Road to Paradise (54 page)

Tara clapped with delight. Nora said they would try to come when they could. Before she left she said, “We received a package from her a few days ago. She enclosed some personal things of hers.” Nora coughed. “There was a considerable amount of money. A few thousand dollars. I—I feel uncomfortable with it. Perhaps I can make an offering to your church?”

Lightly smiling, Estevan shook his head. “My abbey won’t need it. Leave it for Tara, please. I know that’s what Grace would’ve wished. Had she wanted me to have it, she would have sent it to me.”

Pulling on her grandmother’s hand, Tara was jumping up and down, squealing. “Nana, nana, nana …”

“What, Tara?”

“Maybe I can get that pony now? You said I could. Please?” She put her hands together as if in fervent prayer.

Apologetically, Nora shushed the girl, with an expression of
kids these days
. They said goodbye to us and walked back to their car, Tara holding Nora’s hand, chatting to her, looking up at her. Something in Nora’s stance, her hair, the shape of her face, I couldn’t quite grasp or place it, reminded me of Emma. That ever-patient, slightly exasperated expression, that kindly, always-leaning-down tilt of the head, as if ever ready to listen, to hear anything. That proffered hand. Nothing too demonstrative. Except … I had seen the way Nora had kissed Tara as she strapped her into the station wagon. As if her entire heart held only Tara in it.

We watched them disappear from view, then Estevan turned
to me. “I really do have to be going,” he said. “I have a long ride back.”

“Don’t I know it.”

He took a breath. “What are
you
going to do?”

“You know,” I said, “I have absolutely no idea.
God pity me
.”

“
Whom God distinctly has
,” he said in reply. We shared a cab to the Chico bus station. His to Dubuque wasn’t until tonight. Mine to Mendocino was in forty-five minutes. We sat on a bench in the waiting room, the way his daughter and I had sat, in Reno, a lifetime ago. We didn’t speak for a while.

“The last time I saw her, she said to me that no prayer was ever denied at the fourteenth station.”

“Yes,” the monk said. “In faith.”

“She never told me what the station was.”

He nodded ruefully. “Did she tell you to go learn the other thirteen? Just like her.” He folded his hands. “The fourteenth station is Jesus dead in the tomb.”

I turned to walk away, but at the last minute turned back to him and said, “Make it as secure as you can.”

A light came into his eyes, and a small smile to his sad mouth that quivered slightly when he said, “Yes. Be not afraid, Shelby.”

Nothing to be afraid of now. I had nothing left. I thought of calling Emma, but, considering I lost her twenty-thousand-dollar present, couldn’t. I thought of calling Gina’s mother, but, considering I lost her daughter, I couldn’t do that, either. I didn’t know what to do about losing Gina.

Johnson had said they would need me to testify in Bruggeman’s murder trial. He’d been found, arrested, held without bail. Stay close, Johnson instructed. I asked for his card, promised I would get in touch as soon as I knew where I was.

One place I clearly wasn’t: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Another place: Larchmont, New York. Neither was I in Reno. Or Paradise. I was on a bus—to Mendocino. We passed lake Geneva as the
sun was setting behind the circling blue mountains. Night fell and gradually thickened with a dense, swirling fog blown in from the bottomless Pacific. The narrow, darkened lane was overhung on all sides by looming sequoias the size of skyscrapers, and the top-heavy bus lurched alarmingly, filling me with terror as it made those blind, ninety-degree turns. Behind me a woman began to pray. Slowly, slowly, on we went, winding through that seemingly unending black nightmare road. There was no light outside and the bus lights dimmed. I closed my eyes. Blind turns and then—nothing.

Hours later, terrors later, the bus finally dropped me off in Mendocino. I flew off that bus. I had with me nothing but the bag holding the remains of Tara’s things. The cops didn’t tell me to go back to my room in Reno, they didn’t tell me to take my stuff, and I had left all I had brought with me in Motel. I left my books and my makeup, my clothes and my music tapes. I left my toothbrush, my underwear, my mini-skirts. I left my maps, and my spiral notebook.

In the pocket of my jeans I had a mint, twenty dollars and my license. This is what I took with me, this is what I had with me as I jumped off the Greyhound onto Lansing Street.

“This is Mendocino?”

“This is Mendocino.” The doors were closing, the driver already pulling away.

I stood in the middle of the street, looked up the hill, looked down the hill. The town was quiet. It was nearing eleven in the evening. Matins? Vespers? Compline? How could it be compline? It meant after supper prayer, and I had not eaten anything but stale potato chips for two days. Far in the black distance was the sound of hard-breaking waves. It wasn’t windy, and it wasn’t warm. It just was. Across the street was an Irish bar, Patterson’s, and from the bar came noise, the happy hubbub of drinking friends. I didn’t go there, I shuffled down the hill. I looked down one street—darkness. I looked down another, darkness—but with a yellow light shining. The street was called Albion and the yellow light
shone in front of a white, multi-story house with steep steps and a glassed-in porch. A sign outside said, “MacCallum House.” I walked up the steps, knocked. A voice from inside said, “Come in.”

I came in, in my worn jeans, with my worn life around me, I came in, barely lifting my head, and said to the two men and a woman sitting at the small bar, “Can you tell me please if there’s somewhere to grab a bite around here?”

“What, at this time of night?” One of the men jumped off his stool and came toward me. He stood right in front of me, but I couldn’t look up. Not at him, them, the house, or another human being.

“Just something quick.”

“This is Mendocino,” he said as if that explained everything. “Closed by ten.”

“Patterson’s might be open,” said the guy at the bar. “I don’t know if they’re still serving food.”

“Yeah, they’re open,” I said. “Is there a bed and breakfast around here?”

“Um,
this
is a bed and breakfast,” said the man in front of me.

“Oh. Do you have a room?”

“Yeah, we got a room.” He paused. “Hey,” he said.

I didn’t know what that meant. Hey. I was looking at my dumb shoes. They were so beat up and the strap was broken. No wonder I was limping. I hadn’t even noticed. I scraped the mud off one heel. “How much for a room?”

“A hundred and thirty dollars,” he said.

I was quiet. “For a
bed and breakfast
?”

He said nothing.

“Anywhere else to stay? A little cheaper?”

“How much cheaper?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t say.

“Hey,” he said again, but quieter, tilting his head down to peer into my face.

Finally I lifted my eyes. In front of me stood a dark, perfectly
groomed, curly-haired young man in a white shirt and jeans. He had an open face, clear eyes.

“How much you got?” He smiled, appraising my bleached cropped hair.

“Twenty bucks.”

Whistling, he grunted. “You’ll have to wash dishes tomorrow. You’ll have to barter for your room at the inn.”

“I’ll do what I have to.”

“Hmm. So will you be needing
two
keys?” he asked, squinting lightly, his mouth quirking.

My gaze focused on him. “No.”

He stuck out his hand. I took it.

“I’m Noah,” he said.

“I’m Shall Be.”

One April, when the weather was dry and crisp and the azaleas were in yellow bloom on the bluffs of the Pacific, I was behind the bar, opening the books for the day, when a voice, a ghastly voice from the past, said “
Shelby
?”

I almost didn’t want to look up. I’m good at that, looking at my feet when I need to lift my eyes. But I had already gone to morning Mass, I didn’t need to lift my eyes again, the heavy lifting was already done. But maybe not. Eventually, profoundly reluctantly, I raised my eyes.

In front of me stood Gina Reed.

Gina, with her hair kinky permed and short, heavier, thicker from the eyes down, her chin, her neck, everything on her looking like she lived a life filled with many intense petty comforts, a life in which she denied her body nothing. She was wearing something indeterminately paisley and carried a bag from Nine West.

“
Shelby
?” she repeated incredulously.

It was April, but it could have been December, at night it got to the mid-forties in California, but the days were warm and the flowers fresh, so wherever you stepped in Mendocino, the Pacific Ocean was always seen through a prism of yellows, pinks and lavenders.

Funny how things get you.

Shelby
?

Well, that is my name. I shouldn’t have jumped or been startled.

It was the question mark at the end of it that was startling. The question mark at the end of my name carried with it years of uncertainty. In other words: Shelby, is that you? Because you’ve grown and you don’t look like yourself, but weren’t we friends? You don’t look like that girl anymore. You’re wearing a smart Armani skirt, you’re pressed, your hair is straight and short, though you’ve kept it blonde, I see. You’ve gained or lost weight, the heels make you taller, the lines of life on your face make you nearly unrecognizable, and so I put the question mark at the end of your name, because I’m not sure it’s you, and if it isn’t, I will just apologize in embarrassment and walk on. The lilt at the end gives you permission to smile thinly and say, nope, not me. You got the wrong girl.

The years could have been kinder to Gina, for when she was young she had been so pretty. I could still hear through the haze of decades the boys calling out to her, “Oh, Geeeeena …”

This always happens to me—the world goes on mute for a few moments. Almost like I press pause on life and then mull whether to rewind, or get up off the couch, and go watch another show, or just instant-replay back to make sure I heard correctly, felt correctly, reacted as I should have to what was in front of me. I felt that the whole glassed-in porch with the Georgian windows fell on mute, too, and even the Australian travelers, who had been chatting animatedly about Coral Reefs and floods and cane toads, were holding their breath for what was next. We stood still, she and I. I looked at her, she looked at me, and we stood, and we said nothing. In my periphery, a woman stepped forward supported with her cane, thanked me for breakfast, and limped outside. For a few moments in time, a tick here, a tock there, one year, two—

“Oh my God!”

Sound came back. I slowly put down my tray, slowly; it clanged loudly against the glass countertop of the buffet. I came around
the bar. We hugged. She was thick, and smelled of cigarettes. “It’s good to see you. How long has it been? Twenty years?” Note my own hopeful question mark!

“Twenty!”

“Yes, yes, you’re right. Twenty-five, more like.”

“Twenty-seven years, Shelby,” Gina said.

“Of course.”

Awkwardly we stood.

“So, what are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?”

“I’m having breakfast. We’re staying at the Seacove Inn, down the road.”

“Yes, I know it. Nice place.”

“Not as nice as this. And you?”

“Well, I’m here. The MacCallum House is mine. Mine and Noah’s.”

“Who is Noah?”

Noah came downstairs, in his booming boots and indigo Cherokee stonewashed jeans. He was helping build a new garage and was not dressed for guests. I took care of the mornings. He labored outside. Tonight we were having a wedding, white tie, and everything had to be just right. There was a lot to do. Noah shook Gina’s hand. “You’re married?” She assessed him. “How long?”

“Too long,” Noah said, pinching me. “I’ll have Gracie come help you. I gotta go. They’re waiting.”

“Yes.”

“Grace? He knows about
Candy
?” said Gina, with surprise.

“Who?” asked my husband.

“Grace is our daughter,” I said.

“Oh, my God, you called her
Grace
?”

Once again I lowered my eyes to my shoes under her gaze. “Why is that so surprising?” Noah whispered to me. I pushed him gently away. Finally he bounded down the porch steps and was gone.

Gina stood by the bar. “What the hell happened to the both of you?”

“Us? What happened to
you
?”

Gina shrugged. Clearly the events of back then had grown fuzzy in her memory. She couldn’t recall the sequence of things. She said she tried to find us, only to find us gone.

“I don’t know how that could be,” I said. “We looked for you for days. For all I know, my stuff is still at Motel motel. I never took it.”

“Don’t I know it. That weird creep had thrown all our things in the trash. I had to dig through a dumpster to find my duffel.”

“Where did you go, Gina?”

“What?” She waved her hand. “I really don’t remember. So what are you doing now?”

“Living here,” I said, wishing I could take a step back.

“When did you make it back?”

“Back where?”

“Larchmont.”

“I never did make it back. You?”

Gina shook her head. “I’m still in Reno.” She rolled her eyes and laughed.

“Really?” I said. “Candy suspected as much. I hadn’t believed her. You married?”

“Married, divorced, married again. Separated. I’m seeing somebody new now, trying to save up money for a quickie.”

“A quickie what? Divorce or marriage?”

She paused, then chuckled. “I guess both. My boyfriend’s real nice. He’s a dealer.”

“Not Raul?”

“Who?”

“Nobody, nobody. So whatcha been up to in Reno?”

“I have a dealer license,” Gina told me. “Suspended. Can’t practice at the moment. A little trouble with the casino. They accused me of embezzling, but I wasn’t. I didn’t. Case didn’t go to court, I pled down, but lost my license in the process. But I’m bartending, so it’s all good. Just a little probation.”

“Whatever happened to Eddie?”

“Who?”

I was silent.

With a shrug, Gina said, “I don’t know what happened to him. I never called him. For all I know he’s still in Bakersfield.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Married to Casey.” Gina laughed. “To think there was once a time when that mattered so much. More than anything in the world.”

“To think.” There was once a time when many things mattered more than anything else in the world.

“But what about you? What about Harvard?”

“Didn’t go,” I said. “I came here. Got a job, worked here, behind the bar.” I smiled to even things out. “I was bartending, too. Took accounting classes. Noah and I got married a few years later.”

“So you never left?” Gina looked through the front doors to the outside. MacCallum House is on a small hill, and beyond the rooftops you can see Mendocino Bay morning and night. “And now you own this?”

“Yeah, we bought it three years ago. Noah is a carpenter, a construction worker. But his friend Jed made a lot of money on dot coms. We went in on this together. Bought it from the old owners.”

“Wow.” She shuffled her feet. A fleeting cold wave passed across her face. “Well, I really have to be going.”

She didn’t ask about Grace Rio, about her little girl, what had happened to either of them. Didn’t ask, didn’t care, didn’t want to know. Quietly Gina said, “I read in the paper about that guy. I’m glad he went down. Years later, I know. But still.”

“Yes. After fifteen years of appeals.” So she did know. Knew something, read the paper enough to know about it, a murder trial in another state, followed by a conviction, years later an execution. She knew. Just didn’t ask. Well, what was there to ask, really. What was there to say? I told you so?

My hands have been muddied my whole life by not ever knowing what the right thing had been. To open my car? To go in the first place? To send her on her own? To never leave her side? Except … I hope that Candy’s Tara has had a different life. That’s the only thing. Candy must have hoped for that, too. Because, she, too, left Tara be, to her swings and her blue ball.

“It was good to see you,” Gina said.

“Yeah, you, too.”

“You mind treating me to breakfast? Bill was kind of steep.”

“No, no,’ course not. Breakfast’s on me.”

“Thanks.” She smiled. “Hey, aren’t you gonna ask if I have any kids?”

“Do you,” I asked neutrally, “have any kids?”

“Yeah, a girl.” She giggled. “Can you believe it, me, a girl.”

“I believe it. I have a girl.” And two sons—for Noah.

“Mine’s eighteen. What an age, huh?”

“Sure is. Mine, too.” She’s a senior at Mendocino high school that overlooks the ocean. She works with me on Saturdays, and goes up to Fort Bragg with her friends, calls me every five minutes asking for advice prefacing every query with a plaintive “Mommy …”

We were both looking at the wooden floor under our feet. Some things are just easier not faced. Unfaced, but not unwept. “What’s
your
girl’s name?” I asked.

“Tiffany.”

“Ah. Where’s her dad?”

“Out on parole in ’09,” she replied, slightly sheepish. But only slightly. “Tiff and my new boyfriend get along real well.”

“Oh. Good for you. That’s important.”

As she was heading out the door, she turned around. “I almost forgot,” she said. “Did you ever find your mother?”

“No.” No trace of Lorna Moor anywhere. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried.

“Huh. Sorry about that. I know how much that had meant to you. You know, I stopped by your aunt’s house in Larchmont many
years ago. I must have been twenty, twenty-one. They said she’d gone. No one knew where.”

“She came out west. I brought Emma with me when I knew I’d be staying.”

“Really? You did that? Well, that’s great.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Good. She’s our office manager. She walks the headlands every day.”

“Oh, man, those headlands,” said Gina. “Too windy for me.”

“Yes. Emma likes that. Needs the extra shot of oxygen. The sun brings the tides and the tides bring the wind. When the sun goes down, the wind dies. She’s always there at sunset. Tries to get Grace to go, who’ll have none of it. Emma forces her to go on Fridays. Like penance.”

“Penance indeed. Great. Well. Tell her I said hi.”

“I will.”

I turned away from the door, so I wouldn’t see her clomping down my stairs and out of the gate. I heard her, though. Clop, clop. Then she was gone. The gate creaked. Carefully I washed out the glasses I needed to dry and stack for tonight. There was so much preparation for a wedding. No time to waste. I kept my mind here, on the glasses, and the oysters, and the crates of Cristal arriving any minute. Noah came back inside, all hammers, plywood and ripped apart jeans but a white shirt and designer stubble. He laid his dirty tools right on the bar counter despite my vocal protest, and said, taking the glasses from my hands and stacking them on the tray, “Okay, I’ll bite—who in the world was that? And who is Candy?”

The story of Judas and the eternal sorrows had been far away until Gina clambered up into my room full of memories. I never forget. I never stop thinking of Grace Rio, because the roads that led me here, to the only place I ever want to be, haven’t all been paved in gold. And yet, just when I thought it was over, my life was only beginning.

Not hers, though.

Lines from a poem came from long ago, one she had read to me in that other life I call youth.

To Noah’s questioning eyes, I waved my hand dismissively.
You
know what I have been thinking
, she whispered to me our last night in Reno,
traveling with you through every mile of this country? What
if there is no place in the world for me
?

That’s what I was afraid you were thinking, I thought, but to her I said,
Don’t say that. Look around you
.
The world is so big, so
beautiful
. I tried to convince her.
There is a place for everyone. We
just have to find it
.

Mendocino Bay was in front of me through the yellow-painted houses. To the right were the ocean headlands, and morning. Emma was out there somewhere communing with the divine. My own house was here, where I stood, with the glass porch, the Georgian windows, and the parquet floors.

You cannot save your life until you lose it utterly.

Well, no use loitering. There was still so much left to do.

“Are you going to tell me or no?” said Noah. “Who is she?”

“Oh no one,” I replied, so casual, picking up the tray and spiral accounting books, catching my reflection for a moment in the mirrored surface of the bar. “She was just someone I used to know.”

She was just someone I used to love.