Closer To Heaven by Patrick Sean Lee (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📕

Jerrick stood up. “We need to eat,” he said, “and I don’t want cold beans.”

He walked out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, and then I heard the back door open. A few seconds later the generator started up and the lights came on. Lashawna was smiling when I looked over at her. I hoped Jerrick was right, because if he wasn’t, we’d all be dead before we finished eating our hot dinner.

Munster and Mr. Baxter were looking for us. I wasn’t sure of many other things, but I was sure of that.

Dinner was rice boiled in a pan, because we didn’t have a steamer like Mommy did. Lashawna mixed it with Ragu spaghetti sauce. I would have liked noodles with the sauce better, but the rice was okay. At least dinner was hot. On our next Target shopping trip—if we ever had one—I promised myself to for sure pick one up!

While she and Jerrick were busy making dinner, I went into our bedroom and turned on the stereo. I put in a Selena Gomez CD I’d found at Target the week Lashawna and I went shopping without Jerrick with us to make life miserable. We found a lot of CDs, and we put as many as we wanted into the basket. I liked Selena Gomez and One Direction best. I turned Who Says up very loud. If our lights were on, then it wouldn’t matter if Munster and Mr. Baxter and all the clouds on earth heard Selena Gomez singing in our house. If they were all bad and came in to kill us, then I wanted to hear Who Says because it always made me happy when I played it.

A long time ago, last year when my computer still worked, I used to go to Youtube  and listen to songs I liked, and Debra Sassone, and Diane Fairmore—although she thought Justin Bieber was cute and sang good. But I never liked him that much. I guess he died. I hoped Selena Gomez didn’t. I wanted to think she was in a church somewhere near where she lived, and that she had friends like Lashawna and Jerrick to help her.

I began to dance. I always danced. Always with Debra, but sometimes with Diane, or Juliet Fenniston if they came to my house. We sang along with Selena, even with Liam Payne when we listed to What Makes You Beautiful, and I’d missed dancing. I missed singing. I missed happiness.

So, I turned the CD player up loud, loud, loud, and forgot all about our strange new life. I danced with my eyes closed, around and around and up and down. Pretty soon I felt my elbow touch something. I opened my eyes, and right beside me was Lashawna, dancing better than I had ever seen anyone dance, except maybe Gangnam. She smiled at me and then took my hands in hers and we danced together until the song ended. I don’t think I’d been that happy since…since everything ended before Christmas. Then I hugged her and began to cry a little. She asked me why I was sad, and I told her I really wasn’t, that I was happy, and sometimes when you’re happy—very, very happy—you cry.

“Yes. That’s true, Amelia.” Lashawna put her hands on my cheeks. “I remember once when my father was really sick, and my mother and Jerrick just knew he was going to die. I sat by his bed—he had the flu really bad that year—and talked to him, and to God. A few days later while I was sitting beside his bed talking away as though he could really hear me, he opened his eyes and smiled up at me. I was so happy that I began to cry, but I think I was smiling, too. That’s happy crying, just like what you just did.”

“Yes,” I answered her, “and even if I still miss Mommy and Daddy as much as ever, I’m happy you and Jerrick are here now, and I’m happy we can listen to our music and dance and yell if we want because no one will care. And I’m glad we have a home and electricity. I’m glad we aren’t cold and can cuddle up in our bed to stay warm, and that someday everything will make sense again. Maybe I’ll even marry Jerrick.” I said that in a whisper because Jerrick had such good ears. Because he was blind. Lashawna giggled.

“That won’t happen. Jerrick loves books, not girls.”

“Then I’ll never get married. The only other boy I know of is Munster, and he might be a zombie now.”

“Oh, no!”

“I don’t know. I mean, he looked normal, but...well, I just don’t know.”

I heard Jerrick fumbling with the dishes and silverware for our dinner, and I looked over Lashawna’s shoulder. Jerrick was so quiet, except for rattling the dishes. I wondered what he was thinking?

“Where do you think Munster is right now?” Lashawna asked.

“Don’t know. Out there I guess. Looking for me—for us. He’s going to find us, you know.”

“Then we will go into the church and pray that he’s good, and that Mr. Baxter is, too. If you like, we can even light more candles beneath your Saint Therese…if that makes you feel better.”

It would. It did.

Lashawna was not Catholic. She didn’t believe in our Pope and our saints. She believed in Jesus, though, and so did I, so I guessed that would be enough. I wished he would come down and talk to us. That would have made all of us feel very, very better. I knew he wouldn’t, though, so in the meantime I would keep asking Saint Therese to ask him to send more angels down to protect us until we grew up, or he decided to come down from heaven to earth in person.

Jerrick called us. He had put the rice with Ragu sauce mixed in onto the table. He had also found a candle holder with three candles in it, and he’d lit them and set the holder in the center of the table. Even with the lights on, the candles made our dinner seem beautiful. Like we had all gone to an expensive restaurant where there are waiters with white towels on their arms. We could go to one of those restaurants anytime we wanted, but there would be no waiters with white towels, it would be dark inside, and we would have no way to cook our dinner. Our rectory kitchen was just fine, I thought. It was home.

Lashawna and I sat down, and we both thanked Jerrick for being so kind while we’d been dancing and singing.

“My pleasure,” he said. “Now, what would you ladies like to drink? We have water in bottles, Pepsi, I think. Tomato juice in a plastic bottle. We even have wine if you’d care for a glass. Which shall it be?”

“No wine!” I laughed. “My daddy used to drink beer, and beer is like wine. It made him cranky, and he used to hurt himself after he drank it. So no wine for me. I don’t want to hurt myself or cuss. Pepsi!”

“Very good, Madame. Pepsi it shall be. And you, little sister? What would your pleasure be?”

Lashawna beamed. “I’d like a glass of your best wine, sir. We drank wine on holidays, remember? Our Papa never got cranky or cursed, or hurt himself, and neither will I.”

That made me think about how different her mother and father must have been from mine. How she had never seen her daddy lose his temper after drinking, like my daddy sometimes did. The three of us were in a brand new family, now, and so I decided to celebrate with them. Once when my daddy had offered me a sip of his beer, Mommy had gotten very angry and told him not to do that, ever, that children don’t drink. He had had lots of beer that day, and he told her that in Europe all children drink beer with their fathers.

“Not beer, Matthew. Wine. And they grow up in households where the father isn’t a drunk!”

“I’m not a drunk,” he answered her, and he was angry because of what she’d said.

“No, you’re not, and neither will our daughter be if I have anything to say about it.”

Daddy got up without saying anything else, turned off the TV, and then went out into our garage. I don’t remember if he hurt himself that afternoon, or even if he cussed, but I knew my mother didn’t want me to drink beer or wine, and so I didn’t.

That night at the table, though, I was with my new family, and if they thought it was okay to drink wine, then I would try it—but only a little bit. I would be European.

We ate our dinner. I had a small glass of purply wine. It was Christian Brothers, and because of that I knew Father Kenney had bought it. He wasn’t a Christian Brother, but he was a Christian Priest, and so that’s why he bought wine made by Christian Brothers. I liked how it tasted. Jerrick had gone into our bedroom and turned the CD player down low after he had gotten the bottle of wine and opened it. He put on one of Father’s old CDs; one where a big orchestra played, and no one sang. The candles in the holder flickered sometimes when we spoke, and the rice with Ragu sauce was good, although it was gooey. For dessert we had Keebler cookies, but no more wine. I wanted milk, but the cans of evaporated milk tasted yucky, so we drank water instead.

“They will find us. They have found us,” Jerrick said after dinner in our bedroom. He kept putting on Father’s CDs, even though I wanted to hear my favorite music, and I told him so. Father’s music was so boring. He said we needed to think, and that it was impossible to think with Selena’s music. So I just crinkled my lips and let him have his way again.

“They have found us,” he said, “at least one or two of them anyway, and the question is, why don’t they simply come in and speak to us?”

“How would they do that if we can’t understand them?” Lashawna said.

“Maybe true,” Jerrick said. “But if they are smart enough to cause everyone’s death, wouldn’t it be reasonable to think they are smart enough to talk to us? I mean, they spoke to Mr. Baxter Amelia said.”

“But Munster didn’t know what that cloud was saying!” I told Jerrick.

“Yes, I guess you did say that. But what about the dreams, or what you call dreams, that both you and Munster had? Maybe that was their way of communicating with you,” he said.

“I don’t know. They were just dreams. Dreams are funny.”

Lashawna came closer to me and put her arm around my shoulder like a big sister would do. I wasn’t angry, just confused again.

“You said Munster saw you in his dream, and that you were with the nice lady on the road. How do you explain that?” Jerrick went on. He was staring right at me, as though he could see me, but I knew he really couldn’t.

“I can’t. I don’t know.”

“Then they weren’t dreams at