Stealing Heaven

by Elizabeth Scott

  “So, this apartment,” Mom said to her. “What’s the neighborhood like?”

  “Oh, it’s perfectly safe. Right by the university. I have two little ones myself, and I know how it is. You want to make sure your children are taken care of.”

  “That’s right. And thanks to you, she’s got a good place. Now all she needs is a millionaire husband. I don’t suppose you know where she could get one of those.”

  The nurse laughed and told us about a neighborhood on the far west side of the city. “You should see the houses. A new museum wing”—she gestured at the newspaper on the floor—“was just donated by someone who lives out there.”

  “Oh, I read about that,” Mom said, and looked at me. “Baby, when we’re done here, let’s go for a drive, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and tried to want what I knew was coming.

  I couldn’t.

  We went for our drive. I saw Mom sit up straighter when we finally reached a neighborhood that called to her. I watched her look out the window at the houses. I saw how happy they made her.

  I took her to see my apartment the next day. She waited while I talked to the guy, charmed him when he spoke to her. She watched him hand me the keys. She came in, looked around.

  “You’re really doing this.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nice view,” she said. “Can you take me back to the hotel?”

  I did. She hasn’t unpacked her bags yet. I don’t think she ever will.

  I’ve thrown mine away. I bought a dresser last week at a thrift store. It’s old and the drawers are warped and it leans a little to one side, but it’s mine for as long as I want. For forever if I choose. I keep my books on top of it.

  I’m still getting used to the school thing. I thought signing up for GED classes would be a big deal but it wasn’t. I just went and did it. Just like that. I don’t mind the homework, but talking in class is weird. I’m used to being silent, blending in, only saying what I’m supposed to. It seems strange to be asked to give my opinion on a book or what happened to some long-dead president hundreds of years ago. I kind of like it, even if I do have a lot to learn.

  Everyone in class calls me Dani. I really like that. The girl who sits next to me says I’m lucky because I never went to high school. Her name is Rachel and she works at a sandwich place in what everyone around here calls “The Fan.”

  The sandwich place is pretty cool. The owner, Maureen, is into art and is always having exhibits of stuff made by university students. She says she hired me because I’m the only person who ever asked what the statue on her desk in the back is supposed to be. She says I have a creative mind.

  Mom was mad about the job. I told her about it after chemo one afternoon, when we were driving down a wide tree-lined street through the only neighborhood that seemed to bring her any joy. She was looking at houses, one hand pressed against the window, but she turned to look at me after I finished talking.

  “A job?”

  I nodded and I knew from her voice I definitely wasn’t going to be telling her about school yet.

  “You got a job,” she repeated. “Why?”

  “I wanted to.”

  “Pull over.”

  I did and she reached over, turned the car off, and took the keys.

  “Baby,” she said. “Look at me. This house—” She gestured around us. All I could see was the street and a security fence. “This house is maybe worth concentrating on. Maybe. But it’s just one place and there are others out there. Better places. Better things. You know that.”

  “Maybe I don’t want better.”

  She turned toward me. I saw so many things on her face. Disappointment. Fear. Love.

  “I know I’m going to die.”

  “Mom—”

  “I am. You talk to the doctor, baby, but I watch his face. I watch his hands. He always taps the desk when he talks about my future. You see my hands?” She held them out toward me. “They’re still. They’re still because I know what to do with them. The doctor doesn’t, not when he’s talking about me, and we both know why.”

  “You don’t know that. You—”

  “Stop. Listen. I know, and you do too. And I want more for you than this when I’m gone. I want more for you than what I had when I was your age. I taught you everything I know, and there’s nothing in this world you can’t do. Nothing.”

  “I know,” I said, and watched my mother’s face fall.

  We sat in silence for a long time. Finally she handed me the car keys.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “No,” she said. “You aren’t.”

  She’s right. I’m not sorry for the choices I’ve made. I see her in me now, finally, in how I’ve made up my mind and am moving forward. I get up in the mornings and make sandwiches. I study. I take Mom to chemo. I ask the doctor questions, do research at the library, and come back with more questions. I go to school. I walk by the university and think that maybe someday I could be there.

  I visit Mom at the hotel and watch television with her. She’s met a businessman. He brings clients to the hotel, takes them out to eat in the restaurant. He says it impresses them and his clients always want to be impressed. He sells real estate. He’s offered to take her to see one of the houses he’s trying to sell this weekend.

  “You’ll be careful?” I ask, and hand her a glass of juice. She has a hard time eating or drinking after chemo. It leaves a funny taste in her mouth. She says it never goes away.

  “Don’t worry about me.” She takes the glass. The sun shines in through the window, dances through her hair. It is still dark and full, beautiful. The nurses tell her she’s lucky. Mom always smiles and says she guesses she is.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I know.” She takes a sip, grimaces, and then puts the cup down. “But you don’t need to.”

  “I know,” I echo, and lean over, rest my head on her shoulder. She changes the channel, kisses the top of my head, and then moves away, sinking into the pillows with a yawn. I watch her lying there, perfectly still with her eyes closed, and then I get up and rinse out the juice glass. I stand watching water spill out of it and rush down the sink for a long time. When I go back to the bed, I cover her with a blanket, tucking it around her.

  “I love you,” I whisper. Her face twitches, but she stays still, stays silent. I grab my stuff and leave, go to class. Rachel asks me if I want to take over her shift tomorrow morning. I say I do.

  “What are you going to do?” Mom asks when we’re sitting in the hospital waiting room one afternoon. She’s thinner now, frailer. She no longer wants me to sit with her during chemo. She says some things are easier on her own.

  I know what she’s really asking. I know what she wants the answer to be, and part of me wants to tell her what she wants to hear. She raised me to live a certain way, to believe in certain things.

  “Go to school,” I tell her. “That’s what I’m going to do. That’s what I am doing.”

  “School? After everything you’ve seen and done, everything you know, you want to go to school? What can school teach you?”

  “I don’t know.” I look at her and smile. “I guess I’ll learn.”

  She doesn’t smile back. “You should want more.”

  I lean over, rest my hand on top of hers. “I’m happy.”

  She shakes her head but doesn’t pull away. When the nurse comes to get her she says, “You don’t have to wait, you know.”

  “I know. I want to.”

  I read magazines after she’s gone. There aren’t any new ones yet so I read the ones Mom and I have read before. I take a quiz she once did. I’m starting to add up my answers when I hear a voice ask where the waiting room is. I look up.

  Through the glass doors I see Greg approaching. His hair has grown out to the crazy stage again, but even without it I’d still know him anywhere. I sent a postcard to him at the police station last week, a picture of a sculpture I saw in the museum. I didn’t have to go to
the museum for school or anything. I just thought it would be interesting to go. It was.

  The sculpture I saw looked like nothing from far away, just a lump of rock, but up close you could see it was a figure pushing up out of the ground and reaching toward the sky. There was a little plaque under it. It said “Stealing Heaven.” I looked at it for a long time. On the back of the postcard I wrote the hospital name and then my own. Dani. Just that, and nothing more.

  My mother taught me to believe in silver, to believe in things, but I think it’s more important to believe in me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Tara Weikum for her dedication, kindness, and belief in my work—you’ve been in my corner since the beginning, and I am so grateful for everything you do; and to Robin Rue, for continually proving that she’s the best agent around.

  Thanks also go to Katharine Beutner, Jessica Brearton, Clara Jaeckel, Shana Jones, Susie LeBlanc, Amy Pascale, Donna Randa-Gomez, Nephele Tempest, Marianna Volokitina, and Janel Winter for reading drafts, encouragement, and all-around support as I was writing this book.

  Special thanks to my husband for believing in me and being the best man I know.

  About the Author

  ELIZABETH SCOTT grew up in a town so small it didn’t even have a post office, though it did boast an impressive cattle population. She’s sold hardware and pantyhose and had a memorable three-day stint in the dot-com industry, where she learned that she really didn’t want a career burning CDs. She lives just outside Washington, DC, with her husband; firmly believes you can never own too many books; and would love it if you visited her website, located at www.elizabethwrites.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Cover art © 2008 by Margaret Malandruccolo/MergeLeft Reps, Inc.

  Cover design by Jennifer Heuer

  Copyright

  STEALING HEAVEN. Copyright © 2008 by Elizabeth Spencer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-192006-6

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  Table of Contents

  1 My first memory is staring through a window into a house that isn’t mine. I’m not very old, three or four at the most, and a hand rests on my head and fingers tap twice softly on my left ear. I know this means I must be extra super quiet and wait exactly where I am. I am good at being quiet. I am good at waiting. The window opens. Through it I see a carpet. It’s all different colors and enormous, stretching out as far as I can see. I stare at it for a long time and then I hear a bag fall, clinking softly as it lands. I am scooped up in a pair of arms and held tight, the only sound the rhythmic slap of feet hitting the ground over and over again. My name is Danielle. I’m eighteen. I’ve been stealing things for as long as I can remember.

  2 My first memory is of the Lanaheim house, which I guess everyone has heard of, what with the Lanaheims being, well, who they are. It’s not someone’s home anymore, it’s a museum, and we went there again today, toured the house. Mom wanted to see what had happened to the place, and we didn’t have anywhere we had to be since we’d just finished up in Charleston, so we went. She spent a lot of time talking to the tour guide, asking if Baltimore really is as awful as everyone says and was it true that once someone broke in and stole a lot of jewelry but left a diamond necklace sitting right out in the open on Mrs. Lanaheim’s dressing room table? The tour guide laughed and told Mom yes, it was true, and then led us into a big open room, which he called a “formal dining room,” and started telling a story about daring thieves who were never caught. I didn’t listen, just stood staring at the carpet. It looked so much smaller than I remembered. I stared at it until Mom’s bright voice called out

  3 We take turns driving until we hit North Carolina and our storage place. We keep everything in a rental facility, the kind of place where people store old furniture and mildewed knickknacks and who knows what else. We park the car a mile away and walk through scrubby trees and weeds that skirt the edge of a couple of crappy subdivisions until we get there and then jimmy open the unit we’ve been borrowing. Mom did some checking, back when we started coming here, and everything in it belongs to an old lady who died ten years ago and whose kids can’t or won’t deal with coming down and picking through it. There’s a lot of stuff, but none of it is worth anything (we checked, ages ago) and so I guess I can see why no one would want to go through it. But it kind of sucks, doesn’t it, that a person’s whole life can be boiled down to a few things stuck in a room no one ever uses? “I swear, this crap gets uglier every time,” Mom says. “I’m going to have nightmares about the sofa.” It is pretty

  4 Now I know people think that thieves, when they hear the word “beach,” head straight for Long Island or Cape Cod or Newport, but the thing is, those places are where the police expect you to go and so—well, it’s obvious, right? Plus the rich—the real rich, the rich that have had money for so long they’d probably bleed gold if you cut them—they have other places by the sea. Out of the way places. Places like Heaven. I laugh when Mom passes me a map and taps a finger against it because places called Heaven are usually filled with boarded-up houses or worse, dippy types who own bed-and-breakfasts adored by other dips. “I know,” she says with a smile, “but trust me. This place will live up to its name. I can feel it.” She always can. We pass through a tiny town called West Hill and then reach the beach. It’s much smaller than I thought it would be: one public beach, a couple of private ones, and a one-street tourist strip filled with local places. There isn’t even one chain restaurant. I

  5 Mom doesn’t come home that night but she’s back in the morning, lying on the sofa with her eyes closed when I come downstairs. There’s a hickey on her neck. I pretend I don’t see it. “Hey, baby,” she says. “Taxis around here suck. Also, I really need some coffee. Why didn’t you buy any?” “Because we don’t have a coffeemaker.” “Oh.” She’s silent for a moment, then opens her eyes and gives me a big smile. “There’s a fifty in my bag upstairs. Take it and go get yourself some breakfast, okay?” “And coffee.” “And coffee,” she says, still smiling. Even after being up all night she looks great. Makeup, perfect. Hair, perfect. I don’t even want to think about what I look like right now. I go get the money, then grab the car keys and head for the door. There’s a donut place down the road, and I buy Mom a jelly and a plain plus a large coffee. I buy a cream-filled donut for myself. “Another coffee?” the wo
man working the counter asks. I’ve never been able to drink coffee. It smells great but t

  6 Mom tells me she’s going out a little later, that she needs to find someone who knows more about Heaven. “There’s a bar across the street from the town yacht club. I figure I’ll go there, meet the bartender and maybe, if he’s cute—well, if he is, he’d be a great source of information. And you, baby, should go to the beach. Not the public one. There’s a little one in Heaven, remember? Go and get some sun, meet a few people, and find out what you can.” I nod, even though it’s the last thing I feel like doing. Mom must know that because she doesn’t leave till I’m in a cab and headed for the beach. I’m not good with people like Mom is. She can start a conversation with anyone and—well, I can too, if I have to, but I don’t like it. Whenever I talk to someone it’s always the same; I’m nice, they talk, I remember anything important and then tell Mom. Jobs are the only time I talk to anyone besides her. If we live somewhere where we have neighbors, like in an apartment, we have to keep a low

  7 The next morning Mom says she has something for me to do. I rub my face with both hands and stare at her sleepily. She’s caught a cold or something, was up most of the night coughing. “You should go see a doctor,” I tell her as I’m fixing her coffee and she’s looking at a map, marking off houses with little red Xs. She nods, which I know means she isn’t even listening. I sigh, put her coffee in front of her, and then fix myself some cereal. “So what do you want me to do?” “Baby, can’t you eat something with marshmallows or frosting on it like a normal kid?” I sigh again. The map thing must not be going as well as she wants it to. “I had a donut yesterday.” “Only old people eat those wheat biscuit things.” “I like them.” She finishes marking Xs on her map and drops her pen on the table. “Well, at least that’s finally done. Did you meet anyone at the beach?” “Not really.” She gives me a look and I take an extra big bite of cereal just to be obnoxious, crunching it loudly between my tee