Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  Her household had suddenly magnified, and Lizzie found herself having to work to show she minded. Her fortieth birthday turned out to be a pleasant affair, not the gloomy signpost she’d dreaded. She was surprised to find that she was spending more time rather than less in her studio. Jake usually worked at Synercomp during the days, most nights he had either a rehearsal or a gig, and Jeep went to school and to her AA meetings, but one was often there when the other was not. Maud’s play had opened. Busy with that and shifts at the Red Garter and teaching piano lessons, she still found time to drop by often. Driver hung around a lot, supposedly sorting through Sam’s stuff.

  With more time than she’d had in a long while, Lizzie was painting well. Three new canvases in the last two weeks. She’d turned them to the wall, letting them steep before looking at them again. Sometimes she felt Sam was taking care of her in some way. Her contentment, restless though it was, with Jake, and with her painting. The close call with Jeep. The odd way Driver had begun to stand in for Sam, particularly with Summer, bringing her arrowheads and, just yesterday, a stone shaped like a flying bird. Sam as angel. A silly thought. But it occurred to her often.

  Late one morning, when Jeep had returned from her morning classes and put Theo down for a nap, she came out to the studio to tell Lizzie that this funeral idea, discussed weeks ago at breakfast, was something Lizzie ought to consider. “Summer keeps talking about it.”

  “Summer talks about a lot of things.”

  “Maybe this is one time to listen.”

  Lizzie began to wash up. This discussion, she could already tell, would leave her feeling pretty dry. “It wouldn’t be a funeral. It would be a memorial service.”

  “Ceremony, anyway. Maud says ceremonies exist for a reason.”

  “Maud.”

  “Not just Maud. We were talking about it in my herbology class. Those of us who don’t have a group, a religion—it’s harder to acknowledge passages, changes. Like deaths. Coming of age.”

  “What about AA? That’s a group, isn’t it?” Lizzie shook the wet off her hands. “And I am not giving Hannah a First Moon party, or whatever it’s called, when her period comes. She’d die of embarrassment.”

  Jeep shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “He’s gone. We missed it. What on earth good will it do to ‘dress in black and sing and cry’?”

  Jeep moved to the window and looked up the hill at Sam’s trailer. “Is Driver moving in up there?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Is that okay with you?”

  The trees along the road, scattered on the hillside, were still leafless. But Lizzie could see the green running just beneath the surface of the bark. She wondered if she could capture that moment, the one just before budding, with paint. “I have a feeling that Driver moving into the trailer would be what Sam would want. Chalk it up as my own little ceremony. My own little funeral service.” She scraped with one fingernail at a fleck of paint beneath another.

  “He’ll have to put in electricity. For his computer. To write his dissertation,” Jeep said.

  “Yes.”

  Jeep turned. The light from the window made one side of her face almost translucent, emphasizing the still-obvious circles under her eyes. “I need to say goodbye too, Lizzie. In the night I try. I try to talk to it, to say, ‘I’m sorry I poisoned myself, little one, and poisoned you in the process.’ I’m not sorry, on one level, but on another I am. I’d like to say goodbye, properly. Maybe this would give me a chance.”

  Lizzie stared up the hill for another moment. Sam, she cried to his memory. Why don’t I learn? When will I ever learn? She took a startled Jeep by the shoulders. “I never think. You’ve come back so quickly from that Seconal excursion of yours that you’ve made me forget it happened, that there were reasons you did it. I keep thinking we’ll talk.”

  “You make it clear you don’t want to talk. So I don’t. Not to you.”

  Lizzie felt as if she’d just been poked hard in the stomach—as Jake described he’d been that day at the clinic. But she nodded. She deserved this. She needed this.

  “Sometimes I think it would help. To sing and throw earth. To cry. Wail.” Jeep tried to smile. “Dress in black.”

  Lizzie ran a finger along the window ledge, examined the resultant snarl of dust and cobwebs. “But get Maud to organize it. I don’t know what one does at a funeral. I’ll do the wake. Afterward. Beer and juice and chips and cookies.”

  But she found herself doing more. She told Sara about the plan. And Driver. She also went by the Billy Goat and sat at the bar and told Cody. Cody said she’d be there if she could and that Jed said to say hi.

  The girls and Maud decided on a Sunday morning. Sunday on general principles, Hannah told Lizzie. It was the day of rest, and that meant all kinds of rest. And they would do it in the morning because Maud had to do her play in the afternoon. Lizzie had requested that this not be something they did while The Parents were in town. She could see Maud arranging this dramatic moment for their benefit. But Maud had thought of that. The Parents wouldn’t be arriving until the following Friday. They would stay through the weekend, see Maud’s last performance on Saturday night, then fly back home to Seattle on Sunday. Lizzie, wishing they wouldn’t come at all, was irritated they were staying such a short time.

  But at least the funeral nonsense would be well over and done before they arrived. Rolling a cart through the grocery store, loading it with beer and chips and flour, she decided to make the frittata Sam loved. She hadn’t made it in years. She bought eggs, cheese, spinach, potatoes. She would bake ginger muffins, serve strong coffee after champagne and orange juice. She would make the kind of brunch she and Sam had enjoyed, once upon a very long ago time.

  That night, as the girls were preparing for bed, they told her Maud had suggested they choose something they loved and give it to someone as part of the ceremony.

  “Someone? You mean, anyone?”

  Hannah tried to explain. “Well, maybe someone you think Sam would appreciate you giving something to.”

  Summer shoved back the covers and fetched her snake’s egg. She would give it to Driver, she said. Hannah took more time, vacillating between a little ring given to her by Blair or her CD of the Spice Girls. “What will you give, Ma?” Summer asked. But Lizzie had no idea. She told the idea to Driver, expecting him to scoff along with her, as he often did. “A giveaway,” he said. “How’d she know about that?”

  “It’s not like it’s a fucking birthday party,” Lizzie said, grumpy.

  Summer said, “It’s a funeral party!” to which Hannah said, in the arch and superior manner she’d started to adopt, “That’s obvious, Summer.”

  Driver shook his head. “What has happened to our ceremonies? They get stolen, pulled out of shape. . . .” But he seemed to run out of steam before he got very far, and shrugged.

  Perhaps because of The Parents’ impending visit, there was suddenly a lot of cleaning, repairing, planting to do. With spring beginning to push green onto the tips of the leaves of trees, the daffodils beginning to pop by the roadside where she’d planted them years ago, she found herself dissatisfied with the dilapidated condition of the tool shed, the appalling state of the outside stairs. Jake, and Driver too, dealt with her demands with sarcastic humor. The weather cooperated. Day of sun followed by day of rain followed by day of sun. She thought she could hear the earthworms and the moles and the buried roots of things stretching and moving, growing.

  The night before the funeral—even Lizzie had taken to calling it that—Maud invited the girls and Jeep to come to the play again and then spend the night. “We’ll raid the costume shop,” she said. The girls had seen Twelfth Night so many times they could act out some of the scenes. They liked the one in which Olivia—Maud, played by Hannah—fell in love with the girl dressed up as a boy. Summer was particularly fond of saying, “Build me a willow cabin at your gate and cry out ‘Oliviaaaaa’ so that the hills reverberate.” She also used “Farewell, fair
cruelty,” with indiscriminate glee for all partings and goodnights. At breakfast, or whenever Jake would listen, Hannah would tell them, pointing, “Item: two lips, indifferent red. Item: two gray eyes, with lids to them. Were you sent hither to praise me?”

  At other times, especially when they could get Jake and Driver to watch, they imitated the duel between the girl dressed as a boy and the swordsman whose name they loved—Sir Toby Belch. Here they traded roles. Hannah played the ineffectual and terrified Viola, whishing a wooden sword around, while Summer, burping and belching, put one hand high behind her head and lunged: “En garde!”

  Watching these Scenes from Mostly Nonexistent American Family Life, when she sat with Jake, and sometimes Jeep, joined now and again by Driver and by Maud, Lizzie felt almost terrified. It seemed as if she had come through some enormous travail. A pilgrim who’d survived an Atlantic crossing, a pioneer who’d hauled her wagon over the Rockies. It was absurd to compare these enterprises with the last nine months of her own life, but she felt she had endured something, only barely. She didn’t know how to let Jake know. She made him sleep at his own apartment sometimes, even though she missed him when he was not with her. At these times she wore his MARRY ME T-shirt to bed. And sometimes she thought about how different it all might be had Maud not come to Marengo.

  “En garde,” Summer cried, and charged them, sword held high, where they sat together on the couch. Jake scooped her up and tickled her and she laughed with a joy that Lizzie wished she could let herself express.

  She layered a casserole dish with sliced parboiled potatoes. She smoothed the spinach, onion, and cheese mixture over the top, then poured over all a dozen beaten eggs. Jake sat at the counter with a cup of coffee, watching. As she set the casserole to bake, she said, “It takes forever to cook. All those eggs.”

  “I’m in no hurry.” Jake took a sip of coffee. As she straightened, pushing hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, he said, “I love you.”

  She was aware of the window behind her back. The square of landscape it framed included Sam’s caboose and the path up to it. She was mindful of their presence as she looked at Jake, at his curly hair, ringleted and dripping from the shower they’d taken together. “Well,” she said. “I love you too.” She was aware she sounded defensive, almost querulous, with that too.

  The sound of car horns pulled them outside, carrying their cups, Theo on Lizzie’s hip. Jeep’s car and then Maud’s, followed by the big yellow car that was passed back and forth between Sara and Driver, proceeded slowly, parade-like, up the driveway.

  Maud had indeed managed to raid the costume shop. Hannah wore a low-cut, shiny black gown, the hem pinned up so it wouldn’t drag on the ground. An enormous black hat swooped marvelously high in the back and low over one eye in the front. Black netting did not hide her smile as she waved. Curiously, Summer had chosen a white dress. Dozens of pastel ribbons fluttered from sleeve and hem as she moved. She wore a small pink and white hat—more suitable for Easter than a funeral, though Lizzie did not point this out. They both carried furled white parasols.

  Jeep had borrowed a skirt Lizzie recognized as Maud’s—black gauzy material, spattered with small white and red flowers. Maud herself wore a black skirt, pink sweater, white aviator scarf, white hat. In the chill spring breeze, the fabrics billowed and blew around them. Summer, laughing, held on to her hat with one hand, the ribbons of her dress spiraling and dancing around her.

  “I have to get my gift,” Hannah said. She lifted her skirts, negotiating the stairs with precision, as if she’d been wearing skirts and long petticoats all of her life. She was, Lizzie reflected, her sister’s niece.

  “Me too.” Summer clomped up the stairs with less grace.

  Sara walked with Maud. Jeep, looking pale, carried a bouquet of daffodils.

  Driver came down the hill from the trailer. With the fringed leather jacket and his lanky, stoop-shouldered walk, he reminded Lizzie, forcefully, of Sam. Her nose prickled with emotion. The girls clattered back out onto the porch. Lizzie stopped herself from asking what on earth Hannah was planning to do with Jeep’s portable CD player, which she was carrying.

  She went to get her jacket and to check the casserole while Jake strapped Theo into the backpack that would carry him. The girls pranced and ran ahead, a festive, medieval scene. Lizzie particularly appreciated the parasols, which they opened and twirled on their shoulders. Maud called to them, pulled them close to speak to them, and after that they walked side by side, ahead of everyone else, but in step, heads held high, singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.”

  “ ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore’?” Jake said to Lizzie.

  Maud walking ahead with Jeep, turned. “Well, it’s one we all know. We’re saving ‘Amazing Grace’ for later.”

  Lizzie turned to Driver, walking behind with Sara. “Do you know ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore’?”

  Driver shook his head in disgust. “Poor little Indian boys, parents too poor, too ignorant, to send us to camp. I was seven. So some hokies brought camp to us. ‘The river Jordan is deep and wide,’ ” he warbled.

  “We don’t think so much in terms of milk and honey on the other side,” Sara said. “Milk not being something the Ancient Ones had much knowledge of.”

  “The river Jordan is chilly and cold,” Driver sang.

  “I thought you didn’t know it,” Lizzie said.

  “I didn’t want to know it. Who wants to know that death ‘chills the body but not the soul’?”

  “Well, there was a request for singing,” Maud said, “and this is what the girls chose.”

  The high ragged voices of Hannah and Summer floated back to them. Maud joined in. The hair lifted along Lizzie’s forearms as Jake’s deep baritone took up the melody along with Jeep’s high voice, then behind her, Sara, and eventually, and slightly flat, Driver.

  Summer had chosen the place for the ceremony—a bank above the arroyo that was already beginning to seep with snowmelt, above the place where Summer had found Luna, and where Maud had found Summer.

  Maud spread a cloth in the middle of the circle they formed and put a small leather-bound book on it. She nodded to Summer, who put her egg carefully beside the book.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Hannah said. She knelt to put her ring on the cloth and then set up Jeep’s CD player. Lizzie recognized what she called tinkly-winkly music—George Winston or some other artist from the Windham Hill label, music she liked but pretended not to.

  Driver reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a leather thong with a large turquoise bead strung on it. He added this to the array. Jeep put her daffodils there, and added a small leather pouch. She had started to cry, although she made no sound. Jake spread his hands. “I’m singing to you, later,” he said. “Back at the house.”

  “And I’m feeding you.” They had not planned this, and Lizzie felt a small, pleased jolt of symmetry.

  Summer said, “But that’s not for Sam.”

  “Actually, it is.”

  Summer accepted this. “Now what do we do?” she said.

  Maud clasped her hands, self-consciously solemn. “Well, I thought we would remember Sam a bit—quietly if we wanted to, and aloud if we wanted to share something.”

  “Can I start?” Summer asked. “He was my best friend.” She swallowed. Her voice came out high, pinched. “You were my best friend, Sam, and I miss you very much and I hope you are happy where you are, but not too happy because I hope you miss me as much as I miss you. Now I throw some earth.”

  She scrabbled in the damp soil and came up with a clot of red dirt. She hurled it as far as she could across the arroyo. It landed in the undergrowth on the other side. She picked up another one. “And this is for Luna. I miss you and wish you were here, Luna.” She threw this, then wiped her bare forearm under her nose. “Who’s next?”

  The music was slow, portentous, something with cellos and horns. Jeep openly wept. Lizzie found herself split in two. Part of her was gratef
ul for the upheaval the music was making in her heart. She also wanted to reach down and punch the music off. Maud picked up some earth. It dribbled through her hand as she said, “Once—I had just arrived here and I was feeling terrible about everything—Sam came down to Lizzie’s house with Luna. I said, ‘You don’t want to see me like this.’ And he said, ‘I would always want to see you.’ I’ve thought about that many times. That it was true, and he made me believe it. It was simple. He said what he meant.” She threw the earth. It fell apart in the air, spilling away in the wind that parted it.

  “I wasn’t as good friends with Sam as Summer was,” Hannah said, “but I remember how he helped with my homework and I miss him a lot. I hope he’s happy in heaven.” Like Summer, she found a satisfying clot of earth and heaved it all the way across the damp creek bed.

  “Sam taught me to build the infallible fire,” Jake said. “They don’t die out, they always burn. My band thinks I’m a genius because at our rehearsals, when we have to warm the building with the woodstove, my fires always take. Thanks, Sam. We miss you.”

  “Now throw earth,” Summer prompted in a whisper.

  Jake got hold of a handful of dirt. “Just throw it?” he said. “Not into anything?”

  Summer nodded. “We’re not putting him in the earth. He is the earth. That’s what Driver says.”

  “Do not stand at my grave and weep,” Sara said, putting an arm around Jeep, who sobbed, once, loudly, then bit her lip. “I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the glint of sun on snow.”

  Jeep took a shaky breath. “I can’t help but think that you would have stayed with us if only I’d— And Lizzie, that isn’t meant to make you feel bad. I know that really, Sam, you were sick, and that I couldn’t have done too much to make you better, but I hope that if there is a place where you can know another spirit, and if my lost baby is a spirit, that you will take care of it. And if you are just particles blowing around, then I hope you will come together in some way and make a beautiful herb, or become the molecules of another human on this earth, or something that is good and brave and wonderful. I’m sorry, little girl or little boy, but it wasn’t time to have you. Please, please forgive me.”