Closer To Heaven - Patrick Sean Lee (rosie project .txt) 📗

you can’t remember everything about him while he was gone. I liked that idea. Momma called it an analogy. And so I knew a big word, and what it meant, and I knew what dreams were, but not why I had them. If I thought back really, really hard, I could remember the cloud lady, and Munster, and my momma, and the stream, but I couldn’t remember everything, like every step I took on the road, or what notes the birds sang. Things like that. I had already begun to forget about them, and lots of things were fuzzy. But I remembered everything, everything about my trip to the hospital. I could never forget that because it wasn’t a dream.

I went back to the bed and sat down.

“Lashawna, when you get better we have to go out again. Munster is out there with the man. We have to find them, and we have to help Munster get away. We have to find the clouds, too. One of them came and woke you up, and I think it was a she, and she doesn’t want any of us to die. Maybe we can find out what happened to everyone.”

“Tomorrow, maybe,” Lashawna said with a big smile.

“Okay, tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe it won’t be raining anymore, and the sun will be out. I hope.” And then the promise I made came to my mind. I had something I had to do. I jumped up and ran toward the bedroom door.

“Where are you going?” Lashawna asked me when I got there.

“I have a promise I have to keep. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I ran down the hall, through father Kenney’s messy office, out the door into the rain, and then I went into the sacristy. The little candles were in a cupboard on the bottom shelf. Boxes and boxes of them. I grabbed one of the boxes and then ran into the church to the altar of Saint Therese. I set the box down and took the burned-out candles from each of the glass holders. I replaced every one of them, and when I was finished, I lit them with a long stick match. Seeing them all bright and dancing in front of Saint Therese’s statue made me smile. I took the rest of the candles out of the box and set each one on the altar, and when they were all neat, I lit them, too. Still, it didn’t seem like enough candles, and so I ran back to the sacristy to get more. Two boxes. It took me a long time to spread them out around the altar, on the steps, and on the communion rail and the front pew. I lit them all. Then I went back to Saint Therese’s altar and knelt down.

“Dear Saint Therese, thank you for answering my prayer and waking Lashawna up. I don’t know why the clouds came or why that one cloud did that to her. Can you tell me? I don’t want everyone to be dead, either. I don’t understand it. Did God tell you why yet? I want to know. And I don’t know what will happen to Jerrick and me and Lashawna. There’s no one here to help us, so I guess you’ll have to do that. Okay?”

I knelt in front of Saint Therese for the longest time, until my knees hurt, and so I sat down and just talked to her, right there on the steps of her altar. She didn’t answer. Something strange and wonderful happened, though, as I sat there. I looked up after a while and saw the statue all wrapped in a small whirling cloud, and through the cloud I could see the statue’s face a little. Saint Therese’s face. And I know her eyes were looking down at me through the cloud. Maybe…maybe she was the cloud, the good one from my dream, like it was her spirit.

I was happy. I’d lit a hundred candles or more, and my thank you would keep going up to heaven for a long time. I was just about ready to stand up and leave when I heard Jerrick coming out of the sacristy.

“Amelia? Are you in here?”

“Yes. Over here,” I answered. “Be careful, though! I lit candles and they’re all over the floor by me.”

“Yes, I know. I can hear them burning,” he said.

“You can? Really?”

Jerrick laughed. “No, not really, but I can smell them.”

“Oh. I can’t.”

He came over to me carefully, with his nose pointed up a little.

“That’s because you depend on your eyes too much,” he told me. I closed my eyes and tried to pretend that I couldn’t see; that maybe I would be able, then, to smell like he could. Nothing changed, though.

“Amelia, Lashawna is sleeping…”

“Oh no!”

“It’s okay. She’s just weak, still, and needs rest. She’ll wake up again, I’m positive. But…we need better food. Canned beets and tomatoes, sardines—we’re running out of them, and besides, I’m sick of the same old stuff. If Lashawna’s going to get better, we’ll have to go out and find a better variety of food.”

“Where? All the fresh things are rotten and crawling with germy flies.”

“The grocery stores must have thousands and thousands of cans of different things. Canned fruits, canned meat, like salmon and tuna and Vienna sausage…”

“I like those!” I said to him, imagining walking up and down the aisles with Momma when the world was still normal. When there was music, and people talking and laughing, and noises that sometimes weren’t pleasant, but…when there were lights on, and smells that weren’t of decaying bodies.

“We have to go find more food. You and me,” Jerrick said.

I didn’t see how both of us could go, and I told him. “You can’t leave your sister. You have to take care of her. I know where Albertson’s is. I’ll go shopping for all of us. I know how to do that, and I won’t even need money to pay for all the food I’ll get!” I laughed when I said that, and that made Jerrick laugh, too.

“I want to go with you, Amelia. I won’t slow you down, and there are some things I want to help you find. Some things that might make life easier for us. Lashawna will be fine for a few hours by herself.”

“Oh, no! What if the cloud comes back and we’re not here?”

“What if it does? What do you think we could do if we were here with her? Besides, if it didn’t kill her the first time, maybe it never intended to. Maybe the reason she fell into the coma was because she went to it and touched it when she shouldn’t have. Remember, we didn’t die when everyone else did. There’s a reason for that. So, if the clouds you saw, and the one Lashawna saw killed everyone else, but not us…don’t you see? They won’t come and hurt her now.”

“I don’t know, Jerrick. What about Munster and the man who has him. What if they come when we’re gone?”

“You said a prayer here, right?”

“Yes.”

“What did you ask for?”

“I didn’t ask for anything. I just thanked Saint Therese for keeping us safe and alive,” I told Jerrick.

“Do you think she heard you?”

“Yes! I saw her smiling, Jerrick. I saw that, honest!”

“Then ask her to keep Lashawna safe while we’re out getting food. It sounds like there’s enough candles burning for one more prayer!”

Jerrick was right. He was so smart, like an older brother might be if I’d ever had one. I decided I’d let him come with me. At least I’d have someone to talk to, and we could shop together and find the other things he said would make our life easier. I thought about a new TV and a computer, but I knew that was out. Still, whatever he was thinking about, I could see it and help him get it back to our new home.

Jerrick and I left the church and returned to our little rectory house. Lashawna was still asleep, but she didn’t have that dead look on her face, and she was breathing in and out and in and out, exactly the same as she was supposed to. Just to be safe I went straight to Jesus after seeing her in bed, because he was really God and not just a saint, and I asked him to protect Lashawna while we were at the store. I lit another candle after I said that prayer, and then Jerrick and I found an umbrella and a raincoat and a regular coat that Father Kenney wouldn’t need anymore, and we left.

The rain had died down some, and it wasn’t too hard to walk in it. There was no wind like there sometimes is in a rainstorm. I held Jerrick’s hand and did like Lashawna did whenever we came to a curb. We were fine, and Jerrick walked fast, trusting my eyes. We talked about our old schools and our friends who were probably all dead, now, and soon we arrived at Albertson’s. Both of us were very excited to find marshmallows and Graham crackers, and yes, canned vegetables. I told him when we had loaded two shopping carts that I would play checkout lady.

It was very hard to open the sliding doors, but both of us pulling on them made them finally open, and when we went in, they didn’t swish close behind us. Of course there were no lights on, or music, and we had to pinch our noses because there were about twenty dead people all gooey and covered with flies lying on the floor. I was getting used to that. I could never, ever get used to the smell, though.

We didn’t bother with the fruit and vegetable area. All that stuff was pukey. We did find cheese, and it didn’t look moldy, so we threw a bunch of it into my basket. Jerrick had his own basket, and he bumped into stacks of cans, and into the ends of the food racks, which made me giggle. He knocked over a whole stack of Pepsis, but they were in plastic bottles, so it didn’t matter. We found canned tamales, tuna, creamed corn (which is my favorite corn), stuffing for a turkey, boxes of tea and even coffee! Momma and Daddy never let me drink coffee, but maybe now I would try it if we could figure out how to make it without hot water. Twice we had to turn around and go back down the aisles we were in because someone had fallen dead and blocked them.

We didn’t bother with the liquor, but we did get a few pretty folders on the stationary aisle, and a pen and pencil I liked. We found bottled water, and soft drinks, and more crackers and peanut butter and jelly and honey. Just so many things. It was wonderful shopping with Jerrick!

“Okay,” he said when we’d loaded up our baskets, “we’ll take these things home. You got batteries, right?”

“Yep.”

“Good. We’ll be fine. I hope the ones you took are good. At least we’ll have a flashlight for you and Lashawna to see with at night instead of just candles. Do you know where there’s a Walmart or Target around here?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so. There’s a Target down that way,” I said, pointing south. THAT was not smart. Jerrick was staring at me, and I could have pointed up and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. “That way. To your right,” I giggled.

“Good. When Lashawna gets better we’re all going there. That’s where we’ll find the other things we’ll need.”

“What other things?”

“Do you know what a generator is?”

I didn’t. “No.”

“It makes electricity. It runs on gas, and as long as you keep it filled up, you can have electricity. We can have lights in the house…and music, and hot food!”

I would never have thought of that!

“Really, Jerrick? They have machines that will make electricity? I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought. I just never thought about