Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  Hannah’s eyes gleamed. She shook her head. The blanket capping her black hair made her look like an illustration out of The Little Match Girl. “You’re being rather loud.”

  “ ‘Rather loud.’ She is your niece, Maud.” Lizzie rolled over to sit beside the couch. “I’m trying to convince Maud to get you a sister before you’re too old to enjoy it.”

  “That wouldn’t be my sister.”

  “You’re right, Hannah, as usual. How’d I ever get such a practical child? I know, it’s Blair, not me.” She pulled Hannah to her feet.

  “It was fun seeing that play with you, Aunt Maud,” Hannah said. “Summer wants to be the ghost of Christmas past, all jolly, but I want to be the ghost of Christmas yet to come.” She pulled the blanket forward, hiding her face. Making wind noises, she pointed a shaking finger in Maud’s direction, then at her mother.

  “Come along, Hannah-hoo. Christmas yet to come has to brush his/her teeth.” Lizzie nodded towards Theo. “Would you carry our little Christmas Present?”

  Hannah giggled and let her mother pull her from the room. Theo’s cheek was mashed into the couch pillow. Maud scooped her arms beneath him, holding his hot body close. Puh, puh, puh. Theo made a puffing noise as he slept.

  She carried him up the stairs. Lizzie helped her roll him into the dinosaur-decorated sheets of his crib. Maud wished she could always feel as she did at this moment. Her sister had made Theo’s body. But Theo and Hannah and Summer were and always would be a part of Maud. It seemed you could always need something other than what you already had.

  She put her hand on the small of Lizzie’s back and stared down at her nephew, adoring his open mouth, the Mick Jagger upper lip with a smear of jam upon it, his sticky hair, the abandon of his round limbs, his tiny fists, loosely clenched against a world that had not yet given him too much anguish.

  W I N T E R

  CHAPTER 21

  LIZZIE

  NOTES FROM BENEATH THE MAGNETS ON LIZZIE’S FRIDGE

  We need, in love,

  To practice only this:

  Letting each other go. For holding on comes easily;

  We do not need to learn it.

  —RILKE

  When Jake called to ask for “normalizing time” with Theo, Lizzie laughed. “Normalizing time?” she repeated back to him in a snide voice. The phrase summoned up visions of a psychologist’s office, where adults sat hugging teddy bears and occasionally pounding pillows.

  “I’d like to spend some time with him, Liz, where it’s natural—whatever the word is. As normal as possible. Given the circumstances.”

  She wondered if Jake had started to see a counselor. She badgered him with the fact that she didn’t owe him anything. He managed, nevertheless, to wrangle an invitation.

  Within half an hour Lizzie had finished her first beer and was hankering for a second. She lounged on the couch. He sat opposite, stiff, upright, on the edge of the armchair, hands held in upside-down prayer. Amidst a scattered collection of wood blocks, plastic dinosaurs, animals of the barnyard, Theo squatted on the rug between them. Behind Jake, through the big window, Lizzie watched the sun slip over the edge of snowy mountains. The bright white of the field around the house dulled.

  “Cow?” Theo held this up.

  “Ask Jake.” Lizzie pointed in Jake’s direction.

  Theo tottered over and placed the wooden cow in Jake’s hand. “Moo?”

  Jake looked like he might faint. “You’re right, it does say moo.”

  The front door slammed. “Ma!” Summer called from the kitchen. “Ma? Sam won’t let me in again.”

  She careened around the corner, shirttail poking out from beneath a parka that needed a good wash, hair a bristle of red-blonde. When she saw Jake she stopped dead.

  “Well, hi there,” Jake said, getting to his feet.

  Summer squinted at Lizzie. “What’s he doing here?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you about slamming the door?”

  “Visiting,” Jake said.

  Summer put one foot on top of the other. “I thought you told him to go away.”

  “He’s visiting Theo.”

  “And I’m visiting you.”

  “Moo.” Theo placed another animal in his hand.

  “No, this one goes quack.” Jake tried to hand it to Summer. “Doesn’t this one go quack?”

  Summer grabbed the wooden duck and shoved it at Theo. “Quack, stupid.”

  “Summer!”

  “Wack,” Theo tried.

  “So,” Jake said, “you still run up and see Sam after school?”

  “He’s been a bit sick,” Lizzie said.

  “He’s not a bit sick, Ma, he’s a lot sick. Luna died.”

  Jake looked shocked. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “That day you were over.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I’m going upstairs and doing my homework,” Summer said, and stomped up the stairs.

  Lizzie searched for and found shades of lavender and blue in the dusk outside the window, aware that Jake was fighting a desire to take her to task. She shrugged her inner shoulders. Finally he sighed. “How is Sam?”

  “Not good.”

  After another pause, Jake said, with humor, “So Summer does her homework without being nagged to death?”

  It would be so easy, Lizzie thought, it would take so much less effort, if she dropped the load of resentment that dragged at her, and which she had to keep shifting back into place like a loose bra strap or a pair of high-riding underwear. “I’m getting another beer. Want one?”

  “I’m still okay, thanks.”

  As she opened the refrigerator the front door slammed again. “Ma, I got an A!” Hannah dumped her parka, waved a sheaf of papers. “And Mrs. Anderson says could you do car pool next Tuesday and she’ll do yours the week after.”

  Lizzie opened her beer, checked the pot of water heating on the stove. “There’s a friend of yours in there.”

  “Sam?”

  Lizzie shook her head. She followed Hannah into the living room.

  Jake was on the rug beside Theo. He looked up as Hannah rounded the corner. Hannah stopped. “Jake-o,” she breathed, and went towards him like something sucked into a wind. He scrambled to his feet to receive her, bending over the black, sleek head, arms circling her waist. Lizzie watched them with her hands on her hips.

  Hannah looked up at him. “Are you here for dinner?”

  Jake nodded.

  “Could we all eat together?” she asked. “Please? Ma? At the round table? Can I dress up?”

  Lizzie pondered her.

  “Don’t laugh. Blair likes it when I dress up. And don’t do your grown-up thing and eat by yourselves the way you used to, the way you do with Aunt Maudie. Please can we?”

  “I guess,” Lizzie said.

  Hannah clapped her hands. “I’ll tell Summer to put on a dress too.” She ran up the stairs.

  Lizzie lifted Theo onto one hip and headed into the kitchen. “Let’s get this normalizing dinner over with.” She pulled a bag of mushrooms and some green onions from the crisper. As she slammed the refrigerator door, a Christmas tree, cut from purple construction paper, slipped from its magnet and fell to the floor. “Shit!” she said.

  “Sit!” Theo said, waving a fist.

  “Right, my man,” Jake said, “sit it is.” He stooped to retrieve the tree.

  “Just toss it,” Lizzie said. “The season’s over. I’ve got too many things tacked to the goddamn fridge anyway.”

  “This must be Summer’s,” Jake said. “She’s got your audacious sense of color.” Lizzie did not reply. “Now, Hannah would never have a purple tree.”

  She dumped spaghetti into the water boiling on the stove. It was true. Hannah’s trees would be green, her pumpkins orange, her witches black. Summer’s witches had been red, her turkey decorated with purple and pink feathers.

  Jake hummed the tune to “How Long Has This Been Going On.” “May I hel
p, Liz?” he said. “Hold Theo, maybe?”

  “Set the table.” She picked forks and knives out of the drawer. “The napkins are in that basket on the counter.”

  Jake stared down at the collection of silverware askew in his hands. “Lizzie . . .”

  Lizzie cocked the hip Theo straddled and raised an eyebrow at him. Jake turned away to place the napkins on the table. She put Theo down. He clung to her legs, crying, “Mami, Mami.” She mashed garlic with the flat of a chopping knife, sliced onions, some mushrooms, with a vengeance.

  “Sure you don’t want me to hold him?” Jake held out his hands to Theo. “Up?”

  Lizzie was glad when Theo pressed his face against her legs and cried, “No!”

  “Maybe I’ll light the candles, then.”

  “There’s plenty of light in here.”

  “Liz.” Jake held out his hands. “I’m trying.”

  Candles had been Lizzie’s ritual, not his. She banged at another garlic clove. She would sauté these vegetables and then dump in some jarred marinara sauce. That was all the effort she would make.

  “How about we do it for Hannah?”

  Lizzie swiped with the back of a hand at her forehead and lifted Theo onto her hip. This is our baby, she thought, the statement suddenly encompassing something beyond this simple fact. We made him together. From upstairs Summer shrieked, “Ma. Ma. I do not have to wear a dress, do I?”

  “No,” Lizzie yelled back.

  “Excuse me a sec, would you?” Jake walked to the bathroom, where he stayed for a long time. Lizzie held Theo away from her, seeing Jake there in the hair, more wispy than Jake’s, but as curly and as black. There he was, too, in the dense brown eyes, even in the chin, still hidden in baby fat. But where was she? She hugged Theo so hard he yelped.

  Hannah came downstairs wearing a party dress, white socks, and her black Mary Jane shoes. In the calf-length white dress, a ribbon tied to keep her hair off her face, she looked like an illustration out of the volume of Alice in Wonderland she’d just finished re-reading. “Where’s Jake?” she said, worried.

  “In the bathroom.”

  Hannah climbed up on a stool. “How come you didn’t tell me he was coming, Ma? I could have made place cards.”

  “Wash some lettuce, Hannah.”

  Somehow she got through the pandemonium of serving the plates and arranging seating. Hannah wanted to be next to Jake, while Summer didn’t want to be next to anyone. Jake seemed to enjoy the pasta. Lizzie couldn’t stomach a thing. She got up to fetch the Parmesan cheese, then to open a bottle of wine, then again to get the salt. While Theo pounded his hand in the coils of spaghetti on his plate, Hannah told Jake about his vocabulary.

  “Everything’s a ball,” she told him. “ ‘BA.’ ”

  “Ba?” Theo said, pointing at Hannah’s plate. He pointed to the candles. “Ba.”

  “A candle’s not round, Theo,” Hannah said.

  “It has a halo,” Summer argued. “The light looks round.”

  “Cosmic,” Lizzie said, “don’t you think? Ball. Circle. The interconnectedness of everything, as Maud would say.” She slopped a little more wine into her glass and topped up Jake’s, although he had hardly sipped what was already there.

  “You know Aunt Maudie?” Hannah said to Jake, excited.

  “He met her here, Hannah. Years ago. You remember.”

  “You know her?”

  Jake shook his head. “A little. I ran into her a while back. When I was having coffee with Sue. At Joanie’s one morning.”

  Lizzie set down her glass. Red wine sloshed onto the table. Maud had not mentioned this.

  “And I’ve seen her dancing at Farquaarts.”

  “With Rich Pack.” Lizzie got up to get a dishrag. “I don’t approve.”

  “It is curious.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Hannah said. “Like in Alice in Wonderland.”

  “I don’t know him much, except he’s always late with his rent,” Jake said. “And Jeep’s let a few things drop.”

  “He was a little shit with Jeep.” Lizzie’s tongue felt too large, her words blurred together.

  Hannah said, “Ma! You go wash your mouth out with soap.”

  “What’d he do to Jeep?” Summer asked.

  Lizzie shook her head.

  “Ma, what?”

  Jake said, slowly, “Sometimes, when people love each other a lot, or have loved each other a lot, when they decide to split up, sometimes they aren’t very nice to each other.”

  Lizzie looked at him sharply, but he didn’t seem to be aiming this in her direction. Summer rested her chin on the edge of the table. “You mean Rich was mean to Jeep because he loved her?”

  Lizzie snorted. Jake said, “Not quite like that. Maybe Jeep loved Rich too much, and it started to bother him.”

  Summer rocked back. “Oh I know exactly. Scooter likes me that way and I am so mean to him.” She giggled. “On purpose I tripped him and when we’re standing in line I push the backs of his shoes down.”

  “Well, then you understand.” Jake sipped his wine.

  “Or that could mean you like him,” Lizzie drawled. “People have funny ways of showing things sometimes.”

  Jake glanced at her. He chased a few squiggles of spaghetti around his plate.

  “Anyway!” Hannah said. “You should get to know her. You’d like Aunt Maudie.”

  Theo pointed at Jake. “Daitch?”

  “Daitch?” Jake repeated.

  “We haven’t figured that one out yet,” Hannah said.

  Theo tongued papped carrot onto his lower lip. He pulled at the wad with grimy fingers and examined the blob of food. He dangled it over the edge of the high chair’s tray until it fell to the floor.

  Jake looked away, swallowing. “Yuck!” Summer said. “Gross.”

  “That’s him just being a kid,” Lizzie said. “You used to do the exact same thing.”

  “I never did.”

  Jake pressed a napkin to his mouth, looking so much like a caricature of an offended woman at a tea party that in spite of her efforts, Lizzie laughed. She leaned over and scraped up the food with a fingernail. “You get used to it.”

  Jake kept his eyes on his plate and nodded.

  “I’m never having kids,” Summer said. “Ever ever ever.”

  “Why not?” Jake asked.

  “Because life is horrible.”

  “Oh, bananas,” Hannah said. She patted her hair and adjusted the knot of her ribbon, which peeked out, lopsided, from behind one ear.

  “Bananas yourself. I know about this. No one cares about our future.” Summer’s voice rose to a shriek. Her braids seemed activated by her vehemence—they stuck almost straight out from the sides of her head. “This country is going to pot and nobody cares about what happens to us.”

  Jake mouthed “Willy!” at Lizzie, who nodded, aware, once again, that she kept having to stifle a great desire to simply enjoy this conversation.

  “Like today,” Summer said, “Mrs. Farr tells us that no matter what our parents say Russlimba has it right. We’ll probably all die before we grow up because of Saddam, and the Democrats won’t let us kill him. And Sally used all the blue paint and Sam won’t let me in. And Luna’s dead. Did you know I ran away?”

  “You did?” Jake clearly didn’t know whether to take this seriously.

  “You didn’t tell him, Ma?” Hannah said.

  “Killing Saddam has nothing to do with the Democrats.” Lizzie gave another piece of cooked carrot to Theo. “And Rush is an uneducated slob.”

  “Mrs. Farr says everyone will say that. She said someday the world will see he’s a clever clever man. Half the world already knows it, she says, and the others will find out soon enough. Clever, clever, she says.”

  “Oh dear,” Lizzie said, looking, in spite of herself, at Jake.

  “I did run away, and everyone was all worried,” Summer said. “Aunt Maudie came over in her car. She’s the one that found me. She said I scared h
er, that I scared everybody.”

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” Lizzie said.

  “And then he’s here”—Summer pointed at Jake—“and then”—she pointed at Lizzie—“you didn’t go to the store the way you said you would and there were no snacks and now we’re having plain old spaghetti and I was so hungry.”

  “Boy,” Jake said. “Life is horrible.”

  Summer folded her arms and slumped in her chair. It was clear that by agreeing, Jake hadn’t made life any better.

  “Jake-o.” Hannah folded her hands on the table. “How’s your music these days? How’s your band?”

  Lizzie stared at her in astonishment. Sometimes she didn’t know where this creature had come from, with her liking for Mary Jane shoes and her inevitable sense of the polite thing to say. While Jake answered her, Lizzie piled their plates into the sink. She loaded the remaining spaghetti onto a plate. “Run this up to Sam,” she said to Summer.

  “He won’t come to the door,” Summer said. “And anyway, his house stinks.”

  “Summer!”

  “It does. It smells terrible when you go in there. And I miss Luna.” Her voice shook, but she took the plate of food.

  “If he won’t let you in, leave it outside on the steps. But be sure to tell him, loudly, that we send our love. Put on your coat first.”

  Summer banged out the door.

  Hannah sponged off the table without being nagged. Jake rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Theo remained in his high chair, watching the activity in silence, eyes beginning to glaze, eyelids drooping.

  Lizzie mopped the counters, wishing Jake would just go home. She didn’t want to have the talk he was here to have. When Hannah asked if they could all watch a video together until bedtime she said, “Great idea. It’s such a normalizing thing to do.” Jake put down the sponge, turned to stare at her. She gave him a wide, false grin. “Go choose,” she told Hannah, and shooed her into the den.

  Jake turned on the disposal as Summer slammed through the door. She was shouting, crying. Lizzie could not understand her above the noise. Jake turned off the motor. Summer grabbed hold of Lizzie’s shirt. “He’s just lying there. He isn’t moving. Right outside the trailer, like he was trying to get here.” She pressed her face into Lizzie’s belly. “He’s dead, I just know he’s dead, like Luna.”