by Barbara Hall
Finally we arrived at Viv’s room. Her parents and sisters were standing outside. They were talking and smiling. When they saw me, her parents hugged me and her mother said, “She is very insistent upon talking to you, Blanche.”
“I’m happy she’s okay,” I said.
“Yes, we’re all relieved,” her mother said. She gestured toward the door and I went in alone.
Viv was lying in the hospital bed, propped up on some pillows, staring at the blank TV screen as if she were waiting for something to appear on it. She sat straight up when I came in and a smile took over her face. She patted the bed next to her and I sat down. I hugged her. She felt very skinny.
She said, “Have you been here long?”
“Awhile. A lot of people were in the waiting room.”
“The doctors gave me all these tests. Then I had to talk to the reporters. You’d think I’d invented something.”
“Are you okay?”
“I am now. I was hungry but they let me eat some stuff. Not too much. They say you can’t eat a lot at once after you nearly starve.”
“You nearly starved?”
“Well, they say so. I wasn’t hungry much after the first day. I was just cold.”
“Do you have frostbite or anything?”
She shook her head. “I found this place under a rock and I made a bed with some leaves and limbs and stuff. I was near a stream so I drank water. I saw something on the Discovery Channel that said you’re not supposed to move far from where you get lost. So I just stayed in the same place for a while.”
“What did you do?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.” She smiled.
“Go ahead.”
“The first two days were really bad. I was afraid and I worried and I was hungry and cold and stuff. But eventually I got tired and I slept a lot. Then around day three, something happened. I want to tell you.”
“Tell me,” I said.
She was holding my hand now, gripping it pretty tight.
She said, “I thought I was probably going to die. And a lot of stuff went through my head. Believe it or not, I was sorry that we wouldn’t make Coachella, that was the first thing. The second thing, stupid as it sounds, was that crazy guy Redmond Dwayne.”
“He was here,” I said. “He was at the vigil and again in the waiting room.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “He doesn’t matter. I was just missing all the things I thought I’d have. But I got to this weird place where I was ready to die. I don’t mean ready. I mean I figured it was going to happen so it was kind of like when you take an exam. You’re sitting at your desk and the teacher is passing it out and you know you’ve wasted some time but you’ve also studied a little and you’re just hoping you’ve done more of one than the other. When you think you’re going to die, this weird thing kicks in where you start focusing on the part where you studied. That is, the good stuff you did. And I was thinking about the talent show and how awesome that was and how happy I was that I had it to think about when I was about to die. I was thinking how kind of sad my life might have been without it. At least I did that. That was what I was thinking and I was grateful that you made me do it.”
“I don’t think I made you do it.”
“Just listen.”
“Okay.”
“So on what I guess was the third day when I was getting kind of delirious and sleepy, I kept drifting off, thinking about the band and missing out on Coachella. I didn’t think about soccer at all. I mean, sometimes I had these crazy dreams about missing goals and stuff. But those were mostly nightmares. The nice dreams were about the band. I got to this place … and it’s hard to explain … but I got to this place where all I could think about was the band and every time I thought about it, I felt happy enough to die. And it was while I was feeling like that, I started to pray.”
“Pray,” I said.
“Yeah. You know, my parents are scientists and we don’t believe in that stuff. But I thought, why not try it out. So I prayed. I didn’t pray for anything specific. I just got very quiet and thought about help.”
“Okay.”
“Nothing happened at first. Then I fell asleep and when I woke up, I was looking at this … I don’t know, Blanche … this thing. It looked like a person but it was more shiny. It was like a white shiny shape. I couldn’t make out any features because it was just so bright. It was like looking at a sunrise. You want to stare but you can’t. I had this overwhelming feeling that whatever it was, it was good news. Not like death. It was some other kind of news. And it kind of spoke to me.”
“It spoke. The white shiny thing.”
“Yeah. Not with words but with thoughts. My thoughts could hear its thoughts or something.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know what it said to me?”
“No,” I said.
“It said, ‘Don’t be afraid.’”
“Oh. Like in the Bible?”
“I don’t know. I don’t read the Bible.”
“In the Bible, angels are always saying don’t be afraid.”
“Well, I’m not saying it was an angel. Necessarily.”
“Okay, go on.”
“It said, ‘Remember what you prayed for the first time.’”
“You prayed for something?” I asked. “When? You said you didn’t pray before.”
She leaned forward and squeezed my hand harder.
She said, “The prayer box.”
“The prayer box.”
“When we went to that weird shop that day, next to Guitar Center.”
“Oh, the prayer box.”
“Yes,” Viv said. “The thing, whatever it was, said, ‘Remember what you prayed for.’”
“Oh,” I said.
“And at first I couldn’t remember what I prayed for. When we did the prayer box thing, I thought it was all kinda stupid. Remember, we wrote down our prayers but I was just goofing around. I didn’t know what to put.”
“Right,” I said.
“So I jotted something down. I wrote down, ‘Safe from harm.’”
I just looked at her.
“Safe from harm,” she repeated. “Why would I put that? I couldn’t even imagine being in any kind of danger. I just put it down without thinking about it.”
“That’s not so strange, Viv. People always pray for health and safety.”
“You didn’t, did you?”
I thought about it. It was true, I hadn’t.
And Gigi had prayed to win the talent contest. No telling what Ella had prayed for.
But my prayer hadn’t been serious. And I hadn’t expected anyone’s to be. The outing had been no more meaningful to me than going to a coffee place. I had to believe that Viv was just dreaming, just suffering from some strange aftereffect of nearly dying.
Her eyes were bearing down on me, though, and I felt she was expecting me to realize something of great importance. I just kept holding her hand and I waited.
“My prayer was answered,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Blanche, don’t you get it? It’s all real. That whole idea of God. It’s not a dream.”
“Okay, Viv.”
She stared at me for a moment and then her face changed. She let go of my hand and lay back down on her pillows.
“You don’t believe me,” she said.
“I don’t not believe you,” I said. “I just don’t know what to think.”
She lay there for a moment, then sat back up.
“So let me tell you the rest of it.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
She cleared her throat and said, “The way they found me. Do you know about the way they found me?”
“No,” I said.
“My cell phone had died so I couldn’t call anyone. I kept checking it right after I got lost but it wouldn’t even turn on. But after that dream, or whatever it was, I woke up because my cell phone was making a noise. Like an alarm. I woke up and my cell pho
ne was on and blinking. I couldn’t believe it. I started dialing numbers. At first it just bleeped but finally I called my mother and she answered and I started talking to her. I told her where I thought I was. And the cell phone stayed on and the rescue people, they started picking up my signal. I kept talking on the phone until finally it died and about two minutes after it died, there was a helicopter and they somehow saw me. And I was rescued. I picked up my phone again to talk to them but it was completely dead. Like it had always been dead. When I checked my log of sent calls, it hadn’t recorded any of the time I spent talking to my mother. It was dead from the time it died, you know? It’s like it never happened except it did.”
I didn’t know what to make of any of this. I just sat very still, listening to Viv.
We were quiet for a while and I could tell she was waiting for some kind of reaction to her story but I didn’t have one.
She was staring at me and then she collapsed into the pillows again.
“I thought you’d understand,” she said. “You of all people.”
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you’re the one who got me to pray. You’re the one who led me to the prayer box.”
I shook my head. “It was just a game. The prayer box. I didn’t really think … It was like wishing on candles.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Listen, on Christmas Eve I went with Mom and Ed the Guitar Guy to church. When I was sitting there with all the candles and the music, I started to think it might be real, the whole God thing. It had that effect on me. But then when I walked out, I realized I had just been imagining things. Wishful thinking. I’m fine now. You will be, too.”
She lay down and turned over on her side, away from me.
“Never mind. I want to go to sleep now.”
“Viv, I don’t think it matters how you were rescued. The important thing is you’re okay. We were all so worried.”
“I’d like to sleep now,” she repeated.
I touched her arm but she twisted away from me and turned more on her side.
I felt like I’d let her down. No, I knew I had let her down. But what was I supposed to do with all that information?
I stood up and said, “Good night. I’ll come back tomorrow with Gigi and Ella.”
She didn’t answer.
I didn’t say what I was thinking and hoping—that by then she’d be back to normal. She would forget the white shiny presence and the prayer box and this would all be what it really was. A bad thing that nearly happened but somehow turned out all right.
Even Weirder
SCHOOL STARTED AGAIN AND WE DECIDED IT WAS OKAY FOR our singer to have a bizarre story about an angel saving her life. I argued that it was practically a requirement for the singer to be a little unhinged. I listed a lot of examples from Billie Holiday to Bj?rk. In fact, it was probably a good thing that Viv now had this flighty, creative side. Maybe she could participate in the songwriting and I wouldn’t have to feel like that part was all on my shoulders.
Initially, I hadn’t told the others. I had intended to keep it to myself. But Viv wouldn’t shut up about it. She stuck to the story and told everyone who would listen. She had gone from being noncommittal about the white shiny thing and had turned it into a definite messenger from beyond.
“The crazy singer theory is an interesting one,” Gigi said. “But I’m still holding on to Viv comes to her senses.”
But that wasn’t what happened. Viv just became more adamant about her story. She wrote about it in her English class and she submitted the essay to the Manifesto. Josh Hammer showed it to me when I stopped by to drop off my latest piece for “Perspective, People.” I had chosen to write about the Faces, a greatly ignored British band, whose songs my father liked. I also wrote about Coachella and the Unsigned Competition. It was a little bit self-serving but it was music and it was news.
Josh pulled me aside and said, “Do you know about this whole angel thing with Viv?”
“Oh. Yeah. How did you know?”
He showed me the essay. It was pretty much what she had told me, written in plain prose. Something about the minimalist style made it seem even crazier than when I heard it in the hospital.
“Was she nutty before?” Josh asked me.
“No, she wasn’t nutty. And she’s not nutty now. Lots of people think they see angels. Doesn’t Newsweek do a story about that every other month? Reporting on how many people believe in God and angels, something like seventy percent of people? You and I, we’re in the minority.”
Josh just blinked at me. “She said the angel talked to her.”
“She never actually calls it an angel.”
“And it made her cell phone work.”
“Crazier stuff has happened. Lots of them. You believe in time flaps, don’t you, Josh? As a nerd, aren’t you required to?”
“Sure,” he said, without taking offense. “But there’s a scientific explanation for those. Angels? That’s nuts.”
That was pretty much how everyone felt. But Viv wouldn’t back down and wouldn’t shut up.
Her parents were even more disturbed than her friends. You can imagine. Famous scientists whose daughter was now giving regular interviews to local newspapers and TV stations about her angel encounter. (It didn’t matter that she never called it an angel; the press was filling in the blank.) She was dubbed Angel Girl. Viv found it not the least bit disturbing and she didn’t even put up a protest when her parents sent her to a therapist.
“Of course they’re doing that,” she told me. “They have to because until you’ve seen that dimension of life, it seems crazy. I understand.”
“Viv,” I said, trying to sound calm and nonjudgmental. “Everybody gets that this happened to you and you really believe it, but is it necessary to talk about it?”
“Why wouldn’t I talk about it?”
“Because it’s freaking people out.”
“I know. That’s going to have to be their problem, though.”
It was our problem. And it was about to become an even bigger problem.
The first thing that happened was that Gigi stopped talking to her.
It started with an argument at lunch. We were eating outside in our usual spot and I was desperately trying to talk about school or anything except Viv’s experience. But Gigi couldn’t leave it alone. She kept saying, “How can you believe that? You’re smarter than that. You’ve been raised to think scientifically.”
“It doesn’t matter how I was raised,” Viv said, nibbling on bread. She nibbled now. Everything she did was different, softer, quieter, and stranger. “What matters is my experience.”
“Don’t you see how it could have been a hallucination?”
“I can see how you could think that.”
“You guys,” Ella said. “Can we table it? It’s hard to chew and swallow when you’re yelling.”
“I’m not yelling,” Gigi yelled.
“Okay, when you’re talking enthusiastically in a loud voice,” Ella said.
“I’m just making a point. Angels don’t come down and save people and fix their problems.”
“Hey, they came down and fixed hers, so leave it alone.”
“I didn’t say it was an angel,” Viv reminded us.
“But why her? Why didn’t they come down and fix all those people in New Orleans’s problems during Katrina? Why don’t they fix global warming? Why didn’t they fix my mother’s problem so she didn’t have to leave me in a basket in a hospital parking lot?”
“I don’t know,” Viv said quietly. “I don’t have to know the answer to that.”
“Well, I have to know the answer to that,” Gigi said.
“Then you should pray about it.”
“I don’t think I can have a friend who tells me to pray about it.”
Viv didn’t argue with that. She just smiled.
Ella said, “Why do her beliefs have to square with your b
eliefs?”
“Why are you defending her?” She turned to me. “And why aren’t you contributing?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You’re just trying to keep the band together.”
“We’re close to Coachella. Let’s just talk about other things till then. Like music. I think we can survive for a couple of months and then we don’t have to like each other anymore. Lots of bands do that.”
“Okay, but I have to warn you, I don’t think I can have actual conversations with her,” she said, talking about Viv as if she weren’t there.
Viv just smiled.
Gigi pulled at her hair again and left.
“Guidance told me this was going to happen.”
“What?” I asked, unable to stifle the incredulous tone.
“Yeah, she said no one would believe me. Or he. Spirits don’t really have a gender, turns out. Anyway, part of what she or he told me was that.”
“In actual words, she or he said no one was going to believe you.”
“No, with her or his mind. It’s hard to explain.”
“Please stop trying.”
“I’ll try, Blanche, but it’s hard.”
Coachella and the band weren’t just a hobby to me, a fun preoccupation. It was the thing that was going to bring my father back into my life. Not quite the same as being rescued from the jaws of death by an angel. But to me, in a lot of ways, just as unlikely.
“Let’s rehearse tonight,” Ella said. “I’ll text Toby and get the room. As soon as we start playing again, it’ll feel normal.”
“Good idea,” I said.
We stopped in the hallway before heading our separate ways and I had to ask:
“You kind of believe her, don’t you?”
“If it were true, wouldn’t life be more interesting?” she asked.
“That’s not a reason to believe something.”
She shrugged. “More than most people need.”
“Okay, let me ask you something. What did you put in the prayer box?”
“You can’t ask me that.”
“Why not?”
“The rules are you don’t tell anybody.”
“I just need to know if you think it came true.”