Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “Oh,” she told the recording after it beeped. “You’re not there. I thought you would be. Well. I just called to tell you my new phone number.”

  For a moment she almost read it off to him from the paperwork the phone installation guy had left. Then she realized that was twentieth-century thinking. It would read out on his cell phone.

  “But you have it now, because I called. I’m going to jump into my car and join you there. Call me back if you get this, though I might not be in a reception area if I’m on the road. Bye.”

  She replaced the receiver to hang up the call, something she hadn’t done in quite some time. Then she grabbed her car keys off the little table by the front door.

  Before she could even pat Buzzy’s head and cross her own front porch, she saw Lance’s car come through the gate, trailed by clouds of dust.

  And she knew.

  She walked in the direction of the car, and Lance drove in the direction of her. When they met, his window powered down.

  “That was awfully fast,” she said.

  No one spoke in reply.

  Roseanna scanned the crestfallen faces in the car and sighed.

  “Did you at least get to say goodbye?” she asked.

  Lance shook his head. “He passed in the night. The hospital tried to call us. But . . . you know.”

  “Right,” Roseanna said, knowing there would be a tragic message on her cell phone next time she drove into town. Or maybe she could now access her voicemail from the landline. Then again, at a time like that, who cared? “I do know.”

  “They wanted us to tell them who his next of kin was,” Nelson said, leaning over Lance to be heard out the driver’s window. “We told them we don’t think he had one. He never mentioned anybody to me. You?”

  “No,” Roseanna said, strangely aware of the ground under her feet, and the warm air of midmorning on her face. Notably alive. “I think if he had a next of kin, he would have gone to them and asked to be taken in.”

  “Anyway,” Nelson said, “I’m going to go see if he has a wallet in his tent. If he does, I’ll drive it over to the hospital. I can use the scooter.”

  “Take the pickup,” Roseanna said.

  Nelson said nothing, but his face changed. He looked surprisingly comforted, as if buoyed by that tiny concession—a privilege normally only extended to family and close friends.

  “So you were the last one to talk to him,” Lance said.

  It was after lunch. They were several minutes into their nap ritual, lying on the rug together, waiting out the hottest part of the day. Most definitely not sleeping. In Roseanna’s case at least, not even trying.

  “How did he seem?” Lance added.

  “Calm. Accepting. He told me the world was a good place in spite of its flaws, but going where his wife went would also be good. He didn’t seem to have a strong preference.”

  Lance didn’t answer for a few moments.

  “Hard to imagine,” he said in time. “But you hear about that. I guess when people get closer to the end they don’t fear death so much. They get into some kind of acceptance about it.”

  “Some, I guess,” she said. Hoping to leave it at that.

  “Were you the last person to see Alice?”

  Roseanna squeezed her eyes shut.

  “I was.” It came out barely stronger than a whisper.

  She waited, but he never asked the question. It just hung there in the air, unspoken. Which seemed to create an even greater pressure, though it made no logical sense that it should.

  “No,” Roseanna said. “To answer your question. The one you didn’t ask. Thank you for not asking, but I’ll answer it anyway. It wasn’t that way with Alice. She looked scared to death. Though that’s a bad choice of phrasing, I guess.”

  “Sorry to bring it up, then.”

  “She wasn’t eighty,” Roseanna said. “That might make a difference right there. She wanted more time.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “Martin didn’t. But I think it’s because he was old and he missed his wife.”

  She expected her son to respond. Explore the subject more deeply. He never did. In time she heard the soft patterns of his sleep-breathing.

  A few minutes later she dozed off herself.

  It was two mornings later when Lance suggested he might want to make a trip back home. To the city.

  “Just for a day or two. Three, tops,” he said over breakfast. “But I don’t want to leave you here at a bad time.”

  “Why would it be a bad time?”

  “Well, you know.”

  “Not really. Hence the question.”

  “The thing with Martin and all.”

  “I’m okay. Go. It’s fine.”

  “You sure?” he asked, mouth stuffed with toast. The two words were barely intelligible.

  Just for a moment she almost called him on it, the way she would have when he was a boy. Don’t talk with your mouth full. That sort of motherly jab. She stopped herself. He wasn’t a boy. A time comes in the life of a mother and son when that kind of mothering crosses the line into critical behavior. At age thirty he could eat and talk in any way he saw fit.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “If Martin was okay with it, I can deal with it, too. It was a much bigger thing for him than it was for me.”

  “I know it’s brought the Alice thing up again,” he said. This time empty mouthed and fully intelligible.

  “I suppose. But it’s not like I’m alone here. I’ve got Patty and Willa and Nelson. And a phone if I need to call you. Or you need to call me.”

  “True,” he said. “Okay. I’ll leave right after breakfast.”

  Not two minutes after he left, Roseanna wandered out to the barn to give Earnest his morning feeding.

  She found the horse already munching contentedly from his hay bag, and Nelson crouched on the dirt floor in the opposite corner of the barn. The latter was welding.

  It was a talent Roseanna had not even known he possessed.

  He looked up and saw her there. Turned off the welding torch. Lifted the visor of his mask.

  “I fed him already, miss,” he called to her.

  Roseanna crossed the barn to Nelson and sat close by his side. He lifted off his heavy welder’s mask—well, it was her mask, actually—and set it beside him on the hard dirt.

  “I didn’t know you welded,” she said.

  “I didn’t. Till yesterday.”

  “Winging it?”

  “Not really. Not entirely. I didn’t want to maim myself or burn down the barn. I took a lesson.”

  “From?”

  “Patty’s friend. That same guy who taught you.”

  They sat in silence for a moment while she visually examined his creation-in-progress. It didn’t seem to be shaping up into an animal. It looked more human. A stick-figure man with pipes for arms and legs. Pipe elbows for joints. And a sphere of rusty metal, currently separate from the rest, on which Nelson seemed to have been welding some lengths of chain.

  “So what are you making?” she asked him.

  “Is it okay if it’s a surprise?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  For nearly a minute, a literal sixty seconds, there was no sound except the birds outside the open barn door, and Earnest’s absurdly loud chewing.

  Then Nelson said, “I have an idea to run by you.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s just an idea. No pressure. You can hate it and I won’t take offense. I’ll just drop it if you want me to. But it never hurts to ask, right?”

  “I think it’s time to tell me the idea.”

  He shook off one of the huge welding gloves and scratched his stubbly chin. “I was thinking I could use Martin’s scooter now. I just know he wouldn’t mind. I was thinking I could ride it back and forth into Walkerville. You know.”

  “Not sure I do,” she said when he failed to elaborate.

  “Work a job.”

  “Oh. Well. You don’t have to run that by me.�
��

  “That actually wasn’t the heart of the idea yet.”

  “Got it. Go on.”

  “When I’m working, my life could go a couple of ways. There’s the obvious way. Find a place of my own. And then some less obvious ideas that could work out for both of us.”

  “This is an awful lot of prefacing,” Roseanna said.

  He averted his eyes. Stared down at the dirt, his face reddening.

  “Sorry. Right. I was thinking I could maybe build something. Here. On your property. Not to live in forever. But maybe to live in for a set number of years. Two or three, maybe, and then after that I can go off on my own, and the guesthouse’ll belong to you. And it’ll be an improvement to your property.”

  “And who would buy the building materials?”

  “I would. With my job.”

  “I’m not sure you’re being realistic about how much it costs to build.”

  “You might be thinking of something fancier than I am. I was thinking more like one outbuilding that could go right up against Patty and Willa’s little place. Just a big room. When it’s done I could open a doorway between the two. And their little house would be a bedroom for a more reasonable-size place. It’s a good size for a bedroom, what they’ve got. It’s just not a good size for a whole house.”

  Roseanna sat a moment, wondering if she should ask the obvious question. Though, based on her recent conversation with Martin, it might have gone without asking. Still, she decided it was best asked. Most things are.

  “And then who would live in it for those two or three years? Patty or you?”

  She watched his face redden further. She’d known Nelson was a blusher, but this was extreme even for him. Apparently he’d had nothing to blush this deeply about before now.

  “If I’m lucky, miss, maybe . . . both of us? Plus Willa, of course.”

  “Well, it’s not a bad idea—” she began.

  Nelson cut her off.

  “No, never mind, miss. Forget I ever mentioned it. You don’t like the idea. I can tell.”

  He shot to his feet, brushing his hands off on his dusty jeans.

  “I like it fine, Nelson. There’s just an unrelated problem.”

  He held still a moment. As if he could find the problem on his own. As if he might simply fish it out of the air over her head. Then he squatted on his haunches and looked into her face.

  “I told you, Miss Rosie, if you have a problem, I’ll tear up the world to solve it for you.”

  “You can’t solve this one.”

  He leaned his elbows on his thighs and laced his fingers together in front of him. Like a polite student, paying attention at his desk.

  “Tell me and we’ll see.”

  “It’s hard to talk about.”

  “You can tell me anything.”

  “I might lose this place.”

  Nelson sat down hard on the barn floor. Smacked onto his butt with an audible thump.

  “I thought you owned this place free and clear.”

  “I do. But I’m having some legal trouble with a former partner. He’s suing me. And if he gets everything he’s demanding, I probably won’t be able to keep this property.”

  A moment’s silence, during which she did not dare look up at his face. But soon not looking at his face became something akin to not thinking of a white elephant. The more you try not to do it, the more you’re doing it in spite of yourself.

  She quickly looked away again, burned by the absolute devastation in his eyes.

  “That can’t happen, miss.”

  “It could.”

  “It’s wrong, though. It’s a thing that shouldn’t happen. We can’t let that happen, miss.”

  “That’s a nice thought,” she said, feeling motherly in that moment. As though she could nurture him through this shock. But also as though he needed a gentle lesson in “adulting.” “But sometimes things happen that shouldn’t happen. And sometimes there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop them. But it’s not definite yet. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  It was about an hour before sundown when Roseanna realized how much she missed Lance. It hit her in a way she could not have imagined and had not seen coming.

  He had only been with her for a double handful of days, and yet it had changed everything. She’d already grown accustomed to having him around to such a degree that it made his subtraction painful.

  She brushed her teeth, watching her own eyes in the tiny, scarred bathroom mirror, and thought about change. Thought about how afraid everyone is of change, and how sure they feel that their adaptation to change cannot, will not, happen. Then something new comes along, and a couple of weeks later it feels as though life has been exactly that way since the beginning of recorded time.

  Then she spit, rinsed, and wondered how she had ever lived without him for so many of his adult years.

  She decided to call him.

  She scooped her cell phone off the coffee-table trunk and stepped out into the slightly cool late afternoon. The last of the sun threw long shadows of her barn and other outbuildings as she trudged toward CPR Hill. She walked along through the loose, dry dirt thinking almost nothing until she was on the other side of her barn and almost to the road.

  There she stopped, looked at the phone in her hand, and laughed.

  “Old habits,” she said out loud, and turned to walk back to her house. In which lived an actual hardwired telephone.

  Halfway there she stopped walking unexpectedly and stood frozen.

  There was a new addition to the metal zoo. But it wasn’t an animal. Nelson had apparently finished his creation and set it in place, and it stole Roseanna’s ability to breathe. She actually had to concentrate on filling her lungs with air again. It took a few seconds.

  The pipe man Nelson had created had no face. Just a rusty iron sphere of a head. But the sphere had a ring of hair over where its ears might have been, had it had any. Nelson had welded lengths of fine chain to create a version of the long and unruly hair of a mostly bald man. On top of that sat a fabric hiker’s hat. But not just any hat. Martin’s hat. At the end of the pipe man’s legs sat Martin’s red high-top sneakers. He wore Martin’s khakis and favorite yellow shirt, and at the end of his pipe arms Roseanna saw the old man’s leather work gloves. They were somehow affixed to a pipe splitting maul, which the figure held raised. On the ground beneath the statue sat a piece of uncut firewood—a full round that had been cut from the trunk of a fallen tree.

  Roseanna sat down hard in the dirt and just stared at it. For how long, she could not have said.

  In time Buzzy came around and licked the air in the direction of her face. A moment later Willa landed against her back and wrapped her arms around Roseanna’s shoulders.

  “Do you like it?” Willa asked, too loudly, into Roseanna’s ear.

  “Very much,” Roseanna said.

  “It’s Martin.”

  “Yes. I see that.”

  “He’s chopping wood.”

  “He is.”

  “He was always chopping wood.”

  “Much of the time he was, yes.”

  “And you were always telling him to stop it.”

  “Well, I won’t tell him that anymore.”

  “Good,” Willa said.

  Then she kissed Roseanna hard on the back of the head and disappeared back into her tiny home.

  She called Lance, and it felt strangely momentous. It was the first time she had ever sat on the couch, in the comfort of her own house, on her new property, and made a telephone call. Then she remembered she had called him once already, the morning they learned that Martin had died. But she had not been seated comfortably that morning, so she decided to consider this a first all the same.

  Unfortunately, Lance didn’t pick up, which made her feel painfully hollow inside.

  “Lance,” she said to his voicemail.

  Then she opened her mouth and listened to nothing come out. For an embarrassing length of time. The strain of
knowing her inability to speak was being recorded only made the situation stickier.

  Finally she forced out, “That has got to be the longest silence in the history of voicemail.”

  Then a—blessedly—much briefer lag.

  “Problem is, I guess . . . I’m not a hundred percent clear on why I’m calling. Just to say I miss you. Which seems strange, because we’ve spent so much time without each other since you grew up. But now that I’ve gotten to know you again . . . oh, never mind. Never mind what I was about to tell you. I know exactly what you would say. You’d say, ‘Mom, that crosses the corny line even for the new us.’ Or ‘mushy,’ or whatever that word was you used. Anyway, I’m going to bed, but I just wanted to say thank you.”

  Then she quickly hung up the phone.

  She stepped out onto her porch and sat on the edge of the boards, feet dangling and swinging. Buzzy saw her and came wiggling up onto the porch to sit by her side. She massaged the muscles under the short fur of his neck and shoulders and stared at the new statue.

  The setting sun turned its clothes, especially the yellow shirt, a brilliant orange. Clothes that would slowly deteriorate in the weather, she realized. But maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe everything deteriorates in time, and maybe that doesn’t make it any less worth having while it lasts.

  She sat until it was too dark to see, watching the new iron Martin chop wood. He didn’t, of course. The pipe splitting maul never moved. It would remain forever poised in the upstroke, never to slam down on that round of tree trunk.

  But the intention was there.

  Chapter Twenty

  Meteor Showers and Star-Crossed Lovers

  Lance arrived home the following night, quite some time after Roseanna had fallen asleep. He still didn’t have his own key, so he had to knock and wake her up.

  More to the point, when she stumbled to the door to let him in, he did not come in. Rather, he insisted she come out.

  “What time is it?” she asked, blinking too much.

  “It’s after midnight.”

  “Why would I want to go outside after midnight?”

  “You have to trust me. Do this for me. Please, Mom?”