News from Heaven (12 page)

She is thinking not of his death but of that earlier departure, his disappearance like a magic trick, as dizzying and complete. His manic and determined flight from Bakerton, from the family, from her.

On the one hand, she almost understands it. Family life, on the whole, does not fill her with joy. Her lively daughter delights but also exhausts her, and Teddy keeps her in a nearly constant state of panic: his fevers and infections, his cystic lungs that will never clear. Her sister, more and more, is a like a grown-up child, unwilling or unable to drive a car, maintain the house, or pay her bills on time. And yet Joyce could never leave them, run off to California or to Africa, as her younger siblings have done. Freedom is, to her, unimaginable, as exotic as walking on the moon.

She hears footsteps in the hallway, a knock at the door.

“Can I come in? I need to get something.” It is a woman's voice, low and honeyed. Only then does Joyce notice the Pullman case lying open on the floor.

Joyce sits up quickly. “Of course,” she calls, swiping at her eyes.

Vera Gold opens the door. “Sorry. I need my cigarettes.” She kneels and rifles through the suitcase. “Damn. I thought I had another pack.” She glances up at Joyce. “Oh, honey. Are you okay?”

“This was Sandy's room,” Joyce says, her voice trembling. “He had it to himself after Georgie went overseas. I can barely remember him living here. It seems so long ago.” Why did he leave us? she wants to ask. For God's sake, what did we do?

Vera sits beside her on the bed. A sweet, dirty fragrance—perfume and cigarettes—surrounds her like a cloud. “He was always afraid of missing something. Even in L.A. he got restless. And this place broke his heart.”

The words hit Joyce like a slap. “But
why
? It's home.”

“That's why.”

(
Heart failure
. Her brother's unknown heart.)

“You told Dick Devlin,” she says softly. “What Sandy did. Why on earth would you tell him a thing like that?”

“I'm sorry,” says Vera. “He was Sandy's friend. I didn't know it was a secret.”

“This is a very small town.”

“Sandy told me that. He said everybody knows your business.” Vera looks down at her hands, the collection of gold rings. In the dim light, her face looks smooth as a girl's. “He thought about coming back here to live. I guess he told you that.”

Joyce stares. He told her nothing of the kind.

“It was a fantasy, really. Whenever he got into trouble, he figured he'd always have this place to come back to.” Vera smiles sadly. “He never could have done it, though. He would have felt like a failure. More than anything, he wanted you to be proud of him.” She gets to her feet. At the door she pauses a moment, like an actress making an exit.

“The church today—it was a beautiful service, Joyce. But it isn't what Sandy would have wanted. That wasn't for him. It was for Bakerton, and for you.”

She closes the door behind her. The click of her high heels fades down the stairs.

I
n the kitchen Dorothy is putting away the leftovers. Joyce goes out to the back porch, where a Poblocki twin stands alone, smoking. “Have you seen Georgie?” she asks.

“Vera ran out of cigarettes. He's driving her to the store.”

Joyce walks around to the front of the house. The lawn, she notices, is shaggy. She will ask Ed to run the mower when the guests have gone.

She rounds the corner just in time to see it happen: Vera clomping down the front steps, glancing over her shoulder at George and laughing her throaty laugh. There is a sharp crack like wood splintering, and Vera teeters backward. In a split second she is down.

“Oh, no,” says Joyce, rushing toward her.

George hurries down the steps and kneels at Vera's side.

“My ankle,” she moans. “I think I twisted it.”

“It's broken,” says George, who many years ago was a medic in the war. Gingerly he touches her foot. “See that? That's the bone coming through.”

“Oh, Jesus. I can't look.” Vera lies back against the stairs and hides her face with her hands. Her black dress is rucked up around her thighs. Joyce resists the urge to cover her.

“I'll call an ambulance,” she says.

“No need,” says George. “I can take her.”

“Are you sure?” Ed calls from the porch, where a small crowd has gathered.

They watch as George lifts her into his arms.

J
oyce never sees Vera Gold again. The emergency room doctor confirms that the ankle is broken and admits her overnight. The next morning, her foot in a cast, she flies back to Los Angeles. George Novak takes her to the airport, carrying first Vera, then her suitcase and crutches, up into the tiny plane.

Joyce spends that day as she does many others: first in the car with Teddy, then reading outdated magazines in a doctor's waiting room, then stopping to fill a new prescription. It is dusk by the time she leaves the pharmacy and begins the long drive home. By then Vera Gold seems no more real than a character in a movie, her visit fading like a dream.

A week later a large envelope arrives in the mail. The return address is Santa Monica, California. There is a note on perfumed stationery, in a sweeping, nervous hand:

Dear Joyce,

Here are the papers Sandy left. There wasn't much else, just some clothes and household things. Let me know if you want them. He sold his car years ago and by the end he had nothing.

I guess we will never know what happened. I saw him the day before he died and this will sound strange, but he seemed happy.

I loved him and always will.

—V.

The envelope holds a tan leather wallet—worn and creased, its rawhide stitching coming loose—and a thin sheaf of papers: Sandy's birth certificate, unopened bills, and a pink carbon copy of a completed form, State of California Application for Unemployment Benefits
.
Between the papers are a few slippery photographs—snapshots of Joyce's children, Rebecca and Teddy as infants, as toddlers. Each is marked in Joyce's neat cursive:
Teddy's first birthday. Rebecca Rose Hauser, 22 months.
A photo of her wedding, Joyce and Ed coming out of the church into a shower of rice. On the back, in her own handwriting:
We missed you.

At the bottom of the pile is a typewritten transcript from Bakerton High, listing Sandy's quarterly marks: a string of A's in Algebra and Plane Geometry, D's in everything else.

Why would he have a copy of his transcript? Joyce wonders. Was he going to apply to college? For a moment, from lifelong habit, she hopes fervently for his future. For a single cruel moment she forgets that he is gone.

In the wallet she finds a dollar bill and a business card.

TERRY'S BAIL BONDS—FREE BAIL INFORMATION—

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL—24 HOUR SERVICE IN

HOLLYWOOD AND WEST L.A.

In an inner compartment is the stub of a raffle ticket,
To Benefit Van Nuys–Reseda Little League Grand Prize Color TV.
The drawing took place on October 3, 1974—Sandy's fortieth birthday, the day his body was found.

That's all? she thinks. A whole life, her brother's life, distilled down to this small sad pile. Not a whole life: half a life. The second half he discarded on purpose, the precious years cast to the wind.

The ticket stub is clearly marked:
NOT NECESSARY TO BE PRESENT TO WIN
.

She decides that this is good news.

Thrift

A
gnes has never spent a winter in a trailer. From the window she watches Luke leave for work, his truck roaring down the lane, gouging tracks in the muddy earth. It's a blustery morning in November, the ground slick with wet leaves. A storm overnight knocked the last color from the trees. Now the narrow kitchen feels drafty without him, and smaller, as though its aluminum sides have contracted in the cold.

The coffee is tepid, but she finishes it anyway, then picks at what's left on Luke's plate: a few bites of scrambled egg, a half-eaten slice of toast. She remembers a summer job—thirty years ago? is that possible?—busing tables in a restaurant. How the customers' leftovers disgusted her, contaminated by saliva from strangers' forks.

Once, when her niece was small, Agnes watched her sister share a lollipop with the child, the little girl squealing with delight as she passed the sticky thing from her own mouth to her mother's.

That's unsanitary,
Agnes told her sister.

To which Terri merely shrugged.
She's mine
.

Is it odd that Agnes feels that way about Luke? That his body belongs to her and no part of it displeases her. That she can love his feet and armpits as she loves his eyes, his hands, his groin, his mouth.

She clears the dishes. From the window she sees a strange car make its way up the lane, tires sliding in the muck. The car is small and sporty, a new hatchback. The hunters and fishermen drive Jeeps and pickups. The nearest year-round house is a half mile up the hill.

Then the car stops and her sister steps out—as though, in thinking of the lollipop, Agnes has conjured her from the air. This has happened her whole life where Terri is concerned: simply thinking of her is enough to make the phone ring. Today she wears a long sweater-coat trimmed with fake fur. In stiletto-heeled boots, she picks her way through the mud. The white sweater-coat, a size too small, gapes open at her wide bosom. She is a woman whose clothes never fit properly; she is always dieting or gaining. She clutches the collar with one hand, close at her throat.

Agnes steps back from the window, her bare feet silent on the linoleum. She catches her reflection in the mirror above the sink: pale, shiny face; hair loose and needing a wash. It's her day off from the hospital, and she wears green scrub pants, no bra, an old flannel shirt of Luke's. The shirt is soft from many washings, gentle on her skin.

Terri's boots climb the stairs, sharp and adamant on the porch Luke built. The high, shallow windows have no curtains. Agnes has been meaning to make some. Oh, hell
,
she thinks, crouching low.

Terri knocks at the door. “Agnes? Are you there?”

Agnes holds her breath as the doorknob turns. Every morning Luke kisses her goodbye at the door. That morning, luckily, she remembered to lock it behind him.

“I know you live here. I saw your name on the mailbox.”

Agnes nearly groans. Luke bought adhesive letters at the hardware store and spelled out both names,
GARMAN
and
LUBICKI
. She asked him to leave hers off, but it wasn't practical. Their bills—gas and electric, insurance for Luke's truck and motorcycle—come addressed to her.

“I can't believe you're living in a
trailer.
”

Agnes waits.

“I've been trying to call you, but you don't answer. I'm starting to worry.” There is a long pause. “We missed you at Thanksgiving. The kids miss their aunt Aggie.”

This is a blatant lie. Agnes's niece is a sulky teenager, indifferent to relatives. The little twins might miss the candy she brought, the gifts on their birthday; but her company, itself, was never much of a draw.

“I just want to see you,” Terri warbles. “To make sure you're okay.” Her tone is one Agnes recognizes; it means she is about to cry.

A rustle then, a jangle of keys: Terri rooting around in her pocketbook.

“I found some old photos of you and Mum. Daddy, too. I thought you might want to have them.”

It is just like Terri to entice her with these treasures, all that remains of their dead parents. Shameless. Yet in the silence Agnes feels a pang of longing, exactly as Terri intends her to.

“Fine,” Terri huffs. “Be that way.”

Agnes thinks, Please go away.

“He's using you. Don't say nobody warned you.”

The screen door slams shut. Agnes exhales softly as Terri's boots clomp down the stairs.

Cautiously she approaches the window, just in time to see Terri lose her footing on the path and land gracelessly on her wide behind. Agnes feels a flash of alarm, a wash of tenderness.
Baby fell down.
For a second she wants to burst through the front door and run down the porch stairs, to make sure her baby sister isn't hurt.

The moment, and the urge, pass swiftly. Terri gets to her feet. The sweater-coat is ruined, a blessing, really. She was doing her figure no favors in that coat.

T
erri, Theresa, has always been her baby—twelve years younger, a toddler when Agnes started high school. For the first year of her life, Agnes carried her around like a doll, and Theresa did, in fact resemble the dolls of that era: blond curls and a dimple, chubby hands that clapped and a tiny mouth always pursed for a kiss. She was born pretty and stayed pretty. Unlike Agnes, who was backward, Theresa was bubbly and sociable.
As different as they can be,
their mother often said.
Like apples and turnips.

There was no doubt, ever, which sister was the turnip.

If they'd been closer in age, Agnes might have envied Theresa. Instead she felt nothing but pride that her baby sister did not stutter, did not blush, that she jumped rope with the other girls at noon recess. (Agnes had spent lunchtimes in the school library with a book.) On the playground, the school bus, Theresa was surrounded by girlfriends: a little chubby always, but still the prettiest, a girl everyone loved. Agnes and her mother took turns dressing her. At the dime store they studied the pattern books. They bought sprigged cotton and gingham, cherry pink and sunny yellow. They shared Theresa like well-behaved children. Each day after school, they kept her company at the kitchen table while she had her snack, a slice of homemade cake or pie. Theresa was an excellent mimic, adept at imitating her teachers and schoolmates. Agnes and her mother sat by patiently, waiting to be entertained.

They were two big, strong women, sturdy and plain as Russian peasants. Of the two, Agnes was slightly smaller and softer. She had the comfortable proportions of a woman who'd borne four children, without actually having done so; in fact, she had never been on a date. At that time she worked second shift at the hospital, four to midnight. The other nurses, married with children, groused about the hours, but Agnes didn't mind.

They were happy years: her parents still living, the mines booming, her father sleeping all day, working the night shift—known locally as Hoot Owl—at Baker Eleven. Later, looking back, Agnes wished she had paid more attention, that she had noticed and savored every moment. Her mother would have liked more children, but Nature hadn't cooperated; and as she liked to tell her telephone friends, she wasn't one to complain. After all the miscarriages, she had been blessed with Theresa, a peppy girl with the energy of several, filling the house with life.

Then, in one bewildering year, several things happened. Theresa graduated high school and went on a diet and began calling herself Terri. She started and quit the nurses' training, married a town cop named Andy Carnicella, and moved into her own house behind Mount Carmel, the Italian church in town. And when the dust had settled, Agnes was thirty-one and living with two aging parents, and she understood for the first time that her family were isolated people. Her mother, an only child, had grown up on the Hoeffer farm in the middle of nowhere. Her father's people, the Lubickis, had disapproved of his marriage to Mae: they were Poles, and clannish, and so Mae had never bothered with them. As a result, Agnes had a pile of Lubicki cousins she'd never met. These cousins lived a few miles away, in Fallentree or Moss Creek, but she'd be hard pressed to recognize them in the grocery store.

When Agnes was a girl, this had seemed unimportant. But her mother, as the years passed, was lonely. Before her marriage, during the war, Mae had worked three years in the dress factory; she'd retained a few friends from that time—a Mrs. Miller, a Mrs. Goss, women she kept up with by telephone. For most of her married life, Mae left the house only for church on Sundays. While Agnes or her father did the grocery shopping, Mae stayed home to work in the garden; to sew the family's clothes; to bake bread and pies; to put up quarts of vegetables and homemade preserves. Always she cooked enough for a crowd, even after Theresa left and she had only a single overfed daughter and a lean, fussy husband who ate like a bird. They lived in a newish house on the edge of town, a pleasant split-level with a large backyard, and yet Mae labored like a farm wife with a dozen children. Agnes was an adult before she understood that this was work that didn't need to be done, that her mother was simply desperate to fill the days.

Sometimes, her other chores finished, Mae would get down on her knees and scrub the garage floor with a brush.

She had never been a beauty—in the eyes of the town, an unlikely bride for John Lubicki, who as a young man had been handsome as a film star. He'd come back from the war determined to marry, a decision made while marching across Belgium sick with pneumonia. What, in that faraway place, made him think of Mae Hoeffer? In school she'd been two grades ahead; she had never been his sweetheart, or anyone else's. When the war ended, handsome John Lubicki had his pick of the Bakerton girls, and he chose her.

It had been pointed out—though not to Mae's face—that the Lubickis were dirt-poor, and Mae would inherit the Hoeffer farm. In marrying her, John had shown some initiative. The more charitable of the town gossips called it
a practical choice.

I
n the afternoon the rain stops. Agnes pulls on her boots and walks down the muddy lane to the road. Deer Run is high and winding, overlooking a deep valley. The abandoned coal mine looms in the distance, the rusted tipple of the old Baker Twelve. Years ago, PennDOT resurfaced Deer Run every year, for the hundreds of miners who drove it each day to work. Now the road is poorly maintained, the asphalt crumbling in places. Moving here was Luke's idea. On Deer Run they'd have no prying neighbors. Their trailer is invisible from the road.

Agnes climbs the hill to the mailbox, one of several mounted on an old railroad tie. The other mailboxes are unused, unlabeled—relics from an earlier time, when the property was covered with trailers. Five years ago a strip-mining company, Keystone Surface, descended on Saxon Mountain, peeling back the trees and vegetation and extracting what coal they could. They brought their own trailers and stayed just a year, but you can still see the imprints they left behind, rectangular depressions in the bare earth. Luke and Agnes's trailer is the only one left; they rent it from a man named Jay Wenturine, whom Luke calls
my old buddy.
Luke speaks often of his
old buddies,
boyhood friends he's tracked down since returning to town. He was a teenager when his father was laid off and moved the family to Maryland. Luke reappeared in Bakerton ten months ago and met Agnes soon after. In that time she's met no
old buddies
except Jay Wenturine, who stops by the trailer on the first of each month.

In the mailbox she finds a phone bill addressed to her, a sale flyer from the grocery store. Behind them, wedged at the back of the box, is a slender packet of photographs.

I thought you might want to have them.

Greedily she shoves the envelope into her pocket. She walks fast and sticks close to the road. It's the first week of buck season, and the woods ring with gunshot. She should have worn Luke's orange jacket.

Back inside, she opens the packet. The first photo makes her throat ache. Agnes and her mother at the kitchen table, rolling dough for noodles. They sit shoulder to shoulder, Agnes in an old sweatshirt, Mae in one of her flowered housedresses. Their large hands are crusted with flour. They wear the same shy smile.

The next photos are from Terri's wedding, a day Agnes has no particular interest in reliving. It's disorienting to see her mother in the dress Terri chose for her, a pale blue sack covered with a tent of sheer lace. She is bigger than Agnes remembers, and Dad looks smaller. His tuxedo is a size too large. Terri stands between them in her frilly white dress and picture hat, which was the style at the time. Agnes herself lurks at the edge of the photo, in her nursing smock and slacks. That day, as always, she worked the second shift, though she could have swapped with someone if she'd wanted. She hadn't wanted. She was glad to skip the reception at the church hall, to which Terri had invited two hundred guests: Andy Carnicella's large family, plus half her graduating class from Bakerton High. For bridesmaids, she'd chosen four friends from high school.
I didn't think you'd want to,
she'd explained to Agnes.
Getting dressed up and all. I know you don't like to make a fuss.

Certainly this was true. She'd have been mortified to stand at the altar alongside the others, who, even young and slender, looked ridiculous in their shiny dresses, with puffed sleeves and a bow on each hip. Still, she'd have liked to be asked.

Agnes shuffles quickly through the photos. Each one sets a fire in her, sharp bright bursts like Fourth of July sparklers: a crackle, a smolder, a lingering trace.

The last photo is of her parents, younger than she has ever imagined them being: her father in uniform, his pompadour glistening with Brylcreem; her mother thinner then, a big raw-boned girl tightly corseted, her hair crimped into precise curls. They sit at a table littered with empty glasses; behind them, couples are dancing. On the back of the photo is a handwritten date:
June 1, 1946.
In six months they would be married. In two years he'd run the Hoeffer farm into the ground.