Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “The animals?”

  “Right.”

  “No comment. If I answer that, then you’re interviewing me, and I haven’t agreed to an interview. And anyway, they weren’t even my idea. They were the kid’s idea.”

  He stared at her for a moment with his mouth open. If she’d had to guess at reading his mind, she’d have figured he was trying to decide if that had been a joke, and whether he should laugh.

  Eventually he seemed to tire of the effort.

  “That little girl who doesn’t look any older than six or seven? Made all those huge, complicated sculptures?”

  Roseanna noted a slight burning smell, and quickly flipped her trout with a spatula. Just in time, too. When somebody hands you a fish, you don’t waste it by burning it in the pan. And, of course, if she had, it would have been all this reporter’s fault. That was the trouble with . . . well, everybody.

  “She’s five. And I didn’t say she made them. I said they were her idea. You know how children stare up at clouds and decide they look like teddy bears and elephants? Well, she did that with . . . wait a minute. Now you’re interviewing me again. And I haven’t agreed to that.”

  “Sorry,” he said, but she wasn’t sure he looked it. “You just go ahead and eat your fish, and I’ll go talk to my friend.”

  He ducked out the door, and she sighed out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  She flipped the trout onto a plate, sat down on the couch, and began to carefully separate the fillets from the small bones.

  She watched out the window, but she couldn’t see the reporter or his photographer friend. Not that she wanted to. She would have been more comfortable knowing where they were, but she never really cared to see anybody roaming around her place. And yet here the roamers all were.

  Long after she had finished eating and cleaned up the dishes, he still hadn’t come back. Which was quite a long talk to have with a photographer. She’d had in mind something short and to the point. More like “Stop that.” Something efficient.

  This much of a delay had to make one wonder.

  She found the reporter fellow down on one knee in the hard dirt, talking to the little girl. Or, more accurately, listening. You couldn’t talk to her much, that kid. You’d say one sentence and then she’d blast off on some tangent that seemed endless, made your brain hurt, and added up to nothing. Meanwhile, good luck getting a word in edgewise.

  “Whatcha doin’?” Roseanna asked in a singsong voice, tapping the reporter on the shoulder so he’d know which one of them she meant. It was a tone intended to help genuine irritation pass for lightheartedness, at least to a five-year-old. For the adult listener it was hiding her anger in plain sight, to put it mildly.

  “Oh,” he said, jumping to his feet. “I was just talking to her.”

  “Talking to her?” she asked, staring at the notepad in his hand. “Or interviewing her?”

  The little girl, obviously bored by them, ran away again. This time she chased the chickens and the dog chased her, seeming troubled to have his job stolen. Shrieking ensued.

  “Just talking,” the reporter said.

  “When I talk to a five-year-old I hardly ever take notes.”

  “Look . . .”

  For a long, strange moment they just stared off into the distance together. As though he had meant the word quite literally. She looked out over the rural farmland, the evenly plowed fields. Down the steep hills to patches of tall forest. The stream that ran through her acreage gleamed in the sun. It was summer, and everything looked a bit browner than it had when Roseanna first saw it and fell in love with the place. But it still struck her as a particular sort of heaven.

  The reporter startled her by speaking again.

  “Here’s the thing. I don’t have to write up anything I’ve got so far. I’ll only do it with your permission. But I’m talking to all these people, and I’m taking notes, because I believe you’re going to give me permission. I know you don’t think you are. But I think you are.”

  “Do you, now?”

  “I do.”

  “And why do you think that?”

  “Because I talked to a couple of these people—”

  “Like which ones?”

  “Like David.”

  “There’s no one here named David.”

  “Sure there is. You know. The guy who handed you the fish.”

  “Nelson. His name is Nelson David. And it irks him when people get that backward.”

  “Oh. I’d better correct my notes on that, then. Speaking of names, I’m Evan Maxwell.”

  “Maxwell Evan. Got it.”

  She didn’t go on to tell him her name, because he must have known it. He knew what kind of life she had left behind in the city. Hard to arrive at that depth of research without a name to google.

  Evan barked a short, uncomfortable laugh. Scratched behind his ear with the pencil he’d been using to note the meaningful thoughts of a five-year-old. “Now that you mention it, I think he did say Nelson David. But I thought he was doing that military thing where you do last name, comma, first name. He was in the military, you know.”

  “I know he was in the military.” Her fuse was burning low again, and she could feel it. And they could both hear it. “You don’t have to tell me all about him. He lives here. But you’re evading the question. Why do you think I’m going to give you my blessing to write about me? And this place?”

  She began to walk back toward the house as she spoke, knowing he would follow.

  He followed.

  “Because of what Nelson and the old man told me. I’m sorry, I can’t remember the old guy’s name. It’s in my notes.”

  “Martin,” she said.

  But it didn’t stop him flipping the pages on his pad.

  They passed the ancient, massive barn, imposing and tall with its tin roof and weather-beaten wood sides. The makeshift chicken coop. The tiny shack that could almost have been a large tool shed, but had ended up being a squatter’s cabin for her original two squatters. At least it was well tended—unlike almost everything else on the property—with curtains in the windows and flowers in a neat bed out front.

  Still Evan was flipping through his notes.

  “Oh well,” he said as if giving up on something. “I can’t find it now. But here’s the gist of it.” They stopped at the foot of her porch stairs. Evan looked up at the old farmhouse, seeming amazed to see it there. As if he hadn’t noticed that they had been moving, approaching it. “They all said they stopped out front to look at the animal sculptures. Originally, I mean. When they first stumbled on this place. And you wanted to talk to them. You purposely got them talking about their lives and asked them all these questions. You wanted to know if their lives had turned out the way they’d expected. If they were as happy as they’d thought they would be.”

  He paused. As if his point might already be made, but he was waiting to see.

  “All? Nelson and Martin aren’t really an ‘all.’ More of a ‘both.’”

  “I might have had a few words with Melanie and . . . I forget the husband’s name. That couple who live in the tent.”

  “They pretty much all live in tents.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “I think you have something important you want to say. I think you found something here. And you want to share it. I think you want to ask questions that might lead other people to the same place you reached yourself.”

  Roseanna shook her head. Walked up the six old, saggy wooden steps to her front porch.

  Evan followed. The stair risers creaked ominously.

  “Yeah, just my luck,” she said. “They’ll all end up in the same place I reached myself. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of and why I don’t want to do your interview. That’s exactly what keeps going wrong. I wanted to encourage them to find their own place. Someplace that was almost heaven for them. I didn’t mean they should all look at this place that way.”r />
  “If you wanted them to go,” Evan said, “you would have asked them to.”

  She paused on the porch. Looked around. Other than the running, shrieking girl, she saw only Martin, quietly stacking firewood.

  “Martin!” she called. But apparently not loudly enough. “Martin!” she bellowed, and he turned around. Moved closer to the house to hear, pulling off his big leather work gloves. “How many times have I asked you to leave my property?”

  Martin’s face fell. He scuffed in the dirt with the bright red high-top sneakers he always wore. “Oh dear,” he said. “We’re back to that again? I thought you’d more or less gotten used to me by now.”

  “No, I didn’t mean . . . I meant, Martin, tell this young man how many times I’ve told you to leave. In the past.”

  “Oh, oh. I see. I got it now.” Martin smiled then. It was an uneven thing, the smile. A bit sardonic, but not without good humor. “Oh, hundreds. Well. Maybe I’m exaggerating.” He raised one hand in a sweeping movement as if to brush hair out of his eyes. Which was silly, since he had no hair to speak of, or to sweep away. Just a raggedy ring of it down around his ears, now overgrown for lack of a barber nearby. “Dozens, at the very least.”

  “Thank you,” she said loudly, and walked inside.

  Needless to say, Evan followed. Even Roseanna might have been forced to admit she—possibly—wanted him to. Because it was clear that he would, unless she expressly forbade it. And she did not forbid it.

  They stood together in her drab and tiny room of a house.

  “Let me ask you one question,” he said, looking around. “Whether I do this story or I don’t, I just really want to know this for myself. This little house you live in . . .”

  He stopped talking and allowed his eyes to rest on one aspect of her homelife after another. The potbellied wood stove. The blanket-covered old couch. The bedroom so small that if you fell down in it, you’d have to plan your direction of fall carefully to avoid hitting the opposite wall. The “light fixture” in the middle of the ceiling that involved a hanging bulb with a chain as a pull.

  “You left a pretty opulent lifestyle,” he said. “You had money.”

  She flopped onto the couch. He towered over her, still a bit close for her liking.

  “How do you know how much money I had?”

  “I don’t, exactly. But I know your law firm. I mean, it’s not hard to find out about the firm. And you were a senior partner. A founding partner.”

  “Let’s see if we can’t find our way to a point here, Maxwell.”

  But she knew the point.

  “I can see you coming out here and buying a piece of land like this. It’s beautiful country. And I can understand wanting to get out of the city. I love the city, but I know not everybody does. But I’m thinking you could afford to tear this old house down and build something really nice here.”

  Silence. For a time.

  He sat down on the couch beside her, still with an energy of hovering. Except now he made matters worse by holding his pad in a state of preparation in his left hand, his pencil poised on a blank page. As if she were about to say something brilliant. Timeless.

  “But maybe then I wouldn’t have been able to afford to live here for the rest of my life and not have to work. And not have to worry about money.”

  “I see,” he said, and almost wrote that down.

  “No. Don’t even write that. It’s not really the whole truth. I probably could have done both.”

  “Then why?” he asked, sweeping his arm in an arc to indicate the room. “I mean, not to insult you about this place, but . . .”

  “I have eyes, Max. It’s a dump.”

  “Why not make it into something better?”

  “Because it’s enough.”

  That sat in the air for a moment. It was unclear, at least to Roseanna, who would speak next. Or when.

  As it turned out, she did.

  “Because it’s everything a person needs to live a decent life. It has a stove for heat. A fridge to keep your food cold and a stove to cook it when you’re ready to eat it. It has a bathtub and a shower to get you clean after your chores and a bed to lie down in at the end of the day. And that’s all a person really needs. And I think the whole trouble with us is that we think we need so much more.”

  “It’s nice to have more than just the basics of survival.”

  “Is it? Maybe. I don’t know. I think it’s a trap. We have all this ‘stuff.’ And we think we need it. But it never feels like enough, and we only end up working to defend it, and to get more. And we have all these labor-saving devices. So now we have this life that’s almost entirely devoid of labor. A few centuries ago, there was work involved in everyday survival. And I can’t know this for a fact, Max, but I have a really strong suspicion that not too many people were neurotic back then. Who had the time for it? Now we spend our spare time getting addicted. To drugs or alcohol, or our smartphones, or the internet, or checking our email, or shopping for all that ‘more stuff’ we think we need.”

  She paused. Looked up to see him scribbling fast.

  “This is good,” he said. “Not totally new thinking, but good. Don’t stop.”

  “I’m still not sure I want you to use this. And I’m not sure you ever explained why you’re so convinced that I will.”

  “I told you. You want people to know your thoughts on all this. You’ve discovered something that’s important, and you care enough to want to share it with other people.”

  “Nuh-uh,” she said. “That won’t fly, Max. I’m an attorney. I’ve been an attorney since before you were born, buddy boy. Compared to you, I practically invented that ploy.”

  “What ploy?”

  “The one where you appeal to someone’s ego. I don’t care about that stuff anymore. Whether I’m looked upon as wise or not. I don’t need to be right at this point in my life. I don’t care what other people choose to do. I just know what I want to do now.”

  “Then why did you bother having those serious talks with these people when they came by? If you don’t care about them?”

  A silence.

  During it, she looked out the window and watched clouds scudding across her fields. Watched them touch the top of CPR Hill, the peak they had to summit when any kind of cell phone reception was needed.

  “So what if I do, then? Care?”

  “If you have questions about life that you want other people to hear, what better place to ask them than the New York Times?”

  She laughed, quick and bitter.

  “Just my luck, Max, everybody who reads it will come pitch a tent on my property. And my son and my former law partners will find me and drag me home. And then everybody in the world will live here, which it almost already feels like they do. Except me. I won’t. I’ll have been dragged away.”

  “We don’t have to give your exact location,” he said again.

  Roseanna sighed.

  She looked out the front windows to his van to see if the photographer was staying put. He wasn’t. The van was empty. So he could be anywhere, taking pictures of anything.

  “Another question,” Evan said, startling her slightly. “You said you asked these people to leave over and over. And they didn’t. But you could have forced them to leave. As the legal owner of the property, it wouldn’t have been hard at all. So why are they here?”

  Roseanna sighed again. It seemed to be a pattern setting up. One of many.

  “They thought I’d found something really special here. And I thought so, too. And I didn’t feel right depriving anybody else of it. Just in case it turned out we were right.”

  Chapter Two

  The Fresh Egg Arbitration Department

  Roseanna had finished her morning chores and stepped back into her house for another breakfast when the first knock came at her door.

  It was nine days after the reporter had come and gotten her story. She knew because she’d been secretly counting—inwardly wondering how long it take
s a thing like that to come together. Partly dreading publication and partly looking forward to reading it. But mostly dreading it.

  She threw her front door wide.

  Nelson was standing on her porch, hat in hand. His face, his eyes, his very aura were filled to overflowing with roiling aggravation.

  “Melanie collected three eggs out of the field this morning, miss, and I just know they were mine. I’m really convinced this time. I’ve been paying extra attention to who lays what and where they lay it.”

  Roseanna sighed and worked very hard to keep her eyes from rolling.

  “Nelson. We’ve been through this before.”

  “I know you say you don’t want to get in the middle. But we don’t seem to be able to work this out on our own.”

  “Well, you’re just going to have to. Maybe go into town and get some chicken wire and build a run for yours?”

  “Free range is very important, miss.”

  “Free range is a whole entirely different thing, Nelson. Free range is a counterreaction to chickens in tiny nesting boxes, being forced to lay eggs without ever being able to see the sun or turn around. It doesn’t mean the chicken has to be able to run indefinitely without hitting a fence. Trust me on this, Nelson. If you limit their pecking by, say, a couple hundred feet, they’re just as free range as they always were. But that’s not the important part of what I told you before when this came up. Here’s what matters most: I am not the court of egg ownership. I am not King Solomon for the laying community. Do I look like the arbiter of eggs? Do something to work it out. Separate your birds somehow. Or feed them those dye packs the banks use on stolen money. Just, whatever you decide to do, keep it away from my house. Okay?”

  Nelson frowned.

  “Okay, miss,” he said. “Sorry to bother you, I guess.”

  He turned and trotted off her porch and down the steps.

  “You know I was kidding about the dye packs, right?” she called after him.

  He waved a hand in the air without turning around.

  It might have been two minutes later when the second knock came, or it might have been three or four. With no working clock in the house, it was hard for Roseanna to judge time. But clearly not much of it had elapsed.