Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Roseanna stepped off the porch as she spoke. Walked down the stairs and into the dirt to peer around the barn, still hoping to see Lance on his way back.

  “And with you, I offered you one night, and then we extended it a few days because you had that bad flu. And then, yes, things got a bit out of hand. But not because of any lack of politeness or respect on your or Nelson’s part. But Melanie and Dave—”

  Roseanna heard a distinct thump, something falling on the porch boards. It stopped her in midsentence. She whirled around to see that Martin had collapsed smack onto his face on the porch and was lying sprawled and—from the look of it—not fully conscious.

  She looked around desperately, hoping to see someone who could help. Nelson would have been a good bet.

  She saw only Willa playing with the dog.

  “Willa!” she screamed, and Willa jumped. “Willa, run get your mom. Quick, okay, honey? Tell her I need her to take my phone and run it up the hill and make a call. It’s an emergency, okay, honey? So run fast.”

  As the little girl skittered out of sight, Buzzy in close pursuit, Roseanna reflected on the importance of a landline.

  You just never knew when you’d find yourself in a situation where it could save somebody’s life.

  “Oh, honey,” Roseanna said, looking up to see Lance jog into the hospital waiting room. “You’re here.”

  “I came as soon as I could. I got stuck up on CPR Hill after Patty told me. I ran up to make the call instead of her, and by the time I got back to the house I’d just missed you and the ambulance.”

  She struggled to her feet, and he wrapped her in his big arms. They just stood that way for a time, her head against his chest. Roseanna was wondering how people coped with moments like this when they lived in a heaven all to themselves.

  Then again, in a private heaven there’s no one to have a sudden coronary and be rushed to the hospital. Yet somehow that didn’t strike her as a good enough argument. Life always held some surprise that made you wish you had two strong arms and a solid chest for support.

  “What happened to him?” Lance asked quietly, leaning down to speak close to her ear.

  “Coronary event.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “So far as I know, we don’t have the odds on that yet. If we do, nobody’s bothered to tell them to me.”

  He let her go, and they sat side by side in two uncomfortable plastic seats.

  “I guess it’s not so important now,” Lance said, “in light of more pressing developments . . . but the phone company will come do an installation between nine and noon tomorrow.”

  “It’s important. Believe me. It’s more important than I even knew. You don’t know what a phone is worth until somebody has a heart attack on your porch, and you can’t even call 9-1-1 without jogging up a massive hill first. Especially when you know it’s a long ride to the nearest hospital. Kind of a desperate feeling.”

  An awkward silence fell.

  “He seems like such a nice old guy,” Lance said. “But I don’t really know him well.”

  “Neither do I,” Roseanna said.

  She saw his eyebrows lift slightly in her peripheral vision. But he chose not to comment.

  “I mean . . . I know him,” she said, wrestling with a chokehold of possible words and their meanings. “I guess I meant I don’t know him as well as I should. I could’ve taken more time to get to know these people. So long as I’m letting them stay.”

  “Not in your nature,” he said.

  Roseanna sat with the sting of that for a few beats before he said more.

  “That came out colder than I meant it to.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes and no. But don’t blame yourself.”

  For what might have been three or four minutes they only stared at the patterned linoleum together.

  “Maybe I should just throw myself on his mercy,” Roseanna said suddenly.

  She looked up at Lance to see him staring at her, his brow knitted.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Oh. Sorry. I guess I changed subjects on you. I meant Jerry. Shows you where my mind keeps going. Maybe I should throw myself on Jerry’s mercy instead of trying to fight him and losing. You think he has any?”

  “Hmm,” Lance said. Then he seemed to go inside himself for a few seconds. “Yeah. Maybe. But it’s not a lot of mercy. It’s a thin little sliver of who he is, if I’m guessing correctly, so if you’re going to throw yourself at it, you’d better hit that tiny sucker just right. If you know what I mean.”

  They fell silent again. Roseanna watched nurses bustling by.

  Then she said, “I’ve been such an idiot.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I’ve been acting like heaven is a place with no people in it, so there’ll be no one to bother me. Like that’s what’s really important in life—no minor irritations. But then there’s no one to delight me, either. And what did it take to force me to figure that out—that’s what bothers me the most. All of a sudden one of the pests I really did like might be about to get yanked out of my world, and so now it seems perfectly reasonable to think heaven on earth is probably a place with shrieking children and running dogs and a horse who eats the rubber blades off your windshield wipers. Now I get it, but it’s too late, because I’m about to lose it all to Jerry just as I finally figured out what’s best about it. Hell, if all I wanted was to avoid minor inconveniences I never would’ve considered children—well, child—and so I wouldn’t have you. And then where would I be?”

  She paused briefly in the tangle of thoughts, realizing she was babbling. Realizing that a genuine sense of grief was forcing the rush of badly organized words.

  Lance opened his mouth to answer, but he never got the chance.

  A doctor walked briskly up and stood over them. A young man in his thirties, in green scrubs.

  “If you’d like to come in and see your father now,” he said to Roseanna, “just for a few minutes, that would be okay.”

  “Rosie,” Martin said. Thin. Weak.

  Roseanna had to lean over his bed to hear him. But then, she would have had to lean in close anyway before she spoke. So he would hear her.

  He looked pale and half-asleep. Maybe on pain medication, or maybe fighting for his life. More likely both.

  “I’ve gone and messed it all up now, haven’t I, Rosie?”

  “Don’t be silly, love,” she said, close to his ear. “You can’t help what happened.”

  “But here I am trying to be no trouble to you at all. And you end up having to rush me to the hospital and sit here waiting like you’re my next of kin. What a thing to have happen. You should go home, Rosie.”

  “I don’t mind staying a little longer.”

  She pulled up a chair and sat, grasping one of his ancient hands.

  The heart monitor caught her eye, and she watched it for a time, the line of Martin’s status as a living being looking ragged and weak. She tried to pull her eyes away, but it didn’t work. It tapped into a horror in her gut that ran deeper than the moment she was currently living. She did her best not to dwell on why.

  “We’ll get you home soon,” she said.

  He seemed to smile. Or to try to smile, in any case. It didn’t quite pan out. It seemed to involve more effort than the poor old guy could currently spare.

  Roseanna sat, watching his face, and realized that the promise she had just made to him would be impossible to keep. Assuming he left the hospital in one piece, it made no sense to think he could return to living in a tent, wading the creek every day, and slogging up and down that steep hill. And yet her property was the only home he currently had.

  As if reading her mind, he said, “Not so sure, Rosie. Not as sure as you are. But it’s okay. Either way it’s okay. I like the world with all its faults. It was an honor to have a place in it. But going where Nan went is an appealing option, too. Whatever fate has for me wil
l be all right.”

  Roseanna felt herself begin to cry, which was rare for her. Had she even cried openly when Alice died? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t trust her own memory. Then again, if she hadn’t, she was crying in great part for Alice now.

  Martin gave her hand a squeeze.

  “You’re a caring person, Rosie. You try to pretend like you’re not, but I see right through you. I can smell it the way a bloodhound picks up a scent trail.”

  He opened his mouth to say more, but his sleepiness and lack of energy seemed to torpedo the effort. His eyes flickered.

  “I’m going to go away and let you get some rest,” she said.

  He opened his mouth but no words came out. He did manage a weak nod.

  ONE MONTH BEFORE THE MOVE

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lifelines and Badly Timed Snubs

  Roseanna leaned forward in the hard plastic chair, her upper body hovering almost over the hospital bed. Her whole torso felt rigid, like concrete. The less she moved it, the less she felt able to.

  It took her many seconds to realize she was not breathing.

  She gasped in a double lungful of air, and it made a big sound.

  Alice noticed.

  It would have been hard for Roseanna to explain how she knew that Alice noticed. Because, as far as she could tell, only Alice’s eyes were functional. She seemed to be able to shift them from one direction to another. And it was painfully clear from the look Roseanna saw in them that her friend was able to take everything in. She was awake and aware. She was in there.

  But to be “in there,” in Alice’s current predicament, represented a massive dilemma.

  Roseanna shifted her eyes up to the monitor beside Alice’s bed. It traced a line that represented her best friend’s life. But it did so weakly, as though fresh out of enthusiasm. Still, machines are not capable of enthusiasm, or lack of same. They simply perform a function, without adding their own attitude—and the knowledge of that led Roseanna to understand that Alice’s life was dangerously weak.

  Again, Alice noticed.

  Roseanna forced her gaze away from the lifeline on the screen.

  She looked directly into Alice’s eyes and saw fear of a variety she had never witnessed before. And the fact that those panicked eyes appeared in a face devoid of expression made it all the more alarming.

  Alice did not raise her eyebrows in fear. She did not wrinkle her forehead. Her facial muscles did not contract. Her face was a soft mask of what appeared to be relaxation, but in reality was an inability to force her face to respond to signals.

  Still, the eyes said it all.

  “You know I’d do anything for you,” Roseanna said out loud.

  Alice’s eyes softened just the tiniest bit. Maybe five percent of the fear fell away. Unfortunately, it seemed clear that they both understood the subtext of that statement.

  I’d help you in any way I possibly could, but there’s not a damn thing I can do, and we both know it.

  Roseanna glanced at those eyes again, then looked away.

  It should have been a comfort, that Alice was alert. That she was demonstrably in there.

  It wasn’t.

  Her friend was trapped. Imprisoned in a body that had been an ally just an hour earlier. Now it was nothing but a tightly fitting cage, a cause for the abject alarm brought on by claustrophobia. It had suddenly, unexpectedly, turned on its owner.

  I have to help her get out, Roseanna thought, a panicky rush of words in her brain that added up to nothing even vaguely actionable.

  That’s when she was struck with the worst thought of all. The one she had been holding at bay.

  There’s only one way to get out of your body.

  A movement caught Roseanna’s eye, and she looked up to see Jerry standing in the doorway, looking lost. Looking as though someone had recently wakened him from a sound sleep and shaken him hard before standing him up in that doorway and forcing him to say something coherent.

  “I came as soon as I heard,” he said. It sounded breathless.

  Roseanna looked down at Alice’s eyes and saw that the presence of their partner Jerry was not helping. With nothing to guide her but that window onto the inside of her friend, Roseanna made a snap judgment that things had been better for Alice before he arrived.

  “This is not a good time,” she said to him, her fear causing it to come out more harshly than she had intended.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Could you just wait out in the waiting room?”

  “But you’re here.”

  “I won’t be for long. She needs to rest.”

  Then Roseanna connected with Alice’s eyes again and told her, without words or overt expressions, that her last statement of intention had been a lie. She was not leaving.

  When she looked up again, Jerry was gone.

  It might have been a minute later, or five.

  The line on the monitor gave up. It was simply too weak to continue. It collapsed into a flat line, and Roseanna imagined a great sigh as it did so. A big sound of relief in being allowed to surrender, to set down something that had been so desperately strenuous to carry.

  Then she realized the sound was real, and had come from her own chest.

  And there was another noise in the room. Some sort of buzzing alarm. The monitor was screaming, but Roseanna felt so distant in her shock that it was simply a background noise, as if she were wearing earplugs, or had fallen mostly asleep.

  The room filled with bodies.

  Nurses rushed in. A man in scrubs who could have been an orderly or a doctor ran by her chair.

  She slid herself and the chair back to offer them more room.

  One of them, a female nurse, turned to Roseanna and shouted words quite loudly, but Roseanna could barely make them out. The woman seemed too far away, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, and the meaning of her words remained veiled, as if spoken in a foreign language.

  Roseanna shook her head hard to bring in more clarity. Only then did she realize that she had heard the nurse’s instructions. They had just taken a strange amount of time to sift down into her awareness.

  She had been told to leave.

  She hunkered down more tightly in her chair.

  Alice wanted her to stay, so she would stay.

  Roseanna rose from her chair and craned her neck to see beyond the swarming bodies. It worked. She got one last glimpse of Alice’s eyes. They were wide open. But they were not the same. They had joined the rest of her face, the rest of her physical being. They were slack, and contained nothing.

  Alice matched with herself now, all over. The jarring disconnect between her eyes and the rest of her body was gone.

  That’s when Roseanna knew it didn’t matter if she walked out of the room or not.

  “I get it,” she said, out loud but under her breath. She paused briefly at the doorway, still feeling as though she were walking in a dream. “There was just no other way out.”

  Jerry was there when she stumbled into the waiting room.

  He looked up. Met her eyes. She watched him realize what was what, understand the gravity of exactly what was happening to all of them.

  He had wanted to downplay it. His face had said so. Who wouldn’t want to minimize this? Now he was no longer able.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  Roseanna shook her head.

  Jerry turned away and left without further comment.

  THREE MONTHS AND A COUPLE OF WEEKS AFTER THE MOVE

  Chapter Nineteen

  Metal Martin

  Roseanna stumbled out of bed in the morning to find all the inhabitants of the property in her living room.

  Lance and Nelson were sitting on the couch together, talking quietly. Willa was pacing around the house, looking closely at everything Roseanna owned. Her mother held both the little girl’s hands in her own and guided her from location to location as though that might be the only way to keep their host’s belongings intact.
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  “Are we having some sort of meeting?” Roseanna asked, her voice still thick with sleep.

  “We’re working out details of a hospital visit,” Lance said. “They were hoping to ride with us.”

  “One of us has to stay here for the phone installation,” she said, and made a sharp turn toward the coffee machine.

  “Oh,” Lance said. “Right.”

  Silence. It was a dark silence, freighted with dark thoughts and expectations. It made Roseanna shiver briefly. Made her wish she could shrug it off like a too-warm coat. Before it suffocated her.

  “I was going to go there myself on Martin’s scooter,” Nelson said. “But then Patty and Willa wanted to go see him, too, and besides, it’s almost out of gas.”

  “Fine. Whatever. Let me just get some coffee and breakfast into myself, and then I’ll drive you all out there. Lance can stay home for the phone guy. We can bring that gas can that’s in the barn and carry some gas home for the scooter.”

  “Actually . . . ,” Lance said. “You might need to sign for it.”

  “For . . . what?”

  “The phone. The new installation.”

  “Oh. Okay. Fine. I’ll stay. You all go.”

  “I’d like that,” Lance said. “I didn’t get to see him yesterday. I feel kind of bad that you all know him and I hardly do.”

  He didn’t go on to add that he might soon be out of chances. Then again, he didn’t need to. It was part and parcel of the dark thoughts and expectations that filled the room and made everyone’s shoulders sag. Every one of them, with the possible exception of Willa, knew it was there, whether any one of them formed it into words or not.

  No one did.

  The moment the phone guy stepped out the door again, Roseanna stood nervously over her new telephone and called Lance’s cell.

  She expected him to pick up, because reception was good at the hospital, and he always had the phone in his pocket.

  He did not pick up.

  Instead she heard his outgoing message, and knew better than to be fooled into thinking it was the live Lance.