News From Heaven

by Jennifer Haigh

  Cargo.

  Randy shrugs. “Most everything is shipped by truck these days. Unless it’s, you know, urgent.”

  Joyce nods. She can think of many things Saxon County needs urgently: decent jobs, better roads. Coal operators responsible enough to backfill the land ruined by strip-mining, the sooty moonscapes left behind. None of this is likely to be delivered by cargo plane, from points far away.

  “Thank you for doing this,” she says. “On a Sunday morning, yet.” It doesn’t sound quite right, though she means it; she is grateful for his presence. Nothing in her life has prepared her for this day. Randy, though young, is a Bernardi and will know what to do.

  “I haven’t been out here in a couple years. For a while I was coming all the time. Soldiers,” he explains.

  He leads her across the parking lot to the terminal. He seems to sense her resistance; his hand hovers at her lower back. The building is quiet inside, a single large room, sun-filled. The plate glass windows are streaked in the morning glare.

  “Wait here, Mrs. Hauser.” Randy lopes across the floor to confer with a stooped man behind a counter. A moment later he returns. “They landed early. This way.” Again he presses her lower back. His presence is reassuring, calm and practiced. She wonders how many women he has guided through this airport—mothers of fallen soldiers, boys his own age back from Vietnam.

  She follows him through a swinging door, through an empty back room smelling of diesel. Through an open hatch, they walk out onto the tarmac. A small plane sits with its engine idling, propellers quivering. A uniformed pilot stands smoking with a man in coveralls, who spots them first. He shades his eyes. “Randy, man, is that you?”

  “Yeah. I’m parked out front.”

  “Well, come on around. You can help me unload him.”

  Joyce hugs her arms around her. The mornings are cold now. Fooled by the bright sunshine, she left her coat in the car.

  The man in coveralls turns to her. “What about the passenger?”

  Joyce stares at him dumbly.

  “You’re the family, right?”

  She nods.

  “There’s a lady on board. I’ll go get her.”

  He climbs the stairs into the plane and comes back carrying a Pullman suitcase. Behind him is a woman in dark glasses and a long pink coat. Her red hair blows in the breeze.

  “You must be Joyce.” She offers a clawlike hand, bony, heavy with jewelry. “We spoke on the phone. I’m Vera Gold.”

  Sandy Novak died on the second of October, the day before his fortieth birthday. This is the fact of the matter, the only one the family knows for certain. He left them so long ago, went so far away. For years he told them little about his life, and not everything he said was true. After high school he worked on an assembly line in Cleveland; later he sold cars and cleaning products and sets of encyclopedias. He was a fry cook, a bartender, a blackjack dealer, a limousine driver. He spoke of meeting famous people: the governor of Nevada, a boxing champion, the actress Annette Funicello. Once he drove the daughter of Frank Sinatra. On several occasions he was chauffeur to the stars.

  For twenty years he followed a jagged path westward: Cleveland, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles. He occupies a full page in Joyce’s address book, the entries crossed out every few months and replaced with new ones. That his journey ended in California—a place that had fascinated him since childhood—seems somehow correct, as though he planned it that way all along.

  His final address was a basement apartment in a low stucco building in North Hollywood. Joyce has never seen it herself. Her older brother, George, in Los Angeles on business, once visited him there. When George rang the bell at noon, Sandy was still asleep. He answered the door groggy, in undershorts. George hadn’t called ahead, couldn’t have if he’d wanted to. Sandy rarely had a working phone.

  It wasn’t much of a place, George told Joyce later: a single room with an electric hot plate, a mini refrigerator, a Murphy bed. Sandy shared a bathroom with the tenant next door.

  “Is he eating properly?” Joyce asked. “Where does he do his laundry?”

  She could tell by George’s face that he hadn’t considered such questions.

  “Never mind,” she said. “How did he look?”

  “Like Sandy,” George said. “Like a million bucks.”

  The men slide the box into the rear of the hearse. Joyce and Vera Gold watch in silence. The box resembles a shipping crate, long and narrow. Stamped at one end are the words Stern Brothers Mortuary, North Hollywood, California. He’s in there, Joyce thinks, but it seems implausible. At Bernardi’s his body will be transferred to a different box, the handsome coffin she chose from a catalog.

  Randy leads the women to the terminal, carrying Vera’s suitcase. “I guess that’s it,” he says, pressing Joyce’s hand. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Mrs. Hauser.” The autopsy, the flight from California, have left no time for a wake. The funeral Mass will be held Monday morning, Sandy’s body rushed into the ground.

  “I’m parked out front,” Joyce tells Vera, and for the first time she thinks of the ride ahead, an hour in the car with this strange woman, delivered to them along with Sandy’s remains.

  At first they ride in silence. Vera stares out the passenger window, her hand over her mouth. Her long red hair is dyed. She fills the car with a spicy perfume. She is older than Joyce. How much older is hard to say.

  Do you know a person named Sandy Novak? she asked when Joyce answered the phone yesterday morning. I found this number in his wallet.

  Joyce, stunned, could barely formulate the questions.

  Friday, they think. He was lying there awhile.

  Sleeping pills. They found an empty bottle.

  Yes, honey. I’m sure.

  Only now does Joyce wonder: How did you know my brother? For God’s sake, why did you come?

  As if sensing these questions, Vera turns to her. “Sandy told me so much about you.”

  Joyce thinks, He told us nothing about you.

  “We were great friends.” Vera smiles wanly. “When he first came to L.A., he worked for my husband. We owned a diner. I’m a widow.”

  Joyce takes a moment to ponder this. She dimly recalls Sandy working in a restaurant several jobs ago.

  They take the back road through Kinport, through Fallentree. The sun is nearly blinding. A gentle breeze blows; the golden leaves shimmer in the clear morning light. When they make the turn onto Deer Run, Vera removes her sunglasses. Her eyelids are red and swollen, smeared with makeup. “What’s that?” she asks, pointing.

  “A coal mine. It’s closed now. There was an accident years ago.”

  Vera studies it, shading her eyes with her hand. “Sandy told me about the mines. His father worked there.”

  “Yes.”

  Vera roots through her purse for a handkerchief and dabs carefully at her eyes. “It’s beautiful here,” she says softly. “I didn’t picture it this way at all.”

  Finally they arrive at the house. Joyce feels an overpowering urge to warn Vera—my sister’s housekeeping isn’t what it used to be—but resists the impulse. If she’d known a visitor was coming, she’d have persuaded Dorothy to redd up.

  “Here we are,” Joyce says. Like all others on this street, it is a company house: three rooms upstairs, three rooms down. The family bought it years ago from Baker Brothers. Dorothy, who never married, lives here alone.

  Vera stares in wonderment, as though the mean little house were a historic monument. “Polish Hill. I’ve always wanted to see it.” Her lips tremble with emotion.

  Why, she loved him, Joyce thinks.

  She parks and engages the brake. A moment later Dorothy appears on the front porch. Her sister’s face is as familiar as her own, but now Joyce sees her as a stranger might: the pilling cardigan, the ankle socks and stained housedress, her graying hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. The sweater, once white, is grimy at the cuffs. Oh, Dorothy, Joyce thinks, hot with shame.

  “I thought you we
re Georgie,” Dorothy calls. “He should be here any minute.”

  When Vera steps out of the car, Dorothy’s eyes widen. She has never been comfortable with strangers.

  Joyce climbs the porch steps, which are a little rickety. The shabbiness of the house is suddenly overwhelming, its flaws exposed. “This is Vera Gold,” she says. And then, for lack of a better explanation: “Sandy’s friend.”

  At that moment a car climbs the hill, a newish Cadillac scattering gravel.

  “There’s Georgie,” Dorothy says with audible relief.

  “Our older brother,” Joyce explains.

  Dorothy squints into the distance. “He’s alone. I can’t believe it. I thought for sure she’d come.” George has been divorced for two years, but Dorothy, ever romantic, holds out hope. In Joyce’s view, it’s a subject best avoided. To most of Bakerton, divorce is still a rarity. To Joyce, herself: her brother is, in point of fact, the first divorced person she has ever known.

  He parks and steps out of the car, a handsome man of fifty with a full head of gray hair. To Joyce, he looks well groomed and prosperous in his stylish trench coat.

  Dorothy clatters down the porch steps to embrace him. “Georgie! You made it.” It seems excessive, a hero’s welcome, as though driving across Pennsylvania were some epic feat. But this brother is hers, her idol since childhood. He belongs to Dorothy the way Sandy had belonged to Joyce.

  Arm in arm, they climb the stairs. “Whoa, careful,” says George. “These boards are a little loose.”

  Joyce accepts his kiss on her cheek, struck, as always, by his resemblance to their father. She makes what is now the standard introduction: Vera Gold. Sandy’s friend.

  Inside, the radio is playing. The local AM station broadcasts a weekly Mass for Shut-ins. Dorothy, who is not a shut-in, listens anyway, though she’s already been to Mass at St. Casimir’s. Joyce ducks into the parlor and unplugs the radio. The dials are long missing, and this is the only way to turn it off.

  Dorothy follows her. “Where is she going to sleep?” she whispers.

  “Don’t look at me. You’re the one with all the empty bedrooms. She can have my old room, I guess. Or Sandy’s.” Joyce wonders, but does not ask, the last time Dorothy dusted or changed the sheets.

  The kitchen is sunny and very warm, the refrigerator packed already with covered dishes. After Sandy’s obituary appeared in the paper, an army of neighbor women showed up with casseroles. Joyce puts on a pot of coffee, wiping the counter as she goes. It isn’t easy to do, with all the clutter. Near the sink are rows of clean empty jars—mustard, jelly, pickles—Dorothy has set out to dry. Eventually they will join the hundred others in boxes in the basement—for what purpose, Joyce couldn’t possibly say.

  George and Vera sit at the big Formica table. “We’re still in shock,” he tells her. “You can imagine.”

  “Of course.” Vera’s voice is low and gravelly, a smoker’s voice.

  “He came back three years ago for my son’s wedding. Before that it was ten years, at least.”

  Cups are passed, the sugar bowl, the can of evaporated milk. George and Dorothy drink their coffee light and sweet. Joyce and Vera take it black. Brown, really: the family brew is Maxwell House boiled in a percolator, so weak Joyce can see the flowered pattern at the bottom of the cup.

  “He wanted to visit. He talked about it all the time.” Vera sips her coffee, her rings clinking on the china cup. “It was always a question of money.”

  “I would have bought him a ticket,” George says.

  “He wouldn’t have let you. He’d be too ashamed.” Vera hesitates, as though there’s more she could say.

  “He was always hard up,” George says. “I never understood it. He couldn’t seem to get on his feet.”

  I gave him money, Joyce thinks. We all did. It’s a subject she has never discussed with George or Dorothy, but she knows, suddenly, that this is true. He called at strange hours: though he’d spent fifteen years on the far edge of the country, he paid no attention to the time difference, as though it were an unsubstantiated rumor he didn’t quite believe. Loans, he called them, though he was casual about repaying. He was casual in all things. Joyce remembers his shirts always wrinkled, his blond hair shaggy before that look was popular, back when other boys were wearing crew cuts. The scruffiness suited him. He was so good-looking, he’d have seemed almost feminine without a day’s growth on his chin.

  The coffee finished, George walks Joyce out to the car. Her husband has been alone with the children all day. By now Teddy will be clamoring for his mother.

  “Who is she, anyway?” George asks. “His girlfriend?”

  “No, I’m sure not,” says Joyce, who isn’t at all sure. “A friend, she says. She’s the one who found his body.” She hugs her coat around her. “Honestly, Georgie, I don’t know who she is.”

  “She must have been a knockout in her day.” He fumbles in his pocket for a cigarette. You’re smoking again? Joyce wants to say but doesn’t. She is trying to be less critical.

  “I finally reached Lucy,” she says. “Leonard, actually. They couldn’t get a flight out until Tuesday, so I told him not to bother. What would be the point?” Their younger sister is a medical missionary in a remote village in Madagascar. She and her husband run a small hospital, the only nurse and doctor for miles.

  “I missed Daddy’s funeral,” says George. “I never forgave myself.”

  Here we go, Joyce thinks. It’s a story she’s heard too many times. During the war George served on a minesweeper in the South Pacific. By the time he learned of their father’s death, the body was already in the ground.

  “I remember his face so clearly,” says George. “More clearly than I remember Mother’s, if you want to know the truth.” He exhales in a long stream. “Remember my violin?”

  It’s another old family story, oft-repeated: the time their father spent his whole paycheck to buy George, then eight years old, a secondhand violin. George’s version of the story is tender, sentimental. Their mother, charged with feeding four children on groceries wheedled from the company store, had remembered it less fondly.

  “I told Sandy that story,” he says. “When I went out to California that time. And do you know what he said to me? I don’t remember him at all. That killed me, Joyce. I don’t remember him at all.”

  “Well,” says Joyce, “he was young when Daddy died.”

  “He was ten. A ten-year-old remembers.” George flicks away an ash. “I’m telling you, it affected him. He was traumatized by it.” He is a man of certain opinions. In that way he is the exact opposite of Sandy, who believed in nothing at all.

  She remembers clearly the last time she saw him. They were riding in her car to the airport in Pittsburgh—Sandy behind the wheel, his suitcase in the trunk. His face was pale that morning, a little drawn. He’d had a late night and too many drinks at their nephew’s wedding, the reason for this visit. For years he’d seemed preternaturally youthful, but that day she noticed his hairline receding, faint lines at the corners of his eyes. For the first time he looked his age.

  At the wedding he’d put on a good show—dancing and joking, charming neighbors he couldn’t possibly remember, old miners and miners’ widows who still lived on Polish Hill. The Novak boy, gone a decade, had been welcomed like the prodigal son. He’s so handsome, Joyce was told again and again. He always had a way about him. She accepted the compliments graciously, as though she herself had been praised.

  His homecoming had been an unqualified success until the final morning, when—despite Dorothy’s wheedling, her lectures, and finally her tears—he had refused to join the family at Sunday Mass. It would be a lie, he said simply. I don’t believe.

  “People like to think there’s a plan,” he told Joyce. “Some point to it all.” He changed lanes smoothly, with barely a backward glance. “So they’ve made up all these elaborate explanations.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Fairy tales, Joyce. They�
��re nothing but fairy tales.”

  She stared at him, appalled. “You don’t believe in God? In heaven?” To her it was the essential point: the ultimate reunion with her parents, Rose and Stanley waiting for her on the other side. The alternative—that she would never see them again—was inadmissible, a sorrow she couldn’t bear.

  “Sorry, doll. Heaven is here on earth.”

  They drove awhile in silence.

  “So you’re an—atheist?” The word felt foreign in her mouth, wicked as an epithet. She knew such people existed but had never met one. Fairy tales. Nobody she knew—herself included—would dare say such a thing aloud.

  Sandy parked at the terminal and stepped out of the car. With a crooked grin, he handed her the keys. She can see it now, the smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. The memory shatters her.

  On Monday morning the house smells of pancakes—a weekend treat, usually, but her husband has made an exception. Ed is an early riser, and he and Rebecca have already demolished an entire stack. Joyce has no appetite and neither does Teddy, who is running a temperature. She lay awake half the night, listening to him cough.

  She drinks her coffee as she dresses for the funeral. “I hate to leave him,” she says, helping Ed with his tie. Her friend Eleanor Rouse, the school nurse, has offered to sit with the children while she and Ed are at church. Joyce wouldn’t—realistically, she couldn’t—leave Teddy with anyone else.

  “Where are you going?” Rebecca asks.

  She stands in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, watching Joyce put on panty hose. On her head is a pink paper cone left over from her birthday. On Saturday morning, in the Hausers’ basement rec room, Joyce served ice cream and cake to a dozen second-graders. It seems a long time ago.

  “To the funeral home,” she says. “That building I showed you, uptown behind the A&P.”

  “The red one,” says Rebecca, adjusting her hat.

  “Yes,” Joyce says.

  They have discussed the best way to explain Sandy’s death to the children. Teddy is too young to ask questions, but Rebecca, who is seven, has been told that her uncle has gone to heaven.