Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The complex bond and unspoken resentments between sisters . . . the aching search for home and connection and community . . . the ever-changing landscape of family and those who define it . . . Sands Hall weaves these powerful elements into a novel ripe with discovery and wonder. Set against the immutable backdrop of the American Southwest, Catching Heaven illuminates that quiet place in the heart where solitude embraces serenity and dreams meet possibility.

Release date: January 18, 2001

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

CHAPTER 1

MAUD

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world —RICHARD II

The sky was still dark when Maud closed the motel door behind her. Shivering, she crossed the street to the twenty-four-hour restaurant and bought a cup of coffee from a yawning waitress. She’d left the freeway late the day before, turning east onto a two-lane highway. Now it unfurled ahead of her headlights, which she kept on high beam except for the rare times a truck or car approached. She thought how like eyes the bright lights coming at her were, and how easy it would be to swerve into their oncoming glare.

An hour after dawn, a small town rose like a mirage out of the Arizona desert. Maud passed the flickering sign of a burger stand, a gas station, a battered motel before pulling in at Maria’s Trading Post, whose attractions—gas! mutton! nails! flour!—were advertised on a hand-lettered sandwich board at the edge of the road.

The gas tanks were round-topped, old-fashioned. There seemed to be no expectation that she pay before pumping the gas. The latch on the trigger was broken. As Maud leaned against her car, hold- ing the nozzle in the fill hole, she had another wince of memory. Actually, it was more than a wince, the rearranging of her shoulders she’d had to do when images of the Cheesios audition, of Miles, of Nikos’ acting class leered towards her as she drove. A fragment of one of the days she’d worked on Tucker’s Larks pushed at her. When she’d filmed her short though vital scene with Tucker, the actor hadn’t actually been present. He was in Chicago playing baseball for a handicapped children’s benefit—they planned to film his lines later. “Virtual Tucker,” a crew member joked. In the sterile, muted space of a police interrogation room that was the set, Maud emoted her half of the scene to the plaid shoulder of the cameraman. Off to one side, the script girl read Tucker’s dialogue in a flat, nasal voice. “Wait a bit after each line,” the director coached Maud. “I know that’s tough, given the, like, highly charged context of the scene, but we can’t have any overlap.”

The trigger beneath her finger clicked. Maud pulled at it a few more times, watching the numbers on the gas pump inch by. This isn’t acting, she’d wanted to tell the people gathered in the room, wielding boom mikes, lights, makeup brushes. She replaced the nozzle in its slot in the gas pump. I will not keep this form upon my head, Constance, pulling at her hair, tells King John just before she exits and goes mad, when there is such disorder in my wit.

The wind pushed out of the desert, flattening her skirt against her legs. Maud closed her eyes before its chafing warmth, holding her hair back from her face with fingers that smelled of gasoline. ’Tis an unwanted garden—no, that wasn’t right—’tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Fie on’t, ah fie.

A large yellow car with fins, parked askew, guarded the door to Maria’s Trading Post. Its back seat was filled with newspapers. Both taillights were broken, and the paint above the tire wells badly rusted.

The screen door screeched as she opened it, activating several buzzing flies. A man leaned against the counter, watching a woman hack with a cleaver at a glistening haunch of meat. On his cheek was a constellation of pockmarks—a swirl, a small galaxy of indented scars. The door slapped shut.

“Sorry,” Maud said, using a French accent.

The woman gestured with the cleaver. “But get that car to Sara anyway.”

It took a moment for Maud to realize that this instruction was not meant for her. The man leveled dark eyes in her direction, then went back to brooding on the skinned carcass. Maud made out angles of marbled fat and blood that might have been part of a leg, cut off above the knee. A cowboy hat sat beside this on the coun- ter, jaunty, incongruent. She turned away, into an aisle, walking past huge cans of chili and hominy, cellophane packages of HoHos, boxes of cornflakes and saltines, loaves of Wonder bread. She stared at a shelf that held polyester shorts and sneakers, wondering if this man and this woman held their pockmarked faces against her, her and her kind.

“Need help?” the woman called.

Desperately, Maud thought. “Merci,” she said. “I am just looking.” She didn’t know why she’d started with the French accent but she didn’t know how to stop now. She stared down into hunched burlap sacks of flour, beans, dried corn that stood at the back of the store. After searching for an apple or an orange, she settled for a package of sunflower seeds from a dusty display next to the cash register. She handed a twenty to the woman. “I would take this, please. And I put the fifteen dollars of the gas in the car.” Her ability to use a French accent had always been rather dismal. The woman looked at her sharply before lifting a cash box up from beneath the counter.

“That car of yours is packed up pretty good,” the man said. He’d put his hat on. Leaning against the counter, hip cocked, looking back at her from under the brim, he reminded Maud of an advertisement for jeans or male cologne in a hip fashion magazine. Sexy, definitely. Black hair looped over one shoulder fell to his waist. “You coming or going?”

For a moment she thought he meant the idiom: you coming or going? Was it so obvious that she was indeed at sea? that she was at sixes and sevens, all balled up? But his eyes were black, opaque, unamused.

“Well, I am coming, I guess.” She straightened, as if her shoulders had been rounded by the weight floating around her, as tangible, as encompassing, as a long black veil.

“Where from?”

“Hollywood.”

The air in the room shifted. They were impressed by and at the same time dismissive of this admission—which was what Maud felt it was. “Los Angeles, I mean,” she amended.

“L.A.” The man stated the letters as if something vast were con- nected to each one.

“Well, you sound foreign,” the woman said. “Don’t she sound foreign, Driver?”

Maud opened her mouth in a silent laugh, wanting to let them in on the joke: Hollywood is foreign. She wanted to convince them of this, as if this would give her defection validity. Hollywood is another planet. Instead, ashamed of having started the absurd charade, she accepted her change with a muttered “Merci.” As she pushed the bills and coins into the pocket of her jean skirt, the man straightened and stepped away from the counter. Startled, she met his eyes and noticed again the nebula of scars on one cheek. She wondered how many women had reached a finger to trace the precision of that spiral; it was intriguing, oddly attractive. Although he wasn’t as tall as she’d expected from his broad shoulders and length of torso.

The screen door slapped again behind her. “Sorry,” she called. “Pardonnez-moi.”

A phone booth leaned against the wall outside the store. Maud closed herself into it. It had been easy, yesterday, not to call Miles. When the car was in motion, on the freeway, calling him involved waiting for the next exit, the next town, pulling over, looking for a phone. Each time the urge struck her there had been lots of time to talk herself out of it. She’d called last night before she went to sleep, but he was at the studio. Of course. She hadn’t left a message. Let him worry when he got home. But she’d slept fitfully in the double motel bed, waking up again and again to stare into the darkness that encased her, while Joni Mitchell mourned that the bed was too big, the frying pan too wide.

She pressed the series of buttons that added up to his phone and her calling card numbers. But of course he did not answer. When no one else had rented the studio he often worked there until morn- ing, sometimes through the next day. Unless he was sleeping. His machine picked up.

“Hey there! This is Miles! Leave a message, and I’ll be in touch, real soon. See ya!”

“Miles.” Her voice was shaky. “Are you there?” She had argued with him over the use of that word, real. “It’s really,” she’d told him, as if by changing that one word she could change the tone of the whole message and by extension some aspect of their life together. But as he had pointed out to her, they had two separate phone lines; he could say what he wanted on his.

“Miles?” The idea that he might be lying in the next room, listening to her high, tight voice, made her pause again. “I can’t do this anymore. So I’ve gone.” A short laugh, the breathy one, the one that irritated him. “Which you’ll figure out.”

A dog, ribs showing through patchy fur, one leg lifted under its belly, limped through the trash at the side of the road, stopping to sniff at a curl of abandoned retread. Tears filled Maud’s eyes. She listened to the hum of long-distance wires, the tape full of silence spooling onto his answering machine. She held the phone more tightly. “It’s just that I had wanted—”

She’d used the past tense. The past perfect tense, to be precise. As her father had long ago informed her, using had before a verb was far more final than not using it. Plain old past tense could imply something ongoing; past perfect meant the thing being discussed was perfectly, as in completely, over and done. Because she had at various times pointed this distinction out to Miles, he would notice.

She wished she could change the message, even delete it. But there it was, a blinking red light that would alert him to listen as soon as he got back to the apartment. He would hope it was a producer, be disappointed that it was Maud, be baffled and then irritated that she’d placed his phone and his machine on the floor. The phone table, a long-ago gift from her mother, was one of the first things she’d packed into her car. “I’m sorry. I’m—” She imagined his pursed lips, his flared nostrils, the shake of his head as he knelt to punch the rewind button on his machine. “I’m sorry.”

She watched the dog halt its way across the road. Behind her the screen door of the store slapped. The man named Driver stepped down the cement block that served as a stair. Heeled boots emphasized strong thighs. He turned to look at her. He’d tilted his hat forward, shadowing his eyes. She smiled, suddenly nervous. He stared a few moments longer, then stalked to the battered yellow Chevrolet. Gravel shot from beneath its wheels as he spun out onto the highway.

The car seemed to drive right into the sun, diminishing in size along the gray ribbon of highway. Just beyond Maria’s Trading Post, the town stopped as abruptly as it had begun and then the distance started, a greenish gray and brown distance, dotted with scrub and an occasional blowing, bouncing tumbleweed. A semi came into view, leaping through the flaming hoop of the sun, growing huge in size and sound, shifting down noisily for the short trip through town. The driver lifted a hand. She raised hers in return, sucking in her belly, closing her fists, praying to the gods that the dog would not be hit, exploded, turned into a bloody carcass tumbling along the road, a sign that would be too much to bear.

The truck blared by. The dog lurched its way along the opposite side of the road. Maud offered thanks.

She checked the top rack—the blue tarp covering the load, frayed from the constant buffeting wind, and the multitudinous crisscross of rubber cords that held the load in place. No one, she thought, no one in the world, knew where she was at this moment. She hadn’t told Miles she was leaving; she hadn’t told Lizzie she was coming. If the impossible should happen: if Cheesios should call Danielle and say they’d loved Maud’s brief, bizarre, cud-chewing appearance and would she please take the commercial; if her parents should eat bad sushi during the Tokyo symposium and die; if her other agent, Scotty, should suddenly receive the perfect script with the perfect role for her; if Miles discovered he couldn’t live without her; if she herself should decide to join the Navajo nation, or the Hopi tribe, or otherwise disappear into the space between worlds she sometimes thought was the best place for her, could her trail be traced? She’d used cash to buy gas along the road, purchased Diet Cokes, coffee, had spent the night in St. George. She wondered if she could be found on the basis of those stops, and this one, here at Maria’s Trading Post, where she purchased sunflower seeds and spoke in a French accent to a man with a pockmarked face.