps. The pain alone made it obvious to her he had only a little time left.