Passing Through Paradise

by Susan Wiggs

  Her father’s face had both character and kindness in it. And distance—something about the angle of his gaze, the set of his mouth. She wondered if this was new, or if she’d simply never noticed before. And for the first time, she wondered if she did the same thing—kept her distance, protected herself.

  “Did you even try to get help, Dad? I don’t mean reading a book. Did you go for counseling or to a—” The thought of sexual dysfunction crossed her mind, but wild horses couldn’t make her go there, not with her own father. “I think you should try a marriage counselor.”

  “We did.”

  She lifted her eyebrows in surprise. “Yeah? And?”

  “It was baloney. We were supposed to make lists about what we like about the other person, think up one compliment per day and go out on dates together, all that crap.”

  In spite of everything, she laughed a little. “Dates and compliments. Sounds tough.”

  “I’d’ve done it gladly, but that’s all superficial stuff. Band-Aids. People drift apart—you know that. And your mother— “ He broke off to finish his beer. “There are things about her that I’ve never understood—stuff she wanted, expected, dreamed about. I guess those things built up over the years, and it’s too late to fix it now.”

  Sandra tried to conceive of her mother as a woman, but had trouble forming an image of Dorrie apart from wife and mother. She could picture her in that role clearly. Neat as a pin, the house spotless. Her favorite ashtray was on the back porch—since her husband had kicked the habit years before, she had taken her solitary vice outside. A knitting basket still rested beside her easy chair in the den, the skeins of yarn carefully balled and labeled with little tin tags.

  Her favorite books were stacked on the coffee table, their spines lined up just so. Oh, she loved those books. Big album-sized tomes with glossy photographs of exotic places—Cadiz, Nepal, Tuscany, Tintagel. Sandra tried to imagine that her mother had led some sort of secret life, dreaming of far-off lands and dangerous strangers, but that was too preposterous to contemplate.

  Or maybe not, she reflected, thinking of Victor. Some problems were buried too deep to fix. She’d discovered that the night of Victor’s death.

  “It’s the retirement,” she said at last. “Somehow, it didn’t turn out the way you and Mom expected.”

  “Yep.”

  “Mom says you wouldn’t help out. She wanted to retire, too.”

  “I tried to help but when I loaded the dishwasher, she rearranged it. When I dusted, she followed behind me, doing everything her way. And don’t get me started on the vacuuming.”

  She shut her eyes guiltily. Perhaps with her problems, she had unknowingly sucked away whatever patience and understanding her parents had for each other. “My troubles put a strain on everything. Losing Victor, the search for his body, the inquest—I’ve been a mess for months. No wonder Mom needed to get away for a while.”

  “Hey.” Her father got up from the table and put his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t want to hear another word of that. What happened with you and Victor is lousy enough without you thinking it caused your mother and me to split up.”

  Split up. Oh, those words hurt. In her novels, she had written about kids whose parents divorced. She thought she could imagine their confusion and fear, likening it to being dropped off a cliff in the dark, but now she knew she hadn’t even come close. A free fall in the dark didn’t begin to describe what it felt like to have her parents break up.

  “Listen, can we talk about something else?” Her father’s bushy brows knit as he studied her face.

  She took a deep breath. “Actually, there is something I wanted to discuss other than Mom.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The deed to the house on Blue Moon Beach. Do you know where it is?”

  “I think it’s in the basement.” Rifling through a drawer, he found a flashlight and took it into the hallway. “What do you need it for?”

  Sandra cleared her throat. “I’m thinking of selling the house, Dad.”

  He paused at the top of the basement stairs. “Yeah?”

  “Yes. I never thought I would, but . . .”

  “Do you need money? Is that it?”

  Her parents weren’t well off; they weren’t starving, either. But they sure hadn’t factored bailing out their grown daughter into the budget.

  “That’s not why I want to sell the place. I want to get out of there, start fresh somewhere.”

  “I thought you liked the area.”

  She had never told her parents all the details of the petty vandalism, the phone calls in the middle of the night. The “Black Widow” stuff worried them enough.

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of time to figure out what to do next,” she added, remembering Milton’s advice. “The house needs to be fixed up. But I intend to sell it and get out.”

  “You’re sure it’s not the money.”

  “No, Dad. I’m okay.”

  “Scout’s honor?” he asked.

  “Scout’s honor. In fact, there’s a royalty check in the mail.” She’d called her literary agent to explain about the one that had been destroyed. Her agent had been incredulous— They blew up your mailbox? I thought you lived in Rhode Island, not Idaho. “So is this a problem, Dad?”

  “Your grandparents left the place to you. Selling it is your prerogative.”

  “But you don’t approve.”

  “I don’t have an opinion about it. Never much cared for the place myself. My folks used to drag the whole family down there every summer. I was always bored stiff. Couldn’t even pick up Sox games on the radio.”

  The stairs creaked under his weight as he disappeared into the dark maw of the basement. She heard him bumping around, swearing as he smacked his head on a rafter. After a few minutes, he emerged with a fireproof box.

  “Haven’t looked through this stuff in years,” he said. They sat together on the sofa, and he set the box on the coffee table, stringing the surface with cobwebs. Flipping open the lid, he revealed a collection of file folders, papers, little boxed objects.

  He pulled out old photographs and stock certificates, school records, things that had once seemed important and no longer were—an instruction manual for a short-wave radio, the manufacturer’s warranty on a typewriter, a Cracker Jack code ring, a clipped article about a neighbor’s son making Eagle Scout.

  Other things were so important that they seemed inordinately fragile, hard to hold—a lock of baby’s hair, tied with a bit of white ribbon and tucked away in an envelope. Sandra’s birth certificate. A child’s drawing of a bird in a nest, the name Sandra B. printed carefully in the corner. A photograph of her great-grandparents, circa 1900. An emigration certificate from Ellis Island for someone named Nathaniel Babcock.

  She picked up a yellowed, embossed document. “Your marriage certificate.”

  “Yep.”

  “What happens to this if you get a divorce?”

  “Nothing. I suppose there’s a new piece of paper dissolving the marriage, which trumps that one.” He unfolded the certificate to find a small wedding photograph inside, paperclipped to the document.

  Sandra studied the photograph, realizing with a jolt that in the picture, her parents were younger than she was now. In his early twenties, her father hadn’t been her father yet. He was simply Louis Babcock, and he’d been flat-out hand-some the way Stewart Granger or Gary Cooper was hand-some.

  And her mother, of course, was beautiful in the luminous, uncertain way of all brides.

  Sandra knew she, too, had looked that way at her wedding to Victor. She knew, because the pictures had run in the papers.

  She tried to read the smiling faces of her parents in the old wedding portrait. Was there some clue, like a shadow hovering over them, that condemned their marriage to failure? Back in 1966, was there any indication at all that the union was only going to last thirty-six years? She wondered if the happiness of those young, naive peopl
e was worth the pain they were going through now. Some nights, lying awake, she wondered if she would have been better off never having met Victor at all. He’d changed her life in so many ways.

  Her father’s thumb lingered over his bride’s signature, rendered in plump girlish script: “Dorothy Heloise Slocum.” His face softened with remembrances she knew he wouldn’t share.

  “Dad,” she said quietly, “I’m so sorry. I really do think you and Mom can fix this.” She pointed to the photograph. “Look at you. There’s so much love there. It’s written all over your faces. You can’t let it all break apart because you’re having a tough time adjusting to retirement.”

  “It goes a lot deeper than that, honey.”

  “Then you’ll have to dig deeper to fix it.”

  He pulled out a folded parchment document, tied around the middle with string. “Here it is,” he said. “The original deed to Blue Moon Beach, the will and the transfer.”

  Opening the old papers, she read the terse legal definition of the property and ran her finger over the raised seals on the document. “Fair enough,” she said. “I plan on getting the place sold by summer.”

  “And then what?” her father asked.

  “And then—” A chill ran through her. She had no earthly idea how to start the rest of her life from here. “And then . . . I guess I’ll see.”

  Chapter 11

  Journal Entry—Tuesday—January 8

  Ten Lies I’ve Told My Therapist

  8. I never let my stutter define me.

  9. I am fulfilled by my role as a daughter, wife, friend and writer.

  10. I find sex enjoyable, rating it somewhere between “most of the time” and “always.”

  No wonder she’d only managed to make it through two incredibly unproductive sessions, six months after marrying Victor. Even then, she’d sensed a problem—something her heart knew even as her common sense rejected it. But subconsciously, she probably hadn’t wanted to explore the shadowy undercurrents pushing her and Victor apart, which was why she hadn’t returned to the therapist.

  Her stomach tightened into a hard ball of nerves when she heard the crunch of Mike Malloy’s pickup truck coming up the drive. He made her edgy; she couldn’t decide whether he was ally or adversary. Regardless, she knew she couldn’t trust him.

  Going to the front door, she absently ran a hand through her hair, and then felt a stab of surprise. She had dressed up for him, relatively speaking. Instead of donning her usual jeans and oversized sweatshirt, she’d put on khakis and clogs, an angora sweater with a silver cat brooch Victor had given her one Valentine’s Day.

  She looked good. Not politician’s-wife good, but everyday good.

  It was Victor who’d taught her to worry about her appearance. Until Victor, she never had, because she thought she was invisible. After the lonely experience of high school, she’d expected to settle into anonymity after college at URI. Her small, quiet life would have gone on undisturbed, except that one autumn night, her speech therapist had sent her to a support group meeting. She thought no one would notice the girl in the back of the room, scribbling in a yellow notebook. What she hadn’t known was that she’d caught the eye of the local hero.

  After that, everything, every moment of every day, had changed.

  Watching through a front window, she observed that Malloy didn’t seem to have much compunction about his appearance. Not that he needed it, she thought with a warm shiver she wasn’t expecting to feel.

  His dark, longish hair stuck out of a baseball cap. He had a face that looked lived-in and eyes the color of forget-me-nots. But on Malloy, the delicate blue wasn’t a feminine attribute, and looked striking in contrast to his black hair. A thick athletic sweatshirt and an insulated vest exaggerated the breadth of his shoulders, and heavy gloves covered his hands. His Levi’s were faded in all the right places, and his work boots added another couple of inches to his six-foot-plus height.

  His rough but undeniable appeal drew a strange visceral reaction from her. How could that be? She remembered how attracted she’d been to Victor’s refined urbanity, his sophistication. Mike Malloy was a far cry from urbane and sophisticated. She didn’t like his effect on her. She wasn’t even sure she should have an opinion about him.

  Then she saw something that surprised her. Two kids tumbled out of the passenger side of the pickup truck. The bigger one was a girl of about twelve or thirteen, wearing a pink ski jacket and matching hat and mittens. The boy was younger, clomping around in baggy jeans and unbuckled boots, with Malloy’s scruffy dog tucked under his arm, wriggling and straining until the boy let him go.

  When Mike spoke to the kids, he leaned down, resting his hands on his knees and making eye contact. As he talked to them, he pointed at the beach. The boy let out a whoop and ran up and over the dunes, the dog leaping along behind him. The girl stuffed her hands into her pockets and walked more slowly toward the water’s edge.

  When Sandra had first met Malloy, she hadn’t been able to picture him as someone’s dad. Someone’s husband. Not that it mattered, she told herself. But as she watched him surveying the wind-carved dunes where the children played, and saw the expression on his face, she felt as though she had discovered a whole new side to him.

  In the past couple of years, Sandra had found herself becoming increasingly preoccupied with kids. Sometimes when she saw people with children, she felt such an unholy envy that it burned like a fire in her heart. She felt that now, watching Mike Malloy. God, what she wouldn’t give to have what he had, a couple of messy, loud, unpredictable kids. Someone to giggle with, to hold close at night, to love with every bit of her heart.

  She recalled the first time she broached the topic of having a baby with Victor. They’d been married a year; he was getting ready for opening session of the General Assembly. With the big-hearted charm that so endeared him to his constituents, Victor embraced the idea. He took her face between his hands, holding it delicately, as if it were something fragile and precious. “Oh, Sandra, yes,” he said. “I want that, too.”

  She believed him. That was what made him such a good politician. Even his own wife, who knew him better than anyone else in the world, believed everything he said.

  Composing herself, she opened the door for Mike Malloy. He grabbed a clipboard and a zippered leather portfolio from the truck and came up the walk toward her. She tried, without success, not to stare, but good Lord. The man turned a pair of old, faded jeans into living sculpture.

  “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly,” she said, hoping that sudden flush of warmth didn’t show.

  “No problem,” he replied. His face was without expression, his eyes unreadable. He didn’t appear to notice how neatly and carefully she was dressed.

  Yet even indifference encouraged her. She’d learned to expect open dislike and suspicion from everyone, so this was new. “You brought company today,” she said.

  Neutrality changed instantly to defensiveness. “Is that a problem?”

  She stepped back, holding her hands palms out. “Not at all. I like kids. I was just making conversation.”

  “I see. Sorry. I didn’t mean to jump on you. I just picked them up from school.”

  “Let me take your coat.”

  Transferring the clipboard from one hand to the other, he slipped out of his vest and handed it over. Her fingers sank into the deep pile of the vest, where his body heat lingered. She resisted an absurd urge to press her face to the fabric before hanging it in the hall closet.

  “If your kids get cold outside, they’re welcome to come in.”

  He hesitated. She wondered if he’d heard any of the local gossip, or if he’d made inquiries after she told him about her troubles. Then he nodded and said, “Thanks.” He inspected her then, his frank, assessing gaze taking in the angora sweater, the brooch. Then he removed his Red Sox cap, folding the bill and sticking it in his back pocket.

  “I . . . guess we should have a seat.” She walked over to the o
ld piecrust table and moved the chairs around to face the bow-front window. From here, they could easily keep an eye on the kids. “How old are your children?”

  “Mary Margaret turns thirteen in the spring, and Kevin’s nine.”

  Resting her chin in her hand, Sandra watched them playing Frisbee while the dog ran frantically back and forth between them. “They look like a lot of fun.”

  “They are.” He set some papers in front of her on the table, separating the pages into two piles. “Here’s what I’ve done. I’ve worked up a bid for basic repairs. The other is for a full restoration. Why don’t you look over them and I’ll answer any questions you might have.”

  “Thanks. Um, would you like a cup of coffee or tea or something?” she asked, watching his big, squarish hands. “There are some snacks in the kitchen.” She’d put out a plate of molasses cookies and a dish of cashew nuts. The simple act of readying herself for company had felt alien, reminding her of how long it had been since she’d entertained Victor’s friends and associates at the house in town. She knew, of course, that this was not a social call, but in some ways, it felt like one. And it felt good. Almost. . . normal.

  “No, thanks.” He spoke fast, almost harshly. “I’m fine.”

  She ought to be smart enough to know a hired contractor wasn’t going to fill the void in her life. Exasperated with herself, she gave her attention to the preliminary bids. His work, on crisp laser-printer paper, was clear and well organized, spelling out what each phase of the project would involve and the estimated costs in labor and materials. Computer-generated images of the house and grounds made the place look like a picture in a storybook.

  She paged carefully through the first document, bracing herself for the bottom line on the last page. She stared at the number for a long time. Keeping a poker face, she turned her attention to the second proposal. This one was longer, more involved and detailed. As she read through it, she was able to picture what he had in mind. And it was a grand plan. The entire place, from the wild blueberry and rose hedges to the verdigris wind vane on the roof peak, would be transformed into a state of glory the old house had never enjoyed, not even when it was newly built.