Heaven Adjacent
Page 1
Also by Catherine Ryan Hyde
The Wake Up
Allie and Bea
Say Goodbye for Now
Leaving Blythe River
Ask Him Why
Worthy
The Language of Hoofbeats
Pay It Forward: Young Readers Edition
Take Me with You
Paw It Forward
365 Days of Gratitude: Photos from a Beautiful World
Where We Belong
Subway Dancer and Other Stories
Walk Me Home
Always Chloe and Other Stories
The Long, Steep Path: Everyday Inspiration from the Author of Pay It Forward
How to Be a Writer in the E-Age: A Self-Help Guide
When You Were Older
Don’t Let Me Go
Jumpstart the World
Second Hand Heart
When I Found You
Diary of a Witness
The Day I Killed James
Chasing Windmills
The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance
Love in the Present Tense
Becoming Chloe
Walter’s Purple Heart
Electric God/The Hardest Part of Love
Pay It Forward
Earthquake Weather and Other Stories
Funerals for Horses
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Catherine Ryan Hyde
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503900394
ISBN-10: 1503900398
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
CONTENTS
THREE MONTHS AFTER THE MOVE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
THE MOVE
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
ABOUT A MONTH BEFORE THE MOVE
Chapter Nine
THE MOVE, CONTINUED
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
THREE MONTHS AFTER THE MOVE
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
ONE MONTH BEFORE THE MOVE
Chapter Eighteen
THREE MONTHS AND A COUPLE OF WEEKS AFTER THE MOVE
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
THREE YEARS AFTER THE MOVE
Chapter Twenty-Five
HEAVEN ADJACENT BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THREE MONTHS AFTER THE MOVE
Chapter One
When Somebody Hands You a Fish
Roseanna was standing under the barely warm water in her tiny, cold makeshift shower when the bell at the gate began to clang.
She cursed to herself a few times, under her breath but out loud, rinsing off more or less all at once and grabbing a towel. She stepped out into her shabby and small add-on bathroom, toweled her hair briefly, then wrapped the towel around herself.
Roseanna stuck her head out the bedroom door, leaving most of her body still in hiding. From there, through the living room window, she could see a young man of twentysomething standing at the gate. He was looking around and—puzzlingly—even up over his head. As though something tangible and remarkable were about to materialize close by. Or above.
“I’ll be there in a minute!” she bellowed.
She could see by his reaction that he heard. But he never seemed to get a bead on the direction of the sound.
She trotted down the steps of her little farmhouse, the porch stairs sagging limply under her weight, then headed for the gate. She was still a bit huffy and she knew it. She could feel the ball of irritation tucked under her ribs.
“Peace and quiet,” she muttered to herself under her breath. “Solitude. Still don’t think it’s too much to ask.”
She took a deep breath and tried to let it all go before she spoke.
He was a nice enough looking young man. Clean-cut. He reminded her of her son, Lance. A little bit, anyway. But he seemed somewhat greener regarding life in general—what Roseanna’s mother had used to call wet behind the ears.
“I’m sorry I got you out of the shower,” he said.
“What can I do for you?” she asked, without addressing whether he was or was not forgiven.
“I was hoping to get your story.”
“My story.”
“Yes.”
“You want to know why I made the metal animals.”
“I want to know everything. Why you left such a successful life in the city. And a really comfortable lifestyle. Why you chose a place like this that’s so . . .”
He paused. Looked around again. Looked at her little farmhouse, with its faded paint and saggy porch. At her barn, huge and imposing, but looking like a good wind could end its upright life once and for all. His face took on a humble expression. He seemed to realize he had painted himself into a verbal corner—that there was no polite way out.
“How do you know what I left behind?” she asked him, feeling her eyes narrow.
Generally the people who stopped here knew nothing beyond what they saw with their own eyes. Oh, perhaps they’d heard that she had a reputation as a colorful local, and that the animal sculptures were worth a look and a few photos. Some had even been told that they could talk to Roseanna about their lives—that a visitor might be asked whether his life had turned out the way he’d dreamed it might, and a conversation of some depth might ensue. But no one had come by who knew anything about the past she had so unceremoniously left in the dust.
“Well, you know,” he said. “Word gets around.”
“Not a good enough answer.” Her tone fell somewhere between firm boundary-setting and an impenetrable brick wall.
“A couple of people came back to the city who’d been talking to you, and, well . . . it just seemed like an interesting story. You know. Human interest.”
She looked up and over his shoulder and noticed, for the first time, that a van sat parked across the road. It was not empty. It contained a passenger. A man who looked to be in his late forties, playing with an expensive-looking camera.
“Wait a second,” she said. “Wait just a second. Are you telling me you’re a reporter?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“From?”
“The New York Times.”
She spun on her heel and headed back to the house. “Goodbye,” she said over her shoulder, the word accompanied by a backward wave.
“No, wait!” he called. “Don’t go yet. Give me two minutes to make my case.”
Roseanna stopped. For a moment she did not turn back to face him. Instead she regarded her own property. The little girl was out and around, she saw. Chasing the short-haired brown dog, who was chasing the chickens. The old man was chopping wood, which Roseanna had ask
ed him not to do. He was eighty, and the last thing she needed was for him to have a coronary on her property. They never thought of things like that, these people. These squatters. They never thought about legalities. About the extra burden she faced by virtue of owning the land.
Just before she turned back to face the reporter, she saw the young male squatter, the veteran—Nelson, his name was—walking back up the hill from the creek. Two good-sized trout hung from a stringer in his left hand.
She turned back to the gate. Moved a step or two closer.
“Fine,” she said. “Take your two minutes. But I’m telling you right now it won’t do you a bit of good.”
The young reporter swung her gate open and stepped onto her property. Which she had not asked him to do. And he handled the gate a bit stridently, she noticed. He seemed not to understand that everything on her farm needed to be used gently. Like its new owner, none of it had been born yesterday.
Roseanna heard a car door open. The photographer across the street was stepping out of the van. The reporter spun to face his partner, shook his head, and used his hands in a kind of cutting motion. A universal, nonverbal Don’t. The older man stepped back into the van and slammed the door.
“So, here was my thinking,” the reporter said, walking up to Roseanna and standing too close. “An awful lot of people are in the city right now, living the kind of life you left behind. I think they’ll want to hear your reasoning. Some will think you’re crazy. I won’t kid you about that. But others, it might really strike a chord. Like I said. It’s a human interest thing.”
“I find it hard to believe that welded metal animals are interesting enough for the New York Times. And I wasn’t exactly a household name in my old profession.”
“You’re missing the point of the thing,” he said. “It’s the sudden shift in life direction. Walking out of your life and leaving everything behind. I didn’t think my editor would go for it, but I was wrong. It fascinates people. Probably because so many people have thought about it or wanted to do it. Like I keep saying. Human interest is all it takes.”
“Well, this human is not interested,” she said.
“But you seem to like to share your thoughts on life. From what I’ve heard. You seem to want to get people to open up about whether they’re really happy.”
“So?”
“So . . . wouldn’t you like to reach thousands of people with that same message?”
“No,” Roseanna said simply.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want my family to know where I am. Or my colleagues. My former colleagues, that is.”
“They don’t know where you are?”
It was an incredulous question. Unguarded. She looked up into the young man’s face. He looked a bit hurt, for reasons she couldn’t quite sort out. As if he were the family being held at arm’s length. He was still standing too close to her. Not respecting her personal space. She took a giant step backward, holding one hand as a stop sign to ensure he would not follow.
While she was taking him in, deciding he was more like thirty but with a baby face, she could hear the little girl shrieking, and the dog barking, and the splitting maul whacking down onto wedges of firewood over and over again.
“I text and phone them,” she said, feeling annoyed. By the noise, but also by the fact that she knew she didn’t owe him this information yet had not found her way out of paying it. “Some of them, anyway. But if they knew my exact location, they’d show up here and try to drag me home.”
A silence. If you could call shrieking children and barking dogs and thumping splitting mauls silent.
“No law says we have to give your exact location,” he said.
For a moment, Roseanna didn’t answer. She was considering it, and she could feel it. And he seemed to feel it, too. It drew him in closer again, as though she had left a door ajar and he was preparing to dart through it.
Just then Nelson, the young veteran, tapped her on the shoulder. She hadn’t known he was there, and she jumped.
“Sorry to startle you, miss,” he said.
Then he handed her a fish.
“Oh,” she said, taking it from him. “Thank you.”
It was a rainbow. A headless rainbow trout, carefully cleaned. Its shiny side gleamed in the sun.
“I took the head off the way you like. And I cleaned out that gut cavity real good. Did everything but eat it for you.”
“Thank you,” she said again.
Nelson tipped his sun-faded hat and backed away.
She looked up at her intruder again. The reporter.
“I have to go,” she said. “Somebody just handed me a fish.”
“Oh. Okay. You have to go put it in the fridge. I understand. I’ll wait right here.”
“No, you don’t understand at all.” She heard a second swelling of her own irritation. He undoubtedly did, too. “First of all, your two minutes are up.” They very likely weren’t, but she said so all the same. “Second, when somebody hands you a fish, you don’t put it in the fridge.”
“You don’t? I would think that’s exactly where you put it.”
“Well, then, you don’t know much about the subject, do you? This fish was alive and swimming not ten minutes ago.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Excuse me?” she asked, her voice rising to a screech. The dog stopped barking and the little girl stopped shrieking. The old man, who was a touch hard of hearing, did not stop splitting wood. “I do so know it. Why would you say otherwise?”
“Well . . . he was down there fishing for . . . we don’t know how long. Right? That’s my point. Could have been hours. And he could have caught that fish the first moment he was down there.”
Roseanna rocked her head back and stepped away from him again. “See, this is the problem with people like you. You don’t know what you don’t know. You’ve never been fishing, have you?”
“No. But I know how to figure basic lengths of time.”
“When you fish, you carry something called a stringer. Might be a chain with gill hooks on it. Might be just a cord with a ring on the end that you thread through the gill and back on itself and . . . oh, why am I explaining all this to you? It doesn’t matter. You don’t care about stringers and I don’t care about educating you, and anyway your two minutes are up. What I’m saying is, you put the fish on a sort of . . . leash and put it back in the water. Alive. You don’t take it out of the water until you’re ready to walk home. Which takes not ten minutes.”
“Oh,” he said. And for a brief but blessed moment he seemed genuinely abashed. “I guess you’re right. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But you still have to put it in the fridge.”
“Absolutely not. If you’ve never experienced eating a fish that was alive ten minutes ago, I guess you can’t understand.”
“So where do you put it if not in the fridge?”
“A frying pan. And then my stomach. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”
She turned and walked up onto the porch, still holding the fish. In both hands, because it was slippery. He darted up the steps to open the front door for her.
“Thank you,” she said.
But then he followed her inside.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “who are all these people?”
Roseanna sighed deeply. And a bit more audibly than necessary. “Not a day goes by that I don’t ask myself that same question.”
“No, really. It was a serious question.”
“It was a serious answer,” she said.
“I think you might need to keep that photographer of yours on a leash,” she said, leaning closer to the window.
The man was walking among the sculptures—all of which were located distinctly on her property—doing what photographers do best. He was staring up at the giraffe, and when he broke free of that obsession and stared into the iron eyes of the lion, the lion looked for all the world as though he were staring back.
/> “I think he just figured everybody takes photos of the metal animals.”
“Oh really. Is that what he figured?” She paused. Watched the photographer for another few seconds. Caught him sneaking a shot of the side of her house and another of the little girl and the dog. Meanwhile she could hear the fish sizzling in oil in the frying pan near her left elbow. It sounded like crispy trout skin, if crispy trout skin had a sound. “Most of them take pictures from the road unless I invite them in.”
“Want me to talk to him?” He moved closer to her and peered into her frying pan. “Wow,” he said. “That’s a lot of oil.”
“I like the skin crispy. Not that it’s any of your business how much oil I use when I fry a fish. But, there. I told you. Besides. I’m trying to gain weight.”
He laughed a sputtery laugh, as though she had just told him a grade school joke and he was attempting to find it funny.
“Nobody’s trying to gain weight,” he said. “Unless they’re . . .” Then he paused, seeming to realize he had backed himself into another conversational corner. She was not problematically thin. “Nobody’s trying to gain weight,” he said again. As if that simple repetition would free him.
“Wrong. I am. It was one of my first goals when I moved here, but it’s not working out as well as I’d planned. I eat enough. More than I ever did in the city, believe me. But then I work most of it right back off again.”
“Why would you want to . . . ,” he began. And never finished.
He was still standing too close. She hated that. Whatever happened to personal space?
“Because I can. Because in my old life I never could. Or never felt I could, anyway. And now I can. It’s a freedom. I like freedoms. Now to answer your question, yes, you should go have a talk with him.”
“Who?” he asked foggily. He had clearly forgotten the question. Then he seemed to clarify matters on his own. “Oh. My photographer. Yes. I’ll just go do that now.”
He moved for the door. Not the kitchen door, because there wasn’t one. Her tiny house was more or less one room, except for thin walls creating a miniature bedroom in one corner. The kitchen was more like a nook in the opposite corner. He moved to the front door of her house.
Then he stopped, turned back.
“Before I do, I just wanted to ask you . . . what inspired you to make them?”