Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  “No. But of course abortion was on my mind. Appear away. Something appears and then goes away.” She heaved in her seat to face his profile. “Or maybe I felt sleeping with you was doing something to Lizzie—stabbing her? Pulling her innards out? Or maybe us deciding not to make love was putting a knife inside me—I won’t have children, I’ve flushed that hope down the toilet?” She put her hands to her head, held them there. “All these bloody images keep haunting me this morning. But I also feel tremendously relieved, as if I literally did get rid of something. But I can’t think what it is.” She laughed. “You see why I’m a little obsessed with why my car won’t start.”

  Jake grunted.

  The heater was finally making a difference. Maud shrugged out of her coat. “We could have called Triple A. I feel terrible. Because of my car problems you’ve been dragged into this. I’m so sorry that—”

  “Stop it, Maud.”

  It sounded harsh. Maud said her now predictable “Sorry.” They rode in silence through landscape that was dreary: branches of trees and scrub scratching a sky the color of a black T-shirt washed too many times.

  “Bare ruined choirs,” Maud said. “When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang upon these boughs.” She heaved around in her seat again. “I can’t help but run it around. What engine isn’t running in my life? What needs jump-starting? What battery’s run down? There are a lot of possibilities.”

  “You are exhausting,” Jake said.

  “But at least I’m laughing.”

  But when they turned onto Lizzie’s road, Maud’s voice was subdued. “If Jeep’s not waiting, I’ll just run in and get her.”

  “That’d be good.” Jake imagined the arch of Lizzie’s eyebrows, the lifted chin. He smacked the steering wheel with his gloved hand. “Why am I so goddamn worried? She’s done nothing but dismiss me, make me feel like a cad. Okay, I’m a cad,” he yelled. “I’m an asshole. I could have been better. I fucked up. I feel bad. Real bad. Do I eat shit for the rest of my goddamn life?”

  He was driving fast. The car lurched over a dip in the road. He braked, too hard. The car skewed back and forth, went into a skid. Maud reached for the dashboard. Her face a white, aghast blur in his peripheral vision. He turned into the skid, impatient lessons taught to him by his father years ago in an iced-over parking lot. The car stopped at the edge of the road, front end hanging over a ditch. They stared into the white field ahead of them.

  Maud said nothing while Jake straightened the car out.

  They approached the house. “Since we did what we did, and only did what we did,” Maud whispered, as though Lizzie might hear, but her voice was fierce. “can we let it be okay? I don’t want us to regret it. Please don’t regret it.”

  “I’m not regretting it.”

  Lizzie’s car was gone. Maud pulled on her mittens, didn’t look at him. “I’ll be right back.”

  But she didn’t get very far up the stairs of the house before Jeep came out, zipping her parka, breath puffing in the cold. She wore Lizzie’s red ski hat pulled down to just above her eyes. Maud insisted she sit in front.

  “Thanks,” Jeep said to him. She didn’t seem surprised he’d come too. “I know this is a hassle.”

  “No.” He wasn’t sure whether he should smile at her. What tone did one adopt while driving someone to an abortion? Funereal? Probably not celebratory, although he wouldn’t want to have Rich’s kid either. It’d be born wearing cowboy boots. Cowboy hat. And nothing in between but a red kerchief and a well-slung dong. He said, “You tell Rich?”

  Jeep shook her head.

  Huge flakes of snow whirled towards them. Jake tried to keep his shoulders from hunching with tension. Maud leaned forward into the space between the front seats, told Jeep about the protesters who might be waiting. Jake listened to the following discussion with interest. The pros and cons of the “procedure,” as Jeep referred to it. How long it would take. That it was good she was doing it so early. Her insistence that her mother must never know. Or Rich either. What she could and could not expect for the next few days. “I can’t wear tampons for at least two periods. But that’s petty. I guess. In the scheme of things.”

  Maud put her arms around Jeep’s neck. Jeep’s hands came up to hold them. After a silence, Maud began to sing.

  When that I was and a little tiny boy,

  With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

  A foolish thing was but a toy,

  For the rain it raineth every day.

  The tune was mournful but pretty. After another long silence Jeep took a deep breath. Didn’t speak.

  “What?” Maud said.

  “It’s just an idea. Silly.”

  “Jake’s good at listening to silly ideas. He’s been listening to mine all morning. Was Lizzie mad?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. When she realized I was talking to you she went over and started doing dishes.”

  They stared forward. The curtain of snow spiraled towards them.

  Jake said, “What were you going to say?”

  “It’s just I keep thinking this thing. It’s stupid.” Jeep pulled her mitten off, put it on again. “I just keep thinking. That if I don’t have this baby it gives a chance for Sam to stay alive. Silly.”

  “No,” Jake said. Maud said, “It’s not at all silly.” He downshifted to stop at a light. They were in Farmington.

  Jeep drew a shaky breath. “Not that I think there’s only so many spirits on the earth at any one time or anything.”

  Outside the clinic a dozen protesters, bundled up in parkas and mufflers, waved posters tacked to sticks. Blurred by falling snow, it was still obvious that the signs depicted something pink and bloody. “Oh no,” Jeep moaned.

  Jake drove around the side of the building and parked. The two women stood and watched without smiling as he maneuvered his limbs and length of parka over the emergency brake and gearshift. He took Jeep’s other arm. She looked about twelve years old. Red ski hat perched above frightened eyes. They walked around the corner of the building. The knot of protesters turned towards them.

  “Dedicated little fuckers, aren’t they,” he whispered.

  Jeep kept her head down.

  About fifteen feet from the clinic doors, one of the men—they were mostly men, as Sue had said—stepped so close Jake could smell sour creamy coffee on his breath. “What’re ya doing here? Why would you bring your sweet daughter to a murdering place?” Brown eyes flecked with green. The eyes were nice. The look in them was not.

  “Excuse us,” Jake said. Jeep made a little sound. Jake slid his arm all the way around her. Maud’s arm held her waist from the other direction.

  A woman stepped in front of them. Eyes filled with tears. “What if the blessed Mary had aborted her baby?”

  Appear and away. “Excuse us,” Jake said. “Excuse us.”

  The woman fell back but another pushed forward. “You’d murder your own child? You’d aid and abet? You’d help them invade the sanctuary of the womb?”

  “Please let us through,” Maud said.

  “You call yourself parents?”

  A young girl, younger than Jeep but not by much, pushed a poster into their faces. Maud hissed. Jake jerked his eyes away from the sight of chunked-up flesh and blood.

  “Jesus H. Christ.” Jeep pulled away. “You should be ashamed. Shoving shit like that in people’s faces. Have you thought about it? It’s pretty damn easy not to think about it, let me tell you, until it hits you between the eyes. Do you think this is easy? Do you think I want to do this? It was a mistake. I’ve cried about it all night, I’ve cried for three fucking weeks.”

  Jeep’s raised voice caused a tumult. “You never know when a mistake is the word of God,” a man yelled. Brandishing a poster, he pushed towards them. “Who are we to say the will of God is a mistake?” Shoved the poster in Jake’s face.

  Jake pushed it away. “Don’t go poking that thing where it ain’t wanted, man.”

  The man jabbed the post
er at Jake repeatedly with a kind of weird glee. “I’ll poke it where I want to, man. It’s a free world, man.” He hadn’t shaved. Eyes small and red, face blotched with cold.

  Jake felt rage boiling. “I’m asking you. Get that thing away from me.”

  “Cool it, Bill,” someone said. Others shouted. The door of the clinic opened. A pale, scared face looked out, disappeared.

  “Let’s not do this.” Maud was almost moaning. “Please.”

  Spittle clung to the corners of Bill’s mouth. “Man,” he kept saying. “Man.” Unexpectedly, he backed up, then shoved the stick, hard, like a wooden sword, into Jake’s stomach.

  Jake doubled over.

  Jeep gave a scream. Maud shouted.

  “Bill!” a woman shrieked.

  Jake could not get a breath. He grunted, gasped, holding his stomach. Wished he could laugh—show he was okay. But couldn’t get breath for that either.

  “Jake?” Maud bent beside him.

  “Stop it, you guys.” Jeep was crying. “Just stop it.”

  He tried to straighten. The man named Bill loomed over him. Flecks of spittle at the corners of his mouth. “You murderer. Murderer of innocents.”

  Jake grabbed the poster out of Bill’s hand. Put the stick across his knee, snapped it in half, dropped the pieces to the ground.

  Jeep’s gasp was a scream.

  “Now, Bill.”

  Jake felt Maud go stiff. Looked up. Noted with a peculiar mixture of wonder and outrage that Bill held a gun. A little snub-nosed gun whose handle fit his hand neat as a computer mouse.

  “Who will suffer the little children if we don’t?” He waved it in front of Jake’s face. The other protesters backed away. “Put that away, Bill,” someone said.

  The muzzle of the gun grew, yawned, stretched. A cartoon. More large, more black than was possible. “Hey, man,” Jake said. “Let’s just cool it.” Wanting to laugh.

  Hairs sprouted on the knuckle that crooked around the trigger. Lizzie, painting, would be able to find the color blue in the flat black of that muzzle.

  Then. “Put that the fuck away.” Jeep’s voice was thick with tears, but she bellied up to Bill the way a cowboy might a bar. “That make you feel good? Forcing your crap on us with your big nasty gun, your big nasty penis extender.” Her mouth pinched, turned down at the corners, as if the man smelled. She looked at the girl, who was clutching her poster, wide-eyed. “You just let him do this? You let men decide what we can and can’t do?”

  “Women aren’t the only ones who care about this,” a woman shouted.

  Jake managed to stand straight. In spite of his efforts he was still gasping. In the distance came the sound of sirens. “Go to school,” Jeep said. “Go get a fucking education.”

  Jake pulled open the door to the clinic. Maud and Jeep stepped past him. He closed the door, leaned against it with both hands, shutting out not just the wind and the snow and the voices. For a few moments the hate was shut out as well. He didn’t think it was only in his imagination that soon enough, like some ooze from a horror movie, he felt it—tangible, pea-green, oily—seeping through the walls, around the edges of the door.

  Jeep sobbed. Maud held her. “I’m not a murderer,” she said. “I’m not.”

  The receptionist, pale and scared, did her best to look calm, but one hand washed the other incessantly as she told them where to hang their coats. It was quite cold. “Problem with the heat,” the receptionist said. “We’re working on it.”

  Jake wondered what meaning Maud would wring out of a heating problem.

  Jeep’s eyes were red. Cheeks flushed, lips a hard thin line. “We were reading this book last semester,” she said. “All that out there reminded me of it. The way everyone liked to go see the killing. How they scrabbled in the street for the red wine, how they liked to attend the beheadings, see the violence and the blood and the guillotine. It’s sick.”

  He was moved when she came to him, pressed her face into his shoulder. Because of the way it made people behave, he thought, one of the greatest of all the great evils had to do with the desire to perpetuate fear. He put a hand around the small blonde head. Felt her tears wet against his neck, wished he could make it all go away.

  Sue emerged from the back. If she was surprised to see him, she didn’t let on. She took Jeep into her office for a few minutes. When Jeep emerged she was calmer.

  “I’m sorry you had to deal with that,” Sue said. “Most people go away instead of walking that gauntlet.”

  “I’m so mad.” Jeep’s voice shook. “They act like this is something I want to do. They have no right.”

  Sue shook her head. “Actually, they do have a right. I have to remind myself of that a lot these days. Bad as this is, the alternative would be far, far worse.”

  She excused herself for a few minutes. Jake looked around. This was where his sister came five, sometimes six days a week. Walls a shade of shiny green that reminded him of the nurse’s room in grade school. Hanging pots with thick, abundant leaves. Sue’s touch, he was sure. What would pro-lifers say of the irony of her nurturing life in plants and taking life from innocent—what was the word Jeep had used in the car?—viables?

  This was where he would have come with Lizzie, he thought, if she had done as he’d asked. He leaned back against the couch to ponder this, watched Maud and Jeep leaf through magazines. Tears seeped from Jeep’s eyes. She pushed them away with the back of a hand, blew her nose on tissue after wadded tissue pulled from the box on the table beside the couch. Maud kept an arm around her. He and Maud had been called Jeep’s parents. He supposed in some way they were in loco parentis, which didn’t mean—as he used to think it did—crazy parents. He watched Maud’s face. She wanted a child so badly, yet here she was, aiding and abetting, as the woman outside had said, the stopping of a new life. He was glad, guilty and glad, that such a choice would never be his to so ultimately have to make.

  And yet he had thought Lizzie should do it.

  His face grew warm. So that was the reason he was here. Maud’s peculiar logic had rubbed off on him. In spite of the ironies and the moral ambiguities and his own lack of conviction in either direction, his being here with Jeep might balance out something in the cosmos. He was being here for someone in a way he had not been there for Lizzie.

  He looked around, feeling lighter, feeling as if sunlight had just come through windows. “Maud,” he said.

  She marked her place in a magazine with a finger.

  “I think I have an idea of why your car wouldn’t start.”

  Jeep pulled another tissue and blew her nose.

  “It’s just a thought,” he said. But he didn’t know how to begin to share it.

  And then the door scraped open. He heard Lizzie say, “Just fuck the fuck off.” She slammed the door, then opened it again. “Those are such nice signs,” she said in a high, fake, sweet voice. “Did you make them yourselves?” She slammed the door again.

  Even Jeep laughed. She stood up. “Oh, Lizzie.” She tripped over the corner of the low magazine table. Lizzie sank onto the couch with the onslaught of her embrace. Jeep burrowed into her lap, crying.

  “Shh, shh.” Lizzie smoothed the messy blonde hair and looked at Jake. “I thought I saw your car out there.” She sounded, unexpectedly, as if she approved. She threw her hat onto a chair. “I got to school and was sitting in this inane meeting and I thought, this isn’t where I need to be. So I was suddenly taken sick, and here I am. You guys can go along now. I’ll take it from here.”

  Maud looked like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. Eyes wide and startled. Jake thought it was a measure of some distance he had come that he could lean back on the couch, cross one ankle over the opposite knee. “We’re not going anywhere without Jeep,” he heard himself say. “Without you. Seems to me we’re all in this together.”

  Lizzie shrugged. Leaned over Jeep. “I’ve decided. We should keep this little baby.”

  Jeep pulled back, face full of confus
ion. “No, Lizzie.”

  “Yes. We’ll all chip in to bring it up. If you don’t want to be a mother right now, I’ll do it, or Maud will.”

  Jeep shook her head. “We talked about all this.”

  “You can be around just as much as you want to. You won’t have to worry about that ‘murderer’ crap. And Maud wants a kid. Right, Maud?”

  Maud moved her head in what was not quite a nod, not quite a shake. Face drained of color.

  Sue opened the door that led into the back. “It’s finally warm enough back there. Oh my goodness—Lizzie!”

  Jake watched his sister, calm and smiling, greet Lizzie. Recognized the gleam in Sue’s eye. He’d hear about this later, he could count on that.

  Lizzie took Jeep’s hand, straightened her shoulders. “We’ve changed our minds.”

  CHAPTER 28

  MAUD

  Last scene of all,

  That ends this strange eventful history,

  Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

  Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

  —AS YOU LIKE IT

  Maud rode back with Lizzie and Jeep. This effort to avoid awkwardness only managed to complicate matters. The logistics of getting her car fixed had to be discussed, and with Lizzie watching, Jake put out his hand for the key to her car: “I’ll get your battery charged.” Lizzie stalked to her own car and had not said a word to Maud since they’d started home.

  From the back seat, Maud could see a rectangle of Lizzie’s face reflected in the rearview mirror. Lizzie checked behind them from time to time, but would not meet Maud’s eyes.

  The wipers hummed and clicked, heaving their loads of snow from side to side. Maud moved behind the passenger seat and put her arms all the way around it, around Jeep. Lizzie glanced over, slid her eyes back to the road again. Jeep held on to Maud’s arm with both hands. “This isn’t what you want,” Jeep said. “You wanted it to be your own.”

  Maud tightened her hug, remembering how Sue, in the clinic, held both of Jeep’s hands and asked, “You sure?”