Suddenly the bright light started turning a beautiful honey gold color. Everything glowed. Sarah looked at her hands, and even they glowed. Everything was sunshine gold. Apple jelly gold. If she was in heaven, it smelled like apple jelly—wasn’t that funny? Gold fell over Sarah’s arm, warm as the sun.
This was the most beautiful place Sarah had ever seen. She couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. Water splashed from a waterfall and ran into a beautiful stream that seemed to be singing as it flowed along its path. Peace and joy filled the air—and singing. The hills and valleys seemed to be singing. The mountains were singing. Singing from every direction. Singing in every tone and tongue, yet no note discordant. Singing about a God who loved more than Sarah could even begin to imagine.
Then suddenly she was inside Annie’s house, the one Annie had when Sarah was a child, but everything looked absolutely perfect. There were jars of gold liquid so rich and clear in the window, and she thought she heard her grandmother singing like she used to. “We shall tread the streets of go-o-oold.”
Sarah felt a longing inside. She wanted the peace and joy that surrounded her to be in her heart. She ached for the innocent wonder she’d lost, for the little girl who’d yearned for an embrace, a smile, anything from her mother, the little girl who’d found approval only in her grandmother’s arms. She didn’t want to be afraid anymore. She wanted to rest.
Sarah had heard plenty about how to get into heaven. She remembered hearing about how Jesus knocks on the door of your heart and if you open the door he will come in. She had heard the Christmas and Easter stories—how Jesus was born in a manger, to a virgin girl. How he died for her sins on a cross and was raised from the dead. Was this what she’d believed when she was a little girl?
Was she dreaming? Sarah wondered. Because if this was heaven, she didn’t think she had any right to be here.
But maybe it wasn’t heaven. Even as she took in the room, she realized that she was lying in a bed with a quilt draped over her and a soft pillow beneath her head. Someone had taken great pains to make her comfortable. Besides, she hadn’t prayed or asked for God’s forgiveness for anything since she’d been eleven years old.
She had believed then. Annie believed in Jesus, and Sarah wanted to also. She let Annie pray a prayer with her inviting Jesus to live in her heart, and she remembered believing that he was in there after that. She even talked to him, asking for his help. How was it that her simple childhood faith dissolved so quickly as she grew older?
Suddenly Sarah remembered. She’d left Tom Roscoe waiting for her! He’d be in his office by now and Nathan Cornish would be well on his way and Tom would be gnashing his teeth that she’d disregarded the request of a client. Panic rushed through her like an electric current. Her clattering heart banged in her ears, more dissonant than plates in a downtown diner.
Tom Roscoe would have her cleaning out her desk before the end of the day.
I don’t have time to be here, wherever “here” is.
She felt she was being pulled in two different directions by two different worlds: the one she was experiencing for the first time—the bright, golden, warm, loving, peaceful, happy one; and the one she was accustomed to—the one with constant frustration, pain, disappointment, and never-ending pressure to perform.
I’ve got to use my cell and find Leo and have him get Roscoe on the line. But she couldn’t find her cell phone. She wanted to order someone to do something. Now that would make her feel better. Have him make some crazy excuse for me; I don’t care what he says. Just tell him to get me out of this. But when she tried to speak, nothing came.
The golden glow seemed to be taking over again. Sarah’s panic was being swallowed up in peace. What she felt right now was infinitely better than the anxiety she felt when she thought of Tom Roscoe, her cell phone, being late for the meeting, and the possibility of getting fired.
She heard someone tramping up the steps to the porch and fiddling with the doorknob. “Please. You’ve got to find my cell and—” The door swung open. When a man entered, Sarah’s words lodged in her throat.
“Bryl-creem,” the stranger sang as he pushed his way inside.
Only he wasn’t a stranger anymore, not really, because Sarah had met him once before. “A little dab’ll do you. Use more only if you dare! But watch out, the gals will all pursue you. They’ll love to put their fingers through your hair.” Which seemed an absolutely ridiculous song for him to be singing since the sparse hanks of hair springing from his head looked more like a badly weeded thistle patch than anything a girl might want to run her fingers through.
“You!” Sarah felt every muscle and nerve in her body come to attention when she recognized him. “What are you doing? Get out! You… you don’t have any right to be here!”
“Seems to me,” he noted, “you’d better figure out where you are before you start telling me if I have a right to be here or not.”
“You’re following my family! I know you are!” Sarah lost the pillow on the floor and grappled for the quilt to shield her chest. “You’re stalking us.”
The man broke into a whistle and shouldered the sugar bag.
“He’s our friend,” Mitchell had said the last time she’d laid eyes on this man. “I saw him at the Cubs game.”
Sarah clenched the quilt. “Who are you? Why are you here? What’s so important that you’ve got to follow me—” She glanced around the room. Where?
He took one step forward and, shooting bullets with her eyes, she bunched the quilt tight as a barrel around her. Still, she couldn’t shake the odd feeling. In one way she felt afraid of the man but at the same time, she sensed his kindness.
Apparently her reaction didn’t ruffle him much. He barely even glanced her way before he plopped the heavy sugar bag on the sideboard with a resounding thwack.
“Guess you’ll figure it out directly.”
He started whistling. Sarah noticed a slight grin on his face before he was suddenly gone.
For the first time Sarah surveyed her surroundings. The house did look just like her grandmother’s house. With its narrow linoleum-covered counter and its sink as big around as Cook County and its single pipe buttressed beneath it in the shape of a bent knee. Somehow these old household belongings looked brand-new even though the style of them was old. A gleaming Zenith radio perched on a table beside an upholstered chair with crocheted doilies draped over each arm. The gas range squatted in the corner like an overdressed guest, its legs Betty Grable curvy, its black knobs winking like buttons on a bodice.
The stove’s brushed-nickel plaque announced its maker with simple new-minted pride: Kalamazoo. Sarah didn’t understand what was going on, but she kept thinking how totally beautiful everything was. It had a beauty that was beyond anything she had ever seen or read about or imagined.
A steady flame licked the bases of two shiny new aluminum pots. Tongs rested sideways on the counter. Sunlight spilled over rows of empty canning jars. Skeins of vapor rose from the pots, scalloping the windowpanes. Everywhere, the smell of home-grown McIntosh apples. Mouth-pucker tart, yet sweet as honey and crispy as spice—the way her grandmother had always described them “back in the day.”
The cell phone beeped beside her, and Sarah practically fell out of bed trying to get to it. She knocked over a lamp in the process, but managed to grab it before it toppled to the floor. What was she doing here in a bed like some sick person, anyway? She kicked her legs out of the tangled quilt and performed a level-four gymnastics move so she wouldn’t end up on the ground.
Maybe Leo was trying to find her. Or maybe a nervous client needed reassurance about oil prices. It could be one of the firm’s senior partners, seeking her input on the precious-metals fund. Sarah flipped the phone open, intent on taking the call. With anticipation hammering in her ears, she surveyed the screen, expecting a number she recognized.
SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL.
It took precious seconds for the words to register and her hopes to plummet.
“What do you mean, searching for signal? I always have signal!”
Only then did she realize the beeps sounded at regular intervals. LOW BATTERY. In desperation, she pried open the battery panel, yanked out the battery, and slammed it back in its place. Once again, she checked the screen. Nothing had changed. The red indicator flashed its warning. The narrow bar stood empty.
Someone had dressed her in a nightgown. The clothes she had donned in haste this morning flapped in the breeze on the clothesline outdoors. Sarah frowned. The sight of her blouse flapping its arms at her, the skirt kicking up its narrow pleat, made her freeze in her tracks. A chill raced the length of her spine. Suddenly she remembered this morning. She remembered the bridge and the water. She remembered Joe. She remembered what happened before she’d gotten here.
With her hopes dashed and fear tugging her insides, Sarah glared at the phone. As if in defiance, the final three-note alarm rang and the thing shut itself off in her palm.
“You really think that phone’s going to do you any good in this place?”
Sarah lifted her eyes toward the owner of the voice. If it had been any other time, if she’d been eleven years old again, if Annie Cattalo had been seventy, Sarah would have shouted, “Oh my goodness! Oh my word!” and launched herself laughing into the woman’s arms. But not this moment when the woman standing before her was beautiful and young, a pinup girl instead of an old woman, as vigorous and sparkling as all the other articles in the house. Not this moment when her grandmother seemed more like a youthful actress out of a World War II movie than anyone Sarah had known before. Not this moment with the grave memory of squealing tires, descending barricades, and pounding water leaving Sarah’s stomach to pitch with nausea and regret.
“Annie.” No more than a breathless whisper. A beloved name. “Did I die? Did I drown? Am I in heaven, or am I dreaming?”
Her grandmother propped her hands on the hips of her red polka-dotted dress and pressed her calves together like a model in the Buy More War Bonds poster. “We’ll have a conversation about that.”
Now Sarah knew who’d dressed her in the nightgown—it suddenly made perfect sense. Annie had been the one to take care of her, even before her mother had finally married Harold. When Sarah was little, whenever this woman had come to visit, Annie had been the one to lift her from the sofa when Sarah was left watching television and had fallen asleep alone. This woman had been the one to whisper, “Sarah, sweetie, will you wake up a little bit? Let’s get you into bed,” as she tugged the shirt over Sarah’s head. “Can you get your arm in here for me?” as she helped work an elbow through small pajama sleeves.
Still, Sarah wasn’t one to get sidetracked by sappy memories. “Wherever we are, I don’t have time to be here. I have to get back.”
Gone was the fine silver hair Sarah remembered so well. In its place, lacquered yellow curls jutted forward like a finch’s nest ready to topple from a tree. She was a lot younger, but it was Annie all right. Sarah would have known Annie at any age.
The woman narrowed her eyes and shook her head with the same spunk that would continue to serve her kindly over the decades. “Oh, you’ve got everything all scheduled for yourself? You have the plan figured out, do you?” Annie stood before Sarah with her knee cocked and her mouth in a dubious pucker. “All I’ve got to say to you is this, young lady.” She brandished a paring knife and attacked another apple. “You’d better be careful what you pray for. Otherwise you might just get it.”
“I haven’t prayed for anything in thirty years,” Sarah said.
“Actually you have,” Annie reminded her. “You told God you couldn’t go on anymore the way you were. And anything you say to God is a prayer.”
Well, Sarah hadn’t thought of that.
Apple skin peeled off in one perfect, red spiral. Annie met her granddaughter’s eyes with such intensity, Sarah worried Annie might slice her thumb. “I have prayed,” Annie said. “And so has Joe. And that’s the reason I’m here now.”
“Joe prayed?” Sarah asked. “You’re here because of Joe?”
“No.” Annie retrieved another shiny McIntosh, polished it against her apron, and turned it in her fingers. “I’m here because of Jesus. Because he loves you and has a plan for your life. One that you have been totally missing.”
Sarah’s grandmother scrabbled through a drawer and came up with an extra blade. “I was beginning to think you might sleep until sunset. How about some help paring these apples?”
But Sarah wasn’t one to be diverted. “If we’re in heaven, we don’t have to go through all this, do we?” she asked. “Couldn’t we just get it over with? You could take me by the hand and walk me right up and you could introduce me to Jesus, couldn’t you?”
On the shelf above Annie’s head stood a small ancient clock, “Enfield” written in script on its face, with its crystal missing. When Annie saw that its hands weren’t moving, she eyed it disagreeably and gave it one good whump. Still, its hands didn’t move.
“Don’t you see? That’s what I did every day of your life from the day you were born until you turned eleven and I got taken on to Glory—I tried to introduce you to Jesus, but maybe this time I get to introduce you to yourself as well.”
Annie felt amiable enough to banter back and forth with the fellow who kept appearing at the window, but Sarah felt anything but. She felt afraid every time he came around. The knife shuddered every time she sliced an apple. She shot countless furtive glances in his direction, trying to figure him out.
There had been bushel baskets of apples to peel, core, and pare. Each of Annie’s peels came off in one perfect, single whorl. Sarah’s came off in a pile of stubby, short slices because her nerves made her clumsy. Sarah nicked herself again and, with a sharp cry of pain, sucked her thumb.
“Are you going to tell me who that man is and what he’s doing here?” Sarah asked, letting the knife clatter to the counter. With the knuckle of her injured hand, she swiped at her hair-plastered forehead. “Is he a friend of yours or something?”
“Who? Wingtip? A friend of mine?” Annie pressed her hand against her apron sash and gave a hearty laugh, which didn’t make Sarah breathe any easier. “Of course he’s my friend. In this place, we’re all friends.”
Sarah commented, “His name really is Wingtip,” her voice dry.
As if mention of his name had caused him to spring forth, Wingtip appeared in the open window again and crossed his arms on the sill. “Sure it is.” He shot Sarah the same broad grin she remembered from the clothing bin in Chicago. He lifted a foot so she could see the wingtip. “Guess the Heavenly Father thought it’d be cute to name an angel after his shoes.”
So that’s why Annie had teased him about living in eternity.
Some other person might have accepted this angel information with awed reverence. But not Sarah. She searched her mind, rifling through the details from that day on LaSalle Street. She accosted him with the same vigor as an attorney defending her rights. “Why were you following us that day? Are you what they call a guardian angel? Why would you think I’m someone who needs looking after?”
“In God’s kingdom, we don’t get to order up our own duties. The way it works, we all do what we are asked and we do it with great joy.”
Well. Maybe she hadn’t expected that answer. Sarah gave every ounce of her attention to the McIntosh in her hand. She set it down hard on the counter and, with one flash of the knife, sliced it in half. “I don’t believe you.” The apple fell in two, revealing a core and seeds.
“That’s your problem, Sarah,” he responded. “You don’t believe in anything except what you can see and touch and accomplish by your own effort.” He paused before continuing on. “I tell you, that kid you got, Sarah, he’s something special. You ever notice his rally cap punched inside out? The way he pumps his fist at those come-from-behind runs? Now, how cute is that? Your kid knows how to enjoy life, that’s for certain.”
“Well, of course I’ve seen all of that.
He’s my son.”
“Kid bites his tongue every time he keeps track on his scorecard. You noticed that?”
“I have,” she lied.
“As a matter of fact, you don’t see most things that are really worth noticing and remembering. When he gets stats wrong on that card, he pushes his glasses up his nose and erases so hard he leaves a hole in the paper. Have you seen that?”
“Just stop it. Please.”
“When he swallows his gum, he—”
Resentment and pain sliced through her. “Please. I’ll picture it every minute of eternity that I’m gone from them. Please stop asking me what I’ve seen and not seen.” Now that Sarah had lost so much, she realized she’d never taken the time to be grateful for even the most basic things. She’d never even thought to be grateful for being alive. “I am very aware that I failed at being a good wife and mother.”
Anyone could see at that moment that Sarah cared about her boy.
“That kid of yours sort of gets me right here.” Wingtip thumped his chest right above his heart. “Come to think of it, he’s a little version of his mama. Quite the little math whiz.” He shook his head as if he’d just realized something. “Guess that means I’ve taken a liking to you too.”
Sarah Harper would go after a good argument any day. Here she stood, bursting with angry pain, raring to go at it. Just let him say she didn’t measure up as a mom. Just let him say she did everything wrong. She’d take him on about all of it!
But Wingtip’s gentle humor gave her pause. The care in his eyes disarmed her. As fast as the fight had flown into her, it seeped out again. “Can you see my family from where we are?” she asked with hope in her eyes.
Wingtip nodded. Yes.
“Are they okay?”
“They’re being looked after, just like you always were.”
Any Minute: A Novel Page 12