News from Heaven (24 page)

Authors: Jennifer Haigh

BOOK: News from Heaven

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But these aren't family photos. They're black-and-white shots taken in and around the high school. She recognizes certain classrooms, the library, the cafeteria, the gym. Yearbook discards, then: unknown teenagers with outdated haircuts. She is halfway through the pile when she spots a familiar face.

Marianne Blinn is laughing into the camera, Marianne in a dark coat and earmuffs, her hair flocked with snow. Joyce stares at the photo a long time. Marianne clearly doesn't mind being photographed. She beams as though the camera were a lover, or simply a very good friend.

Joyce puts the photo aside. Beneath are more shots of Marianne. In her classroom, erasing the blackboard. In the cafeteria, holding a lunch tray. Sitting at her desk before a bulletin board decorated with snowflakes; Joyce picks out the words
Joyeux Noel.

Other shots were taken in summer: Marianne in a tank top and long skirt, astride a bicycle.

Ed's private things.

Breaking her own rule, she opens a second box. This one, too, is sealed with packing tape. Inside is an untouched package of Kodak paper, and Joyce feels a momentary pang: photographic paper was expensive, and they were both children of the Depression. Ed had abhorred waste of any kind.

Beneath the Kodak paper is a slippery stack of plastic envelopes, each filled with amber negatives. At the bottom is a pile of color printsâred-eyes, double exposures, decapitations, the sorts of mistakes that usually ended up in the trash. Why would Ed keep these? she wonders. Why on earth? As she sorts through the pile, she understands. The photos weren't Ed's but Teddy's, taken with his new Instamatic the summer he was thirteen. It was, without question, the happiest time of his life, his weeks at Camp Aspire.

They had driven him there in their old station wagon, a long drive on winding back roads since there wasn'tâstill isn'tâa highway running north to south, an efficient route from Bakerton to western New York. Rebecca had stayed behind with her aunt Dorothy, so Teddy had the entire backseat to himself. He stretched out full-length, surrounded by his prized possessionsâhis Evel Knievel action figures, the toys he hated to leave behind but in a day would forget entirely, distracted utterly by sack races and scavenger hunts, his new friends, his counselor, Zachary, a young medical student he'd idolize the rest of his days.

The camp was just over the state line, a woodsy spot, the small cabins built around a lake. In June and July it was overrun by Girl Scouts, but for three weeks at the end of the summer, it hosted kids with cystic fibrosis. Joyce had learned of the camp from Teddy's doctor. It was, he said, a welcome break for parents: a brief holiday from medical appointments, the daily gauntlet of aerosols and nebulizers, the endless, hopeless work of clearing mucus from the lungs. The kids, too, got a break from overprotective mothers, a chance to make new friends. They were treated to a few weeks of vigorous, lung-clearing activityâswimming, hiking, canoeingâin the fresh mountain air.

Of course, they got more than that. No one realized then that CF kids passed infections between them, that the camp's equipmentâthe shared aerosols and nebulizersâwere a breeding ground for bacteria, resistant strains that flourished in cystic lungs. Teddy came home with pneumonia. He spent the autumn at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, breathing through a respirator, visited daily by his camp counselor Zachary, a second-year resident at Children's.

It rained heavily the morning of the funeral, a cold downpour that soaked her coat in the short walk from car to church. Joyce scarcely remembers the long Mass, the droning eulogyâthose details, mercifully, have been wiped from her memory. She recalls only the procession out of the church, the priest and the altar boys and finally the family following Teddy's small casket. Outside the wind had kicked up, a dizzy spiral of snowflakes. The church steps were edged with white, the first snowfall of the year.

As they stood waiting for the hearse, a tall woman approached Ed and clasped him fiercely. Joyce waited for the usual platitudesâ
He's at peace now. An angel in heaven.
But the woman said none of these things.

Instead, on the steps of the church, she swore bitterly:
Jesus Christ, Ed.
The epithet was oddly beautiful in the low, accented voice of Marianne Blinn.

Joyce stood there awkwardly, watching them. They were nearly the same height. Marianne's cheek was pressed to Ed's. Her eyes, like his, were closed.

That day was like truth itselfâcolder than you expected, and full of surprises. In a year the Blinns would divorce, shocking the town. Dr. Blinn would retire and move to Florida, and Marianne would go back to wherever she'd come from.

But that morning on the church steps, a fine snow swirling the sidewalk, Joyce wasn't thinking of the Blinns. She was remembering Teddy at the window in his pajamas, looking out at the other children sledding, an armada of yellow toboggans shooting down the hill.

I
t is too late in life to open all these boxes.

Joyce reseals them carefully, understandingâtoo lateâwhy Ed had taped them shut: a protective impulse, a kindness to them both. Upstairs the kitchen is filled with a golden light. In another hour, the sun will set.

Where did the time go?

Albert Chura's number is written in Ed's neat cursive on the inside cover of the phone book. Albert's wife answers the phone. “He isn't here right now, Mrs. Hauser. Want me to have him call you back?”

“Darlene,” Joyce says, “would you do me a favor? Give Albert a message from me.”

She is sitting on the front porch when he wheels up on Ed's bicycle. He dismounts carelessly and drops it roughly on the lawn.

Joyce rises. She has rehearsed what she is going to say.
I'm sorry, Albert. I'm not ready to part with it.
He doesn't give her a chance to speak.

“Indian giver,” he says, and she smiles. It is a phrase she remembers from childhood, and for a moment she is grateful to him for easing the tension with a joke.

“What are you laughing at? You should be ashamed of yourself,” he says, his boots loud on the porch steps. “A teacher! And here you are going back on your word.”

He stands too close to her. His face is very red, his breath beery. He wears the alcohol like a subtle cologne, a fruity reek that seems to come from his pores.

“I'm sorry,” she begins.

“A teacher!” he repeats, shaking his head in disgust.

“Ed was a good friend to you.” The words come out more softly than she intends. She is dismayed to hear a tremor in her voice.

“Well, maybe so. But it was a two-way street. I was a good friend to him, too.”

Joyce glances across the street. Betty Bursky's windows are open. She wishes he would lower his voice.

“I was
trustworthy,
” he says. “That's hard to find these days. In them days, too. Hard to find, period, in this town.”

Joyce stares at him.

“I'm not saying Ed owes me anything,” says Albert.

Yes, you are, Joyce thinks. That's exactly what you're saying.

“The way I figure, we ended up even. So.” He nods once, decisively. “Keep your goddamn bike.”

He stomps off muttering and cursing, into the sunset like the hero in a Western. Calmly Joyce watches him go. Ed's bike lies in the grass like an abandoned toy. She lifts it carefully and rolls it toward the garage, one hand on the handlebar, the other on the seat.

I'll walk behind you, keep you steady
.
Just like we did with the kids.

More than anything in life, she wishes she'd let him. That she'd smiled for the camera. That she'd said yes
.
Life was gone before you knew it; how foolish she'd been to refuse any of it. In a couple of months Rebecca would arrive from Paris. They would rise before the neighbors and practice in the driveway, hidden by Ed's birches: fresh cool mornings, dew on the grass. Her daughter would get a kick out of that. It was just the sort of project she'd enjoy.

About the Author

J
ENNIFER
H
AIGH
is the author of four critically acclaimed novels:
Faith
,
The Condition
,
Baker Towers
, winner of the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Fiction, and
Mrs. Kimble
, for which she won the PEN/Hemingway award. Her short stories have been published in many places, including
The Atlantic
,
Granta,
and
The Best Americna Short Stories 2012.
She lives in the Boston area.

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Also by Jennifer Haigh

Mrs. Kimble

Baker Towers

The Condition

Faith

Credits

Cover illustration by Rob Arnold

NEWS FROM HEAVEN
.
Copyright Â© 2013 by Jennifer Haigh. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

These stories have appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “Beast and Bird” in
The Atlantic Monthly
(Kindle edition); “Something Sweet” in
Harvard Review
; “Broken Star” in
Granta
; “A Place in the Sun” in
The Common
; “Thrift” and “What Remains” in
Five Points
; “The Bottom of Things” and “Favorite Son” in
Virginia Quarterly Review
; and “Desiderata” in
One Story.