Road to Paradise (22 page)

“It’s not a journal, it’s a planner,” I said, extremely defensively.

“Oh. Right. Well, aside from the subject matter of your so-called planner, one thing in it struck me as funny.” She paused a moment for emphasis. “You know we can’t go on I-80. So what the heck are you wasting your ink on?”

We weren’t despicable. What these two days of sleep and revelry had allowed us was an escape from the important things, an escape, a denial of decisions, a refusal to make choices, to decide to take a different road, to plan Candy, to discuss. I clung on to my earlier positions like a vine out of quicksand. All pointless and pointed disquisition ended at the blackjack table. Time stopped. And even now, when we knew we needed to decide one thing, one day, one morning, one turn in the right direction, we were too tired to talk. Barely undressing, we climbed into bed; Candy lay next to Gina for a while, then got up and crawled into bed with me. “I figure it’s only fair,” she said, giving me a little nudge in the ribs. “You don’t want Gina having me all to herself, do you?”

I said nothing. The curtains were open. Gina was already in twilight, sleep-muttering. Candy and I stretched out with our arms above our heads and stared at the ceiling.

“Forget the Interstate, Shel,” Candy said. “No more Interstate for us.”

For us. “Okay.” I lay next to her thinking regretfully of the twenty minutes of hard planning I had just done. “Does luck sometimes run out?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Other people’s luck certainly does.”

“Does yours?”

“Sometimes. But you know, I don’t believe much in luck, except
at the gambling tables, and I don’t have much to lose. I’m not afraid,” she said. “That’s the only difference. You’re afraid.”

“Sometimes you can be plenty brave and lose anyway.”

“Sure. But I don’t care. That’s the beauty of it.”

We lay.

“You must care about some things,” I said.

“Desperately,” said Candy, turning on her side to me. “The things I’m afraid to lose.”

“That man … Erv … Candy, you didn’t really mean what you said about him, did you?” The night was too quiet to say the awful words out loud. That he wanted to kill her.
She took something of
mine that I need back
. I lived in suburban Larchmont, not the Beirut war zone. I didn’t know about these things.

“Tomorrow,” Candy said, by way of answer, “we should drive up to Dubuque.”

“Why? More casinos?” I said nothing about her coming with us, as if, of all the things to decide, that was no longer even on the table. What happened to
I’m going to let you off at the next Interstate
junction?
Once Interstate was removed from the equation, easing her out of my car was also removed from the equation.

“Hah. No. But U.S. 20 runs through there.”

“Is that north or south of here?”

“North.”

“Candy, why would I be going north? I have to head west!”

“U.S. 20 runs through Dubuque.”

“Um, is that somewhere we want to be?”

“Oh, yes. U.S. 20 isn’t the Interstate, but runs near clear across the country. I think it will bring us to Reno.”

“Reno?” I lowered my voice. “Reno,
Nevada
? Are you crazy? Candy, what does Reno have to do with California? And do you expect me to
take
you to Reno?”

“If you get me to Reno,” she said, “I’ll be fine from there. There’s a chick there, a friend of mine, who owes me a solid. She’ll help me.”

“She owes you a
solid
? How would you know anybody in Reno?”

“I know people all over.”

“No kidding. But come on, why can’t we just stay on I-80?”

She sighed. “Shel, up near Dubuque, maybe sixty miles from here, lives my old man. I’d really like to go visit him.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Please help me out. I haven’t seen him in years.”

I still didn’t say anything. I wanted to ask and didn’t know how to: are we visiting or are we … dropping off? But what’s worse, I didn’t know which answer I wanted. I stared at her in the dark, her peculiar punky hair, her slowly blinking brown gaze, her bare shoulder sticking up from the sheet.

“There’s something I need to leave with him,” she said.

“Is it the something you took from Erv?” I whispered.

She sucked in her breath. “What do you know about that?”

“Nothing. Just what he told me.” I waited. “Well?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Oh no. Score two for Erv. Was this worrying, his record of accuracy? Yes. Yes, it was. What if everything he had told me was true? What if this girl
had
run away and left her mother broken? What if he would not stop until he found her? The pit in my stomach got darker.

“Does your dad have money?” I asked. “Maybe you can borrow some.”

“Dad’s broker than me,” said Candy. “So no. Besides, we have a little money.” She smiled in the night. “A few hundred bucks.”

“Well, all right,” I said. “We’ll go. He
is
your father.” I would’ve liked to visit my father. I would’ve come to Iowa to see him. I wondered if he had been like Emma, being her brother and all. Jed Sloane. Had he been stalwart? Had he been true? “What’s your dad’s name?”

“Estevan,” Candy replied. “Estevan Rio.”

“Huh. Not Cane?”

“No, not Cane.”

We lay quiet.

“You think I’m going to find my mom, Candy?” I whispered. I
don’t know why I was asking her these things, and worse, I didn’t know why I expected her to have any answers.
Say hi to Shelby.
Mendocino, California
.

“No, sweetie-girl,” she whispered back. “I don’t.”

She took my hand in the dark, and her mouth moved silently, as if in prayer, and we lay there on our sides, our hands under our cheeks, until we fell asleep.

The next morning Candy was up before us. Washed and dressed, she sat quietly in the chair, waiting for us to stir. She wasn’t completely ready: her makeup wasn’t on. When we were ready to check out, I looked at her still motionless in the chair. “You gonna put your face on?”

“Not today,” she replied. Her piercings were out, even the tongue ring; she had on no jewelry, no hair gel. I’d never seen her eyes so bare, without heavy liner, thick mascara. She looked like a different person. Her hair was clean, streaks of pink sad and down; her cheeks pale, her skin opalescent, blemished only by wearing too much makeup and never washing it off.

When Gina found out we were going to visit Candy’s father, she laughed. “Nice face, Cand, but what are you going to do about the tattoos?”

“Hide them.”

And to me, in the hallway, Gina said, expectantly, “We’re dropping her off at her old man’s, I hope?”

“Dunno.” I didn’t want to say more, which was: don’t think so. Or even: hope not.

Candy was unusually subdued during breakfast, not chirpy at all. I wanted to believe that the events between St. Louis and Isle of Capri would take the chirp out of white-throated sparrows, but
she had just spent two days on the gambling boat feistier than a single gal on ladies night.

Yesterday she had asked to borrow a pair of my jeans and one of my T-shirts. She herself, I guess, had nothing to wear for a visit with her father. My jeans were too big on her, my T-shirt too long. She was a little shorter than me and thinner. I didn’t realize how much thinner until I saw her in my clothes. I began to reconsider my bagel with cream cheese and my second helping of eggs and bacon. And I’m a runner—was a runner. It’s not like, in the words of Woody Allen, I had fat dripping off my body like hot fudge off a sundae. Thinking about running made me feel bad, as if the different parts of my life that had been most important to me, had defined who I was for many years, were being washed away with the tide like seashells.

This morning I tried to interpret her quiet face. I liked Candy’s eyes without makeup. They were real. She had something going on beyond the façade of her usually madly black-lined eyes. I’ll admit it disconcerted me to see her in my running shirt. “NY State Champion, 1981, 2-mile.” The waitress came to pour us a little more coffee and said to Candy, “You were the New York State Champion in the two-mile?”

“Huh?” said Candy, who had obviously put on the T-shirt without so much as glancing at it. “Not my shirt.” She pointed to me. “Her shirt.”

The waitress looked at me questioningly. I shrugged. “9:52.”

“Is that fast? I don’t know.”

“Good enough for a record,” said Candy, which I found amusing—her defending me when two seconds earlier she didn’t even know I had ever run, or won.

Now it was the waitress’s turn to shrug. “Are you really the state champ?” asked Candy after the server ambled away.

I nodded.

“How come you’re so casual about it?”

“You have to put the thing in perspective,” I said. “The running is the thing. That’s everything. The winning is … I can’t explain. Nice. But temporary. And ultimately, meaningless.”

“Why do you say meaningless?” asked Gina. “You were the pride of our whole high school. I’ve never won anything in my life.”

I wanted to say that Gina had won some things in her life, but didn’t. “Well, you don’t run,” I said. “But if you played the piano, it’d be the piano playing that was the important thing. Look,” I said when I saw Candy and Gina’s uncomprehending faces. “It’s like this. The year before, in 1980, the girl who won ran the two-mile in 9:42. In 1981 she had an appendectomy.”

“And didn’t run?”

“Oh, no, she ran. Just ran it in 9:58. And that’s with fifteen stitches in her stomach. I got lucky, that’s all.”

“Come on, Sloane,” said Gina. “You’re going to a very good college because of that championship.”

“Well, that’s true,” I agreed, looking sheepishly into my cup.

“That’s not so meaningless,” said Candy. “You go to college, get a degree, a good job, all because you ran that one race. That’s not temporary. Nine minutes and fifty-two seconds equals all future roads.”

“Well, that could be true,” I admitted.

“Is it a good college?”

I demurred. “Pretty good.”

“You could say, pretty good,” said Gina, poking at her cold bacon. “She’s going to Harvard.” She said it without looking at me, but then looked up with a tight smile. “It’s really great.” She had been accepted to State University of New York in Geneseo for teaching.

“On a track scholarship,” I said apologetically, in four words demeaning myself, Harvard, track, scholarships, and prepositions.

I don’t think Gina deemed it fair I got a full scholarship just because I moved my feet quickly from point A to point B. Now, if I had counted some numbers at sonic speed, or combined gold and nickel and made a new alloy, or perhaps created a paramecium out of nitrogen gas, or wrote a poem,
that
might be fair. But moving fast didn’t seem to fall into the same category of stellar achievement. I don’t know for sure that Gina felt this way. But I know
I
felt this way. Therefore, slightly ashamed of my own good luck because of someone’s ruptured appendix, I kept mostly quiet about my college choice. Though I will admit, I was going to find my mother so I could tell her these things about me, including what college I was going to, because I thought she might be proud. Thinking about my mother made me think about what Candy had said to me last night, and I started to feel bad, and pushed my coffee away.

Candy was blankly silent. “Is Harvard a good school?”

I laughed. “That’s
exactly
what I’m talking about,” I said to Gina, getting up. “Come on, let’s get going.”

Gina stood from the table. “Shelby got real lucky,” she said. “But sometimes luck does run out, don’t you think, Candy? I read in the paper that five upstate New York girls were all killed in a car wreck, less than a week after graduating from high school.”

“That’s not luck,” said Candy. “That’s destiny. You best pray it’s not yours.”

We were on the open road away from the Quad Cities by 9:30. The road was a rolling highway between Iowa farms and corn fields, the day was gray. There were no trucks, no cars, sky to the earth was empty, and up and down we went, like on a rollercoaster, flying along, the view and the silos forever.

After we’d gone about sixty miles, Candy asked me to slow down and peered at the road signs. Making a left, we drove up and around a winding road where the Iowa vistas disappeared; what was left was tall pines and shady canopies. It didn’t seem like Iowa at all, no fields till the horizon, but forested and woodsy, like Maine, where I’d been once with Emma. I wanted to ask if her father was a farmer, but didn’t. Everything was very still and there were no other cars on the road. We passed a small cemetery on the left, and up ahead on the hill, partially covered by trees, stood a brilliant snowy stone building, like a historic school, or a museum from the Middle Ages. Solemn, it stood like a beacon and Gina said, “What is that?”

“That’s the New Melleray Abbey. Make a right here. On Melleray Way.”

“New Melleray?” I said. “Does that mean there’s an even older Melleray?”

“Yes, Mount Melleray Abbey in Ireland,” replied Candy as if she knew about these things.

We drove through the pristine green grounds and tall pines. There were benches under the trees near a statue of the Holy Mother. The large light building stood silent, as if deserted.

“We’re going to the abbey?” I asked.

Candy nodded.

“Why?”

“Because my father lives here.”

“Your father
lives
in the abbey?” Gina said, while I attempted not to crash into the statue of the Holy Mother.

“Careful,” said Candy. “Don’t drive like a maniac.”

“Why does your father live in an abbey?” Gina asked.

“Because he’s a Trappist monk.”

“Your father is a
monk
?” I had stopped the car in the empty parking lot—more like screeched to a diagonal stop. When I spun around to look at Candy, I took my foot off the brake, and my Mustang pitched forward and went over the curb onto the grass.

“Shelby! Please.”

Brake slammed on, car reversed, gingerly parked, ignition off, I turned to Candy. “Your father is a
monk
,” I repeated.

“Why is that surprising?” she asked, frowning. “Do you
know
my father?”

“Uh—no,” I said cleverly. But, I wanted to add, I know
you
. “You don’t seem like a …” How to put it mildly? “… a monk’s daughter.”

“I did not choose who I was born to,” she said. “When he was in college, he went looking for answers. First he had a thing with my mother, then he petitioned the Formation Council about joining the Cistercian order.”

“Not because of your mother, I hope,” I said.

“Your mother went to college?” Gina asked disbelievingly.

Candy squinted from the back. “Do you know my mother, Gina? Shel, open the windows, we’re gonna die in here.”

We rolled down the windows. No one was getting out of the car.

“So your mother went to college?”

“She cleaned the humanities building.”

“Your father is a monk?” exclaimed Gina, as if just hearing it. “Oh my God.”

“Shh.” Candy crossed herself.

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“Shh!”

“Candy,” Gina asked, “does your father know the kinds of things you’ve been up to?”

“Gina,
you
have no idea what I’ve been up to,” said Candy.

We sat. “So what do we do now?” I asked. “Wait for you?”

“No. We leave the car, go inside. Ask for him.” She paused. “But look, just so you know—they don’t care what you do outside these walls. Really. So don’t have that worried face on, because then for sure, the brothers will think you were up to no good, you look so guilty. And because you are guests, announced or unannounced, they will welcome you. That’s their way. But please—respect their rituals. Do not talk inside the church or the cloister. Do not say, ‘Oh God,’ as often as you take a breath. Don’t laugh.”

Gina rolled her eyes.

We left the car and went inside, Gina and I
extremely
reluctantly. There was no one around to ask for Candy’s father. We wandered through a small unattended bookstore (“Aren’t they afraid someone is going to steal stuff?” asked Gina, and Candy replied, “In a
monastery
?”) through a room full of urns and caskets (!), through a stone hall, opening and closing heavy solid wood doors, and finally found our way into what Candy whispered to me was the tabernacle.

“Is that a place of worship?” I whispered back.

“Yes!”

It was a long narrow hall, plain and rectangular, built in stone and wood, with ceilings tall like Ponderosa pines. The oak pews were in the back, where we sank down under stark shadows. The church was filled with light, streaming through the clear glass of the stone arched windows. A long way in front of us stood twenty white-robed monks in two straight lines on opposite sides of the
church, in stalls, chanting a monophonic song. I thought at first it wasn’t in English because there was not one word of it I understood. But then something plain filtered through, like the wiping away of snow on the windows and glimpsing beyond.
My soul waits
, they sang.
I wait
.
My soul waits for the Lord
…

Their somber voices filled the church.
I wait in hope for the Lord
…
in his word do I hope
…

We had come at the tail end; barely minutes later it was over. They crossed themselves, and filed out, leaving the place in echoing silence, almost as if the semitones of their last hymnic notes still lingered in the wooden beams, reflecting off the glass windows.

“Which one was he?” I whispered.

“Shh,” Candy said. “Don’t talk inside the church.”

I was as quiet as can be. I told her so.

“What, you think God can’t hear you?” she said.

Gina had been rendered mute by all this, not out of reverence but out of critical astonishment. I, on the other hand, especially after hearing that mystical singing, felt as if I had been walking in mud and then accidentally stepped into an alluvial deposit. It was still mud, and I couldn’t for the life of me get my feet out of the morass, but underneath, in the wet slickness, I felt there was something gilded this girl was showing me with her extreme life that was out of my existence, beyond my understanding, and almost out of my reach.

“I’d never been inside a church, you know.”

Candy looked at me with the kind of incredulous expression we must have been bestowing upon her these last days for not knowing the words to Blondie and Andy Gibb.

“What service was that?” I asked. “I didn’t know they had services in the middle of the day.”

“They have services all day long,” Candy replied. “Seven separate services of the Divine Office, not including Mass at seven a.m. That one was sext. The noon service.”

“What was the song they sang?”

Candy stared at me. “Um, Psalm 130,” she replied slowly. Much the way we had said,
um, Baby, Come Back
.

“So you do know some songs?” Gina smiled.

“Yes,” said Candy. “Psalms, the songs to God.”

We loitered in the store. Eventually but suddenly a monk appeared, as if out of thin air. One moment there was no one near, the next, he, in his white tunic and black apron was walking past, his hands folded together. He looked at us and said nothing. “Hello, Brother Placid,” said Candy. “Can you please tell my father I’m here?”

Brother Placid, a short squat man, observed her pink hair without reaction, cocked his head, nodded slightly, and poof was gone. His shoes, his robes made no sound, not even an echo off the walls. We walked outside into the square stone deck with benches and waited there. It was quiet outside; the air smelled of pines, and we didn’t speak. Finally, the tall, narrow, solid oak door opened, and out came a tall narrow man who looked like solid oak himself, with gray hair and glasses. He was clean shaven, blue-eyed, grave. He wore a white robe and a sleeveless black tunic over it. He came out, stood still, and Candy got up off the bench, stood still also.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Hello, Grace,” said the man she had called Estevan Rio.

Grace
? I whispered sideways to her, as if in tranquiloquy.

“These are my friends,” Candy said. “Shelby and Gina.”

Estevan Rio nodded without expression. “Your friends are always welcome here.”

They walked away from us then, down the steps and across the garden.

“She’s using the term
friends
loosely,” whispered Gina.

Was she? “Shh.” I stepped away from her.
Grace
?

The grounds around the abbey were vast and Gina and I would every once in a while glimpse Candy and her father on
the meandering paths, beyond the trees, behind the statues. Gina said she was hungry.

“Okeydoke. Thanks for letting me know,” I said.

“How long is she going to stay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Five minutes? Five days?”

“I
don’t
know!” I sounded churlish and silly.

“You think they’ll feed us?”

“Candy did say they receive guests. They’ll probably feed us.”

“But when?”

“Man does not live by bread alone,” said a male voice behind us, and as we turned around, a monk walked by, bowing his head slightly. He had a bemused, exasperated expression on his face, as if he had seen the likes of us many times and didn’t know why the likes of us continued coming. He said he was Brother Benedict Babor; could he help us? We explained that we were waiting for our friend, the daughter of Brother Estevan; could we walk the grounds in the meantime?

He waved his hand, curlyQ in the air, meaning, go, do what you like, just don’t shout, you spoiled children. “Of course,” he said. “All are welcome here.”

So we walked the grounds, our conversation stilted. We expressed surprise at the gust of wind that had blown us into an abbey. “Can you imagine, Sloane,
you
in an abbey?”

I was offended for my own agnosticism. “Well, perhaps I would’ve gone to one, but there weren’t any abbeys in Larchmont,” I said, huffing.

“How do you know? Have you looked?”

What an odd question. “Have
you
?”

“I’ve been to the Ashram many times,” Gina said loftily. “Same difference.”

“Is it the same difference? And what does that mean, same difference? Are they the same? Or different? Or it doesn’t matter?”

Pointing to me, Gina said, “Now you got it.” She wiped her perspiring face. “For God’s sake, are they
ever
coming back?”

Out of nowhere, footsteps behind us made their own shuffling noise, and a male voice said, “Children, respect the premises. Don’t blaspheme on our grounds. We don’t pray in your nightclubs, do we?” It was Brother Benedict Babor again.

Chastened, intimidated by his robes and authority, I clammed up. Gina whispered, “Why is he following us?” We turned around. He was gone.

Unnerved by the magical realism of his effective transformations, we hastened our step and walked back inside the abbey. For some reason it seemed safer to me. Not talking also seemed safer. “Maybe she isn’t coming back?” Gina ventured after half an hour had passed. “Let’s go. What’s she gonna do? She’s in a monastery. She’ll be fine.”

“Gina …”

“What, you don’t think she’ll be fine
here
?”

Before I could say that I didn’t think I’d be fine, Gina announced she was bored. And hungry. She wanted to go—now. “It’ll take us a while to find a McDonald’s.”

“Let’s go inside the church,” I said. “Another service might be beginning.” I wanted to hear the singing again.

“Are you out of your mind? I’ll go crazy if I stay
outside
another minute, and you want to go
inside
?”

“Just to note,” I said, “I don’t remember you rushing me along out of the casino—for two days straight.”

“Why would I?” she said as if she had no idea what on earth I was talking about. “The casino was fantastic and fun. This is slow death.”

I looked at her as if I had no idea what on earth she was talking about. Throwing up her hands, she stormed outside to the car. “Don’t stay in the car, Gina,” I called after her. “You’ll suffocate. It’s so hot. At least crank open the windows.”

She waved me off the way I used to wave Emma off. I sighed.

There was no one inside, and though I peeked in one of the corridors, I got nervous. What if I wasn’t allowed to walk here, look here?

I went in to the casket room. The Melleray monks supported themselves by making pine and walnut caskets out of indigenous wood. The three they had on display looked well made.

I knew I was allowed inside the chapel, so that’s where I went, tiptoeing, not wanting to make a sound, holding my breath, clutching my purse so the keys wouldn’t jangle. I sat in the back again, resting my hands on the wooden pew in front of me.

I was the only one inside. I guess it wasn’t time for songs.

I sat and waited.

What was I waiting for? I wasn’t sure. What was I feeling? A little like a dry sponge onto which warm water was dripping. At the Isle of Capri, I had been bone dry for two days.