Straight to Heaven

by Michelle Scott

  I parked my car in the lot of a neighboring video store and ordered Grace to stay seated. Then I went looking for my niece.

  I didn’t have to look far. She was perched on a concrete curb, holding a bandage to her bleeding forehead while an EMT squatted beside her, asking her questions. When Ariel saw me, she burst into tears.

  I sank down next to her and wrapped my arms around her skinny shoulders. “You okay, kid?”

  “She must have a guardian angel or something,” the EMT said. “She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt and there was no airbag, but she’s only got a cut and a few bruises. It doesn’t look like a concussion, either. It could have been a lot worse.” He was a young kid. In my opinion, far too young to be making that kind of medical assessment. Then again, I had to admit that my niece looked okay. Shaken, but okay.

  Ariel’s mother began shrieking. Her words were so slurred it was hard to understand them. “That little bitch is a liar. No matter what she says, she’s lying.”

  Ari pressed against me more tightly. We both knew who ‘that little bitch’ was. “When did she start drinking?” I asked.

  “A few days ago,” Ari said. “Right after her boyfriend lost his job.”

  So she couldn’t even stay sober for a week around her kid. Nice job, Tanya, I thought.

  Ari’s breath came in bunched-up sobs. “I tried to get her to stop, Aunt Lil. I swear I did. I kept finding her bottles and throwing them away, but she kept going out for more.”

  So that’s why my niece had been climbing on the chair to reach that uppermost kitchen cupboard. She’d been searching for her mother’s stash.

  “I know you tried your best to help your mom, but she’s got to make the decision to stop drinking. You can’t do it for her. You understand that, right?”

  Ari didn’t say anything.

  A scrawny guy wearing a dirty T-shirt stood facing one of the police cars. His hands were planted on the roof, and his legs were spread. An officer patted him down and took something from the cuff of his turned-up jeans.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Aldo. My mom’s boyfriend.” Ari pressed closer to me.

  The police officer handcuffed Aldo and turned him around. The guy was at least a dozen years older than Tanya, and he wore an expression of such hostility that it would have made a demon proud. A face like that belonged behind barbed wire and a chain link fence, and even then, you wouldn’t feel safe looking at it. I couldn’t imagine how Ariel had managed to fall asleep in the same apartment as that man for the past week.

  “Did he hurt you?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “What about your mom? Did he hurt her?”

  Ari stared at her feet.

  Seeing Tanya, Aldo began screaming at her, using language so crass that Grace put her hands over her ears. He tried to lunge in Ari’s direction, but a pair of police officers wrangled him into the back of the patrol car.

  “That bastard hit me!” Tanya shrieked. She pointed to the side of her face where a bruise bloomed under her eye.

  Ariel stubbornly released her tears one at a time. “I hate that son of a bitch,” she said.

  I leaned in close, stroking her hair. She smelled like cigarette smoke. “Me, too,” I said.

  I caught a flash in the corner of my eye and when I turned my head, I saw Jed, Ariel’s guardian angel, peering at me from the otherworld doorway. Blood dripped onto his shirt from a long cut in his chin. Nevertheless, I was so furious that I wanted to drag him out of Heaven and beat the shit out of him. Because the place was crowded with humans, I had to settle for a vicious look instead. I only hoped he understood that I was gunning for him.

  I talked to the police officers, and ignored Tanya who was bleating at me about what a good mother she was. When she was bundled into the cruiser, I flipped her off for good measure.

  Finally, after the wreckers arrived, and the rubberneckers had dispersed, I got back into my car with the girls. “Looks like you’ll be staying with us for a while,” I told Ariel.

  Grace had been silent and wide-eyed throughout everything. “Don’t worry, Ari. My mom has a gun now, so she can defend you if Aunt Tanya’s boyfriend comes around.” She looked at me proudly, as if I was the female reincarnation of Rambo.

  I dropped my forehead against the steering wheel. Just what I needed. “The gun’s going back to Mr. Clerk,” I said. “He’s picking it up tonight.” When Grace looked disappointed, I tilted my head towards Ariel who was in the back seat and raised my eyebrows meaningfully.

  Grace’s eyes went wide again as she realized her mistake. Even young as she was, she understood that letting her cousin know that there were firearms in the house wasn’t wise.

  Before going home, I took Ariel to an emergency walk-in clinic near the house to make sure she really was fine. Ari’s angel hovered nearby the entire time. He looked miserable. His chin had been bandaged, and his arm was in a sling. When our eyes met, he nodded towards Ari and smiled slightly as if to say, “I protected her pretty well, didn’t I?”

  I was having none of it. I narrowed my eyes at him.

  When the girls and I got home, we settled down and watched a Disney DVD. Even Drinking Tea did his part by jumping into Ariel’s lap and purring. Ari stared at the movie, her eyes distant. Several times, she asked me about her mother. “Will she go to jail?”

  “Probably,” I said. “I don’t know for sure.”

  “If she does, will you pay her bail?”

  “I’ll talk to a lawyer,” I promised, “but I want to see her in rehab.”

  “What about Aldo? Will you bail him out?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  Ariel leaned her head against my shoulder. “Good. Because that guy scares me.”

  Halfway through the movie, I got up to use the bathroom and make popcorn. When I returned, Grace was sitting by herself, staring at the TV. “Where’s Ariel?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  Worried, I went looking for my niece. “Ariel? Ari?” She wasn’t in the kitchen or by the pool. I was checking her bedroom when, looking through the window, I saw her in the driveway. She’d opened the trunk of my car and was reaching inside.

  I flew down the stairs, out the front door, and across the yard, but even so, I got there too late to prevent my niece from opening the gun case and taking out the rifle. “Put that back,” I demanded. “Right now!”

  “I only wanted to look at it.”

  “No looking. No touching.” My heart pounded in my chest.

  “I know how to use it,” she argued. “My mom’s old boyfriend taught me how to load one. And every time I’d get him a beer from the fridge, he’d let me shoot it.”

  Shoot it? Dear gods! I took the gun from her hands. “How did you get in there anyway?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Your car was unlocked, and I got inside and pressed the button that opened the trunk.”

  I cursed myself for being so stupid. In the short time that Ariel had been gone, I’d let myself get careless.

  I was three words into a really good lecture about gun safety when Casey Scarsdale crossed the yard. “Is that a gun?” Casey looked over the tops of her sunglasses. “Lilith Straight, what on earth are you doing with a gun?”

  I opened my mouth to explain then realized I couldn’t. Her question hit hard. Because what was I doing with a gun? Yes, it was a prop to help me tempt my client, but it was also something more. A symbol. Yes, a symbol of how bizarre my life had become. I now lived in a world where tempting people to sin was normal. Where I was gunned down by demon assassins and roughed up by angry angels. Where I overlooked the consequences of what I was doing because I wanted to make my evil overlord happy! Casey’s question was like Mr. Clerk’s magnifying glass, and I felt as though I were looking at my own life on one of his scrolls. Suddenly, I felt sick.

  Casey continued to wait for my answer, but all I could do was swallow and shrug. “The important thing,” I said, “is that this gun does
n’t belong to me, and it’s going back to its rightful owner. Tonight.” I put the gun back into its case, secured the latches, and slammed the trunk of my car. Then I flipped the locks on the car to prevent Ari from getting inside again. Thank God Ariel wasn’t as good a thief as her mother. I knew from experience that a locked car wouldn’t stop Tanya from getting at something she really wanted.

  Lucky for me, Casey was far less interested in the gun than she was in William. “So where’s your boyfriend?”

  “Mom doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Grace said.

  Casey’s lips quirked upwards. “So that adorable, dark-haired beauty I saw at your house the other day is available?”

  “Girls, go in the house,” I said. “I’ll be right there.” At the tone of my voice, even Ariel complied without an argument.

  I turned to Casey, ready to explain, but once again words failed me. William, too, was a part of my bizarre new life. A part that I’d completely misjudged. All this time, I really had thought a good heart hid beneath his incubus nonsense. But you don’t send a pair of demons after a woman you care about. Without meaning to, I began to cry.

  “Oh Lilith, what happened? Did that man cheat on you, too? You really do have the worst taste in men.” Casey’s tone dripped with sympathy, but she was smirking. Unable to bear her look, I went into the house without saying a thing.

  When the movie ended, and the girls went to bed, Ari panicked. “Tommy’s spacer,” she said. “It’s still at my mom’s apartment.” Ariel had lived the life of a street-wise twenty-five-year-old, but now she broke down like a toddler. “I can’t sleep without it.”

  “We can get it tomorrow,” Grace suggested.

  “No! I need the spacer. Tommy gave it to me!” Ariel looked up at me tearfully. “Please, Auntie Lil, I need it.”

  Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t deny my niece. I used a tissue to wipe her face. “Lay down in bed, and I swear I’ll find it before you fall asleep.” I didn’t care if I was risking discovery; I’d use the otherworld tunnels to get the gauge.

  Ariel looked doubtful, but she put on an old T-shirt of Grace’s and climbed into bed. “You promise you’ll get it?”

  “I swear,” I said.

  It took only a minute for me to travel from my kitchen to Tanya’s apartment where I located Tommy’s metal gauge. Ariel had strung it on a filthy shoelace and hung it around her bedpost.

  When I left Ari’s room, I found Jed standing in the living room. “You don’t have to thank me, but I wish you’d stop glowering every time you see me,” he said.

  “Whatever,” I told him. I started to leave the apartment, but then I stopped. “You know what else? Forget what I told you before. Leave my niece alone. She doesn’t need you.”

  “I would disagree.” Jed appeared to be in his early thirties, but his eyes were much older. Decades older, in fact. “If I hadn’t stepped in today, she would have gone through that windshield.” He rubbed his injured arm. “I took a hit for her.”

  “What about the grocery store?” I countered. “You nearly got her arrested for shoplifting!”

  He was getting angry as well. “I was doing her a favor! Your niece shoplifts so often that she doesn’t even realize when she does it! Every time she gets stressed, she steals things. I wanted you to see firsthand how bad her habit had gotten.”

  “Well, why didn’t you stop her from climbing onto that chair? Or keep her from breaking her nose last winter?”

  “I can’t protect her from everything,” he argued. “The kid has to make some mistakes, or she’d never learn.”

  I supposed that he was right, but I wasn’t about to concede. Instead, I said, “What about Tanya? Where were you when she started drinking again? Why didn’t you do anything to stop her?”

  Jed’s shoulders slumped. “I wanted to, believe me, but I can’t make her decisions for her.”

  It was exactly the same thing I’d said to Ariel earlier, but hearing it now only made me angrier. “That’s no excuse! You’re a terrible guardian angel, you know that? That little girl has been through hell.”

  “I know. I was there.” His blue eyes sharpened. “But where were you? You knew your niece was in trouble long before Tanya dropped her off on your doorstep.”

  “No, I didn’t!”

  The angel’s penetrating stare didn’t soften. “Are you sure about that?”

  I fidgeted with Tommy’s gauge. “Okay, I kind of knew,” I admitted.

  “You just didn’t want to get involved, did you?”

  “It was a messy situation,” I argued.

  “Most human situations are.”

  Jed’s barbs struck my heart like ninja throwing stars. William was right; guilt was a weapon the other team used to their advantage. “If you were doing your job, I wouldn’t have had to worry about her,” I said.

  “You’ve got it backwards,” he said. “If you would have gotten involved, I wouldn’t have had to worry about her.”

  “Well,” I said, trying to think of a way to defend myself. I looked at the spacer in my hands. “Well.”

  “Exactly,” the angel said.

  Then, as if we were declaring a temporary truce, each of us left the apartment. But through different doors.

  “How did you get the spacer?” Ari asked sleepily when I returned.

  I hung the shoelace on her bedpost. “Magic.”

  She ran her fingers over the spacer. “Aunt Lil, when I was living at my mom’s, I swore I heard you talking to me.”

  I kissed her forehead. “You were dreaming, honey. That’s all.”

  She yawned widely and, before the conversation could go further, she was asleep.

  I left Ari’s bedroom and checked on Grace. She looked sound asleep, but when I kissed her cheek, she sat up. “Don’t go yet. I want to say my prayers.”

  I loved my dad, but I cursed him for putting the idea of nightly prayers into my daughter’s head. A few months before, he’d babysat for me, and had started her on this awkward routine. Try as I might, I couldn’t break her of the habit.

  “Oh, Grace. It’s so late. How about tomorrow?”

  Tiredness made my daughter petulant. “We need to do it now! I have to thank God for taking care of Ariel. She could have been killed today.”

  “Fine. So thank him.” I crossed my arms over my chest. I couldn’t help but feel betrayed. It was like my daughter had just chosen to spend the weekend with Ted instead of me.

  “Dear God, thank you for not letting Ariel get dead in a car accident. Also, make Aunt Tanya stop drinking alcohol and keep her boyfriend in jail forever. Please and thank you. Amen.”

  As I kissed my daughter’s cheek again, I thought I caught a glimmer of white from the corner of the room. Another angel, this one for my daughter.

  “Beat it,” I muttered as I left the room. “We don’t need you.” To my relief, the angel disappeared.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After making sure that the girls were asleep, I decided to risk one final otherworld venture. I wanted to get that gun back to my dad’s house.

  Unfortunately, my father’s house only had one otherworld doorway, which was situated right next to his recliner in the living room. Not wanting a repeat of the Jasmine/frying pan incident, I called first to see if anyone was home.

  My dad answered on the second ring. “Hello,” he said. “This is Simon Yoshida.”

  Even though I was disappointed that I couldn’t return the gun right away, I smiled into the phone. “Hey, Dad, it’s me.”

  “Lilith!” He sounded thrilled.

  “So you and Evelyn are back from vacation? How was Lake Michigan?”

  “Lovely, as always. I still have sand in my shoes. How are you?”

  “Okay.” It’s amazing how much blighted ground that one little word could cover up.

  My dad’s voice grew cautious. “Did you hear your sister’s news?”

  “About the engagement? Yes.”

  “This is not good, Lilith. Not good at all.
” I could picture him drawing his worried, little, concentric circles on the notepad next to the phone. “I had really hoped that Jasmine and Tommy would make it work.” Like everyone else, my dad had taken a shine to Tommy. The two of them had enjoyed long talks about the history of the Protestant church.

  “I know. Me too.” The guilt I’d been trying to ignore for the past few months suddenly sank onto my shoulders. I sat down on a bar stool.

  My dad lowered his voice. “Evelyn is devastated.”

  “I am, too.” I thought about Tommy crossing three continents for my stepsister, and how Karl wouldn’t have walked a block to buy her a ginger ale if she had the flu. I wondered if I could drag Karl to the otherworld and turn him over to Miss Spry. The thought certainly had possibilities. “Maybe there’s still hope,” I said.

  “Maybe.” My dad sounded even less certain of it than I had.

  Since returning the gun was not an option until my dad and Evelyn went to sleep, I lay down in bed to read. Although it was only nine-thirty, I fell asleep almost immediately.

  My ringing cell phone woke me up. I squinted at the alarm clock. It was just after ten.

  “Hello?”

  “Lil? It’s me.”

  “Tommy! Where are you?”

  “Calgary.”

  “Calgary? As in Canada?”

  “Yeah, at a bar in the terminal, actually. I had to find a public phone since my cell died a while ago.” There was a lot of background noise. Someone cheered loudly. “I’ve been living in airports for four days now. Do you know how hard it is to find vegan food in an airport?” He sounded slightly fuzzy around the edges like he’d been drinking. A lot.

  I got out of bed and went downstairs. “When are you coming home?”

  “I finally got a flight to Detroit. I’m leaving in a few hours, and I’ll be back early tomorrow morning.”

  I was thrilled. “That’s great. I can’t wait to see you. You’re staying here with us, right? You can even have your own room, so you don’t have to sleep on the couch.”

  “All I need is a place to shower. Once I’ve cleaned up, I’m heading to your dad’s house to see Jasmine. Did you tell her I was coming home?”