Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Roseanna sighed deeply. When he put it that way, she really had little choice. But the situation was making her grumpy.

  “Fine. Let me go get some clothes on. And a jacket.”

  “Just a light jacket. It’s really lovely out.”

  He was leading her across the dirt and into the big grassy field behind the barn—literally holding her hand and towing her—when she spoke up in her own defense.

  “If the point of this is just to enjoy a lovely night outside,” she said, “couldn’t we do it tomorrow night? I could drink a cup of coffee in the evening and stay up late. So much better than getting yanked out of sleep.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Has to be tonight.”

  He stopped suddenly. Roseanna glanced down to see what looked like a blanket spread out on the dry grass.

  “Get comfy,” Lance said.

  “And then you’re going to take this blanket back into the house?”

  Roseanna tried to ask the question in a manner that didn’t drip with disapproval. She failed.

  “It’s not a blanket. It’s one of those painter’s drop cloths from the barn.”

  “Oh. Okay. Good.”

  Being out of complaints, or pretty much any other comments clear enough to express, she stretched out on her back. Lance settled beside her in the dark, his hands laced behind his head. Together they looked up at the stars for a minute or more.

  Roseanna started a conversation because she didn’t want to insult her son by falling back asleep. And it would have been easy to do so.

  “There really are a lot of stars out here, aren’t there?”

  “Well . . .” He sounded so very awake. Perky, even. “There are a lot of stars, period. Everywhere. We just see them better out here. So far from the city lights and all.”

  “You know that’s what I meant.”

  “You used to do that to me all the time when I was a kid.”

  “I wanted you to learn to express yourself clearly. Even if I don’t always.”

  She took them in for a moment, all those stars. Clear and bright, and clustered so close together. And there were millions of them. She felt as though she could raise her hands and frame off a little section, like a photographer composing a shot, and there would be hundreds just within the frame of her hands.

  “Is that what we came out here to see? How many stars there are without the city lights?”

  “No. There’s more.”

  She fell silent for another moment, waiting. Looking. But still she could not find the “more.”

  “How was your trip to the city?”

  “It was . . .” Then he paused. And in that pause she felt something tight. Something he was holding onto. Something he probably would rather not say. “. . . okay.”

  “How are things with you and Neal?”

  “You remembered his name!”

  “I did. Finally.”

  “They’re good. Actually.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. I think absence is making our hearts grow fonder.”

  Before Roseanna could open her mouth to answer, something caught her eye. A bright but very distant flash of light in the sky. It fell in a soft arc through the millions of stars, trailing a bright tail, which faded into nothing again.

  “Did you see that?” she asked Lance.

  “Yes. A meteor. That’s the ‘more.’ There’s a meteor shower tonight. Well, for a bunch of nights in a row, but tonight between midnight and four is supposed to be the best viewing.”

  Roseanna hoped he didn’t plan on extending the viewing session until four, but she didn’t say so. She was glad to be here with him, and glad to see the meteor she had just seen. It was her first “shooting star” experience. Having grown up in the city, she had seen them in movies but not in the real world.

  “So, you see,” she said, “there’s something to be said for living out in the country, where you get a clear view of a dark night sky.”

  “There’s also something to be said for living in the city, where you get phone reception and internet and TV so you know when there’s a meteor shower coming. Otherwise how would you know what night to look up?”

  She considered that for a moment.

  Then a huge mass appeared between her face and the stars, startling her. She jumped, and screamed, and the mass spooked away in such a motion as to clearly reveal itself as Earnest.

  The animal stood a moment in the dark, as if regaining his composure. A moment later he stretched his long neck down and began to graze in the dry grass a few feet from Roseanna’s elbow.

  “What’s he doing out here?” she asked Lance, who had been gone for a couple of days and was unlikely to know.

  “He’s been flipping the latch on his stall door.”

  “How did you know that? You’ve been gone.”

  “He was already doing it before I left. But Nelson was there to catch him. He was going to try a solution. Taking a stick and pushing it into the latch where a lock would go. I’m guessing it didn’t work. Knowing Earnest, he probably has a stick in his belly right now. I hope he chewed it well.”

  “You and me both,” Roseanna said. “I can’t afford too many more of those vet visits. Especially if . . .”

  But she trailed off and never finished the sentence, because it had to do with financial reversals, and she didn’t care to talk about such things.

  Besides, a tension had sprung up between them. She could feel it rolling her way from Lance’s side of the drop cloth blanket. She didn’t know why, or what it was, but she knew it wasn’t her imagination.

  “We have to find a way to keep him in,” Roseanna said. Mostly to talk over that tight feeling she was picking up from her son.

  “I was thinking just the opposite. Let him out all day to graze. Just bring him in at night. Then he might be more content to stay put in his stall.”

  “But the place isn’t fully fenced. He could just walk away.”

  To her surprise, Lance laughed.

  “Yeah. Right, Mom. You should be so lucky that Earnest walks away from this place. When he left Archie’s, where did he go?”

  “True,” she said.

  They lay in silence for a few moments, except for the chirping of crickets, which she had just now consciously noticed, and the contented sounds of Earnest’s chewing.

  Another meteor streaked through the stars, and they both said some version of “ooh,” more or less simultaneously, then fell silent again.

  “Okay . . . ,” Lance began.

  Roseanna felt her stomach tighten. She knew this was it. The something that had been radiating around him, between them. It was coming up now to be spoken.

  “I have something I need to confess,” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Oh. You’re going to be mad. I’m really afraid you’re going to be mad. But as I was driving home I realized you’re probably going to hear about it anyway. From somebody else. And then you’ll be even madder because I didn’t tell you myself.”

  “You’re killing me here, honey. What’s the thing?”

  “Just remember it was done out of love. It was all me wanting to help. Even if it doesn’t quite work out the best possible way, it all came out of my wanting to help.”

  “Lance . . .”

  “I went to see Jerry.”

  Silence. Briefly. And in that brief silence, two meteors. Almost at the same time.

  “Without talking to me first?”

  “Right. I know. It sounds bad. And maybe it is. But I had to be able to honestly tell him that you had no idea I was there. Otherwise . . . if he thought you’d sent me to throw myself on his mercy, he wouldn’t have liked that. He would have been ticked that you didn’t come face him yourself. And I’m a terrible liar, as you know. So I had to be able to truthfully say I was going rogue.”

  “Right,” she said. “Got it.”

  She wanted to know how it went, but couldn’t bring herself to ask. He might answer. And it might
be the wrong answer.

  “I’ve been thinking about Jerry ever since we talked about him last,” Lance said, his stress and guilt morphing into words. So many words. “You remember, right? When you asked if I thought he had any mercy you could throw yourself on?”

  Another bright streak in the sky, this one huge.

  “Whoa!” Roseanna said as it tailed out, leaving an image of itself burned into her retina for several blinks.

  “Good one,” Lance said.

  “Go on with the story. The suspense is killing me.”

  “Right. So I tried to gather up everything I know about the guy. And I decided his Achilles heel is being a hopeless romantic.”

  “Jerry’s a romantic?”

  “Absolutely. Didn’t he ever tell you about that girl he loved in college? He thought she was the one, and that they’d be together forever, but then she got killed in a car crash?”

  “I heard about it, but not from him.”

  “I heard it from him. Two years ago, when I came to the firm’s Christmas party. He had a few drinks too many and cornered me and told me this story like it’d happened to him the previous week. Like he hadn’t even begun to get over it.”

  “Hmm,” she said, still wondering where this was headed.

  “So I decided he’s just a big softy when it comes to love. Which is why I made the decision I did. Which I want to remind you was done entirely out of love and wanting to help.”

  “Oh, honey,” Roseanna said. “You know I adore you. But if you don’t spit this out . . .”

  Still, for a tense moment, he didn’t.

  “I told him you and Alice had been madly in love ever since you met in college. Don’t say anything yet. Let me explain. There’s a logic to it. You have to follow the logic. He’s furious because you did something he never in a million years would have done. You walked away from something that’s the most important thing in the world to him. And he doesn’t understand why. He can’t understand it. So in his mind it devalues everything he’s built with you. Because you had no clear reason to reject it. But by reframing it into this massive grief . . . which it was, so in that sense I’m not misleading him . . . I’m not sure he could understand it in terms of Alice being a great friend. But the tragic loss of a lover . . . well, I figured that would hit him where he lived. He couldn’t resist a story like that.”

  Roseanna scanned the sky for a few seconds, plowing through the many questions that had gathered in her brain. Trying to single out just one.

  “I thought you were a terrible liar.”

  “I did say that, didn’t I? But this one panned out. I think because it wasn’t all that far from the truth. I mean, you did love each other. And you were devastated to lose her. To me I guess it seemed more like a little lie you tell to make things feel even more true. It’s just framing it a different way so he gets a better picture of what it did to you when she died.”

  “Doesn’t that . . .” Then she paused, still overwhelmed with questions.

  “Doesn’t it what?”

  “Doesn’t it make me a complete cad for getting married and having a kid?”

  “Or it makes you someone who’s afraid to buck convention and is worried what everybody else is going to think. And who can identify with that more than Jerry? Plus it makes the whole thing additionally tragic.”

  Roseanna opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  She propped herself up on her elbows and looked over at her son. Her eyes had adjusted to the lack of light, so she could see the overall shape of him. But not the look on his face.

  “You would make a great attorney,” she said.

  “I’m going to pretend you never said that to me.”

  “It’s an interesting take on human nature,” she added, realizing as she did that she was not angry. She had scanned herself for anger and found none. “Where did you learn so much about human beings?”

  “I don’t know. I just pay attention to people, I guess. Oh. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m not saying you don’t.”

  “But I don’t. And we both know it.”

  She lay back down again, and another star fell.

  “You don’t sound mad,” he said.

  “Well, you were trying to do something good, I suppose.”

  “I really was. But then as I was driving home, I realized that Jerry’ll probably tell people. You know. What I told him about you and Alice. And maybe that’ll get around. And that might bother you. And I should’ve thought of that before I dove in like an idiot. But . . . did I mention I was only trying to help?”

  “Oh, I don’t care about that,” she said. “Let people think whatever they want. That’s the least of my worries.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that. I thought you were a little touchy on the whole Alice-as-gay subject.”

  “Only because it pointed up all the ways I wasn’t a good enough friend to her. But that guilt aside . . . I’m not gay, but damn, honey . . . I could do a lot worse than Alice. Anybody could.” A freighted pause. “So, sooner or later I have to ask this next thing.” She felt her stomach tighten and grow cold, like ice crystallizing around the question. “What did he say?”

  “Just that he needed time to think about it.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t think I made it worse, though. I don’t know if I made it better. I guess it’ll be a while before we know that. But I don’t think I made things even worse than they already are. But I look back now and I see that I could have. Made things worse. Just barging in like that without your permission.”

  He waited for some kind of response from her. But for a moment she had none. She laced her hands behind her head, imitating his position in some kind of show of body language solidarity. And she watched for another shooting star.

  When she saw one, she knew everything was going to be okay.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”

  “You think he’ll back off the suit? How do you know?”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean everything will work out exactly the way I want it to. I can’t possibly know that. I mean whatever happens, I’ll be okay. People get by in all kinds of situations. All over the world people are getting by on almost nothing. Losing things they think they can’t live without. Or at least that they think they can’t be happy without. But then it’s pretty hard to be happy . . . you know . . . if it’s dependent on some material possession not going away. I don’t want to live like that. Whatever happens, I’ll get by. If you made it better, I’ll thank you for the rest of my days. If you made it worse, I’ll kick your ass, but then when I’m done kicking your ass, I’ll forgive you, because you’re my son and you were acting out of love.”

  She almost rose to her feet. It was a speech that seemed to want to be followed by a dramatic exit. But another meteor streaked through the sky, reminding her that the show was not over. And also that this celestial show was part of how she knew she would always be all right. She would live under the stars, and they could never be taken away.

  What seemed only seconds later, Lance jiggled her elbow, and she came awake, not having realized she had fallen asleep.

  “We should go back inside now,” he said.

  Roseanna woke in the morning—a much later section of the morning than usual—to find Lance sitting on the edge of her bed. He held a cup of coffee that he seemed to indicate was intended for her.

  She sat up. Woke up as best she could. Took it from him and let the aroma fill her senses.

  “So now you’re going to wait on me hand and foot because you feel guilty?”

  “No,” he said. Then his face twisted into that shy little smile she had loved so much when he was a boy. “Well. Yes.”

  “Tell me again. I know I’m kind of beating this to death, but tell me again how you knew exactly what to say to him. Where all his soft spots were.”

  “All his soft spots? Get real, Mom. We’re lucky he has one.” He wove his fin
gers together in front of his knees and rocked slightly. Clearly thinking. “He did say one thing that tipped me off. I didn’t go in there with a script or anything. I was feeling him out as we went along. But he kept talking about how Alice was his friend, too. How he knew you two were closer and had known each other longer, but that it was a loss for him, too. He said it about three times before I realized what he was saying. That if he could keep moving forward after her death, so could you. So I guess we put that notion to rest.”

  Much to her own surprise, Roseanna laughed out loud.

  “This is going to make some great watercooler gossip,” she said. “I’d like to be a fly on the wall.”

  “What do you suppose Alice would think if she could hear all this?”

  “She’d be laughing her ass off, and you know it as well as—”

  A sharp pounding on the door made Roseanna jump. Ridiculously jump. As though she’d been walking through a haunted house when a hand reached out from under a bed and grabbed her ankle. Had she really been that overtly edgy about all this? If so, she had kept it well hidden. Even from herself.

  She looked at Lance, who looked back.

  “Probably just Nelson,” Lance said. “Or Patty.”

  “They knock. They don’t pound.”

  On the subject of pounding, Roseanna’s heart had begun to hammer.

  “I’ll go see what it is,” Lance said, and jumped to his feet.

  When he opened the door, all she could see was her son’s back. She never saw who stood on the other side of it. She saw him reach into his shorts pocket. And extend something through the door. And take hold of something, though she couldn’t make out what it was. She was fully expecting a scary manila envelope, but it looked much bulkier and more three-dimensional than that.

  Lance swung the door closed and turned to face her bedroom again. In his right hand he held a florist’s box. Not that she could read the name of a florist from her bed. But there’s a special shape to a box made to hold long-stemmed roses, and Roseanna knew one when she saw it.

  “You have a secret admirer?” he asked.

  “If I do, it’s a secret from me, too.”

  She rose, shrugged on a robe. Walked to the coffee-table steamer trunk, where Lance had set the box. There she tore into it and pulled out the card.