The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

She turned abruptly and walked directly into the knee-deep snow of the park, moving smoothly, glidingly, the snow seeming to part before her like a white Red Sea. It took Ben a moment to realize there must have been a path that wasn’t visible from where he stood. He called her name but not loudly enough. He felt too self-conscious to really yell. Nonetheless, when she didn’t respond, he was seized by irrational anxiety. She’s walking into the snow, he thought. Oksana’s walking into the snow to die.

  He knew she wasn’t really walking into the snow. That wasn’t even a thing people did. Still, what he knew of her fell into an ominous pattern: her abortive career as a mail-order bride, Martin using her as a womb for hire, the films she’d made, which were clearly unsuccessful or she wouldn’t be hiring out her womb. On the spur of the moment, he decided to follow her. There wasn’t any harm, after all, in making sure she was all right.

  The path where she’d entered the park was a block away, so Ben decided to cut across. He stepped directly into a snowbank. After a few high-kicking strides, he was sweating and excitement caught in him. It was a good deed, even if it was ridiculous. He could take her to buy a pair of boots; she shouldn’t go walking in the snow in sneakers. And there was something in it about all the women in the world Ben should have taken care of—the crazy girls. For him, there had always been women like that: suicidal exes and hapless stalkers and female friends who needed something from him, to talk at 2:00 a.m. or borrow money or be told they were beautiful, and sometimes Ben complied but not always, and sometimes when he didn’t, it ended badly. Most of all there were the girls he wouldn’t visit in the psych ward, because of his childhood spent at psych wards visiting his crazy mother (his ur-woman, as all mothers were), his mother who’d made little Ben into her confidant and sobbed to him and told him all her suicidal fantasies, then killed herself in the hospital when Ben was thirteen: Mom hanging from a bathrobe belt, undiscovered by the nurse and strangling terribly slowly despite the call button having been pressed, for which Ben’s father later unsuccessfully tried to sue the hospital. So it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together, to see why Ben had to follow Oksana, who might have been fine, but he had to make sure. It was also why (this came to him out of nowhere) he’d fallen in love with Kate.

  Ben was thinking this and watching his footing, and when he looked up again, Oksana had vanished. There must have been a hill she’d descended that Ben couldn’t see; the terrain was so uniformly white as to obscure any topography. However, he spotted the path she’d been on, its packed snow showing the spirograph prints of her sneaker soles. He clambered into it and followed, faster now, and almost instantly caught sight of her again—the telltale pink of her coat—at the door of a low drab building. Then its door blinked and winked her out.

  Behind the building, its shape confused by trees, was the dull/bright expanse of the skating rink. She’d gone into the skate rental building. She was here to go skating. That was all it was. Ben stood, catching his breath, and watched the rink. He was just making sure.

  There were only a few skaters out, in the bright striped puffer coats people wore that year; they looked like bees in fanciful colors and described the heavy, tentative loops bees might make if confined to two dimensions. And, presently, Oksana appeared—a plain pink bee—and shot dramatically through them all, bisecting the rink; then she snagged and fabulously spun on a point, one foot turned aside, the skate blade flashing. She glided away again and picked up speed, sprinting down the ice. Ben’s panic came back. He thought: She’s trying to kill the baby. She’ll fall and lose the baby, and she’ll be free. She leapt, and Ben’s heart leapt. She was going to fall, it was happening now. But she landed, buoyant, like a sailboat skipping on the waves, and skated on. He was a little in love with her at that moment. He wanted to call Kate and tell her about it and say: I felt a little in love with her. Kate would say: Listen, skating isn’t everything.

  He turned away then, embarrassed. It had begun to feel like stalking. But he was left with the all-too-familiar feeling of having been infected by insanity, of being drawn into someone else’s insanity, although Oksana had done nothing insane. (It was Kate somehow. It was Kate these feelings were about. It was all about Kate.)

  He was also left with the image of Oksana, hunched and dirty pink and poor and invincible. It became the image that occurred to his mind when he thought of mental illness. Specifically, it became an emblem of Kate.

  Because Kate’s anomalies had now spawned enigmas, discrepancies, holes in the fabric of Kate. It wasn’t that she was crazy, or not like any crazy girls he’d known before. She didn’t weep; she didn’t scream. She wasn’t hyperemotional. If anything, she was all too sanguine—wore the same clothes for days on end and forgot to brush her hair and was perfectly content. In the daytime, she often went to Sabine’s and sat with the mail-order brides for hours, singing along to records and knitting, and she wasn’t ever worried about getting older and having no idea what she wanted to be. Once when Ben was furious at his boss, Kate listened to him ranting for a few minutes, then said, “I wish I was angry. It looks really fun,” which was annoying, but it wasn’t insane. She was a happy person.

  But there was also an incident where Kate told Ben a story about an ex–Green Beret who had climbed the White House fence and broken into the White House and bearded the president and the First Lady in bed, and instead of calling for the Secret Service, the president called downstairs for tea, and they sat drinking tea in the president’s bedroom and discussing the treatment of veterans, and the man became the president’s personal friend. She couldn’t remember which president. It had happened sometime in the nineties.

  Of course it hadn’t really happened, Ben said. Perhaps it was from a movie?

  It absolutely happened, said Kate. It had been on all the news.

  But an internet search didn’t turn up anything. At which Kate became a little stiff and said, “I don’t know how to explain it, but it was real.”

  Then what was frightening—what made him feel like a child intrepidly lost in the woods—was that he loved her more for that, particularly for that. Could no longer imagine being with a woman who never said things like that, a woman who didn’t (as Kate did) believe New Delhi was infested by pangolins, and that New Yorkers had a tradition of flying elaborate kites on May Day, and that there was a nation in the Virgin Islands ruled by a “Breadfruit Monarch” descended from the leaders of a slave rebellion. Random nonfacts appeared in her head, and Kate would not exactly admit they were wrong; she tended rather to be sad for Ben, who had to live in a world without pangolin infestations and breadfruit kings. And he liked to keep one foot in Kate’s world, even though he didn’t really think it was healthy.

  Once, when Kate was out at a domestic violence fund-raiser, Ben went to visit Salman and Ágota by himself, and casually mentioned the Green Beret and the pangolins, and asked if they thought Kate believed those things. In asking, he was rationally nervous—they might confess that Kate had a psychiatric history—but he was also absurdly afraid they would say the pangolins were real, and there would turn out to be two realities: an extravagant Persian-Hungarian reality where the amazing people lived, and a gray, time-serving reality for duds like Ben.

  But Ágota made her exasperated face, and Salman laughed with paternal pride.

  “Kitty!” Ágota said. “She’s terrible.”

  “I love the pangolins,” Salman said. “Are we absolutely sure that’s wrong?”

  Ágota said, “I will tell you, Kitty’s brother is very sensible. If you call Petey and ask him a practical question—you’re renting a car and you want to know whether you should get the insurance—Petey will tell you, ‘Yes, you must always get the insurance,’ and he has all the facts to tell you. If you call my daughter with such a question, she will say, ‘What’s insurance?’ and you must explain insurance for her, and she is then shocked by insurance and says it is a con and you should please complain to the rental company so they will stop collaborat
ing with this con.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Salman told Ben.

  “But does she believe in the pangolins?” Ben said.

  “Who knows what Kitty believes?” said Ágota. “I think, yes, she believes in the pangolins. But it is not a firm line.”

  “Kitty’s off conversing with the pixies,” said Salman. “How could she be expected to keep track of things like car insurance?”

  Ben told them about how Kate believed she had learned Italian in her sleep, convinced that this, at least, would worry them, but they only laughed and countered with an anecdote about when Kate was seven and had woken up convinced she could play the harp, and she made herself so insufferable that they found a store where they could buy a harp, but when Kate saw the harp, she said, “That’s a harp?” and was crushed and said, “I thought you played a harp like a bicycle.”

  “Kitty gets mixed up between reality and fantasy,” Salman said. “My dad was the exact same way. He used to come back from fishing and tell us all the things the mermaids told him.”

  “It is not a disease,” said Ágota. “If you can’t tolerate it, we will understand. It’s your life, and we won’t hate you. But really it is not a pathology.”

  A week after that conversation, Kate started painting the nursery wall at Martin’s, an event that Ben had been anticipating as a possible antidote to his malaise. Kate would have adult responsibilities for once. Maybe it could turn into a long-term business: Martin had rich friends who might see Kate’s mural and want one of their own. Furthermore, money was becoming an issue, because Ben had been made part-time at work. Now, instead of looking for another job, he could use his days off to work on a poetry chapbook and the bills would still get paid.

  What Ben hadn’t anticipated was that, when he stayed home alone, he would pine for Kate and be both lethargic and restless with bad energy; that he would call Kate twice a day and want to call her five times more; that he would end up calling Sabine to talk about Kate; that Sabine would eventually ask, “Is something wrong? Like, really fucking wrong?” and he would have no answer. There was, but there wasn’t. He said, “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  On a day like that, a cold March day, he decided to go surprise Kate at work. He would bring her a tuna melt from Fredo’s and maybe they could have furtive nursery sex, although that wasn’t necessary, might be inappropriate: he’d leave that up to Kate. He bought the sandwich on a wave of optimism, then on the train he was already self-conscious. How had he become so needy? The sandwich would be cold by the time he got there. She would wonder why he hadn’t called first. It was as if he were trying to catch her at something—and what if he did catch Kate with a man? Of course he wouldn’t. It was Martin’s place and Martin still had decorators coming in, and anyway, Kate wouldn’t cheat. Still, the thought of it hurt him. He couldn’t stop the scene from playing in his head.

  So that was boiling in his mind, recalcitrant and ugly, when he got to Martin’s door and rang the doorbell and big male footsteps came and when the door opened, it was José.

  Ben went hot in the face. This couldn’t be happening. He should have stayed home.

  “Ben!” José said, waving him in. José was smiling with apologetic friendliness. He chatted too much as they climbed the stairs, and Ben felt certain he was interrupting something. Maybe Kate had been sleeping with José all along. Now they’d sorted out the problems that had kept them apart. They’d been discussing how to break it to Ben.

  Some part of Ben knew this wasn’t true. Still he felt it. And why did José have to be here? It was like a conspiracy to make Ben crazy.

  At the top of the stairs, the nursery door stood open. There was Kate in her everyday clothes, a sweater and jeans which already had dings of paint here and there. She saw Ben and her posture changed, became resigned—as if Ben were the interloper, the stranger to whom she must be polite. She put her brush down on the drop cloth, then reconsidered and put it in a jar of water.

  “I brought you a tuna melt,” said Ben.

  “Oh.” Kate looked at José. “We just called out for pizza. Maybe we should cancel it?”

  For a minute, they discussed the logistics of lunch, concluding after a nervous surplus of talk that they could eat both the pizza and the tuna melt. Or else leave some for Martin. Not a problem.

  “That’s so nice of you to bring me a sandwich,” Kate said finally, lamely. They all fell silent. They were looking at the mural on the wall.

  The nursery furniture had been shoved back to make room for the drop cloth on which Kate knelt. The wall above was a blotched cerulean blue; it was the underpainting for what was going to be a map of a fanciful world with a Cocoa Sea and a Soda Pop Ocean and countries called Centauria and Zoof. Kate had been finishing a border at the bottom: a procession of fairies, mounted on prancing rabbits and cats and frogs and skunks. In the far corner of the room was a collection of a dozen new stuffed animals, all facing the painting so they looked like a rapt cute audience. And the painting—like everything else here—gave Ben a terrible feeling he couldn’t explain.

  Meanwhile, José gazed at the painting with a kind of faith. It was clear he wanted Ben to admire it—another wrong note, because why should José care? He didn’t know Kate, according to Kate. Clearly, Ben should comment on the painting, though you couldn’t tell much about the painting yet. But no doubt José had praised it enthusiastically.

  Then José turned to Ben and said, “Did you see Oksana’s room yet?”

  “Oksana’s room?” said Ben, and was relieved when his voice sounded perfectly normal.

  “Oksana’s staying here,” said Kate. “Martin’s paying her extra to stay and breastfeed the baby the first three months.”

  Ben must have made a face, because José laughed and said, “Exactly.”

  Kate said, “I think Martin’s scared to be alone with the baby.”

  “Well, that bodes well,” Ben said.

  “Right?” said José.

  “Maybe we should all move in,” said Kate. Then she and José laughed more than it warranted—as if they were laughing at an inside joke.

  Ben forced himself to be normal, to grin. “So does it have furniture? Oksana’s room?”

  “Oh, bro,” José said. “Has it got furniture? Come on, Kate, we have to show the room to Ben.”

  Kate got up promptly and went with José. Ben followed them down the hallway despondently, thinking he should make an excuse and leave. Oksana’s room was the next one down, and José was smiling strangely as he opened the door. Kate moved aside to let Ben see.

  The walls were powder pink, and the curtains were gauzy and pink. The bed had a frilly canopy, embellished with pink satin bows at the corners. The furniture was white and visibly cheap. There was a lamp in the shape of a shepherdess and a lamp in the shape of a swan. On the wall was a large framed photograph of two white kittens looking up from a basket.

  José was laughing under his breath. He said, “Kate was saying how it needs a music box with a little ballerina.”

  “No, it’s where the ballerina would live,” said Kate. “It’s her room inside the music box.”

  “Martin did this for Oksana?” Ben said.

  José lost it completely. He was giggling, breathless. He looked almost hysterical.

  Kate said, “Oksana chose everything. We think it’s passive aggression.”

  Ben smiled uncomfortably. He got the joke—that the room was hideous—but didn’t know Oksana well enough to find it funny. And again, he got the sense the house was wrong. It was a place where bad things happened.

  At that moment, the phone rang in the other room, and they all startled guiltily. Kate went to answer it, and Ben followed after her possessively. José came along, and in that moment, Ben knew what the phone call was going to be. He didn’t believe it yet, but he knew. He felt as if José and Kate knew. Like it was obvious.

  From there it all went fast, because Ben was right, it was Sabine on the phone, saying Oksa
na had gone into labor six weeks prematurely. Sabine was demanding Martin and demanding to know how she ended up being point man and giving all the hospital details. Then it seemed only natural to pile into José’s car and speed off to the hospital. There was a vague impression of racing to the rescue—and what was strange was, the instant they stepped out of the house, Ben’s jealousy vanished. He didn’t even notice how it went. He was just giving directions as they drove while Kate sat in back and tried different numbers for Martin on José’s cell phone. José played Cal-Mex rap in the car and looked inexplicably grim, even angry. When they parked outside the hospital, Ben said to him, “You could go home now,” but José just shook his head and got out of the car without answering. In the hospital they got instantly lost. Nothing seemed to be usefully labeled; it was the Dorfmann Pavilion and the Faroukh Building and the Bluebird Pathway and a bewilderment of acronyms. They couldn’t find anything, they couldn’t find anyone to tell them anything. They roamed the broad corridors, repeatedly ending up at locked security doors and impotently pressing a button for an intercom that didn’t respond. They were short of breath from anxiety, walking too fast. Medical staff in color-coded scrubs stormed past, and patients were rolled by on gurneys that rattled deafeningly over invisible bumps in the floor. Some gurneyed patients smiled at them, but the staff didn’t seem to see them at all—it was as if Ben and Kate and José were ghosts, and the smiling patients were also ghosts, being hastily removed by living doctors.

  At last, they stumbled into the maternity waiting room. Sabine was there, ranting into her cell phone; also Amina, the Nigerian mail-order bride, who was reading an economics textbook, and Raya, the Russian mail-order bride, who was weeping and staring into space (she’d had a miscarriage six months earlier). A large South Asian family was gathered on the other side of the waiting room, talking and laughing in a traffic jam of strollers, all loaded with somnolent toddlers who, in this context, seemed like encouraging examples of successful birth. The strollers were festooned with IT’S A BOY! balloons, and Kate commented, “Those people are really concerned that their sons not be mistaken for daughters,” and at first Ben thought she was serious and started to explain, but it turned out to be a joke.