Here

The nicest thing about being Here is that we get to remember everything from before. Not every life we’ve lived, mind you, and for all I know I’ve lived a thousand. But the last one - the most recent trip we’ve had to Earth - that one, we get to remember in its entirety.

There are other things about being Here that are not so nice. In fact, from the moment I got Here, I’ve been trying to make the case for change.

“Is there a suggestion box or anything?” I asked Abe, my favorite person to talk to.

He raised his eyebrows at me. “Here? In heaven?”

I nodded.

“You’re lookin’ for a suggestion box? In heaven?” He laughed then, a big, belly laugh that didn’t amuse me. On Earth, there’d always been a way to advocate for yourself, to support improvements to your school, your church, your workplace.

“Why not?” I asked Abe. I was aware that my voice sounded whiny, pouting.

“Well, what would you suggest, Lisette?”

I looked around me at Here. It was a beautiful day. Where we existed had the appearance of being a civilization set atop of Earth’s white, puffy clouds, as if we had built a city ten thousand feet above the house I grew up in. If I looked up, I’d see a bright, slightly warm sun shining down on us. There was no breeze - zero wind, ever. Every day was 75 degrees and sunny. It never changed, and I despised it.

*****

I was born in upstate New York during a blizzard. Of course, I don’t remember that at all, but I have childhood memories of my mother telling me the story.

“There was three feet of snow outside,” she said, shaking her head. “Your father was away. I had to trek through the snow to the next door neighbor’s, half a mile away, to get a ride to the hospital. And do you what the worst part was? Getting on my snow boots at nine months pregnant and three centimeters dilated.”

She’d laugh at that part, always. My dad would grin at her, dopey and in love even in his fifties, and my older brothers would groan the way you do when you hear a family story for the hundredth time.

“I could never live in a place that didn’t have all four seasons,” my mother would always say, and I’d nod in agreement.

*****

Abe tolerates me, but many people Here don’t care for me, and that bothers me. On Earth, I was popular, pretty, and charming. Apparently once you leave Earth, it becomes obnoxious to ask for what you want and need. Maybe it was considered obnoxious on Earth, too. But that’s not how I remember it.

The day I arrived - which also, of course, was the day I died - there was an orientation held for the latest earthlings. There were only about a hundred of us in attendance. Abe was one of them.

“Don’t, like, a hundred thousand people die every day?” I whispered to him. “Why are there so few of us here?”

“If you’d pay attention, you’d understand,” he chastised me.

I rolled my eyes and tried my best to listen to the person speaking. Abe was right; they explained it all.

“There isn’t just one heaven,” the woman in charge explained. She was small, severe, and commanding, and she never told us what to call her; from the moment I met her, I thought of her as The Woman. “There are millions of heavens. You’re matched with a heaven that we feel will be comfortable for you.”

“Based on what?”

She scowled at me; I guess calling out is as frowned upon in the afterworld as well as it was on Earth.

“Based on how you died,” she said.

We were seated in a small amphitheater, stadium-style seating surrounding the podium where the woman stood. If I looked around, we seemed to be in the middle of a wooded area. I looked up, expecting to see trees swaying in the breeze. But they didn’t sway. There was no breeze, and there never would be.

*****

If my mother’s favorite season was winter, my father’s favorite was spring. We lived in a huge house with a backyard that came up against a forest, and my older brothers and I loved to explore the woods. Dad would get us all in our muck boots and lead us back out to the forest.

“To explore,” he explained to me one day as he helped me into my raincoat. I was six years old at the time of that memory. He left my brothers to gear up themselves that day; they were all teenagers at the time. I’d been a surprise, my parents had always told me. They had three boys, a year apart, right when they got married. Then, ten years after my brother Kenneth was born, I arrived.

“That’s why you’re spoiled,” Kenneth told me. “The only girl, and so much younger than us. You’re their little miracle baby.”

He said it without malice. I suppose they did spoil me - not just my parents, but my three older brothers. Without realizing it, they taught me to be a person who demands what she wants and needs, and I can’t see what’s wrong with that.

*****

Except that now that I’m Here, my commitment to advocating for myself has complicated things for me. It’s made the people around me despise me.

We are largely left to ourselves, the thousand or so of us that exist in our own particular heaven. Our days are our own. We can eat endless bowls of ice cream, watch movies, listen to music. It’s endless leisure time for all of us.

For people like Abe, it’s paradise. He worked construction for forty years on Earth, and though he loved it, he says it exhausted him.

“Had to die to get a break from it,” he jokes.

He did. He drowned in a flood caused by a hurricane in Texas. When I complain that it never rains here, he shrugs and tells me he’s seen enough rain to last several lifetimes.

*****

I haven’t. I always loved a good rainstorm on Earth. I played soccer every fall when I was a kid, and my favorite days to play were the rainy ones, when we could slide tackle in the mud. I’d run to my mom’s car, soaked and smeared, and she would shake her head at me and refuse to allow me into her car. Dad would chide her, pulling out bath towels for me to sit on so I wouldn’t destroy the car with my muddiness.

My brothers played soccer, too, but none of them were as good as me. Davey, the oldest, says that’s because Dad worked with me more - had more time to help me train since I grew up basically as an only child, my three brothers already out in the world with jobs and homes of their own by the time I was twelve years old.

While I loved the rainy days, the reality was that I loved all of it. A hot summer day at the beach, crisp spring sweatshirt weather, and the cold breeze that would hit my face when I flew down a hill on a sled in the winter. I loved it all.

*****

“Do we get to go back?”

It was one of the first questions every new arrival to our heaven asked on the first day. It certainly was one of mine.

Whenever a question was asked, it was The Woman who answered - the same one who’d told me that each person who dies is sent to a specific heaven. Abe thinks she might be God, but I disagree. She’s too snooty, too easily annoyed, to be a celestial being. I think she’s one of us who somehow got promoted.

“You can go back if you’d like to,” she told us on the first day. “Not today, but after some time.”

“Will we -”

“No,” the Woman said, shaking her head before the question was finished. “You won’t remember your life before. Well,” she said, correcting herself, “you will - but only for a moment.” We must have looked confused, because she rolled her eyes in exasperation before continuing. “There will be a fleeting moment after your birth. We call it the nanosecond of knowing. You’ll have your memories that you have now - of your most recent life, of your time Here - and then it will be gone, and you’ll be fully immersed in your new self.”

I looked around me after she said this. Everyone looked blank and confused, except for Abe, who was nodding slowly. I scowled at all the others, annoyed by their confusion, even though I was confused, too. On Earth, too, I’d often had contempt for people who shared the same weaknesses as me, as if I could bear my own insecurity and selfishness, but couldn’t abide the same qualities in another human being.

“Do we get to choose where we go back to?” Abe asked the Woman.

I’m pretty sure it was only Abe and me who paid attention to her answer, everyone else still contemplating the nanosecond of knowing and wondering when they’d experience it.

“No,” the Woman said.

“Like, we can’t even make a request?” I blurted.

The Woman’s voice had warmed a little when she spoke to Abe - he had a way of helping people feel calm, I noticed - but it turned icy cold when she spoke to me.

“You can make a request, and I’ll make a note of it,” she said simply.

When she turned away from us to answer questions from the others, I noted that her voice warmed yet again. It was only me that was the recipient of her icy tone.

“You rub people the wrong way, don’t you?” Abe said to me, his tone good-natured. If anyone else had said it, I might have lost my temper with them, but Abe had a way of indicating to me that he was in my corner no matter what he said.

I shrugged.

“Was it the same on Earth?” he asked me.

I considered this. My parents adored me, and my brothers loved me - but did I rub other people the wrong way?

*****

It was fall when my family first came to visit me at college in Boston.

“Cambridge,” I corrected when my brother Christopher said it, and he raised his eyebrows at me.

“Trying to make sure people know it’s Harvard and not some other school for mere mortals, are we?”

I grinned. I was proud of where I was. “Straight As and varsity sports, right?”

He looked at me, surprised. A civil rights attorney and Georgetown graduate, Christopher was the most serious of my three brothers.

“That and a lot of privilege and opportunities,” he said quietly.

I think I was meant to feel ashamed just then, but I didn’t. I was too happy, feeling the cool fall breeze on my cheeks, taking in the sight of the gorgeous red, yellow, and orange leaves throughout the campus. I was wearing a turtleneck sweater and brown knee-high boots with a matching set of mittens, scarf, and hat, and I knew I looked lovely - like a vision of youth and vibrance in a perfect autumn setting.

“Let’s get a coffee,” I said to Christopher, linking my arm through his. “The day is so beautiful, isn’t it?” He shook his head and smiled at me. If he’d wanted to say more, about my privilege and opportunities and lack of appreciation, he chose not to.

*****

The vibe Here wasn’t always as accepting and affirming as I was used to. I continued to complain about the lack of weather, and I continued to be ignored by everyone but Abe.

I understood their satisfation with the lack of climate. Everyone in our version of heaven had a horrible weather-related death story - overheating, wildfires, tornadoes, bitter cold, and hurricanes and drowning like Abe. They relished the endless supply of days that were warm, not hot, without a bit of breeze or a drop of precipitation.

“Why don’t we just get to choose?” I asked the Woman, frustrated.

“The decision was made for you,” she said, using the same weary tone she always used with me.

“Well, when I return to Earth,” I said, tossing my hair. “I want weather. I want seasons. I’d rather risk dying in a tornado than live without snow and rain and wind and heat.”

A man nearby frowned at me, shaking his head, and I vaguely recalled him telling a story of dying in a tornado in St. Louis. I frowned and rolled my eyes; I couldn’t abide people who were overly sensitive.

“How can you stand it?” I asked Abe one day. He had his eyes closed, feeling the warmth of our heaven’s sun, swaying back and forth. “It’s the same, all day, every day. Don’t you hate it?”

“Why do you hate it so much, Lisette?” he asked instead of answering me.

I started crying before I even realized what was happening - my first heavenly tears, the first time I’d cried since the moment I opened my eyes in this weatherless nightmare.

*****

Before you leave Earth, you don’t realize how much things like falling snowflakes and crunching leaves are associated with your memories. When I got to Here, it was hard for me to even pull back the memories of my mother, my father, my brothers without those sensory, visceral reminders. What kind of heaven would deprive me of the ability to do that?

They didn’t understand; no one Here understood. They’d been traumatized by their deaths-by-weather, and they welcomed the still air and the unchanging landscape. “It’s paradise,” they said. “Every day’s a perfect one.”

They knew nothing. The rhythm of the seasons had vibrated throughout my childhood. My best memories of my family were tied up with the sights and sounds of the four seasons, and to live without those reminders was an agony I couldn’t continue to bear.

*****

“Why are you so kind to me?” I asked Abe that day, my eyes still streaming with tears. “Everyone else can’t seem to stand me.”

He smiled at me warmly. “I don’t know what you had to be angry about on Earth,” he said gently. “But I had a daughter just a little older than you. And I know she’d be angry as hell if she died when you did.”

They all remembered their painful deaths, but I didn’t. That’s the thing about being struck by lightning. One minute, you’re eighteen years old, running through a rainstorm with your family on a vacation in Wyoming; the next minute, you’re gone, dead, trapped in a weatherless nightmare.

*****

The day we got to leave Here, it was as if the air was pulsating with excitement. It wasn’t everyone; we weren’t all on the same schedule. But Abe and I were. I was thrilled.

“Maybe I’ll land in upstate New York again,” I said.

“You know, you won’t -”

“I know,” I said, nodding. I wouldn’t be able to communicate with my family. I wouldn’t know them if I passed them on the street. That thought pained me.

We were all in the amphitheater, the same place where we’d had our orientation, waiting for the moment when we’d cease to exist Here and be reborn on Earth. I couldn’t wait. But I did feel a pang of longing for the questions I’d forget once I was reborn - the questions I’d never get the answers to. Like why there were all these different heavens, rather than just one place to be reunified with those you loved. And then, there was the question that was most important to me in this moment of waiting to be reborn: who and what would determine where I’d end up when I left Here?

“It’s her,” Abe whispered. He pointed to the Woman. “She decides.”

I groaned. “She hates me,” I said. “Why does she hate me, Abe?” I understood by then that Abe’s affection for me was rooted in pity because of how young I’d been when I died. But the Woman had the same information; why did she not give me any grace?

“Well, you know,” Abe said. I looked at him, and he frowned. “Well, maybe you don’t.” He paused, sighing deeply. “She had a daughter who died, the Woman. Younger than you. Hit and run driver when the girl was six years old.”

There was no time for anything I was feeling - deep sorrow for the Woman, anguish over what a pill I’d been, excitement for my rebirth. One moment, I was holding Abe’s hand, and the Woman was smirking at me from the center of the amphitheater. The next moment, I was gone from Here.

*****

I was born making anguished cries toward the heavens; most babies are, I think. For a moment, I could only think of the Woman’s sorrow, her grief, the children that leave Earth way before their mothers are ready to let them go.

“She’s perfect,” a sweet voice cooed, and I looked up at my new mother. “Look, the sun is shining right on her, honey.”

“Of course it is,” another voice - presumably my father - said. “Welcome to Santa Barbara, baby girl, where it’s seventy degrees and sunny every single day.”

It was the end of my nanosecond of knowing, and the Woman’s face flashed before my eyes.

That bitch, I thought.

And then disappeared into my new life.