Even in Paradise

by Chelsey Philpot

  I felt my cheeks get prickly. “Flattery will get you nowhere.” I took the bottle from her, grateful for the distraction of the bubbles exploding in my mouth.

  Julia stood up. “I’ve hurt your feelings? I know how to make it up to you. I will perform part of the Great Buchanans acrobatic act, a breath-catching, show-stopping, world-famous defiance of gravity!” Julia put both her hands on her hips and started kicking her legs in front of her like a can-can dancer.

  I tried really hard not to smile.

  “What? Madame is not impressed.” Julia stopped kicking, her chest heaving in and out. “I can tell ze Madame is a lady of exigeants taste. Perhaps zee ballet dancing is more to her liking, oui?”

  I nodded.

  “Well I shall perform zee Swan Lake for zee discerning Madame.” Julia raised her arms and bounced on the balls of her sneaker-clad feet with small, barely discernable fluttering motions.

  “You’re really good for a pick-up ballerina.”

  “Thank you, Madame,” she huffed. “Mummy insisted on zee ballet lessons since zis ballerina could barely walk. Too bad I have the height of a munchkin instead of a dancer. And maintenant pour le grand final!” Julia moved closer and closer to the edge of the widow’s walk until she was less than a foot from where it ended and the sky began. She stopped and drew her arms into a circle in front of her. She looked at me, winked, and then began raising her left foot until it formed a triangle against her right knee. She slowly moved it behind her, lowering her chest toward the railing as her leg climbed higher and higher behind her.

  “Julia.” I dropped the empty champagne bottle and had to clamor for it as it rolled toward the edge. I grabbed the neck and stood up. “Julia, stop. I’m impressed, okay. Now move away from the railing, please.”

  Julia didn’t break her slow graceful motion except to raise her head to look at me. “Say you forgive me.”

  “I forgive you.”

  “You forgive me for what?” She kept stretching her back leg even higher, and I could see her standing leg start to wobble.

  I moved toward her, and this time when I dropped the bottle I let it roll off the roof. It hit the gutter with a thud and then sailed over the edge, crashing in the bushes three floors below.

  “I . . . I forgive you for saying you invited me because you always need people with you when you come to Arcadia.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you.” Small sweat beads gathered near her hairline.

  “I do. It’s true.”

  “Good.” She lowered her leg. “Because I am hopelessly out of shape. Let’s go down to the edge. The view’s better there.”

  She had one leg over the railing before I had begun to exhale normally again and was lifting the other when her sneaker got caught in the corner. Without thinking, I reached and grabbed her wrist. She stumbled, but she didn’t slip any further. For a moment I just held her, feeling her heart pounding, feeling the adrenaline pump through my veins. Still holding her arm, I guided her back over the railing, until she was inside the widow’s walk once again with me.

  Clinging to me, she raised her face up toward mine. First, her breath on my face: sweet, fruity, and warm. Then her lips on mine: soft, gentle, and curious. Then she was kissing me. She tasted like champagne and salt, so I didn’t think. I just kissed her back.

  We stopped kissing when a seagull’s caw pierced the barrier of our little world. I ducked my face away from hers and reached to push back my loose hair. I felt her gaze on my face and that my skin was flushed with champagne, and heat, and I don’t know what else. I looked up.

  “You’re blushing,” she said, leaning against the railing. “It’s cute. Right now I can totally picture five-year-old Charlie getting caught stealing a cookie or trying on your mom’s jewelry. Tu as l’air d’une enfant coupable.”

  “Julia, it’s just that . . . I don’t know. It’s just that I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve kissed in my whole life and . . . I don’t know.”

  “Oh, Charlie. You saved my life, so I kissed you because I felt like kissing you. We’re not lezzing it up for a bunch of boys behind the gym at a dance. “Profite un peu de la vie!” she whispered, her voice smoky.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you should drop Latin and take French. Come on, let’s go inside and see what Nanny left us in the kitchen. Practically dying has made me hungry.”

  I followed her through the hatch and down the ladder, stumbling at the bottom over a plastic dump truck. If I hadn’t bumped into Julia on the attic stairs, I wouldn’t have noticed the room at all.

  “Oomph. Sorry. Julia?”

  Julia was staring down the hall. I followed her gaze to the green door at the end. It was slightly ajar and dust drifted in the slant of afternoon light coming from within the room. The metal plate near the top was so dull that I couldn’t make out the writing.

  “That room should not be open.” As Julia strode to the end of the hall I jumped the rest of the way down the steps. She slammed the green door with a bang loud enough to make me reach to cover my ears.

  “Jesus, Julia!”

  “Nanny knows I don’t like to have the door open.” She spun and started down the stairs to the first floor. “It’s Gus’s room.” Her voice was a filled sink in danger of overflowing.

  I took one more glance at the closed door before padding after her, the cork from the champagne bottle safe in my pocket.

  Julia was quiet the rest of the day. Nothing Sophie or I said or did could bring her back. After dinner, she went to bed early, so I did, too.

  I had learned to accept her laughter as my reward for never pushing her too far and her silences as answers.

  TWELVE

  I WENT INTO THE ROOM while Julia was riding at the farm across the road. I went in because I was not supposed to, and because I was curious and bored and because I wanted to know the unknowable girl who haunted Julia and Arcadia itself.

  Just turning the doorknob made my heart clatter like a box of nails dropping onto the floor of my dad’s garage. I found myself walking on the balls of my bare feet and preparing excuses in case I got caught:

  Oh, that’s Gus’s room? I got confused.

  I got lost.

  I’m sorry. I thought you were joking when you said no one went in here.

  They were all lame. None of them would work.

  The room was black as the bottom of a sealed box, and the hot dusty air made me feel like I was trying to breathe inside a balloon. When I couldn’t find a light switch, I tiptoed across the floor with my arms straight in front of me until I bumped against the far wall and the edge of a curtain.

  “Ow!” I pushed the dense fabric aside with one arm while trying to grip my stubbed toe in my free hand. The rectangle of morning coming through the window cut across the space like a flashlight, illuminating the objects directly in its path and throwing the rest into shadow.

  The room was spare and lonely. There was no carpet on the scuffed floor. The whitewashed bureau was tired and leaned on the uneven floorboards like one side of it had melted. A navy and ivory comforter and throw pillows with cartoonish nautical designs—anchors, fish, and mermaids—topped the twin bed. It was a bed for a little girl or a girl who couldn’t be bothered to get a grown-up one.

  Trophies of various sizes, many with plastic sailboats on the top, lined the bookshelves to the left of the bed, interspersed among knickknacks, half-used candles, and photos without frames, their edges curled in. I stepped toward them, picking up the first object that my fingers could reach: a miniature stuffed moose, a smaller version of Julia’s Aloysius. I set the creature down as carefully as I had lifted him, adding a pat on his head for good measure. Someone must have loved him for his antlers to be so worn.

  I reached for the photo nearest to me. Its edges were uneven with age and faded, but the center was still vibrant. In it, Gus looked about the same age as in the photo in Julia’s room. Her smile was wide and strands of her dark hair ble
w in her face. She was perched on a railing, her head resting on the shoulder of a guy with red hair and freckles across his burned nose. He wasn’t looking at the picture taker. He was looking at Gus. He was a lottery winner who couldn’t believe his luck. A guy holding a statue made of crystal and gold that he was terrified of dropping. They looked happy. They looked in love.

  I was about to set the photo in front of a dried corsage when I heard soft footsteps behind me.

  “Chérie?” a delicate voice said over my right shoulder, barely above a whisper.

  I tried to put the photo back, but in my panic I dropped it and knocked my elbow against one of the metal latches of an upright trunk behind me.

  “Ow! Oh, my God. I am so sorry. I . . . I was just—” Gripping my elbow, I looked up at Sophie. Her perfect posture reminded me of a post stuck in the earth. Her expression betrayed nothing. “I was just looking.”

  “Une porte fermée est toujours une tentation.” She leaned in toward me. “Truth be told, I like to come in here, too. Sometimes it’s nice to look at her things.” She reached down and picked up the photo. “She was such a pack rat, this one.” She pointed to the center, her finger pressed right below the face of the dead girl with the beautiful smile and eyes full of love. “She saved everything. Passed the habit on to Julia, too. That child has had that élan since Augustine put it in her crib.”

  Her sharing made me momentarily forget I had gone into a room that I had no business going into. “She looks like Julia . . . or Julia looks like her. She and her boyfriend, they’re . . . they were . . .” I searched for a word. The right one wouldn’t come to me. “Vibrant?”

  Sophie sighed and set the photo back on the shelf. “That’s her David. They were very in love. C’était beau à voir.”

  I let go of my elbow and shifted so I stood next to her, both of us looking at the shelves that now seemed more like a shrine than a girl’s collection. “He was in the car, too? The driver, right?” I knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

  Sophie clicked her tongue. She studied the space in front of her for so long, I thought she didn’t hear me.

  “Was he—”

  “There was only one David in Augustine’s life. She met him and that was it.” She reached forward and swiped at some dust on one of the shelves, leaving a wide streak where her fingers had touched. “I need to convince Julia to let me clean in here. C’est très sale.”

  “Nanny, I mean Sophie,” I said. “Why did she get in a car with him if he was drunk? Why would she let Julia? Gus loved him. Wouldn’t she want to protect him?”

  “Is that what Julia told you? That David was drunk?”

  I let my fingers trail across the top of the trophies, avoiding Sophie’s gaze. “Julia talks about Gus a lot, but I heard that from . . . well that’s what the papers imply, and then some of the girls at school—”

  “Tu ne devrais pas croire tout ce que tu entends.” Placing a hand on my back, she guided me away from the shelves. “Ma douce, l’amour peut faire des choses folles.” She lapsed into French as gracefully as she moved me toward the door. When we reached it she turned and held my face, her piercing eyes fixed on my own. “Tu comprends?”

  I didn’t understand at all, but I nodded anyway.

  “If not now, someday you will. Come, let’s go see what’s in the kitchen for lunch.”

  I followed her out of the room, and only after she had shut the door with a click did I find my voice again. “Is it okay if we don’t tell Julia about this?”

  “I already have a lifetime of secrets, chérie. I think I can keep one more.”

  STAY/SCULPTURE I

  “I have to go home eventually.”

  “Why?”

  “For starters, because I have a job, and I’m probably already going to get fired.”

  “Quit.”

  “I need the money, Julia.”

  “Stop being so damn responsible. I’ll talk to Mummy about it. We’ll figure it out. Plus, I must, must, must take you to get your hair fixed.”

  “It’s really that bad?”

  “Oui.”

  “I also need to check on the boys. Melissa is the worst cook in the world. She could ruin instant rice. And my dad hasn’t been allowed to make anything since he put aluminum foil in the microwave.”

  “What do they do when you’re at school?”

  “They get by. Eat a lot of pizza, Chinese takeout, frozen lasagna.”

  “What are they doing right now?”

  “Probably the same. Getting by.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly?”

  So I stayed. And I started sketching an idea for a sculpture.

  I wanted it to be something sturdy that would last through snow, rain, and time, but was also as delicate as a memory.

  A structure of driftwood. Stained white like bleached sand. A thing with sea glass that reflected the sun during the day and caught the lights from the porch at night. A piece of art that would look so natural, it would seem as if it had always been there.

  THIRTEEN

  SKINNY-DIPPING WAS, OF COURSE, Julia’s idea.

  “What do you mean you’ve never been?” she shrieked. We were lounging in the Adirondack chairs on the lawn. She had grown bored with her game of solitaire and had switched to mindlessly shuffling cards. I was sketching the line of kayaks leaning against the side of the boathouse, trying to capture the strange shadows they made in the midday sun.

  “When would I have gone skinny-dipping? Family vacations?” I raised my sketchbook, hoping Julia would drop it and start another game.

  She didn’t.

  “Swimming naked is delicious. The water feels like silk and goes places you never would imagine you’d be able to feel it go.”

  “You’re just trying to make me turn red and it’s not going to work this time.” I was bluffing. My face felt like I had just opened an oven door. “Stop distracting me.”

  “Charlie.” Julia put a hand down on the top of my sketchbook and lowered it until I was forced to look up at her.

  “Yes?” I kept my pencil raised so she’d know I wasn’t going to stop drawing.

  “What kind of artist are you if you’re so embarrassed by the human body, so, dare I say, represssssed?” She drew out the “s” sound like a snake hiss. “So uptight that you’ve never even enlevé tes sous-vêtements and taken a little dip.”

  “I’m not repressed. And I’m not ashamed of nudity. I’ve been to tons of life drawing classes. I’ve probably seen more naked people than any other girl in our year,” I replied, snapping my sketchbook shut. “I just don’t feel like swimming now, that’s all. Plus, I really don’t feel like Sophie needs to see my derrière hanging in the breeze.”

  “Nanny went to town ages ago and she takes forever at the grocery and—” Julia smacked the arms of her chair for emphasis. “If you’re really an artist, you have to experience everything once and that includes skinny-dipping!”

  Julia was off across the lawn before I even had a chance to argue again. As she got closer to the boathouse, I saw her kick off her flip-flops, then wiggle her shirt over her head. She was shaking her baggy pink shorts off before she even passed the shoreline.

  I tapped my sketchbook against my forehead, sighed, and then set it down on the seat of my chair. I dropped my shirt on the lawn and my shorts at the start of the beach. My bathing suit bottom was the last thing to go as I charged off the end of the dock.

  Julia and I were shouting so loudly and so focused on spitting water at each other and diving into the waves that neither one of us heard the sound of a car pulling up the gravel drive.

  “Oh, mon Dieu!” Julia stopped splashing me and ducked into the water so that just her nose and mouth were above the surface.

  “What?” I smoothed my now-short hair back from my forehead and rubbed some of the salt water from the corners of my eyes. When I spun around, I was much less eloquent than Julia. “Shit!”

  Sebastian stood at the end of the doc
k with my shirt in one hand. His other hand covered his eyes. He laughed. “Well, I’ve been called worse things, I guess.” He gave a little wave with my shirt. “Nice to see you again, Charlie. Don’t worry, I’ve seen nothing. Promise.”

  “What the hell are you doing here? You’re—” Julia shouted, but a wave caught her by surprise, filling her mouth with sea water. Coughing, she tried to keep going. “You’re not . . . until . . . second week . . . August.”

  “It is the second week in August,” Sebastian called down from the dock, one hand still clamped over his eyes.

  “Well, Nanny didn’t warn me you were coming,” Julia said, as if that would make him disappear from the dock and everything right again.

  “She didn’t know. Mum didn’t tell her.”

  “Mummy’s here?” Julia’s voice lost its anger. And she suddenly sounded weary from treading water for so long.

  “We’re all here. Mum, Cordelia, Bradley, Boom. Don’t tell me you don’t remember what Saturday is?”

  “I remember,” Julia shouted half into the water. “I just chose to forget for a bit, that’s all.”

  I had slowly been moving out deeper, where I knew the water was dark. Following Julia’s lead, I ducked beneath the waves until just my nose was above the surface. Sebastian had on a navy T-shirt from some college I had never heard of, and his cheeks and the bridge of his nose were slightly burned. Even though he continued to hold one hand over his eyes, I tried to tread water and cover my chest with my hands, just in case. I ended up sputtering and spitting. Julia swam over and tried to pound me on the back, but she just splashed more water in my mouth.

  “Look, why don’t you be a gentleman and give us our clothes and then go up and distract Mummy, Boom, and the lot so we can go change,” Julia shouted after she gave up trying to help me. “Don’t they teach you manners at Harvard?”

  Sebastian tried to lean against one of the dock posts while covering his eyes. He ended up stumbling and nearly falling off the edge of the dock. After he righted himself he replied, “Most days I don’t think they teach me much at all.”