Catching Heaven Read online

  “Theo awake yet?” Jeep called. She wore her usual jeans, torn extravagantly at the knee and beneath one buttock.

  “Nope.” Lizzie crossed the driveway and dumped the journals through an open window onto the back seat of her own car. “But that doesn’t make you not late.”

  “I got a phone call.”

  The note of defense in her voice made Lizzie look at her sideways. “Was it Rich? Jeep.”

  Jeep pulled a Tonka truck from the back seat of her car. Wisps of blonde hair, escaping the ponytail on top of her head, blew across her face. She held up a pile of picture books, a miniature baseball cap. “Spoor of Theo.”

  “Repeat after me,” Lizzie said. “I will not talk to Rich. I will not talk to Rich. I will not talk to Rich.”

  “It’s not like I’m going back to him or anything,” Jeep said. “He’s a bastard.”

  “He’s a shit.” Lizzie stomped up the stairs to the front door. She found her wallet in the pile of papers on the counter, her keys beside a sprawl of Theo’s toys. She grabbed a banana and aimed this like a gun at Jeep, who’d followed her into the house. “He treated you like shit.”

  Jeep shrugged and began to run water over the dishes piled in the sink. “He says Jake is back.”

  Lizzie kept the banana in firing position. “Is that supposed to mean something? Does that mean something?”

  Jeep’s ponytail moved from side to side. “I guess not.”

  “I didn’t get to the dishes. And I might be late. I keep promising to have a drink with a colleague.” She put this word in quotes. “Patricia’s doing my car pool. The girls will be home from gymnastics around six.”

  “Just so I get to my AA meeting at seven.” Jeep gathered cereal bowls off the counter and slid them into the sink.

  “Yeah, yeah.” At the door Lizzie stopped and aimed the banana again. “And don’t call Rich.”

  Jeep stopped scrubbing, her back a statement of injured reproach. “You’re not my mother.”

  “Well, I should have been.”

  Lizzie headed down the stairs and across the gravel driveway, wondering why she would be so angry, why her hands on the steering wheel would shake at the thought that Jeep might call Rich, why she would shift gears too quickly, grinding into reverse with a horrible sound at the idea that so-called love must always make these stupid, stupid efforts to reconnect.

  CHAPTER 3

  JAKE

  love me any way you choose

  handle me with kid gloves

  light me like fuse

  love me

  Jake bought a newspaper on his way into Joanie’s. Sat at the counter. Lunch was over, the café empty. Joanie’s had added a brew pub while he’d been gone. He wanted a beer—he’d spent the day tangling with software at the new job. Thought he might order something called Red Coyote, but settled for coffee. Had rehearsal later. Wasn’t so much fun anymore to be even a little muddled while figuring out chord changes and the logistics of harmony. One of many things that had changed.

  The waitress behind the counter looked vaguely familiar. Wideapart brown eyes. Pert nose. She smiled, poured coffee, turned to keep scrubbing at the hot plates of the coffeemaker. Pushed at her bangs with the back of her hand and then untied the strings of her apron, which had slipped low on her hips. With deft fingers, behind her back, she tied another, tighter bow. Emphasized her waist.

  She met his eyes in the mirror that ran the length of the wall behind the counter. “I heard you were back.”

  Jake nodded, resumed his study of the box scores. She brought the coffeepot, topped off his cup. “Everyone says you went to Nashville. To sell your songs, they say.”

  “That was the idea.” Jake wondered who “everyone” was.

  “Wow, Nashville.” She leaned a hip against the counter, coffeepot dangling. Jake stared down at the newspaper.

  “How long were you gone?”

  “A little over a year. Almost two, maybe.”

  “I knew it! See, I’d just started working here when you left town? My name’s Tina?”

  “Ah!” Did his best to look like he remembered.

  “You still have that band of yours? Did it fall apart?”

  “Could have. But didn’t. We got it back together.” He clinked his spoon against his coffee cup. Keep her from seeing how much this fact still had the power to move him.

  “So it is you that’s playing at Farquaarts next month! You guys’re my favorite dance band.”

  “Thanks.”

  “They were telling me you used to live in Nashville.”

  They? “Years ago.”

  “Why’d you go back?”

  He held his hand over his cup to stop another onslaught of coffee. “Seemed a good idea. Worked once.” He heard Minerva: Can’t step in the same river twice, buddy.

  “But it didn’t work this time?”

  Jake shook his newspaper. If this went on any longer Tina would think he was flirting.

  She didn’t take the hint, leaned in further. “I’ve always wondered—Oops, just a sec.” Flashing that sweet grin, she headed towards a man who’d sat at the counter several stools down. Jake nodded at his nod, short tip of the chin. Stood and fished in his pocket for change. Along with the coins came a piece of paper. His own scrawl:

  coffee!

  milk

  paper towels

  o.j.

  Withheld hearts

  No more of this (these?) withheld hearts

  starts

  parts, darts

  bread

  toothpaste

  Ajax

  call Willy and Sue—Johnny’s Birthday!

  I fell in love with all of you

  do I only get to

  how do I love apart from you

  how do I love just part of you

  your withheld heart

  Tina returned. Jake tucked the scrap of paper back in his pocket. “As I was saying,” she said. Scooping coins off the counter with a swipe of that deft hand. “I’ve always wondered why it is you call yourselves Jake’s Blakes. At first I thought it was a typo. Like it should be blokes.”

  “Well, you’re close.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You’re on the right track.”

  Tina shook her head at him. “Come on.”

  He tapped the newspaper on the counter. “Gotta go. I have rehearsal with those blokes.”

  “You do?” Tina clasped her hands between her breasts. “You do? That is, like, so cool.”

  Jake shook his head in appreciation. Started away, came back. “Any thoughts on what to buy a nephew who’s nine?”

  “You have a nephew?” Hands still clasped between her breasts. It had been a mistake to ask this.

  “Thanks anyway. I just thought of something.”

  The man down the counter stared straight ahead. Fork, napkin on one side of folded hands, knife, spoon on the other. Waiting. Lizzie had once told Jake that coffee shops were the home kitchens of the lonely. Where else can they find the aromas of Mom? Toast, coffee, casserole with tomato sauce. Where else can they hear people sounds? Fork against plate, laughter, talk.

  Lizzie.

  Jake offered the guy the newspaper.

  “Thanks, man.”

  He paused at the pay phone on his way out to call his sister. Willy answered. “You’ve taken your sweet time about getting over here to say hi in person.”

  “Job keeps me busy. Like you pointed out the last time I saw you, Willy, I can’t just go on being a goddamn artiste all my life.”

  “Yeah, well. I was drunk.”

  Which was as much of an apology as Willy would muster. Jake accepted it with a grunt. “I want to drop something by for the Jellybean before rehearsal.”

  “We’re not going anywhere.”

  Jake headed down the sidewalk towards Elmer’s Mountain Music. Paused to take a look at Fable Mountain. She glowered above the slanted roofs of Marengo’s houses. Crook-backed, familiar as a children’s story, raisi
ng her bald and jagged peak. Invitation. Threat.

  Your withheld heart.

  CHAPTER 4

  LIZZIE

  NOTES FROM BENEATH THE MAGNETS ON LIZZIE’S FRIDGE

  The hunter stands beside the tree in the storm and the lightning and when the hunter raises his rifle to shoot at the deer the tree whaps the hunter with a branch and the hunter falls down and the deer is safe and he says thank you old friend to the tree and the tree leans down to pat the deer with another branch I love you, Ma.

  SUMMER

  In Lizzie’s afternoon Life Class, Sara Roantree held her arms over her head in a position that was a crouch, about to spring. Or warding off an expected blow. Or kneeling in agonized prayer. The erect spine and bowed head, the twisted fists, the angle of harsh cheekbones, managed to convey despair, pride, supplication. What was it in this combination, Lizzie wondered, that reminded her of her sister?

  She checked her watch. “Three minutes,” she said, and ignored the groans of her students.

  Her own fingers itched for a piece of charcoal. As she wandered through the forest of drawing pads propped on one knee, clipped to an easel, held in a lap, she saw few students capturing the arrogance, nor the entreaty, the pose implied—the appeal to some power larger than self, and, at the same time, the self’s ability to withstand what the gods might deliver. Again she thought of Maud. In one of the last moments of the episode of Tucker’s Larks, the searchlight of a hovering helicopter had leached all color from the scene. Caught in that fierce light, Maud jerked and swayed in a barrage of bullets meant for a gang member. Blood bloomed from her mouth. Lizzie, admiring the Gorey-esque color scheme—black, white, red—did not realize Summer was weeping, hysterical. “She’s dead, Ma, she’s dead!” As it turned out when they called, Maud was not dead, but she was also not fine. She was in yet another questioning-our-relationship crisis with Miles.

  She checked her watch. “That’s it. Sign your sketch. Close your notebooks.”

  The class moaned. Sara rubbed her upper arms, blinked and yawned. Lizzie draped a kimono over her shoulders. “Great pose.” She turned to the class again. “I said, that’s it. No pissing and moaning. And no erasing—” She snapped her fingers. “Yvette, I said no erasing.”

  Yvette writhed in front of her easel. “But it’s terrible. You’ll flunk me for sure.”

  “Probably not,” Lizzie said, and earned a fiery, grateful look from beneath the black beret. Yvette’s attempts to look like an artist living on the Left Bank in the thirties amused Lizzie. In addition to the beret, slanting across a marble-white forehead, the girl wore a jumper, tights, clogs—all black. On the official student roll sheets her name was Ellen.

  “Those who didn’t hand in your sketchbooks last week, and you know who you are, get them on my desk, now. You’ll get them back next Tuesday.”

  Yvette reluctantly closed her notebook and stood in line to deposit it on Lizzie’s desk. One student still gazed at the pad clipped to his easel. “Aaron.” Lizzie snapped her fingers again. “Now.”

  “Okay, okay.” Aaron, closing the large leaves of the sketchbook, paused as Sara made her way across the studio towards the changing room. Lizzie turned to see what he saw. Splayed bare feet, almost as wide as they were long, shaped by years of walking barefoot. Kimono tight around the roll of large hips. Pendulous breasts straining the kimono’s silk. Aaron whistled softly. “Some boobs!” he said to the student standing next to him.

  Hands on her hips, Lizzie walked towards him, wrinkling her nose against his cheap and tangy cologne. “Boobs, Aaron? Did you really say boobs?”

  Aaron stepped back. His eyelashes drooped like a beauty queen’s. They were long, black and feathery, reminding her, with a mental lurch, of Jake.

  “Be careful of the words you choose,” she said. “They are just like lines of charcoal. Each one has the potential to convey as much about you as about your subject.” She sounded exactly like her father. Sententious, Maud called it, behind his back. She gathered up the pile of sketchbooks and pushed with hip and shoulder against the heavy classroom door.

  The hallway was lined with stripped canvases, sculptural attempts, discarded found-art objects ready to be re-found, gunmetal tables and cabinets that looked as if they’d been used as palette and as canvas. Even the floor was dappled with daubs and spots of paint. She breathed in the beloved smells of clay and turpentine.

  “Mrs. Maxwell?”

  Lizzie turned, supporting the notebooks on a hip. Aaron sped towards her down the corridor. His shoes flashed—he’d painted the inner half of his high-topped Keds neon red, the outside purple. “Mrs. Maxwell!” He slid to a stop, face open and flushed. His skin glowed.

  “It is not Mrs.,” she said. “We’ve been over that.”

  He ducked one shoulder and took a deep breath, as if running down the hall had emptied him of all oxygen. “When can I get my journal back?”

  “What did I say in class?”

  Aaron shook his head. “I didn’t hear you. I was, you know, so into—” He swiped a hand through the air, up towards the sky, as if he could summon whatever ambiance had been hovering around Sara as she posed. His hair, composed of a million black, loose ringlets, reminded Lizzie of a younger, thinner version of Jake. But it wasn’t just the eyes, or the hair. It was the slanted, humorous I-can-see-through-you gaze, and the sense of boundless energy he carried with him.

  She felt her lips fold into a straight line. “Is that all?”

  Aaron waved at the pile of notebooks. “Could I borrow mine back? Just for a sec? I want to write down what you said. About a line of a drawing and a word—I liked that.”

  A number of students used their sketchbooks as diaries, and Lizzie sometimes puzzled over the quotations, thoughts, scraps of poetry scribbled in and around their drawings. “It can wait until Tuesday.” She sounded unbearably prim, even to herself. “If you find it a really valuable piece of advice, it’ll stick with you until then.”

  In front of her office door, she squeezed two fingers into a pocket to get at the key, managing to balance the notebooks until the door opened. They slipped out of her hold and sprawled onto the floor with a series of loud thumps. “Fuck it!” She slammed the rest of them down on her desk, amazed at her sudden desire to burst into mad weeping. She wasn’t yet forty. Was this the first sign of the perimenopause crap she’d heard too much about from the other soccer moms? Her father would say it was just one more excuse for female displays of emotion.

  “I think you dropped something.” Cal, the art history teacher, crouched in the doorway, gathering notebooks. “Here you go.” He deposited them on her desk, pushed his glasses back up his nose.

  “Thanks, Cal.” She sounded brusque. Cal’s goofy, lopsided grin irritated her. She often had to overcome the impulse to move behind him, place her hands over his rounded, obsequious shoulders, a foot in the middle of his back, and pull, hard. “Thanks a lot.”

  He crossed one arm in front of his waist and one behind and bowed. She chuckled in as appreciative a way as she could muster. “Madam,” he said. “Is today the day we finally get to have that drink?”

  “Oh, Cal.” A margarita sounded good, a Bass sounded great. And she had promised. But not with him, not today. “It’s my day to carpool.” It wasn’t a complete lie. It had been, until she’d asked Patricia to do it for her.

  Cal shook his head, blinking rapidly.

  “We’ll just be damned sure we do it, okay? Maybe next week?” Lizzie looped the straps of her bag over her shoulder, slid her grade book into it, gathered up the pile of sketchbooks.

  “Sure, sure.” His wide front teeth made him look like a cartoon character. “We had it in the book, though. Want me to carry those?”

  “I’m fine, really.” The heels of her red cowboy boots echoed down the corridor. She heard his office door close. The quiet click reproached her.

  Sara’s bulky figure undulated in the heat rising from the black asphalt parking lot. “Sara!” Lizzie called
, and trotted towards her. She let the notebooks fall onto the hood of Sara’s huge yellow car. “Too fucking hot.”

  “Hot for September, sure. The seasons are crazy. Sam says they’re changing for good.” She screwed up her face. “I’ve been filling out forms.”

  Sara’s distaste for anything bureaucratic stemmed from her experiences with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Lizzie could hardly blame her. From the stories Sara had to tell of living on the Reservation, it seemed nothing got done whether you did or did not fill out all the necessary governmental papers. Sara hated anything to do with paperwork and had modeled all of the previous semester without being paid. It was only by accident that Lizzie’d found out about it.

  “I’ll work you a lot this semester, if you like.”

  “You just want to use me because I got some boobs.” Chuckling, Sara lowered herself into the driver’s seat. The back of the car was filled with newspapers. Lizzie couldn’t make out whether it was an ongoing recycling attempt, which she rather doubted, or—and this seemed far more likely—a bed for some itinerant relative.

  “That young artist looks like that friend of yours that was.”

  “No. You think so?”

  Sara started the engine and spoke over its roar. “Except this one thinks too much of himself already. Get those things off the front of my car.”

  Lizzie scooped up the notebooks. “Want to see what you look like?”

  “Not through those eyes.” Sara put the car in reverse. “Tell Sam there’s a powwow this weekend. He should come.”

  “He never goes to those things.”

  “Well, he should. Won’t admit he’s lonely, but he is.”