See You in Paradise (26 page)

That was that. I was gone. I would leave it all behind. I ran to the bedroom; snatched up my wallet, an extra pair of eyeglasses, and my only pair of clean socks; and bolted for the door, shouldering on my coat as I went.

I made it to the middle of the gravel lot before I changed my mind. The air was chill, the sun was nowhere to be found, and I had already lost heart. I couldn’t just leave. I couldn’t just start over. What had I been thinking? I was not that kind of man; rather, I was the kind of man who endured, ignored, and took his lumps. Perhaps I could mound the nose back into shape. I turned, drew a deep breath, and took one step back toward the door.

There was a rumbling. Thunder, I surmised—or a big rig passing on the freeway. But I could feel it in my stomach, in my bowels, and I knew that this was something else, a new sound, low and terrible.

A moment later, dozens of animals, their patchy fur standing on end, came pouring around the sides of our building—squirrels, deer and elk, grouse and chukars, a mountain cat and a lone galloping moose—and streamed past me as if I were a rock or tree. I did not understand what it was I was seeing. The animals fled, the rumble grew in intensity, and I looked up to see an avalanche, a white wave fast approaching, scouring the mountain clean: a million little boulders, ten years of Sisyphean teenage ambition loosed from the tyranny of the text. The BEAVERS sign, ruined, and on the rampage.

A hundred lifetimes might have passed in those awful moments, as the stones screamed down the rock face—a hundred of my lifetime, anyway, which might as well have been lived in a second, for all the good it had done anyone—and buried our lousy little shack of a home. Buried is the wrong word, perhaps. Annihilated is more like it. Our apartment unit, all of the apartment units, were crushed. The wave stopped at my feet, half-surrounding me in an implausible arc of apparent magnetic repulsion, and I stood there, blinking at the dusty ruins.

Of course there would be lawsuits, lots of them. There would be resignations, elections, excuses, exhortations. The landlord would flee. The Open Space Committee would be formed. The high school would change the name of its mascot. And, in time, the crushed bodies of Weber and his girl would be discovered in the rubble, and upon her broken finger an engagement ring would be found. This last, of course, is the detail that would be best remembered: a love so strong, it brought down a mountain.

My own life, though, would never be so romantic. I would merely shack back up with Ruperta, regain my potency, and happily resign myself to life as a kept man. When a heart attack claimed her lovesick employer, she would buy the business for a song and open three more across the state. She would become mildly famous throughout the region for her amusing television ads in which she lured white-tail deer with a come-hither glance. And when, in a rare exhibition of initiative, I proposed marriage to her, she would respond by driving us to the courthouse to get it over with.

As for Mount Peak, it still stands, renamed Mount Sandy, thanks to the passionate lobbying efforts of Weber’s fiancée’s mother and father. (Weber’s family, for their part, just wanted to put everything behind them.) Nature has been allowed to reclaim it—the logging roads closed, the housing project bulldozed, the forest reseeded. From our taxidermy-festooned house across town, the new saplings seem to shroud it in a haze of new green, like a girl in a peekaboo teddy. By the time we’re old, it will be wearing a heavy coat, like a stout old fellow with a war wound.

This I am looking forward to seeing, from the picnic table on the back deck, where I have learned to tie flies for my boss, my wife. It is a pastime designed to endure, a tedium of infinite small variations. Weber was right about me, that I would be better off with some kind of purpose. I’m not a man, not really, just the gray clammy shadow of one—startlingly realistic at times, sure, but the product of hands not my own. I sit, bent over my vise, under the watchful eye of Mount Sandy, and expect to be here, still doing it, when I drop dead of old age.

The sitter was asleep and dreaming when footsteps sounded on the porch. Her dream was anxious; it was spring and finals were not far away. Exams had never bothered her before, but now she had decided, in the middle of her sophomore year at college, to major in chemistry, and for the first time her performance was of real importance to her. So, after putting the children to bed, she had spent the evening rereading her chemistry textbook and class notes, attempting to cram this vital information further into her already-packed head. The footsteps woke her: she sat up on the couch, the dream dissolving. What had it been about? No matter, the children’s parents were back. Her watch said midnight. Maybe time for another hour of work, when she got home.

The parents were decent people. They tended to shuffle around on the porch a little before coming inside, to spare the sitter the embarrassment of being found asleep. They didn’t mind her sleeping—in fact they often told her that she ought to get more sleep—but the sitter liked to be in control of a situation. The parents must have sensed this; they gave her space. She rubbed her eyes and shook her head. Any moment now they would open the door.

Instead there was a knock. The sitter looked at the deadbolt, making sure that it was engaged. A knock, at midnight? In this neighborhood? A man’s shadow darkened the curtain over the door. He shifted from foot to foot, waiting.

She went to the door and stood in front of it. Who could it be? A criminal, she reasoned, wouldn’t knock. She quickly peeked behind the curtain before the illogic of this thought could sink in. There he was, a young man in a uniform. A policeman. He was gazing to his left, at a screen of clematis blooming on the wrought-iron trellis that enclosed the porch. Beneath the clematis she could see a tricycle, a garden spade, a snow shovel that had not yet been put away. The policeman was tapping his foot.

She unlocked and opened the door. The policeman stood stiffly, his hands behind his back. On his belt hung a radio and a holster with a gun in it. A wire ran from the radio up to his shoulder, where a small microphone was pinned. He looked into her eyes and said, “Miss? May I come in?”

She stepped back and he entered, closing the door behind him. As though it were an afterthought, he removed his hat. The two of them looked at each other. She thought that maybe she had seen this policeman before. He might have been the one who broke up a party she was at, a party where there was beer. She didn’t like this sort of party but had gone because her friend asked her. She drank beer from a huge plastic cup and sat near the stereo, listening to the music. Actually she had had a great time, until the police came. This policeman had a narrow face and head and wavy black hair, and brown eyes that blinked. He cleared his throat, preparing to speak. A terrible thought occurred to the sitter.

The policeman said, “You’re the babysitter for Mr. and Mrs. Geary?”

“Yes.”

“Are the children sleeping?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Maybe you should sit down.”

The sitter made no move toward the sofa. She could see the depression, the smooth place on the slipcover where she had been sleeping moments before. She said, “What happened? Was there an accident?”

“Yes,” said the policeman.

It gave her a jolt—as if she’d just made it happen by guessing. “Are they all right?” she asked, automatically.

The policeman looked down at his feet. He couldn’t have been much older than she was. As young as twenty-five, certainly not more than thirty. He said, “They died.”

“Oh my God,” she said. It didn’t seem like enough. She said it again, more quietly.

“She was carrying baby pictures. We figured … I had a feeling there would be a sitter.” The policeman wobbled back and forth as he had done behind the door. He told her that a delivery van had hit their car head on; they’d been taken to the hospital but couldn’t be saved. He said, “I’m sorry.”

Now the sitter did want to sit down, but again she made no move. Nothing seemed appropriate. She continued standing before the policeman, continued to gaze at the spot where she’d been sleeping. The policeman’s hand was resting on her shoulder now. “We’ve contacted the victim’s—Mrs. Geary’s—um, sister,” he said. “We found her number in the victim’s purse. She’s coming up from Scranton. It’ll be an hour or two. We were thinking—if you want to go home, you could go. A female officer could come and stay here. But we thought—if one of the children wakes up, you could—that is, it might be better if there wasn’t a police officer here. If it was you instead.” He took his hand off her shoulder, suddenly, as if he’d forgotten about it.

The sitter looked up at the policeman’s face. It registered that she was being asked to do something. “Yes,” she said. “Sure.”

“You’ll stay?”

“Yes.”

He asked her name and address and phone number and wrote them in a small spiral notebook. Then he took out a card with his name and the number of the police department, and he added the name of the female officer who could take over for her, if necessary. His name was Officer Clarke. He gave her the card. His handwriting was severely slanted, almost illegible. She thanked him. A sigh escaped her, because she’d been holding her breath. But he seemed to interpret the sigh as an expression of grief. His hand returned to her shoulder and squeezed it, very gently. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you know them well?”

“Yes,” she said, though she didn’t, not really. Hadn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Uh huh.”

After that, they stood there another moment, and then the sitter lost her balance, just a little, and the policeman caught her up in his arms and held her. It was odd, but it seemed like something he wanted to do. She let him. His radio microphone pressed into her forehead. She patted his back, as if consoling him. He smelled very clean, the uniform very new. She sort of squeezed him, to signal the end of the embrace, and pulled away. They stood in front of each other as before. She said, “Thank you. I’m sorry you had to do this.”

“I’ve never done it before.” He said this in a quiet, very un-cop-like voice; the embrace had seemed to soften him. His face looked different now, too.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

He straightened, seeming to recover himself. “Well. So am I. Thank you for agreeing to stay. The sister will be here soon, the sister and her husband. Their name is low.”

“Oh,” she said, unsure of how to respond. Their name is low? What did that mean? Officer Clarke turned and went to the door. On the way out, he apologized again. Then he closed the door and was gone.

When she could no longer hear the police car, the sitter went to the sofa and sat there, her hands folded in her lap. She thought about what she should do. In a while she got up and began to walk around the house. She played a chord or two on the piano, very quietly, so as not to wake the children. She looked at a painting of some flowers on the wall. In the dining room, on a bookshelf, she found a row of photo albums. She pulled one down and opened it on the dining table. It was dark in the room, but a streetlamp cast enough light to see by. There were pictures of a party in a dirty apartment, people holding glasses of wine and one woman drinking directly out of a bottle of liquor. Here was Mrs. Geary talking to a curly-haired man, not Mr. Geary. On the next page was a bleary photo of the Gearys collapsed into a chair, laughing. A hand belonging to someone outside the frame was pointing at them. The hand, unlike the Gearys, was in sharp focus. Later in the book there were wedding photos, not professional ones, snapshots. The Gearys appeared to have gotten married in a forest. The sitter replaced the album and took down another. Here were pictures of Mrs. Geary, completely naked, giving birth to a baby. Her red anguished face and large breasts were in shadow in the background; in the foreground were her white legs and, beneath a thick patch of black pubic hair, a small red human head, its own thin hair slick and parted, as if combed. There were more pictures of the Gearys together with the new baby. Mr. Geary was fully dressed. The rest of the album consisted of baby pictures; when the Gearys appeared it was in a supporting role. A series of pictures depicted friends and relatives holding the baby. The baby was John, the older child, who was five now. The younger one, Emma, was two; the sitter knew that the other albums probably contained pictures of her birth and infancy. But she didn’t want to look at them. She put the album back and returned to the dining table. She realized that all those people—the people at the drunken party, the friends and relatives, perhaps even the obstetrician—would have to find out about what happened. Some of them were probably finding out right now. She imagined their shocked faces and suddenly felt very sad and rested her head on her folded arms. Her face tightened, as if she were about to cry. But she didn’t. The feeling passed. Another was coming, she sensed, but it wasn’t here yet. She got up from the table and continued looking around the house. The kitchen, the den. She went up the stairs, treading lightly. She did not hesitate: she went in the closed door of the Gearys’ bedroom and switched on the lights.

It was tidy, if a little stuffy. The windows needed to be opened, the linens changed, but there was no one to do this, and no one ever would. The carpet was beige, the bedspread a knitted afghan. Family photos hung on the walls. The sitter took off her shoes and lay on the bed. At each side stood a white bedside table with a lamp on it. One of the tables also held a near-empty glass of water, a full bottle of aspirin, and a stack of parenting books. On the other was a science fiction paperback and a mug with some cold coffee dried to the bottom. She leaned over and opened this table’s single drawer. The drawer was full of junk: thread, buttons, coins, papers, breath mints. There was a deck of cards, or rather just the box. The cards were missing. Instead there was a flimsy plastic sandwich bag containing three loosely rolled joints. She held up the bag, sniffed it, set it down beside her on the bed. Then she put the box away and closed the drawer. As she did this she noticed a book sticking out from under the bed.