Even in Paradise

by Chelsey Philpot

  “Charlie, will you come? Sophie will call with details. I need you here. We need you. Please.”

  I stood up, but I had to lean on the table. Sam dropped the phone parts on the counter and circled his warm arms around my waist, pressing his face to my stomach. He was the only thing that kept the room from closing in on me. I nodded and then remembered I would have to speak, too. “Yes. I’ll be there,” I whispered.

  He hung up before I did.

  I looked at the phone and then placed it gently on the counter. I took a few halting steps until I couldn’t move anymore. I crumpled to the kitchen floor, my back against the refrigerator and Sam on the cold linoleum by my side. I drew my knees to my chest, and that’s when I started sobbing—violent, body-shaking sobs that left me gasping, light-headed, my throat raw. I tried to stop. I couldn’t stop.

  Sam ran out the side door to the garage. But even when my dad rushed inside and picked me up off the floor, holding me so close my tears soaked his flannel shirt, I couldn’t stop crying. It felt like I never would.

  THIRTY-THREE

  IS THERE A LIMIT TO what a family will be asked to endure? Had they suffered enough?

  Or was tragedy what made them what they were?

  The funeral was subdued, somber, and unlike Boom in every way.

  Cordelia read a poem. Bradley got so choked up that he couldn’t finish his speech, and one of the cousins played the organ while another cousin sang. A ruddy-faced priest read a section from Corinthians, and although his bit was nice and the small island church was old and lovely, I thought Boom would have hated it.

  He would rather have skipped the funeral part entirely and gone right to the party. He would rather have had people drinking dark liquor in crystal glasses on the lawn of Arcadia, smoking cigars, and talking politics. He would rather have heard loud debates than hushed conversations and a jazzy band playing instead of somber hymns. He would have wanted a party, not a good-bye.

  But funerals are for the living, not the dead.

  I was grateful for Rosalie beside me. Grateful that I didn’t have to come alone. She’d been in a state of awe and confusion since we’d gotten off the ferry that morning. A tourist who has embarked in a country where no one speaks her language and she doesn’t know the laws. Even the wooden street signs and cobblestone roads fascinated her.

  Though she said little, her presence was a comfort. In the church, she patted my hand any time someone was done speaking. She held the purse I’d borrowed from Melissa and picked up my shoe when it slid off my foot and under the pew in front of us. We were among the last to leave for the reception at Arcadia. We parked at the end of the long line of cars on the road and walked close enough for our shoulders to touch while we made our way toward the gate.

  “Whew. I get it now.” Rosalie whistled when we reached the driveway.

  The house reminded me of the children’s story about a mitten that could not possibly fit even one more animal inside of it. People spilled out onto the porch, standing in close protective circles, as if they were guarding something in their centers. The first-floor windows were dense with bodies. The buzz of conversation was numbing and strange. When a laugh came from the far end of the porch, it was like a bolt of lightning had struck the center of the lawn. I had never been to an Arcadia party where laughter was the exception.

  “Charlotte?” Rosalie said.

  “Yeah. Sorry,” I replied. I had not realized I had stopped walking.

  Rosalie squeezed my arm once we reached the front porch steps. “Whenever you’re ready to go, we’ll go. I’m gonna go look around inside for a bit and then park at one of those chairs there.” She gestured toward a set of Adirondacks at the northwest corner of the porch. “Just come grab me.”

  I exhaled. Nodded. She climbed up the steps and disappeared through the cluster of bodies packed by the door. Soft piano music floated out the open library window, but I couldn’t make myself follow Rosalie in. Instead I wrapped my arms so tightly around myself that I could count my ribs with my fingertips. I walked around the side of the house, trying to pretend that I had never been there and I was seeing it for the first time. If I could take it all in, then maybe I could take it with me and keep it forever. Maybe I could put Arcadia in my memory box as easily as I had kept the shell Boom had given me that first summer.

  I heard Henry the pug’s snuffling at the same time that I felt Cordelia slam into me, wrapping her arms around my waist and burying her face in my side. “Charlie, you came. I knew you would, but I thought maybe you wouldn’t or maybe you’d still be rarified of Mummy.”

  “Petrified.” I smoothed back her dark hair. “You mean petrified.”

  “That’s what I said. Did you like my poem? I was going to read it in French. ‘Les aubes sont navrantes.’ But Sebastian said more people would understand if I read the transition instead.”

  I let that one slide. Henry sniffed at my ankles, circled twice, and then, deeming me a friend instead of an enemy, plopped down on my feet. He looked up at me, his little pink tongue sticking sideways out of his mouth, his bug eyes wet and glistening as if he too had been crying. If it had been a different day, I would have laughed at him.

  “Charlotte,” Bradley called, approaching from Sophie’s cottage. Cordelia let go of me as he reached down to hug me. “I’m so glad you could come. It means a lot,” he said in his charming old man voice, which today sounded forced instead of funny.

  The skin of his tan face looked looser, like some structure beneath had begun to soften. He smiled at me, one arm still on my back, but the corner of his eyes did not crinkle.

  “Of course.” It was all I could manage.

  “Mom told me you got Julia to come home.” He swallowed loudly and pulled at the knot of his tie with his free hand. “Before . . . before the accident.”

  “Accident,” I repeated, not really knowing why. Cordelia bent down and scooped Henry up in her arms, clutching him against her chest, burying her face in his shiny black fur.

  “I told you that you were good for us, that you would save us all.” He rested a hand on my shoulder. There was a dullness in his eyes and pain in the twist of his smile.

  “I didn’t, though,” I said.

  “But you did.” Bradley bent down and kissed the top of my head. “I have to go check on the kitchen situation, but the rest of the family is on the beach if you want to go say hello, and Sophie and some girls from St. Anne’s are inside. Come on, Cordelia.”

  They walked toward the house, but I didn’t follow them. I didn’t want to see anyone from school, but I couldn’t make myself go to the beach. I headed toward the newly repaired dock instead, hugging myself tightly once more. There was no trace of the boathouse left. What had remained of Gus’s sailboat had been removed completely. The fire was nothing but a bad memory now.

  Shielding my eyes with one hand and keeping the other arm wrapped around me, I looked toward the beach. Mrs. Buchanan was holding her black heels by her side and was leaning on Julia, who stood still as a pillar. She was barefoot, too, and didn’t look like she cared that the waves were filling her shoes with water and sand.

  David and Thoreau were racing each other up and down the beach. Sebastian had his pants rolled up and was standing in the water. When a stick drifted near his legs, he reached down, picked it up, and then chucked it for the two dogs to chase.

  I slipped off my shoes and sat down at the edge of the dock, letting my feet dangle over the edge—sitting in that same spot where we had talked that night forever ago, watching him watch the sea. When Sebastian turned and saw me, he looked confused for a moment, like you do when you see someone out of context: a teacher in the grocery store, your doctor in the library. He shouted something to Mrs. Buchanan and Julia and started jogging toward me.

  Julia gave a little wave. But she made no motion to follow him. She collapsed against her mother’s side, hiding her face in the taller woman’s shoulder.

  I had not heard from her since that day
in the chapel, but I wasn’t surprised. Piper had warned me that if I learned too much she would push me away and I would get my heart broken. And now I was going to break someone else’s.

  “You came.” Sebastian stopped about halfway down the dock. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he walked the rest of the way. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

  “Of course.” I had to shield my eyes to see him.

  His pants were too big and they still had creases from where they had been folded. His face looked sharper than the last time I saw him, and his dark eyes had smudges beneath them. Sleeplessness or bruises, they could be either.

  “How have you been?” He sat down beside me.

  “Okay,” I practically whispered. “I’ve been okay.”

  “I’m sorry.” He looked away from me and out toward the water. “Look. I’m sorry about being so out of it . . . after the party. Things were just crazy around here and . . .” He drummed his fingers against the dock. “Charlie, I need to tell you something. I need to tell you the truth about . . . about what happened the night of—”

  “Don’t,” I interrupted. “Don’t do that. Don’t apologize.” I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand. “Julia told me everything. I know that you lied because you love her and you, all of you, were trying to protect her. I don’t want to know more than that . . . I think I’m done with secrets for a while.”

  He exhaled, gripping the edge of the dock like he was trying to stop himself from falling into the water. “I’m too late. I messed up and now I’m too late. I should have told you all of it that first time on the ferry.” I could feel him studying my face. His hands at his sides lifted and then dropped. He couldn’t keep them still, but he couldn’t touch me either. “We aren’t going to be able to get past this, are we?”

  I shook my head.

  “And you’re going to break up with me now, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not even sure if we’re together to be broken up.” I couldn’t look at him or I’d lose my nerve entirely.

  “What if you just stayed?” Now he did touch me, his hand brushing across my cheek. “Just stay the night and we’ll talk. Come say hello to Mum and Julia. Just don’t go.”

  “And then what?” I was crying now. I had to speak between gasps. “Then a few more months before we finally recognize what was so obvious all along?” I looked up toward the house before turning back to him. “I don’t belong here, Sebastian. I’m just a visitor who stayed too long.”

  “Charlie.” He placed his hand over mine on the rough dock. “You’re as much a part of this as the rest of us.”

  I could taste tears where they drifted into the corners of my mouth. I shook my head. “I can’t. Sebastian, you know I can’t. I need to walk away now or I’ll never go. You’re going to be great. Maybe even greater than Boom. But I need to figure out who I am when I’m not here. What’s real. I thought I knew, but I think . . . I think I lost track somewhere.”

  Sebastian was silent for a long moment, and then he reached into his pocket. He took my hand and placed a smooth metal disk in my palm, closing my fingers around it one by one. “This,” he said. “This part was real. Please trust me that much.”

  When he released my hand, I looked down and read, “The human heart beats 100,000 times a day.”

  “I do trust you that much,” I said. “Bye, Sebastian.”

  “Take care, Charlie.”

  I ran up the lawn toward the porch where Rosalie was waiting, as she said she would be. Before we left I let myself look once more, but only once.

  Bradley and Cordelia had joined the rest of the family. Sebastian had made his way back to the beach. The Buchanans were standing in a loose semicircle, looking out at the black water and the cloudless sky.

  Mrs. Buchanan, delicate and poised even in her misery, was an elegy to herself—a tribute to the young woman she must have been before she became the wife and mother who lost so much because she had so much to lose. Bradley, his perfect posture temporarily forgotten, stood hunched with his hands in his pockets and his tie loose around his neck beside her. Cordelia, hugging Henry once again to her chest, was already a little more somber, a little older. Sebastian was skipping stones because he could not stand still.

  And Julia. My Julia. I whistled sharp and clear and waited until she turned around and saw me. “Contra mundum,” I whispered, and I swear I saw her mouth form “Contra mundum” in return.

  Julia and me against the world. That’s how I like to remember her.

  They were perfect. They were flawed. They were scarred and beautiful. They were too familiar with death and clung to life by clinging to one another. The Great Buchanans were only human, after all.

  A NEW BEGINNING

  Dolor hic tibi proderit olim

  (One day this pain will be useful to you)

  —Ovid

  DOLOR

  This is not something anyone can teach you. Heartbreak you must learn on your own.

  I knew too much. So she pushed me away. It was how she stayed whole. It was how she survived. I could not hate her for that—for wanting to survive. I could not hate her for anything.

  But I also know that I left them all even more than she left me. It would have been so easy to lose myself in the Buchanans, to become the Charlie they thought I was and needed me to be. They were so generous, so kind, so persistent in their belief that I could protect her from herself.

  But I couldn’t. I could no more rescue her than she could save me from my self-doubts and uncertainties. I had to do that on my own.

  I heard that she went to college for a while, then to the west coast. After that I lost track.

  And Sebastian? He did what he promised Boom. He finished Harvard. Enrolled in law school. Became a rising star.

  For a time, I missed them like winter misses warmth. I could not breathe without her. I could not feel without him.

  Friends helped. New friends who understood that they could never replace the family I had lost, but tried anyway. They were ever ready with cheap beer, dirty jokes, and coffee at the cafés near campus in downtown Providence. Friends who could make vegetarian lasagna to feed fourteen in under an hour. Friends with haircuts they gave themselves, tattoos from ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, and scars from past lives. They accepted my flaws because they had them, too.

  Travel helped. Getting off a plane in a place where no one knew me. Walking among tombs, paintings, and strangers like a ghost was oddly comforting. I could be no one. I could be someone. I was just a girl with sad eyes, a sketchbook, and an oversized bag drifting among ordinary people.

  Time helped. The pain faded from a gaping hole in the very center of me to quick moments of remembering that took the air from my body, forcing me to make excuses for the sudden watering of my eyes.

  Art helped. The sculptures—the collecting of odds and ends and molding them into something striking and new. Success came gradually and then overnight. And I welcomed it, because it, too, was a distraction.

  I made it to this point, but I made it on my own terms. That was her final gift to me. Helping me stand. Helping me imagine a life large enough to stand for.

  CAPECODTIMES.COM

  BUCHANAN FAMILY COMPOUND TO BECOME CULTURAL CENTER

  The Buchanan family has transferred ownership of their family home, Arcadia, on Nantucket Island to the late Senator Joseph “Boom” Buchanan’s nonprofit foundation.

  The Cape Cod–style 6,000-square-foot house designed by architect Alexander Flyte will become a community center and historical museum. Renovations will begin this fall on the main home. A cottage on the southeast side of the four-acre property has been given to Ms. Sophie Girard, Mrs. Teresa Buchanan’s secretary.

  Mrs. Buchanan released this statement: “This house is our gift to the people of Nantucket, her visitors, and her artists. We hope it will become the cultural center of this community that has given our family so much. We have cherished every sunrise, sunset, and moment in between in this extraordinary pla
ce.”

  The museum’s opening date has yet to be determined.

  It only takes ten folds for me to turn the article into a butterfly.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  MY DAD, TO HIS CREDIT, does not ask why I need the keys to the new truck. He hugs me and hands them over. He doesn’t ask what’s under the sheet or how long I will be gone. He just lets me go. Just as I know that in a few days he will let me get on a plane and travel until my fellowship money runs out.

  He is as stable as I am restless. That’s why we work so well.

  The trip from Hyannis to the island is longer than I remember, and the ferry strangely empty for August. Even when the massive ship is docking and folks are lining up on the metal steps to go down to their cars, I linger on the top deck.

  The drive, however, is shorter.

  I park on the road and struggle with the gate, which has become rusted and stubborn. When I finally heft it open and bend down to pick up my package again, my arms are tired. But I know I’ll make it to the porch.

  The house looks like an old woman waiting on a bus bench. Shabby. A little sad. Hunched over and tired. Plywood covers the first-floor windows and the gray paint is peeling off in some spots like bark on a birch tree. The lawn is dotted with dandelions, and the grass grows in patches in the circular drive. A porch step cracks as I walk up. I hold the package close to my chest, trying to ignore the wood and metal edges that poke me through the sheet, pricking the bare skin that my sundress doesn’t cover.

  I set the sculpture down by the kitchen door. Exactly where Sophie had told me she would find it later that day. She told me it would have a place of honor. She told me she would explain who it was from to the family and that the parts all had a story.

  I could not finish before because I was not done collecting memories. I had not seen that it needed my bottle caps and champagne corks, stones, shells, and origami animals. I have used it all—all but one, which I am keeping for later.