Road to Paradise

by Paullina Simons

  THIRTEEN

  YOU ARE ASCENDING INTO PARADISE

  1

  Endless Skyway

  The bus ride was interminable. Two hundred miles seemed to take longer than the last three thousand.

  I slept some of the way, my head bouncing against the glass. When I opened my eyes, it was raining. I closed them again. Pretty. Wet fields. The sky was gray. The bus passed through snowy mountains. It got colder, strangely, for it was summer, but it was cold, and raining—decidedly not like my dreams of what California was like. The mountains and trees were the color of storm. We drove through the Tahoe National Forest where the trunks of trees were the size of cars; it looked man-made, movie-effect unreal.

  The rain cleared, the sun shone, glinted through the wet; it got warmer; we opened the upper windows, and the air smelled of damp orange blooms. It was a long way on the winding two-lane highway, through fields of orange groves, past distant mountains, grass, green, the tangerine sun, the summer air, it smelled of familiar, happy things. California looked to be paradise. But Candy had described it as the worst place on earth, full of hicks and narrow minds, ugly and oppressive. Maybe I was in the wrong place. She said Paradise was on Route 70, but clearly it wasn’t, for we left Route 70 far behind, and were now somewhere else, between here and there.

  When I opened my eyes again, the afternoon sun was shining on wet strawberry fields. The bus was stopped at a farm stand. Did anyone want some strawberries? I clutched Tara’s bag and didn’t move. We bounced along again. I asked where we were.

  “In California,” said the unfriendly woman next to me, clutching her own bags. The strawberry fields looked so pretty, stretching deep into valleys, the orange groves blooming all around. The sun . . . I don’t know. It looked different in California. And in the distance were mountains. It was warm with the windows ajar, but not boiling like Reno. I touched the glass with my hands. Did a five-year-old need a ticket? I had never even talked to a five-year-old. Why hadn’t I babysat? I was always helping Emma, never had the time. Like Candy. But different. Was Paradise here, in these strawberry sun-kissed valleys? Maybe Mike hadn’t told Candy the truth because this sure didn’t look awful. I closed my eyes again to try to keep my heart from pounding. I couldn’t think of tomorrow, tomorrow was too frightening, even in this sun, and I didn’t want to see Erv’s face again—ever. What if he was waiting for Tara as she got out of school? And what if Mike’s parents were there? Who picked a child up from school? I decided I would wait for her at recess. But I couldn’t take her out of school, could I? Just like that, in the middle of the day? Who was I? How would I explain myself? If only Candy could have come with me. Or Gina. That Gina!

  The sun was setting. It was nearly eight, or nine, late, and the fields were burnt sienna and golden green. It looked peaceful, and I was scared.

  We’re making good time, the driver said. We’ll be in Chico early. We’ll drive through Paradise first. We should be there in thirty minutes.

  The road narrowed and wound far uphill, trees overhung the road, mountain vistas peeking through, strawberry fields glimmering in the valleys below. The bus chugged up the sloping hill, and didn’t stop. The hill never plateaued, just spiraled up and up, through pines, groves, and fields. Finally, just the embers of the sun remained in the blue and purple sky. On flat land at a mountain pass, under Ponderosa pine, I saw a wooden sign adorned with blooming pink flowers: YOU’RE ASCENDING INTO PARADISE, it read. POP. 13,000, ELEV. 2,400. Not as high as the Great Divide that we left long ago, but high enough.

  You’re ascending into Paradise. We were twenty-four hundred feet above sea level. Dusk had set; the bus had stopped at a light. I jumped up, pushed my way past the unfriendly woman, rushed to the front. “Do you think you can let me off here instead of Chico?” I panted. “Please?”

  “I’m not supposed to,” the driver said. “I’m responsible for each and every person on this bus. What if something happens to you?”

  “Something’s happening all the time,” I said. This gruff man thought he was responsible for me?

  “You got luggage?”

  “Just this bag.”

  The light turned green. He pulled the lever and the doors hissed open. “Watch your step,” he said. “Vaya con Dios.” What did that mean? I took French in high school; a lot of good it did me.

  I walked down a main street called Skyway with my bag (wondering why they called it Skyway) until I found a cabin in a place called Ponderosa Pines. I slept like the dead with all the doors chained and locked. The next morning was like one I’d never seen before. The sun was shining, filtering through the soaring spires of pine. The slight southern breeze gently tossed the needled branches and danced the heads of the pink and white flowers that bloomed everywhere. There was no one else in the cabins, except for the one, of course, right next to mine. An old blue Lincoln was parked in front with a worn-out bumper sticker: “God is my co-Pilot.” I waited for the people to come in or out, just to talk to someone, but everything was quiet. It was still early, and I had to find Tara’s school, and Tara’s house perhaps, to see where she lived. Candy told me that they lived in a trailer park. I could get a cab there, but did cabs go inside trailer parks? Maybe I could just look at it from the outside. The girl attended Pearson Elementary; how far was that from here? A map would’ve been helpful. I told the woman in reception I’d be keeping the room for another night. She in turn gave me a map, told me Pearson was just off Skyway, and that the Paradise Trailer Park was right behind Skyway, too, and nowhere near Tara’s street, Lovely Lane, which apparently had no trailer parks on it, only small private homes. On the bad local map of the town, I found Lovely Lane.

  2

  Lovely Lane

  A cab came and drove me around town at my request. When the ten bucks ran out, I got out, but I freely admitted I liked seeing things from the passenger window. What a novel way to see the road—out of the side window! Paradise is laid out in an upside down V on a flat butte in the high of the Sierra foothills, so if you drive just a few streets east or west, you’d go right off the cliff that overhung the stretched-out canyons and the valley below. Green-covered mountains ranged as far as my eye could see.

  I had the cab pass quickly by 24 Lovely Lane. Tara lived in a little freshly painted white house, nested in high old pines, and surrounded entirely by red and yellow flowers. It had a white fence, and a dog barked in the back.

  I saw supermarkets and a library, a chamber of commerce. There were restaurants and drugstores, and a place called “Nancy’s Books.” There was a Paradise Recreation Center, set on pine needles with a playground; the center had a pool and picnic tables, and everything was shaded from the California sun by 200-foot Ponderosas.

  Paradise had a church on four corners of every street. Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, two Assembly of Gods. Why did they need two? There was a Safeway, an Albertson’s, and a Longs Drugs.

  There was stuff. There was everything.

  The cabbie dropped me off on Pearson, just as school was letting out. I watched four older girls, maybe nine or ten, with their books on their backs, walking home, gabbing with each other in the sunlight.

  And farther on, in the school playground, on the swings, were three small girls. One of them, sparkly and golden, her feet up in the air, kicking high, swinging mightily, was a child that could’ve been Tara.

  I placed my hands on the chain-link fence and pressed my face to the diamond opening, gaping, my mouth quivering.

  Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot escape your life.

  And sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot keep it.

  Which of those was this moment for me? Which one of those was this moment for Candy?

  It was as if my life had two realities. One in front of me, in which mothers walked their children to school on sidewalks under pines, and girls in pigtails ambled home cracking gum and jokes, the sun in their hair, in a town high up in heaven where cars stopped at schoo
l crossings, and there was a church on every corner, sometimes two, and where a boy said, here, let me help you take that out to your car, and where there was a book fair in October, and a ten-mile run from Paradise to Chico, and a winter festival and a dog festival, and where they now used the town’s money to put up complimentary telescopes over the valley so that anyone who wanted to could study the sky in search of Aurora borealis.

  And then there was Candy’s world, where a strung-out man took small girls, dressed them in pigtails and school clothes, and hung them from trees, made them do unspeakable things and did unspeakable things to them. And, as if that weren’t enough, he filmed his depredations and sold them to other men who paid very good money to watch privately in the dark. This pitiless man took his lover’s child, fresh from the monastery, and sold her young body for smokes, gifts, and icy cash to his friends at the local bar, he pimped her and kept the money she earned. He had a menu of her services typed up which he discussed and negotiated while she stood silent nearby. He plied her with alcohol and drugs to make her more pliant, put red lipstick on her thirteen-year-old mouth, black mascara on her lashes, bought her miniskirts and told her not to wear underwear. He bought her tube tops and halters and told her not to wear a bra. He did all this, then brought the money he made off her to the girl’s mother and said, here’s your new washing machine, your TV, the truck you wanted. He traded her young body in stinking alleys and in adult bars at night, then used the money she made to buy Christmas gifts for her mother and his family. And the mother said to the child, why are you doing so bad in school? They keep calling me every day saying you’re cutting eighth period and fifth period. What are you doing?

  Erv Bruggeman’s world was the only world that Candy knew, and all the people she had met were those who were turning their backs on her now. A universe of sewers separated the sun-drenched avenues of Paradise from the foul alleys of Huntington, but every once in a while a blighted soul tried to escape through the manholes. But all Candy did, every day of her bleak and lonely life, was look for the manholes to crawl back into.

  All roads are parched and barren that lead to God, she said to me.

  I watched the girls on the swings with a sadness so profound, I couldn’t stand up anymore. I sank to the ground on my haunches, hoping the nice Paradise cop wouldn’t arrest me for loitering, and put my face in my hands. I couldn’t watch them anymore, I couldn’t sit anymore. I didn’t know what to do.

  Like this I sat, shaking to the depths of my soul with sorrow, sat in the mess I could not claw out of. I didn’t know how to turn away from the girls, or how to come close. I didn’t know how to begin to right myself. Please help me, was what was on my breath. Please, please please help me. Help me.

  A voice said, “Hey, Miss, you okay?”

  I looked up into the face of a blonde angel in a pink dress, who handed me a tissue of dubious pedigree and said, “Here.”

  Her friends were at the monkey bars, looking at her and me, and giggling.

  “Thank you,” I said, or thought I said. What a sight I must have been. I wiped my face, blew my nose. I felt red and swollen, absurd like a salt-sprinkled snail. I tried to get up, but my legs were noodles. The girl stretched out her hand.

  I took her little hand, but pushed myself off the pavement. I crawled, half-standing, to the chain-link fence and sat down on the ground against it. She came and stood by me. “I’d sit with you,” she said, “but I don’t want to get my dress dirty.”

  “You’re so right not to,” I said. “Your dress is too beautiful to sit in the dirt.”

  “Thank you. My nana got it for me.”

  “Oh yeah? And what’s your name?”

  “Tara. I’m five. I just turned five on July fifteen.” She smiled. “I’m a Yankee Doodle baby, I’m going to a big girl school now. I just started kindergarten. Are you in school?”

  “I was,” I said.

  “Oh, you must be big.”

  “Do I look big to you?” The tissue was wet. It was disintegrating in my hands.

  “Yes,” she said with a giggle. “Big and sad.”

  “Well, I am sad.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I just . . . felt blue all of a sudden. Does that ever happen to you?”

  She nodded solemnly. “Last year I cried because my dolly’s head came off, but I was a baby then, and my daddy fixed it.” She paused, for the briefest second. “My daddy died. Nana was sad. She cried. My daddy was her son, but she has two more sons, my uncles. Sometimes I cry when I miss my mama. Do you want to come play with us?”

  I glanced behind her. “Those your friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “You girls here all by yourselves?” I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t really thinking, just crying.

  “No. Megan’s mama is over there, eating ice cream.” She waved into the distance, too far for me to see clearly, where on a bench, under a pine, a woman sat wholly oblivious to little Tara in the street talking to a sobbing stranger.

  “Where’s your mama?”

  “She’s coming to get me,” said Tara. “She writes me letters. I’m a big girl now, I can read them all by myself. Nana used to read them to me when I was a baby.”

  “Your nana reads you your mama’s letters?”

  “Uh-huh. She used to. Not anymore, because I’m big now. I keep them in my box where they’re safe. I have seventeen dollars in there, and almost four dollars in quarters. Nana says that when Mama comes she can live with us and Popup.”

  “Your nana says that, does she?” I said. “Well, lucky you.” I struggled to my unsteady feet at this point remembering that my sole purpose in being here was to introduce myself to this child and say, I am Shelby. I am your mama’s good friend, and she is waiting for you, here is her picture, and here is a letter she wrote to you, and if you come with me, we will catch a bus to where your mama is waiting. I have some toys for you, and a dress. Coming, Tara? Why couldn’t I even begin?

  “What’s your name?” the girl said.

  “Shelby.”

  “Shall be?” And she giggled.

  “I don’t know, Tara,” I said. “I may never know.” I felt in my pocket for Candy’s picture, for her letter. “Do you know your mama’s name?”

  “Yes. It’s Grace Rio. I am Tara Rio. Well, Tara Rio Cordelli.”

  “Tara!” A woman’s voice sounded from under the trees. A white-haired, extremely concerned woman was hurrying across the sand to us. “Tara! Come here now, young lady!”

  “I gotta go,” the girl said. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers. Please can I play with your ball for just a little while?”

  “It’s yours. I brought it for you.”

  The girl’s brow furrowed, her round face scrunched up. “For me?”

  “Tara!”

  She grabbed the ball and started to run. “Bye!”

  “Bye . . .” I called after her, clutching the chain-link and her mother’s picture, her mother’s letter, while she skipped to a woman who scooped the girl up into her arms, admonishing her with her voice while caressing her with her hand; stern words but gentle kisses. She carried her all the way to the parking lot, to a tan station wagon, carried her and her bag, her little stones, her blue ball, and then put her in the backseat, strapped her in and kissed her. I watched the girl’s hands wrap around the woman’s neck as they hugged. She then got behind the wheel and drove away. On the bench, under the trees, Megan’s mother finished her ice cream, and took the two other girls into her own car. The playground was quiet. Not even my hand rattled the chains.

  It was early afternoon, and I had missed my bus back to Reno. I was supposed to call the room to tell Candy we’d be coming, but now I couldn’t call and didn’t know what to do. I had all these things in my bag for Tara that I forgot to give her, a dolly, a new dress. She looked so much like her mother. She had the same eyes, calm and deep, too wise for a five-year-old. There was no one walking on the stree
t, but maybe in one of the parked cars, Erv sat stalking, waiting.

  I didn’t feel his eyes on me. But then I didn’t feel anything. I walked the three miles back to my room, sat outside my little cabin under the pines, called no one and did nothing. At night I watched TV. I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink. I didn’t have a shower. In the early morning, I put my stupid matronly dress back on, and packed my few things—Tara’s one bag.

  I walked three miles along the Skyway back to the school. The buses were pulling in for the morning session. It was crowded. I felt conspicuous. I wished I had a camera. Well, why should I have had a camera? I was supposed to be bringing the real thing! Not a Polaroid. Oh, Candy. If only you could see her. Everyone was that small girl. Candy. Me.

  I thought Tara might take the bus in the mornings, but not two feet in front of the coffee shop where I sat, the tan wagon pulled up, and the same silver-haired woman got out. She wasn’t old and she wasn’t ugly. Her clothes were decent and ironed. Just her hair was white. Maybe it had gone white after she lost her son; whose wouldn’t? She opened the rear door and unbuckled the girl, helping her with her backpack. Tara had pink ribbons in her hair, and ladybug barrettes holding the front wisps away from her face, that’s how close she was, that’s how clearly I could see her. My nose to the glass, my hand fanned out, as if waving. Goodbye, Tara. She was wearing overalls and a yellow shirt with ruffles, ballet slippers for shoes and pink socks. The woman straightened her collar, wiped her mouth, bent to her head. Tara ran to school, waving. “Bye, Nana!” The woman watched her until she disappeared through the school doors. Then she drove away.

  My hands remained flat on the glass. I wished I had my car. I wished I had it, so I could get in, and drive to Mendocino, or back home, never go back to Reno, never face Candy again, because I couldn’t. I couldn’t face anything.

  It was nine in the morning. I called a cab company number tacked onto the public phone outside the coffee shop, and rode the ten miles to Chico, not seeing the canyon below, or the mountains, or the slight bright morning haze of a late summer sun. At 11:25 my bus came, and I got on, me, my dolly, and the pink dress with yellow flowers. The doors hissed closed.