Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  Hey, bud. Wherever you go, there you are, you know.

  Minerva. Laughing in her tinkly way when he’d talk about moving away from Nashville, leaving everything behind, making a fresh start. Wherever you go, there you are. It hadn’t made sense to him until this minute.

  “Shut up shut up shut up.” He made one boot move, then the other.

  He was Marley’s ghost, shackled to a clanking jangling chain of wrongdoings, the rusted links and padlocks of happiness he’d known with Lizzie. He’d drag these fetters around forever, into every encounter, every love affair, every gig. Hauling it up this mountain. Hauling it back down. He’d never be rid of it.

  He scrambled up the last long hill of shale. Stood on the granite outcropping: Fable Point. He’d made it. He gave himself some credit for that. The sun hovered, briefly halved by the horizon. Late light gleamed on meadow and tree. Dusk layered the valley beneath him. He stared down at pinpoints of moving headlights far below, aware of the earth’s turning, moving him away from the sun and into the night. He was turning on it, a speck at the top of a mountain. He shivered, pulled his down vest from the pack and began to collect wood.

  He took the potatoes out from beneath the coals long before they were done. He’d forgotten salt and pepper. He ate one anyway, raw, crunchy, unseasoned. The noodles and tuna tasted decent. Desert was a bar of chocolate. Wishing he’d brought a flask of whiskey, he played with the fire with a long stick whose tip he whittled with his army knife.

  A rising cold wind drove him into his sleeping bag. He folded his hands under his head, stared up at the flickering wash of stars. Set his mind on rehearsal logistics. Computed electrical outputs of various instruments, the amplifiers that held them. Tangled again with the software problem at work. Pondered opportunities for intelligent life on other planets. Worried if he’d ever sell another song. Fretted about what it meant that he’d had to take a day job. He didn’t want to admit he was tired. The deal at work was he could keep his own hours, as long as he made his weekly quota. Even so, rehearsing, playing weeknight gigs—it was arduous.

  Not for the first time he wondered if he should just take the band apart. Become the software maven he could see was possible. He was good at it. But, as happened each time he pursued this train of thought, he came back to the same conclusion. He’d built his life around his music. It would do something bad to his soul to abandon it now.

  He watched the moon’s majestic rise, watched it transform itself from a luminous semiorb into a flawed spotlight aimed at him from the sky. Closed his eyes against its insistent light, a prisoner facing interrogation.

  “I’m pregnant, you know,” she’d said one morning. They’d made love. He was drowsing, a leg thrown over hers.

  His eyes flicked open. He stared at her.

  She lay face up. “Yes,” she said, nodding as if he’d asked. “I’m certain.”

  Jake didn’t move. The mattress bounced. Lizzie shook him. He smiled, avoiding her eyes. Siamese cat eyes, slanting up at the corners ever so slightly, giving her a perpetual look of intrigue and amusement. “So?”

  “That’s great!”

  She drew back. The smile left her eyes. “I see.”

  “See what?”

  But she only nodded, slowly.

  “Liz, I can’t—” He stopped. “I just don’t have—”

  He couldn’t think of the appropriate word to describe what he didn’t have. Time seemed callous, money materialistic. Want seemed cold—he did want kids. Someday. He wasn’t ready, one more thing he wasn’t. Considering his advanced age, it was hard to admit that. “The wherewithal.” He wondered what that word meant, exactly.

  “But I do.” She patted him.

  Jake rose to face her, both of them sitting cross-legged. He took her hands. “Liz. We don’t have to go through with this.”

  Her fingers went limp within his. A slow disdain entered her eyes.

  “Sue can help us out, down at the clinic,” he pressed on. “I’m happy to pay for it—”

  “It.” She slid off the bed and walked to the window. Winter sunlight slipped beneath the curtain, gleaming pale on her pale skin. The thatch of hair between her thighs glinted red. She gazed at him. “You can be such a creep.”

  He repeated the word with its knife-edged sound. Outrage stirred within him. His head felt triple its usual size. A buffalo, eyes perched on either side of his skull, peering in two different directions so he couldn’t get a solid look at the problem. Or a bull in that famous china shop, baffled, infuriated by the chaos created by his smallest step.

  “All this time I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?” Nothing about this conversation made sense. He felt absurd, sitting cross-legged and naked on the wet spot. He lurched awkwardly away from its dampness, wrapped the sheet, toga-like, around his upper body. “We talked about this.” At least he sounded calm and reasonable. “I asked you to take precautions. You said you were.”

  Lizzie held the curtain away from the window so she could look outside. “I didn’t say I would take precautions. I said I knew when I was fertile.”

  “But—” This was, in fact, exactly the conversation that had taken place. He felt even more like a bull, baffled, weaving on bloodied sand, watching the picadors ride away.

  “It’s simple, Jake-o. I want a kid.”

  “You already have two.” He withered under her look. “Look. Liz, I do too. I’ve told you that.” Tumbled tricycles, bales of disposable diapers, piles of doctor bills loomed over him, spun in circles over his head.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Just not at this particular juncture. Not when I’m trying to put this band on the map. I’m barely supporting myself—” He stopped. He was forty. When would this no longer be true? He’d have to get a job. A real job. The kind that paid dependable money. He groaned.

  “There’s never a good time to have a kid, Jake.” Lizzie shook her head at the apparent truth of this. “And I don’t need supporting. I’ve never asked that, I never wanted that.”

  A shroud of certainty wrapped him in cold, damp folds. He’d never dared to ask—what would the words have been? Throw your lot in with mine, Liz. Walk through life by my side. Marry me. It was marriage. Ritualized or not, named or unnamed. Sensing she didn’t want that, he’d balanced on the edge of commitment pretending he didn’t want it either.

  Well, do you, buddy? This is a good time to find out.

  Lizzie knelt on the edge of the mattress. “I think we’ll have made a beautiful baby.” She crawled towards him. He smelled the salt-fish scent of their sex. She nipped his ankle with white teeth, laid her head on his foot, smiled up at him. Her hair pooled out onto the sheet, the nape of her neck exposed, her backbone a mountain ridge in miniature leading to the soft swell of her buttocks.

  He had thought of bending down to kiss the array of brown-red curls. He could have bent to her ear and whispered that she was a screwball. That it would be fun. They’d do it together. But he hadn’t done those things.

  Jake writhed up out of his sleeping bag. What would have been different? he wondered, picking up his whittled stick and poking, hard, at the coals. Would Theo not exist? Or would he be Theo’s father in practice as well as in fact? In fact as well as in theory?

  He wrapped the sleeping bag around his shoulders, an immense nylon muffler. Found his way by the light of the gibbous moon out to the edge of Fable Point. Stared out into the void, into the heart of darkness beneath him. He could have been less self-righteous. He could have been a willing participant. Could have held her hand during labor, or whatever fathers did. It was overwhelmingly, excruciatingly awful that he had allowed her to go through the birth—and the pregnancy, and whatever else—by herself. He had not been there for any of it. How could he? How had he? He understood why dogs and wolves bay at the moon.

  When they’d first met, when she reluctantly agreed to go places and do things with him, he’d been struck at how little faith she had in the usefulness
of men. Except for their sperm, she’d told him any number of times, one of the many hard-edged, caustic comments she flung about. He’d begun to coax her out of these disparaging remarks. Flattered himself that as the months, and then a year, then two, went by, she’d given him, and by extension men, a more respected—or at least tolerated—place in her worldview. He’d betrayed this utterly. Held the football out, taken it away.

  “Lizzie,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  A pair of headlights, two tiny eyes, prowled the road far below. In the immense loneliness he felt at that moment, in the anguish of understanding that he could not pull time back to do this differently, he was glad of this distant company. Sue had wanted to know what had happened. But who—how—could he ever, ever tell?

  He made his way back to the fire. Coals glowed red and mottled black, tiny cities falling to hoarding marauders.

  She hadn’t moved when he’d pulled his foot from beneath her cheek, slid off the bed. His body felt like a crude hunk of uncarved marble, one of those Michelangelo statues Lizzie had showed him in a book. Bodies writhing out of stone. At the same time he felt massively horny. Wanted to ravish her, push her up against the wall, make her come. He felt sperm leaking down his thigh. Extricated his boxers from his jeans beside the bed. As he held them out, balancing on one leg, he almost fell over. He caught himself on the edge of the bed, avoided meeting Lizzie’s eye. It was the sort of thing that would make them both laugh and then he’d be hard put to recapture the outrage he felt, that he wanted—absolutely needed—to hold on to.

  “What are you doing, Jake?” Lizzie sat up. Back curving up from the lilt of calves and thigh. Swell of breast half hidden by the long, straight arm. Blush of telltale tawny red along each cheekbone.

  Jake pondered her question as he slid his arms into his shirt, lined up the bottom buttonhole and button. Maybe one of the things that was delicious about making love to Lizzie was the danger of exactly what it was that had occurred. When their bodies entwined it was never just the two of them. Always there was this other, potential third entity in the picture. He felt watched. Oddly protected. Assessed and participatory in a process to which he realized he had, at some point, agreed.

  But he couldn’t say any of this. “I always thought”—he tucked in his shirt, zipped his jeans—“that I’d be fully involved in this. That when it happened—”

  “Couldn’t have done it without you.”

  He yanked the belt tight. His eyes hurt.

  “It’s a lot more fun that way,” she said. “Sexy. Definitely. Making a baby.”

  She was talking about Blair, who had happily participated in the creation of Hannah. As he now happily contributed to her food, housing, education, clothes. And happily lived two thousand miles away.

  “And I miss having a baby around. I love them small, dependent.” Her face creased as if something about this statement was not to her liking. Her eyes threw a gauntlet across the space between them. “They haven’t figured out yet they can leave.”

  “Sounds plain old selfish to me,” he said. “Just doing what you want.”

  “Oh it is not selfish,” Lizzie said, too fast. She scrambled backwards off the bed, mouth and face wrenched out of shape. “I don’t do what I want,” she yelled. “I do what other people want all the fucking time.”

  “You didn’t ask me,” Jake yelled back. “Do you get that? You didn’t even talk it over with me. I trusted you. It’s such a monstrous—” He pawed the air, looking for the word he wanted. “Betrayal. Like you went and fucked somebody else.”

  For a moment she looked aghast. Then she laughed, a harsh single sound. “Give me a fucking break.”

  “We had an agreement.”

  “I never agreed to anything.”

  “You didn’t disagree.”

  “No, I didn’t disagree.”

  Jake slapped the back of the chair, caught it before it fell. He had lost this round. Wonderful, horrible, that she should stand there facing him, fully naked, and admit this. His hands shook as he pulled on his socks and boots.

  “What are you doing, Jake?” Her eyes glittered.

  “I’m not doing anything. You are.” Or, he thought but couldn’t say, We are.

  She averted her face. Tangle of red-brown curls. He walked towards the door, boot heels loud against the wood floor. She’ll call to me, he thought. Before I even get as far as the stairs.

  He waited for the whispered “Wait!” The sound of bare feet running, the press of her knees as she leapt onto his back. This had happened once before. Or he could turn back. That, too, had solved a fight. He paused for a long time at the front door, pretending to search in his jacket pocket for something other than his keys. But she did not come, and he did not know how to return. He slammed the door hard.

  The air was cold. He cracked ice in a pothole with the heel of his boot as he crossed the driveway. Waited beside his car, staring up at the bedroom window, at the dusting of snow on the peak of Fable Mountain, at the window again. The curtain stayed closed. Finally he opened the door of his Volvo. It creaked, moaned, screamed its protest as he pulled it wide. She must have heard. They’d talked about how human the door’s anguished sound was.

  He turned the key in the ignition, craned his neck to look up through the windshield. But no face appeared in the window, no hand drew back the curtain.

  He turned the car around, headed down the driveway. I’m not doing this, he thought, I’m not. But he had.

  He poked with his stick at his flagging fire. The wind sighed, whirled through the trees, drew closer. Battered his hair around his face, shook the branches. He was freezing. He lowered himself back into the depths of his sleeping bag, closed his eyes against the pines that lurched and swayed above him, desailed masts on a ship climbing and descending mountainous waves, heading towards the infinite swirl of the Milky Way.

  He had to hope that some insurance through the college helped cover whatever maternity and delivery had cost. He had no idea. Could have asked Sue these questions but hadn’t wanted her to ask anything in return. Vague references to commitment, to different points of view on essential things, was how he’d dealt with most of the questions, spoken, unspoken, from those who knew they’d broken up just before her belly began to round.

  He did try calling. She hung up when she heard his voice. He left messages on the phone machine. No answer. In a last-ditch effort he’d gone by the house, twice, but neither Lizzie nor Jeep and the girls were home. Left a note. No reply.

  Before he left for Nashville he sent her a check for two thousand dollars. A great deal more than he could afford but so much less than he felt it should be—and how could this come down to money?—that he almost didn’t send it at all. Agonized for days over a letter but in a fit of exasperation finally mailed the check off without enclosing anything else in the envelope. It had been months before the check had cleared.

  By then he’d fled to Nashville. On the lam from love.

  The sun was high, halo behind feathery pine branches, when Jake finally drew his head up out of its nest of sleeping bag and curled arm. He’d wanted to be up in time to watch the sunrise from Fable Point, had planned to greet the new day, greet the new life he’d come up here to find. Instead, feeling drugged, he’d slept on for hours.

  Bare-legged, bare-bottomed, freezing, he sat on his sleeping bag, staring at the ashes of the fire, rubbing his eyes. The effort to stand, pull on pants, sweater, vest, to light the kerosene stove for coffee, seemed insurmountable. But eventually he crouched, shivering, hands held over the tiny bubbles forming on the bottom of the saucepan. His sleeping bag, airing over a branch, looked like a patched purple caterpillar crawling into the tall pine.

  He closed his eyes. When he and Lizzie had slept up here, they lingered in the morning inside their zipped-together sleeping bags for a long time. Gazing up, head pillowed on his shoulder, she explained, “The reason why the sky is so pale at these altitudes? Because the air is thinner.” Her voice
conveyed utter certainty. “You aren’t looking through so many layers. There’s veils and veils of this cobwebby fabric, one layer on top of another.” She undulated her arms above them to demonstrate. “That’s what makes the deep blue of, say, tropical islands. Layers upon layers. But up here most of the veils disappear. So you’re getting the purest of the blues, the wash on the original canvas.” She turned to look at him. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Liz. Your being fanciful is not something I’m prepared for.”

  There had been one of those moments, eyes naked with the love they never spoke. Then her face changed, grew sour.

  “I’m not being fanciful. My sister is. It’s Maud’s theory. She came up with it when she was about seven. Mom thought it was so fucking delightful, talked about it for years while Dad smoked his pipe and said we’d all heard about it enough already and it wasn’t all that great. But he was proud.”

  Voice bitter. Face turned into his arm. He held her, thinking how much there was about his Lizzie he didn’t understand, and how much he looked forward to sorting it out. Little by little, like a song lyric you just keep worrying at until it scans and rhymes and adds its layer of meaning:

  leaning into loneliness

  my shot glass full of wry

  stood this round and others too

  I’m drunk with wonderin’ why

  The flame beneath the saucepan, almost invisible in the bright sunlight, barely warmed the water for the instant coffee he’d brought in a plastic bag. He used too much of the powder. The resulting concoction was silty as mud. Crying like a fire in the sun, Bob Dylan had written. Exactly how he himself felt. He sat on the very edge of Fable Point, legs dangling over the jutting granite shelf. Rubbed his hands along his thighs, pressed thumbs into his calf muscles, which ached from his scrambles of yesterday. It’s all over now, Baby Blue, Dylan rasped at him, over and over again, inside his head.