See You in Paradise

by J. Robert Lennon

  Margaret went next, and was back in a flash: either she’d flung her contribution in irritated haste, or she hadn’t participated at all. The girls went out together, bearing something or other wrapped in a plastic grocery sack. When they were through, I carefully fitted the Harris half of the capsule onto ours and screwed them tight, before calling my family out to the burial. They came slowly, purposefully, their faces grave. The girls were holding lit candles—not sure where they found those. Margaret had her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her shorts, and in the moon- and candlelight appeared to have briefly been crying. This surprised me, and I gazed at her with a question in my eyes, but she never looked up to answer it.

  I knelt on the beach and pressed the time capsule to the bottom of the hole. Rae took the initiative of pushing the sand back over it. When she was through, her sister stamped on the mounded sand with surprising vehemence, then she turned on her heel and marched back into the house, her arms straight down at her sides.

  “Can we go home tomorrow?” Rae asked Margaret and me.

  “We still have a couple of days left!” I protested, but I wanted to leave too.

  Rae sighed and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “I do have a lot of work to attend to,” Margaret said, the only words she’d spoken since we’d read Natalie Harris’s note. It occurred to me, suddenly, that we hadn’t left a family statement in the capsule, identifying ourselves. The future wouldn’t recognize us. I grew depressed.

  Rae and Margaret waited, not looking at each other, not looking at me.

  “If it’s what your sister wants,” I said, and Rae went inside to share the good news.

  For a few minutes, Margaret and I stood facing each other across the packed sand, before I turned to face the lake. I wasn’t even sure if she was still behind me when, some time later, I said, “If you’re still planning to leave, I’d like you to do it as soon as we get home.”

  There was no answer, though I thought perhaps I heard a small motion, perhaps that of a woman covering her face with her hands.

  “Are you still planning to leave?” I asked her.

  And again, no reply, and I considered that good news, if in fact she was still behind me.

  “I still love you,” I added quietly, and this time the silence was a bad thing, and I wished I hadn’t spoken. I should have turned, to see if she was standing there, if she had heard me—it would have been best if she’d left between “Are you still planning to leave” and “I love you”—but instead I sat down on the damp beach, then lay down, then curled up and went to sleep.

  The following morning we drove away in silence. I had prepared a playlist for the ride home, too, but it didn’t seem very fun anymore, and both girls had their headphones on, and each stared out her respective window at the passing scenery. I didn’t think we would ever see this road again, not the four of us anyway, not together. We passed Belinda’s place, and though I tried to peer in the windows, I couldn’t see her, and I thought maybe someday I could come back alone, and Belinda would still be there, and would sit down beside me the way she had the other night, and put her arm around me, and whisper poor baby, and I would see for the first time the little apartment behind the restaurant, the little bedroom where she slept.

  We made good time and found ourselves at Mister Bip’s before the menu changed from breakfast to lunch. We ordered the exact same things we’d ordered on the way to Lake Craig and ate them listlessly, saying little between bites. I happened to glance at Margaret’s hands as she ate. Her wedding ring was gone. Halfway through her omelet she excused herself, grabbed up her satchel, and headed for the ladies’.

  Lyn and Rae watched her leave with what appeared to me undue interest. They stole a glance at one another, and then at me, and then quickly returned their attention to their meals.

  “What?” I said.

  Rae didn’t look up. Lyn gazed at me innocently and offered a puzzled shrug, but her hand snaked over and found her sister’s, and they came together in a white-knuckle clutch.

  A moment later, Margaret emerged from the ladies’ and headed straight for the exit. We watched through the window as she opened the trunk of the car and began rummaging around through our things. After a while, she opened the passenger door, and then the driver’s, and then the rear doors, leaving them all open. She appeared to be searching under the seats for something.

  I wiped my mouth and went out to see what was up.

  “Okay,” she said, “where is it.” The expression on her face was one of barely repressed anger and panic.

  “What are you missing?”

  “My BlackBerry, Dave.”

  “Oh. No. Where did you have it last?”

  Her eyes flashed like broken glass; her body was a tree bending in a gale. She said, “Fuck you, Dave! Give it back to me!”

  Across the parking lot, an elderly couple ducked their heads and hastened their progress from their Cadillac to the entrance. I raised my hands.

  “Whoa, take it easy. I don’t—”

  Margaret reared back and hit me in the head with her satchel. Something in there really packed quite a wallop—an eyeglass case, maybe?—and I staggered a couple of steps to the side. I could see the girls through the window, staring at us with huge round eyes, and half the rest of the patrons besides.

  “You infantile, jealous piece of shit!” she shouted. “This is so like you! So like you! Do you think this will make me love you again? You fucking moron!”

  I stood perfectly still, my hand to my head, as Margaret trembled, buckled, and slumped to the ground, sobbing.

  A man was standing beside me, holding a piece of paper. “Here’s your bill,” he said. “We’d like for you to leave immediately. So the police don’t need to become involved.” His mustache and eyebrows were epic. They looked like props.

  I dug out my wallet and handed him two twenties.

  “Sorry about all this,” I said.

  He didn’t ask if I needed change as he returned to the restaurant, passing the girls on their way out. I suddenly recalled their mysterious plastic-wrapped package on the beach and felt a wave of love for them as perfect and as melancholy as a song. They gave their mother a wide berth and slipped in the open doors of the car.

  I helped Margaret to her feet and took her into my arms. “Let go of me,” she cried, but she didn’t resist, and I held her there, in defiance of the mustache man, in defiance of her disgust, of my lost ambitions, of the unraveling of my family. I ought to have gotten angry, I know, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. She was so sad, and it was summer, and tomorrow was another day.

  Flight

  I was heading east through central Washington in my rented car, hours behind me and hours ahead. The land was flat and brown all around and the trees very small, set far apart from one another a great distance from the highway. The sky was clear and dark blue and wallpapered with tiny weird clouds. So intent were my eyes on the incessant approach of road that the stationary world inside seemed to race away when I looked at it, and I felt like I was falling helplessly through space.

  At a desolate exit I stopped for gas and bought a frozen something-or-other, which I heated in the microwave in the gas station and ate standing while I looked at boxes of rental videos. Back on the road, I drove until night fell. When I got tired I pulled over at a rest stop and dozed next to an idling tractor trailer. For what it was worth, I was more than halfway home.

  A telephone woke me. When I opened my eyes I was surprised to find myself in a car. It was a cellular phone, bolted to the hump between the seats. I hadn’t asked for it at the rental office, but they had provided it gratis, as if it would be of some use. Outside, the rest-stop parking lot was illuminated by streetlights around which no insects swarmed. Beyond the light there was only blackness. The glowing digits on the dash read 1:25.

  The phone kept ringing. I picked up the receiver and pressed a button marked START.

  “Hello?”

  For a mo
ment I heard only shallow breaths.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” came a woman’s voice.

  “Don’t hang up,” she said. The voice was hoarse and slow, a nighttime voice, the sort heard when everyone else has left the party and the floor is littered with half-empty plastic beer cups. “Okay, good,” she said. “Don’t. Hang up. Please.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t know why I’m calling. I know it’s late.” She let out a long, acid sigh that ended with a hitch, and I thought she’d cry. But the moment passed. “First of all, I want to say, I want to apologize, and please don’t say anything, please, I would like to finish before you say anything or hang up on me. First of all, I am very, very sorry, and I know that may not mean anything to you right now, and I understand that, but I am sorry. I just got home and all I could think about on the drive back was what a terrible mistake I made and that I would do anything, anything in the world, to be able to take it back. Okay. Just let me finish. Second of all, I just want to say that I know you won’t take me back and I don’t expect you to just because of this phone call, but if it’s any consolation to you for what happened I am never going to forget this and I will probably go to my grave thinking that it was the worst mistake I ever made. I mean, and I can barely imagine this, I guess there will be somebody else someday”—she was sniffling now—“but even so I think that no matter what happiness comes to me I will always remember this unhappiness and think how much better my life would have been if I had thought … I mean if I had thought for even a second, but there’s no point in saying that now. And the third thing, I guess there is no third thing, except just that I love you and I know that means nothing to you now, or maybe just makes you angry thinking it’s a lie or maybe even if it isn’t a lie it just doesn’t matter to you anymore, because you can’t love a person you cannot trust. I shouldn’t sit here and tell you—but I will, I’ll tell you because I have to say it—you can trust me, if you took me back, which I know is out of the question, you would never hear a lie out of my mouth again.” A pause. “So I’m sorry,” and her voice broke on “sorry,” before she lost it to sobs.

  I was still not awake enough to realize that I’d been asleep for some time, and my mind tried to peek around this monologue and find the missing hours. I was awake enough to know that this voice on the phone belonged to no one I’d ever spoken to.

  The day before had been my thirty-sixth birthday. I was supposed to fly from Newark to Minneapolis, then connect to Marshall, Montana, where I lived alone in a two-room apartment in a crumbling part of town known as West Hill. I had been in Newark to attend my mother’s deathbed, which failed to work out: by the time I arrived, less than twenty-four hours after she had called to tell me she was dying, she had already arranged for a car to take her home from the hospital.

  Choppy air roiled over the East Coast, and some kind of accident in Denver had delayed flights across the country, so my plane idled for hours on the runway, stuck in traffic. To save myself the trouble of carry-on luggage, I’d foolishly packed the books I’d brought into my duffel, which was checked through to Montana; now I had nothing to read. Instead I listened to my fellow passengers cobble together a narrative from the fragments of crash rumor they’d overheard back in the terminal.

  “It was a UPS plane. The crew escaped, but all the packages were burned up. Guarantee my J.Crew stuff was in there.”

  “I think it was a military transport. Some general or somebody got killed.”

  “They saw it go down in the mountains but can’t get to it.”

  “It was a private jet. I hope it was Bill Gates’s.”

  I checked and double-checked my arrival and departure times in Minneapolis and the gate map in my on-flight magazine, trying to calculate the latest the plane could take off and still allow me to meet my connection. I saw myself sprinting down a crowded concourse, unencumbered by luggage, toward a far-flung terminal. Outside, men and women in dayglo jumpsuits zipped around on their little vehicles.

  “There’s a massage station back on concourse B,” somebody said. “For fifteen bucks you can get a half-hour back rub. I ought to have done it.”

  “In front of all Newark!”

  “I’m not ashamed.”

  We took off with apologies from the pilot at about the time we were supposed to have begun our descent into Minneapolis—Saint Paul. I fell asleep, ate dinner, fell asleep again, and disembarked in the muggy and lake-spangled Midwest.

  “Flight 157 to Marshall?” I asked the ticket agent.

  She laughed. “Long gone.”

  “Put me on a later flight?”

  “No such thing. I can get you out at nine fifteen tomorrow morning.”

  “Will you get me a hotel room and a ride to it?”

  She reached under the counter and pulled out a coupon: 10 percent off at the Super 8. “We can give you a discount,” she said. “No accommodations for weather delays, sorry.”

  I refused the coupon. “I thought it was a crash. In Denver.”

  “That was O’Hare. And I wouldn’t call it a crash.”

  I persisted. Could I get out of Minneapolis that night? I didn’t know anyone in Minneapolis, and didn’t want to sleep huddled against the refrigerated terminal air on an ass-worn seat in the waiting area. She asked how about Seattle at 9:00 PM, then Marshall at 2:10 in the morning, and I said okay.

  I had time to kill. The airport had a little mall, and the shops had themes: winter, health, wholesomeness. But it was August, and weary, begrimed travelers from all quarters haunted the unswept concourses. At something called High Plains Brewhouse I bought snob coffee and drank it over an abandoned USA Today. I read over and over, without comprehension, a graph charting the consumption of watermelon in America since 1954. I must have slept, because when I woke my flight was boarding.

  Everyone on the plane to Seattle seemed to be drunk. They were possessed of an odd solidarity, as if they had all been friends for ages, though they lacked any common feature save their booze-fueled ruddiness and good spirits. I asked the slumped, frayed-looking woman sitting next to me what was going on. Her face fell into a happy leer as she remembered. “You see that guy?” she said.

  “Him?” I was pointing to a thickset man wearing a big hat and waiting in line for the first-class bathroom a dozen rows ahead.

  “He is a top-notch oil-and-gas lawyer from Fort Worth, Texas, and he has been buying us drinks for the last two and a half hours.” Apparently they had all been booked onto a flight scheduled to depart some time ago, but while taxiing their plane bumped a wing against a moveable ladder left out on the tarmac. Maintenance crews had to examine and possibly repair the damage. “They put us all on this flight, but we had to wait. So this guy gets up and says the drinks are on him. I put away a half-dozen margaritas with some high school teacher.” At that moment a bespectacled man wearing a loosened Mickey Mouse necktie shambled past and pointed at the woman with both hands. The two burst into giggles and the man moved on. “Oh, my,” she said.

  “Did you hear about the crash in Denver?” I asked.

  “That was in Omaha, I heard. You know, the plane was full of zoo animals from Africa, isn’t that terrible? Although no more terrible than a zoo. I believe they are inhumane, the zoos, not the animals. The animals ought to be let go.”

  People were boarding the plane to cheers and applause, ducking in embarrassment or making jokes, exaggerating their drunkenness, staging pantomimed pratfalls. Nobody seemed to recognize specific seat assignments: they just stowed their carry-ons and stood around, as if at a cocktail party. Flight attendants touched their shoulders and spoke quietly and were met with roars of laughter.

  In time, we took off. Passengers quieted, falling into boozy sleep. The new silence, backed by murmured conversations and the ambient rumble of the engines, reminded me of my mother’s hospital room, the sharp evening light softened through tan shades. She was telling two nurses a joke when I arrived. “So Moses says, ‘I’ll
take a mulligan!’” They laughed together.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “Paulie!”

  “How are you?”

  The nurses bustled out past me, averting their eyes. “Actually, Paulie, I’m feeling much better.”

  She looked like a party clown on a three-day weekend, her skin sallow from long days under makeup, her eyes tired and shifting.

  “I’ll be out of here tomorrow,” she said.

  “That’s great.” I riffled through the list of comforting phrases I’d compiled in my head. Had I misunderstood? Come right away, Paulie, she’d said, and I maxed out my credit card buying the ticket.

  “Have you gotten your birthday present?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  “It’s coming. You’ll love it.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “Thanks.” I wanted to sit down, though not necessarily here. The only furniture in the room was her bed and a nightstand, which a lamp shared with a paperback novel and her reading glasses. “Maybe I’ll go find a chair.”

  “Why don’t you do that? Then we can talk.”

  All along the ward I peered into rooms, looking for a free chair. There were a few, but the beds they stood by were occupied by sick people languidly manipulating their television remote controls or fitfully dozing. At the end of the hall I turned a corner and found an empty room. I went in. There was a neatly dressed bed, half-curtained and in shadow, and beyond it an unmade one under bright light. Two chairs were arranged at its foot. As I picked one up, preparing to carry it back, I noticed that the unmade bed was unmade because somebody was lying in it: a very old man with skin the color of Elmer’s glue. A discreet translucent tube was taped across his face, branching off into his nostrils, and he breathed in a rhythm so slow that I thought he must be in hibernation.