The Door to Heaven Read online

  Dominic thought about this. “What is Heaven like?” he asked at length.

  “It’s not bad,” the old face in the doorknob said.

  “Can I go there?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Does God live there?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “God does not live in Heaven. Heaven lives in God.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither.”

  Dominic and the Door to Heaven talked about the lake and the island. He boasted about the raft that he and his papa were building. The old face in the doorknob smiled and congratulated Dominic on his good hard work and told him secrets about his papa that he had never heard before. His papa had given food to people who were hungry and clothes to those who had none. His papa had visited people who had been sick and dying and in prison. His papa had even built a house for a family who could not afford to buy one. His only payment was glasses of sweetened iced tea. The old face in the doorknob said that many people in Heaven were eager to meet his papa and embrace him like a brother. Dominic felt very proud of his papa. He turned around to look at him, but his papa was nowhere to be seen. He saw hummingbirds zipping by, going from violet lantana to the bougainvillea. He saw bees drifting from flower to flower. He saw a fox in the forest. He saw mallards flying in formation overhead to Duck Island. But he did not see his papa anywhere.

  A cold wind had begun to blow over the lake. The raft was in the lake and moored to the shore. His papa had said that the branch was for punting. He walked from the Door to Heaven to the raft. He was close to the lakeshore. His shoes soaked in the rising tide. His feet felt frozen. The sun was high in the sky and was burning his neck and arms. He shivered. He was not breathing. His heart beat and the burning in his chest began to hurt.

  Then he saw his papa laying face down in the grass. His papa was not moving. He had been reaching with one arm toward the raft, but now his arm was floating on the surface of the lake — La Muerta. Minnows were nibbling his fingertips. Dominic decided that the body in the grass was not his papa. He was just talking with his papa. His papa would never lie down on the job. He turned away from the body.

  Then he suddenly saw his papa standing before the Door to Heaven with his hand on the doorknob. The Door to Heaven swung open from within. Bright light shone out through the frame. The light was pure and beatific. It was resonant with sound and pulsating with the constancy of the tide. Dominic covered his eyes with his hands by instinct, not by pain. He peeked between the divide of his fingers. The brightness did not hurt his vision. The light was warm and comforting. He cautiously lowered his hands. His papa was standing on the threshold of the Door to Heaven. He seemed to be young and old, rich and poor, worker and master, all at the same time. His papa had become a man of many seasons. The light from the Door to Heaven surrounded his papa like thick vines. The vines of light coiled around his arms and legs. They wrapped over his shoulders and around his waist.

  “Papa?” he called out.

  His papa began to look back at Dominic. But he never looked over his shoulder. He seemed to see someone he knew through the Door to Heaven. Whomever he saw made him smile and laugh. He started to step forward to go through the Door to Heaven. But the luminous vines lifted him up and carried him over the threshold, his arms dangling in contented surrender. Then the light through the Door to Heaven intensified.

  Dominic shut his eyes and covered his face in his hands. He stayed like that for a long time until he heard his mamá cry out from the back porch. He looked up. It hurt his eyes to adjust to the poor light of the world. His mamá had collapsed to her knees. Her mouth was open. Her fingers were in her mouth. Her hands cupped her jaw. Her eyes were wide in shock and denial. She screamed again. It was a deep and guttural scream from her stomach. It was a scream without fear yet filled with an emotion that Dominic could not name.

  The forest was silent. No birds. No wind. The surface of the lake was calm. It was almost evening. The sun was setting just behind Duck Island. The Door to Heaven was gone. His papa’s body lay somewhere behind him in the grass. Unmoving. Growing cold. That body is not papa, he told himself. It was just a body. His papa was not there. His papa was gone. That’s all. Dominic wanted another hug. He could not feel the sun on his face or the grass crushed beneath his knees. He was still holding on to the screwdriver. It was his screwdriver now. He tightened his grip. His knuckles whitened. Then he walked to the lake and he waded into the water. He did not look at the body as he waded over to the raft. One screw still needed tightening. He tightened the screw. He felt determined and safe while he repeated his papa’s catchwords. “Righty tighty. Righty tighty. Righty tighty.” He drove the screw far down into the wood with all his strength. He stopped when he could not drive it any deeper. His papa would have had the strength to do it. Dominic was resolved to be strong like his papa. His mouth watered for the taste of squaw bush berries.

  PASCALA

  Pascala had a happy childhood but now she was not happy. Something seemed to be ending. Her guardian angel Ruth could protect her from the dangers of the world, but not from the unavoidable change of maturing. Growing up seems more dangerous, Pascala wrote down in her journal. She was proud of herself for seeing that much. But maturity felt as mysterious as Divine Providence. What is changing in me? She had been writing that question down lately in her journal. Ruth her angel had had no answer and Pascala had not yet learned that silence from Heaven is a word of patience for the world. Her old dolls and toys no longer satisfied the hunger of her mind. The things of childhood were now gathering dust under her bed and in her closet. She did not know how she had lost the happiness she had had since her earliest memory. She used to set her dolls around a table and have teatime. She thought about doing that now. But thinking about it made her tired and restless. She believed she needed a change because she thought that a change had happened to her. She wanted something new, but she did not know what she wanted.

  Pascala looked up at her ceiling and she searched through her room. She wondered if her angel was nearby. She might have seen Ruth if she had looked at the place beside her. Ruth was there. The angel placed its hand on her shoulder to comfort her with grace from Heaven.

  It was late night. Pascala’s parents had already gone to bed. They thought she was in bed too. But the teeming questions in her mind were a swarm of tormenting demons. She could not sleep and she sought escape. So she opened her bedroom window and snuck from her house. Her angel was with her. It tried to tell her not to go. But Eve’s bad fruit did not fall too far from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Pascala thought that she had to have something different from the same old safety of her home. This was not the first time she had tried to escape. But it would be the last time she snuck from her house in the middle of the night.

  She walked in the middle of the road and meandered through her neighborhood among the many houses that seemed to look the same. Coyotes came down from the hills and went into the neighborhood at night. Pascala sometimes saw them running through the streets. She did not know that they would have eaten her. She did not know that her angel Ruth was guarding her with its sword of the Word of God. Her innocence helped her enjoy her walks through her neighborhood in the nighttime. The daylight had been hurting her eyes lately. The soft lights of the nighttime seemed wonderful with beautiful stars dusting over the cosmos. She imagined what all that fire and empty space might look like beyond the narrow confines of the world. She pictured herself living on a different planet under the same stars, yet twinkling with altogether different constellations. She would walk barefoot through the neighborhood streets in the summertime. The asphalt would still be radiating the midday heat of the desert. She loved how its warm jagged texture would scratch her arches and soles. But the desert summer heat was gone. That night was the winter solstice. The air was cold, even though a desert winter was a Los Angeles spring. She had to bundle up in heavy clothes while she walked
through the neighborhood.

  Now a soft breeze blew through the trees that flowered during desert winters — the desert willow tree, the orchid tree, and the jacaranda tree with its purple blossoms. Pascala closed her eyes to enjoy the sound of the breeze rustling the sable palms. She recalled the old bible story about the prophet who could not find God in gales or earthquakes or fires. Soon the breeze ebbed. She opened her eyes to speak to the universe. She wondered whether Heaven held within its mystery such fullness and such emptiness together at once. She spoke but she could not tell whether she was asking something, or saying something.

  “God.”

  Pascala returned home and she went to bed, but it took some time for her to fall asleep. She slept few hours that night and then she woke up and got out of bed not long after her papaito left for work. It was all right for her momma to sleep a little longer because she was nine months pregnant with her baby brother. Pascala went into the kitchen for breakfast. Before her papaito left for work, he had prepared her a bowl of dry cereal and left it on the dining table in a corner of the kitchen. She only needed to add milk. He had also set out a child’s vitamin beside her spoon. The vitamin was the shape of a cartoon character. “I’m not a little girl any more,” she told her papaito in her mind. He called her, “Mija.” She was more impatient with him than angry. He wanted his little girl. She wanted to be the woman she would become one day.

  She ate her breakfast in silence and she thought about the day her momma would give birth to her younger brother. She had already started calling him, “Hermanito.” Her papaito liked the nickname. And he called his children, “Mija y su Hermanito.” The idea of having a baby brother excited her at first. But then life started changing around the house. “You need to be a big girl now because now you’re a big sister,” her momma kept telling her. Pascala now looked at her child’s vitamin. Its shape was not like the shape of the actual cartoon character. The vitamin was supposed to be grape flavored, but she had had it before and knew it would not taste like a grape. The world seemed deceitful and confusing. Her momma wanted her to be a big girl. And her papaito wanted her to be his little girl. And she did not know how to make them both happy. “I do not want a baby brother,” she said to her child’s vitamin.

  Pascala ate until she was full and not until her food was gone. Then she returned to her room, got her journal, and went back into the kitchen. She crawled inside the cabinet below the kitchen sink where she could feel safe to think. She had been crawling in there since she was small. But her hiding place seemed small now. Pascala had to squeeze in between the wall and the strange curving pipes of the sink and the oval valves that scalded or froze or flushed away wasted meals. She pulled the cabinet door closed but kept it cracked open wide enough to let in light. She set her journal on her lap and she wrote about her walk through the neighborhood the night before. Then she read what she wrote. “Ordinary,” she said to herself. She hated the word. She hated all her words in her journal entry that morning. She wanted to write words that were the most meaningful in the world. She thought about the Son of God, only Son of the Father. She would not be an only child much longer. Her momma was pregnant with her little brother. Pascala wrote about that. Then she read her words again. “Ordinary,” she thought again. Then she wrote a note to her guardian angel: Protect me from being ordinary. Ruth was there with her under the sink. The angel could go anywhere with her. Ruth read the words in the journal and the angel smiled. Pascala never understood why God answered prayers with silence. She thought about a still small voice and she wondered why the universe could be so big yet so quiet with so many burning stars.

  She peeked through the crack and she saw her momma shuffling into the kitchen. She saw the weariness bagged beneath her momma’s eyes. Her momma seemed ready to give birth any day now. She thought about how life might be different with a fourth person in the house. She hoped that would not be true. She prayed that God would make things go back to the way they were. She wanted to be happy about teatime with her dolls again.

  Pascala opened the cabinet door and she crawled out from under the sink. She went to her momma. The baby was low in the womb and she wondered if that was normal. “You were higher last month,” she said quietly to her little brother, “but now we are face to face.”

  She sat at the table. Her momma sat beside her. She looked more tired than sleepy, but her smile was sincere.

  “Good morning, peach,” her momma said.

  “Hola, momma mia.”

  “How is our big girl today?”

  “Okay.”

  “Sleep well?”

  Pascala shrugged. “Más o menos. How’s Hermanito?”

  “Restless.”

  “When is he coming?”

  “Not soon enough.”

  “Any day?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Can I help with anything?”

  “I have to go to the bank and grocery store today. You could be my helper.”

  “Need me to drive?”

  “Eleven year olds are not allowed to drive.”

  “Okay.”

  “But you can push the grocery cart.”

  “Can I ride in it?”

  “You cannot ride the cart and push at the same time.”

  “That’s an aphorism.”

  Her momma smiled in amazement at her. “Peach, where did you learn that word?”

  Pascala shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

  Her momma thought for a moment. “What does it mean?”

  The wind was not blowing the desert dust toward the coast. That winter day was clear and cool and lovely. Pascala rode with her momma to the bank. She unbuckled her seatbelt and waited in the car with the motor running and the windows up. She opened her journal and started writing. She had many thoughts in her head and she liked them better when they were written down. “Then I don’t have to think about them,” she told herself. “Why do I try to remember them if they are not written down? Why do I think my thoughts are so important?” She wrote that down too.

  Her momma returned to the car. She had difficulty sliding into the seat. She had short legs. The seat could not go back any farther. The steering wheel pressed against her belly. Her momma seemed fine but then she winced and sat still for a moment. She rubbed her belly, staring ahead, her brow tense. She seemed to be in pain. She started breathing in a way Pascala had never heard before. Her momma closed her eyes and gripped the sides of her belly with both hands. Her breathing quickened.

  “Hermanito,” Pascala said quietly to her little brother, “what are you doing to momma?” Pascala was not sure what to do. She buckled her seatbelt. She opened her journal and scribbled a hurried note to her angel: Ruth, please help my momma and give peace to Hermanito.

  Ruth was there. The angel was filled with the love of God and it was fearless. Pascala did not know about the other two angels in the car. One was guarding her momma. The other was guarding her little brother in the womb. Ruth spoke with the other two angels. And the three angels placed their hands over Pascala’s momma. One placed its hands over her head. The second placed its hands over her heart. The last placed its hands over the child in her womb. They adored the power of the almighty God and they begged for the mercy of God to come down upon her momma.

  Her pain ebbed. Her breathing slowed. She looked at Pascala, smiled and nodded. “I’m good,” she said. “I’m good. Pray, hope, and do not worry.”

  Pascala wrote in her journal a message to Ruth: Thank you, my darling angel.

  The next stop was the grocery store. Pascala found a cart that did not have a broken wheel. She pushed it through the store while her momma read off the shopping list. Together they filled the cart with eggs and milk and bread and other good foods for the house. They also gathered all the ingredients for buñuelos. Her papaito loved them. They would make them that night for dessert.

  Pascala loved going to the bakery at the back of the store. The bakery had the warm scent of good bread and the c
ool scent of frosting that always made her picture the color pink. She loved arriving at the grocery store early when the cookies were still warm and moist and she could taste their sugar granules like delicious sand dissolving between her teeth. The baker working behind the glass counter saw her staring at the assorted cookie rows and he reached into the case and grabbed two cookies covered in pink frosting. He brought them over the counter and gave them to her and her momma. She bit into her cookie and chewed it slowly to enjoy the sensation of the texture and the taste. She planned to write about it later in her journal to her guardian angel because she knew her angel could not taste food.

  Pascala looked at her momma. The cookie was gone. Crumbs speckled the corners of her momma’s mouth. Pink frosting was smeared across her cheek. She was chewing the last bite. Pascala laughed.

  “What?” her momma said with crumbs falling from her mouth.

  This made her laugh even harder.

  Her momma swallowed the last bite and she understood what was so funny. Unable to hide her smile of embarrassment, she said, “Well, your little brother thought it was good.”

  The cart soon became laden with groceries. Pascala struggled pushing its weight to the register. A bag boy helped put the bulk in the trunk. She liked watching the weight sink the tail of the car. Now the exhaust pipe scraped the parking lot.

  She and her momma got into the car and got on the road to drive home.

  She opened her journal and started describing the taste of the cookie so that Ruth might enjoy it also. But her angel did not read the words because it was whispering into her ear, trying to warn her about the danger ahead. Pascala had forgotten to buckle her seatbelt.

  They drove back to their house. Construction on the road had reduced the speed limit from fifty miles per hour to thirty. Her momma slowed down and set her cruise control to the speed limit.

  A red truck sped up and drove very close to her bumper. An evil spirit had been allowed to prevail for a time over the power of the driver’s guardian angel. Now it was hissing in the driver’s ear: “Go faster or else you will be late for work again – and then you will be fired from your job – and your life will be ruined forever – and no one will love you ever again.”