I'll tell you something else, too – the world is full of puzzle pieces. Know how you feel lonely and apart sometimes? That's because you're not connected up the right way. People who find out that secret spend the rest of their lives trying to find their matching other parts. But I'm not here to talk about that with you. We don't have time for it. There's so much else I gotta tell you."
AS I mentioned earlier, before that wondrous afternoon with Beenie Rushforth, I was beginning to believe more and more in God, but one along the lines of Emily Dickinson's 'God is a distant, stately lover.' One who is fully aware of us and what we are up to every minute of our lives,' but one who has the love and respect to allow us our own fates. When we die and reach whatever other side there is, He will go over our lives with us page by page, like an essay written for school, an essay having on it many mistakes that must be identified and corrected before the essay is put away. Once the mistakes have been brought to our attention, we will recognize most of them, and He will point out others. By the time we get up from His desk we'll fully understand what we did wrong. Did I believe in reincarnation? No. Why would we repeat third grade if we fully perceived all of the mistakes we'd made there? I believed in an afterlife, but not on earth. I hadn't a clue as to where we went, and I did not want to guess.
However, when I arrived at my own front door again many hours later, my understanding of the world, of life, of death, of God … was a quintilIion miles away from what I had thought before. For this loud, sweet, dying woman had proven without question that what she had told me was true. As she said, I was a hard case and wanted proof even beyond Annette. Proof that transcended the transcendent. I cannot tell you what she did, but I can say she took me where I wanted to go, and showed me the impossible.
I wanted to see Melville and Hawthorne alive and in the flesh, wanted to hear their voices and the kind of words they used outside their books. I wanted to see Albert Pinkham Ryder at Christmastime, brewing up his own private brand of perfume and giving it away in little jars to children. I wanted to visit Montaigne in his tower, circa 1592, and look over his shoulder while he wrote, "Though we may mount on stilts, we must still walk on our own legs, and on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own bottom." These were my heroes, the people I'd thought about my entire adult life. If Beenie was God, and time belongs to God, then she could clap once and give me these people for a moment. She did. She took me wherever I wanted to go, and affably said stay as long as you like. Funny thing was, I didn't need or want to stay long. Only a few minutes to breathe their air, see how they held their pen or formed words with their lips. That was all I needed, and she gave it to me.
After that, when I was sure, I asked questions, but her answers wereoften unsatisfying.
"Why me?"
"Scott, I'd tell you if I knew. But I don't, honest. It just happens. They tell you that – one day you'll see your replacement, and you'll know. I guess it's sort of like love at first sight."
"Beenie, you're God/God knows everything. There's nothing He doesn't know."
"Maybe when we're all joined together, all thirty-six of us. But that never happens, so individually we got to struggle along with what we do know. You're it, mister. You're the one who's gonna take my place."
"Where do we go when we die?"
"Wherever you want. Some people stick around here; others take off."
"Take off where?"
"I told you: wherever they want."
"You're not helping!"
"They're vague questions. Remember in your class? 'Be more specific, Silver!' By the way, you know where you got that name? Your family's real name is 'Flink,' but when your great-grandfather came here from Saarland, he didn't think it sounded American, so he changed it to 'Silver.' Jack Silver instead of Udo Flink."
"Udo Flink? That's the stupidist name I ever heard."
"I guess your grandpa thought so, too. Do you want egg salad or corned beef?" From her left and right pockets, she took out sandwiches wrapped in plastic. "Roberta told me you liked my egg salad."
"I do. Thank you. That would be nice." She handed it to me, and I held it up. "An egg-salad sandwich from God."
"At least that way you can be sure it's fresh, eh?"
"Beenie, what am I supposed to do now? It's an incredible compliment that you've chosen me, hut… what do you do when you're …. "
"Well, you're not there yet, bug, so don't start worrying about that. First you gotta pass the tests. I mean, you're already over the first hurdle, which is getting picked. But now come the tests. Those're the rules, and you've just gotta follow them."
"What kind of tests? What kind of rules?"
"You want to know now? Don't you want to finish your sandwich first?"
"Now."
"O.K." She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin that had 'Dairy Queen' printed across it. "First thing you gotta do – the first test, if you want to call it that – is work out your problem with Annette. A dead person can't be angry. There's a lot they've got to do on the other side, but so long as they're still mad at something in life, it keeps them sidetracked. Know what I mean?"
"Why can't you do something to take her anger away?"
"First of all, I wouldn't know how; remember, I'm only a fraction of the whole, and my powers aren't as great as you think. Second, you two've got to work it out yourselves. If I waved some kind of magic wand over her and did what you said, it wouldn't solve her problems. It'd only be like a stopgap. A kid's got to learn to tie its own shoes sooner or later."
"What should I do to help her?"
"That's part of your test. You have to figure her out and how to start patching things up. I can tell you, though, she's not going to be much help. You've got yourself a hostile witness there, counselor. She hates your guts."
I gathered. Does she know about me? Obviously she knows about you, since you were the one who brought her back."
"Yeah, she knows about me, but not about you. She thinks I brought her here so you could make peace. She doesn't know it's part of your test."
"How do you hush the dead?"
She slapped my shoulder. "That's a good question. You know what one of my tests was?"
"Beenie, these are the ultimate mysteries! They're not recondite – they're impossible to understand. How am I supposed to go about –"
"What does 'recondite' mean?"
"Difficult to understand.'"
"Stop whining man. Of course they're hard to understand! You're the scholar, the thinker. I'm just a stupid little woman from Kansas with kids who don't like me. But I passed my tests. Sure, they were different from yours, but they weren't any easier."