Passing Through Paradise

by Susan Wiggs

  She frowned. Now what? Had the stupid family court judge thought up a new rule for him? Did he have to start reading children’s books in order to prove he was fit to be a father?

  “Are you looking for something special?” she asked.

  “Maybe.” He ran a finger through the As, then the Bs. “I need to ask the librarian about something.”

  She couldn’t stand the suspense, so she followed him over to the desk. When she looked up, Miss Cavanaugh’s cheeks got red. “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for some books by Sandy Babcock,” Dad said.

  Sandy Babcock? Mary Margaret had never heard of her.

  Miss Cavanaugh was massively efficient, her fingers plinking rapidly over the keyboard. “Hm,” she said. “We do have a few of her books in our collection. Children’s novels. Is that what you were looking for?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I didn’t spot them on the shelf.”

  “They’re available by special request.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Miss Cavanaugh pushed a paper form across the desk to him. “You have to fill that out and sign it, and then I can get you the books.”

  “Why is that?” he asked.

  Her face turned even redder. “Well, it looks as though these are disputed titles. A disputed title is one that a patron claims contains questionable or unsuitable material. A special request is required in order to access them.”

  “I thought censorship died out with the McCarthy era.”

  “I don’t make the rules, Mr. Malloy. To be honest, I find this sort of thing appalling. But we’re a public institution financed by public money and governed by a board of directors that answers to the taxpayers.”

  “Tell you what,” he said, leaning his elbows on the counter, “why don’t you track down these books and we’ll see what kind of obscene material they contain.”

  Mary Margaret was starting to feel embarrassed for poor Miss Cavanaugh, who hurried to the shelves behind the desk, her rubber-soled shoes squishing quietly on the old wooden floor.

  “What’s up, Dad?” Mary Margaret asked.

  “I’m curious about these books, is all.”

  “How did you even hear of them?”

  Before he answered, Miss Cavanaugh came back with two books. Mary Margaret liked the look of them immediately—they were long. She loved long books. Her dad picked up one called Beneath the Surface and read the stuff on the inside of the book jacket. “Do you have some way of knowing why this was disputed?”

  Miss Cavanaugh scanned the bar code and studied the computer screen. “Alternative religion is practiced, it encourages the breakup of the traditional nuclear family and there’s a questionable scene with a mongoose.”

  Dad looked at Miss Cavanaugh. Miss Cavanaugh looked at her dad. At the exact same second, they both started laughing. Seeing them laughing together made Mary Margaret feel a little funny inside, not in a bad way, but not in a good way, either. Just. . . funny. The librarian had kind of a goofy smile, although she was a nice enough lady. But she worried Mary Margaret. All women making googoo eyes at her dad worried her. It was bad enough her mom had married Carmine only six months after her dad moved out. But for Dad to flirt with the librarian?

  If he started dating, Mary Margaret would have no refuge at all. No parent who was hers and hers alone. She didn’t know if she could stand that.

  “What’s the other one?” Dad asked.

  “Every Other Day. The story of a girl in an alternative family situation.”

  “And the disputed parts?”

  “The main character, uh, lives with two women.” Now Miss Cavanaugh wasn’t just red, but edging toward purple.

  “You mean her mom’s a lesbian.” Mary Margaret couldn’t help speaking up. It just popped out.

  The librarian nodded. “Apparently so.”

  “Cool,” Mary Margaret replied, feeling smug. She caught the look on her dad’s face and said, “I don’t think these books are going to harm me.”

  He grinned at the librarian. “Out of the mouths of babes . . . ” Then he turned to Mary Margaret. “What do you think, Princess? Want to read either of these books, or do they sound too naughty for you?”

  Was he kidding? The fact that someone had banned them, that an adult had to sign off on them, made them more interesting than Harry Potter’s next adventure.

  “Sure.” She pulled out her card.

  Miss Cavanaugh beamed at her dad as she processed the books and he signed the pink slip.

  They got back in the truck and headed toward the Y on Bushnell Street. During the ride, Mary Margaret picked up one of the books. The cover of Beneath the Surface had a picture of a boy with swirling hot red-and-orange whorls and vaguely threatening tentacles reaching for him. It didn’t look like the sort of book she usually chose, but she’d give it a try. Next, she read the summary on the book jacket flaps, and finally looked for the author’s photograph and biographical information. To her surprise, there was no photo of Sandy Babcock. The bio read simply, “Critically acclaimed author Sandy Babcock lives in New England with her husband.” That was it. Big deal. Either she had something to hide, or she had the face of a horse.

  “What made you ask for these books, Dad?” she asked.

  “Just curious.”

  She frowned. “How’d you even hear of them?”

  “Actually, I met the author. You did, too.”

  “I don’t remember meeting—oh. Her.” She thought of the woman with the silky brown hair living in the rambling old beach house at the end of nowhere. A real-live writer. She always pictured them as magical creatures, different from regular people, living in faraway places, subsisting on misty air and dreams. The woman in the beach house seemed . . . ordinary. Funny and maybe a little sad. She was pretty, with large brown eyes and a face like a lady on a soap commercial, so Mary Margaret couldn’t figure out why they didn’t put her picture on her books. Maybe because they were the sort of books that got banned.

  “So she’s an author, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  Mary Margaret stared down at the books. They felt weightier, somehow. She put them in her backpack as they drove up to the Y, just in time for the meeting.

  She and her dad had started in Indian Princesses back when she was five. After fourth grade, they advanced to Fathers and Daughters. It was kind of dorky, but her dad seemed to like it. There were organized campouts, potluck dinners, community service and sports activities. It was pretty fun, being with other girls and their dads, learning to throw footballs and build fires. The campouts were the best. She loved the quiet of the woods, and the way her dad’s face got all bristly because he said only wimps brought shaving kits on a campout.

  On the way to the meeting hall, they peeked into the gym, where Kevin’s basketball practice was going on. He was right in the middle of things as usual, racing up and down the court with shoelaces flapping.

  Mary Margaret studied her dad as he watched Kevin. Dad had a strong face and gumball-blue eyes, and when he looked at Kevin, she could feel the love and pride coming from him like body heat. All of a sudden, she was consumed by a fierce wish that they could all be like a TV family, living in a house with cross-stitched sayings hanging on the walls, making each other laugh and fixing even the worst problem with heart-to-heart talks that ended in hugs.

  In real life, it didn’t work that way. She tugged on his sleeve. “Let’s go up to the meeting.” He nodded. “This is about that dance, isn’t it?” “The Valentine’s Day dance.” It was pretty dorky, too. Still, she liked the idea of getting dressed up, and her mom had said she could buy a new outfit for the occasion. “I don’t know how to dance,” Dad said. “I didn’t think you did. Look, if you don’t want to— “ “Are you kidding? Of course I want to, Princess.”

  Chapter 15

  Journal Entry—February 1—Friday

  Ten Places I’d Rather Be

  1. The Rodin Museum, looking at “The Kiss.”
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  2. On a cruise ship with my mother.

  3. In Mike Malloy’s arms—

  Sandra hastily scratched out Item #3, then scratched it off again and again until the ink bled through the paper. Really, she ought to be working on the revisions for her novel, and having the house renovated was no excuse to stop. Ordinarily she would have sought total isolation in order to finish the rewrites. Since Victor’s death, she’d found solace in the lonely boom and hiss of the surf and the disembodied howl of the winter wind. The brutal elements walled her off from the rest of the world, made her feel detached, no longer a part of things, so that she could concentrate on her writing.

  But lately, isolation was in short supply around the place; it had been supplanted by the chaos of Malloy and his crew banging around. In addition to Phil Downing, he’d brought in two others, tall and thick-shouldered and so alike she could never remember their names, so she thought of them as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Downing had actually made himself useful, fixing her old laptop after she’d given up hope of getting it to work again. She’d donated it to Phil—free to a good home—but now she wondered if she should have kept it, taking it to a quiet place where she could hear herself think.

  These days, the atmosphere of the old house was charged with energy—busy, alive, productive. Her ears rang with the industrial rhythm of table saws and air hammers. The house smelled of fresh-cut lumber, oil-based paint, wet plaster—like something alive again. Malloy’s scruffy, overly friendly dog had taken to sleeping on an old braided rug in front of the iron stove, and despite his size, he had a way of taking over a room.

  The clamor of power tools drowned out her thoughts, mocking all attempts to weave a cocoon of numbness around herself. She craved that numbness, because it kept her safe from grief and regrets and confusion.

  Malloy’s presence changed all that. Rattled by the noise and activity, she gave herself over to worries about the looming civil action, moving away from Blue Moon Beach, her parents’ separation. She caught herself going over and over her past with Victor. Then the anger would come—how could she have been so stupid?—and finally her thoughts would return to the lawsuit, and the next wave of worries would hit.

  She was beginning to resent Malloy’s intrusion. It wasn’t simply his habit of standing on the beach in the morning, patiently throwing a stick for Zeke, again and again. It wasn’t even that piercing sapphire stare, or the way he bent over a table to study the house plans, his angled body so close to hers that it felt like a long, quiet caress.

  Surrounded by activity, she tried to sink into the strange music of the construction noise and delve into her book. She studied the opening page, but in the middle of the first paragraph, a series of hammer blows upstairs made her jump. Exasperated, she shoved her chair back from the desk and stomped upstairs.

  Malloy stood in the middle of her bedroom, his imposing presence incongruous amid her dollhouse-sized furniture and frilly linens. A light dusting of plaster covered his baseball cap and the dark hair curling from the edges, and just for a moment she could picture him, old and still maddeningly handsome, like a latter-day Sean Connery. The image fueled her resentment—she didn’t want to think about him getting old; she didn’t want to think about him at all.

  Perched on a ladder, he held a hammer in one hand and a long iron pry bar in the other, which he used to work the ruined plaster free to expose a plumbing leak. Spying her, he holstered the hammer and took off his safety glasses. “You need something?”

  She felt stupid, standing there, seething, and that only made her madder. “A little peace and quiet might be in order,” she said.

  He laughed, completely unsympathetic. “A quiet house restoration. Hey, I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

  “I’m trying to work, and I can’t hear myself think.”

  He shrugged unapologetically. “We’ll be gone at six.”

  “That’s six hours from now.” A brilliant comment. What was the matter with her? Did staring at well-defined pectorals cause brain damage?

  He came down from the ladder. His body moved like a sleek machine—there was nothing awkward about this guy. “Relax. Maybe you’ll get used to the noise. While I ‘ve got you here, take a look at the paint for the upstairs.” Flipping open a binder crammed with invoices, work orders, and product sheets, he turned to a page of historic milk paint colors ranging from Wedgwood Blue to Clotted Cream. “I thought the green for the hall and— “

  The sample was labeled Tavern Green. “I hate green.”

  “It was the preferred color in the 1880s, when the house was built.”

  “It’s not my preferred color. What’s wrong with Buttermilk?”

  “It’s bland. I like the green. Besides, why should you care? You’re putting the place up for sale.”

  “Why should you?” she shot back.

  “Because you hired me to do a historical restoration.”

  “It’s my house until I sell it.”

  “Look, you’ve argued about details since I started the job. I’m just curious about why these things matter so much. You’re investing a lot of energy in a house you intend to sell.”

  He was always doing that—always reminding her that she had the rest of her life staring her in the face. What was she going to do about it? Freedom was waiting around the corner, and maybe a part of her didn’t want to step back into a normal life, because then she’d have to learn to feel again . . . to hurt again.

  She bristled, trying to deny that she had a stake in this project. Was it because it had been in her family for generations? She glowered at Malloy—he didn’t get it. Both of them seemed to care too much about this place, even though it wasn’t really theirs to care about. “You’re not the owner,” she pointed out. Yet she could see him in a house like this, him and his kids and his dog . . .

  She stuck her hands in her back pockets and paced, feeling his gaze stalking her. This was the source of her resentment. He and his dog and his workmen were intruding, disrupting her quiet melancholy. They were thawing out the numbness that had kept her from falling apart since Victor died, and that scared her. The numbness was her refuge, her sanctuary, and Malloy was taking a hammer and chisel to it. He was pulling down walls, altering the structure, changing the colors of the past.

  “Whatever,” she said at last. “The green’s fine.”

  He blocked her exit from the bedroom, placing his long, bare arm across the door frame. “Is it?”

  She could smell his scent of sweat and plaster and man. “You’re the expert.”

  He grinned as though aware of his effect on her. “I am.”

  Ducking under his arm, she went back to work and somehow managed to get a few things done. At midday, the saws, drills and hammers stopped. Merciful silence. The crew was probably ready to take a breather. In the aftermath of the noise, Sandra could hear music from Malloy’s paint-spattered radio drifting in from across the driveway. Feeling petty and mean after the exchange in the bedroom, she decided to hold out the olive branch.

  Malloy had the radio set on a classic rock station that played the occasional fifties tune. Though she hadn’t been around in the fifties, she felt wistful when she heard “Unchained Melody,” as though the song were a part of her own past. Because of Victor’s position in the General Assembly, their friends had tended to be older, many of them ten or twenty years her senior. Maybe that was why a wave of nostalgia engulfed her when she heard the mellow old song.

  Zeke got up and stretched, then trotted through the kitchen to paw at the back door. Clicking SAVE on her computer, she went to let him out. It was lunchtime, judging by the open cooler and brown bags in the back of the painters’ van. But Malloy wasn’t eating lunch. In the windswept yard, he held a long-handled shovel in one hand and seemed to be dancing with it to the plaintive tune.

  In his baseball cap, sweatshirt and tool belt, his movements clumsy and earnest, he looked absurd—and curiously appealing. An unbidden and rare laugh escaped her. Grabbin
g her jacket, she went outside. He didn’t notice her at first, and she watched him, both baffled and fascinated. It felt good to smile again.

  At a pause in the music, she cleared her throat to announce her presence.

  He turned to her abruptly, his face beet-red.

  She folded her arms in front of her. “I never pegged you as the type who had trouble getting dates, Malloy.”

  He sent her a sheepish grin. “At least my partner doesn’t complain.”

  “Is this how you spend all your lunch hours?”

  “I’d be better at it if I did.” He propped the shovel against his truck. “I promised I’d take a very special lady dancing on Valentine’s Day.”

  “Oh, th— “ The rest stuck in Sandra’s throat. She stood pinned to the spot while he watched her with mild curiosity that began to deepen into concern. The stutter possessed her, a force far more powerful than her own will. Years of therapy fell away; the stress increased and she felt the cords of her throat stiffening, standing out, betraying her helplessness. And all because he’d so casually revealed he had a woman in his life. As if it were any of her business. As if she should care. She made a sort of lame motion with her hand and walked back toward the house.

  “Sandra.”

  She froze; it was the first time he had called her by name.

  “I meant Mary Margaret.”

  Her throat and diaphragm relaxed as the stutter melted away and she turned to face him. “Pardon?”

  “I’m taking Mary Margaret to a dance. It’s a father and daughter thing we do through the Y. So I was just trying out a few moves, you know, to—well, you saw. I suck at it.” He had an aw-shucks air about him that showed both the depth of his love for his daughter and a touching vulnerability. Interesting. Malloy was an expert at everything she’d seen him do. This uncertainty was new, and perversely, she liked it.

  “Your daughter must be really excited,” she said, praying her relief didn’t show.

  “Yeah, well, she hasn’t seen me dance yet.”