Any Minute (18 page)

“How you doing, man?” Pete asked again, desperate to keep Joe on the line.

“We fought last night,” he said. “Did you know that? You should hear some of the things I said.” Soon Joe might list every word in a litany of grief. But for now, the shock numbed him. His emotions had shut down.

“Don’t think about that now. You’ll go crazy. You have to think of happier times.”

“She drove off the bridge, Pete,” Joe said. Now that his anger had dissipated, his voice had gone flat. “Isn’t that nuts? She drove off the bridge.” The police had told him they’d talked to people who had witnessed it. “I don’t know how I can face this.”

“We’re on the way,” Pete kept repeating. “We’re creeping along, but we’re making some progress.

“Joe. Joe? Say something. Are you there? Listen to me, Joe. Sarah was probably just in a hurry like always.”

But Joe couldn’t speak. He dropped his forehead onto his arms.

“You hang in there, Joe. You hang in there. We’ll be along as soon as we can.”

Chapter Twelve

B
right light! A light so bright Sarah couldn’t even look at it at first, but then it seemed to be drawing her. The light was warm, and the closer she got the better it made her feel. She felt safe for the first time in as long as she could remember. She felt totally safe, and it was wonderful.

Suddenly the bright light started turning a beautiful honey gold color. Everything glowed. Sarah looked at her hands, and even they glowed. Everything was sunshine gold. Apple jelly gold. If she was in heaven, it smelled like apple jelly—wasn’t that funny? Gold fell over Sarah’s arm, warm as the sun.

This was the most beautiful place Sarah had ever seen. She couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. Water splashed from a waterfall and ran into a beautiful stream that seemed to be singing as it flowed along its path. Peace and joy filled the air—and singing. The hills and valleys seemed to be singing. The mountains were singing. Singing from every direction. Singing in every tone and tongue, yet no note discordant. Singing about a God who loved more than Sarah could even begin to imagine.

Then suddenly she was inside Annie’s house, the one Annie had when Sarah was a child, but everything looked absolutely perfect. There were jars of gold liquid so rich and clear in the window, and she thought she heard her grandmother singing like she used to. “We shall tread the streets of go-
o-oold
.”

Sarah felt a longing inside. She wanted the peace and joy that surrounded her to be in her heart. She ached for the innocent wonder she’d lost, for the little girl who’d yearned for an embrace, a smile, anything from her mother, the little girl who’d found approval only in her grandmother’s arms. She didn’t want to be afraid anymore. She wanted to rest.

Sarah had heard plenty about how to get into heaven. She remembered hearing about how Jesus knocks on the door of your heart and if you open the door he will come in. She had heard the Christmas and Easter stories—how Jesus was born in a manger, to a virgin girl. How he died for her sins on a cross and was raised from the dead. Was this what she’d believed when she was a little girl?

Was she dreaming? Sarah wondered. Because if this was heaven, she didn’t think she had any right to be here.

But maybe it wasn’t heaven. Even as she took in the room, she realized that she was lying in a bed with a quilt draped over her and a soft pillow beneath her head. Someone had taken great pains to make her comfortable. Besides, she hadn’t prayed or asked for God’s forgiveness for anything since she’d been eleven years old.

She had believed then. Annie believed in Jesus, and Sarah wanted to also. She let Annie pray a prayer with her inviting Jesus to live in her heart, and she remembered believing that he was in there after that. She even talked to him, asking for his help. How was it that her simple childhood faith dissolved so quickly as she grew older?

Suddenly Sarah remembered. She’d left Tom Roscoe waiting for her! He’d be in his office by now and Nathan Cornish would be well on his way and Tom would be gnashing his teeth that she’d disregarded the request of a client. Panic rushed through her like an electric current. Her clattering heart banged in her ears, more dissonant than plates in a downtown diner.

Tom Roscoe would have her cleaning out her desk before the end of the day.

I don’t have time to be here, wherever “here” is.

She felt she was being pulled in two different directions by two different worlds: the one she was experiencing for the first time—the bright, golden, warm, loving, peaceful, happy one; and the one she was accustomed to—the one with constant frustration, pain, disappointment, and never-ending pressure to perform.

I’ve got to use my cell and find Leo and have him get Roscoe on the line.
But she couldn’t find her cell phone. She wanted to order someone to do something. Now
that
would make her feel better.
Have him make some crazy excuse for me; I don’t care what he says. Just tell him to get me out of this.
But when she tried to speak, nothing came.

The golden glow seemed to be taking over again. Sarah’s panic was being swallowed up in peace. What she felt right now was infinitely better than the anxiety she felt when she thought of Tom Roscoe, her cell phone, being late for the meeting, and the possibility of getting fired.

She heard someone tramping up the steps to the porch and fiddling with the doorknob. “Please. You’ve got to find my cell and—” The door swung open. When a man entered, Sarah’s words lodged in her throat.

“
Bryl
-creem,” the stranger sang as he pushed his way inside.

Only he wasn’t a stranger anymore, not really, because Sarah had met him once before. “A little dab’ll do you. Use more only if you dare! But watch
out
, the gals will all pursue you. They’ll love to put their fingers through your hair.” Which seemed an absolutely ridiculous song for him to be singing since the sparse hanks of hair springing from his head looked more like a badly weeded thistle patch than anything a girl might want to run her fingers through.

“You!” Sarah felt every muscle and nerve in her body come to attention when she recognized him. “What are you doing? Get out! You… you don’t have any right to be here!”

“Seems to me,” he noted, “you’d better figure out where
you
are before you start telling me if I have a right to be here or not.”

“You’re following my family! I know you are!” Sarah lost the pillow on the floor and grappled for the quilt to shield her chest. “You’re stalking us.”

The man broke into a whistle and shouldered the sugar bag.

“He’s our friend,”
Mitchell had said the last time she’d laid eyes on this man.
“I saw him at the Cubs game.”

Sarah clenched the quilt. “Who are you? Why are you here? What’s so important that you’ve got to follow me—” She glanced around the room.
Where?

He took one step forward and, shooting bullets with her eyes, she bunched the quilt tight as a barrel around her. Still, she couldn’t shake the odd feeling. In one way she felt afraid of the man but at the same time, she sensed his kindness.

Apparently her reaction didn’t ruffle him much. He barely even glanced her way before he plopped the heavy sugar bag on the sideboard with a resounding
thwack
.

“Guess you’ll figure it out directly.”

He started whistling. Sarah noticed a slight grin on his face before he was suddenly gone.

For the first time Sarah surveyed her surroundings. The house did look just like her grandmother’s house. With its narrow linoleum-covered counter and its sink as big around as Cook County and its single pipe buttressed beneath it in the shape of a bent knee. Somehow these old household belongings looked brand-new even though the style of them was old. A gleaming Zenith radio perched on a table beside an upholstered chair with crocheted doilies draped over each arm. The gas range squatted in the corner like an overdressed guest, its legs Betty Grable curvy, its black knobs winking like buttons on a bodice.

The stove’s brushed-nickel plaque announced its maker with simple new-minted pride: Kalamazoo. Sarah didn’t understand what was going on, but she kept thinking how totally beautiful everything was. It had a beauty that was beyond anything she had ever seen or read about or imagined.

A steady flame licked the bases of two shiny new aluminum pots. Tongs rested sideways on the counter. Sunlight spilled over rows of empty canning jars. Skeins of vapor rose from the pots, scalloping the windowpanes. Everywhere, the smell of home-grown McIntosh apples. Mouth-pucker tart, yet sweet as honey and crispy as spice—the way her grandmother had always described them “back in the day.”

The cell phone beeped beside her, and Sarah practically fell out of bed trying to get to it. She knocked over a lamp in the process, but managed to grab it before it toppled to the floor. What was she doing here in a bed like some sick person, anyway? She kicked her legs out of the tangled quilt and performed a level-four gymnastics move so she wouldn’t end up on the ground.

Maybe Leo was trying to find her. Or maybe a nervous client needed reassurance about oil prices. It could be one of the firm’s senior partners, seeking her input on the precious-metals fund. Sarah flipped the phone open, intent on taking the call. With anticipation hammering in her ears, she surveyed the screen, expecting a number she recognized.

S
EARCHING FOR SIGNAL
.

It took precious seconds for the words to register and her hopes to plummet. “What do you mean,
searching for signal
? I always have signal!”

Only then did she realize the beeps sounded at regular intervals. L
OW BATTERY
. In desperation, she pried open the battery panel, yanked out the battery, and slammed it back in its place. Once again, she checked the screen. Nothing had changed. The red indicator flashed its warning. The narrow bar stood empty.

Someone had dressed her in a nightgown. The clothes she had donned in haste this morning flapped in the breeze on the clothesline outdoors. Sarah frowned. The sight of her blouse flapping its arms at her, the skirt kicking up its narrow pleat, made her freeze in her tracks. A chill raced the length of her spine. Suddenly she remembered this morning. She remembered the bridge and the water. She remembered Joe. She remembered what happened before she’d gotten here.

With her hopes dashed and fear tugging her insides, Sarah glared at the phone. As if in defiance, the final three-note alarm rang and the thing shut itself off in her palm.

“You really think that phone’s going to do you any good in this place?”

Sarah lifted her eyes toward the owner of the voice. If it had been any other time, if she’d been eleven years old again, if Annie Cattalo had been seventy, Sarah would have shouted, “Oh my goodness! Oh my word!” and launched herself laughing into the woman’s arms. But not this moment when the woman standing before her was beautiful and young, a pinup girl instead of an old woman, as vigorous and sparkling as all the other articles in the house. Not this moment when her grandmother seemed more like a youthful actress out of a World War II movie than anyone Sarah had known before. Not this moment with the grave memory of squealing tires, descending barricades, and pounding water leaving Sarah’s stomach to pitch with nausea and regret.

“Annie.” No more than a breathless whisper. A beloved name. “Did I die? Did I drown? Am I in heaven, or am I dreaming?”

Her grandmother propped her hands on the hips of her red polka-dotted dress and pressed her calves together like a model in the Buy More War Bonds poster. “We’ll have a conversation about that.”