The Next Person You Meet in Heaven

Annie is six years old and walking home from school with an older boy and his two sisters, whom she stays with until her mother gets home from work each day. They tend to bully her and take advantage of her naivety, and on this occasion, they decide to urge her to knock on the door of the house where a witch is rumored to live, offering to pay her five dollars. Annie’s mother has been tight on money since being single, and Annie is enticed by the idea of being able to buy toys. She knocks on the door of the house. A woman answers. She scolds Annie and explains she isn’t a witch; she’s just sick. When Annie returns to tell the others, they tell her she can’t have the five dollars since the woman was not really a witch.

Annie realizes she has no mouth nor a body at all, but the boy she meets can hear her thoughts. He tells her she’s in heaven, and it finally hits Annie that she has died. He sarcastically calls Annie “slow,” and Annie enters a denial period where she believes she should not have died yet: “But it wasn’t my time. I’m not old or sick. I’m just… […] a person who makes mistakes” (45). The boy takes the train through the air and then under a purple ocean before emerging into a natural landscape. He punches the glass window and he and Annie hurtle out and onto the tracks.

The boy explains to Annie that he is the first of five people she will meet in heaven: the five people who will teach her lessons that eluded her in life, and that will help make the events of her life clearer. He tells Annie to watch as another train approaches with a boy, the same boy Annie is talking to now, chasing it. He explains that he thought he could “hang on like a kite” (48), and in doing so, his arm was ripped from his body.

Meanwhile, on Earth, Tolbert picks up his wife’s car and attempts to call his assistant, who doesn’t pick up. Tolbert heads to the balloon field.

The train stops, and a woman notices the boy on the ground. She wraps his arm and the scene flashes to a hospital, where the boy becomes the first person to ever receive a full limb attachment. He points out how the success of the surgery came to save many more lives. He and Annie watch the moment unfold. Annie wonders why she is there, but the boy tells her to keep watching. Suddenly, he begins to grow up, until he becomes a middle-aged man. He confesses he died of a heart attack around this age despite becoming a doctor and introduces himself as Sameer. The scene changes to a different hospital, in which Dr. Sameer goes into a room to check on Annie, who had just had her hand reattached after the Ruby Pier accident.

Annie is eight years old and heads to Ruby Pier with her mother and the latest in a series of her mother’s miscellaneous boyfriends. Annie feels recently neglected and pushed out of her mother’s life. Sure enough, at the pier, Annie is given some tickets and told to go have fun and avoid large rides. Annie is bored by mid-afternoon and, after getting a pipe cleaner rabbit from a worker (Eddie), wins a wooden airplane from a fair game. She tosses it into the air, and it lands underneath the free fall ride. Annie climbs under the railing to retrieve it.

In the present, Annie enters the body of her eight-year-old self as she lies in the hospital bed. She realizes that Sameer was her doctor, and her voice starts to return. Annie wonders why she is meeting Sameer in the afterlife if she hardly remembers knowing him on Earth. Sameer explains that she is reliving past moments because “it all ties together” (59); an individual’s time on Earth is only a tiny fraction of a massive, interconnected chain of people and events. He reminds Annie that everything that happened to her is part of a process that started long, long ago. He takes Annie from her childhood body and brings her back into her spirit form. They return to the massive landscape and Sameer reveals that it, along with the train, is his heaven. Before departing, Annie asks Sameer if she was able to save Paulo in the end, but he cannot tell her the answer; all he replies with is, “Others are coming” (64).