Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

“Yes. I figured you would have heard of them.”

  “I don’t have a bathing suit.”

  “You used to have one that you wore at the health club.”

  “True. But now I have no health club. So why would I still have the suit?”

  Lance sighed deeply. As if Roseanna were a three-year-old who was straining his patience to the breaking point, and for no discernible reason.

  “Fine,” he said. “Then just wear shorts and a T-shirt.”

  “I don’t own shorts. I look terrible in them.”

  Another huge, theatrical sigh from her son.

  “I’ll bring a pair of my shorts, then.”

  “Knock yourself out, honey. But if you think you’re getting me into them, you don’t know me as well as you keep thinking you do.”

  “I hope you know better than to drive me anywhere near the city,” Roseanna said. Then she went back to staring out the window.

  They had taken the Maserati, at Roseanna’s suggestion. If she was about to lose it, which it seemed she was, it would be a fitting last fling with her beloved car. But Lance was driving. Because she had no idea where they were headed.

  “Of course I know that,” he said.

  Roseanna felt a spot just under her diaphragm relax.

  “Thank you,” she said simply.

  They seemed to be on some kind of back road. Not exactly a country lane, but not the New York State Thruway. They had driven a series of smaller state routes since Lance had spirited her away from her property. The drive was becoming wooded and as remote as home. If not more so.

  It should have soothed her. She refused to let it.

  She woke up her phone display with her thumb and stared at it for a few seconds, watching the bars of reception rise and fall. Now and then they disappeared entirely. Then one bar would struggle to make itself known.

  The phone disappeared from her hand.

  “Stop that,” Lance said, and tucked the phone into his shirt pocket.

  “That was cold.”

  “You’re getting obsessed about this, Mom. I’m not saying it’s not understandable. But you have to at least try. All my life I’ve had to sit back and watch stress eat you alive. And watch you not even try to manage it. Not even try to save yourself from it. Now I at least want you to try.”

  Roseanna sighed deeply and said nothing.

  They drove in silence for a few miles.

  “Now do I get to know where we’re going?” she asked after a time.

  “No. It’s still a surprise. I’m only going to tell you that it’s beautiful and natural. Which we both know soothes you. Granted, that’s a bit of a late life surprise, but now that we finally know it, let’s squeeze everything we can out of that revelation.”

  More silent miles.

  Roseanna had a question rattling around in her gut, but wasn’t sure she could see her way clear to ask it. She almost let it sink back down into the abyss again.

  Then it hit her. That was the old Roseanna and Lance. The way she’d done things all his life. That was how he’d grown to age thirty without mentioning whom he’d been seeing. Or even the gender of those he felt most inclined to see.

  Sooner or later you have to recognize the old patterns. But even that wasn’t enough, she now realized. It wasn’t sufficient to simply watch them play out while thinking, Yes, indeed, that is my pattern, and then continue to do it that way all the same. No. Sooner or later you had to get up off your sorry butt and do a little better for yourself.

  “And what about you?” she asked, startling them both.

  “What about me?”

  “You’ve been living surrounded by nature for a few weeks. We’re both city people born and raised, but it didn’t take me more than an hour in the middle of nowhere to know it’s where I wanted to be. Where I needed to be. But you haven’t said much about it. You know. About your opinion of the wilderness experience. At least, wilderness by New York City standards.”

  “Oh, it’s wilderness to me. And then some.”

  “You seem to be evading the question.”

  For a strange length of time, Lance didn’t answer. He just took one hand off the steering wheel, made a fist, and cleared his throat into it.

  Then he said, in a quiet mumble, “I don’t think you’ll like my answer to that.”

  “It’s not a matter of whether I’ll like it or not. You just have to tell me the truth. You don’t have to filter it through the net of what you think it will please me to hear. That’s how we got in all that trouble in the first place.”

  “True,” he said.

  He lifted his sunglasses and rubbed a spot on the bridge of his nose where the pads had left red indentations.

  “Well . . . ,” he began. Then he stalled for an uncomfortable length of time. “I guess I’d have to say . . . I hate it.”

  “Where I live, you mean?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I want to say it’s beautiful and peaceful, but really I just . . . I hate it. Granted, it’s pretty to look at. But I’m the kind of guy . . . I look at it once, and I say, ‘Yeah, yeah, very nice.’ And then I’ve seen it. And I don’t have the need to just keep staring at it. I’m a city person, Mom. I can’t help it. I like Wi-Fi and cell phone reception. And the theater, and comedy clubs. I even like all that raucous traffic noise while I’m trying to get to sleep. It’s kind of hard not to wake up in the morning feeling like I’m in a bad Green Acres remake.”

  He fell silent. The dense forest rolled past Roseanna’s car window while she thought about nothing at all.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No, of course not. It’s who you are. You’re a city person. You’re young. When people are young, excitement is a good thing. Living like I’m living now seems boring. Then you get older and you’re wearing the scars of all that excitement you’ve chased after your whole life, and then what you used to call boring starts to look serene. Then you start to view boring as a lofty goal. But maybe you’ll get to be my age and still love the city. Plenty of people do. The idea is that we get to do what suits us. The idea is not that what suits me has to suit you, too. If you can accept where I want to live, I can accept where you want to live. Has to be a two-way street, right?”

  Lance smiled his trademark crooked smile. “And that’s another thing. I like two-way streets. With more than one lane in each direction.”

  He fell silent, but Roseanna could hear his breathing. It sounded loud and slow, as though every breath were a carefully planned sigh. As if he were doing exercises to clean out the inside of himself.

  “That’s a relief,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t be afraid to tell me things like that.”

  “I try not to be.”

  “But you’ve been out at my place with me for so long now. And you never said a word. You never complained.”

  “We were getting to know each other,” he said. “It was worth it. It was kind of nice.”

  They stepped out of the car in a parking lot at a shady state park.

  “Leave the phone in the car,” Lance said. But he handed it back to her. So at least it was more of a suggestion.

  “But—” she began.

  Before she could say more, she looked down at its display and saw the phone was getting zero bars of reception.

  “So what was this you were saying about how I’d have cell phone reception all day?”

  “I didn’t say all day. I said mostly. And I said you have voicemail. I’m sure Franklin can handle voicemail.”

  Roseanna sighed deeply and locked the phone into the glove compartment of the Maserati.

  They took off on foot, Roseanna following silently behind her son. She could hear the sound of running water. Maybe even falling water.

  He seemed to know exactly where he was going, and he seemed to go there deliberately. More like there was an exact latitude and longitude to locate. Less like “This is a nice p
lace. Let’s poke around here.”

  She noticed he was carrying the spare pair of shorts with which he had threatened her. They were dangling from his left hand.

  They walked along a shaded dirt path. Then the path bent suddenly and began to descend down stone steps, guarded on one side by a stone retaining wall. On the other side of the wall Roseanna looked down into a deep gorge carved by a running stream or river. The rock of the area had clearly been formed in horizontal shelf-like layers, now carved away by years of flowing water.

  Lance was several steps ahead of her, so she hurried to catch up.

  “This is near Ithaca,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  He stopped descending. Stood still to answer her.

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “No. But I’ve always known there were all these gorges around Ithaca. Your grandpa used to tell me about them. He went to Cornell, you know. Well, yes, of course you know. He only dropped it into every other sentence. He used to come out here with his college buddies, and they’d drink beer and dive off cliffs into the deeper pools.”

  “Grandpa? Got drunk and dove off cliffs?”

  “Well, we were all young once, honey.”

  “Not Grandpa,” Lance said.

  Another crooked smile from him. Then they began to descend the stone steps again, more together this time.

  “He always said he’d take me out here and show me the gorges,” Roseanna said. “But of course he never did.”

  “Now that sounds like Grandpa,” Lance said.

  They crested the lip of a steep drop. On her right, Roseanna saw the water fall off into a stepped cascade, spreading out like a white bridal veil over thin layers of rock. It was a lovely sight, but she could not help but turn around and look back the way they had come. All these steps they were descending would have to be climbed again to get back to their car. That would be no small task.

  “Why did you choose this particular gorge?” Roseanna asked, raising her voice to be heard over the falling water.

  Lance only shrugged.

  “Have you been here before?”

  “Once,” he said. “Neal and I explored this whole area once. I thought this was the nicest waterfall. I figured you’d like a good waterfall. Being a nature person and all.”

  “Actually, it’s more of a cascade. Sorry if that sounds like splitting hairs.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “My understanding is that a waterfall involves free-falling water. When it tumbles over rocks at an angle like this, I think it’s more of a cascade.”

  “The name of the park has the word waterfall right in it.”

  “Well, that’s the park service for you, honey. Haven’t you noticed they never use apostrophes on their signage? Clouds Rest in Yosemite? Angels Landing in Utah? They’ve apparently never heard of a possessive. They are clearly not the department of English grammar.”

  “We’re stopping here,” Lance said.

  And he stopped.

  They stood at the bottom of the gorge now. Or, at least, the bottom of this gorge. Whether there were more gorges downstream, Roseanna could not see. But they stood at the very edge of the water, which had now formed a wide pool with a high stone wall behind it. She craned her neck back to see the top of the gorge, from where they had come.

  “You realize we’ll have to walk back up there,” she said.

  Lance looked up. As though elevation were fresh news to him.

  “All the more reason you should go in for a swim. It’s getting hot. You want to be refreshed before we do the big walk out.”

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “What’s so weird about wading into a pool of water and swimming on a hot day?”

  “My legs are all pasty white. And how am I supposed to change into shorts anyway? We’re in the open out here.”

  “And who are you thinking is going to see you?”

  Roseanna looked around. She saw a group of three people descending the stairs above them, but they looked like ants from this distance. She pointed at them.

  “They would,” she said.

  Lance shielded his eyes against the sun and looked where Roseanna had pointed. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously.”

  “They’re a little far away to see much, don’t you think?”

  “But they’re getting closer.”

  “Better hurry up and change then. You have on underwear, right?”

  “Of course I have on underwear. What kind of question is that?”

  Lance unbuttoned his light print shirt.

  “Here,” he said, taking it off. Baring his hairless, strong-looking chest to the dappled sun. “I’ll hold this in front of you.”

  “But my legs are all pasty and white. Even after I’m done changing.”

  “You know . . . if you wore shorts once in a while, they wouldn’t be.”

  “But I don’t. And they are.”

  “So hurry up and change and then jump in. And then your legs will be underwater. And no one will see.”

  Roseanna opened her mouth to argue. But it was hot, and would only get hotter. And she knew she would regret the missed opportunity if they continued to be surrounded by people for the rest of their time here.

  So she cursed under her breath, more or less nonstop. But she changed behind Lance’s shirt.

  Roseanna held her nose and let herself sink. The pool was shallow where she swam, and she had to bend her legs so they wouldn’t touch bottom. She wrapped her arms around her knees and allowed her head to dip below the waterline.

  She felt the icy coldness of it surround her head and face.

  Then she popped up again and shook water out of her hair.

  “I hate to admit it,” she said to Lance, who floated on his back a few feet away, “but this is very pleasant.”

  Lance smiled but offered no comment. Then again, maybe no comment was needed.

  Roseanna treaded water with her knees bent, and looked around.

  The three people who had come down the stairs after them had long ago descended to this level and kept going. Moved downstream. Everybody wanted a pool to themselves, she decided.

  Just on that thought she noticed the young man who apparently didn’t.

  He was in the water, and swimming toward them. Right toward them. It made her uncomfortable, the way it would if a stranger sat down next to her in an empty movie theater. He was breaking the rules that were universally observed by strangers. And those rules were there for a reason. Everybody knew it.

  She watched him swim closer with a growing sense of alarm.

  He was slightly built, with dark blond hair wetly slicked back along his head. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, even in the water, and swam in something that looked like a cross between a butterfly stroke and a dog paddle to keep his head above the surface. Probably to keep his glasses dry.

  Roseanna swam the few feet to Lance and poked him hard in the ribs.

  He bent in the middle, sank like a stone, then came up sputtering.

  “That’s not funny,” he said, blowing water out of his nose.

  “It wasn’t a joke. That guy is coming right toward us. Why is he doing that?”

  Lance looked around.

  Then, much to Roseanna’s surprise, he smiled broadly. He fell forward into a smooth-looking swimmer’s stroke and headed straight for the intruder.

  They met in the middle, where both tested the depth of the water by putting their feet down. They were able to stand, though Lance stood a good head taller. Whether the bottom was uneven or Lance was much larger, Roseanna could not know. But she hoped for the latter.

  The two young men embraced.

  Roseanna stood in the shallow water with her mouth open, vaguely thinking, What is happening?

  A moment later they were headed in her direction, side by side. More or less walking. The water came up to Lance’s chest and the other man’s chin. They held each other’s hand high, above the surface of
the pool.

  “Mom,” Lance said when they arrived, “this is Neal. Neal, Mom.”

  Roseanna said nothing for an awkward length of time. Then she sputtered out a few words.

  “Well, when you said surprise you really meant surprise.”

  “I hope you don’t feel like we broadsided you,” Neal said.

  “Not at all. I’m happy to meet you.”

  She reached out one awkward hand to shake Neal’s. Then she realized this was the old pattern. The old Roseanna. Keeping her distance out of formality and fear.

  Instead she pulled her hand back and plunged forward two or three steps through the water to throw her arms around the young man.

  He seemed surprised, but not unhappy.

  “I’ve been wanting to meet you, too,” he said into her ear.

  “I’m off to find a restroom,” Lance said a few minutes later. “You two get acquainted.”

  “An actual restroom?” Roseanna asked. “Like all the way up at the parking lot?”

  She was attempting to gauge how long he would be gone. Because, truthfully, it was a little soon to be alone with Neal, and the prospect made her uneasy.

  “That’s a long way to go,” Lance said. “I was thinking more like the men’s room behind a big tree.”

  Then he swam to the shore and climbed out.

  “Sorry,” Neal said. “He probably should have told you.”

  “It’s not a problem,” she said, though it clearly was a little bit of one. “I just don’t deal all that well with surprises.”

  “Which is why he should have told you.”

  He had a gentle voice. Patient, like a person who takes the time to speak kindly to a child. Up close she decided he looked a bit more like a math or science nerd than the way Roseanna had imagined him.

  “My family lives in Ithaca,” Neal said. “Well, my dad. He’s all the family I’ve got left now. So this is someplace I like to go. So we thought we’d meet here. Lance wanted this to be a de-stressing sort of a day for you, and I guess he thought if you knew this would be our first meeting . . . well, that maybe that would just make you nervous. And he figures you’re nervous enough right now. What with all that’s going on.”

  Roseanna said nothing in reply. Just mulled over the fact that Neal knew all about her. Because people talk to their partners.