This Vacant Paradise

by Victoria Patterson

  She felt stirrings of grief, an acknowledgment of loss; she pulled the tiny ridge of skin from her fingernail, creating a stinging speck of blood.

  He continued to speak about Esther, commenting on what he knew about her history. All her character deficiencies, he insisted, could be linked to her past. Could Nora imagine growing up in a family that acknowledged success according to financial gain only? Could Nora imagine if her only access to this success was through her womanly traits, which she’d been trained to employ with manipulation and deception?

  Nora agreed that it was tragic, but she pointed out that most people had to deal with their share of tragedy.

  “And let’s not even talk about her father,” he said, his eyes widening at the injustice.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Awful. No one should be disowned for being gay—as if it’s a lifestyle choice, rather than a genetic trait.”

  Charlie was uncomfortable discussing the origins of homosexuality. He changed the subject, as she expected.

  “Not only that,” he said, “her family’s dishonest and cruel.”

  “Her grandmother’s the one with all the money?” Nora asked.

  “A scary woman,” he said. “Fierce. She dangles money and then pulls it away. Esther’s trained—like a monkey, a trained monkey. But she’s smart, fighting for her very life.”

  Against her will, Nora found herself listening gravely and nodding her head.

  “Paul Rice,” he said, spitting it out. He was silent, as if the name said everything.

  “How old is she?” Nora asked. “Does she want kids?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She tried changing the subject—but he was trapped.

  He continued to discuss Esther, the problem of Esther. Esther this, Esther that. After he was finally done, his head lowered and, despite everything, her heart beat in commiseration.

  “She doesn’t want to marry him,” he said.

  The next few minutes were infused with a kind of solemnity on both their parts, as they each pondered their respective fates, until finally he spoke: “Did you know that Fred Smith owns The Palms? He must’ve bought it.”

  She wanted to tell him that people usually purchased things by buying them, but then he changed the subject.

  “Do you have anything to eat? I’m starving.”

  While relaying her meager food choices, she felt that, once again, she’d given more of herself to Charlie than she’d intended to. She resigned herself, like taking a punch: a quick, sharp initial pain, and then a lasting ache.

  8

  AFTER HIS FOURTH failed drug rehab—what was it, nine, ten years ago?—Esther’s family no longer acknowledged her brother, Eric, as if by ignoring him, they rendered him (and thus his upsetting and tiresome and implicating heroin addiction) nonexistent; but, just as Grandma Eileen considered a yearly visit to Uncle Richard a sibling responsibility, Esther paid monthly visits to her brother (without her family’s knowledge) to give him money, with, she believed, the blessing of their deceased father. She’d been doing so for about two years. She drove slowly, watching for Eric, driver’s-side window down on the metallic silver BMW she’d borrowed from Grandma Eileen. In the usual inundation of holiday cheer, the streetlights in Santa Ana were decorated like giant candy canes, tied with glittery ribbon, flapping softly in the night breeze.

  Tonight, along with her monthly payment, she was adding a Christmas/birthday bonus of $50; Eric was thirty-six, three years older than she was. She remembered their father’s toasts on Eric’s birthdays, before the fights and the constant running away from home and the confiscated baggies of marijuana and Ecstasy. “To Eric and Frank,” he’d say (December 12, Frank Sinatra’s birthday also), wine glasses of grape juice lifted, clink clink clink; and then Eric’s sidelong glances, his shy, responsive, and rare smiles.

  The little fucker, she thought. He’d better not be homeless. Again. Aside from her credit card debt, Eric was the greatest hindrance to her gaining financial equilibrium—forget about plain and simple autonomy.

  Until I marry Paul Rice, she thought. And then everyone can kiss my ass. She had a premeditated destiny—it had been drilled into her for years. When she was twelve (sometime after she’d gotten her period), her father had taken her to Castaways Park, to the peak, which looked out on Newport Beach. There it lay beneath them, all the mansions and yachts, the biggest mansions at the rim of the bay, with docks and yachts and boats of their own, and, going up and up, more homes and Fashion Island—a circle of shiny buildings and palm trees.

  The Back Bay looked like twisted fingers of green water, spreading through bridges and land and stretching underneath a ribbon of Pacific Coast Highway, where she heard the buzz of cars and the occasional thunder of a truck rolling past. Catalina, at the horizon, was under a veil of haze—barely there. Instead of taking in the view, her father was looking at her. “I love you so much,” he said. “It’s almost over for me, but it’s just beginning for you.” He pulled the hair back from her face, stroked her cheek. “You’re gonna show all these motherfuckers,” he said.

  ERIC WASN’T HARD to find: If she drove long enough, she’d see him walking along a street or leaning against a wall. Or she’d find him at the Olive Pit, sitting in the back booth, the one with the splitting foam cushion—each time, it was opened up and split a little more, like a sideways foaming mouth. There were no windows and it was dark and it smelled like stale beer, urine, and hay. But at least there weren’t many people inside, and the ones who were there rarely acknowledged her, not even bothering to look up from their glasses. Eric called the booth “my office.”

  Last time, he’d even cracked a smile for Esther, after coming upon her, pretending to surprise her: “Boo!” And for Eric, she’d pretended to be surprised, even though, with his cough, sniffle, and tread, she’d heard him moving toward her.

  And then, as they sat together in the booth, he’d turned the tin ashtray over and over and over in his shaky hands while she’d filled him in (in a general way) on her life; and then she’d asked him questions (in a general way) about his: Is your cold better? Are you sleeping? Have you got enough money? (All answered with “yes,” whether or not they were really nos.)

  “Are you living the dream?” he’d asked. (A long-established question—she couldn’t remember when it had started—between them. An inside joke. That, and “Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your chin up. Is your eye on the ball? Chin up?”)

  “Yes, Eric,” she’d answered. “I’m living the dream. How about you?”

  “Oh yeah,” he’d said—ashtray turn-turn-turning in his hands—“I’m living it, all right.”

  At some point (this part was horrible for the both of them), she slid the envelope of money across the table and he took it without looking at her. Rick had told her that he’d spotted Eric at a bus stop near a Winchell’s, and as she turned a corner, she saw the bus stop shelter, a billboard advertisement for Forrest Gump—Tom Hanks sitting with his knees together, awful haircut, hands at his knees—and beneath the stone bench, a huddled figure.

  How odd that she could tell it was Eric, even without seeing his face. She slowed the BMW even more, and the car behind her let out a shrill and sustained honk. Asshole, she thought, as a Jaguar sped up to pass her, thump and bass of Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love”; a face stared back at her, indistinguishable behind the tinted-glass window, the silhouette of an uplifted, jabbing middle finger, and then the Jaguar accelerated in an angry engine roar and was gone.

  One gray sock—this detail stayed with her, even as she made a U-turn to go back around to the bus stop. Where were his shoes? Where was his other sock? Then she saw Eric again, and, to her dismay, she saw herself—in the curve of his back, the angle of his legs. When she’d asked her father if they were biologically related, siblings beyond adoption, he’d said, “Are you sure you want to know?” And the answer was already there, in his eyes.

  Once, when she was very young (even before sh
e and her brother had been officially adopted) and her father thought she was napping, she had overheard him talking to someone on the phone. She’d stood at the door to his bedroom and listened, but his voice was muffled, so she pressed her ear to the door.

  “Yes, yes. That’s right. I know. I know. Things had gotten out of hand long before. They’d been neglected—personal hygiene, nutrition.” He was quiet for a minute or so, and then his voice came back so angry that it frightened her. “No! I’m not going to tell them. Accidental overdose or not, Esther’s the one that found her. Jesus. Can you imagine? That’s not something—that’s not something I’m going to talk about.” Another pause, and then his voice was calm, sad. “That’s not something; it’s not something I want to talk about. Still in diapers, and, well, there’s your mom, dead—it’s just too much.”

  She heard him moving toward the door, and she went back to her bedroom, lay back in her bed and waited for her father to appear at her doorway, signaling the end of “quiet naptime.” And the wall was sliding, so she shut her eyes and listened to the birds and the ocean and her heart, until the noises finally faded to a shared hum inside her head.

  ESTHER PAUSED OVER Eric, unable to wake him with the nudging of her hand. In her other hand she held a tightly folded envelope; inside were fifteen $20 bills paper-clipped with an old receipt from her purse, on which she’d written a to-the-point note: “Happy Birthday. Merry Christmas. Love, Esther.”

  The yellow light above them made a buzzing noise. There was a long, red, pus-filled scrape at his arm, and the concrete evidence of his addiction, from the needles puncturing workable veins: the x-shaped nicks with their halolike bruises. One hand was tucked protectively between his legs, but the other was flapped out at his stomach, his fingernails leathery-looking and split apart at the tips.

  As she slipped the money inside his front Levi’s pocket—pushing, to make the envelope go deep, where hopefully no one would steal it—she kept her face turned, but she could smell him anyway: pungent, like bad BO mixed with honey.

  She fought an instinctive gaglike response, her neck angled uncomfortably, and she looked past the bus stop’s canopied roof at a parting of dark clouds, a fraction of moon.

  He might buy drugs, but she didn’t care anymore—at least, that was what she told herself. She was practiced at guarding herself against Eric, safeguarding her love. Everything he did seemed to hurt her, though she knew that he did it unconsciously.

  Impulsively, she took off her coat with its fur-trimmed collar and put it over his body, tucking it under him, so that it would be more difficult for someone to take; and this time (holding her breath), she looked at his light brown eyelashes, the slanted scar on his forehead from when he’d run into an opened oven door when he was six or seven. And there she was again, in the angle of his cheekbone and the slant of his mouth. What had they been playing, anyway? Hide-and-seek?

  All that blood—normal for head wounds, her father had said. In the emergency room, as the doctor had stitched Eric’s cut, they’d made her wait behind the extendable curtain—she sat in a plastic chair, so small, her feet were unable to reach the floor, an untouched paper cup of apple juice on a side table. She’d believed that it was her fault, for chasing him, and when she’d heard him screaming behind the curtain, she had felt like she was screaming, as if they were really and truly one person; she’d pressed her palms against her eyes, her stomach tightening, imagining the nurses holding his legs and her father holding his arms. A chanting in her head: Please, please, please, let him (me) be okay. Let my brother (me) be okay.

  Accident-prone, born with a death wish, Eric was often in emergency rooms and there were many hospitals, but she never got used to it. She was a witness, an unwitting participant. Fourteen stitches at the back of his head, from when he was trying to pull her up the brick wall in their backyard. (“Come on,” he said. “No, no, I can’t,” and she let go, so that he tottered for a second, his face morphing into surprise, and then fell backward, cracking his head on a rock.) Riding his bicycle, he caught his bare foot in the spokes—a quick thut-thut-thut noise, and then it was over, but the metal had slashed through his heel, leaving a steady stream of blood (twenty-four stitches). Hit by a car when he was nine—“Look both ways!” she shouted, Eric running across the street to get their ball, the sound of car brakes screeching, the smell of rubber from skidding tires, and Eric rolling up the hood like a sack of bread, and then back down, plopping onto the street (his appendix had been removed, leaving a long jagged scar down his stomach, like a train track).

  She remembered approaching Eric’s room when he was eleven, a few days after she’d seen their father kissing Scott. She was determined to ask Eric about it. He was lying on his back on his bed, his legs extended upward at full length, and she paused and stood in the doorway, already wary of his moods. He slowly bent his knees up and down the wall, watching them move in the lamplight, making bars of shadow.

  “Can men marry men and women marry women?” she asked.

  For a long time, he ignored her. But then he turned his face in her direction, and his look made it clear that he would not answer, and that she should never ask him again.

  Although others couldn’t see it, she perceived a deep knowledge in Eric that seemed connected to their past, to what he remembered. But he guarded his knowledge fiercely, as if he had some secret awareness of the way the universe worked and would keep it to himself, and when she looked in his dark eyes, she saw a glimmer of his uncertainty and his fear, his vulnerability and sensitivity, and she understood how incredibly fragile he was; she believed that if she ever let on that she knew, even for a moment, or asked him the wrong question, he might quickly unravel. So she didn’t usually ask him questions.

  She searched in the book their father had given them, Everything You Need to Know about Sex. The completion of the sex act was described as feeling similar to a sneeze, and whenever she sneezed, she would think, This is like sex? She was astonished to discover that milk came out of a woman’s nipples and that the testicles of the man contain the sperm. She was amazed at the size of an unborn baby’s head, at the upside-down position of the baby in the womb, at the rendezvous of the ovum and sperm (which seemed to her an exciting race), and at the fact that babies were born to all women essentially the same way (she had the notion that the procedure differed with different women). But there was nothing in the book about men kissing men.

  Not long after, Eric’s bedroom door was cracked open, and she looked in and saw him. He was nude, having just taken a shower, and his skin was pink from the hot water (he took only very hot showers). His hair was slick and wild from a towel-dry, and he was seated on the side of his bed, staring at a pubic hair. He extended it with his fingers, and it looked to be about a quarter of an inch long. His face had an abstracted, rather wondering look.

  She shut his door quietly and went to her own room. But despite the space between them, she felt as if she were still in the room with her brother, sharing his loneliness, his wonder at his developing body, and she understood that she would always be connected to him, as if by an invisible line.

  AT LEAST THIS way, with Eric passed out, she didn’t have to attempt conversation; she didn’t have to watch his face while she talked: twitching, nervous, cheeks sunken, his hand passing through his greasy hair, as if the motion soothed him, his thoughts beating around them, hounding them.

  And she didn’t have to pretend not to care that he’d lost his shoes, that he’d lost more weight, and that he hadn’t showered in days or weeks. But her heart was loose, unsettled, shredded. She wondered if her visit with Uncle Richard had made her more emotional. She wasn’t usually this close to tears. Maybe it was Christmas—people were prone to depression during the holidays.

  It wasn’t until she was back in the warm safety and new-leather smell of Grandma Eileen’s BMW, at least three blocks away, that she realized she’d spent over $200 on her jacket, the one that she’d just given Eric. But she didn’t
go back to get it.

  ESTHER PAUSED OVER the jewelry in the glass case. Take me, take me—the items on display hummed. But she wouldn’t take anything over $100, knowing that these were the items that would get her caught. There was a satisfaction in even the lowerpriced goods, the earrings and bracelets and necklaces hanging from the racks. Huey Lewis was stuck in her head: That’s the power of love—Can you feel it? A nervous energy, but she took her time, glad that the stores in Fashion Island had extended their hours for the holidays.

  As promised, Brenda had called her, and they had made plans to meet at the central location of the Fashion Island Christmas tree at 9:00 PM and to decide what to do from there; Esther had about fifteen more minutes. She recognized herself as superior to the women clutching multiple shopping bags, who struck her as comparatively stupid. She was prettier, smarter. They didn’t appreciate the beauty of the world they inhabited, and the items they purchased she deserved for free.

  The image came to her of the little lemons covering Grandma Eileen’s polyester pants, and then of her brother’s one gray sock, a hole at the bottom; she dropped the small gold hoop earrings she’d been fingering into an opening in her purse.

  Immediately, there was perspiration on her palms and along her hairline, but when she saw her image in a mirror, she looked calm. Huey Lewis was gone.

  She watched herself in the gleaming glass and mirrors as she moved through the store, and she experienced a numb and soothing equilibrium; for a moment, she allowed herself to imagine what it might be like for Eric: heroin blending with the blood, expelling everything life-related, a dreamlike, deadening euphoria. She thought of the earrings in her purse, along with the lipstick and bracelet that she’d already stolen. She started for the exit. The two or three times the detectors had sounded as she’d crossed through them, she’d continued walking, heartbeat racing, and no one had run after her.