Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  As it turned out, she had guessed correctly.

  She turned toward the road to look, but the zoo-goers at the fence had driven away. Roseanna breathed a sigh of relief.

  Lance stuck his head through the door as Roseanna was washing up the breakfast dishes.

  “You want to come see this?” he asked. “Since it’s happening on your dime?”

  “A horse having his stomach pumped? I think that’s a clear no.”

  “It’s not exactly that.”

  “How do they get the oil into him?”

  “There’s a tube going in through his nostril.”

  “Doesn’t he mind that?”

  “He’s been sedated. He doesn’t mind much of anything.”

  “Well, you let me know how it goes. When it’s time to write a check, that will be when I step up to the plate.” Then, just as his head pulled out of the doorway again, she called after him. “Lance? Is Earnest going to be okay?”

  His head poked back in. They looked at each other for a long moment, each probably thinking the same thing. That it was interesting to note that she cared.

  Neither said so out loud.

  “We don’t know yet,” Lance said. “But I’ll keep you posted.”

  Three hours and almost six hundred dollars later, Roseanna sat in the barn with her son. They stared at the horse together. Someone had to stare at the horse, and it was Roseanna and Lance’s shift.

  “I know I never did before,” Lance said, breaking a long silence. “But can I tell you my thoughts on something? Almost like giving you advice? Which feels a tad dangerous, you being you and all. But still. I have some rather strong feelings on the subject, and with your permission I’d like to take my chances.”

  Roseanna didn’t answer. While she was not answering, she inwardly winced, thinking her posthumous friendship with Alice was about to take another beating.

  Lance seemed to hear her silence as assent. He plunged in.

  “I think you should offer to settle with Jerry.”

  “I already did.”

  “I think you should offer him more. Enough that he goes away.”

  “To make him go away, I’d have to give him more than I can afford. I’d have to give him money I really need. Or will need. In my lifetime.”

  “I think you should do it anyway.”

  They sat in silence for a time. Roseanna stared at Earnest and noted that his head was still a bit low and saggy from the sedative. Which, according to the vet, should have worn off by then. Or maybe the poor guy was just having a rough day.

  “I’m not going to roll over for Jerry. I’m not going to roll over for anybody.”

  “So instead you’re going to give him this new life you’ve found. You’re going to give away any chance at serenity to fight him.”

  “I’m going to do no such thing.”

  “There’s no way around it, Mom. You’ll have to come back to the city for court appearances. Meet with your lawyers regularly. Be deposed. It’s exactly the opposite of what you say you want. You want to live in peace and be left alone. You need to decide if you’re serious about it or not. How much it means to you. Because part of what Jerry wants is to screw you out of that. And what if you ruin your life for a year or more over this, and you lose, and he gets the money anyway? You said you were willing to keep chickens and eat their eggs and grow vegetables and get by on very little. Did you really mean that? So tell me what matters more. Money? Being right? Or being happy and living a peaceful life?”

  Another long silence.

  Then Roseanna said, “Let’s talk about horses and their gastrointestinal tracts. It’s a happier subject.”

  “Right,” Lance said. Obviously disappointed. “Got it.”

  “There’s a reason why you never used to give me advice.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do see that.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Go Fish

  Roseanna squatted on her haunches in a corner of the barn and watched Lance weld. It was his second lesson, and his first chance to add an animal to the iron zoo. Though, frankly, Roseanna had no idea what variety of animal this was supposed to be. Lance’s first effort had moved beyond fanciful and into a territory more like unintelligible. But he was trying, and she didn’t care to rain on his parade.

  From the opposite corner of the barn, Roseanna could hear the rhythmic thunk, thunk, thunk of the posthole digger. Nelson was digging a hole in the barn floor into which he could cement a post. The post would then form the corner of Earnest’s new stall.

  Meanwhile, Earnest, who was still noticeably alive, nibbled hay from a hay net hanging on the wall. He was temporarily roped off into that corner to keep him away from Roseanna’s car.

  Lance turned off the welding torch and lifted the big mask on his helmet.

  “Well, that pretty much sucks,” he said, indicating the . . . whatever it was supposed to be. That thing he’d been attempting to weld.

  “It takes practice,” Roseanna said.

  Lance reached out a heavily gloved hand and lifted the freshly welded section of his creation into an upright position. The weld did not hold, and it fell to the hard dirt floor with a clang, spooking Earnest slightly.

  “I don’t even want to try again right now,” Lance said, clearly discouraged. “I’m hungry. I just want to eat lunch and forget all about it.”

  “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It takes practice,” Roseanna said again.

  “It might be time to accept that I’m just no good at doing things with my hands like this.”

  “That’s an awfully sweeping pronouncement,” she said with an exaggerated frown.

  “Look at it this way, though, Mom. Let’s say I try again and again and eventually I learn how to be a decent welder. Can you even tell what this is? That I’m trying to make?”

  “Hmm,” Roseanna said, and tilted her head. In case that slightly shifted perception was all she needed. But in truth, she could not even venture a guess. “It’s a . . . help me out here.”

  “A penguin.”

  “A penguin? Really?”

  “I give up.” Lance lifted off his welder’s helmet and set it on the dirt floor. “We need to face facts here. I’m not the creative type.”

  “You used to like to play musical instruments.”

  “But you’re forgetting that I was always terrible.”

  “You were a kid. You just needed practice.”

  “I took flute for six years.”

  “Oh,” Roseanna said. “Did you?” She could not remember how long her son had attempted to learn to play the flute. She remembered quite well that his flute music was always painful to the ears. “Well, we all have different things we’re good at.”

  Lance did not answer.

  They sat on the dirt floor for a few moments, knowing lunch was next on the agenda, but not hurrying off to fix it.

  “You know,” she said, glancing at his discouraged expression, “you can bring a guest around here if you like.”

  “A guest?”

  “Yes. You know. Blank.”

  “Blank?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s terrible. I’m terrible at this. I already forgot your . . . partner’s name.”

  “Oh. Neal.”

  “Yes. Neal. It must be hard for you two. This separation. He can come around here on the weekends or whatever. I realize my couch is not a suitable accommodation for two. Hell, it’s not even all that suitable for one. But there’s always the motel in Walkerville.”

  Lance frowned.

  Roseanna watched him pull off the huge welding gloves one by one and slap them down onto the barn’s dirt floor.

  “Here’s the thing about that.”

  Then for an awkward length of time he did not go on to explain the thing.

  “I guess the whole idea of this is that we confide in each other,” he said, restarting himself. With some effort, from the look of it. “Right? Tell ea
ch other things that are hard for us, or that we’d rather keep to ourselves. So here goes. Neal and I are . . . I don’t want to say ‘having problems.’ Because if you asked me what the problems are, I wouldn’t even know what to say. It’s more like things are just not clicking very well right now. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that.”

  “You don’t need to explain it,” Roseanna said. “I’ve been in relationships. I know they’re complicated. And hard.”

  “I think the reason I didn’t tell you this sooner . . . When you asked me to stay here, and I said yes, I wanted you to think it was all about us. About having a better relationship between us. And mostly it was. But then the more I thought about it, the more it felt like this huge relief to take a vacation from Neal. And then when I went up the hill and called him and talked to him about it, I got this strong feeling that he felt the same way. I just don’t want you to be offended by that. I don’t want to devalue the fact that I was willing to do this.”

  “Don’t worry about stuff like that,” she said, patting him on the knee. “If you get too tangled up in subtext, you’ll just freeze up and go back to not sharing anything. We’ve spent enough of our lives in that place, wouldn’t you say? Now come on in the house. I’ll make us some lunch and you can tell me more about it.”

  He levered himself to his feet and reached a hand down to Roseanna. Lifted her up.

  They walked to the open barn door together, squinting into the daylight. There they ran smack-dab into a total stranger.

  He was a young man, maybe in his twenties, with neatly combed hair. Wearing a leather jacket that looked far too hot for the weather.

  “Oh, here you all are,” he said. “I’ve been knocking at the house.”

  “Can I help you?” Roseanna asked him.

  “Roseanna Chaldecott?”

  “Yes.”

  He handed her a plain manila envelope. It was unmarked, and sealed shut. He didn’t say anything to indicate why he was giving it to her or what was in it. Then again, he really didn’t need to. Roseanna had been an attorney for too many years to fail to recognize this scenario.

  “I’m being served,” she said to the back of the young man, who had already turned away and was striding toward his car.

  “Right you are,” he said over his shoulder. Still moving. “Only, past tense. You have been served.”

  Roseanna sat on the couch, leaning forward, her elbows braced on her knees. She eyed the cards on the coffee-table trunk in front of her, then laid another card down with a sharp slap.

  Lance twitched slightly. He was lying on his back on her living room floor, one arm draped over his eyes. It was the hottest part of the day, and the house was the only livable space in which to ride out the heat.

  “I know you’re thinking about what to do,” he said. “Because you always play solitaire when you’re thinking. You said it yourself. And the louder you slap the cards down, the harder you’re thinking.”

  Roseanna didn’t answer. While she was not answering, she learned something about herself. She had been playing the game with no thoughts in her head whatsoever. Not one. It was not true that she played solitaire when she was thinking. She played it when it was important not to think.

  Lance sat up on the floor, probably to see why she was not answering. He leaned over to look at her cards.

  “Play your red nine on that black ten,” he said.

  “Right. I know. I was just thinking.”

  But that wasn’t true. She wasn’t thinking. She was trying to avoid it.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Well, I have to fight it. I just have to. It’s my life savings. It’s everything I’ve worked for all these years. And I need it to live on for the rest of my life, so I can’t just let Jerry take it.”

  She braved a glance at his face. He looked disappointed. Unless she was reading that in.

  “You own the Maserati free and clear, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. You know I always pay cash for my cars.”

  “Couldn’t you live pretty comfortably just on the proceeds of that?”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘comfortably.’ But yes. I could live on it until Social Security kicked in. If I scrimped. But then I’d have to sell it.”

  “I see,” Lance said. “So it’s not really about whether you’d survive and be okay. It’s more about a radical change to your financial status. You’d be a woman who really genuinely owns a used pickup truck and no other vehicle. No more bumper sticker on the truck that says, ‘My Other Car Is a Maserati.’”

  “Excuse me,” Roseanna said. “Can’t you see I’m trying to play cards here?”

  She slapped the red nine down on the black ten.

  Lance lay back down again and draped his arm over his eyes.

  A few minutes of silence passed.

  “What do you do around here?” he asked. The words seemed to burst out of him as if they had been contained under pressure. “It’s just so boring. How do you make all this time go by?”

  “You adjust,” she said. “You get over that urge to check your phone every couple of seconds. It’s a mind-set, and you break it. Sometimes I get more bored than usual. So I get up and do something. Cook something, or do a chore around the place. Or weld a new animal to add to the zoo. Other times I just sit with the boredom. If you even want to call it that. We could just as easily call it serenity and not put the negative connotation on it. It’s not the worst thing in the world, doing nothing. You just have to get used to it.”

  “Maybe I’ll go down the hill and see if Nelson is around and if he’ll teach me to fish.”

  “The heat of the day will be the worst time to catch one.”

  “I expect the lessons will take a bit of time, though,” he said, pulling to his feet. Towering over Roseanna. “I’m a rank beginner, after all.”

  He crossed to the door in three long strides.

  “Alice would want me to fight,” Roseanna said. Before he could turn the knob and let himself out. Before he could get away.

  He looked back at her. Stared into her face for a moment, which caused her to shift her gaze down to avoid his.

  “Alice would have wanted you to stay with the firm to begin with.”

  “Now there you go again. We’ve been through this. Yes, if she was alive, maybe. But she made a huge mistake. And if she has any form of consciousness now, she’ll feel differently. She will have learned. I told you that. We went into this at some length already.”

  “When did you tell me that?”

  Roseanna blinked too much and tried to straighten out her thinking. Or lack of same.

  “Oh, that’s right. That wasn’t you. That was Nita.”

  “You’re trying to have it both ways,” Lance said. Taking that tone she hated. As if he were the parent and she were some errant child. “You say if she were here now she would feel differently—want you to leave the firm and have some retirement-style living while you still can. But then you say she’d want you to fight the lawsuit. If she were here, and saw her mistake, how do you know she wouldn’t tell you to forget Jerry and the money and just enjoy your life? Death either changed her or it didn’t.”

  He paused. Screwed up his forehead.

  “This is a really weird conversation,” he added.

  “Go learn how to fish.”

  He shook his head. But then, after a moment of silence, he did.

  It was still dark the next morning when Roseanna noticed that Lance was awake. She’d been sitting on the edge of her bed, head in hands. When she lifted her gaze from her own palms she saw him sitting up on the couch, looking in at her through the open doorway.

  “You okay?” he asked, sounding for just a moment like the young boy she remembered so well.

  “I didn’t sleep,” she said. But the words barely made it to him. They came out rusty, like unoiled metal joints. As though she hadn’t used her voice in a month.

  “I’m sorry,” he said,
and came to her bedroom doorway. “What did you say?”

  “I said I didn’t sleep at all.”

  He didn’t reply. Just hung in the doorway for a few moments. Then he crossed the small room and sat on the edge of the bed with her, draping an arm around her shoulder.

  “The Jerry thing, right?”

  “More or less. But it’s more that I was thinking about my part of it.”

  “You mean like . . . seeing his side of the argument?”

  “More like my part of how I’m handling it. I think you’re right. I think you were right all along, and you tried to tell me. And it’s not so much that I didn’t agree, or that I didn’t see your point. It was more that I refused to look. Which is a very bad quality in a person.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but she plunged ahead.

  “I want to have plenty of money because it’s part of how I see myself. Sure, I can say that I’ll keep some laying hens and grow vegetables. And it’s all very romantic to say so. But it’s hard to make an adjustment like that. And I don’t want to do it. So what does that say about me?”

  For a moment, he didn’t answer. Almost as though he was waiting to be sure it was his turn. That more emotion was not about to spill from her.

  Then he said, “It’s not so ignoble as you make it out to be. Everybody is afraid of stuff like that.”

  “They are?”

  “Of course they are. All big changes are scary. And it’s scary to think of being without money. It doesn’t even have to be an ego thing, but it would be pretty human and normal if there was some of that mixed in. We need money to survive, and to solve basic problems. And, you know . . . they tend to come up. It’s hard to be without it, especially if you’re used to having plenty. Cut yourself a little slack.”

  They sat in silence for a moment or two. Roseanna was enjoying the sensation of his huge arm holding her snugly.

  “I’m not sure what I’d do if you weren’t here with me during all of this,” she said.

  The arm disappeared and Lance stood, towering over her.

  “Well,” he said, “that might cross the sappy line even for the new us. So, look. I didn’t mean it was terrible if you chose to take on a big legal fight. I’m just saying it’s a good chance to figure out your own priorities. I know you know what I mean.”