Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “I was a kid. What did you expect?”

  He gathered up the cards, shuffled, and began to deal again.

  “Hey, wait,” she said.

  His hands stopped moving.

  “No, I didn’t mean literally wait and don’t deal.”

  “Oh,” he said, and began tossing cards again. “What, then?”

  “If we played all those hundreds of hands of gin, how could we never have spent any time together?”

  “I didn’t mean we never spent any time together. I didn’t say that.”

  She picked up her hand of cards and arranged them. It was a lousy hand but she tried not to let on.

  “What did you mean, then?”

  Lance sighed. For a few moments he stared at his hand without speaking.

  Then he said, “I guess I felt unwelcome. Like you’d rather live alone.”

  “Oh, there’s no doubt I would rather have lived alone. Still would. That’s just me, darling. I was hoping you wouldn’t take it personally.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Today I do. That’s the problem.” They stared at each other for a moment. Then he cut his eyes away. “All my life I’ve been thinking, well, that’s just my mom. It’s just how she’s always been. She hates dogs and people and she just wants to be by herself.”

  “I don’t hate dogs,” she interjected. It was half a joke and half just a simple statement of fact.

  He went on as if he hadn’t noticed. “And then I get out here, and you have a dog. And you’re letting all these people live with you. And I guess I wonder why they rate if I never did.”

  “Oh, honey. You rated. Besides, I can’t stand all these people. I’m just waiting for them to go away and leave me alone. And I tried to get you to stay, too, but you weren’t having any of it.”

  “Great,” he said. “You keep it a secret where you are, and then when I finally find you, you’re living with six people, a kid, and a dog. And the offer is that I get to be the ninth if I want.”

  “It’s five people, a kid, and a dog. You could be the eighth if you wanted. Isn’t that better?”

  Unfortunately, Lance did not smile.

  “You had a chance to live any kind of life you wanted, Mom. You got to choose all over again. And now it seems like everything you said you wanted wasn’t true. You even have a kid here. And you babysit. And I’m sorry, but it makes me jealous. I’ve been walking around here all day feeling jealous. Does that make me a terrible person? I mean, is that really petty?”

  “Well, that’s not my call to make, baby. It either is or it isn’t, but whatever it is, it’s the way you feel. You can put any kind of judgment you want on the way you feel, but that won’t make it go away. Unfortunately you can’t insult your feelings out of existence. Trust me. People try all the time. If it worked, we’d know about it by now.”

  He drew a card, discarded, and laid his hand down faceup again.

  “Gin,” he said.

  “You have got to be kidding me. You draw one card and you have gin?”

  “What can I say? I’m lucky in some games and unlucky in others.”

  She did not attempt to delve more deeply into his veiled sarcasm.

  It was nearly eight in the evening, with a view of the sun just touching the western hills through her living room windows, when she voiced her opinion that it was too late for him to drive all the way back to the city.

  “Just stay one night,” she said.

  “Where?” he asked, looking around her little house.

  “My couch. Or there’s a motel in Walkerville.”

  “Hmm,” he said, as though it were a truly momentous decision, and one best not entered into lightly. “Is the motel in Walkerville better than what I’m seeing around me right here?”

  “Not a great deal, no. And there’s no mother to talk to while you’re trying to fall asleep.”

  “Sold,” Lance said. “I’ll take the couch. But then in the morning I have to go.”

  “That’s fair enough.”

  “I have to make a call,” he said, standing up from her couch and digging his phone out of his jeans pocket. He tapped it a few times and then stared at it closely, frowning.

  “You can get reception,” she said. “Just not right here in the house.”

  “Oh. Thank goodness. Because I have to call . . . someone.”

  Roseanna pulled herself up off the couch and walked with him. Out the door and onto the porch, where the orangey light of sunset turned this whole arena of farmland and raw nature into a spectacle. It was a sight that made her suck in her breath and thank whatever had created her for the chance to stand here and see it unfold. It happened that way every night.

  “You might not like this part,” she said, pointing at the big hill down the road. “That’s CPR Hill. You have to go to the top of it. There’s a little scrambling involved here and there.”

  Lance just stood beside her on the porch and stared.

  “You’d best get a move on,” she said. “It’s not one of those trips you want to make in the dark, believe me.”

  “And you call it CPR Hill because . . .”

  “It stands for cell phone reception.”

  “Ah. Got it. Good. That’s a little less terrifying than what I was thinking.”

  It was pitch-dark by the time he came back in. Roseanna was in bed but awake. It was strangely comforting to hear her son come through the door. It was a connection to the one part of her past she was not inclined to discard.

  She had left a candle burning on the steamer trunk coffee table. To guide his way in.

  “I left you a pillow and some blankets on the couch,” she said.

  “I see that. Thanks.”

  “Everything okay at home?”

  “Yeah. It is. Sorry I was away so long.”

  An extended silence. Roseanna could see, by candlelight, Lance stripping down to his boxer shorts and climbing under the blankets. He leaned over and puffed out the candle.

  “You trying to sleep?” he asked.

  “Not necessarily. Why?”

  “It’s barely nine o’clock.”

  “I know. When you live out in the middle of nowhere like this, you tend to rise and set with the sun.”

  “I’m not sure if I can go to sleep this early.”

  “We could talk.”

  But then for a strange length of time they didn’t.

  “See, this is the problem with getting to know each other better,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I just never know where to start.”

  “Here’s a possible starting point,” Roseanna said, and pulled a big, deep breath before continuing.

  A tightening in her chest almost stopped her. It was a foreign feeling, to be so afraid of words addressed to her own son. And, in another very real way, familiar. She had stood at this threshold many times, and each time she had let that clench of fear stop her. Turn her around, steering back into simpler territory. This time she felt like maybe she would keep going.

  “You’re thirty years old. Any time now you could say, ‘By the way, Mom. I happen to be gay. And my significant other’s name is Blank. And he’s a great guy for the following list of reasons. And maybe I could bring him around to meet you at some point.’”

  Another long silence. Though, oddly, she noted it did not feel uncomfortable. There was no tension in the room that she could feel. The energy was more like that of a soft sigh.

  “And you’ve known about this for how long?” Lance asked after a time.

  “Since you were four.”

  “What did I do when I was four? That was so telling?”

  “You didn’t do anything, honey, you just were. It’s just what you were. I’m not going to say something hopelessly stereotypical. You didn’t play with dolls or listen to show tunes. It was just part of who you were. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “Did it bother you?”

  “N
ot at the time, no. Later it bothered me. Because I kept waiting for you to take me into your confidence and you never did.”

  Roseanna stared out the window at the moon. It was a mere sliver, hanging in the sky over CPR Hill. It seemed to be listening. Which was a silly thing to think, and she knew it. But it felt that way. And it wasn’t just the moon, either. This was a moment between a mother and a son, two people who could find each other belatedly or blow their chance yet again—maybe forever this time. And in that important moment Roseanna felt an odd sensation, as if the whole universe understood the significance and was holding still, anxious to see how things would turn out.

  He still wasn’t answering.

  So she added, “I just really hope you don’t think I’m such a blockhead that you can’t share a thing like that with me.”

  “No,” he said. His voice was soft. It sounded aware of the gravity of the moment, like the moon and the rest of the universe. “No, I didn’t think that. I just . . . I guess I just felt like it was . . . fairly . . . personal. And it didn’t seem like . . . I mean, we didn’t have much of a precedent for getting that personal with each other. Really, when did we ever talk about private things?”

  Roseanna’s brain and belly tingled as she let the question soak in. She didn’t answer, because no answer would come.

  “Wow,” Lance said. “We really are in trouble, aren’t we?”

  Still Roseanna had no answer. She tried, but it was too much to sort through. She might have one. Eventually. But it had been a long and trying day, so she accidentally fell asleep instead.

  When she woke in the morning, Lance was sitting on the end of her bed, in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, staring out the bedroom window at more or less nothing. His shoulders slumped under the weight of whatever concerns had brought him into her room.

  “Okay,” he said quietly. “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay I’ll stay. I’ll go home this morning and grab some things and make some arrangements, and then I’ll come back and we’ll figure our stuff out.”

  She sat straight up in bed. “Really? For how long?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. As long as I have to, I guess. Until we dig out of this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. Or until I can’t stand it any longer. Whichever comes first.”

  And in that moment Roseanna felt . . . well, contradictory emotions. She felt elated at the idea of another chance with her son, and touched that he cared enough to upend his life in the effort. Around and underneath all that, a voice suspiciously like her own was saying, Great. One more squatter. And this one will be living in the house.

  And before that moment had even faded there came yet another knock at her door. It seemed rather astonishing in Roseanna’s overloaded brain.

  “Want me to get that?” Lance asked.

  “Sure. If it’s anybody who wants to talk about the ownership of eggs, tell them to hit the road.”

  “Eggs. Got it.”

  He strode to the door, still in just boxers and a T-shirt, and swung it wide.

  Roseanna sat up in bed and saw the one person in the world she least wanted to see on her doorstep. It was Jerry, the only senior partner in her old firm now that she and Alice were both gone.

  “Hey, Jerry,” Lance said, as if it were not an utter disaster to find Jerry on the porch.

  But then, to Lance, maybe it wasn’t.

  “Lance,” Jerry said. A bit cautiously. As though that might or might not be Lance’s name. “You swore you didn’t know where she was.”

  “I didn’t,” Lance said. He was either calm or doing a great imitation. “I found out the same way you did.”

  He pointed to the newspaper dangling from Jerry’s hand.

  “Is she here?”

  “I’m not even decent yet,” Roseanna bellowed from under the covers. “Holy crap, Jerry. What did you do? Drive out of the city at three o’clock in the morning?”

  “I’ll just give you a minute, then,” Jerry called in to her.

  “Should I ask him in, Mom?”

  “No,” she said. “You should treat him like a person complaining about eggs.”

  “Eggs?” she heard Jerry ask, in that irritating tone of his. The one that made your subject sound like cartoon fiction, and belittled you for merely discussing it.

  Roseanna sighed and tossed the covers back. She grabbed her robe off the hook and threw it on, stomping to the door.

  “I knew better than to talk to that Maxwell guy,” she muttered to herself as she stomped. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Then, to Lance, “I’ve got this, honey.”

  Lance peeled away and Roseanna faced the trouble head-on.

  Jerry was wearing his glasses halfway down his nose. He looked as if he hadn’t combed his hair in days, which was unlike him. He wore a camel-hair coat on a nearly sixty-degree morning.

  “I’m not coming back,” she said.

  “Well, that’s going to get awkward.”

  “Yeah, for you.”

  “No, for you, Roseanna. Look. Consider this a courtesy call. Twelve years we worked together. I could have just served your attorneys and let them pass the papers on to you, but it seemed too cold. So, yes, I left at three in the morning to see if I couldn’t find you based on this article. I wanted you to hear it from me first. I wanted to give you another chance. I know it threw you, what happened with Alice. It threw all of us. But life is still life, and it goes on. You’re in breach of more than one contract with us, and I know you know it.”

  “Right. That’s why I have attorneys now, to sort all that out. Come to some agreement that satisfies all involved.”

  “It’s not nearly enough,” he said. “What they’re offering.” He had dropped into a tone that she had only heard him use with the opposition. A deepening of his voice. A threatening edge. “You need to come back and fulfill your commitments. If you don’t, we’ll be taking you to court for most or all of the money you think you’re going to live on for the rest of this”—he backed up a step, gazed up at her house—“fantasy life of yours. I wanted to give you the respect of telling you this myself. We’re colleagues. I even thought we were friends.”

  “Really? Because I never got that.” There was some nervousness. She could only just barely feel it, but it was there. It was tucked deep in her lower intestines. She tended to keep things rattling around down there until she was more prepared to deal with them. “But really, I’m moved. It’s always very sweet when an old friend chooses the personal touch when they sue you.”

  Jerry shook his head slowly. Took off his glasses and rubbed his eye with the back of one hairy hand. “I’m doing my best here, Roseanna. But you don’t answer my calls or texts. You don’t call in. I don’t know what attitude you expect me to take.”

  “Look,” she said, “I’d invite you in, but . . . I just really don’t like you anymore. I never liked you a great deal, and now your stock has taken a hit with me, so . . . drive carefully.”

  She swung the door shut. She leaned on it for a minute or so, poking at the feeling deep in her gut. Making sure she could trust it to stay put.

  When she turned around, Lance was sitting on the couch staring at her. The fear in his eyes made her own fear jump up into the base of her throat.

  “Can he really cause all that trouble?”

  “Oh, attorneys can always cause trouble if they get it in their head to. He can bury me in legal fees if nothing else. Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  She moved into the kitchen to make some.

  “Whatever,” she said, running water for the coffeemaker. “Doesn’t matter. I own this place free and clear. If I have to live on nothing, then I’ll live on nothing. I’ll grow vegetables and eat eggs. Nothing he does can make me go back.”

  “Can he take this property?”

  “Yes,” she said, and stopped moving, the coffee forgotten. “Possibly. But I’m trying not to think about that right now.”

  THE MOVE

  Cha
pter Three

  The Little Bird That Changed Everything

  The alarm shrieked. Roseanna woke up.

  What choice did she have, really, what with all that shrieking?

  She slapped the top of the clock, which silenced it. Then, as she did every weekday morning, she formed her thumb and index finger into a revolver, took aim at the offending machine, and fired. She even imitated the kick of the weapon, and pursed her lips to blow away imaginary gunpowder smoke.

  As it had done every morning for the last three decades or so, the alarm clock survived the mock execution.

  She had tried a gentler, quieter alarm clock, but it had served poorly. Nothing short of a shriek could pull her from her dreams.

  Roseanna sat up in bed, silently nursing the discomfort of her need to ignore the day coupled with her obvious inability to do so.

  She gazed out her bedroom window—the one that looked over Central Park East—with a wistful sort of energy. She was lost in her head, and at first did not see much of anything. But then something caught her eye.

  She saw the little bird that changed everything.

  She had no idea what variety of bird it was. Nor, really, did she care. It wasn’t a big, ungainly pigeon of the sort one normally sees in the city. It must have been some small feathered thing that lived in the park. Her late friend Alice would have called it a “little brown jobber” as part of Alice’s habit of labeling various things whose labels were unknown to her.

  Why it had crossed Central Park East to peck around on her windowsill, Roseanna would never know.

  This she did know: for just a split second, she considered the world from the point of view of a small, brown, unremarkable bird. The feeling that came up—no, it did more than come up; it flooded her, overwhelmed her senses—was one of undeniable envy.

  A bird did not carry the weight of . . . well, anything. With the possible exception of finding food and avoiding miscellaneous predators, its day was free. Its life was free. It was not crushed by the responsibility of other people’s losses. It was not required to pore over law books or take meetings or mollify angry clients. Had anyone tried to force such burdens on it, it would simply fly away.