River of Heaven

by Lee Martin

  As he stood in the middle of the aisle, he lifted his eyebrows and gave just the least bit of a nod of his head toward the front of the store. It was spring, and outside the sun was shining, and, when I stepped out there, as I knew I soon would, that sunshine would warm my face and the air would smell of the earth thawed from its winter freeze.

  The man took his time walking across the parking lot. Blue and orange pennants swayed from the light poles, lifting and falling in a lazy breeze. The sun glinted off windshields and chrome bumpers. I shaded my eyes with my hand and saw the man open the door of a blue Ford Galaxy. He paused a moment, one hand on the door, one reaching in for the steering wheel. He kept his eyes on me, and I knew that I was to get into my own car and follow him.

  We drove out into the country, into Lukin Township, and then the Galaxy turned down a gravel road. The man slowed down, and I knew he was being mindful of the dust he was throwing up behind his tires, trying to spare me.

  That kind gesture makes it difficult for me to say what happened next. I got to thinking about Dewey and the kiss he gave me the night we walked down the alley behind our houses, holding hands. A sweet kiss. From that point on, though I didn’t know it at the time, I’d never be able to feel a man close to me with the same sweetness that I had that night with Dewey.

  The Galaxy turned down a lane that led back to a deserted farmstead. I stopped my car on the gravel road, idling there at the mouth of that lane, unable to turn the wheel and follow. The Galaxy’s brake lights came on, and the man stopped, waiting for me. Then I pressed down on the accelerator and went on up the gravel road. I found my way to the blacktop and went back into town. I went back to the IGA, and, believe it or not, our carts were still there right where we’d left them. I could barely stand to look at his—that Wonder Bread and lunchmeat and those cookies I’d never be able to buy for myself after that day. If I knew where that man was now, I’d tell him I’m sorry I left him there in that lane.

  I can barely stand to think of all this as Stump and I take our walk. The only person we meet is Arthur. He’s at the corner, so much in a rush that he almost steps out into the path of a car. I have to take his arm and keep him on the curb.

  “It’s Maddie.” When he looks at me, his eyes are wild. “She’s gone again, and I can’t find her.”

  “Again?”

  “She came home, and I told her all right, we’ll have tinsel and icicles. Everything was shipshape. Then I told her to open her present.”

  “The skirt and top.”

  Arthur nods. “Let’s just say here’s one time when Vera didn’t quite make the right recommendation.”

  I see the fear in him, and, no matter how much he hurt me earlier, I’m ready to offer my help.

  Then he looks down at Stump, and for the first time he takes in that French sailor’s outfit, and he says, “Jesus Christ,” says it as if he’s just seen the most pathetic thing in the world, and all I can bring myself to say is, “I hope you find her,” before turning, tugging on Stump’s leash, and heading off down the street.

  I go around the block, circling back to my house.

  Arthur’s house is dark. His Chrysler isn’t in the driveway, and I imagine he’s driving the streets now, looking for Maddie.

  I open the gate to my side yard, and as Stump and I pass his ship, I smell cigarette smoke. Stump strains against his leash, and I let him take the lead. He pulls me toward the ship, where he sniffs at the pet door that leads into the hull. Then he tugs harder at the leash and he begins to bark.

  Something scrabbles around inside the ship. It takes some doing on my part, but I get down on my knees there in the snow. I pull the door away from the hull, and that’s when I see the fire of a cigarette, and I say, “Maddie, is that you?”

  “No,” she says, “it’s Santa Claus taking a smoke break.”

  I can only see her when she puffs on her cigarette and its fire spreads a dim light over her chin and the tip of her nose. “You can’t stay in there,” I tell her.

  “Seems pretty cozy to me.”

  “Your grandfather’s worried about you. He’s out looking for you right now.” She has nothing to say to that. She only draws on her cigarette again, and I hear her breath as she exhales the smoke. “It’s Christmas Eve,” I say.

  She starts crying in earnest now, hiccupping sobs she couldn’t hide if she tried. She tries to say something between the hiccups. “Do…you…know…”

  “Do I know what?” Although the sound of her crying is something I feel in my throat, I keep my voice patient and calm. “What is it, Maddie? Go on, you can tell me.”

  “It’s him,” she says. “He doesn’t know anything about who I am.”

  Something comes flying toward me, a piece of cloth that strikes me on the chest and then falls onto the snow. I pick it up, and from the feel of the material and from what Arthur told me earlier, I can make a good guess at what I’m holding in my hand.

  “The skirt or the top?” I ask.

  “Half of the top,” she says. Several more pieces of cloth come fluttering out the pet door. “Here’s the rest of it, and most of the skirt. Why would he ever think?”

  “He was just trying,” I say. “You can’t blame him for that.”

  “We’re strangers,” she says in a tired whisper. “That’s what we are. I see him maybe once or twice all my life, and then, bam, I’m living with him. How would you like it?”

  I imagine she’s right. How hard it must be for the two of them tossed together now because her mother’s in trouble with dope and her father is incommunicado south of the border. “I guess you’ll have to get to know each other,” I say. “What choice do you have?”

  “I could stay right here.”

  “No, I think eventually you’d freeze.”

  “You should have heated this place.”

  I don’t tell her that I’m thinking about it. I’ve been studying up on how to wire the ship’s hull with thermostat-controlled electrical heating elements. I don’t tell her because I don’t want her to think I’m being ridiculous about Stump, who has started to chew on some of the scraps of cloth that Maddie threw out of the hull.

  “Looks like Stump agrees with you about that outfit,” I say.

  Maddie crawls over to the pet door and sticks her head outside. She starts that baby talk. “Stumpie-Wumpie,” she says. “Yes, that’s a good boy. What a good boy. You old Stumper-Wumper, you.” She reaches out to scratch his ears and that’s when she notices the French sailor’s outfit. “Oh, look at you. You handsome devil, you. Très chic. Oui, oui.”

  “It’s his Christmas present,” I say. “Too much, you think?”

  She has her arms around Stump’s neck, and she’s pressing him to her with a tenderness I can feel in my chest. “Not a bit,” she says. “It’s just perfect.”

  I can’t tell you exactly what comes over me, only to say it’s a feeling I haven’t had for a long time, a sense that here’s this girl who will let me be who I am, and I say to her, “Come inside my house. Get warm. We’ll figure something out.”

  She pulls away from Stump and looks at me. Here we both are, kneeling in the snow on Christmas Eve, and there’s that music off in the distance at the city park—“Silent Night” is playing now—and Maddie says to me, “All right. Just for a while.”

  Then she stands up and reaches her hand out to me, and I let her help me to my feet.

  INSIDE MY HOUSE, MADDIE FLOPS DOWN IN MY RECLINING chair and picks up the remote control from the end table. She kicks up the leg rest and clicks on the television. Music swells: the I Love Lucy theme song.

  “TV land,” Maddie says with a smug nod of her head. “Yep. That suits you.”

  I’m stooped over, taking off Stump’s leash. “How do you figure?”

  Maddie mutes the sound. “Look.”

  I straighten and watch the TV. Everything’s in black and white, of course. There’s Lucy in their New York City apartment, playing the piano, the flared skirt of her dress fa
nned out about her legs. Ricky is standing beside the piano, and he’s wearing a Santa Claus suit, at least the coat and the pants and the boots. He doesn’t have on the hat or the fake white mustache and beard. His glorious black hair is perfectly combed, and he’s snapping his fingers as he sings. The Mertzes are there. The Mertzes are always there. Fred’s trousers are up high on his big belly, and he rests his hands on its shelf. Ethel has that angelic look on her face that says even though she’s married to an old poop like Fred she still thinks her life is wonderful.

  Without the sound, it’s as if I’m watching someone’s home movies. Lucy finishes the song with a flourish, her hands coming down hard on the keys. Everyone holds that last note—whatever the song is—mouths wide open, and then Fred pats Ricky on the back, and Ethel puts her arm around Lucy’s shoulders and gives her a squeeze, and everything’s all right there. You can tell that even without any words. Everything is A-okay, hunky-dory, apple-pie grand.

  Then the feeling starts to come to me, the way it always does when I look at old photographs or when I daydream too long about something that happened way back when, that there’s this whole life that these people don’t know about. This inevitable life. It’s just waiting for them. Sooner or later, Cal will come back—his things are still here, so he has to come back, right?—and I’ll ask him about that map, and then who knows what will happen next.

  I want to explain the feeling I have to Maddie, but it’s hard to find the right words, and all I can manage is, “There they are.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “It gives me the shivers, too.”

  The telephone rings, and Maddie clicks off the TV, puts down the chair’s leg rest, and springs to her feet. She looks at me and puts a finger to her lips.

  “I have to tell him,” I say.

  “You could let it ring.”

  “Maddie, he knows I’m home. He can see the lights.”

  “I don’t want to go back there.”

  “We’ll work it out,” I say. “You’ll see.”

  But it isn’t Arthur on the phone. It’s Vera. “Our boy’s over here.” For a moment, I wonder whether she means Cal: maybe he’s gone to pay her a call. Then she says, “He can’t find his granddaughter,” and I know she’s talking about Arthur.

  “Yes,” I say, “that’s what he told me earlier. I was out walking my dog. It was that time of evening, you see, that time when Stump…that’s my dog…needs to go for a walk.” I’m not sure why I go to such pains to explain how I happened to be out at the same time Arthur was looking for Maddie. As if a man can’t take a walk with his basset hound, who just happens to be wearing a French sailor’s suit on Christmas Eve. “I was walking my dog,” I say again, “and I ran into Arthur.”

  “He’s plenty worried.” Here Vera’s voice shrinks to a whisper, and I hear her heels clicking over the floor as she moves, so I assume, out of range of Arthur’s hearing. “Oh, ducky. He’s out of his head with worry. He’s sitting in my living room right now, and he’s crying. A man like him. Sam, it breaks my heart.”

  Maddie stands close to me, close enough so she can tilt her head toward my ear, trying to hear every bit of my conversation with Vera. I smell a faint tang of cigarette smoke from Maddie’s hair and the wool from her sweater and a trace of vanilla—a shampoo or powder or lotion, I assume. All in all, it’s a pleasant smell. What I’m saying is, I don’t mind it. A strand of her hair tickles my neck. She comes up on her toes, trying to get even closer to the receiver. She has to lay her hand on my shoulder for balance, and this intimacy makes it seem that we’ve lived comfortably together in this house for years.

  “I’m sorry this is happening,” I say to Vera. “Sorry for Arthur.”

  “He’s thinking he should go to the police, but he wanted me to call you first to ask if you could see any lights on in his house. Maybe the girl’s come home.”

  “No. No lights.”

  “Then I guess it’s going to have to be the cops.”

  “Vera, wait.” Maddie draws away from me. A stir of air passes over my face, a last sniff of vanilla. She crosses her fingers. She mouths the word, please. I don’t have time or the nerve to tell her I don’t want to do this, to explain that I’m glad for her company, that I wish we could pretend a little longer. I don’t know how to explain that I have no right to her, that family, no matter how shaky, is always more important than one person’s loneliness. “Tell him she’s here,” I say to Vera. “Tell Arthur I’ve got her.”

  I hang up the phone, and Maddie bangs her hand down on my kitchen counter. “I can’t believe you ratted me out,” she says.

  What was I to do, I ask her. Lie? “He’s worried about you,” I say. “Vera says he’s over at her house right now, crying. That’s how worried he is.”

  “He should be worried.” Maddie crosses her arms over her chest and makes her head do a sharp bob, the way that Jeannie did on that old television program whenever she wanted something to change. She crossed her arms, blinked her eyes, nodded her head, and presto: a grown man shrank to the size of a snap pea, a dog became a camel, people traveled back in time.

  But nothing changes for Maddie. Here she is, still in my house on Christmas Eve, mad at her grandfather, who, I’m sure, is on his way to get her.

  “He loves you,” I say. “Look at what he’s doing for you. Taking you into his home. Taking care of you until your mother gets well.”

  “Gets well?” Maddie’s arms come undone, and she puts her hands on her hips. She opens her mouth and stares at me as if she’s trying to make sure that she just heard what she thinks she did.

  “What kind of sick joke are you trying to pull? Last time I checked, Sam-You-Am, no one ‘gets well’”—as she says this, she lifts her arms and curls the first two fingers on each hand into air quotes—“from being dead.”

  Now it’s my turn to question whether I’ve heard correctly. I go back over the story Arthur told me about Maddie’s mother and her methamphetamine addiction.

  “Your mother,” I say.

  “Dead.”

  “But…”

  “Dead.” Maddie is shouting now. “Dead, dead, dead.”

  Stump comes to her. He noses around her legs, barks at her until she stoops down to pet him. Don’t shout, he tells her when he licks her face. Don’t shout. I’m here.

  I have stones in my throat. Sorry that I’ve hurt her. I try to explain. “Your grandfather told me your mother had a drug problem, and that’s why you’re here.”

  “Is that his story?” She gives Stump one last scratch behind his ears and then straightens up to face me. “It doesn’t surprise me. That’s how ashamed he is.”

  She tells me the real story. Her mother died of AIDS, which she caught from having unprotected sex with a man who used heroin. “Shot up smack,” Maddie first says, and I have to ask her to please speak in language a man like me, one who doesn’t know the lingo of this and that, can understand. Heroin, she says. IV drug user. Exchange of bodily fluids. She thrusts her pelvis forward. “You know,” she says. “The old humpty-dumpty.”

  I hold up my hand in protest. “Please,” I say. “This isn’t my business.”

  She puts her tongue to her front teeth, and her jaw juts out and her lips curl with what I can only call disgust. “Too much for you?” she asks.

  “Please,” I say again. “This is a matter of your family’s. Something now between you and your grandfather. It’s not for me to be a part of.”

  “But you are a part of it,” she says, her voice now overly sweet, the way Vera’s can be when she’s telling the Seasoned Chefs how to prepare a dish or when she’s on her radio show. “You know the story,” Maddie says. “The real story. It’s yours now, Sam-You-Am. It’s up to you what you do with it. You can ignore it. You can tell it to someone else. You can shake your head and say, my, my, my. You can think, oh, how fucked up these people are. Pardon my French. Choices, Sam. We all make choices.” She moves to the kitchen window and looks out across my side yard to a s
et of headlights sweeping now into Arthur’s driveway. “Here he comes,” she says. “Here comes the Pope. What’s it going to be, Sam?” She turns back to me, and I see tears wet on her cheeks. “Are you going to let me stay here with you or not?”

  “Here?” I say.

  “Choices,” she says. “Sam, I don’t have too many left.”

  Arthur doesn’t knock on my back door. He opens it and comes marching in. “Maddie,” he says. He doesn’t bother to close the door behind him, and the storm door, once it claps shut to the frame, clouds over with condensation, the warm air inside my house meeting the cold on the other side. “Maddie,” he says again.

  “Good Christ.”

  His face is red, and despite the cold, sweat beads up on his forehead. I can smell liquor on him. This isn’t to say that he’s drunk. I don’t believe he is. But it’s clear that he’s had a drink or two, something I imagine Vera offered to brace him while he told her about Maddie.

  “You’re drunk,” Maddie says to him.

  “Maddie,” he says, “don’t be like that. You know it isn’t true. Now let’s go home. Let’s get out of Sammy’s hair.”

  She stares at me and lifts her eyebrows as if to say, Well?

  I remember what she’s just told me about choices and how I can ignore her or judge her or make her the subject of gossip. She’s right. Once we know the hidden life, the secrets someone carries, how can it not be ours? How can it not be something we live? I think of Cal and all he told me. I think of that map and all that’s about to become mine. My life used to be so simple, no one expecting anything of me, no one but Stump—and he’s always easy to please. Now here are all these people. Now I have all their stories.

  “Arthur,” I say. “Let’s all sit down. It’s Christmas Eve. Please. Let’s sit down and talk.”

  Sometimes all we can hope is that someone will come forward and say, Here. Listen. This is what you should do. I know this to be true because it’s what I did once upon a time when I was friends with Dewey Finn. I was young and stupid. I was Cal’s little brother, and I didn’t understand that I could determine what happened next.