Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  There was a problem, though. She had imagined a gas station nearby.

  There did not seem to be one.

  Roseanna looked around again, and began counting her problems. There were several. Focusing only on one had been wishful thinking.

  She couldn’t see much of anything. That felt like a problem. The rain had stopped, but she was in the hills, or maybe even the foothills. The Adirondacks were around here somewhere. Her spatial relationship to them was hard to gauge. But in place of the rain, her location was socked in with fog. Dense, white. Cold. A little frightening. She estimated her visibility to be something like twelve feet.

  So Roseanna quite literally did not know where she was. Not only did she not know what to call it, or where to locate it on a map, she couldn’t even visually assess it. She had no idea—if she drove forward, if she stepped off the road—what surrounded her. She could be standing at the edge of a thousand-foot drop-off and would not know. It made the little hairs stand up at the nape of her neck.

  And there was another pressing problem. Yes, she had her phone. And her phone could pinpoint her location. It could advise her of the closest gas station. Call a tow truck or the auto club to bring her some gas. Except at the moment it could do none of those things. It was getting no reception.

  Roseanna shivered in the gray for a moment longer, feeling as though the world had disappeared. The fog was so thick, and had nestled so tightly around her, that she had lost all visual bearings. There was no horizon. No sky. Even the point at which the road met the fog was nearly impossible to decipher.

  Shaken, she decided to wait in the car.

  Before she could even reach out for her door handle, a movement caught her eye. She jumped, thinking only of danger. Her first instinct was to plunge into the car and lock the doors. But she froze for a split second. And in that split second, the movement clarified itself.

  It was not danger.

  It was just two people. A couple. A young man and woman, maybe twenty, walking along the road, hand in hand, bundled up against the wet coolness. A shaggy brown dog danced ahead of them, along the road in her direction.

  She felt saved.

  “Excuse me!” she called.

  The couple walked up to her and stood a few feet away.

  “Car trouble?” the young man asked. He had a waterproof hood over his head, with the string drawn tightly to keep moisture out. He looked like a face floating on the road alone, independent of the rest of a body.

  “I’m out of gas. Not completely out. I could start it up. But I think my range at this point is something like five miles or less.”

  “Oh, you won’t find a gas station that close to here,” the young woman said. She wore a rain hat with an absurdly wide brim. The wisps of dark brown hair surrounding her face drooped limply, saturated with fog moisture.

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in Chudley,” the young man said.

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  “No,” he said. “Unless you live around here, nobody really does.”

  “I’m not sure how to get out of here. I’m not getting any cell phone reception.”

  Both young people pointed ahead down the road and slightly right.

  “There’s a hill just a few hundred yards from here,” the young woman said. “Hard to see in all this fog. But you’ll see if you walk down the road a bit. We’re just in a dip where we’re standing. We have hills all around us here. But if you walk to the top of that hill, you’ll get good reception. And you can call a tow truck to come bring you some gas.”

  “Okay,” Roseanna said, thinking it did not feel okay.

  They were about to walk on now. She could feel it. She could tell. She didn’t want them to, but they clearly would. As if that tiny bit of information had set her up, and she’d do great on her own.

  “We’ll come by again on the way back,” the young man said. “Make sure you got out okay.”

  “Thank you,” Roseanna said.

  It didn’t feel like enough. But it would have to do. She would have appreciated an offer more like . . . well, maybe the couple taking her phone and running it to the top of the hill for her. Making that call. But what they had offered—to check on her situation on their way back—was a reasonable amount of help to offer a stranger.

  Still, as they walked away, Roseanna felt strangely abandoned. Stranded.

  As their backs disappeared into the white mist, she realized they likely had not intended to be rude or unhelpful. They had simply perceived Roseanna as a woman capable of solving her own problems. Someone who could walk her phone up a hill and make a call.

  And really, she thought, isn’t that what you want to be? Don’t you want them to be right?

  She sighed, and set off down the road in search of a hill that could not be seen with the naked eye.

  “So this is why more people don’t run away from home,” Roseanna said. Out loud into the blank wall of fog.

  She had found the hill in question, and was walking toward the top of it. But it was not as easy a task as it had sounded in the verbal instructions.

  First of all, it was steep, which required a heart and lungs in good condition, which Roseanna did not possess. So she had to take only three or four steps at a time. Then she would stop. Lean forward, bracing her palms on her knees. Gasp for air. Take a few more steps.

  Perhaps more of a problem was the mud. The rain had left the hill mucky and slippery. Roseanna was wearing sensible shoes, by Manhattan standards. Slip-on boat shoes of the sort that could be worn without socks. They even had a bit of tread on their rubber soles. But it didn’t help much. The mud simply adhered to them, building up into a thick, heavy clump on each shoe that made it hard even to lift her feet. Then, as she placed each foot down again, the mud on her shoe against the mud of the hill provided a system more like makeshift skis than any sort of traction.

  She picked up a stick when she spied one, and used it to scrape the soles of her shoes every few steps. Still, she could not shake the feeling that one wrong step would send her sliding and tumbling to the bottom of the hill. She had no idea how far down that might be, because she could only just see her hand if she extended it as far as her arm could reach.

  And she was shivering, because her light coat was not sufficient against the wet chill.

  A sensation of panic was rising in her gut, and fast. She felt exposed.

  What if the fog cleared and she could no longer see the road, or her car? What if she was lost out here? Forced to spend a night in the elements? How cold would it get in the wee hours, waiting for someone to find her? Would it rain again?

  In the midst of this jumble of panicky thoughts, Roseanna failed to notice that she was no longer stopping to gasp. She still had to scrape mud at regular intervals. But the walking was not taking her breath away.

  She stopped. Glanced around. The earth on all sides of her seemed more or less level.

  She pulled her phone out of the pocket of her light jacket, woke it up with her thumb.

  Three bars of reception!

  Roseanna laughed out loud. And, with the sound, all the panic left her. Just like that.

  As she was finishing her phone call with the cavalry—whose role in this instance was played by a semi-nearby AAA repair shop with tow service—Roseanna raised her eyes and looked back the way she had come.

  She gasped audibly.

  The fog had cleared. Or, more accurately, it had allowed a hole to form in itself. The sun above her was warming the fog into a kind of filmy Swiss cheese, leaving a space for Roseanna to view her surroundings.

  “This is it,” she said out loud.

  It was a strange thing to say. Even Roseanna thought so. Nonetheless, it’s what came out of her mouth in that moment.

  The earth dropped off below her feet into a valley of farmland—mixed crops of various shades of green planted in careful grids. Dividing the planted fields lay strips of forest, tall trees stretching up out of t
he earth, swaying in a light wind. Streams ran through, their water glinting in the sun at various points along their journey. On all sides of this pastoral scene rose more hills. Deep, healthy green hills. Green like a pool table, only better. More natural. A huge bird sailed on a current of air above this heaven. Maybe large enough to be a hawk or an eagle. Roseanna knew nothing about birds, so she didn’t know. Still, birds were playing a larger than average role in her day. There was no denying that.

  It’s hard to find a particular place when you don’t one hundred percent know you’re even looking for it, Roseanna thought. She silently congratulated herself on that unlikely accomplishment.

  She glanced down at her phone again. It had, rather rudely, downloaded two texts and six voicemails. Wincing slightly, she clicked through to the texts.

  One was from Jerry, the only other senior partner now that Alice was gone. Roseanna could read the first two lines without opening it.

  Honey, we understand, but this is not the way to solve it. What about the Neiderman case? When—

  She didn’t click on the message to read the rest.

  The second was from Nita.

  OK, not to sound panicky or anything but all the other partners are freaking out. If you could—

  She clicked back to home, then to phone and voicemail. All six messages were from Jerry.

  Roseanna held her finger down on a button until the prompt came up to power off the phone. She slid her thumb as indicated and the screen went dark.

  Then she slowly, carefully made her way back down the muddy hill.

  By the time she arrived back at her car, the donut hole in the fog had closed again. But it was a light, misty thing, this fog. It no longer felt dense and impenetrable and scary.

  Roseanna leaned on her car before realizing its roof was soaking wet, then stood beside it waiting for the tow truck to bring her gasoline.

  It would be a longish wait. Forty-five minutes to an hour, the man on the phone had said.

  The beautiful hills and valleys were gone again now. That hurt a spot in Roseanna’s chest, the absence of them. In that moment she would have done almost anything to get them back.

  All she could see was a pale farmhouse surrounded by a plain, unpainted board fence. The house was a faded off-white, porch boards and roof sagging under years of weight and wear.

  And, in front of this, she saw a real estate company’s “For Sale” sign.

  Roseanna stared at the sign for a moment before it fully registered in her brain. When that inner click happened, her head snapped up. She walked around her car and approached the sign—warily, though it would have been hard to explain why if anybody had stood nearby insisting on an explanation.

  On its white four-by-four post the sign offered shiny, brightly colored printed flyers in a Plexiglas holder. She slipped one out and looked at both sides of it. There was not much of it she was going to be able to absorb without her reading glasses. Which were in her purse. Which was in the car.

  But she saw overly flattering photographs of the farmhouse and a couple of other raggedy buildings. And she read, “Loman Realty is pleased to offer a very special property,” because it was in larger type at the top of the page. And she saw “27 acres,” because somehow the numbers ran together less than letters. In fact, the word “acres” was a guess on her part, though a likely one.

  Roseanna walked toward the front porch of the house.

  It was a small house. Tiny, really. Just about big enough to hold one decent-sized room—a rectangular box of old, dry wood with a window on either side of its ancient door. The porch had no railing. Just wood pillars holding up a roof, and six unrailed steps leading up to it. Its boards squeaked and sagged further under Roseanna’s weight.

  She walked to a window, shaded her eyes, and peered in, realizing as she did that someone might be living here. But no one was. That much was clear. She could see furniture—couches and tables and what might have been chests of some sort—covered with old sheets and an air of abandonment that she might have been adding to the scene with her own imagination.

  The slightly peeling wallpaper was a faded floral pattern.

  In one far corner sat a nook of a kitchen with appliances—sink, stove, old-fashioned fridge—that might well have been fifty years old or more. In the other far corner a tiny room was partitioned off. A miniature bedroom, maybe? In the middle of the living room sat a potbellied woodstove on a brick pad.

  Roseanna drew back from the window and walked down off the porch again. She began to wander about the property, carefully circumventing the mud puddles.

  There was a barn, as the flyer had indicated there would be. A huge, cavernous thing with a tin roof peaking maybe twenty feet or more off the ground. It didn’t look any too sturdy as buildings go. And there was an outbuilding of some sort. A little shack that looked as though it could serve as a guesthouse.

  She began to cross the muddy field to examine it, but something stopped her. It was more carefully tended than anything else on the property. It had flowers growing in a tilled bed out front, and lacy curtains in the windows. A welcome mat in front of the door. Someone might be living there, as unlivable a space as it appeared. Maybe a caretaker during the sale process?

  It reminded Roseanna that she had no permission to be on the premises, and she hurried back to her car.

  The tow truck driver looked to be about sixteen. He was wearing only a short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, as though there were no such thing as damp or cold. He obsessively combed his long hair back along his head with his fingers, even as he poured five gallons of gasoline into her Maserati from a red plastic gas can. He chewed gum with a similar vigor, snapping it at intervals in a rhythm that ground on Roseanna’s nerves.

  “So where did you drive from?” she asked, hoping that encouraging him to speak would break up the maddening gum snapping. “Where’s your shop located?”

  “Walkerville,” he said. Just that one simple word. It seemed to bore him to say it.

  Then he went back to snapping.

  “Is that where this Loman Realty is located?” she asked, holding the flyer out for him to see.

  He did not look.

  “Yup,” he said, more or less simultaneously with a snap of gum.

  Roseanna wondered how he managed to do both those things at once. Also why.

  “Any advice on how to find it?”

  “It’s on the main drag,” he said. “Everything’s on the main drag.”

  Then he looked up at her for the first time. As if he had wakened up, located his interest in . . . well, anything. He looked at the flyer in her hand, then at the property. Then he returned his attention to pouring the very last bit of gas.

  Roseanna expected him to say something. Ask questions. Maybe whether she was really interested in a place like this. And, if so, why?

  He asked no questions.

  He secured her gas cap, charged her credit card, tipped the brim of his raggedy baseball cap, and drove away.

  Chapter Five

  Rhinestones and Impossibilities

  Roseanna woke in the morning all on her own initiative. No alarm clock.

  She was in a room at the Value Motel in Walkerville, though it took her a moment to piece together her recent history and arrive at this conclusion.

  She lay awake in bed for a few minutes.

  She had been sleeping in her underwear, for lack of anything better to wear to bed. A wall heater blew warm air noisily in her direction, and she was able to lace her fingers together behind her head, comfortably exposing her bare arms. In fact, it was almost too warm.

  She stared at the ceiling for a minute or two, then picked up the phone beside the bed and dialed the front desk.

  “Good morning!” a chirpy female voice said.

  “Right. Whatever. You know how hotels”—she paused, realizing this wasn’t a hotel—“and motels sometimes have a few basics on hand in case you forgot them? Toothbrush, comb. That sort of thing?”
/>   “Yes . . . ,” the chirpy one said. As if waiting for Roseanna to finish. As if that were not enough information.

  “Are you one of them?”

  “We have a few things. What do you need?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything?” Now the voice was de-chirped. Filled with awe and a trace of dread. Apparently she could not fill the void of Roseanna’s request. Which was understandable, since the need for “everything” was a hole more or less the size of the world.

  “Yeah. Pretty much. More or less everything. I didn’t know I’d be stopping for the night. So I have . . . nothing.”

  “Okay,” the voice said, making it clear that it was not okay. “What do you need?”

  “What do you have?”

  “Oh. Well. Let’s see. We have toothbrushes and toothpaste. Plastic combs. Mouthwash. Sewing kits. Mini first aid kits. And . . . cotton swabs, I think.”

  “I’m not injured,” Roseanna said. “And my clothing is in fairly good repair. But I’ll take one of everything else.”

  Then she hung up the phone, got out of bed, and—for the first time in her life as far as she could recall—dressed in the same clothes she’d worn the previous day.

  Roseanna walked to Loman Realty because it was only five doors down, and it was no longer raining. So it did not seem worth warming up the car.

  She pushed open the swinging glass door and stepped into a nearly oppressive warmth.

  The small office held six desks. Only one was occupied by an agent.

  She was a woman maybe ten years younger than Roseanna, with ridiculously overstyled hair and glasses with rhinestones in the frames, like the ones silly women used to wear in the sixties. At least, Roseanna had found them silly. She had always looked down on any sort of frills.

  She was talking on the phone, the agent. She held one finger up to Roseanna, asking her to wait. Meanwhile Roseanna could smell coffee. She sniffed the air in search of it, found it in a corner of the office. Poured herself a white Styrofoam cupful.