Road to Paradise

by Paullina Simons

  “Patterson’s might be open,” said the guy at the bar. “I don’t know if they’re still serving food.”

  “Yeah, they’re open,” I said. “Is there a bed and breakfast around here?”

  “Um, this is a bed and breakfast,” said the man in front of me.

  “Oh. Do you have a room?”

  “Yeah, we got a room.” He paused. “Hey,” he said.

  I didn’t know what that meant. Hey. I was looking at my dumb shoes. They were so beat up and the strap was broken. No wonder I was limping. I hadn’t even noticed. I scraped the mud off one heel. “How much for a room?”

  “A hundred and thirty dollars,” he said.

  I was quiet. “For a bed and breakfast?”

  He said nothing.

  “Anywhere else to stay? A little cheaper?”

  “How much cheaper?”

  I didn’t know. I didn’t say.

  “Hey,” he said again, but quieter, tilting his head down to peer into my face.

  Finally I lifted my eyes. In front of me stood a dark, perfectly groomed, curly-haired young man in a white shirt and jeans. He had an open face, clear eyes.

  “How much you got?” He smiled, appraising my bleached cropped hair.

  “Twenty bucks.”

  Whistling, he grunted. “You’ll have to wash dishes tomorrow. You’ll have to barter for your room at the inn.”

  “I’ll do what I have to.”

  “Hmm. So will you be needing two keys?” he asked, squinting lightly, his mouth quirking.

  My gaze focused on him. “No.”

  He stuck out his hand. I took it.

  “I’m Noah,” he said.

  “I’m Shall Be.”

  EPILOGUE

  MACCALLUM HOUSE

  One April, when the weather was dry and crisp and the azaleas were in yellow bloom on the bluffs of the Pacific, I was behind the bar, opening the books for the day, when a voice, a ghastly voice from the past, said “Shelby?”

  I almost didn’t want to look up. I’m good at that, looking at my feet when I need to lift my eyes. But I had already gone to morning Mass, I didn’t need to lift my eyes again, the heavy lifting was already done. But maybe not. Eventually, profoundly reluctantly, I raised my eyes.

  In front of me stood Gina Reed.

  Gina, with her hair kinky permed and short, heavier, thicker from the eyes down, her chin, her neck, everything on her looking like she lived a life filled with many intense petty comforts, a life in which she denied her body nothing. She was wearing something indeterminately paisley and carried a bag from Nine West.

  “Shelby?” she repeated incredulously.

  It was April, but it could have been December, at night it got to the midforties in California, but the days were warm and the flowers fresh, so wherever you stepped in Mendocino, the Pacific Ocean was always seen through a prism of yellows, pinks, and lavenders.

  Funny how things get you.

  Shelby?

  Well, that is my name. I shouldn’t have jumped or been startled.

  It was the question mark at the end of it that was startling. The question mark at the end of my name carried with it years of uncertainty. In other words: Shelby, is that you? Because you’ve grown and you don’t look like yourself, but weren’t we friends? You don’t look like that girl anymore. You’re wearing a smart Armani skirt, you’re pressed, your hair is straight and short, though you’ve kept it blonde, I see. You’ve gained or lost weight, the heels make you taller, the lines of life on your face make you nearly unrecognizable, and so I put the question mark at the end of your name, because I’m not sure it’s you, and if it isn’t, I will just apologize in embarrassment and walk on. The lilt at the end gives you permission to smile thinly and say, nope, not me. You got the wrong girl.

  The years could have been kinder to Gina, for when she was young she had been so pretty. I could still hear through the haze of decades the boys calling out to her, “Oh, Geeeeena . . .”

  This always happens to me—the world goes on mute for a few moments. Almost like I press pause on life and then mull whether to rewind, or get up off the couch, and go watch another show, or just instant-replay back to make sure I heard correctly, felt correctly, reacted as I should have to what was in front of me. I felt that the whole glassed-in porch with the Georgian windows fell on mute, too, and even the Australian travelers, who had been chatting animatedly about Coral Reefs and floods and cane toads, were holding their breath for what was next. We stood still, she and I. I looked at her, she looked at me, and we stood, and we said nothing. In my periphery, a woman stepped forward supported with her cane, thanked me for breakfast, and limped outside. For a few moments in time, a tick here, a tock there, one year, two—

  “Oh my God!”

  Sound came back. I slowly put down my tray, slowly; it clanged loudly against the glass countertop of the buffet. I came around the bar. We hugged. She was thick, and smelled of cigarettes. “It’s good to see you. How long has it been? Twenty years?” Note my own hopeful question mark!

  “Twenty!”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right. Twenty-five, more like.”

  “Twenty-seven years, Shelby,” Gina said.

  “Of course.”

  Awkwardly we stood.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m having breakfast. We’re staying at the Seacove Inn down the road.”

  “Yes, I know it. Nice place.”

  “Not as nice as this. And you?”

  “Well, I’m here. The MacCallum House is mine. Mine and Noah’s.”

  “Who is Noah?”

  Noah came downstairs, in his booming boots and indigo Cherokee stonewashed jeans. He was helping build a new garage and was not dressed for guests. I took care of the mornings. He labored outside. Tonight we were having a wedding, white tie, and everything had to be just right. There was a lot to do. Noah shook Gina’s hand. “You’re married?” She assessed him. “How long?”

  “Too long,” Noah said, pinching me. “I’ll have Gracie come help you. I gotta go. They’re waiting.”

  “Yes.”

  “Grace? He knows about Candy?” said Gina, with surprise.

  “Who?” asked my husband.

  “Grace is our daughter,” I said.

  “Oh my God, you called her Grace?”

  Once again I lowered my eyes to my shoes under her gaze. “Why is that so surprising?” Noah whispered to me. I pushed him gently away. Finally he bounded down the porch steps and was gone.

  Gina stood by the bar. “What the hell happened to the both of you?”

  “Us? What happened to you?”

  Gina shrugged. Clearly the events of back then had grown fuzzy in her memory. She couldn’t recall the sequence of things. She said she tried to find us, only to find us gone.

  “I don’t know how that could be,” I said. “We looked for you for days. For all I know, my stuff is still at Motel motel. I never took it.”

  “Don’t I know it. That weird creep had thrown all our things in the trash. I had to dig through a dumpster to find my duffel.”

  “Where did you go, Gina?”

  “What?” She waved her hand. “I really don’t remember. So what are you doing now?”

  “Living here,” I said, wishing I could take a step back.

  “When did you make it back?”

  “Back where?”

  “Larchmont.”

  “I never did make it back. You?”

  Gina shook her head. “I’m still in Reno.” She rolled her eyes and laughed.

  “Really?” I said. “Candy suspected as much. I hadn’t believed her. You married?”

  “Married, divorced, married again. Separated. I’m seeing somebody new now, trying to save up money for a quickie.”

  “A quickie what? Divorce or marriage?”

  She paused, then chuckled. “I guess both. My boyfriend’s real nice. He’s a dealer.”

&n
bsp; “Not Raul?”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody, nobody. So whatcha been up to in Reno?”

  “I have a dealer license,” Gina told me. “Suspended. Can’t practice at the moment. A little trouble with the casino. They accused me of embezzling, but I wasn’t. I didn’t. Case didn’t go to court, I pled down, but lost my license in the process. But I’m bartending, so it’s all good. Just a little probation.”

  “Whatever happened to Eddie?”

  “Who?”

  I was silent.

  With a shrug, Gina said, “I don’t know what happened to him. I never called him. For all I know he’s still in Bakersfield.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Married to Casey.” Gina laughed. “To think there was once a time when that mattered so much. More than anything in the world.”

  “To think.” There was once a time when many things mattered more than anything else in the world.

  “But what about you? What about Harvard?”

  “Didn’t go,” I said. “I came here. Got a job, worked here, behind the bar.” I smiled to even things out. “I was bartending, too. Took accounting classes. Noah and I got married a few years later.”

  “So you never left?” Gina looked through the front doors to the outside. MacCallum House is on a small hill, and beyond the rooftops you can see Mendocino Bay morning and night. “And now you own this?”

  “Yeah, we bought it three years ago. Noah is a carpenter, a construction worker. But his friend Jed made a lot of money on dot coms. We went in on this together. Bought it from the old owners.”

  “Wow.” She shuffled her feet. A fleeting cold wave passed across her face. “Well, I really have to be going.”

  She didn’t ask about Grace Rio, about her little girl, what had happened to either of them. Didn’t ask, didn’t care, didn’t want to know. Quietly Gina said, “I read in the paper about that guy. I’m glad he went down. Years later, I know. But still.”

  “Yes. After fifteen years of appeals.” So she did know. Knew something, read the paper enough to know about it, a murder trial in another state, followed by a conviction, years later an execution. She knew. Just didn’t ask. Well, what was there to ask, really. What was there to say? I told you so?

  My hands have been muddied my whole life by not ever knowing what the right thing had been. To open my car? To go in the first place? To send her on her own? To never leave her side? Except . . . I hope that Candy’s Tara has had a different life. That’s the only thing. Candy must have hoped for that, too. Because, she, too, left Tara be, to her swings and her blue ball.

  “It was good to see you,” Gina said.

  “Yeah, you too.”

  “You mind treating me to breakfast? Bill was kind of steep.”

  “No, no, ’course not. Breakfast’s on me.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled. “Hey, aren’t you gonna ask if I have any kids?”

  “Do you,” I asked neutrally, “have any kids?”

  “Yeah, a girl.” She giggled. “Can you believe it, me, a girl.”

  “I believe it. I have a girl.” And two sons—for Noah.

  “Mine’s eighteen. What an age, huh?”

  “Sure is. Mine, too.” She’s a senior at Mendocino high school that overlooks the ocean. She works with me on Saturdays, and goes up to Fort Bragg with her friends, calls me every five minutes asking for advice prefacing every query with a plaintive “Mommy . . .”

  We were both looking at the wooden floor under our feet. Some things are just easier not faced. Unfaced, but not unwept. “What’s your girl’s name?” I asked.

  “Tiffany.”

  “Ah. Where’s her dad?”

  “Out on parole in ’09,” she replied, slightly sheepish. But only slightly. “Tiff and my new boyfriend get along real well.”

  “Oh. Good for you. That’s important.”

  As she was heading out the door, she turned around. “I almost forgot,” she said. “Did you ever find your mother?”

  “No.” No trace of Lorna Moor anywhere. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried.

  “Huh. Sorry about that. I know how much that meant to you. You know, I stopped by your aunt’s house in Larchmont years ago. I must have been twenty, twenty-one. They said she’d gone. No one knew where.”

  “She came out west. I brought Emma with me when I knew I’d be staying.”

  “Really? You did that? Well, that’s great.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Good. She’s our office manager. She walks the headlands every day.”

  “Oh, man, those headlands,” said Gina. “Too windy for me.”

  “Yes. Emma likes that. Needs the extra shot of oxygen. The sun brings the tides and the tides bring the wind. When the sun goes down, the wind dies. She’s always there at sunset. Tries to get Grace to go, who’ll have none of it. Emma forces her to go on Fridays. Like penance.”

  “Penance indeed. Well, tell her I said hi.”

  “I will.”

  I turned away from the door, so I wouldn’t see her clomping down my stairs and out of the gate. I heard her, though. Clop, clop. Then she was gone. The gate creaked. Carefully I washed out the glasses I needed to dry and stack for tonight. There was so much preparation for a wedding. No time to waste. I kept my mind here, on the glasses, and the oysters, and the crates of Cristal arriving any minute. Noah came back inside, all hammers, plywood, and ripped apart jeans but a white shirt and designer stubble. He laid his dirty tools right on the bar counter despite my vocal protest, and said, taking the glasses from my hands and stacking them on the tray, “Okay, I’ll bite—who in the world was that? And who is Candy?”

  The story of Judas and the eternal sorrows had been far away until Gina clambered up into my room full of memories. I never forget. I never stop thinking of Grace Rio, because the roads that led me here, to the only place I ever want to be, haven’t all been paved in gold. And yet, just when I thought my life was over, it was only beginning.

  Not hers, though.

  Lines from a poem came from long ago, one she had read to me in that other life I call youth.

  i walked the boulevard

  i saw a dirty child

  skating on noisy wheels of joy

  pathetic dress fluttering . . .

  while nearby the father

  joked to a girlish whore . . .

  of how she was with child

  To Noah’s questioning eyes, I waved my hand dismissively. You know what I have been thinking, she whispered to me our last night in Reno, traveling with you through every mile of this country? What if there is no place in the world for me?

  That’s what I was afraid you were thinking, I thought, but to her I said, Don’t say that. Look around you. The world is so big, so beautiful. I tried to convince her. There is a place for everyone. We just have to find it.

  Mendocino Bay was in front of me through the yellow-painted houses. To the right were the ocean headlands, and morning. Emma was out there somewhere communing with the divine. My own house was here, where I stood on the glass porch with the Georgian windows and the parquet floors.

  You cannot save your life until you lose it utterly.

  Well, no use loitering. There was still so much left to do.

  “Are you going to tell me or no?” said Noah. “Who is she?”

  “Oh no one,” I replied, so casual, picking up the tray and spiral accounting books, catching my reflection for a moment in the mirrored surface of the bar. “She was just someone I used to know.”

  She was just someone I used to love.

  A NOTE TO MY READERS

  After I had written the first act of this story—my Shelby getting ready to go cross country—I said to my husband that I didn’t think I could write the rest effectively unless I went cross country also. He was unconvinced. Me traveling by myself across the width and breadth of the entire continental United States did not appeal to him as the fam
ily’s self-appointed Director of Security. He wondered why I couldn’t write about a paper towel factory in New Jersey, safe and close to home. Or just make the whole thing up. “You always do.”

  Spending two weeks by myself in a car through the wilds of Wyoming didn’t seem practical for a mother of four, like trying to be young again. He brought up another book I had once thought of writing, part of which was set in Barrow, Alaska, and wanted to know if I would’ve needed to go to Barrow to write it. Yes, I said, and perhaps this is why, after fourteen years of being a published author, I have no book about Barrow, Alaska. I’ve lived in Topeka, I’ve visited Dartmouth College, I was pregnant in Texas, and returned to the Russia of my birth; I’ve lived in New York City and been to Hawaii.

  Now I had to see the Badlands. I had to see the Great Divide. I had to see Mendocino. This was also a journey I had to take, and I had to do it alone. If hubby were in the car with me, we’d be talking about the kids, arguing about directions, feeling hungry, listening to Counting Crows instead of the Bee Gees; it would be a different book, not this book: three girls on a quest for life and meaning.

  I tried to rent an SUV. When I got to Baltimore, Avis didn’t have my car; they were out of cars; would I mind waiting? I waited an hour. They offered me a Jeep, and a Chrysler sedan, but the Jeep was too open in the back and the sedan could’ve belonged to my grandparents. Suddenly the Avis man said, “I don’t know if it will work for you, but a Mustang just came in. Wanna take a look?”

  The rest is history. The Mustang was yellow, and it barely fit my stuff, but I was in the most audacious, fantastic, conspicuous car on the road, and renting it changed my travels and my fiction.

  The other thing that changed my story was a conversation with my mother-in-law, Elaine, who said, “What are you going to write about driving on the interstate? There’s nothing to see.” And she was right. I got off the interstate. To her I owe the digressive paths that expanded my trip to 4,000 miles and made this book what it is. To her I owe a lot.

  Also to Susan Opie, my new lovely editor, who shared with me a magical afternoon on a balcony overlooking the seven hills of Rome, complete with champagne and strawberries, which, come to think of it, probably would’ve made the New Jersey Turnpike look attractive. She has proven to be a wonderful, smart, patient, indulgent editor. I’m lucky to have her.