Free Homing by Stephanie Domet

Leah.
    And then Nathan died, and six months later, whipsawed by confusion, Leah called Sue and begged her to come over. She just couldn’t stand it anymore, the wondering and not knowing, the lack of any reliable non-extra-sensory authority. And so Psychic Sue came. She set up a little alarm clock on the kitchen table, and asked for a piece of Leah’s jewelry. Leah handed over the ring her parents had given her when she graduated from high school, a chunky silver band with cut out suns and moons, engraved with the words
carpe diem
. In the lamplight, Sue had offered a vision of the afterlife as a health spa, where all Leah’s dearly departed hung out together by the pool, having raucous family get-togethers with good Italian food, playing Rummoli far into the night. The specifics were perhaps not quite so detailed, now that Leah thought about it. But Sue had told her that Nathan had had to recover when he got there — that he was sick when admitted to the afterlife, but that the attendants were able to do what their earthly counterparts had been unable to — they’d somehow stopped the rot that had eaten Nathan to death in this world, leaving him whole and healed and gloriously able to stay up all night, plate of cannolis at his elbow, steadily losing his heavenly pennies to his fellow dead, but feeling much better, thanks. Their grandfather’s bone cancer inpermanent remission, their grandmother’s too-big heart beating on track again, their aunt’s MS-shaking hands able once again to hold a flourish of cards, to deftly flick pennies onto the mat, their other grandfather’s litany of complaints — what had he died of, in the end? — now all meliorated.
    Leah didn’t ask questions about this, because she couldn’t think of what to ask. This seemed as reasonable a vision of heaven as any she’d ever had in her head, from her earliest understanding of angels as pudgy babies with wings made of white feathers, to her fervent hope that once she brooked those pearly gates herself, she’d be privy to all the information that eluded her on earth, like how to solve math problems, with trains departing Montréal and Winnipeg and meeting somewhere around London, Ontario, and whether she should have kept dating Timothy, who always made her take her shoes off soon as she set foot inside his apartment, and who never called her anything but dear, which was entirely too avuncular an endearment to be sexy. Of course, it’d be too late then for that kind of information to be much help. But she was looking forward to the hindsight part of it, at least.
    Psychic Sue’s answer about Nathan placated her for a while. It was, after all, the best one she had. As if to prove her point that Nathan was healthy now and happy, Sue passed along nagging messages from him. Don’t wear so much black, especially close to your face; go swimming as often as you can; don’t be afraid to scream; sing more; get back to making art the way you used to; stop drinking that brown stuff, it’s bad for you; eat more orange food, orange foods are good; read more Faulkner; re-read
The Little Prince
before Christmas.
    It was a strange list, not all of which made sense. She rarely had occasion to scream and it was winter, so swimming was a toughie. She thought about Faulkner a lot, but found the memory of him sufficiently inscrutable to keep her from trying to read him again.
    But one day, in the second hand bookshop a few blocks from her house, she found a copy of
The Little Prince,
all out of order in the stacks. It seemed like a sign, and when she took it to the counter to pay for it, JW, the kindly owner, who always had a bit of sandwich in his beard, said, “Oh, you should just take that. Don’t worry.”
    And so she did. She nodded mutely, put her crumpled five-dollar bill back in her pocket, and slipped the slim paperback in after. She walked home in a daze, walked directly