Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  But Sue was listening.

  “Walking out of her house—it’s like a storybook, Sue, you’d love it. You go through an arbor, roses, vines, flowers everywhere, overgrown, rambling, bursting with life. She walked me to my car. It would have been easy to hug.”

  Sue scrubbed at her forehead again.

  “Could we have made it, if we’d hung in there?” He shook his head. “We’ve both changed so much. She went back to school, got her degrees. It took me years to get out of Nashville, stop screwing around in every sense of the word. Came here, moped around, started a band that finally works—” He stopped short of mentioning Lizzie. “Maybe I’m no good at it. Minerva. Lizzie. Maybe we were just keeping each other from going where we needed to go.”

  “But anyone could say that!” Sue smacked a hand on the table. “You don’t keep each other from doing anything. You make adjustments because you love someone so much you can’t imagine doing anything else. No. Sometimes you don’t love them. And you can certainly imagine doing something else. You choose not to. And you hope love comes back.”

  Jake lowered his head. You hope love comes back. “I have to go.”

  “Well, come to dinner one of these days.” Responding to some tacit agreement not to move through the living room, where Willy sat, she followed him out to the street through the gate at the side of the house. “And if you see Lizzie, tell her we send love.”

  “I won’t. But if I do, I will.” He kissed her cheek, waited for her to finish waving, made sure she had shut the gate before he strolled around to the Volvo’s passenger side and bumped his way over the gearshift.

  You hope love comes back.

  We took a wrong tack. It was my lack, I have this knack. Your withheld heart. Bring it back.

  CHAPTER 9

  LIZZIE

  NOTES FROM BENEATH THE MAGNETS ON LIZZIE’S FRIDGE

  Ginger did everything Fred did—

  only backward, and in high heels.

  Dusk. Maud still had not called. Lizzie stepped out on her porch and yelled for the girls. She would not tell them. Hannah would insist on staying up all night if there was the slightest chance her beloved Aunt Maud might be arriving.

  The door to Sam’s trailer opened. “He says thanks anyway but he’s already eaten.” Hannah’s voice floated towards her.

  She had left it too late. Sam knew the invitation was an after-thought. And while he might say he had already eaten, the meal would have been saltines. Perhaps a can of soup.

  “Luuuuna,” Summer shouted. “Goodbye, Luna. See you tomorrow.” She ran holding her arms outstretched, making hooting noises and zigzagging back and forth down the hill and up the kitchen steps. Hannah followed more slowly.

  “I’m an owl,” Summer said, and hooted again.

  “I thought that’s what you might be. Do owls wash up?”

  “Owls hate water.”

  “Well, wash up anyway. You too, Hannah.”

  Hannah headed for the sink. Summer clambered onto one of the stools beside the counter. “Sam says can he take a rain check.”

  With Theo perched on one hip, Lizzie stirred the beans with such force that some of them flew out of the pot. “Times like this I wish he had a phone. Dammit!”

  Summer held a hand to her mouth in a parody of shock.

  “Want me to run up and ask him again?” Hannah asked.

  “He knows he’s welcome. Summer, wash up, please.”

  Summer slid from the stool onto the counter and sat there grinning.

  “Down, you monkey.” Lizzie ignored the tongue Summer stuck out at her and ladled beans on top of Hannah’s rice and to the side of Summer’s. Summer, sitting cross-legged on the counter, stared down at her plate.

  “Your homework done?” Lizzie asked. Hannah nodded, forking rice and beans into her mouth. “Summer?”

  “Didn’t have any.”

  “You did too. She did too, Ma. She did it. Sam helped.”

  “Shut up.” Summer poked a bean with a tine of her fork. “I hate this stuff.”

  “Last week it was your ‘favorite thing,’ ” Hannah said.

  “Shut up. I could take this up to Sam. He’s always hungry, Ma.”

  “That’s a good idea. You eat yours. I’ll take some up to him after I put Theo down.”

  “But I want to.”

  Lizzie kept Theo on one hip as she unbuttoned her shirt, unhooked her nursing bra, fretting about Maud. It was unlike her to stay out of touch.

  Summer eyed her. “You keep saying you’re not going to do that anymore.”

  “Do what?”

  “For weeks and weeks and weeks you’ve been saying how you’re not going to nurse him anymore.”

  “I have every intention of weaning him. It creates a lot of tension and tears I’m not ready to deal with yet.”

  “No, you just don’t want to stop having him suck on you,” Summer said, and then lowered her eyes in triumph.

  Lizzie stared, wondering if the time had finally come to smack her. Something about this thought must have shown in her face. Summer picked up her fork. “I’ll eat it, Ma.”

  “You do that.” Lizzie smoothed Theo’s hair. This petty warfare was all too similar to the battles she’d had with Sparky over the trucks and cars and exhaust pipes and driveshafts that wound up in her driveway, upon which Sparky insisted he was going to work his magic and never did. After a while it had been hard to remember why she’d fallen in love with him, why she’d wanted to make a baby with him.

  Theo’s eyelids began to droop. “I’m putting Theo down,” she said, and left the kitchen. She rolled him into his crib, grateful, as she often was, for his good nature, which allowed him to sleep easily and under most circumstances. She stared down at him for a moment, trying to remember if that quality was or was not like his father’s.

  When she came downstairs, Summer’s plate was clean. Lizzie shook a finger at her, too tired to check the garbage disposal. “You ain’t foolin’ me, girl.”

  “Ma!” Summer protested.

  Hannah said, “Told you so,” which caused them to begin the did-not-did-so ritual. The sound of jangling collar and tags interrupted this. “Luna,” Summer yelled. “Sam!”

  The dog wagged towards her, followed by Sam. Summer sank to her knees beside Luna. “Hello, you old thing,” she said, her voice muzzled in Luna’s fur. “Hello, you fat old dog.”

  Lizzie felt a knot loosen she hadn’t known was in her chest. “Sam,” she said.

  “Hello, Lizard.” Sam’s hair was slicked back into a tight braid. Lizzie was reminded for the second time that day that Sam had been her lover. She had traced with a gentle finger the parentheses that framed his lips, wrinkles that tonight looked as if they’d been laid in by a painting trowel, nose to chin. And he was pale. Thin. She turned away.

  “We were talking about bringing some dinner up to you.” She adjusted the flame beneath the pot of beans.

  “And here I am. But no dinner for me. I ate.”

  “I’ll do it, Ma!” Hannah pushed in beside her at the stove as she spooned rice and beans onto a plate.

  “No,” Sam said, waving a hand, but he took the plate and sat at the counter. “I just thought Luna and I’d stop by to say good night the way we haven’t done in a while.”

  “We’re so glad!” Hannah said. “Ma! Aren’t we glad?”

  “We are. Just in time for bed.” She averted the storm of protests by saying, “Brush your teeth and get in your nighties, and maybe Sam will come up and say good night.”

  Sam nodded. The girls made a beeline out of the room. Summer reappeared and squatted down next to Luna, who had settled in next to Sam’s stool. “Good night, you stupid old dog,” she said.

  Sam put down his fork. “Well, now. She’s not so stupid.”

  “About as stupid as me?”

  “About as stupid as you. And we know how stupid that is.”

  Pleased, Summer ran from the room, arms stretched to either side, hooting. Sam pointed. “
Owl.”

  Lizzie nodded. “Sara says hello. She’s modeling for my Life Class again this semester.”

  “That’s good.”

  “She says to tell you there’s a powwow down in Chinle. This Saturday.”

  Sam hunched over his plate, mashing beans into the tines of his fork.

  “She thinks maybe you’d like to go?”

  He chewed, staring thoughtfully at his plate.

  “I assume she’d drive.”

  Sam shook his head. “Don’t know no one.”

  Lizzie waited.

  “Well.” Sam crossed his fork with his knife. “That was good. How’s your painting?”

  The phone rang, just as Summer and Hannah yelled, “We’re ready!”

  “I’ll go,” Sam said as Lizzie reached for the phone. Luna shook herself to her feet and followed him out of the room.

  “I know you said you’d phone if you’d heard from her,” Miles said without introduction. “But I just thought maybe she’d arrived and you were deep into girl talk and had forgotten to call me.”

  “No.”

  “How long’s it take to get there from here?”

  “A very long day, if you drive straight through. Eighteen hours. Twenty. She’s stopped for the night, Miles.”

  “She stopped for the night last night. She’s been on the road for two days already. She’d call, wouldn’t she?”

  Lizzie, who thought exactly that, stayed silent. She tucked the phone under her ear and walked across the living room to sit on the lowest step, beside Luna. The dog, unable to climb after Sam, whimpered at the bottom of the stairs. Lizzie pulled at the dog’s ears, hearing at the other end of the line the scratch and then hiss of a lighter. “I’m sorry to bug you. I don’t know who else to call. Your parents are out of the country again, and—”

  “Whatever you do, don’t get hold of them! They worry enough about her as it is. Mom would fly right back home, Tokyo or not. Yikes, what an awful thought.”

  “I keep noticing things that are gone. She wouldn’t take things and then, like, do away with herself?”

  “Jesus, Miles!”

  “I keep thinking how she died on Tucker’s Larks. All that black-and-white helicopter stuff, and her jerking when the bullets hit her. The blood in her mouth, so red.”

  He sounded as though he’d memorized these lines. “I’ve got to go, Miles,” Lizzie said. “It’s the girls’ bedtime.”

  “What do I do, Lizzie? I keep imagining all these straws, falling down on Maud-as-camel, forgive me, she’s a beautiful camel. Which straw was it—was it mine?—that made her feet go sprawling, that cracked her back, that sent her out of here? Will she be back?”

  Lizzie shook her head at the new song she could hear in the making. “I’ll call when I hear from her.”

  Sam sat on a chair beside Summer’s bed. Hannah was curled under the covers of the twin bed opposite. Summer looked up at Lizzie. Her gaze leapt like blue neon across the space between them. “Sam found snake eggs up near the ditch! He’s keeping them warm under a lamp. He showed me. And now he says when they hatch I can have one!”

  “He said if they hatch.” Hannah shook her head. “And you are not keeping it in our room.”

  “It’s my room, too!”

  Sam touched Summer’s cheek. “I’m going, little one.”

  “Thanks for putting us to bed,” Hannah said, gravely, as he hugged her.

  Hannah often made Lizzie feel as if she were living in a television special, the kind of film Maud, having acted in them, referred to as Scenes From Mostly Nonexistent American Family Life. With Summer it was the exact opposite.

  She followed Sam down the stairs. He placed each foot with deliberation. “Maud seems to be on her way here,” she said to his back, surprising herself.

  Sam paused, turned a stiff neck to look at her. “Coming here?”

  “Miles called. Said she packed up a lot of stuff and took off.”

  After a long silence Sam nodded. “She weren’t happy in that place. So that’s good.” He emphasized “that.”

  He negotiated the next stair. His hand was white where it clenched the banister. When had he lost all that weight? His shirt was faded, almost threadbare in places, and a stale smell lingered in the air behind him. At the bottom of the stairs Luna heaved herself to her feet and stood panting. The dog’s eyes were rheumy. The white half-moons of cataracts slowly covering each eye were getting worse. Lizzie felt something tighten in her chest.

  “You know what I hate most about teaching?” she said as they headed, a slow threesome, towards the front door. “That I have to say goodbye to all those students. Every semester. Just when you get to know them. I tell them not to bug me. ‘Get out of here!’ Why on earth does anyone need to say goodbye?”

  Sam stopped to look at her, his smile etching deep parentheses into the skin around his mouth. “My Lizard.”

  “You and Maud. You’re the only ones who call me that.”

  “Thanks for the dinner which I wasn’t going to eat but ate anyway,” Sam said. “You’ve got the cumin right at last.”

  “I have?” she said, surprised, gratified.

  He nodded, scratching Luna’s ears. “You have lived away from your clan as long as I have lived away from mine, Lizzie. Now there is someone coming to join you in a world that has been only yours.”

  She had known he would understand.

  He put his arms out to either side. Was it meant to be a weak version of throwing his hands out in despair? Or was it welcome? Be open? He wanted a hug?

  But if he hugged her she would cry. She saw him down the porch stairs. Luna wagged along behind him until the two of them merged into a black shape against the darker black of the hill. She looked up at the billion stars above her, wondering where under those stars Maud might be. High on the hill the light of the kerosene lantern glowed through the window of the trailer. As Sam opened his door, the light yawned open, the golden entrance of a fairy tale. Silhouetted against this light, he raised an arm to her. She moved hers in response. The rectangle of light narrowed to a thin line and then to black. She tried to imitate that odd opening of arms. Above her the window glowed, a small square of gold, holding the spirits of darkness at bay.

  CHAPTER 10

  MAUD

  O time, thou must untangle this, not I;

  It is too hard a knot for me to untie.

  —TWELFTH NIGHT

  Driver sat stiff-backed beside her, his profile dimly lit by the green lamps of the instrument panel. The passenger seat, pulled forward as far as it could go to accommodate the boxes in the back seat, forced his knees to butt up against the dashboard. His feet and calves were surrounded by the items Maud had been unable to stuff anywhere else in the car. Nevertheless, with his lifted chin, his straight back, he managed to look regal, distant, superior.

  They had driven in silence for what seemed like hours, although perhaps it had only been miles. Maud cleared her throat, trying to think of another stick of conversation she could proffer. “Where are we headed?” had received a wave of a hand signifying somewhere forward and to the left of the road. “What happened to your car?” had been answered by “Friend has it.” Her cheerful attempt to talk about coincidence—that she’d seen him at Maria’s Trading Post, that there he was by the side of the road—got no response at all, although after a long pause he’d said, “You slow down enough, you can find synchronicity in everything.” She’d been mulling this over for the last twenty minutes, wondering whether Driver thought this a good thing or a bad thing.

  “I’m sorry there isn’t more room.” She’d dropped the French accent. He hadn’t commented.

  Driver made a noise that was either assent or disagreement. Silence closed once more around them. The headlights funneled into the darkness. Driver shifted, pointed. “There’ll be a dirt road up ahead. On the left.”

  Maud put on the blinker, although there were no headlights behind her and she had not seen another car for well over an
hour. “Where is it I’m taking you?”

  “Maggie’s place. Slow down. Turn here.”

  Maud braked, wondering yet again how smart it was to be driving down deserted country roads well after dark with a total stranger. But it would be unkind to drop him now. She wondered where, in a hundred-mile radius, there might be a motel, a telephone, a place to sleep.

  The road was hugely rutted. The feather hanging from her rearview mirror bounced and swayed; the bead clacked against the wind-shield. Driver put out a hand to hold it. She slowed even further. Driver took his hand away but flicked a finger at the swinging ornament. “Look how you take our signs,” he said. “But you see only the surfaces of these things.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You make this?” He crooked a long forefinger around the dangling leather and bead, the feather that had landed at her feet the taut, sad day after the night in the Taos hotel room. In a wince of memory, quickly shrugged away, she thought of Miles’ desperate, whispered “I can’t.”

  “You make this thing?” Driver asked again.

  “Made. Found. I tied a knot or two in a piece of leather, is all.”

  The lights on the dash glowed, eerie and green. She was aware of the length of jeaned thigh beside her, of the fingers he tapped on his knee. “You go for a two-week retreat and learn how to make a spirit drum. Sit in a sweat lodge and chant words you don’t understand and think you know something? You don’t have a clue.”

  Maud looked to see if he was trying to be funny.

  He stared ahead. His eyes were dark sockets. “You think by reading Frank Waters and Castaneda and Black Elk Speaks you can learn our ways? Lynn Andrews betrays our trust and our religion in her books which are very silly in any case, you hang dream catchers from your ceilings and feathers from your rearview mirror and think you know anything?”