The Door to Heaven Read online

“You would not know them.”

  “Do they live around here?”

  “They died long ago.”

  “How do you know them?”

  “I have known many people.”

  “What did they call the island?”

  “Temeshaa.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Shadow and spirit.”

  “How old are you?”

  “How old do I look?”

  “You look like you’re my age.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  Eric Flu shifted around the squaw bush. Leaves and branches hid his nose and mouth. Only his eyes could be seen. They were squinting as though he were grinning at some secret joke. Dominic knelt before one of the squaw bushes with his back toward Eric Flu. He plucked the round berries and gathered them into a pile in his hand. He ate one and tried not to pucker. He was determined to enjoy its sourness and sweetness. He ate a few more. He wondered how the berries would taste after having dried and sugared under the sun, the way grapes become raisins. He turned away from Eric Flu and went to the cave, hoping he had been born with some of his papa’s courage. He peered into the darkness through the cave’s mouth. His eyes soon adjusted and he studied the cave’s walls and floor and ceiling and back. It looked like Jonah’s view of the fish coming to swallow him whole. It looked like a good shelter to avoid a storm. It looked like a good home.

  He heard gritty footsteps in the sand. Eric Flu was approaching from behind. He almost saw his face as he passed, but Eric Flu looked away to study some rocks on the cave floor. The rocks were covered in rust-colored spots that he and his papa had made long ago, after their fingers had been painted in the red juice of the squaw bush berries. His papa had touched the rocks to make red fingerprints and said, “Future anthropologists will wonder about the meaning of the red spots on the rocks, but only fathers and sons preserving an oral tradition will keep the secret.” Dominic would understand in time what his papa meant.

  Time had aged the blood red color of the fingerprints to their now rusty color. Eric Flu pointed to other rust-colored spots on the walls at the back of the cave. The ancient people who used to come to the cave did what Dominic and his papa had done. The ancient people had eaten berries and had stained their fingertips and had made marks on the cave walls.

  “Cave art,” he whispered. Then he looked at his hands and fingers. They were wet with the red juice of the squaw bush berry. They looked like they were bleeding. He liked the idea that he could be a “cavernicola” like his papa.

  Eric Flu was studying a wall that had two painted figures. One figure was a dark color. The other figure was lighter, a color that perhaps was once white. Both cave art figures appeared to be struggling with one another — as if locked in some antediluvian wrestling match. Dominic stood behind Eric Flu to look closer at the two figures. He had never seen them before when he had come to the island with his papa. He wondered what his papa would say about them now. His papa always saw the world in ways he had never seen before. He liked looking at the world the way his papa had.

  He looked closer at Eric Flu, but the line of a shadow was hiding most of his face. Eric Flu always seemed to be hiding. Or the world seemed to be hiding him, he thought. Then he did not want to be there with the other boy any more. He backed away from him. At the mouth of the cave, he turned around and began hurrying back toward his raft.

  He was almost there when he saw Eric Flu out of the corner of his eye, crouching beside him like a lion in the bushes. The boy leaped out with his hands over his eyes like goggles.

  “Boo!”

  Dominic gasped and fell back into a clump of palm trees.

  “Don’t you want to stay here with me?” Eric Flu asked, still hiding his face with his hands.

  “I don’t know,” Dominic said, getting up and brushing himself off.

  “Yes you do.”

  “I should go back.”

  Eric Flu scowled. “So go. Leave me.”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “Why are you so afraid?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Liar.”

  Dominic walked backward toward the raft. “I’m afraid because you are angry,” he stammered because he thought he should say something.

  “That’s not the only reason,” Eric Flu snapped at him. “But I’m angry because you are afraid.”

  “I’ll come back,” Dominic offered.

  “No, you won’t. You will grow up and grow old and get married and have a baby and wonder where your life went. And then you’ll die!”

  “My mamá needs me.”

  “What if she never wanted you?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “What if she takes you back across the border to her family? Then you will never see the island or your raft ever again.”

  Dominic stood for a long time, not sure what to say or do. Finally, all he could say came out in a soft, defeated voice: “I don’t like you.”

  Eric Flu snickered. “Have you ever wrestled?”

  “No.”

  “Are you struggling now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Stay here with me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “We will make a house and cast clay pots and herd ducks and eat berries and never be near anyone else ever again because you are home.”

  Eric Flu rubbed his hands all over his face, smearing the squaw bush juice so that his whole face was covered in a blood red color. Then he tore his hands away from his face, showing all his teeth in a wide-eyed sneer. He looked as threatening as a Maori warrior. He picked up a rock, whirled around, and hurtled the rock into the cave. The juice on his hand had left a red handprint. He turned back around and glared at Dominic. His breathing now grew quick and heavy. Dominic was not sure whether it sounded like laughter or disease. The boy began clenching and unclenching his fists. Blood red juice dripped from them. The smell of copper filled the air.

  Dominic had had enough. He wanted this boy to stop bullying him. He thought about his papa’s strength and bravery. His papa would not have stood for this boy’s cruel attitude. Dominic would not let it go on either. He started to approach the boy — but Eric Flu suddenly charged at Dominic with his head down like a bull! The sight shocked him. He turned around and tried to run to the raft. But the boy tackled him from behind and knocked the wind out of him. Dominic could not inhale. Eric Flu picked him up by the shirt and with terrifying strength tossed him back toward the cave. Dominic fell like a ragdoll on the cold rock floor. The cave seemed to be spinning around him. He could not remember where he was. In his haze he saw the rock with the red handprint. The rock seemed to soak up the handprint as though it had never been there.

  The boy grabbed Dominic by the shoulders, rolled him over, and shook him. With clenched teeth he growled at him, spittle flecking his lips. Dominic felt dizzy and confused. Eric Flu was shouting strange words — like the tongue of some charismatic. Dominic was losing consciousness. He could hear his papa’s voice. “Be a good boy.”

  Right at that moment, when the world seemed to be fading away, Dominic saw the Door to Heaven on the shore of the island. Eric Flu also saw it and he hissed. His face was red with anger. His teeth looked black with rot. The Door to Heaven opened and bright light shone out from the white doorframe. The old face in the doorknob gave Eric Flu a command and the boy could not disobey. Dominic could not understand them. But the pressure that had been tightening around his throat now released. He could breathe again. A tingling sensation prickled all over his body. He felt cold.

  Right before he blacked out, he happened to glance through the opening of the Door to Heaven. His papa’s voice spoke again, “Bake buñuelos for your mamá.” Dominic’s eyes were growing heavy. In those final fleeting moments that he would forget when he awoke, he glimpsed the vision of a little girl, a girl his own age, lying on a hospital bed, about to wake up, almost as unprepared as he was for the loss of a loved one — almost as unpr
epared to cross over the threshold of maturity and leave behind childhood, in the darkness of youth’s most tender years that can never be reclaimed.

  PASCALA

  Pascala awoke in the hospital. The lights were bright. Tubes were stuck in her arms. She was cold. Her papaito was looking down at her with red eyes, tired eyes, eyes swollen from too much crying. He told her that she was safe and that she was going to be all right. Then he smiled at her in a way she had never seen before. His smile scared her. That was when she saw the doctor standing beside her papaito. He was the Grim Reaper in a white lab coat. The doctor told her papaito that there was no reason to keep her any longer. She had walked away from the accident with only a bump on her head and some scratches on her arms and legs. She had no internal bleeding and no broken bones. She was fine. She did not believe the doctor. How could she? She had never felt so broken.

  Her papaito had brought some of her clothes from home and he waited in the hallway for her to dress. A nurse disconnected the tubes from her arms. Pascala was left in the room alone. The silence helped her remember the accident. She thought of the cookie from the grocery store. She had a pain in her stomach. Was that hunger? She had never felt it before. She remembered the flash of pain that had come before she blacked out. She remembered the weight of her momma leaning over her. She remembered her momma swerving the car. She remembered journaling. She had written a message to her angel Ruth. She knew that she had buckled her seatbelt when they left the bank. But she could not remember buckling her seatbelt when they left the grocery store. She thought she had buckled it. How could I have forgotten, she asked although she did not know whom she was asking. Her guardian angel? Herself? God? Silence answered her. It was louder than a thunderclap. And the rolling rumble of nothing but more and more silent responses seemed to make the world split in two.

  Her papaito led her from her room down the hospital hallway to another room. The fluorescent lights seemed brighter in here. The walls were painted in soft pastels that gave a false sense of spring. The room hurt her eyes. Her eyes hurt her head. She did not want to open her eyes while her papaito led her to the bed in the room. Pascala did open her eyes but she would not look at the face of the woman on the bed. The woman was not dead, but she did not seem alive. Beeping noises were coming from some machine. The woman had been pregnant with a boy. Pascala had known him as Hermanito. But the hump of the child in the womb was gone. (“The child is gone,” she remembered hearing some doctor say to her papaito.) Her family had not decided on a name yet. Hermanito was the only name the child had had. So it would be the only name the memory of him would have for the rest of her life.

  She almost looked at the face of the woman on the bed. Her heart was racing faster than ever. She looked down at her shoes instead. Her momma had bought them for her. They had been cream colored but Pascala had colored them with a blue marker. The color made her imagine living at the bottom of the ocean with the crustaceans and giant tubeworms swaying like seaweed around warm vents. Her papaito started weeping over the woman on the bed. She looked up at him. Then she looked at the woman. The woman looked both familiar and strange. Almost her whole face was bandaged. The parts not bandaged were black and blue with bruises. A large tube was in the woman’s mouth. It made her look like a scuba diver breathing through an air hose. Pascala imagined the woman swimming in the deepest seas of the soles of her shoes.

  “Momma,” she whispered to the woman on the bed and she could not tell whether she was saying a name or asking a question. “I thought I buckled my seatbelt.”

  A doctor entered the room and shook hands with her papaito. He spoke fast and used big words that she did not understand. Her papaito thought the doctor was too young. She thought he was too old. The doctor looked at her through the corner of his eye while he leaned closer to her papaito. He lowered his voice.

  “The car was going between thirty and forty when it went into the ditch,” the doctor said.

  “I see,” her papaito said, holding back his tears.

  “Your wife leaned over your daughter to protect her from the impact.”

  “I see.”

  “The airbag expanded directly into the uterus.”

  “I see.”

  “The blunt force was too much for the fetus.”

  “I see.”

  “We tried to save the mother and the child.”

  “Yes.”

  “But your wife had much internal bleeding.”

  “Yes.”

  “The cesarean aggravated her injuries.”

  “I see.”

  “We could not save either the child or her.”

  “Is my son gone?”

  The doctor shifted. He looked like he wanted to leave. “Remember?” he said, clenching his jaw. “We talked about this.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “Your son is gone.”

  Her papaito started trembling. Holding back his tears was like holding back a dam. “Now I remember,” he said in clipped tones.

  “Your wife does not have much time.”

  “Will she wake up?”

  The doctor looked down. “She has no more pain.”

  The doctor had left the door open. Pascala turned and ran from the room into the hospital hallway. Ruth her angel tried to tell her not to run, that her feelings and problems would hound her like a pack of wild wolves. But Pascala had not yet learned to fight fear with patience. She ran, wishing she could sneak away again — like she had the night before, when she had slipped from her house into her neighborhood in the middle of the night, imagining that she was the only soul on the face of the earth.

  She did not want to hear any more words from the doctor or any more silence from her momma. She counted her steps, the sound of the squeak of her shoes hitting hard against the linoleum floor tiles. A radio was playing. Papers were shuffling. Nurses were calling for doctors through an overhead intercom. The hallway commotion helped Pascala feel different although she thought it made her feel better. Feeling different was good enough for the moment. Feeling better would come later.

  Pascala wished she had her journal. Her thoughts were a mob in her mind. Writing them down would set them free. Ruth did not want her to go far from her papaito. Faster than the blink of an eye, the angel searched the entire hospital for a safe place, and found a vacant room not far away. Ruth inspired her to go in there. The room had plenty of emptiness and silence, plenty of opportunities for her to hear the fullness of the Voice of God.

  The empty room was colored the intense green of a stormy sea. Hanging on one wall in a glass frame was a poster of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Pascala loved that painting. The colors beyond the glass looked so rich with those purples and yellows and blacks and soft greens. She touched the picture. Her fingertips smudged the glass. The rest of the room seemed spotless. Has anyone died in here, she wondered. A crooked looking bed was wired to the wall. Night tables with lamps were on either side. The bedcovers smelled like disinfectant and vitamins. All of it was a false sense of safety. Pascala felt sick to her stomach. She backed into a corner and lowered to the ground and hugged her knees to her chest. She whispered to herself. She was not sure whether she was asking something or saying something. “God…”

  Ruth whispered to her papaito’s guardian angel and his angel helped him find Pascala in the empty room. She was sitting in the corner with her forehead on her knees. She had been in there for a long time. Her papaito spoke in a soft voice. He said that people had been looking for her. She did not look up at him. It was very early in the morning. He had not slept. She knew he was upset. But she also knew how kind he was and that he would not shout at her. He wanted to be loved more than feared.

  “Mija,” he called to her and he rubbed between her shoulder blades with his large warm hand until she looked up into his eyes. They were swollen and red and wet. He had been crying. She had not seen him cry often. It made her feel strange. She wished she were back in her house so that she could sneak out and go walking th
rough the neighborhood at night. She did not want to be on this planet any longer. She wanted life on another planet. A new home far distant from here would be best.

  Her papaito took her from that room into the hallway and he led her to a vending machine. He reached into his pockets. Coins jingled. He asked her if she wanted anything. She did not answer. She had too many thoughts. Her eyes stung. Her stomach turned. She wished she had something to write with. Was her journal still in the car? Where is the car? Her papaito stood for a moment looking at the vending machine foods. His appetite was also gone. Then he took her hand and they walked down the hall together in silence. He said that the doctors were doing everything they could to help her momma.

  “Her brain is asleep and it might not wake up again,” he said and Pascala wondered if he was talking to her or if he needed to hear his own voice say words that he struggled to believe.

  They went to the room where her momma was but the door was shut. A commotion was going on inside. People were talking and shouting. Machines were beeping. Her papaito put his hand on the door but he did not push it open. He was staring at the door with wide eyes. He was listening. He was praying to God. Pascala was eye level with the doorknob. She saw her reflection in it and her reflection was warped. She looked deformed. Like a monster, she thought. She thought she had buckled her seatbelt.

  She thought about how nice it would be to see God. The machines stopped beeping and blared a single tone. One tone all alone, she rhymed to herself. A voice behind the door was speaking but the sound was muffled. New machines made strange high-pitched sounds. One was like a vacuum and another was like a drill. Then her papaito gasped and he cupped one hand over his eyes. He seemed desperate to shut out the nightmare of the moment. His other hand gripped tighter to her hand. His grip started to hurt. Her legs felt weak. Her bones seemed to be shivering. Her guardian angel Ruth placed its hands over her head and prayed to God to help her understand the depth of love that comes from a sacrificial offering.

  Then silence filled her momma’s room. No machines, no murmuring, no momma telling Pascala to come in and assuring her that everything would be all right. Everything was not all right. Every thing was silent. God, she prayed inwardly, are you in the silence? Aren’t you supposed to be inside a still small voice?