Passing Through Paradise

by Susan Wiggs

  Stung, Sandra withdrew her hand. “It’s easy for you to sit here and say these things. You’ve got a houseful of guys who adore you, and your books are read by millions— “

  “That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is that I live in a house that’s falling down before it’s finished being built, the boys are a pack of hyenas and Ralph would rather think about his next chest-beating weekend with the guys than the fact that we’ve had three neighborhood guild warnings about the state of our yard. You think this has been easy street all these years?”

  Her troubles sounded mundane and lovely, but Sandra understood that they were very real to Barb. She also realized that as wonderful as their friendship was, there were things about each other’s lives they would never comprehend. “Got any tequila?” she asked, only half joking.

  “I have something better.” Barb got up from the table. Rummaging in the cluttered pantry, she moved aside boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal and bags of Chee•tos held shut with clothespins. After a moment, she turned with a triumphant grin on her face and held out a gold box with a crushed Christmas bow stuck to the lid. “Godiva.”

  Chapter 9

  That,” Mike said, pushing back from the big kitchen table and grinning at Gloria Carmichael, “was the best thing that happened to me all week.”

  Wearing an old bib apron imprinted with a fish and the slogan “I Got Scrod In Paradise,” Lenny’s wife started clearing away the dishes. Round and soft as a ripe peach, she had crooked teeth and an honest smile. “Yeah? I thought the puttanesca sauce needed a little more anchovy.”

  “It was outstanding,” Mike said, and he meant it. Lenny and Gloria invited him to dinner every other Sunday, when he didn’t have the kids. They acted as though it was no big deal, but they had to know their gesture of friendship helped calm the loneliness howling inside him.

  Gloria stopped behind his chair and planted a loud kiss on the top of his head. “Your mama raised you right.”

  “Don’t go telling him that,” Lenny warned. “He’ll get all full of himself.”

  “Yeah?” Gloria scraped a plate into the trash. “You ought to try paying me a compliment sometime, pinhead.”

  “Don’t believe her ribbing, Lenny,” Mike said. “She’s nuts about you.” The earthy affection between the two of them was obvious to anyone with half a brain. This was what a marriage was supposed to be—love and laughter and being comfortable together.

  “And she’s taken,” Lenny declared. “Hang in there, buddy. You’ll find someone else.”

  “I’m not holding my breath.”

  Gloria patted him on the shoulder. “Angela really did a number on you, didn’t she?”

  That was putting it mildly. His ex-wife had ended up with the house and kids, and her father had taken over the business. Angela’s father had bankrolled the company at the outset, and when the marriage ended, a very irate Rocky Meola seized control of the firm. Mike had ended up with a mountain of debts. Early on in the process his lawyer had suggested they could make an issue of Angela’s affair, but Mike refused to do that. She was the mother of his children, and he wouldn’t subject Kevin and Mary Margaret to a battle.

  Lenny lifted a basket-clad bottle of Chianti. “Need a refill, Mike?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got to get up early—trying to round up subcontractor bids tomorrow.”

  Gloria paused on the way to the kitchen. “So you’re going to be working for the Black Widow, Lenny tells me.”

  Mike stood to help with the dishes. “I’m putting in a bid to restore her house.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Mikey. The woman’s a ghoul, if you ask me.” She started rinsing plates and glasses, loading them into the dishwasher.

  “How well do you know her?”

  “Well enough. We use the same hairdresser, but she was always too stuck-up to give me the time of day. Her true colors showed when she drove her husband off that bridge.”

  “That’s the part I don’t get.” Mike stood back while Gloria wiped down the counter. “If she’s so clever, why the hell was she in that car, too?”

  “One theory is that she got out of the car before it went over,” Gloria suggested.

  “Don’t get her started,” Lenny warned. “She’ll bend your ear all night with this stuff.”

  “Maybe not all night.” Gloria took off her apron and tossed it over the back of a chair. “Let me show you something.”

  “Aw, jeez.” Lenny rolled his eyes. “My wife’s a closet ambulance chaser, did I tell you that?”

  She gave him a playful slap on the back of the head as she led Mike to the living room and selected a hand-labeled videotape from a big collection on a shelf. “Here’s the special broadcast they did on Evening Journal last spring. Have a seat, Mike. Want me to fix some popcorn?”

  “That’s okay.” Mike was curious as hell about the situation, but eating popcorn while watching a broadcast about a dead guy—especially a guy he used to know — didn’t seem quite right. The accident had made headlines last year, and he remembered staring in shock at the front page news. But the fact was, he’d been dealing with the divorce, too caught up in his own business to pay much attention.

  On the TV, a vaguely familiar blond reporter gazed into the camera, giving viewers a recap of the local scandal. Her breathy, urgent-sounding voice grated on Mike’s nerves. With absurd gravity, she enumerated the salacious details of a fairy-tale marriage gone sour.

  Victor Winslow.

  Even after all these years, Mike felt a visceral sense of recognition. It was strange, hearing his friend’s name on a newscast, stranger still seeing Victor’s handsome, polished face smiling from the cover of Rhode Island Monthly that flashed on the screen when he’d been named the most eligible bachelor in the state.

  He wondered how Victor had met his wife. Sandra looked a good ten years younger than Vic, mid-twenties, maybe. The scoop on the TV depicted her as a girl with an undistinguished past, a minor career in publishing and no identity outside of being chosen by Victor. These days, Mike figured, she probably wished she had been singled out by someone else. Hell, she probably wished she’d taken a job as a hatcheck girl.

  A wire-service wedding picture appeared on the screen. Victor and his new bride stood in the arched door-way of Old Somerset Church. He wore a Brooks Brothers tux, his black silk bow tie flawlessly knotted. The bridal gown made Sandra look like a princess, her long-gloved hand tucked into the crook of his arm. She held her mouth in a stiff smile of terror. She was stunningly beautiful, as any Winslow bride was bound to be.

  She looked radically different now. The hair, the clothes. Oh, but that face. Thinking about the first time he’d seen her, chopping wood on a cold day, he’d never forget it—those lost brown eyes, the set of her mouth. Though he ought to know better, her image was etched in his heart.

  According to the report, Victor and Sandra Winslow had been the golden couple, youth and promise personified, capturing the public imagination. Their marriage had been a major social and media event, with Victor’s own father, the venerable Reverend Ronald Winslow, presiding.

  A montage of video clips flickered past. Victor and Sandra were as vibrant as a latter-day Jack and Jackie, waving farewell en route to their honeymoon, dancing at the swearing-in party after Victor’s election, cutting the ceremonial ribbon at the opening of the new Sequonset Bridge, one of Victor’s major legislative triumphs.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” Gloria commented, sitting on the sofa next to Mike. “He supported the funding for that damned bridge.”

  “Should have got more funding,” Lenny said. “Rein-forced those rails.”

  Mike kept wondering what the hell had gone so wrong between Victor and his wife. But then, he reminded him-self, every marriage was a mystery in its own way. Things might look fine on the outside, but a flawless facade might conceal irreparable cracks and fissures, dry rot and structural damage. He knew there had been plenty of head-scratching over his and Angela’s breakup
, especially since they were both so crazy about the kids.

  The video montage shifted to later scenes of the bridge, the rail ripped away, chunks of concrete dangling from torn and twisted rebar. No skid mark blackened the roadway.

  Mike winced, thinking about that long fall into the murky water far below. What had Victor felt, flying through black night, the car making a nosedive into frigid seas? As kids, he and Vic had been fearless swimmers, daring each other to jump off the tall pier at Town Beach, racing each other from buoy to buoy. But that had been in summer, in broad daylight.

  Mike could only imagine the icy sting of the water that had engulfed Victor’s car that night. Gloria shivered beside him, though Lenny swore she’d watched this broadcast over and over again.

  “So did they ever figure out who called in the wreck?” Mike asked, his gaze glued morbidly to the images on the screen.

  “Never,” Gloria said. “The call came from an emergency phone box at the east end of the bridge. You know how it goes—everyone’s got something to hide. No one wants to get involved. Happens more than you think. A guy sees something, uses the phone box and we never know who the good Samaritan was.”

  “Somebody not so good, maybe,” Lenny suggested.

  “You’d think they would have made more of the gun,” Gloria said as the scene shifted to the chaos of the predawn search. Squad cars barricaded the bridge at both ends, helicopters buzzed and dipped through the winter sky, draglines dropped from open boats, divers in thermal suits plunged into the killingly cold water.

  “No gun was ever found,” Mike pointed out. “They just said so.”

  “At least two shots were fired from inside the car,” Gloria said. “The windshield was smashed. Somewhere, there’s a handgun lying around, and that woman pretends she doesn’t know a thing about it.”

  There had been a thorough search for the weapon, al though the thick sludge of mud and the strong sea currents made any discovery unlikely. All they’d caught in the draglines were some torn bits of clothing—the lab confirmed the fibers came from a wool tuxedo, the style Victor had been wearing the night of the accident. Investigators had combed the records for a gun registration. They’d come up with nothing. Without a gun, they couldn’t prove Sandra Winslow had shot her husband and let his body be sucked out to sea.

  Still, that didn’t stop everyone in the area from believing she had done just that. He thought of Sandra Winslow, alone now and practically in hiding, if the TV report was even half right.

  The Black Widow of Blue Moon Beach.

  “. . . with only her conscience for company,” the reporter chirped, the camera panning past the overgrown rose of Sharon hedge in front of the Babcock place, then zooming in on a crooked shutter and the sagging garage roof. Maybe Sandra hoped Thursday’s ruling would change things, but glancing at Gloria’s outraged expression, he doubted it. Folks around here wouldn’t bail her out even if they had a life preserver in their hand.

  Chapter 10

  Journal Entry—January 7—Monday

  10 Things I Loved When I Was Little

  1. The smell of baking pizza.

  2. Foreign currency, which I kept in a Dutch Masters cigar box.

  3. My mother’s handwriting.

  4. Going to the library.

  5. The sound of my father singing in the sho—

  “Working on your book?” Sandra’s father asked, coming into the kitchen of the East Providence bungalow. Just out of the shower, he smelled the same way he had all Sandra’s life. Irish Spring and Aqua Velva.

  She flipped the notebook shut and capped her pen. “A few scribbles while I was waiting for you to get home. How was your round of golf?” She’d arrived just as he was returning home from his afternoon match. Since retiring, he played rain or shine, summer or winter, every weekday.

  “Not so great. It’s too damned cold to play. So how’s the book coming?”

  She watched him as though to reassure herself that this was her father, not some stand-in planted by aliens while her real father, who would never let his wife leave him, was vacuumed into the cosmos. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for—an apology for not returning her calls? An explanation about the breakup? Was he hiding some big secret? Holding something in? She couldn’t be sure, because men didn’t tell. It was as simple—and as frustrating—as that.

  “To be honest, Dad,” she said, “I haven’t been able to concentrate on work.”

  He opened the fridge. It was the same refrigerator they’d always had, only now it was . . . different. Disorganized. Food was shoved in haphazardly—cheese and salami and canned drinks. No casseroles in covered, labeled dishes, no condiments lined up according to height, no dairy products organized in date order.

  “You hungry? Thirsty?” her father asked.

  “No, thanks.” She waited while he found a can of beer and opened it.

  “Why’re you looking at me like that?” he asked, direct as always.

  “Like what?”

  “Like I got some disease or something.”

  “Excuse me, Dad, but last time I saw you, you were happily married to my mother.” She knew it was stupid, but she half expected him to manifest literal evidence of the split—a gaping wound, a rash, an ugly growth. In the weeks following Victor’s death, she had lost weight at an unhealthy rate. Her skin grew sallow, her nails brittle. Yet her father appeared unscathed. Something as monumental as the breakup of a thirty-six-year marriage should cause some obvious physical distress. How dare he look . . . normal?

  He took a sip of his beer. “What, you expected to see a mushroom cloud coming out of my head?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.” He sat down at the kitchen table, moving aside a stack of unopened mail.

  “That’s not what’s disappointing me, Dad. It’s kind of scary, the way you’re just—just . . . I don’t know. Carrying on. As if nothing’s really changed, except that Mom is gone.”

  He looked around the kitchen. The sideboard was littered with loose AA batteries, an oil-change funnel, a tire gauge and some lottery slips. Outdated newspapers lay on the counter next to his golf glove and hat. Sandra’s mother always made him leave his stuff in the garage.

  “She’s not gone. She’s everywhere in this house,” he said. “She made the curtains. Put those little knickknacks on the shelves. Lined up all the stuff in the pantry.” A small crack appeared in his facade. “So don’t tell me I’m just carrying on. I’m thinking about her all the time.”

  “Then why don’t you think up a solution?”

  “We did. A separation. And then, I guess, a divorce.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Jesus, honey, you know that’s not the question.”

  “Then what is the question?”

  He hesitated, pinching the bridge of his nose, his face anguished. “It’s about what we don’t want. As in, she doesn’t want to play golf or fish. I don’t want to take ball-room dancing lessons or travel. Or speak Eye-talian and learn to cook Chinese.”

  “Maybe you could do a little of each,” she suggested.

  He waved a hand with impatience. “That’s what it says in all those ‘How to Save Your Marriage’ books.”

  “You’ve read books on how to save your marriage?”

  “It’s all a bunch of crap. How long would your mother last, pretending she likes golf? About as long as I’d last poking around the British Museum.”

  “Go somewhere you both like,” Sandra suggested.

  “Honey, your mother and I had this discussion. Over and over again. The fact is, I spent my whole career traveling, staying in hotels, meeting new people. And all I ever wanted was to stay close to home.”

  “All Mom ever wanted was to go somewhere new.” Restless, Sandra got up from the table and went to the window, staring out at the postage-stamp backyard with its single apple tree and a row of peony bushes, sagging in the cold. She used to have a sandbox out there, a swing.r />
  When she thought of her childhood, she remembered . . . silence. Her silent struggle with stuttering. Her parents’ silent frustration with her problem. The silence of teachers, pediatricians, speech therapists, psychologists—all waiting for her to get the words out. Through no one’s fault, hers had been a quiet childhood. She didn’t have brothers or sisters to fight with, didn’t have a bunch of relatives visiting on the weekends. And God knew, she didn’t have legions of friends lining up to play with her.

  She forced herself to think about her parents’ marriage in objective terms, as an outsider might view them. Had she been the glue that held them together? No. Absolutely not. There was something between them, a subtle, smoldering fire, always present like embers banked for the morning chill. It was never obvious, particularly not to Sandra, who couldn’t stand to think of her parents as lovers, but some-times she’d catch herself reflecting on it.

  “I wish you and Mom would work harder to sort things out,” she said. Anger boiled through her, and she felt like ripping someone’s heart out for examination. Her family was breaking apart—the three of them would never be together again. They’d cease to exist as a unit; the gestalt of her childhood was forever gone. Victor had failed her, and now her father was failing her, and suddenly she caught herself thinking of Malloy, who made her feel all sorts of things. She pushed that thought aside. “You’re making your-selves miserable.”

  “We were pretty damned miserable before she left.”

  “Why?” She gestured around the kitchen in frustration. “You had a good life here.”

  “We had a life here. Whatever was good about it just. . . faded away, I guess.”

  She studied her father, trying to figure out what had changed. In his early sixties, he was a good-looking man, with clear eyes and a ready smile. He was tall enough for a woman to wear heels with, something her mother’s bridge club regulars vocally admired about him. He was thickset but not overweight. His best feature was his abundant hair, which in recent years had turned to a dramatic sweep of pure white.