(15) Linda McMullen: Going Up to Heaven, Fundamentally
In college, I knew a girl of surpassing beauty and fiery faith, and I hated her a little. Christina (of course) treated her good looks like an ugly and oversized Christmas sweater, one she might return to the great department store above, in exchange for life everlasting. She succeeded only in looking like the “before” image in one of those movies where the awkward nerd-duckling takes off her glasses to reveal the dazzling swan princess. Pedestrian jealousy aside – Heaven had had my share of looks on backorder for nearly two decades—she fooled no one.
And I admired her faith, unabashedly. Although she felt it insufficient to move mountains, it blazed within her, igniting the inner glow usually reserved for bonafide saints or the recently engaged. I judged that she could have, at least, passed a gift receipt through the eye of a needle. I didn’t share it; belief and I had a cursory acquaintance at best, but at my most disinterested I could admire the intensity of her conviction. Personally, I couldn’t even bring myself to accept any specific rites; my cosmos was confined to a general appreciation for the platinum rule and the strictures of Mrs. Patrick Campbell (who merely cautioned against doing things in public that might frighten the horses).
We might have gotten on well together—she liked classic fiction and Trivial Pursuit and she offered the occasional dry observation on college life that tickled my desiccated funny bone—but she declared, quite matter-of-factly, that I was destined for a one-way ticket to the Fire & Brimstone Inn. And I had a hell of a time talking pleasantly with her after that.
* * *
Ten years later, preoccupied with my hedonistic disemboweling of an Amazon package, I hadn’t yet bothered looking at the alumni newsletter I received in the mail. My phone chimed with a text from my friend Anne.
“Did you see about Christina?”
“See what?” I wrote back.
“She’s dead.”
I shivered, picked up the newsletter. In Memoriam. Gone, at the age of twenty-eight. She had gone as (I presume) she would have wanted to, pushing a negligent and innocent small child out of the way of an oncoming car.
She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to lament her certain reunion with her Savior up in Heaven. But I never could accept her precepts and felt my eyes sting.
Linda McMullen is a wife, mother, diplomat, and homesick Wisconsinite. Her short stories and the occasional poem have appeared in over sixty literary magazines, including Drunk Monkeys, Storgy, and Newfound.