Proof of Heaven

by Mary Curran Hackett

  She reminded herself of his wisdom as she brushed her teeth without looking up at herself again in the mirror. Then she turned out the lights and headed off to her bedroom. If life had taught Cathleen Magee anything, it was this: No matter what, the morning always came and whatever it brought her—a note on the mirror, a trip to the hospital—she would survive as long as her brother and son were by her side.

  Chapter 12

  Sean woke up abruptly feeling the violent, burning surge lurching up his esophagus. For a second he had forgotten where he was—on Cathleen’s couch—so when he stood up and headed toward what he thought was his own bathroom, he tripped over the coffee table, causing his half-filled glass of club soda and whiskey to spill across the table and soak Cathleen’s Elle Décor.

  “Shitgoddammitall,” he said, stumbling over the table, ignoring the mess. He knew he had only seconds to get to the bathroom.

  Once down the hall, he slammed the bathroom door shut behind him and began making a loud retching sound that echoed in the toilet.

  Cathleen sprang out of bed immediately and screamed out, “You all right in there, Sean?”

  “Yeah, fine. Nothing to worry about,” Sean whispered, staring into the bowl. Without looking, he reached behind himself, grabbed Cathleen’s bath towel, and wiped what he thought was the usual clear liquid dripping out of his nose. When he pulled the towel away, he noticed a mixture of fluorescent-colored bile tinged with blood. He stared for a second and then stood up in front of the mirror. He looked for cuts on his lips, but then he realized the blood was coming from his stomach. The thought of this made him gag again, and when he looked at the vomit in the bowl, he saw the green and red swirl.

  “Never, ever again,” he whispered to himself. “Never.”

  “Seriously, Sean, are you OK? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, don’t worry about me. You’ve got enough to worry about. Nothing a solid Bloody Mary won’t fix.” He laughed, trying to make an ill-timed joke.

  “Geez, Sean.”

  “I’m joking. Come on! It’s nothing.”

  “Well, hurry up in there. I want to get ready and get to the hospital before Colm wakes up,” Cathleen said, shaking her head and trying to hold back her usual tirade against his drinking.

  “Give me a minute,” Sean said as he wiped down the bowl with the towel and then ran it through the cold water under the sink. The blood wouldn’t give and soaked deeply into the fibers. There was no way to hide it from her, he thought. He looked at the window and back at his reflection and shook his head, saying to himself, You’re a first-class idiot.

  Without waiting another second, he quickly opened the window and threw the blood-soaked towel out, promising himself he would swing around the alley and pick it up later. He was shocked at how adept he had become at hiding how excessive his drinking had become again. Even if he knew he wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all his sister, it made him feel better to at least pretend he had it under control. This, he thought, was the worst part—the tiny deceits. The little lies he told to get through the day, to get out of the bathroom, because of the shame and embarrassment of it all.

  After he shut the window and flushed again, he opened the door and stepped out. “It’s all yours, madam.”

  “You look like hell, Sean. When are you going to knock this off? I thought you were going to start going back to meetings?” Cathleen said to Sean, who pretended to look surprised that she could tell he had been drinking.

  “Naw. That shit’s for quitters. But when I do go back, you’ll be the first to know . . . and the first to bitch about that, too.”

  “I give up,” she said, exasperated, and threw up her arms.

  “Love you too, Ms. Morning Sunshine.”

  Cathleen hated to do it, but she cracked a smile. He always had a way of disarming her—by reminding her of who she really was—a royal pain in the ass to him.

  Sean walked into Cathleen’s bedroom and noticed her laptop open on the bed. She had been up late, he could tell, probably doing research again. If he had been awake, he thought, he could have stopped her from this, stopped her from driving herself mad with worry.

  “Hey, Cate, mind if I check my e-mail?” Sean shouted through the door.

  “Go ahead. Computer is open. Just wake it up,” she said, turning on the shower.

  He walked over and sat on her bed and clicked. He had no intention of checking his e-mail. He was curious about what his sister was up to—what she found out. Sean pulled down her history and could tell by the amount of sites she visited that she spent the better part of the night stressing herself out by looking at medical journals dedicated to dysautonomia, pacemakers, MSA, heart defects, and brain ailments.

  He started clicking through all of her sites and stopped suddenly when he saw a Favorites tab open, which contained a link to a website named “Miracles Happen.” On the site was a forum for all sorts of people who had died and come back to life—and all who attributed their revival not to science but to miracles. And several people claimed that while they were dead, they had been to heaven and had seen proof of an afterlife. Physicians from the University of Pennsylvania Near-Death Study program, the president of the International Association of Near-Death Studies, and previous near-death survivors were all quoted or cited. Priests, reverends, pastors, rabbis, theologians—all came together on the issue to talk about the veracity of God, and how near-death experiences always served as proof of God’s miraculous interventions, proof of his existence. Scientists and researchers who explained how the body works, some explaining that near-death experiences were nothing more than the final stages of brain failure—the cells, slowly dying, creating a dreamlike twilight just before it all ends—were discounted and refuted as quacks. Science couldn’t possibly hold all the answers. Miracles did and do happen.

  Sean looked up from the screen, shook his head, and said, “Please, tell me she is not buying this bull.” Everyone, it seemed to Sean, had a story, had a way to rationalize, explain, and defend the afterlife—and not one of them had a clue, a real clue, what they were talking about.

  In the bathroom, Cathleen stepped into the shower and marveled at how things had started to turn around. Despite the horrific diagnosis Dr. Basu delivered yesterday, she couldn’t explain it, but it felt, dare she say, “good” to know that this wasn’t all in her head—or in her son’s. That there was now a name for what was happening to Colm—and that there was a real enemy, something, anything, to actually fight against. More than that, after reading information on all the sites, she was convinced that all these doctors, scientists, and theorists were just wrong about her son’s prognosis. There was always a cure. There had to be. And yes, there were limits to what science could do, but not to what the heart could do—not to what God could do.

  Buoyed by the stories of miracles on the newly discovered Miracles Happen website, she felt more certain than ever that God was on her side for once, and that perhaps the monsignor and the website were right—miracles do happen. She was even a little surprised by Sean’s ability to step up yesterday. He actually stuck around all day at the hospital and stayed with her last night. He called in sick to work too. He had never done that for her before. She had always been the one caring for him.

  When they were teenagers living with their mom, he was always so distracted by his studies that she stepped in and took care of the details he let slip. He seemed to be so driven, drunk then only on the possibility of flight. He had had a singular purpose, and so while he was off studying or volunteering, she did his laundry, signed his forms, arranged for his tuxedos for the proms. When he was applying to college, she set up a calendar with due dates and wrote the checks for his SATs and college applications, things her mother, who never went to college, had no idea how to do.

  But then when things didn’t go as planned, and even later still, after he became a firefighter, she still kept helping him, enabling him, one of his old AA sponsors once accused her. She opened his bank acco
unt and had the rent pulled automatically to make sure they never lost the rent-controlled apartment his mother left him after she died. She ran interference with certain friends, asking them to call her if they ever saw Sean at certain bars. Sean didn’t think his sister knew that he spent a good amount of his paycheck at Eamonn’s across the river, but she was always one step ahead of him. She kept the account numbers and passwords for herself, and when she or his friends hadn’t heard from him for too long, she could log into his account to see where he had been the night before. She never went looking for him or embarrassed him by dragging him off a barstool, but she was always vigilant.

  For the first time in years, she felt relieved that she didn’t have to handle something—anything at all—on her own. She exhaled and felt good, surprisingly rested and fresh, despite the lack of sleep. She felt like she was finally turning a corner, and beyond it were some answers, some ways to fix Colm. She turned off the shower and reached for her towel. Her hand slipped out from behind the curtain and slapped the cold metal bar as she fumbled for it, and then she pulled back the curtain and looked around.

  “Where in the hell . . . Hey, Sean! Would you grab me a towel from the hall closet? I don’t know what happened to mine.”

  Startled, Sean slammed the laptop shut and ran to the hall to grab his sister a towel, and he slipped it through the door.

  Cathleen wrapped her hair, put on her robe, stepped out past him, and slid into her room.

  As she was about to shut the door, Sean yelled back at her, “Wait a minute, Sis.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t get mad, but I was snooping around on your computer.”

  “I’m not mad. I don’t have anything to hide. And I’m the last person who should be mad at you for snooping.”

  “I saw you were probably up half the night—and I saw that crazy site—the one you tabbed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Miracles Happen.”

  “So?”

  “I just don’t want you setting yourself up . . . for some . . . I don’t know . . . some heartbreak.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Sean. I was just doing some research, that’s all.”

  “I know you though. I know what you’re thinking. You’re the person who thought praying would cure Mom’s cancer. You’re the one who thought praying was going to make that jackass father of Colm’s show up at the hospital and actually give a damn about you two. You’re the one who thought all I needed to do was accept that there’s a Higher Power, and I’d quit the sauce. It just doesn’t work that way. You can’t go hide out in church. You can’t go buying that crap the monsignor is selling—wholesale. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He just doesn’t. That’s all I am saying. For whatever it’s worth, I hope you listen to me for once.”

  “Wow, you don’t know anything about me. You don’t know anything about Monsignor. What do you know about faith or miracles or anything? Huh? You can’t get through a day, let alone a Mass, without taking a drink.”

  “Hey, it’s not my fault they serve the sauce there. What am I supposed to do—not drink it?”

  Cathleen cracked a smile; he was quick, that was for sure, she thought. But she remembered again what she was angry with him about. “Sean, you have no right to judge me. You’re one to talk. You don’t know anything that you haven’t gotten from a bottle!”

  “Well, I may drink my stupid, but you get your stupid someplace else altogether. Your son is sick. Sick! And you’re praying for miracles instead of listening to the doctors. Instead of getting ready . . . preparing yourself for the wor—”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Don’t even say it.”

  Sean looked at her and felt like getting sick again. He didn’t know when to stop, when to shut up.

  “I’m sorry, Sis.”

  “You’re not sorry. You’re not sorry for anything. You’re just a . . . a . . . I don’t know what! You can’t just give me this. This one wish. This one thing. You can’t get better for five minutes to help me—to be there for me. For Colm. It’s always gotta be about you.”

  Sean didn’t want to go down this road. Every fight they ever had always led to her begging him to stop drinking, to get his act together, to go back to meetings, to sort his life out for her sake, for Colm’s, for his own.

  Cathleen saw in Sean’s downcast eyes that she had gone too far again, and she stopped and tried to calmly speak and bring the conversation back to who it was really about—Colm.

  “Sean. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I know you love Colm—me. I’m just tired. And I just don’t know how or why Colm comes back, whether it’s because of a miracle or science, or a doctor or a priest, or God or Colm himself. Listen to me, Sean, I only care that he does come back, and that someday, somehow, he’ll never, ever die on me again. For now, I’ll just say my prayers because they make me feel good and get me through the day, and if I just keep at it, maybe they’ll work and Colm can stay with me forever.”

  Sean listened to her and understood his sister in a way he never had. For the past six years, all he saw was her genuflecting and cross signing and praying. She looked downright robotic to him, as if nothing was going on in that once vibrant mind of hers, and now he saw her in a new light.

  “OK, enough of this shit. Sorry, Cate. I get it.”

  “Let’s get dressed and get out of here. Dr. Basu’s taking Colm into surgery in a couple of hours, and I want to be there before he wakes up.”

  “OK. You go get ready then.”

  “Hey, Sean?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you mind making me some coffee while I finish up? I’d really like to get going.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Sis. You just do what you need to do.”

  While getting dressed Cathleen’s mind raged. Throughout her life the battle between what her mind was capable of knowing and what her heart was capable of feeling waged on. She admired people who knew for sure whether they did or didn’t believe in God or in heaven. She was drawn to Monsignor because he had such confidence in his own opinions. But she couldn’t align herself with any one category. She heard equally the voices of faith and reason. Dr. Basu, who believed just as steadily that science and the natural world held the answers, echoed in her head as loudly as the monsignor. For her, belief was something she had to take like some people took sobriety, one day at a time. She knew she could be so easily swayed by one way or the other. The only constant in Cathleen’s life was her ability to love—the father she couldn’t remember, the mother who she never fully understood until she gave birth herself, the son she feared would leave her, the man who took her heart, the brother who challenged her but who knew her better than anyone. Her love was so different for each person, but miraculously her heart had room enough for all of them. Even when her faith and reason failed her, love did not.

  Chapter 13

  While Cathleen dressed, Sean did his best to make up for passing out on her couch the night before and yelling at her this morning. He rushed to throw out the ruined magazine and tidy up the living room, folding the blankets and arranging the pillows. He grabbed the empty bottle of whiskey, rinsed it out, and dropped it in the trash, hiding it under the other garbage. Then he remembered to make the coffee he’d promised Cathleen. While it brewed he washed the few dishes and cups in the sink from Colm’s Sunday breakfast that Cathleen never had a chance to clean herself.

  Sean didn’t want to be useless. He didn’t want to be the burden he knew he could be to his sister. There were so many things he didn’t want out of his life right now, and he didn’t even know how to begin to change it all, or how to make it all better for himself or his sister. So he tried to make amends one dish at a time.

  From the kitchen, Sean heard Cathleen leave her room, head back into the bathroom, and switch on the blow-dryer. He poured a cup of coffee for himself and took another down to her room and set it on a coaster on her dresser, placing it next to the picture of him on his g
raduation day from the Fire Academy. He was holding Colm, just a toddler then.

  Sean shook his head as he looked at the picture and then at his reflection in Cathleen’s bedroom mirror. He was the last person on earth anyone thought would grow up to be a firefighter. Even though his father had been a fireman, Sean had never had any intention of following in Michael Magee’s footsteps. Sean had decided when he was a boy about Colm’s age that he would do everything in his power to make his mother happy and never to give her cause to grieve. He’d grown up in the shadow of his mother’s loss of his father and that was enough.

  Like his older sister, he was intelligent, but he also had a daring, fearless side. While Cathleen sat on the couch reading or drawing, he ran around the apartment with his arms outstretched, pretending to soar above the earth. He wanted to see the world from above it, and he had marked the globe his mother had given him for Christmas with flags and stickers on all the places he wanted to go and see when he grew up—Ireland of course, Italy, France, Germany, England, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the wild American West, the Pacific Ocean. He had plans to see the world, but after that awful September day, his thoughts moved from this world to another. He thought only of one thing: How could God let this happen? Why was there so much evil in the world? Why and how could people who say they believed in a god, any god, cause so much pain, suffering, death?