Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “Not even a little bit.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, looking at the horse, who looked back.

  “I’m having trouble,” Roseanna said, “understanding how something as small as a windshield wiper blade could take down something as big as that horse.”

  “Horses have very finicky digestions. They can’t throw up.”

  “What do you mean they can’t throw up?”

  “It means just what it sounds like it means.”

  “Why can’t they throw up?”

  “I have no idea,” Patty said. “You’ll have to take that up with God.”

  Roseanna mulled that over for a moment but could find no suitable rejoinder. “So we just listen to his intestines every day?”

  “Yeah, and hopefully in the next day or two we’ll see that it went through him okay.”

  “You do realize I won’t be the one picking through his manure looking for partially digested wiper blades.”

  “Oh, I doubt he’ll digest them.”

  “The main point is the same.”

  “Yeah,” Patty said. “I didn’t figure you would be the one.”

  They turned to walk out of the barn together. Roseanna’s eyes fell onto her tarped belongings in the corner of the barn. Furniture. Important paperwork. Albums of family photos. Everything that didn’t fit in her new house.

  “Wait,” she said, and Patty stopped walking. “You know how you guys are always saying you’ll do anything at all to get to stay here? Well, I have an assignment. Build that beast a stall if he survives. You can all put your heads together on how to do it. Just get it done, okay? I don’t care what it looks like. But if he survives the wiper blades, he’s not going to survive eating my furniture. Because I’ll kill him.”

  “Okay,” Patty said. “We’ll work something out.”

  They walked out into the sun together. Roseanna squinted and shielded her eyes with one hand.

  “Why did Macy name that beast Earnest, anyway? Earnest like the man’s name? Or like the quality of being earnest?”

  “The quality, I think.”

  “Because he’s just about the least earnest being I’ve ever met.”

  “She might’ve been trying to give him something to work up to,” Patty said.

  Roseanna was in bed asleep when the knock came at her door, startling her and making her heart pound.

  She put on her robe and made her way through the living room in the perfect darkness. There was no moon, or it hadn’t risen yet. Roseanna was not sure which.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Lance.”

  Roseanna sighed away her fear and opened the door. They stared at each other as best two people can in the pitch dark of a moonless night.

  “I only said maybe I wouldn’t come back,” Lance said, his voice sheepish and almost painfully sweet.

  “Come in, sweetie. Come in.” He did, with two heavy-looking duffel bags.

  “I’m so happy to see you I could almost cry.”

  “Why almost?”

  “Well, you know me.”

  “Yeah, Mom. All too well. The horse ate your windshield wipers?”

  “It’s kind of a long story. Well, actually no. It’s not. It’s pretty short. In fact, that was all of it right there.”

  “The metal parts, too? Or just the rubber?”

  “Just the rubber.”

  “Glad to hear it. For Earnest’s sake.”

  “The last part of the message was ‘I love you.’ The recording cut me off.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Lance said. He draped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close, kissing her temple. “I kind of figured that’s where you were going with that.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Equine Gastrointestinal Tracts and Other Happy Subjects

  They sat on the couch in the barely light morning, Roseanna and her son. They sipped good coffee. Lance fiddled with his phone, staring at the screen and tapping it with his thumbs as if typing.

  “What can you do on that phone without reception?” she asked him.

  Lance laughed. “Close to nothing,” he said.

  There came a knock at the door, which seemed odd before seven a.m.

  Lance jumped up to answer it, which also seemed odd to Roseanna, but in a more pleasant way. He had already come to treat the place as though he lived here.

  “I was just typing out an email that I’ll send later,” he said over his shoulder on the way to the door.

  He swung the door wide. On Roseanna’s porch stood Patty, looking tight and slightly worried. Willa hung off her mom’s hand, uncharacteristically silent.

  “I have a question,” Patty said, coming in without having been invited.

  Perhaps there’s a limit to this treating the place as if you live here, Roseanna thought. Maybe it cuts off at blood family. But she didn’t say so, because first she wanted to hear the turn of events that had Patty so concerned. In case this was entirely the wrong moment for such a pronouncement.

  “Okay,” Roseanna said. “What’s the question?”

  “If I had to get the vet out here this morning for Earnest . . .”

  She paused. But Roseanna had no idea what she was supposed to interject into that pause.

  “That’s not really a question,” she said when she’d grown weary of waiting.

  “Right. I’m worried about Earnest. I’m thinking the vet might need to come out and pump him through with mineral oil. Keep it from turning into a bad colic situation. Because a horse can go real fast with a colic situation. Even a young one.”

  Roseanna opened her mouth to note that no question had yet been placed on the table.

  Patty beat her to it. “Right. I know. Still not a question. I was hoping you might have picked up on the question by now.”

  Lance stood idly by with his hands loosely in his shorts pockets. She caught his eye in case he had any relevant thoughts he might be inclined to share. He didn’t seem to.

  “Sorry,” Roseanna said. “Still on my first cup of coffee.”

  “Well, it’s more than I could afford myself,” Patty replied. Still not a question. But they were moving closer. “And, you know. He’s not even my horse. Trouble is, whose horse is he? I’m not sure you consider him yours, either. Horse needs an owner on the day the vet has to be called, and I don’t think this horse has what he needs to get the right care.”

  “You want to know if I’ll pay for it,” Roseanna said, feeling ever so much clearer.

  “Yeah,” Patty said. “Exactly that.”

  “How much does a thing like that cost?”

  “Couldn’t say for a fact. Vet’s not cheap, though.”

  Roseanna sat back, took a long sip of coffee. Sighed deeply. “Go ahead and give him a call. I don’t wish any harm on poor old Earnest. He has to be somebody’s horse today, so I guess he’s mine.”

  Willa looked up into her mother’s face. “Did she say yes, Mommy?”

  “Yes, honey. She said yes.”

  Willa broke away from her mother and ran to where Roseanna sat on the couch. She hugged Roseanna tightly around the knees, laying her head sideways on Roseanna’s lap.

  Then she popped up quite suddenly.

  “You have to give my mom your phone,” Willa said. “And you have to come walk Earnest around and around while we go up the hill to call.”

  “Why do I have to walk him around and around?” Roseanna asked the little girl.

  “Because that’s how you do it when a horse has the colic.”

  “Why do I have to walk the horse around?” Roseanna asked Patty just before they all parted ways at the barn door.

  “Because that’s what you do when a horse has colic.”

  “At least you and your daughter have your stories straight.”

  Patty smiled a wry smile and took the offered phone from Roseanna. Roseanna watched for a moment as Patty and her daughter walked off, hand in hand, the dog wagging happily behind.

  Then
she turned her attention to her son.

  “What’s that dog’s name?” Lance asked.

  “He doesn’t have a name.”

  “Why would you not give him a name? You have to call him something.”

  “I do call him something. I call him the dog. I only have one dog, so that works out fine.”

  “You only have one horse, but he has a name.”

  “Yeah, well, he came with that. If he had shown up on his own with no one to tell me his name, I’d likely call him the horse.”

  “I bet Willa has a name for the dog.”

  That’s probably true, she thought. She would have to look into that. But in the meantime, she would have to turn her attention back to poor sick Earnest.

  “You know how to walk a horse around?” she asked Lance.

  “We walked him down to Archie’s place and half the way back. I’m guessing it goes a little something like that.”

  They stepped into the barn together.

  Nelson was leading Earnest in a big circle around the inside of the barn, using a makeshift halter that had been formed from knotted rope.

  “Oh, good,” he said. “The swing shift is here.” He held the rope out to Roseanna, who stared at it the way she might at a nonpoisonous—but nonetheless creepy—snake. “Don’t let him stop and lie down,” Nelson added. “Keep him moving.”

  “How do I stop him from lying down?”

  An image filled her mind. Earnest falling to his knees at the side of the road, grunting, then allowing his body to collapse onto the dirt. This was a thousand pounds of unpredictable animal. What was she expected to do? Catch him and set him on his feet again?

  “Bring his head up and hope his body follows,” Nelson said. “It’s hard for him to lie down if you don’t give him his head. Try to keep his attention. That helps.”

  “Can’t you stay and—”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Lance said, and took the rope. “We can do this.”

  Roseanna was not at all sure she agreed, but she liked the sound of that “we” coming from her son. So she made no objection when Nelson hurried out of the barn.

  She looked at Lance and Lance at her. Then they began walking that same slow circle they had seen Nelson walk with the horse.

  At first they didn’t speak. Roseanna felt a dark cloud sitting on her being, as though weighing down her head from above. She had felt it for a while, she realized. Almost a day, maybe. It was not horse related, though the fact that the horse was old and now sick did not help one bit. Trouble was, it was something-related—everything was—but Roseanna had no idea what that something might be. She had quite purposefully avoided poking it or asking it any questions.

  Earnest stopped, swung his head around, and bumped his round and shaggy belly with his muzzle.

  Well, that’s what you get for eating windshield wiper blades, Roseanna was tempted to tell the beast. She didn’t, because the situation was too grave for that type of comment. Lance brought the horse’s head back around, and they moved forward again. Roseanna felt inordinately proud of her son and wondered how he felt able to perform a task so entirely foreign to anything he had encountered in his life to date.

  “I may not know you as well as some sons know their mothers,” he said, startling her. “But I know when you’re bothered by something.”

  “Right,” Roseanna said. It wasn’t enough to say, and she knew it.

  “I can’t imagine it’s all worry about the horse. Because you only met him day before yesterday. And because he’s a horse. And you’re . . . you know . . . you. No disrespect intended.”

  “None taken,” she said, and sighed.

  Then they walked two full laps around the barn without any more words being spoken.

  Somewhere about halfway through the second lap Roseanna identified the dark cloud. Not because she had been trying. Quite the opposite. She had been trying to push it back down into a place where she couldn’t possibly see it clearly, and so would not be overly troubled by it. But then it popped up and stared into her face with that pesky attitude of having won a victory over her. Though maybe she was reading that last part in.

  “Since we had that conversation . . . ,” she began. Then she trailed off.

  “Which one?”

  “The one about Alice.”

  “Oh. Damn. Did I really stick my foot in it about that? I’m sorry, Mom. Can we pretend I never asked?”

  “No. We can’t. Because it got me thinking. And now I’m thinking Alice might have been gay, and I never even knew it. Or maybe I even knew it, but I just never paid any attention to it. I never really met anybody she was involved with. There were only a few—at least, that I knew of. And they didn’t last long, and somehow she always seemed to tell me about them later, after it was over. And now that I look back on it, I’m realizing she only spoke about these people in the most general terms.”

  “Would that be a bad thing if she had been?”

  “Yes,” Roseanna said. With surprising sureness.

  They walked three more laps without talking.

  “So,” Roseanna said, unable to stand the silence any longer, “is it true that gay people have that ‘gaydar’ extra sense, and can guess when someone else is?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “I’m not asking what they say, I’m asking what you say.”

  A pause.

  Then Lance said, “I can usually tell.”

  “Alice?”

  “Pretty much. Yeah.”

  They walked a couple more silent laps.

  “That’s the other reason I asked that question,” Lance added.

  Another silent lap around the barn.

  “So why is that a bad thing?” Lance asked. “You didn’t think it was bad when it was me. Is me, I mean.”

  “Two reasons I can think of right now. First of all, I can’t believe the two very closest people in my life didn’t feel they could confide in me about a thing like that.”

  “It’s not that, Mom.”

  Earnest stopped. Grunted. Tried to go down to his knees, but Lance pulled his head back up and got the horse walking again. She wondered if her son’s rope-burned palms still stung.

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s not that we didn’t think we could talk to you about that.”

  “It’s that you didn’t think you could talk to me about much of anything.”

  She waited. And they walked. And he never directly answered. But his silence spoke volumes.

  “So much better!” she said, her voice steeped in her trademark sharp sarcasm. “I feel relieved now. I’m so glad we had this little talk.”

  She expected him to say something comforting. She glanced over at his face, but he seemed to have gone somewhere else in his head.

  “What’s the other thing?” he asked after a time.

  “What other thing?”

  “You said there were two things you could think of. Two reasons why it bothered you. The Alice thing.”

  “Oh. Right. What if she loved me?”

  “Well, we know she loved you, Mom. You loved her, right?”

  “Of course I did. But you know what I mean. What if the reason she never had a long, happy relationship . . . What if I was the reason she made work her whole world? Always at the office instead of off somewhere having a happy life with someone?”

  “I guess that’s possible,” he said.

  “Not a good answer.”

  “I thought you wanted me to tell you the truth.”

  “Now when did you ever know me to want to hear the truth?”

  “Point taken,” Lance said. “What would it really have changed, though, anyway? Even if you’re right? Maybe she loved you even more than you loved her. I don’t know. But if so, what would you have done differently if you’d known?”

  Roseanna stopped dead and allowed the Lance and Earnest train to go off without her. She watched Lance keep the old horse’s attention. Watched him discourage the beast from
bending around to focus on his own ancient belly.

  When they came around again Roseanna said, “I would have been kinder.”

  “Were you unkind to her?”

  “No. Never. But I would have been kinder. If I’d known.”

  She looked up to see Patty and Willa standing in the bright morning light in the open barn doorway, the dog wagging at their feet. Behind them, Roseanna saw lookers milling at the fence. Four of them.

  “We can take over now,” Patty said. “If you like.”

  “That would be very nice,” Roseanna said. “I’m hungry for breakfast. Is the vet coming out?”

  “Yes. He’ll be here in less than an hour.”

  Patty walked closer, holding her daughter’s hand, and gave Roseanna back her phone. Then she took the lead rope from Lance.

  Roseanna looked down into the face of the little girl, who looked back. Willa’s concern seemed to fall away, and her face lit up from the simple experience of seeing Roseanna again. Roseanna wondered how that must feel to be so utterly in the moment. So open to whatever life chose to bring you next. So willing to drop whatever had been weighing on you.

  “Does the dog have a name?” Roseanna asked the little girl.

  Willa rolled her eyes. “He’s your dog.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t think he had one. I was wondering what you thought.”

  “I think he has one.”

  “And what do you think it is?”

  “Buzzy.”

  “Buzzy?”

  “Right.”

  “Why is his name Buzzy?”

  “I don’t know,” Willa said, and grabbed the loose end of Earnest’s lead rope, below where her mother held it. “Just is.”

  The mother and daughter began walking the circle with the horse.

  As they came around and passed her again, Patty said, “She knows. She just forgot. The first time we saw the dog he was jumping up and biting at a bee.”

  “Got it,” Roseanna said. “Did he ever get the bee?”

  “No, he’s not good at that.”

  “Just as well.”

  As she walked out of the barn with her son, she glanced over at him, guessing that he would return an “I told you so” look.