Page 18 of The Next Person You Meet in Heaven

He glanced in the rearview mirror, then turned the car around, heading for the balloon field instead of home, the good feeling about other people now gone.

The First Lesson

Annie stared at the wounded boy, lying in the gravel, missing an arm and bleeding profusely.

Why are you showing me this? It’s awful.

“Yeah,” Sameer said, “I never cried like that before. I sounded like a wolf.”

Did you die?

“I would have. But...”

He pointed, and Annie saw a head poke out the train window, an older woman wearing black cat’s-eye glasses. She ducked back inside.

The train slowed.

People jumped off.

They ran to the boy.

The woman ran, too.

She grabbed his severed arm, removed her jacket, and wrapped it tightly.

“Let’s go to the next part,” the boy said. “This is gross.”

***

Instantly, they were in a hospital waiting room, where men smoked and women sewed and magazines on low tables were picked up without comment.

“This is 1961,” the boy said. “That’s my mom.” He pointed to a woman in a red coat, her hands clasped against her lips. “And my pop,” he added, noting a heavily whiskered man in a brown suit, hair the same black shade as his son’s, his left leg shaking nervously. Annie saw the woman from the train. She was standing in the corner, arms crossed over her jacketless blouse.

When a doctor emerged, everyone turned. He exhaled and said something. Then he smiled widely, and the mother and father hugged and rose to grab the doctor’s hands in gratitude.

Everything seemed to quicken then, like a movie being fast-forwarded. There were men with cameras and flashbulbs exploding and the mother and father beside the little boy in a bed.

“I made history,” he told Annie.

History?

“First successful full reattachment of a limb.” He grinned. “Pretty good for being stupid, huh?”

Annie watched the scenes unfold, the boy putting on his jacket, posing with a football, leaving the hospital, all of it captured by photographers and reporters.

Why am I seeing this?

“Because you went through the same thing.”

How do you know?

“Know what?”

What happened to me?

“That’s easy.” He took her single hand. “I was there.”

***