Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  She half stood, half floated in the water, absorbing the totality of Lance and Neal having so much shared history. So much life with each other that Roseanna knew nothing about. It felt as though someone had been watching her through one-way mirrored glass while staying safely anonymous and hidden himself. It also meant there was a great deal of her son’s life that she had missed, but that much she’d known already. It just hurt to get a good look at it in retrospect.

  Meanwhile the silence was seeming to make him uncomfortable.

  So she said, “You’ve been very patient about having him away so long.”

  “I’m the one who kept encouraging him to patch things up with you.”

  For a split second, Roseanna took umbrage at the phrasing. It was not as though she and her son had had some huge, sudden falling-out. But the problem was only semantic, she decided. She consciously let it go.

  “Really? You were encouraging it?”

  “Strenuously,” he said.

  Another brief moment of umbrage. Was he saying someone had to hold a gun to Lance’s head before he would agree to get near her again?

  She took a deep breath and decided to make an effort in the opposite direction, away from umbrage.

  “I guess I should thank you, then.”

  “You don’t need to thank me. I just have some experience with mothers.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  Roseanna laughed. Neal didn’t.

  “I meant more like . . . I have some experience with the fallout from doing it wrong. My mother died while I was at Cornell.” He treaded water for several long, silent moments, as though he never planned to go on with the story. Then he went on with the story. “I don’t usually talk about this, but you’re Lance’s mom, so . . . here goes. It was almost midterms, and I was stressing about my grade point average. All I wanted to do was study. My mom asked me to come to the house to see her. She didn’t say why. But I didn’t go. I told her I needed to study. She died of a heart attack that night. I have no idea if she knew it was coming. My dad said no, she didn’t, but it’s also possible she knew but didn’t tell him. She had a way of knowing things before they happened, but he never believed in that. I never found out what she wanted to say to me. I know it’s kind of cliché—how a thing like that happens and it gets to be something of a personal crusade. Going through life telling everybody not to make the same mistake you made. But Lance was always acting like he had plenty of time to patch things up with you. That’s dangerous thinking.”

  “Yes,” Roseanna said. “It is.”

  Alice’s frightened eyes appeared in her head, but she pushed them out again.

  “I’m hungry!” a big voice shouted.

  Roseanna whipped her head around to see that Lance was back. Standing at the edge of the pool. Waving to them to come ashore.

  He cupped both hands around his mouth for another big shout. “We’re taking you to lunch in Ithaca!”

  Roseanna treaded water in silence for a moment. Neal looked into her face. She looked back.

  “Please go over there,” she said in a measured tone, “and tell your significant other that I’m not getting out of the water, because if I do, my . . . son-in-law, for lack of a better term, will see how pasty and white my legs are. And then for the rest of time, every Christmas and every Thanksgiving, I’ll put on my finest clothes and share a meal with you, but all you’ll see is the blinding white of those pasty legs. Once you see it you’ll never be able to unsee it again. And I’ll never live it down.”

  “I could tell him all that,” Neal said, a genuine-looking smile playing on his lips for the first time since they’d met. “But maybe it would be easier if I just made a trip to that local men’s room myself.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Done Deals, and How They Don’t Exist

  Roseanna broke the silence when she realized all three of them had been staring at their unusually handsome college-aged waiter for just a little bit too long.

  “So, Neal,” she said. “You went to Cornell, too.”

  His eyebrows jumped. As though he couldn’t imagine how she knew that.

  “Too? Are you a Cornell woman?”

  “No, my father was.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I knew that. Lance says he found a way to work it into every other sentence. I try not to do that. I try not to bring it up unless I’m asked. But I must’ve . . . oh yeah. It’s all coming back to me now. It was when I was telling you about my mother.”

  That seemed to wake Lance from something akin to a deep, open-eyed sleep.

  “You told her about your mother?”

  “It fit the moment,” Neal said. “If you’d been there, you would have understood.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Peeing behind a tree.”

  Then the conversation died for an awkward length of time.

  Roseanna looked around the restaurant and tried to make peace with her surroundings. But the establishment was healthy to the point of being hippie, and the college-town atmosphere felt jarring. Or maybe just being around so many people felt jarring. It made her want to raise a force field around herself and huddle inside it to stay safe.

  The handsome waiter brought three glasses of water and the freshly squeezed juices they had ordered. Roseanna had had no idea what to order, being thoroughly unfamiliar with the juicing trend, so had allowed Neal to choose for her. He had chosen a blend of celery, carrot, and lemon.

  She sipped it tentatively, as though it might bite back. It was surprisingly pleasant. She relaxed some, accepting that every new food experience might not be the death of her.

  “How long have you two been together?” she asked when the waiter had left again.

  They glanced sideways at each other, then down at the table.

  “I’m sorry,” Roseanna said. “Was that a bad question?”

  “No,” Lance said. “Of course not. Not at all. We’re coming up on a year and a half.”

  A deadly silence fell. Roseanna worked hard to digest the information so as to improve their chances to go on making polite conversation. It worked poorly.

  “I know, Mom,” Lance said. “I know. It’s pretty pathetic. It’s a long time to have something going on in my life that I don’t even bother to share with my own mother. But we’re doing better now, and isn’t that the main thing? Can’t we put that away and just be happy for where we are now?”

  Roseanna took a deep, bracing breath and decided she could. Because she just would.

  She raised her juice glass to them in a toast, and they met her gesture with their own.

  “To where we are now,” she said as the glasses clinked together. Then she added, “And to never doing stupid crap like that ever again.”

  “Your thoughts on the city,” Roseanna said to Neal during dessert.

  They were all three slumped back in their chairs. Full, and finally more relaxed.

  “My thoughts?” Neal asked.

  “Yes. Yours. I already know his.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of her son. “He told me on the drive down here that he loves the city and hates where I live. Which is okay, I suppose. Not everybody has to like it. Hell, I should be grateful everybody doesn’t agree on that. I’m already overrun by people who love it as much as I do. But I must admit it was a little disappointing, because it’s been so wonderful having him there. I guess part of me didn’t want it to end. I didn’t literally think he’d stay. I mean . . . it doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. There’s no real place for him there. But it just made me realize that he’ll be packing up and going home soon. And that made me sad. If I’m being totally honest.”

  “Not that soon, Mom,” Lance said. “Not till you get through this whole legal thing.”

  “Right. Yes. Thank you for that.”

  Roseanna set down her fork. There was still half a slice of carrot cake on her plate, but she suddenly realized she couldn’t stomach another bite of it. She slid her phone out of her pocket an
d glanced at it, surprised she had been able to forget it for so long.

  There were no voicemails. No missed calls.

  After an awkward pause, Neal jumped in.

  “Me and the city. Okay. I like the city, but I don’t love it the way he does. It’s just useful to me. But I grew up near all this natural beauty, and I miss it. So I guess I’m more of a half-and-half guy. I have this dream that when I get older, I’ll build a house out in the country and use it as a getaway.”

  “You could build it on my land,” she said without thinking. Clearly without thinking, because who would say such a thing after thinking it through? “Never mind, scratch that,” she said. “After all, I don’t even know yet if I get to keep the place.”

  But there was a bigger reason why she should not have said it. It was a plan that hinged on the two young men staying together. And, according to Lance, that was anything but a given.

  She stole a glance at her son’s face. The deep discomfort she saw there made her look away again.

  She talked over the awkwardness of the moment.

  “I think I only mentioned it because Nelson asked me recently if he could do a thing like that. Build something on my property. Not to live in indefinitely, as though he were family. Not that I’m saying you’re family . . . ,” she added in the vague direction of Neal. Roseanna felt her face redden. She kept talking, for lack of a better plan. “I’m also not saying you’re not. Well, at this point it should be painfully obvious that I have no idea what I’m saying. Anyway, if he does, and then if he and Patty move to their own place, at least I’d have something like a guesthouse. Because it would be nice if you two would come visit after Lance goes home.”

  “Of course we’ll come visit,” Neal said.

  “Nelson and Patty?” Lance asked, sounding amazed.

  “I don’t know if that’s a done deal,” Roseanna said.

  “I didn’t know it was any deal at all.”

  “I guess I wouldn’t have, either, except that Martin told me. Right before he . . .”

  She trailed off into nothing and stopped talking.

  “Relationships are never a done deal,” Neal said. “There’s always hard work involved.”

  It was a statement that stopped the conversation dead for an embarrassing length of time. Nobody seemed to have anything they wanted to add to an observation like that one.

  “So,” Roseanna said, turning to Neal while Lance paid the check. “I never asked you what you do for a living, Mr. Cornell Graduate.”

  “I’m an attorney,” Neal said.

  “Are you? Isn’t that interesting?”

  In her peripheral vision she watched her son blush slightly. She didn’t go on to say why she found it so interesting, so as not to embarrass him further.

  “I’m sorry for what I said back there,” Roseanna said on the drive home. “I should have thought before I shot off my mouth.”

  She powered her passenger seat back into a more reclined position. Lance had offered to drive again, and she had taken him up on it. Not because she didn’t know where they were going, but because she was tired and a little bit sleepy.

  “You mean the thing about building the house?”

  “That very thing.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Well . . . ,” Lance began. “It’s okay enough. You meant well, and it was a very nice offer. Just that . . .”

  “You’re not even sure you’re going to stay with Neal.”

  “I’m surer than I was a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Good. I like him.”

  “Do you? That’s interesting. I wanted to ask your impression of him, but I didn’t want to put you on the spot.”

  “My impression. Let’s see. He wasn’t the way I’d pictured him.”

  “How did you picture him?”

  “Well. You’re a big, handsome guy. Of course, that’s your mother talking, but we both know that objectively I’m right. I’m not saying Neal’s not handsome. He is. But in a different way. I guess I was expecting a big, handsome guy who was more . . . you know. Hunky. Neal seems to have most of his good qualities on the inside. He’s smart, and he seems to know what to value. He has some depth, from what I can tell. I suppose I wouldn’t have guessed that as your type.”

  “It’s not,” Lance said, pulling over to the shoulder of the road to briefly study the navigation screen. “It’s totally not my type. I’ve always gone with big and hunky, just like you pictured.” He pulled back into the traffic lane of the deserted state route. “So I have this discomfort, I guess, because it’s unfamiliar. I keep thinking I want to back away because he’s not my type, and then I start remembering all the guys who were my type. Not that it was that enormous a crowd or anything, but . . . I guess what I’m saying is . . . I look back and I get it that my type never did me much good. Never got me anywhere I really wanted to go.”

  “His depth makes you uneasy,” Roseanna said. It was not a question.

  “Pretty much. It just makes the whole thing so damned . . . real.”

  “You could do worse than real.”

  “I suppose I could.”

  “I trust you to do the right thing.”

  “Do you? I wish I did.”

  “Trust me, kid. Nobody knows you like your mother.”

  Roseanna popped awake, surprised she had even fallen asleep. She was still in the passenger seat of the car, and Lance was turning into the dirt driveway of home.

  Well, her home, anyway.

  Well. Hopefully her home.

  She had been sleeping with her face pressed against the glass, and she rubbed her cheek to bring blood back into it.

  Then she remembered her phone.

  She whipped it out of her pocket.

  It showed a voicemail.

  She stared at it while Lance pulled the car into the barn. Her face tingled—not just the part that had been pressed against the window glass, but all of it. She felt frozen all over, but coldest in her face and lower intestines.

  Lance turned off the engine and glanced over at her. She never raised her eyes to him, but in her peripheral vision, she could see his reaction. She could watch him take the situation in.

  “What?” he asked. “Did someone call?”

  “Yes, but now it’s too late to call voicemail. You need reception for that.”

  “You can call your voicemail from the landline. Now aren’t you glad I made you get a landline? Who called?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You just go to ‘recents’ and it’ll show the number.”

  “I know that,” Roseanna said, sounding more annoyed than necessary.

  “Then why aren’t you doing it?”

  “I don’t know,” Roseanna said. “I mean, it’s a little hard to explain. Nothing works.”

  “The phone is not working?”

  “No. Me. I’m not working.”

  “Want me to do it for you?”

  He reached out for the phone. Roseanna tried to meet him halfway, but her hand and arm never received the signal. Lance gently slid the phone out of her hand.

  She turned her head away. Watched Earnest, who stood in his stall in the corner. He was bobbing his head up and down, as if affirming something. A yes answer to a question he couldn’t possibly know.

  Then she realized they had arrived home late for his afternoon feeding, and he was impatiently requesting that service.

  “It was Franklin,” Lance said.

  Roseanna realized she had known that. Known it in some part of herself that knew things it rarely shared with the balance of herself.

  Meanwhile she said nothing. Just watched Earnest nod with increasing determination.

  “Want me to go inside and call your voicemail from the landline?”

  “Yes, would you?” Roseanna asked, sounding fully functional to her own ears. “I’m just going to take a minute to feed the horse.”

  She opened the passenger door, and
Buzzy set his head on her lap, tail whipping.

  “And the dog,” she added.

  She looked up to see Lance standing in the doorway of the open barn. The late afternoon sun slanted through a high window on the far side of the barn and fell on him the way a spotlight falls on a lone actor on a stage.

  She felt as though she might explode if he didn’t speak, despite the fact that hardly more than a second had passed.

  “So here was the message,” he said. “Franklin called to tell you that Jerry called him today. To tell you that ‘due to extenuating circumstances,’ he’s decided to accept your offer.”

  “Wait. Which offer? The first offer, that I can actually afford? Or the counteroffer I just made that’ll more or less break me?”

  Lance’s eyes shifted down toward the dirt.

  “Well, now, I feel a little guilty about this. Because you warned me that we could get a call while we were away, and we’d miss it, and then you wouldn’t know for a day what the answer was, and you’d crack like an ice shelf. I tried to call him back. But Jill told me he’s already left the office for the day.”

  “Oh,” Roseanna said.

  Earnest broke his concentration on the hay feeder for just a moment, which was rare for him. He swung his head around and bumped Roseanna on the shoulder with his nose, causing her to stumble a few steps. She had no idea why he would do such a thing. It was as though he were telling her to snap out of it.

  Or maybe she was telling herself that, and got the two messages confused.

  The horse resumed munching on his dinner.

  “I’m sorry,” Lance said.

  “Don’t be. I actually had a nice day. I didn’t expect to. But, surprisingly, I did. I’ll find out in the morning. And in the meantime . . .”

  In the meantime she would be deeply uncomfortable. And, also, she would have a chance to learn to let things like that be. Because, really . . . how was she ever going to be happy if she couldn’t learn to let things like that be?

  “In the meantime,” Lance said, “he’s accepted one of your offers or the other. And either offer lets you keep this property. Right?”