Road to Paradise

by Paullina Simons

  On the bus back to Reno, I opened Candy’s letter to Tara.

  Dear Tara:

  It has been so long since my heart was with yours. Please—for me—above all things, be glad and young.

  For, if you’re young, whatever life you wear, it will become you.

  Know that I am always with you. Wherever you are, wherever I am, where my treasure is, my heart will be also. And my only Heart is with you.

  Mama

  It’s as if she knew I wouldn’t be bringing her baby back. It’s as if she thought I was leaving and never coming back.

  The hours on the rattling bus back to Reno were the longest hours of my life.

  3

  Four Last Things

  The longest, that is, until the three days I spent in Motel motel, pacing, and cursing, helpless and alone, without Gina, without my car, without Candy, my hands fully emptied. The money left with Candy was gone. She must have taken it. I began to suspect that she, knowing I would not do what I told her I’d do, and not having any other way to be rid of me, sent me on a fool’s errand, while she packed her things, took the money, sold my car, and was now headed to Paradise herself, to do what I could not do. I drank water out of the tap, and read Gideon’s Bible.

  Lift up thy hands that hang down, and thy feeble knees.

  The longest three days, that is, until the five-hour ride in the back of the police car to Paradise. No strawberry fields for me this time, no sunsets, hills, or blue skies, no ascensions. Distinctly, I felt like Judas, desperately clawing his way back up to the small light.

  By the time we reached Paradise it was late and dark. Yeomans and Johnson asked if I needed anything, and I said no. Like what? Look, Detective Johnson said, you look real beat up and scared, but this is the thing. You reported your car missing in Reno. You said your friend might have taken it. The guy at Moran’s junkyard confirmed that a young gal brought the car to him. It was in good condition, he saw the dollar signs and didn’t think of anything else. He gave her a thousand dollars for it. The girl fit the description of your friend.

  “Okay,” I said. A thousand dollars for my car! Well, it’s only right. That’s the money Reckless Man gave her and took away. “Why are we here, then?”

  Yeomans and Johnson glanced at each other. “Early this morning, the body of a young woman was found at Neal’s Sanitary Landfill off Neal Road. She had no identification on her. We think it may be the girl who took your car. She had some identifying, similar markings. You think you’ll be okay to come take a look?”

  My hearing left me. I started to cry. “No, I’m not going to be okay,” I said. It was like I crawled into my eardrum to hide and left no room for sound. “Where?” I whispered, but no one heard. “I’m not going to the town dump.” I shook my head. “No.”

  “No, no. She’s been taken to the morgue. If it’s her, maybe we can notify her family. Does she . . . have family?” Yeomans asked with hope.

  “It’s not her,” I said. “She’s not here.” I was nearly inaudible. Johnson patted me on the back.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. “But that’s not what you said when you called to report your car missing. You told us she’d be heading to Paradise in your yellow Mustang.”

  I never looked up. “She didn’t know how to drive.” I kept staring at my feet, at the ground. “Why would you seek me out for this?” I asked. “Why would you come get me all the way in Reno?”

  “This sort of thing doesn’t happen often in these parts,” said Yeomans. “The Reno cops were in touch with the Paradise PD. When we found her, we thought maybe the two were connected.” He paused. “And she’s been three days unidentified,” he added.

  They brought me to Enloe Medical Center in Chico, and took me down to the subbasement, possibly beneath the sewer pipes, where all was cold steel and fluorescents. A man in a soiled white overcoat and black glasses, a man who didn’t look at us, the living, even once, as if he had no interest in the still-breathing, took us to a room full of metal drawers, slid out one of the lower ones, number 518, and pulled a white sheet away from a small thin body. I didn’t have to look at anything more than the tattoo on her bare left shoulder and the matted bloodied blonde of her sheared hair. Accidentally, I noticed the parted frozen mouth, the half-open eyes; the yellowing black-and-blue underneath one of them. I wanted to touch her dear head, to fall to my knees and kiss her hands and feet, but I could do none of these things. They told me she’d been bludgeoned, and my legs gave way. As they helped me up, the drawer slid shut with a metallic thud. I should have touched her, and will regret that I didn’t for the rest of my life.

  I don’t remember how I got upstairs, but Yeomans sat me at a table in the hospital cafeteria. Johnson got me a hot tea.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Do you know anything about how this might have happened?”

  “I know absolutely nothing,” I said. “But I do know the man who killed her.”

  I told them everything. The man who killed her was Erv Bruggeman. He had been following us since Indiana. She had something of his, and he wanted it back. We told her not to come here, we told her he’d be waiting for her. She didn’t want to believe us.

  “Who’s us?”

  I blanched. Did I say us? God, what happened to Gina? Where was she?

  “Why would she come here?” asked Johnson.

  “Her little girl lives here,” I replied.

  Johnson asked where the film was.

  “With her father.”

  Johnson looked notably relieved. “I’m so glad she has family,” he said. “After the worst happens, all you want is for them to be properly buried. I can’t tell you how many times in Reno these sorts of things happen, unfortunately, and the bodies remain unclaimed and unidentified, cremated in the end on the taxpayers’ dime as John Doe or Jane Doe. You want them to have a name in death. As in life. What was her name?”

  “Her name was Grace Rio.”

  And so it came to be that Estevan Rio left the monastery in Melleray, Iowa, and came to Paradise, looking twenty years older than the last bright time I saw him, bringing the film his daughter left with him and a genuine monk-made, Trappist pine casket.

  “Merciful Father, by your Son’s suffering, death, and rising from the dead, we are freed from death and promised a share in your divine life. By the hands of monks, each day raised in praise of your goodness, this casket was fashioned for your child who died in faith. We ask you now to bless it. Receive the soul of our departed sister who is laid in this humble bed as in a cradle, safe in your care. As the thief who had confessed, Remember her, O Lord, when you come into your kingdom.”

  She was buried on a dazzling Friday in Paradise Cemetery, under a tree close to the overlook where Chico Valley lay as far as the eye could see to the hazy horizon. Estevan, the funeral director and me at the graveside. Tara didn’t come, but she gave me back the dolly to be placed with her mother in the pine box, a picture of herself wearing the dress Candy had bought for her, and a Valentine’s Day card. She kept the ball. After the burial, Estevan and I went to the Paradise stone and cement company to order a simple, black granite headstone. It was going to take eight to ten weeks to arrive. Estevan paid in full.

  GRACE RIO

  1963–1981

  “She skated on noisy wheels of joy.”

  After the funeral, we met Tara and her grandmother Nora at the Paradise Recreation Center. I introduced Estevan to his granddaughter, and he sat for a few minutes with her and me on a bench under the Ponderosas, showing us the pictures he had brought with him of a very young Grace. We agreed mother and daughter looked very much alike. “I wish you could have seen your mother,” said Estevan. “She was beautiful like you.”

  “I did see my mother,” Tara told Estevan.

  “When did you see her, child?”

  “A few days ago.” She thought a moment. “Maybe seventeen days last Thursday. She came to the school, kind of like you did, Shall Be. We sat together, we talked.” />
  “Did she cry like me?” I asked. So Candy did see her baby girl, after all.

  “No.” Tara giggled. “She said she was happy to see me, and happy to see me happy. She said she really liked my life. She bought me ice cream, and cotton candy, and a white clip for my hair. See?” She showed us the little white flower that held back her bangs. “She said she would come see me again someday.”

  Estevan briefly held the child on his lap as she talked, his hand patting her kindly. We were high in the hills, it was warm, and the smell of pine and fading summer was strong.

  Nora called for Tara from the shadow of the mighty trees, the safety of the station wagon.

  “Nana!” Tara called. “Come here.”

  “No, Tara, you come here!”

  An open, loving child, Tara hugged Estevan. She even hugged me. Then ran to Nora, joyously skipping the whole way.

  “That’s how Grace was, too,” said Estevan as we watched her, my heart so liquid with sorrow, I thought it would weep itself out of my chest. I clasped my arms around my stomach. “She was just like that, skipping through the abbey the first seven years of her life. She couldn’t walk without bouncing. She ran and jumped and played hide-and-seek with the squirrels. She had to force herself to walk, but even after, she was like a spring, up, down, up, down, so full of joy.”

  I turned away as he spoke, faced the pines and the yellow gardenias. “She was still like that, Brother Estevan,” I said. “She never lost that.”

  “You couldn’t help it,” he said. “Watching her roll around, pick flowers brought smiles to our faces.”

  “Maybe that’s just what all children do,” I said, not really knowing, watching Nora’s face watching the animated Tara, talking, gesturing to us, folding her arms on her chest.

  He nodded, wistfully. “Maybe. She was the only child I’d ever known.”

  The woman took Tara’s hand, and together they slowly walked toward us.

  “You see, Shelby, just when you don’t know how,” Estevan whispered to me, “a mystery happens.” He stood up tall, dignified even in grief, stoic in his white cassock and black tunic, his hands ever ready for a blessing, a prayer.

  “Estevan,” said Tara, “I wanted my nana to meet you. She still doesn’t believe me that you are my mama’s daddy.”

  “I am,” said Estevan. “I was.”

  Stopping in front of us, Nora nodded to Estevan, eyed me warily, but spoke only to him. “Ah,” she said, her brown eyes widening. “That girl had a monk for a father? Well, well. The mysteries just don’t end.”

  “You’re so right about that,” Estevan replied.

  “So why didn’t you want to take her, bury her somewhere close to you?”

  “I think she would have preferred to be close to Tara.”

  I knew this to be true.

  Nora stood awkwardly. She didn’t know what to say, what to do. Did she shake his hand? Did she bow her head? He made it easier by making the sign of the cross on her, which gave her permission to retreat, step by step, as if she didn’t want to turn her back on him. “Would you, um, like to come to the house with us?” she said, trying not to stammer. “Maybe have a bite to eat?”

  “You are so kind,” said Estevan. “Too kind. Thank you. But I must be going.”

  “Of course,” she said hurriedly, notably relieved. “But do come and see the girl, won’t you? Any time you want. It’ll make her happy, and that’s all that matters. She’ll be glad to know her mama’s daddy. I want her to be happy.”

  “I can see that,” said Estevan. “I live in a monastery in Iowa. This is the first time I’ve left New Melleray in eighteen years. I will try to come again for a few days, when I can get a little time. But you are always welcome to visit me with Tara. We offer hospitality to all guests. You can stay as long as you like. I live in a sanctuary. It’s very peaceful.”

  Tara clapped with delight. Nora said they would try to come when they could. Before she left she said, “We received a package from her a few days ago. She enclosed some personal things of hers.” Nora coughed. “There was a considerable amount of money. A few thousand dollars. I—I feel uncomfortable with it. Perhaps I can make an offering to your church?”

  Lightly smiling, Estevan shook his head. “My abbey won’t need it. Leave it for Tara, please. I know that’s what Grace would’ve wished. Had she wanted me to have it, she would have sent it to me.”

  Pulling on her grandmother’s hand, Tara was jumping up and down, squealing. “Nana, nana, nana . . .”

  “What, Tara?”

  “Maybe I can get that pony now? You said I could. Please?” She put her hands together as if in fervent prayer.

  Apologetically, Nora shushed the girl, with an expression of kids these days. They said goodbye to us and walked back to their car, Tara holding Nora’s hand, chatting to her, looking up at her. Something in Nora’s stance, her hair, the shape of her face, I couldn’t quite grasp or place it, reminded me of Emma. That ever-patient, slightly exasperated expression, that kindly, always-leaning-down tilt of the head, as if ever ready to listen, to hear anything. That proffered hand. Nothing too demonstrative. Except . . . I had seen the way Nora had kissed Tara as she strapped her into the station wagon. As if her entire heart held only Tara in it.

  We watched them disappear from view, then Estevan turned to me. “I really do have to be going,” he said. “I have a long ride back.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  He took a breath. “What are you going to do?”

  “You know,” I said, “I have absolutely no idea. God pity me.”

  “Whom God distinctly has,” he said in reply. We shared a cab to the Chico bus station. His to Dubuque wasn’t until tonight. Mine to Mendocino was in forty-five minutes. We sat on a bench in the waiting room, the way his daughter and I had sat, in Reno, a lifetime ago. We didn’t speak for a while.

  “The last time I saw her, she said to me that no prayer was ever denied at the fourteenth station.”

  “Yes,” the monk said. “In faith.”

  “She never told me what the station was.”

  He nodded ruefully. “Did she tell you to go learn the other thirteen? Just like her.” He folded his hands. “The fourteenth station is Jesus dead in the tomb.”

  I turned to walk away, but at the last minute turned back to him and said, “Make it as secure as you can.”

  A light came into his eyes, and a small smile to his sad mouth that quivered slightly when he said, “Yes. Be not afraid, Shelby.”

  Nothing to be afraid of now. I had nothing left. I thought of calling Emma, but, considering I lost her twenty-thousand-dollar present, couldn’t. I thought of calling Gina’s mother, but, considering I lost her daughter, I couldn’t do that, either. I didn’t know what to do about losing Gina.

  Johnson had said they would need me to testify in Bruggeman’s murder trial. He’d been found, arrested, held without bail. Stay close, Johnson instructed. I asked for his card, promised I would get in touch as soon as I knew where I was.

  One place I clearly wasn’t: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Another place: Larchmont, New York. Neither was I in Reno. Or Paradise. I was on a bus—to Mendocino. We passed Lake Geneva as the sun was setting behind the circling blue mountains. Night fell and gradually thickened with a dense, swirling fog blown in from the bottomless Pacific. The narrow, darkened lane was overhung on all sides by looming sequoias the size of skyscrapers, and the top-heavy bus lurched alarmingly, filling me with terror as it made those blind, ninety-degree turns. Behind me a woman began to pray. Slowly, slowly, on we went, winding through that seemingly unending black nightmare road. There was no light outside and the bus lights dimmed. I closed my eyes. Blind turns and then—nothing.

  Hours later, terrors later, the bus finally dropped me off in Mendocino. I flew off that bus. I had with me nothing but the bag holding the remains of Tara’s things. The cops didn’t tell me to go back to my room in Reno, they didn’t tell me to take my stuff, and I had
left all I had brought with me in Motel. I left my books and my makeup, my clothes and my music tapes. I left my toothbrush, my underwear, my miniskirts. I left my maps, and my spiral notebook.

  In the pocket of my jeans I had a mint, twenty dollars, and my license. This is what I took with me, this is what I had with me as I jumped off the Greyhound onto Lansing Street.

  “This is Mendocino?”

  “This is Mendocino.” The doors were closing, the driver already pulling away.

  I stood in the middle of the street, looked up the hill, looked down the hill. The town was quiet. It was nearing eleven in the evening. Matins? Vespers? Compline? How could it be compline? It meant after-supper prayer, and I had not eaten anything but stale potato chips for two days. Far in the black distance was the sound of hard-breaking waves. It wasn’t windy, and it wasn’t warm. It just was. Across the street was an Irish bar, Patterson’s, and from the bar came noise, the happy hubbub of drinking friends. I didn’t go there, I shuffled down the hill. I looked down one street—darkness. I looked down another, darkness—but with a yellow light shining. The street was called Albion and the yellow light shone in front of a white, multistory house with steep steps and a glassed-in porch. A sign outside said, “MacCallum House.” I walked up the steps, knocked. A voice from inside said, “Come in.”

  I came in, in my worn jeans, with my worn life around me, I came in, barely lifting my head, and said to the two men and a woman sitting at the small bar, “Can you tell me please if there’s somewhere to grab a bite around here?”

  “What, at this time of night?” One of the men jumped off his stool and came toward me. He stood right in front of me, but I couldn’t look up. Not at him, them, the house, or another human being.

  “Just something quick.”

  “This is Mendocino,” he said as if that explained everything. “Closed by ten.”