All We Know of Heaven

  Reawakened to life from her own grief, she asked God for guidance down the new path opening before her. She prayed that Kitt and Mike could somehow scrape away the layers of outrage and hatred to find some measure of acceptance, for Eliza’s and Sarah’s sake. And she asked God to bless the Flannerys for their constant vigilance over Maureen.

  Then she headed back up to the unit.

  Supported by two nurses, Maureen was standing in her bare feet.

  Standing?

  When Maureen was back in the reclining chair, a physical therapist came, asking Maureen to push as hard as she could against the woman’s palm with one foot, then the other, over and over again. The therapist sounded like Bill with his wrestlers: “Come on, Maureen. Gut it out. Kiddo, we’re going to get you out of that bed as fast as we can. At least you still have your flexibility. You must have been a rubber band!”

  And Maury, whose every gesture and expression now was a shrine to Jeannie, nodded because she understood.

  She understood!

  And though the hair around Maureen’s reddened face exploded in tendrils from the sweat of exertion, it seemed to Jeannie that the leg barely moved, that the therapist was doing most of the work. But the therapist said she was pleased.

  “No excuses,” said the PT, Shannon Stride. “This is where we’ll start. She clearly hears me. She clearly sees. We’ll work on speech. Identifying objects. Aphasia could be a problem.”

  “And that’s?”

  “Trouble retrieving the names of things. It’s all in there. We have to tease it out. I’m impressed with her leg muscles. Did she run track?”

  “She’s a cheerleader,” said Jeannie.

  “Huh,” said the therapist, almost as though disgusted. Jeannie saw Maureen shake her head as if to say, It figures. What she always said was true. Cheerleaders got no respect.

  When Shannon left the room, Jeannie brushed out Maureen’s hair to plait it into a neat braid. Though it was clean, no one seemed to have brushed her hair in days. Together, she and Lorelei, the red-haired nurse who came on at three o’clock, secured Maureen’s hair out of her face, avoiding the slight surgical swelling, keeping the area where the skin grafts were growing clear.

  “Just touching her hair is like seeing the sun again for me,” said Jeannie. “I’ll never stop crying.”

  “No one expects you to,” Lorelei said.

  She got some nail polish from one of the nurses and they painted Maureen’s stubby nails one by one. Maureen smiled her poor, half-toothed smile.

  “Than, Mom,” she said. “Is it snowing?”

  “No, honey,” Jeannie said.

  “Than,” Maureen said again.

  “Do you want to sit up or lie down.”

  “Sit,” she said. “Rag Mop, sit.”

  Her thoughts would come to her now if she called them. They weren’t instantaneous or always exactly the ones she wanted, but they would come. Nail polish. Earlier, the pleasure of hand cream. She was happy to be alive and with her mother. It was like being born again, only born knowing you were born. Sometimes an image—of the cheerleading squad, of her nest of pillows with their Irish lace slips hand-crocheted by Grandma—would slip across her mind like a hummingbird, so clear and so quick that Maury was not sure she’d really seen it. Childhood, she could remember all of that. Christmases, her first bike, riding on Tommy’s shoulders and touching the ceiling, the smell of leaves burning. But the past year…

  “Do you have a Bible I can use?” Jeannie asked Lorelei. She did, but it wasn’t the one Jeannie wanted. She preferred her grandmother’s old King James with its “thees” and “thous”—at least outside of church.

  She found Psalm 30: 2–5, her favorite since school days, on a computer Lorelei let her use: O Lord my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me. O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from the grave…. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

  The few lines she chose seemed to say it all.

  While Maureen slept, Jeannie went to the little computer room that the ward provided to email her sisters, Rose and Grace, who still lived in her hometown, Verona, Wisconsin, to tell them what they had probably already heard on the news.

  She sent another message to Bill’s sister, Sandy. At the top she typed in the lines from Psalm 30. She added, “I think that I have loved this passage all my life because it led us to this moment. For we were cast down into the pit, Sandy. We were in the grave. And I cried out only for the strength to go on, but instead I received this magnificent gift, truly a new morning in our lives.”

  When she returned to Maury’s room, Jeannie wrapped herself in a blanket and slept in the chair.

  The following morning Lorelei, shrugging on her coat and about to leave, woke her gently by saying, “Mrs. O’Malley, I think you might want to look at the TV.”

  Lorelei pressed the button, and the wide screen revealed Molly, Britney, and Leland! They were being interviewed by Matt Lauer!

  “Oh my goodness!” Jeannie said.

  “Yeah,” Lorelei said.

  “They were so completely messed up that it was impossible to see what they really looked like,” said Leland. “I saw when the ambulance took Maureen away from the accident. She was totally covered in blood. Her own mother wouldn’t have known her.”

  “We were just starting to get used to missing Maureen a little when we found out,” said Molly.

  “It’s like we have to change our grief now. A totally different person died. I don’t know how we can feel happy and sad at the same time,” Britney said.

  “And you have started a website where people can send their thoughts and prayers and offers of help for the families?” asked Matt Lauer. “I heard about this. Someone said this website has gotten more than four thousand messages already—from Israel, Australia, Italy….”

  “People are totally supportive of it,” said Leland. “We haven’t seen Maury yet, because she’s in rehab. But we have been sending the checks that come to us to the bank in a special fund for her that Mr. Vonnenburg created. There are actually two funds, one for her and one that was already set up for a scholarship in Maureen’s memory for a cheerleader. Now it will be in Bridget’s memory. But it’s getting to be a lot, just in a few days. We were going to send someone to a cheerleading camp, but now it might be a college scholarship.”

  “Wouldn’t that be great? Here is the address, folks, if you want to send a donation, or you can write to the blognet address called ‘These Two Girls,’ all one word and all caps…,” Matt said.

  A line crept across the screen with the address of the Bigelow Bank.

  “You were all cheerleaders together?”

  “Since eighth grade. It’s not like anything else. You get to be each other’s best friends. It’s like a family,” said Molly.

  “A dysfunctional family,” Leland added. Everyone laughed.

  A few seconds of the girls, videotaped in state competition, flashed across the screen next.

  “I thought our names weren’t released to the media,” said Jeannie, watching anxiously as she saw Maureen begin to follow the images on the screen.

  “Hmm,” said Lorelei. “Not by us they weren’t.”

  Watching Bridget drop from her stand on the others’ shoulders into the basket of the others’ arms was an eerie moment.

  “If you’re just joining us, that was Bridget Flannery, a champion cheerleader, who was killed just before Christmas. Bridget was in an auto accident with her best friend, Maureen O’Malley. Until just three days ago, her family believed Bridget was alive. But it turned out that the girl they were caring for was really Maureen. This terrible mix-up has caused great joy for the O’Malleys and, understandably, stunning grief for the Flannerys.

  “We are talking now to Bridget’s and Maureen’s best friends, fellow cheerleaders from Bigelow, Minnesota. How is the school reacting? It’s a very small school, isn’t it?”

  “Just four hundred kids. We don’t know how to feel. Th
ey’ll be bringing counselors to talk to any of us who want next week,” Britney said. “We’re happy, of course, but we’re sad. The whole town is, like, torn apart. We were destroyed that Maureen was dead. But now that it’s really Bridget who is dead, we have to live through this all over again. It’s not just their families. It’s all of us. This is a tragedy and a miracle for a whole town.”

  “In a moment we’ll hear from one of the paramedics who was on the scene that night, in this strange and heartbreaking case of two young Minnesota girls. Friends and families mourned at Christmas for Maureen O’Malley, only to learn after eight weeks that the girl who died was not Maureen but her best friend, Bridget Flannery. We’ll be back after the break.”

  “Bug,” said Maureen.

  “Oh, Maury,” said her mother. “Oh, sweetheart. Of course you didn’t know.”

  But she had known.

  Some part of her had known Bridget was dead.

  Some part of her had reached out, and Bridget was not there. To hear them say it, though, that was different. She didn’t want to die—already did that. But live without Bridget? Never hear Bridget call her and say, “I have the most disgustingly exciting news.” Bridget, her other self, who knew things about Maury no one would ever know, who she needed now more than ever. Maureen began to breathe harder. It was as though she couldn’t grab enough air.

  She heard a murmur, felt a silvery shot of fluid slide into her arm, and fell asleep.

  blog fight

  Leland, Molly, and Britney had their pictures taken with Matt and one of the female anchors, Meredith. The other one, Ann, was busy talking with an author. They got autographs and zippered carry bags. “Will you come back and give us an update?” a producer asked.

  “Totally!” said Leland.

  The girls went outside, into the bright sunshine. People behind the barricades in front of the studio’s big plate glass windows were waving to them. A boy on a bike stopped and said, “I just saw you on TV!”

  When they finished taking pictures in front of the building with its rainbow logo, they were taken back to their hotel in a Lincoln Town Car. It was one of those fancy Japanese hotels. Mrs. Broussard took advantage of the night they would be spending here to get them tickets to a musical. They ate dinner at Joe Allen’s and saw the guy who was in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and a famous old lady Mrs. Broussard said had the most beautiful voice of any singer on Broadway, and who had been the original Griswolda or someone in Cats, whatever that was.

  They went shopping at Sephora and Henri Bendel, where Molly lost it and spent everything she had saved from two birthdays and two Christmases on a purse. They took a horse carriage ride through Central Park.

  “I’ve been in Chicago, and how much bigger this city is just blows me away,” said Britney. They ran up and down the stairs in the Nike store. They bought CDs at a huge record store with five floors. Afterward they saw the show, a musical based on the Little House books, with Laura as an older woman singing, “My father built this house of logs, now trees have moved inside. The child I was comes running, her arms flung open wide. Oh Laura, barefoot girl, take me back with you….”

  It was the best time they ever had.

  They were totally exhausted.

  They fell into bed at midnight and got up to hear more about themselves on TV as they dressed to fly home.

  Molly got a hundred text messages on her cell phone from friends who saw her on TV. When Lee-Lee called home, her mother told her that somebody from England had called. A magazine, Your Own UK, wanted to interview the girls. Somebody from Australia called in the middle of the night, too! And People magazine was coming next week. They wanted to try to get pictures of Maureen, and would Leland help? Britney’s dad told her a lady had called and asked him about a movie. But when Britney told Molly, Molly’s mouth turned down and she boringly said, “You know, maybe we should have asked the O’Malleys before we did this.”

  “Didn’t I leave them, like, a hundred messages about our blog?” Leland asked.

  “You can imagine why they’re not returning calls,” said Britney.

  Leland flopped back in her seat.

  “You know, you are so small-town. This is a national thing. This is a miracle and a huge tragedy all wrapped up in one. What were we supposed to do, refuse to talk to Matt Lauer? People care about this. And it was your idea to start the blog, smarty-pants!”

  “I know it was,” Molly said. “But that was different. It was to help the O’Malleys and the Flannerys pay off their bills and stuff. Can you imagine having to pay bills for a girl who died? And I really think there should be something in Maur—I mean Bridge’s memory. And cheerleaders from all over were calling us and texting us and emailing Eddy to find out what they could do so people would hear. It was natural.”

  “And you were very professional, with your little pictures and everything….” Lee-Lee egged her on.

  “I didn’t do it for the attention!”

  “So you did not like being on this show! It’s something you regret!”

  “I liked it! I just think we have to go to the hospital as soon as we get home and tell the O’Malleys. We should have asked them.”

  “Hmm?” said Leland. Eric had texted her. He wanted to see if she could hang out Friday night. But then so had Shane Baker and Matt Wright.

  To Jeannie’s alarm the appearance of the trio on Today was only the first salvo of the media army that descended on Bigelow and camped outside the hospital.

  “I can’t imagine how they all found out about us,” Jeannie told Ben, the nurse.

  “Mrs. O’Malley, I’m sorry, but this is a really big deal. I know that no one from the hospital was supposed to say a word, but there are two thousand people working here, and every single one of them knows about this. You could hardly expect them to keep their mouths shut.”

  “I guess. Do you think it will stop now?”

  Privately, Ben was surprised that somebody hadn’t used a phone to take a picture of Maureen in her pigtails and flowered pajamas. That didn’t happen for another week. But there were already photos in Ours and The One of the cheerleaders and of workmen replacing Maureen’s headstone with a temporary cross for Bridget Flannery, and of the Flannery house and Danny Carmody jogging across the parking lot of the school to his truck. Ben thought, No way is this going to end. He looked at Jeannie with pity. People loved their miracles! They were in short supply in the real world. It came with the territory.

  When Jeannie finally could no longer bear to wash with little foil packets of Castile soap and wear hospital scrubs, she dodged reporters successfully by leaving through the staff exit. But once she was home, she found the answering machine clogged with forty-five messages that she dutifully copied down—from a distant school friend who now worked for Nancy Cassidy Live, from two different Today show producers, from the BBC and Stars and Stripes, from Leland Holtzer and Molly Schottmann. The last was from Danny Carmody.

  Jeannie called Danny back.

  “You probably don’t want to hear from me,” he said.

  “Why ever not?” asked Jeannie. “You’re Maureen’s pal, Danny.”

  “I was honestly broken up that it was Maury and not Bridget. I fell apart for a while. A few of us did. Bridget…no one on earth is as sweet as Maury, but Bridget…” Jeannie waited, not wanting to intrude. “I…can’t say what I mean,” Danny concluded.

  “Bridget was like a comet, Danny. Everyone loved Bridget. Why should I blame you?”

  “Does Coach?”

  “Danny! For goodness sake!” Jeannie scolded him.

  “I can’t believe Bridget is gone,” he said.

  “Neither can I,” Jeannie said honestly.

  “You must be totally happy.”

  “Not really. Of course I’m overjoyed for us. I’m sick for the Flannerys,” Jeannie said. “Have you seen them?”

  “I went over once. I talked to Mr. Flannery and to Sarah. They’re trying to plan a memorial service. But Mrs. Flannery i
s like, out of it.”

  “I should have gone to see her by now.”

  “They’re pretty out of it.”

  “Danny, I’m so sorry,” Jeannie said.

  “Yeah, it’s rough. I don’t think it’s really hit me yet. It’s just days….”

  “This will be with you for years, Danny.”

  “Would you mind if I came to see her?”

  “No, of course not,” Jeannie answered, slightly shocked. We…actually, we want to encourage her friends to come to see her. The last few days have been a blur for me. Maury is starting to talk, and she saw Lee-Lee and the others…”

  “On TV, yeah. Bridget’s memorial fund at the bank has thousands and thousands of dollars in it already, Mrs. O.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t know about that.”

  “People wonder why…”

  “What, Danny?”

  He thought he couldn’t say it now, though going to see Maureen and saying this was the real reason he had decided to call. People were saying Coach and Mrs. O. didn’t seem grateful. Nobody understood why they refused to talk to anybody. It was like Maury belonged only to them and not to anyone else who loved her.

  “What?” Jeannie asked again.

  And so he did tell her, and Jeannie went silent for a moment before she replied, “That makes sense.”

  “So, I thought I’d come to the hospital maybe Sunday.”

  “That’s good,” said Jeannie.

  She put down the phone and called her son, Henry, at school to ask for his help. Henry agreed to drop all but one class and come back to Bigelow to become the O’Malley family spokesman.

  Bill had to be coaxed into letting his son make such a sacrifice. He had to confer with Henry’s coach to see if a semester off would mean cutting off Henry’s scholarship. The coach was adamant: Henry would be welcomed back in the fall.

  So with easy grace, Henry appeared on the Nancy Cassidy show and provided a home video of Bridget and Maureen for Today. He held a press conference in front of the hospital and spoke of his sister gradually growing more responsive by the day, answering questions, asking for her dog.