Nine Minutes in Heaven

by David Connor

  “Yeah. Spry and happy…Max and TJ, too. And all the cats. The Rainbow Bridge is real.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “It really is. So, you believe me, then?”

  “How can I not?”

  “What about Jefferson and Calvin?” Rip asked.

  “They got married. Jefferson and Daniel did.”

  “Who’s Daniel?” Shelby touched my forehead, as if I’d gotten confused.

  “Calvin is Daniel. Jefferson started calling him that. First, he told me I had met Calvin’s family. Then, at the wedding, Calvin said something about having more than one name. Just now, Carrie got some information from her Aunt Shirlene. We have to act surprised, because Carrie is so excited to tell us.”

  “Are you okay, Goose?”

  “Yes, Shell. I know it’s weird, and it’s a lot, and we still have some sleuthing to do to put it all together. Patrick doesn’t know. We…” I had to stop. No more words could come past my throat.

  The doctor came in then, anyway, and shooed my sister and Rip from the room.

  “You could go home,” I said, “and rest.”

  “And leave you?”

  “I’m good, Shell. I swear I’m not going anywhere. Ask him. What’s your name?”

  “Dr. Summers,” he said.

  “Dr. Summers…Sunny the nurse…what a happy staff. Tell them I’m A-ok, Dr. Summers.”

  “I won’t know that until I do some poking and prodding, but his mouth is working.”

  “Ha!” Rip liked that.

  After a thorough check that revealed I would, in fact, likely stay in the land of the living as far as medicine and science was concerned, Dr. Summers said as much to Rip and Shell. I pleaded with them to go home and sleep a while afterward. Eventually, they listened, and I felt about ready to conk out again for a while, myself.

  Only good dreams. Only good dreams, I said in my mind.

  “Hey, sleepy head.” My eyes were only closed for a minute when I forced them open, once I heard Patrick’s voice.

  “Hey.”

  He had his glasses on and his head propped up on his fist, lying beside me in bed at his house. “I hated to wake you, but I need to see your eyes.”

  I reached out to touch him. “You’re okay?”

  “Yes. So are you. I had to make sure.”

  “I am.” I touched my head, my ribcage, my arms, my leg. “I am.”

  “Thank God you called me about Tom and his baseball cap.”

  “Thank God.”

  “If you hadn’t been worried, if you hadn’t thought about that and put two and two together, things could have gotten bad.”

  “Definitely. My obsessiveness came in handy for once. The minute you said, ‘baseball cap’ I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I had to call you back to make sure it wasn’t him.”

  “Except, it was. You were right.” Patrick kissed me. “The way you talked him into letting me go and finally getting help…”

  “Maybe he’ll be better now.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Hold me,” I requested.

  “Of course.” Patrick shifted some, put his head to my pillow, his arm underneath me, and drew me right to him. “You saved my life. You’re my superhero. Now, we continue our happily ever after.”

  “Once we wake up.”

  “Yes. First, we sleep, and then we continue our happily ever after.”

  “Only good dreams,” I said.

  Safe in Patrick’s embrace, I was glad the mantra and my IRT worked.

  Chapter 9

  Though I woke up alone in a hospital bed, still, I couldn’t help but smile, as I imagined the scenario in my dream taking place in some parallel universe, where events had unfolded just as Patrick had described.

  “We’re together somewhere,” I whispered.

  “Goose!” Carrie leapt up from her spot, curled up as best she could with her height on the blue vinyl window seat. “Hi.” Her excitement showed, despite the fact she whispered it.

  “Hi.” I whispered, too.

  “I had all I could do not to wake you every five minutes just to see if I could,” she said. “Shelby told me to keep watching your chest, to make sure it was moving up and down. She’ll be here soon. She wanted to come back a while ago. Rip wouldn’t let her.”

  Rip thought he could stop my sister from doing whatever she wanted. That was cute. I was glad my sister was resting, though. I hoped she was.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “A few hours.” Carrie bit her lip. “Can I hug you?”

  “You better.”

  “Gently,” she said.

  I steeled myself for pain, but Carrie barely touched her head to my upper chest.

  “I owe you a better one.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for school? Or be in school? It’s Tuesday morning, right?”

  “Second period. I got all my work,” Carrie said. “It’s the high-tech age. I have a pretty good excuse for missing a day.”

  “Will they let you go to rehearsal tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  She pulled the visitor’s chair closer and sat back down. “So, I was talking to my aunt from down south last night, and I have news about me and about the Porters.”

  “Oh?” I hoped I was as good an actor as she.

  “But first…something else.” Carrie reached into her pocket. “Look what I found.”

  It took me a while, as the fluorescent lighting in my room caught something shiny. Then, I saw them, the letter G and the letter P. “Our pendants.”

  “Yes! Right after I got off the phone, I started my car to drive over here. The moment I turned on the headlights, there they were. I almost didn’t see them. I was all set to back up, but something made me look in front of me, instead.”

  “Something…” I sent a thank you up to Jefferson.

  “The clasps are both broken.”

  “Yeah.” I remembered why. “But at least you have them. Thank you.”

  “Sorry to interrupt.” There was a nurse at the door. “We have to check on Goose again. Someone should have told us he’s awake.”

  “Just for a second,” Carrie said.

  “We should also really keep it to family…” She was a very stern nurse. “ICU rules.”

  “We are family,” I said just as sternly. “Just because people don’t look alike, that doesn’t mean they can’t be family.”

  Carrie smiled.

  “After they check me out again, I want to talk to you some more. Don’t go anywhere.” I looked right at her. “Please.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  “Good, because I meant what I said. You’re family. I love you.”

  Carrie bit her lip. She was already picking up the Tucker traits. “I love you, too.”

  Before I would let the nurse get down to business, I asked about Patrick.

  “We’re not allowed to give out information on other patients,” she said.

  “He’s my fiancé.” I was going to say husband. I probably should have. “Just tell me if he’s awake or let me see him. Can I get out of here and see him?”

  “Not if you ever want to walk again. That foot is up there for a reason. The cast needs another few hours to be strong enough to hold everything in place. There’s a lot of destruction in there.”

  I made a rather rude sound. “That sucks.”

  “It does.” She recorded my blood pressure, lifted a couple of bandages to survey my wounds, and then asked if I needed to go to the bathroom.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “Hungry? Breakfast is done, but we can find you something.”

  “Nah. Good there, too.”

  “They’ll be bringing lunch around in a little while.” She stepped to the curtain between my room and the hallway. “If you can’t wait, holler. I’ll find you a doughnut.”

  “I want a doughnut.”

 
Not as sunny as Sunny, she smiled for the first time. “Okay. Oh. If Patrick was awake, he’d be demanding to see you, too, I bet. You’d probably hear him from your bed.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

  True to her word, the nurse came back with a doughnut and my phone. The doughnut had multicolored sprinkles. My phone had a huge crack. Carrie reappeared, too.

  “Come in. Before we get to what your aunt had to say, I want to talk to you about…about how I was feeling responsible for what happened to Patrick.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Carrie said without hesitation.

  “No. No one should, except for Tom. That’s what everyone tells me.”

  “It’s true,” Carrie said.

  “It’s true.”

  I saw her shudder, working hard, I knew, to fight back emotion.

  “Seeing you up on that stage, I am so glad I was there and can’t wait to see the show,” I told her truthfully. “I was relaxed and happy, and all those good feelings from doing high school theater came back to me. To be at opening night, I’ll make Rip carry me in piggy-back if I have to.”

  “He’d do it,” Carrie said, cracking a smile.

  “Oh, I know he would. So, you’re going to stick with the show?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Carrie sat down after that with a cup of coffee the nurse, Angela was her name, brought back for her. Angela was a good name for a nurse. All nurses were angels.

  “So, I told Aunt Shirlene to start calling me Carrie,” she told me. “It was…scary, but as dope as our relationship is, it felt incomplete, unless she knows who I am.”

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “Like I wish it would go with everyone. She loves me.”

  As Carrie recounted the rest of her conversation with her aunt, including the part I’d already known about, I scoured the internet for Tennessee landmarks, careful to avoid the rather sharp side of the screen. At least it still worked.

  “I think we should take a trip down there when school is out,” I said. “When I was at Jefferson and Daniel’s wedding,” I’d told her all about that, too, “Jefferson mentioned a family bible. If we can get ahold of that, it might fill in a lot of blanks and give us some concrete evidence. The last time Jefferson was with me, he was alone. Calvin, A.K.A. Daniel, wasn’t with him. Jefferson called him that, though.”

  “So, you knew?”

  “No. Not at all, just about the name change. Not how or why. You put a lot of the pieces into the puzzle. And I certainly didn’t know how Ruth was your relative, and most likely, Calvin Daniel is, too. That’s all you.”

  “Calvin Daniel.”

  Seeing Carrie smile was wonderful. I had to call Jefferson’s forever by both names just to keep track myself sometimes.

  “I’m so new to all this, still,” I said. “I never know what’s literal and what’s some sort of hint. I am really going to have to hone my psychic abilities.”

  I thought about how wonderful it would be to communicate with angel Patrick, if it came to that, and took just a second to put myself in Demi Moore’s shoes in the movie Ghost again. I put myself right at the potter’s wheel, with Patrick behind me, like I’d imagined before. Our story didn’t have to end, if I could get better at paranormal communication. I almost felt hopeful. Then again, I was still on a lot of drugs.

  “I’m trying to find out if the church in my vision of their wedding actually exists,” I said, thumbing through search results. “The revelation concerning Daniel’s identity all seemed so recent to him and Jefferson, I’m wondering if they found out mere minutes before the wedding was set to start. Anyway, as for the church, I know Cone Heads is right there, where the oak tree is, but if that church is still around, well-kept or rebuilt, like, behind the ice cream shop or something, maybe the bible would still be there, if they preserved it.”

  “Oh, yeah. Maybe. I know Aunt Shirlene or Aunt Willa would go look.”

  “Hey. There is a church at that address. The same avenue, different street number.”

  “Wow.” Carrie was up and at my side, peeking at my iPhone screen from there. “That is so cool. I’ll call Aunt Shirlene right now. Actually, if you’re sure you’re okay, maybe I’ll go to school and call her from there at lunchtime.”

  “I think that’s a great idea.”

  And she was off, after another hug.

  Time in the hospital seemed to pass as slowly as time in Heaven, only quite a bit duller. Three minutes felt like as many hours. By the next morning, I was antsy. I was also lucky, the doctor said. There was no permanent damage to my brain. My body, that was a different story. As they began to cut back on some of my medication, things were starting to hurt like hell. The leg that was shattered in several places, tibia, femur, and sacrum, the left ones, throbbed, as the orthopedist released the traction throughout the day, and claimed he would have me up on the damned thing to “test the rods and pins” by the next one. While operating on my brain, they’d fixed me up below the neck as well, but more surgeries might be needed down the road. Three ribs were cracked, and my wrist and left pinky were sprained. “So, it’ll stick out a little from now on,” Rip had said. “Take up tea drinking and everyone will think you’re British.”

  “‘Ello, gov’nor.”

  Still, nothing hurt worse than my heart.

  I was on my phone, still trying to find information on the Goodacre family tree, a way to tie Calvin to the Porters other than his ghostly word of mouth, when a text came. To my surprise, it was from Tom’s brother apologizing for the actions of someone else. Trying to come up with a proper reply, I was saved momentarily, when Shelby arrived with my sketchpad and pencils, some underwear, and most importantly, Wilbur.

  “Hello, my little Willy Wonka!” His kisses were better than anything coursing through my veins from the IV. He was gentle, and somehow knew exactly where to step, even while filled with unbridled excitement. If I could talk to ghosts and angels, maybe I could talk to animals. Dogs, maybe cats, too, had a sixth sense it would be great to tap into.

  “Well, Uncle Max, it’s official,” Shelby said. “The doctor says I’m six weeks along.”

  “You’re going to have a little cousin, Wilbur. How about that? And everything’s okay?” I asked.

  “Yes. She’s glad I came in when I did. She wants me in bed for the first trimester.”

  “Yet, you’re here.”

  “We were in the neighborhood. We have to keep a close watch on this pregnancy, because of before, but I’m okay, I promise. She said naps and take it easy, not become a fulltime couch potato.”

  “I asked for specific rules. She’s not breaking any yet,” Rip claimed.

  “So, thank you.” Shelby kissed my cheek. “And Gramma. Jefferson and Calvin, too.”

  “He’s Daniel, now.”

  “Jefferson Daniel.” Rip nodded. “That’s a good boy’s name.”

  “He’s been doing this since I took the five-minute test, thinking everything might be a good name.” Shelby sat in the yellow straight back chair beside my bed. “On the way over here, he said ‘Bill Board,’ ‘Stone Wall,’ ‘Red Light? What about those?’”

  “Yeah, well, Jefferson Daniel is actually pretty good.” Rip sank into the cushion in front of the window. It was a beautiful sunny day behind him, but my mood was still gray. “Or Calvin Daniel. Or Jefferson Calvin Daniel. Some combination thereof.”

  “Maybe Goose would want that name for himself,” Shelby said.

  “When is the moon full again?” I asked.

  “Um…” Rip checked his phone. “April nineteenth, a little over two weeks. Why?”

  “No reason.” That was too long. I wanted to see Patrick there. “That would be a good name for a boy. I’ll ask Patrick if you can use it.”

  Shelby’s expression was not positive.

  “I know.” My nose needed wiping, also my eyes. “I know what the doctors are saying. Shit!” My
grunt and the expletive hurt as much as the pain that had caused them. “Ow.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I want to get out of this bed and go see him.”

  Shelby tended to my hair. It was a mess all around the small bald spots I could feel, the ones they must have made to check my skull. They hadn’t needed to drill into it, at least. That was good. They had for Patrick. My head was sticky with dried blood and antibiotic creams, though, a lot of the hair all around the wounds on top, too. I figured I probably looked like a troll doll. “Patrick’s not awake. He might not even know you’re there,” Shell said.

  “He’ll know I’m there.”

  My sister and Rip stayed through lunch. Shell ate half my turkey sandwich, and I gave Rip my cake square and chocolate milk. I owed him. Though I hated to see them and my little piglet go, I convinced them to head home to get some rest after we watched The People’s Court.

  I spent most of the rest of the afternoon and early evening sketching my adventures. Jefferson and Daniel’s wedding day came first. I wanted to know about the new name for sure, but suddenly, once again, my romantic, hot angel duo were ghosting me.

  Yeah. I stole that from Rip. It was funny, and I needed all the levity I could get.

  Whatever I called Jefferson’s groom, the day they’d said, “I do” to one another, the day they’d pledged “forever,” was an occasion that definitely had to be memorialized. By the time darkness came again, I had a complete wedding album, including a rendering of Patrick and me in our old timey suits and ties, reaching for oak leaves and eventually falling down while plucking the fourth from up high.

  “I have to see you.”

  Listening for noise out at the ICU desk, I was happy to hear not much commotion going on. I threw back the covers, and then gently moved my leg to one side, since my bone doctor had left it down free the last time he’d visited.

  “Shit.”

  With a hiss, I managed to get to a sitting position. No way was I going to be able to walk. Moving about on one foot was an option, but I’d never really been great at hopscotch.

  “Fuck it. I’ll crawl if I have to.”

  I would. Now that Shelby brought me some boxer shorts, at least my bare ass wouldn’t be sticking out of the opening in the back of my gown if I did.