Closer To Heaven by Patrick Sean Lee (books to read romance .txt) 📖

I remembered all the streets and all the turns without looking at my folded plastic map. That was good. I could run without having to stop and find out where I was. I wasn’t tired, but I was hungry, but I didn’t stop to eat what was left of the peanut butter and jelly. Lashawna was hungrier.

In school I was the best runner, even better than Marcus Gonzales who was fast. He could beat me in a short race, but I always beat him and everyone else when we ran for a long time around the quad. I got a blue ribbon from Principle Terry for doing that.

I saw the park ahead of me, and there was no cloud in it. There were no clouds anywhere, except in the sky to the north, up, but those were just rain clouds because they were very, very dark and like a big blanket. The sun was to the left, which was east, and it was only a little above the Santa Ana Mountains. Those are the mountains where most of the coyotes and wild animals lived, and it was dangerous for children to go there if their parents weren’t with them. But they were far away anyway, so most children couldn’t go there. It must have been about 7:00 o’clock, but I couldn’t be sure because time is different in the winter, and it either goes forward an hour, or else backward, and I could never remember which, and I didn’t have a watch anyway.

Daddy taught me how to tell time without a clock or the computer, or without looking at his or Momma’s cell phone. He bought Momma a clock that was called a Sundial once, and he put it in the backyard for her, right in the middle of the grass where the trees couldn’t block the sun. It had a flat top and a tall pointer thing in the middle. It had numbers, which he told me were Roman Numerals, but they were not like the Roman Numerals on the clock on the wall in our kitchen. The sundial had a XII at the top, and I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and then VII on the right side. That was not like our kitchen clock. On the other side was VII again, and then VIII, and IX, and X and XI just before XII. So it would be VII twice. I didn’t understand that, and at night I couldn’t understand how to tell time without the sun, so I asked him why there would be seven o-clocks twice. He laughed and said it was because that’s how God made sundials. I didn’t know God made sundials, but if God wanted it to be seven twice in one day, I guessed it would be, because whatever God says is the law.

Daddy told me that if I was ever out in the wilderness without a sundial (they’re heavy, so I wouldn’t ever take one to the woods even if I ever went there) that I could poke a stick into the ground, and that if I knew which way was north—which I knew very well by now—that I could tell the time because XII was always “true north”. I didn’t need to stop that morning to poke a stick into the ground because I didn’t really care what time it was.

Lashawna and Jerrick were waiting. I hoped I wasn’t too late.

The black clouds in the sky, the storm clouds I’d seen lots of time, became even darker as I neared Birch Street. I could see Saint Andrew’s right ahead of me. I could also see lightning coming down from the dark clouds farther north, and then thunder. I don’t remember seeing lightning very often in Marysville. The sky always got black, and then it just began to rain. Not that morning, though. I hurried faster until I got to Saint Andrew’s, and I ran in. When I got to the front where I’d first met Lawhawna and Jerrick, I saw that many of the candles had burned out, so that had to mean Jerrick had not come back to put new ones in. That worried me.

I ran through the sacristy, out the back door, and then I took a deep breath before opening Father Kenney’s and our house’s door. Through the front room where the desk was still messy, but the chair with wheels was not turned over anymore, down the hall, and I stopped quickly, for just a second, when I got to our bedroom. I heard Lashawna’s voice! Somehow Jerrick had woke her up, or else she had woke herself…or maybe the good cloud lady was not just a dream, and she’d come and woke Lashawna.

I didn’t knock, I just pushed the door open and ran in. Lashawna was sitting up in our bed with two pillows behind her, and she turned her head very fast when I came in without knocking. So did Jerrick. I was so happy to see dear Lashawna alive, with her eyes open, and smiling at me, and I ran across the room without saying hello and jumped on the bed to hug her.

“You’re awake! You’re alive!” I said, and she put her hand on my dirty hair.

“And so are you!”

I got up onto my knees and took my black backpack off and threw it down to the end of the bed because now we didn’t need the bags and tubes and needles anymore, and I was tired of carrying it for two days. Jerrick hadn’t said a word. He was happy too, I knew, because he was standing at the side of the bed in front of the big chair, and he had his hands together in front of him, and he had a big grin on his face. I jumped off the bed and hugged him so hard he fell backward with me into the chair, and I was glad the chair was behind him, because if it hadn’t been I would have knocked him onto the floor and maybe hurt him! But we just fell into the chair.

“What happened?” was all I could think of to say to Jerrick. That question was a lot, though, because a lot must have happened while I was away. A lot happened to me.

Lashawna couldn’t move very well. She lay there awake, but she didn’t get up. I heard her laugh when Jerrick and I fell into the chair, so I knew she was going to be better. Sick people don’t laugh. When Daddy got sick, he never laughed. He just lay in bed and moaned a lot, but Momma always took care of him, and she didn’t laugh until he got better. I know she loved Daddy very much even when he was sick or cranky, and that is how Jerrick was with Lashawna, although I’m sure she didn’t cuss like Daddy sometimes did. I mean while I was away finding her bags and tubes and needles, and she was waking up.

I sat up and put my hands on Jerrick’s shoulders. “WHAT happened? How did you make Lashawna wake up?” I asked him.

Jerrick shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I didn’t. She just woke up last night. There was a wind that started blowing. It rattled the dishes in the kitchen, and the house shook, but then as suddenly as it had come up, it went away, and afterward I heard Lashawna call my name.”

I sat on Jerrick’s lap for a minute and looked over his head at the curtains and the window behind us. I didn’t really see them. I was thinking about the wind. I made my eyes focus and see through the glass into the gray outside. Lashawna was talking, but I didn’t hear her. It was raining, then, but there was no wind. Just rain. I climbed off Jerrick’s lap and went to the window to look outside.

I hadn’t noticed it when I ran across the stone walk from the sacristy to Father Kenney’s house at first, but when Jerrick told me a moment ago that there’d been a wind last night, the long grass between the church and Father’s house came into my head. It was all bent over in a swirling pattern, like a big hand had brushed over it and made it all go one way very neatly. I looked outside the window. There was the stone path that came around the house from the front, and there was a little house with no walls farther out in the yard. It had two steps made of wood that went up to the inside where there were benches behind a fence of more wood. It had a roof that was held up by four posts, and the roof was leaning toward the stone wall behind it, just like someone had pushed it very hard. A big hand…or a big wind. All around it the grass, which was tall like everywhere else, was swirled. In the corner of the yard, a statue of Mother Mary lay on its side in the grass. I looked all around. Trash and wrinkled pieces of paper everywhere. A branch from a tree had broken, and hung down on the grass.

The wind might have broken the branch, thrown papers everywhere, knocked Mary over, and bent the roof on the little house with no sides, but it would not have twirled the grass unless it had been spinning. That’s when I knew for sure one of the clouds had been there. I thought of the good cloud lady in my dream, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Evil clouds that killed everyone except us, that almost killed Lashawna, but then had come to our house and…it confused me.

I’d seen lots of them from the window in the hospital, spinning and looking for anyone they’d missed when they first came two weeks before Christmas. I guessed that’s what they were doing. I’d seen two in the alley behind the stores, and one down the street right after Munster and the grownup had run by the alley. And the one that Lashawna had touched and gotten sick because of it.

They must have known we were in Father’s house. So why hadn’t they just come in and found us and then killed us, too? And why hadn’t the one I’d seen at the end of the alley come after me when I climbed into the big trashcan? And where were Father Kenney and Father Hiddick or Hendrick, or whatever his name was? Their bodies?

My head was spinning thinking about all of that.

“So, what did you see while you were out, Amelia? You were gone an awfully long time,” Jerrick said, and I woke up.

“Huh?” I answered, and then, “Oh. Lots and lots of dead bodies. And lots of clouds.” I told him and Lashawna about all the things I’d seen while I was gone, and how I’d hidden in the trashcan and had a dream. I couldn’t tell them everything about the dream because dreams are a lot like snowmen. That’s what Momma used to say. You always remember the snowman had a carrot nose and two rock eyes and two stick arms, but when the sun comes, he melts and goes into the ground, and then all you can see about him after another while is his arms and nose and eyes in a little pile on the wet ground. But he always comes back, even though