Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  It could fly away.

  Roseanna rose and shrugged on a robe.

  She tucked her smartphone between her ear and shoulder and carried it into the kitchen, telling it, as she did, to ring her office. While it rang, she poured a cup of the lifesaving coffee that had brewed on a timer.

  Her secretary answered.

  “Roseanna Chaldecott’s office,” Nita said, her wispy little voice official and cordial as always.

  “It’s me. I need you to do something for me.”

  “Anything. What can I do?”

  “Tell the others I’m not coming in.”

  A brief silence fell on both ends of the telephone line. Well, the wireless line, if such a thing can be said to exist.

  “Oh dear. Are you sick?”

  Roseanna sighed. “I started to say I was. I was going to say that. But why am I lying to my own firm? It’s not like I’m subordinate to anybody. Call it a mental health leave. Just be honest and tell them that.”

  “That’s good,” Nita said. “You should take some time.”

  “Excuse me?”

  It was unlike Nita to editorialize or otherwise inject herself into their brief conversations. So, when called on it, Nita clammed up immediately.

  While Roseanna waited for Nita to get her act together, she split a bagel and popped one half into the toaster.

  “I just think that’s something we all support you on,” Nita said after a time. A trifle sputtery. “It’s something that’s come up. Not that it’s my place to tell you this. But ever since Ms. Cummings . . . you know. Since we lost her . . . It just seems like some time off might do you good. I hope you don’t mind my saying so.”

  Roseanna did, just a little. But she knew she probably shouldn’t. And she knew the slightly ruffled feeling would shake out over time.

  So she only said, “I suppose I don’t.”

  “I’m not sure a day will do it, though,” Nita added.

  “I’m not sure it will only be a day.”

  It was something Roseanna had not known until the moment she heard herself say it. Then again, it was so obvious—something that would have been so easy to know, had she been paying attention. If only she’d had a few more sips of coffee and a couple more minutes to wake up.

  “So . . . ,” Nita began. Then she paused, as though praying not to have to ask more.

  “Yes,” Roseanna said. “So. As in, ‘It is so.’”

  “What would you like me to tell them as far as . . . time duration?”

  “I would go with the fact that you don’t know. Since you don’t.”

  “Okay,” Nita said. “Got it.” But she sounded as though she didn’t want what she got.

  Roseanna clicked off the call before Nita could ask any more questions.

  She popped the toaster mechanism up, took the cream cheese out of the fridge, and smeared the tiniest layer of the white heaven onto the toasted surface of her bagel half. It was a layer so thin that one would have to be standing fairly near the bagel to notice it.

  She carried the scant breakfast into her bedroom, took a bite, and stared out over the park. It was a dreary day outside. A rainy spring day that made the street shiny, yet at the same time made the rest of the world dull and gray.

  The bird was gone. Flown away, which is what she had found so remarkable about it in the first place—that enviable ability. But its little feathered being had not been forgotten.

  Roseanna pictured it briefly.

  Then she walked into the kitchen, fetched the cream cheese again, whacked off a good quarter of the brick with a butter knife, and spread it on the rest of her bagel. Or maybe “flattened slightly” would have been a more apt description. It sat on her breakfast easily an inch thick in most places.

  Roseanna took a rudely massive bite, closed her eyes, and sighed.

  She could have taken the Lincoln Tunnel. Or the Holland Tunnel. She didn’t.

  She had never liked tunnels under bodies of water. They felt dank and claustrophobic and vaguely dangerous. She just had never really focused on the feeling before.

  Besides, a tunnel wasn’t scenic enough. And she was enjoying driving her Maserati through the rain—the shushing of the tires on wet pavement, the swish of windshield wipers. The sound of the heavy drops as they drummed on the roof.

  She drove many miles out of her way to the George Washington Bridge.

  Then again, what exactly was “out of her way”? She had no clear idea where she wanted to go. The “way” was wherever she decided it should be.

  There was plenty of traffic on the bridge, but not in her direction. Cars were pouring into the city, not out of it.

  Roseanna powered her driver’s window down, even though it spattered her with rain to do so. She didn’t mind getting wet. It was refreshing. It was counterintuitive. In many ways, it was counter-adult, which appealed to her. Like a little girl who splashes joyfully in puddles before she grows up to be sober and mature and decides it’s more reasonable to walk around them. Fewer laundry bills. Less drying time.

  When had she begun making bargains with life to avoid extra trouble, and, with it, any joy whatsoever?

  She turned up the volume on the stereo and clicked through to her favorite track on her favorite CD, the “Flower Duet” from Lakmé. Bumped the volume up again to a virtual blast. She leaned her head back against the rest and allowed the rain and the music to enter her gut and change her. She almost closed her eyes, but that would not have been wise. But it was a struggle to override the tendency. She looked up at the sweeping cables, arching down and then back up again to the towers. She looked at a rainy Manhattan in her droplet-spattered side-view mirror.

  Roseanna looked at the faces of the city-bound drivers as she zipped by, squinting her eyes against the rain.

  They looked . . . well, maybe they didn’t look like anything different or special. Maybe Roseanna was not even close enough to tell. But in her head, they looked like her. Like the way she pictured herself, based on the overriding feeling in her gut. Or, at least, the one she had just shaken off.

  Still feeling somewhat childlike, she cupped one hand around her mouth to yell something at them. Something they were too far away to hear, and that the rain and the road noise would have swept away in any case.

  For a brief moment, Roseanna thought it would be a taunt.

  Suckers!

  But no such word came out of her. Because she felt sorry for them. She empathized. How could she not? She knew exactly how it felt to be them. She always had. She only just now, in that very moment, understood how to be anything else.

  “I’m sorry!” she shouted into the rain, vaguely aimed at traffic on the other side of the bridge. “I’m sorry our lives didn’t turn out the way we wanted!”

  The words faded into nothing. Went nowhere.

  Roseanna stopped at a café in rural New Jersey. Because it struck her suddenly that she could. She could eat a meal that was utterly unscheduled. Having already eaten breakfast, she could eat another breakfast. She could do anything it came into her head to do, no matter how utterly it defied the rules she had lived by all her life.

  She parked the Maserati in the nearly empty parking lot, close to the diner’s door. When she stepped out, she could barely feel the rain. It had slowed to a light mist—the kind that builds up fast on your windshield at sixty miles per hour, but, when you’re standing still, barely registers at all.

  She stuck her head through the door.

  A tall, solid woman in a tan waitress’s uniform leaned on the counter, staring through the front picture window into nothing. There was not much in this corner of New Jersey to see. She was about Roseanna’s age. Fiftysomething.

  There were no other diners in the place.

  “You open?” Roseanna asked.

  The woman pulled her attention around to Roseanna slowly. As if much effort were required.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Of course.”

  Roseanna walked to the counter and sat.<
br />
  “This is going to sound like a rude question. I hope you won’t take offense.”

  She could see the waitress retreat into herself. She watched it happen in the woman’s eyes.

  Her name tag said “Rosie.” Which was interesting. And odd. And maybe even meaningful. As if something or someone were leaving a bread-crumb trail along Roseanna’s path.

  “I think I’ve heard them all,” Rosie the waitress said.

  “Is the food here good by any objective standard?”

  “Yeah. We make a decent breakfast and lunch. Our customers like us. We’re popular.”

  Roseanna looked around the diner, as though she might see some patrons she had previously overlooked. “So where is everybody?”

  “This is a working-class neighborhood. They clear out in time to get to work at nine. Unless they go to work at seven. And they don’t get off for lunch until noon. Then there can be a line out the door.”

  “Got it,” Roseanna said, and picked up a menu.

  “But I guess not everybody needs to get in to work in the morning.”

  Roseanna looked up from her menu to see the waitress staring through the glass door at her Maserati.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I’m supposed to be at the office right now like everybody else.”

  “Something tells me your office is not like everybody else’s,” Rosie said, still staring at the car.

  “Be that as it may,” Roseanna said, her eyes still fixed on the breakfast options, “I work. Or, at least, I did. After this I’m not so sure. I think I’m . . .” But then she paused, not sure she was willing to share much of her life with this stranger. Then again, she thought, why not? Why shouldn’t she? In half an hour she would drive away and probably never stop in this part of the world again. What better person with whom to share information than someone about to be left behind forever? “I think I just ran away from home. I realize I’m a bit old for it. But I guess . . . you know. Better late than never. You still serving breakfast?”

  The clock behind Rosie the waitress’s carefully coiffed head claimed it was just after ten thirty.

  “We serve breakfast all day.”

  “Good. I’ll have the number three. Eggs over easy. Hash browns, not home fries. Rye toast. And can I get all bacon instead of two bacon and two sausage?”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  Rosie wrote down the order on a pad she’d pulled from her apron pocket, with a pencil she’d pulled from behind her ear. Just like the waitresses do in movie diners in the old classic films. She tore the order off the pad, clipped it onto a hanging stainless steel wheel next to an infrared heat lamp, spun the wheel until the order faced the kitchen, and rang a bell by slapping her palm down on it.

  Roseanna jumped slightly. It was sharp and cutting, that bell. It reminded her of her alarm clock, except that it finished startling her more quickly.

  She realized for the first time that she was not alone in the diner with this waitress. She couldn’t be. Someone was picking up her order and cooking her breakfast. Not that it mattered who all was in the building. It just caused her to shift her perceptions. Everything seemed more vivid somehow. More sharply defined. She felt strangely aware of her focus on everything.

  Rosie the waitress pulled up a tray of bright red ketchup squeeze bottles and began to fill them, through a funnel, from an industrial-sized tub. “So what made you decide to run away from home?” she asked without looking up from her work.

  “A little birdie told me to do it.”

  “Okay, never mind. I just thought you seemed like you wanted to say. Like maybe you seemed to want to bring it up. But it makes no difference to me. I just thought it was one of those moments. You know. Like bartenders have. People confide. I get that a lot. More than you would think.”

  A brief silence passed, and the rain let go again. All at once, battering the windows and the roof. If was so loud it sounded almost like hail. But it was rain in huge, weighty drops. Roseanna looked out at her car and watched the image of it turn muted, faded by the wet glass, as if it were melting. As if the whole world were melting.

  “I had a best friend,” she said. “Her name was Alice. Alice Cummings. I met her in law school. We went to law school together. And that was not anytime recently, let me tell you that. We were in our twenties. This was over twenty-five years ago. A quarter of a century. Hard to believe, but it’s true. We’d been best friends that long.”

  A gust of wind threw rain against the window with a noisy slap, blotting out the world beyond the diner almost completely.

  “So Alice, she was a worker. She was like me, only even more so. When we got out of law school we worked for a couple of firms not a mile apart in Manhattan. Then we started our own firm together. And we built it up into something, too. Took years, but we gave it everything we had and we made it work. I got married and had a kid. But not Alice. She just kept working. She never took vacations. For her, it was all about retiring. She believed you work your whole adult life, from college to retirement. You put away enough money to do it right—to retire in luxury. And then you enjoy life. You put off the fun of your life until after you retire, and then you bask in the fruits of all that labor.”

  Roseanna sat watching the rain in silence for a moment. Not going on with the story. Not sure she ever would. There had been no obligation to begin this story. There was no obligation to finish it. She was writing these new life rules as she went along.

  “I can’t help noticing you’re talking about her in the past tense,” Rosie the waitress said, wiping ketchup off her hands with a well-bleached white linen towel.

  For a time, Roseanna didn’t answer. But a minute or two later—which is a lot of silence when you’re sitting in the middle of it—she heard herself say more. Even though she hadn’t really planned to.

  “A month and a couple of days ago we were in the Brandt meeting—sorry. An important client. Alice stands up at the end to shake this guy’s hand, and down she goes. Like a sandbag. She just swayed for a second like she was drunk all of a sudden, then crashed. Hit her head on the edge of the conference table going down. But that wasn’t the issue. It was a stroke. She’d had a massive stroke. Fifty-three years old. She was going to retire at fifty-five.”

  She looked up to see the waitress staring into her face now. Because of that, Roseanna looked away.

  “She died on the spot?”

  “No. Not exactly. She was alive when we got her to the hospital. But not much beyond that.”

  “Sorry,” Rosie the waitress said, but it was a weak-sounding thing. A word that made it painfully clear, by its tone, that words could do nothing to fix this.

  A plate of breakfast thumped down on the counter in front of Roseanna, at the end of Rosie’s hand.

  Oddly, she had not lost her appetite. Not at all. If anything, reliving the whole ordeal was making her hungrier. She dug in enthusiastically.

  “You look like you haven’t had a good meal for a while,” the waitress said, watching her eat.

  “You could say that.”

  “How long since you’ve really eaten?”

  “Really eaten? About thirty years. That’s how long ago I started dieting. And once you start dieting, if you really overdo it, and keep it up pretty steadily, it just ruins your whole metabolism. You get to a place where you have to eat like a bird to stay slim, and the more you do it, the more you have to do it.”

  Roseanna’s eye itched suddenly. She reached to scratch carefully underneath the lower lid with one well-manicured fingernail. Then it struck her. She was wearing no makeup. She could directly rub her eye. She placed the pad of one index finger on her eye and ran it back and forth, hard, until the itch was satisfied.

  Freedom, she thought. Freedom everywhere.

  She pitched back into her food. That other form of freedom. She broke the gooey orange yolk of an egg with a crust of rye toast and soaked up as much of that richness as she could before taking a bite.

  “So,
anyway,” she said, “job number one in my new life: putting on weight. Who the hell cares? Who am I trying to impress? I want to eat. People eat. It’s time for me to eat like everybody else.”

  As she stood at the cash register paying her check, she found herself staring at the waitress’s name tag.

  “That’s an interesting coincidence,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “Your name being Rosie and all.”

  “Your name is Rosie?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not much of a coincidence, then. Is it?”

  “Well, it’s close. My name is Roseanna. But I always insist on people saying it out. No nicknames. A couple of people have tried to call me Rose or Rosie. Never more than once, though. Not unless they want it to be the last word they ever say.”

  Rosie the waitress shot her a skeptical glance as she counted change into Roseanna’s palm.

  “So what you’re saying is . . . you think I have a terrible name?”

  “No. Not at all. It’s a fine name. It’s just . . . informal. It’s a way of people saying they think they can treat you informally. View you as . . . familiar.”

  “Then I would say . . .” The waitress paused. Trailed off. As though she never planned to tell Roseanna what she would say. “Now that you’ve run away from home, you might want to think about a nickname.”

  “That might be a bridge too far,” Roseanna said, almost without considering her words. Then, remembering the feeling of freedom everywhere, she added, “But I guess I could think about it.”

  On her way out the door, as she passed her well-cleaned plate, she left the waitress a fifty-dollar tip. On a nine-dollar breakfast.

  Chapter Four

  Why More People Don’t Run Away from Home

  Roseanna stood beside her car, waiting. Looking around.

  She had gotten off the main thoroughfare a good hundred miles back. Begun driving byways and smaller roads. In her head, she figured she would let herself be guided—that she would drive the Maserati until its tank of gas was exhausted. And when she could go no farther, well . . . somehow she had allowed herself to believe there would be significance to that place.