The Pear

What might believers see after death?

The woman was sitting under a pear tree when I found her. Knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them, head tilted back against the bark. Her eyes were open but not looking at anything.

I sat down a few feet away and waited.

She turned after a while. Brown hair. A face that showed a lot of living. She studied me the way people do when they can't figure out why I look so young.

"How long have you been sitting there?" she asked.

"Not long."

She rubbed her eyes with her palms. "I can't get used to this. The air. The weight of my own body. I feel like I'm thirty again. I keep expecting something to hurt."

I'd heard this before from others who arrived carrying the memory of pain. I used to wonder what pain felt like. I don't anymore. Wondering about things you'll never know gets heavy after a while, and there's too much here that's worth paying attention to. I couldn't understand it the way they did. I had no body before this one.

"My name is Ellie," I said.

"Catherine." She looked at her hands, turning them over. "I was seventy-three. Lymphoma. Three rounds of treatment. After the last one, I told my daughter not to bring me back to the hospital." She said it flat, the way people here say hard things. Matter of fact.

"I woke up on the sand down there, not long ago." She pointed toward the water. "A woman was waiting for me. She knew my name. She held my hand and walked me up the hill to this tree. She didn't explain anything. Just smiled and said, 'We've been expecting you.' She was gone just before you came. I couldn't stop crying. I didn't have any pain. "

I nodded.

"How long have you been here?" Catherine asked.

"I don't know exactly. A while."

"And before that?"

"There was no before for me. I arrived here like you."

She stared at me. I was used to it. The forehead tightens. The eyes move across your face looking for whatever they think should be there.

"I was a miscarriage," I said. "My mother never held me."

Catherine's hand went to her mouth.

"I didn't know that for a long time. Later, a man I traveled with told me things about the world you came from. Trees and weather and seasons. Winter." I paused. "I still can't picture winter."

"You've never been cold?" she asked quietly.

"No."

"Never saw snow?"

"No."

She stared at me blankly.

The branches moved above us. I could smell the fruit, that dense sweet smell close to the skin.

"My daughter Grace." Catherine said. "She's forty-seven. She held my hand when I died." Her voice caught. "She doesn't know I'm here. She doesn't know any of this exists."

"Not yet."

Catherine looked at me hard. "You believe that?"

"I live it." I picked up a pear that had fallen near my foot. The skin was warm. "You lived there. Now you live here. There's a place beyond here, too. Some call it, 'the Upper Country'. Something we're all waiting for."

"Three," she whispered. "Three lives."

"You're close." I said, "One life, three countries."

She said it softly to herself. "One life, three countries." She looked past me as she said it.

"Grace used to bring me pears from the farmers market," Catherine said. "Every Saturday morning. She'd set the bag on my kitchen counter without saying anything."

I handed her the one I'd been holding. She took it, turned it over once.

She didn't bite it. She held it against her knee and looked out past the orchard toward the water where she'd come from. I thought she might ask more questions.

She didn't.

I could wait.