Road to Paradise (50 page)

“What?”

“Shelby, Gina didn’t come with you on your journey because of Eddie. She came with you because of you. She came to escape her life. Think how many times she didn’t mind staying longer, lingering a few days here, a few days there. She got in the car with you, into the covered wagon to go west, because she too was looking for the summer, all the while hoping it was not with Eddie. Despite what you think, when that thing happened with you and him, it showed her what kind of boy Eddie was, what kind of husband he’d make. Her faith in him was gone. He was just an excuse to leave. As it was, you told me her mother barely let her go, even with you. How many times has Gina called her mother?” Candy paused. “Once, by my count, to ask for money. And she wasn’t even there.” She shook her head. “The worst thing that can happen to Gina is if we pay Eddie to come to Reno to help us. Unless,” the girl said—and this is where her skepticism kicked
in again— “unless you already suspect all this, and the idea was always for you and Eddie to go to Paradise together—and alone.” She raised her eyebrows, in the darkened cab.

Rolling my eyes, I told her how silly she was, and turned away to the window, my heart aching with longing, briefly but viscerally imagining the sunny days in California, just me and Eddie in his beat-up truck with bare rims, no AC, just the hot wind from the orange groves, us together, me and him, going to find Tara, to save Tara’s mother.

In the room, Candy drew the shades. I had a shower to rinse the wine from my pores. It didn’t help. We got into bed, turned off the lights. I lay facing the window, thinking about Gina, while she lay facing the wall, her back to me. She said, “Shelby, I’m sorry. Gina is not going to help you help me. She is not going to leave here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now, you have a choice, Shelby. You can help me get my baby. Or you can leave tomorrow morning and drive to Mendocino. You have a thousand dollars. That’s what you’re up against. Or you can forget your mother, for the time being; there will be another time to find her. Go back home, and pack for Harvard. I hear it’s a good school. You don’t have much time. Summer is soon over.”

“I’m not leaving here without Gina,” I said firmly. “Her mother will
kill
me. She only let her go because she thought her baby girl would be safe with me.”

“She
was
safe with you. But she’s not a child. She’s not my Tara. She was safe until she found her life. Now she’s got to work to put it all together. And you have to work to put your things together.”

“I don’t have my things,” I said into the pillow. “I have
your
things. I have Gina’s things. That’s what I got.”

“Shelby Sloane,” Candy whispered, “I have been abandoned by all the people I thought were my friends. I have surrounded
myself with those who hate me, who want to hurt me, who have betrayed me. My father is my rock, but unless I become a man and a monk, he cannot help me with my life. You are the only one who has not abandoned me. Please. Don’t leave me now. All I want is my girl,” she said in a bare tingle of a voice. “She’s all I got. Her and you.”

“God, Candy, don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

“How can I help you?” I said. “Look what we just went through. You have a black eye; the guy who gave you money took it away, and then beat you up.”

“I know. It’s not always easy, living.”

“I wish it were
sometimes
easy. Just once. Because I’m out of tricks.”

She turned to me, sidled up behind me. Her hand caressed my shoulder, her breath was in my neck. She kissed the back of my damp head. “Shelby … please. Help me.”

I closed my eyes. “What do you want me to do?” I said.

“Go get my baby.”

“We talked about this …”

“Not you and Eddie. Just you.”

“Without Gina?” Why did I say it so shocked?

“Sloane, Gina is not leaving Reno. Get it through your head. It took her a whole country, and a hundred towns, but she’s found her life. Reno is calling to her. She’s not leaving.”

“You want me to go to Paradise
alone
?” I gasped, seeing nothing but Erv’s wild eyes across the Roy Rogers table, telling me
I will
not stop until I find her. You get what I’m saying to you
?

“I’ll wait for you two right here,” she said.

“Candy, no.”

“I’ll give you a picture of me and a letter to give to her.”

“Does a five-year-old read?”

Her arm went around me. “Mike said she learned to read when she was four. She’s very smart, Tara. Much smarter than me or Mike. Show her my picture. Give her my letter. Tell her I’m waiting for
her. Tell her we’re going to start a new life together. I’ve been telling her that I would come for her. Tell her I’ve come, the time is now.”

“And I’m supposed to get there how?”

“We’ll rent you a car.”

First I laughed. Then I cried. She was so earnest, so serious. She had lived much, was old before her time, yet she didn’t know the first thing about the practical world, about how it worked. She was like me, asking Emma if the motels gave you towels and shampoo. Her hand still caressed me. “Candy,” I said. “I’m eighteen years old.
Eighteen
. No one rents cars to eighteen-year-olds. I don’t have a credit card. No one rents cars to eighteen-year-olds without a credit card. You’re just … I can’t speak about this. I’m telling you, this is doomed.”

“Don’t say that. If this is doomed, then I’m doomed.”

I swallowed. “Let’s go in my car.”

“We can’t.”

I turned to her. In the dark room, I felt all alone, overwhelmed by both fear and longing.

“Ours is a God who does wonders,” Candy whispered. “All you have to do is ask Him in faith.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” she said. “He does not always give you what you want, but He always hears your prayer.”

“Does he?”

“Yes. Did I ever tell you the story of the miracle at the fourteenth station?”

“No.”

“No prayer asked at the fourteenth station ever goes unanswered,” she said.

“What is this fourteenth station? I’ve never heard of it.”

“You’ve never heard of Christ’s fourteen stations?”

“No.”

“And you make fun of me for not having watched ‘The Brady Bunch.’” She smiled disbelievingly. “You’ll have to learn the first thirteen, otherwise what’s the point?”

“I don’t know. What
is
the point?”

Reaching out she touched the strands of blighted hair in front of my blighted eyes. “Help me,” she whispered.

“Help
me
,” I whispered.

“He’s not here,” she said, “the man to give you a thousand dollars for touching me. There’s no one watching this time,” said Candy.

“I know,” I said, drawing her near, drawing myself nearer to her. My hands intertwined on her back. Her soft skin pressed in the night against my skin. She was so warm. We lay on our sides, face to face, breasts to breasts.

In the deep of night, the lights out, her smell on me, her hands on me, her bleached hair rubbing against my arm, I thought she was asleep. I was staring at her intensely, trying to catch the contours of her shoulder, her elbow, her mouth, and then I saw her doe eyes blink at me.

I didn’t know what to say. She spoke first.

“So,” she said, “do you know any lullabies?”

“What? Oh. I don’t know. Maybe one or two.”

“Can you sing me one? Any one.”

I thought of what I knew. Admittedly, not many but I knew one for sure. “Hush Little Baby,” I said.

“How does it go?”

“
Hush little baby don’t you cry
…”

When I finished, she said it was pretty. “How do you know it?”

“I think,” I whispered, “Emma sang it to me …”

We lay in the bed, a breath apart. Everything was dark and quiet. The air conditioner creaked and hummed.

“Shelby,” she whispered, “you’re a lovely girl.”

“Candy,” I whispered back, “
you’re
a lovely girl.”

“You know,” she said, “my whole life, when I’ve been with another person, I’ve thought of other things. I count, or knit in my head. Mostly I sing Psalm 69; want to hear it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“
Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul
…” she began to sing, and broke off. “But I don’t feel much like it tonight. When I was with Mike, I was so young. We were just fumbling through it, and then I got knocked up, and was sent away for a while till I had my baby. Being with someone, it’s never been that good. Has it been for you?”

“Well, I haven’t had your wealth of experience,” I said. “But Eddie was good.”

“Really?”

“Really.” So sad and sick to think now, how the waters of him had flooded into my soul.

“Maybe that’s what it is, then,” Candy said. “Maybe that’s why you can’t let him go.”

“I
can
let him go,” I lied, I denied. “Don’t have much choice, do I?”

She ran her hand along my stomach. “You’re sweet,” she whispered. “Soft.”

“You, too.” I closed my eyes.

“Oh, Shel,” I heard her say. “What are we going to do?”

When I turned to her she was staring profoundly at me in the dark. “Nothing. What can we do?” I paused. “What are you talking about?”

“Ahh.” She waved her hand away and fell quiet. “Talking ’bout everything, I guess.”

I waited. I couldn’t get my breath back to reply, this close, sealed up, locked like this into another human being. I was on my back, she on her side next to me.

“I’ll do anything to help you,” I said. Finally. One true thing.

“You know,” she said, “when I first came to Huntington, I used to hang out by the river with my friends, but sometimes I’d go there alone, sit in the sand and look across. The Ohio is so wide in Huntington, it’s like a sea, and beyond the river is another state, another life. I used to sit and dream of what that other life might be like, would be like. If I crossed the river, and went far
away, where would I go? I dreamed of Australia, because it was across the banks of the Ohio.”

“Most things are across the river,” I pointed out. “But why Australia?”

“It was the farthest in the world I could go and still be on this earth,” she replied. “It had an ocean, sun, exotic fish.”

“Yeah, sharks.”

“I dreamed of nothing else, because it was so impossible, yet so desperately desired. In pity for myself, I’d sit and sing …
I asked
my love, to take a walk, to take a walk, a little walk, down by the
sides, where waters flow, down by the banks of the Ohio
…” Her lips kissed my arm, my shoulder. “Except for my dad, no one ever cared for me like you,” she whispered.

“I told you, I’ll do what you want,” I said, my voice breaking. “What do you want me to do?”

“Go get my girl,” she pleaded. “And then the three of us will find a place. We’ll find a place to live. You know I need you to take care of things. And you need me to make money. We’ll get jobs, a little apartment. And my baby will be with us. We’ll go someplace where the houses have flowers in every yard and a church on every corner. We’ll take her away from her horrible life, and me from my horrible life. We’ll putter, and work, go to the bookstores, out to eat, and to church on Sunday. And I won’t be alone. Nor Tara. Nor you.”

For a long time I didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak. Her fingers continued to caress my stomach.

“Candy, are you … serious?”

“Guess not,” she replied, her voice fallen. Her hand fell too, lay flat on me.

But there was a moment between her dream and my question, in that silence of space, in the dark of night, before thought or reason, where I caught a fleeting glimpse of the flowers and the spires and the white-washed houses, maybe a little blue water in the distance, where far away across the banks of the Ohio there was a hill, live oaks, and tall pines, where perhaps wine was served
in small cafés, and in the school playground, on the swings, sat a small girl in braids and a floral dress, swinging, singing. It was like the scent of a coral rose, the canticle of bliss.