Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  Sometimes Lizzie wondered if she and Maud had gotten mixed up in the womb, some Maudish sperm implanting the seed that was intended to be Lizzie, and vice versa. Maud should have been the homemaker, the teacher. Instead, she’d stayed in the kind of motion to which Lizzie aspired. Theater in Seattle, a mime troupe in New York, Shakespeare in San Francisco, Colorado, Oregon, even a tour of Europe, and, after she’d moved to L.A., gueststarring roles on television that sometimes took her to exotic locales. All that time, Lizzie slogged through the banal details of life in Marengo, the details Maud so admired when she visited, raising the kids Maud wanted, building the home Maud longed for, while Maud lived the life Lizzie was made to have.

  But in the midst of success, in the depths of failure, Maud continually questioned the tentative, ephemeral, scary business of her art. You have your paintings, Lizzie! They take up space in the world. No good to tell Maud they were fucking greeting cards, tossed in the wastebasket when all was said and done. The paintings exist. People can hang them on their walls. And you have your children. After Maud moved to L.A., it had gotten worse. She mourned to Lizzie about how unsettled life was with Miles, and the irony of driving the freeways and avenues in and around Hollywood in search of jobs that would last three days, a week, two months at most, jobs that would allow her to go on living in a town she hated, in a career whose validity she questioned. And your life, Lizard, your life is so settled, so sane, so lovely.

  Lizzie went back inside and checked on Theo, who was caught up in his favorite video, all about earth-moving equipment. Before she started in on the next batch of journals, she placed the phone where she could easily reach it, when Maud called.

  CHAPTER 7

  MAUD

  What country, friends, is this?

  —TWELFTH NIGHT

  The sun tottered on the edge of the horizon, a yellow lamp blazing through Maud’s window. Huge rock formations loomed out of the desert, from one angle looking eerily like one thing—a troll, hunched and laughing, a ship in full rig sailing across sand—but as her car hurried her along, becoming something else altogether.

  And then the lamp in her side window disappeared, extinguished. Pink, orange, red oozed out along the distant edge of the earth.

  She glanced out the window again and again, watching the seep of colors shift and change, darken. She felt a prickle of excitement, a surge in her belly, as she imagined Miles discovering just how completely she was gone. The living room had looked decimated, bleak, when she walked out the door, but would he notice? She’d been driving for most of two days, but wasn’t sure he’d even been home yet. All the afternoons and evenings the living room had been empty when she arrived home—it would be his turn to wander through the house, wondering where she was.

  Or would he, as she rather thought, be relieved?

  She swerved, slamming her foot onto the brake. A jackrabbit, a gopher—what was it?—shot out ahead of her car. A box stowed behind her slid forward, pressed against her head. A lamp slipped between the seats, making it impossible to downshift. Her open purse and basket, cassette tapes and cases, skidded off the seat beside her. “No,” she said. “Please.”

  She pulled to the side of the road. Leaving the engine running, she walked back along the highway, squinting through the gathering dusk, looking for a curved, bloody shape. In the middle of the highway she spotted something dark. Hand held against her mouth, she walked towards it. It was hard to imagine anything worse than having to decide what to do with a small creature who would die, suffering terribly, whether or not she killed it all the way dead herself. She squatted to look. Not for the first time she wondered why, if this was one of her greatest fears, she had held on for so long to the wounded life she led with Miles. She stared at the shape on the roadway, her relief enormous; this carcass had been there a long time. Dried, desiccated, its original shape hardly discernible, it was an irregular patch of skin, a sheen of mashed bone, almost one with the pavement on which it lay.

  The day’s heat rose from the asphalt, pulsing against the backs of her thighs. In the distance a mound of mountains glowed a sullen purple. She felt minuscule, squatting on the roadway beneath a dome of sky. Like an inverted pottery bowl, it shaded from light gray above her to deep blue where the rim rested on the horizon.

  Breathing in the smell of heated tar, exhaust, the scent of sage, she waited—for the distant growl of a car, for the sound of a human voice, for a bleat or faint cry that would let her know that she had not been let off the hook. But the night was still. She walked back to her car and restowed the things that had shifted, fished the cassettes and the contents of her purse off the floor. She had not known she was chilled, but in the warm interior of the car she began to shiver, and she scavenged for her sweater.

  It took her a while, driving, to realize why it was so dark. Expelling a breath that was only partly a laugh, she turned on the headlights. Without their light she might not have seen the man at the side of the road. He did not raise an arm to flag her down, but stood as if he were expecting her. His hair was long over the shoulders of a fringed jacket. He wore a cowboy hat. She weighed the pros and cons of leaving a hitchhiker alone in the darkness against the potential dangers of picking him up. She passed him, slowing, debating, and then pulled over. You are too full of the milk of human kindness, Lady Macbeth mocked her.

  She got out, peered back through the darkness. “I don’t have a lot of room,” she called. A breeze with a hint of chill wafted towards her. “But if you don’t have far to go . . .”

  Scuffing steps approached. She thought of bolting, wondered if he had sent the nonexistent jackrabbit to slow her down, if he was indeed the jackrabbit.

  It was the man from the Trading Post, Driver. She watched him come, feeling like an actor in some demented but corny low-budget film. She kept her eyes low—on his jeaned legs scissoring towards her, on his booted feet placing themselves so carefully along the faded line at the edge of the highway.

  CHAPTER 8

  JAKE

  you are the one who said to me

  we sail our boats alone upon the sea

  The only way into and out of the front seat of Jake’s Volvo was through the passenger door. For a long time the driver’s-side door merely screeched when it opened. But about a year ago, right after he’d arrived back in Nashville, right after he’d seen Minerva after thirteen years, right after she’d told him he still wasn’t facing his ancient bullshit—actually she’d called it karma—it stopped opening at all.

  What it is you’re locking out, buddy? Minerva would have asked. Or closing in? Or, Why’s it so hard to get to the driver’s seat, buddy?

  No answer. He took what would have been Lizzie’s approach: “It broke. Fix it.” Promised himself, again—tomorrow he’d call Lester at the Volvo place.

  He clambered over the gearshift, holding the package for Johnny. Elmer had wrapped it in brown paper. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk outside Sue and Willy’s house. Stood on a street full of houses that were all made out of ticky-tacky and that all looked about the same. Welcome-mat-sized lawns. Here an awning. There an open garage door. Toppled bicycle on the sidewalk, tricycle across the street. Red wagon chauffeured by a teddy bear. Smell of barbecue. BBQ. Distant laughter, then a call—“Joey, you git yer butt home double quick!”

  Hoarse voice. Beer-slurred. Like his own dad’s. Snoring away on the Naugahyde couch too early in the evening, TV babbling at the otherwise empty room.

  Jake let himself in. Greeted by the bright gab of TV talk, canned laughter, smell of roasting meat. For a minute, surprised it was Willy, not his dad, who sprawled in the armchair reading a newspaper.

  “So you’re back,” Willy said. Can of beer sweating on the table next to him.

  “I am.”

  “Nashville not what you cracked it up to be.”

  “Nope.”

  “Told you.”

  “You did.” What Willy had said, actually, during that dismal fare-well supper, was th
at Jake’s being an artiste—his word—was not an excuse he could use the rest of his life to keep from facing up to the normal goddamn things that normal goddamn people had to face up to. “Where’s Sue?”

  “Outside. She’s tired. Janie called in sick. She had to work today.” Willy slapped the tips of his fingers against the top of the newspaper, making it stand to attention. “Seen this crap on the new Supreme Court justice?”

  “Is that the Jellybean watching TV? I’ll just say hello.” Jake waved his package.

  “What you got there? Chopsticks?”

  But Jake, following the noise of the television set into the den, didn’t stop. In general he agreed with Willy’s politics. But you didn’t want to get into a conversation with him. For one thing, it wasn’t a conversation. Whenever Willy indulged in one of his long, didactic discourses on how everything in the nation was going to hell, it depressed Jake so much that he drove around for days thinking about moving to Australia.

  Johnny sat cross-legged in front of the wide-screen TV. Hands folded, spine rounded, staring upward, rapt.

  “Ho! Jellybean! Venerating the Great God Tube, I see.”

  Johnny jerked, scrambled to his feet. “Uncle Jake!” Thin arms went around Jake’s waist. “You’ve been gone so long.”

  Jake tousled Johnny’s hair. He’d been back a month. He could have come over sooner. John Wayne’s chaps flapped in a desert wind as he rolled with his seaman’s gait along the main road of a frontier town. “Your mom told me you had a neat birthday party.”

  Johnny’s eyes were eager. “So cool. We threw water balloons!”

  “What’s this one make you, nineteen?”

  Johnny butted Jake’s ribs with the side of his head. “Nine. And I’m going to be a Martian for Halloween.”

  “You already are a Martian!” Jake held his head against his side with his elbow. Johnny yelped in delighted protest. “Nine Martian years old. I owe you a present. Here. Picked out that special wrapping paper myself.”

  Johnny gleamed a little look up at him. “Nice choice, Uncle Jake.” The little hands ripped the tape, unrolled the brown paper. “Drumsticks! Oh, Uncle Jake!”

  Jake knelt for the hug. “That okay?”

  “Okay? Mom! Look!” Johnny ran out of the room.

  Jake followed, pausing to watch a bottle of laundry detergent dance across a washer and a dryer, and then bounce, slow motion, into a folded pile of clean diapers. Signs are everywhere, buddy, if you want to see them, Minerva had always said. He argued he didn’t want to. Maybe you didn’t used to want to, Minerva had told him in Nashville. Tabby purring beneath beringed fingers. Geraniums blooming on the windowsill. Crystals spinning above the kitchen sink, sparked by sun. Same crystals. Different sink. Different window. Same sun.

  He found Sue and Johnny in the backyard. Sue stopped spraying the hedge and hugged him, smelling of soap, cleanliness, order. Johnny straddled a picnic bench, using it as a drum. Moved his shoulders to the sound of a huge internal rock band. “Good present, Uncle Jake,” Sue said.

  “One of the few times I’ve remembered. It better be good.” Jake adjusted Johnny’s fingers around the drumsticks. “Keep ’em loose. Let the drumhead do the work for you.”

  Johnny beavered away on the picnic bench. Sue smiled at him. “Willy tells me you decided to join the rest of mankind.”

  Jake nodded. “It’s not so bad. I make my own hours. Pay’s good. Nice place to work. Sometimes the projects are even fun. Not unlike music—multiple harmonies, anyway, sorting out all the available routes something can follow.”

  Johnny paused in his drumming, worried. “But you’re still Jake’s Blakes?”

  “That won’t change.” Sue hugged Jake again. “I know you were hoping Nashville would work. I’m sorry it didn’t. But I missed you. I’m just so glad you’re home.” Her voice shook.

  “Home. Yeah. Well.”

  “Home. Yeah, well.” She picked up two empty gallon buckets, pointed at shrubs with a trowel. “Did you know this? I didn’t. Things grow faster if they’re planted in the fall.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Things die in the winter.”

  “Perennials, anyway. I don’t pretend to understand.” Sue handed him the hose. “Finish up that last stretch for me. Johnny, will you let me have a few minutes with Uncle Jake?”

  Johnny made a face but went inside. Sue sat on a step, untied her muddy Keds. “Phew! Life makes more sense when I know you’re around.”

  Jake made the spray arc, shimmy, curve. Drops catching the last of sunlight. Falling rainbows, miniature prisms. “Willy says you were at the clinic. Makes this a long day.”

  Sue’s high blonde ponytail flounced. “Up since five. A group of Operation Rescue types from Illinois are making things pretty tense. Janie freaked out. Anyone would, after two days of hymns and posters of chopped-up babies.” She traipsed towards him through the water on the cement walkway, began to coil the hose. “I wish they’d give us credit for the work we do that’s patently helpful. But don’t get Willy started. I’ve had as much rhetoric, on either side, as I can stand. Can you stay for dinner?”

  “I have rehearsal.”

  “Well, you can stay for one more minute. Let me just get my cigs.” She looped the hose expertly over a tin arm that stuck out from the side of the house and disappeared through the sliding glass door into the kitchen.

  Jake sat at the picnic table. Details like that—tin arm ready for a hose—just snuck up and floored him. That his sister and Willy had bought a house in the first place. Dealt with mortgages and renovations, poured cement walkways, bought a furnace. Gone about creating a child on purpose and, after Johnny was born, wallpapered a room. Moved him into it along with sheets covered with dinosaurs, pictures of the Wild West. Bought hoses and a tin arm to hold them. Planted flowers, thought about the growth rate of shrubs. Had friends over for dinner, went to church. Sue was three years younger. Why had he consistently kept from doing these things?

  Come on comeon comeon. Minerva’s face, surrounded by its crinkly triangular mass of black, rose up to grin at him. Arms lined with clinking bracelets angled upward in a yawn and stretch. Buddy. You know.

  The first time he lived in Nashville, twenty-odd years ago, he and Minerva shared a tiny apartment. Ate out of cans, rarely remembered to sweep the kitchen. Never grew beyond that stage, although when Jake’s songwriting career enjoyed its first spate of attention they’d gotten married one drunken afternoon in Las Vegas. Rented larger and larger apartments, eventually a house. But they’d never purchased real estate. Real estate. The rocking chair, the pewter platter, the kitchen table at which he sat struggling with the divorce papers. “Is this real?” he’d asked Minerva, sliding a palm over the table. She was standing in front of the cracked mirror in the kitchen, lining kohl beneath her already dark-as-coal eyes. She nodded. Their sad eyes met in the mirror. “But real isn’t just what we touch. Or can sell.” She tapped her forehead with the eye pencil, pointing to all the pictures there. “We can’t say who gets to own these.”

  Sue stopped in the doorway. “Beer?”

  He shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”

  She sat across from him, lit a cigarette. “Seen Lizzie since you’ve been back?” Shaking the match out, trying to be casual.

  “Nope.”

  “How long’s it been?”

  He shook his head.

  “Come on, tell me. A year?”

  He looked at water drops clinging to leaves nearby. “Two. More than two. Jesus.”

  She exhaled a long plume of smoke. “Since before Theo was born.”

  Jake found a splinter of wood on the edge of the picnic table, pressed the tip of his finger against it hard enough to hurt.

  “Why are you and Lizzie being such jerks? You’ve never answered me.”

  “It’s complicated.” He didn’t see how he could confess to anyone. At the time it had seemed a small thing. But the more time that passed, the worse it got. Thinking about it made him
feel like a skewered worm. He could move, buck, stretch, yearn. No way to detach this hook. No way to escape.

  Sue put out the half-smoked cigarette on the bottom of her shoe, stared at the mangled butt, and promptly lit another one. “You want to know what I think?”

  “You’re going to tell me.”

  “I’ve stayed pretty quiet. You’ve got to hand me that.”

  “I hand you that.”

  “No matter what went down—she screwed someone else, or you did, whatever—go talk about it. Just go start.”

  He stood. “I should get going. Need to clean my living room. Our rehearsal space downtown got purchased by somebody planning another Ye Oldey Shoppey, so we’re at my apartment upsetting the neighbors until we find something else.”

  “Okay, okay, sit down, I’ll drop it.”

  He didn’t sit. The distant noise of cars on the freeway designed to circle the historic town of Marengo sounded like wind through trees, waves on a beach. The smell of something sweet wafted towards him. “You know what’s scary?” he said. “If I met someone tomorrow, how much work it would be. At eighteen, you only have to catch up on eighteen years. At forty-odd, it’s impossible. How do you ever know? Know enough that you think you could spend a life together?”

  “You never do.” Sue ground out another cigarette. “How could you? That’s what marriage is about.” She scrubbed at her forehead with the heels of both hands. “These days, it’s too easy to . . .” She stopped.

  “I saw Minerva in Nashville. Ready for this? She’s a therapist.”

  “Minerva?”

  Jake nodded. “That’s all her card says. Minerva. She went back to school. Her practice includes meditation and Wicca as well as codependent guidance. Don’t laugh. She’s wise, all right. And I don’t just mean because she’s got her license. It’s in her eyes. She knows things.”

  “A therapist.” Sue sat with her eyes closed, forehead scrunched. “Is she seeing somebody?”

  “I didn’t ask. Sitting there with her I realized I still love her. It startled me, after so many years. But we hardly even hugged. I sat in her kitchen. Sun pouring in these big windows.” He smiled. “The table is this one we bought at a garage sale together. Round, oak, I’m sitting next to the burn mark from the Camel she left on the edge of the table too long. And this black circle where she put the hot spaghetti pot down. I mean, I remember those moments. So much of our life was spent at that table. Eating, drinking beers with friends, me writing songs, her casting everyone’s tarot and I Ching. Our life was in that table, and it’s still around. But without me. I’m not saying this well.”