Road to Paradise (51 page)

In the morning—at least I hoped it was morning—Gina was still not in the room, and my head felt thirty pounds full of fermented grapes. Candy laughed at me, stretched, jumped up, got into her old clothes. It was eleven in the morning.

“I can’t believe Gina’s not here,” I said, putting on my shorts, my tank top.

“I told you—she’s not coming. You want her, you’ll have to go and get her.”

“Don’t tell me you think she’s still at that table. With Raul.”

“Oh, yes.” Candy grinned. “When you ask her, she’ll say, Eddie? Eddie who?”

“Funny.”

I was self-conscious; she without reservations. I was ashamed of myself, that I could only look at her surreptitiously while she was bouncing around smiling openly at me.

“What am I going to do, Candy?” I said. “I can’t leave her in Reno, can I? Just lose her in the casino. Oh, sorry, Mrs. Reed, is she not in the car? Oops. Must have left her at the blackjack table. So silly of me.”

“Sloane, you’ve got more important fish to fry right now. Don’t worry, when you come back with Tara, I guarantee, Gina will not have yet left the casino.” She laughed at her own humor. “Me, I’m going to wait right here. Me and your car will be waiting for you and the baby girl.”

Why did she mention my car like that? “How am I supposed to get there?”

“Take a bus.”

“By myself? I’m going to take the bus by myself?”

“It’s a bus, not the wheel of an airplane! But fine, let’s go to
Circus, Circus, see if we can pry Gina’s hot hands off the chips. Maybe she’ll come with you.”

“I wonder why she didn’t come back,” I mused. “Perhaps she won last night.”

Candy nodded. “Don’t you see? She’s never going to leave either way. You’re right, who’d ever leave a winning table? And if she’s losing, she’s just riding out the wave until she gets hot again. No one leaves, Shel. The trap door of Reno is above her head.”

We couldn’t find Gina. Raul had long ended his shift, and she was nowhere to be found. Candy told me not to worry. “She knows where we’re staying. If she needs us, she’ll call. Or she’ll come. She’ll be fine.”

Back at the room, we moussed down my hair to make me look subdued and ordinary. We bought me a dress, and I
never
wear a dress. Especially one like this: long in the knees, with large purple flowers, ruffles at the hem and neckline. I looked ridiculous. “No, you don’t, you look forty,” Candy said, adjusting my buttons. “You look motherly and warm, like you’re about to bake cookies.”

“Splendid.”

I left her my money, for safekeeping, taking with me a hundred dollars for a motel and a burger.

There were no buses going to Paradise from Reno, but there was one bus a day leaving for Chico at 3:25 p.m., the cashier told us, getting in at 11:15 p.m. I had questions for the cashier. Where was Chico, and how would I get from Chico to Paradise?

“What am I, an information booth?” she squawked. “I sell tickets. You want one or not?”

How in the world would I get a room that late, and where? I couldn’t get a map of Chico in Reno, I couldn’t … “Let me just take my car,” I pleaded to Candy. “I’ll take my car, I’ll park in Chico.”

“No,” she said. “You can see that damn car for miles. It’s like a beacon.”

“Paradise is not Nevada. It’s not flat desert.”

“How do you know? You’ve never been there. California has desert. Isn’t Death Valley in California?”

“Is Paradise in Death Valley?”

“Could be. Might be. I don’t know. Do
you
know? I’m not ruling anything out, the way Mike described it. No car.”

Time was ticking. Just ninety minutes till the only bus of the day left. “I’ll come with you,” Candy said.

“You can’t. One glimpse of you, and—you’re worse than my yellow car.”

“I’ll wear a wig.”

“Forget it. You’re already like Twiggy.”

“Who?”

“Forget it. Wait here. Besides you have to wait for Gina. I don’t want her to get frantic when she comes back to the room and finds us both gone.”

Candy sighed. “Babysit the car, babysit Gina.”

I fixed her hair, pulled it away from her face, wiped yesterday’s mascara from under her eyes, touched her cheek briefly. “You think you have it tough?” I said. “I’m going to be in Chico at 11:30 at night without a room.”

“Hang on,” she said. “If there’s only one bus to Chico, maybe we should find out how many buses there are
from
Chico.”

Apparently there was also one. Leaving Chico at 11:25 in the morning, when Tara would still be in school.

“You’ll have to stay one extra day,” said Candy, giving me another fifty dollars out of the depleted stash of money. “You’ll have to stay with her in your hotel, then take the bus back the next morning.” She shook her head. “I don’t like this at all. Tara’s going to get scared. Instead of just driving, or riding, she’ll have to spend a night in a motel. I don’t think she’s ever been in a motel.”

“I could just take my car,” I offered again.

“Cut it out,” she said. “We could sell the car. Buy another one. Heck, with the money we’d get from it, we could buy three.”

“No! I told you already. I’m not selling the car. I can’t talk about this again.” Why couldn’t she understand?

“Okay, okay. What are we going to do?”

“What
can
we do? Tara is going to have to spend a night in a motel.”

Tears came to Candy’s eyes. “She’ll get scared without me.”

“I’ll call you on the phone. Stay in the room. As soon as school is out, I’ll bring her to the motel and we’ll call you. You’ll talk to her, she knows your voice, she won’t be scared then. She knows your voice, right? You spoke to her a lot?”

Candy hung her head. “When Mike was alive, I should have called more often,” she said. “But my life was so yukky. And the time difference … every time I thought of calling it was too late in California.”

“But it’s three hours earlier.”

“I guess. But I was always busy in the evenings.”

“What about Sundays?”

“She was with his parents.”

One more hour till the bus. I left most of my things in the room, just took one change of underwear and a toothbrush in a little bag with Tara’s things in it. We sat in the Greyhound station on a long wooden bench. The inside of the terminal smelled of people who had come into town with luggage and jewelry, perfume and money, and having lost it all, having sold it all, having pawned it all, were now sitting twenty-four hours in a depot waiting for the next bus to nowhere, because they had nothing.

Candy and I sat close, looking down at the floor. She took my hand. “Remember the two men in the Andes?”

“God, please no. Not that again.”

“They did what they had to do. And they made it.”

“The worst thing I ever heard. Don’t remind me. So did Lena and Yuri, you know. They did what they had to.”

“They were not those two men.”

“I can’t help thinking that perhaps I’m one of the twenty-nine unlucky ones. Whose flesh is about to be ripped off.”

Candy smiled. “I’m going to tell you something about Judas,” she said. “To make you feel better.”

“I’ve never heard that sentence before today. But please, God, not that, either. How about a joke? A joke would be good right about now.”

“Judas is not the worst story. It’s the best story.”

I was puzzled. “Judas in the pit of remorse for eternity is the best story?”

“Yes. When Jesus was dead on the cross and in the tomb, his disciples scattered, because they thought all was lost, all was hopeless, and around them was nothing but black despair. They thought they were defeated, that the world was right and they had been wrong. They thought they were doomed. But the truth was, God would not abandon his creation. The story wasn’t over, Sloane. It was just beginning.”

“Ah,” I said, staring at her. Perhaps she was right. Some things required
more
contemplation, not less. You needed to think harder about the things that were the most difficult to figure out, until your puzzler was sore. You could not abandon the Question, though when you were eighteen, how desperately you wanted to. It was the prerogative of youth, to think of nothing as you blared the music with the windows wide open. The spiritual pressures didn’t go hand in hand with Blondie and the Bee Gees. To hear your inner voice, to search for the Answer, you had to turn down the music. And who wanted to?

I brought with me a bag full of things for Tara: her ball, her dolly, and her markers. I brought her a dress, some underpants, a brush, a mirror, a picture of her mother, a letter from her mother. “Don’t open the letter,” she said. “Just give it to her.”

“Of course.”

“Tell her I’m waiting.”

“That’s the point.”

“Tell her you’re going to have an adventure. Tell her you’re my best friend.”

I blinked.

She gave me Mike’s parents’ address. “But don’t go to the house. Just in case that’s where Erv might be. Go to her school.” Her school’s name was written on a piece of paper. All the Pomeranians, Chihuahuas, and Taras, from Glen Burnie to Three Oaks to De Soto to Paradise, on scraps of paper in my hand.

“You have to stay put,” I said. “Gina will be back.”

“Of course she will.” Candy smiled. “And you, come right back, okay?”

“Of course I will. Paradise sounds worse than the well of eternal sorrows.”

“Exactly.” She shuddered. “That’s what Mike said. Just go get my baby. Tell her Mama’s waiting for her.”

I had seen the girl’s small scribblings. “
Hapy Valentin, Mama,
wen u com, I giv u chokolats and roses. From Tara
.”

“I don’t want to do this alone,” I said.

“I know.”

“I can’t do it alone.”

“You can. You will.”

I shook my head. “Even in your stupid story,
two
men schlepped together up the Andes. Who’s going to watch my back?”

“God will watch over you, Shall Be.”

Twenty-five minutes till the bus left. We got in line. Tara’s bag was in my hand. Did I bring even a spot of lipstick for myself? What if I had to stay an extra night? Did I bring my running trophy T-shirt, my spiral notebook, the things of my other life? “I don’t want to do this,” I repeated in a whisper.

“Then, I’ll go,” Candy said. “Let me go. I’ll be fine. You’ll see. You’ve always been a worrier. You wait for Gina here, wait for me. Give me your dress.”

This
is
where I rolled my eyes.

Twenty minutes.

Ten.

My turn. Before I climbed the steps, she kissed me. Around her neck my arm went. “
He shall give the angels charge over you
,” she said. “
And keep you in all your ways
.”

At my seat, I opened the window, and she stood underneath. “Be good, Grace,” I said. “Do as we discussed. Please. Promise? Your Jesus commands you to be good.”

She smiled back and waved. “Christ didn’t come to earth to make bad men good,” she said. “He came to earth to make dead men live.” She blew me a kiss. The Greyhound hissed a shot of steam into the atrium well.

The bus ride was interminable. Two hundred miles seemed to take longer than the last three thousand.

I slept some of the way, my head bouncing against the glass. When I opened my eyes, it was raining. I closed them again. Pretty. Wet fields. The sky was gray. The bus passed through snowy mountains. It got colder, strangely, for it was summer, but it
was
cold, and raining—decidedly
not
like my dreams of what California might be. The mountains and trees were the color of storm. We drove through the Tahoe National Forest where the trunks of trees were the size of cars; it looked man-made, movie-effect unreal.

The rain cleared, the sun shone, glinted through the wet; it got warmer; we opened the upper windows, and the air smelled of damp orange blooms. It was a long way on the winding two-lane highway, through fields of orange groves, past distant mountains, grass, green, the tangerine sun, the summer air, it smelled of familiar, happy things. California looked to be a paradise. But Candy had described it as the worst place on earth, full of hicks and narrow minds, ugly and oppressive. Maybe I was in the wrong place. She said Paradise was on Route 70, but clearly it wasn’t, for we left Route 70 far behind, and were now somewhere else, between here and there.

When I opened my eyes again, the afternoon sun was shining
on wet strawberry fields. The bus was stopped at a farm stand. Did anyone want some strawberries? I clutched Tara’s bag and didn’t move. We bounced along again. I asked where we were.

“In California,” said the unfriendly woman next to me, clutching her own bags. The strawberry fields looked so pretty, stretching deep into valleys, the orange groves blooming all around. The sun … I don’t know. It looked different in California. And in the distance were mountains. It was warm with the windows ajar, but not boiling like Reno. I touched the glass with my hands. Did a five-year-old need a ticket? I had never even
talked
to a five-year-old. Why hadn’t I babysat? I was always helping Emma, never had the time. Like Candy. But different. Was Paradise here, in these strawberry sun-kissed valleys? Maybe Mike hadn’t told Candy the truth because this sure didn’t look awful. I closed my eyes again to try to keep my heart from pounding. I couldn’t think of tomorrow, tomorrow was too frightening, even in this sun, and I didn’t want to see Erv’s face again—ever. What if he was waiting for Tara as she got out of school? And what if Mike’s parents were there? Who picked a child up from school? I decided I would wait for her at recess. But I couldn’t take her out of school, could I? Just like that, in the middle of the day? Who was I? How would I explain myself? If only Candy could have come with me. Or Gina. That Gina!

The sun was setting. It was nearly eight, or nine, late, and the fields were burnt sienna and golden green. It looked peaceful, and I was scared.

We’re making good time, the driver said. We’ll be in Chico early. We’ll drive through Paradise first. We should be there in thirty minutes.

The road narrowed and wound far uphill, trees overhung the road, mountain vistas peeking through, strawberry fields glimmering in the valleys below. The bus chugged up the sloping hill, and didn’t stop. The hill never plateaued, just spiraled up and up, through pines, groves and fields. Finally, just the embers of the sun remained in the blue and purple sky, on flat land at a mountain pass, under
Ponderosa pine full of sunset light, I saw a wooden sign adorned with blooming pink flowers: Y
OU’RE ASCENDING INTO
P
ARADISE
, it read. P
OP
. 13,000, E
LEV
. 2400. Not as high as the Great Divide that we left long ago, but high enough.

You’re ascending into Paradise. We were twenty-four hundred feet above sea level. Dusk had set; the bus had stopped at a light. I jumped up, pushed my way past the unfriendly woman, rushed to the front. “Do you think you can let me off here instead of Chico?” I panted. “Please?”

“I’m not supposed to,” the driver said. “I’m responsible for each and every person on this bus. What if something happens to you?”

“Something’s happening all the time,” I said. This gruff man thought he was responsible for me?

“You got luggage?”

“Just this bag.”

The light turned green. He pulled the lever and the doors hissed open. “Watch your step,” he said. “
Comé con Dio
.” What did that mean? I took French in high school; a lot of good it did me.

I walked down a Main Street called Skyway with my bag (wondering why they called it Skyway) until I found a cabin in a place called Ponderosa Pines. I slept like the dead with all the doors chained and locked. The next morning was like one I’d never seen before. The sun was shining, filtering through the soaring spires of pine. The slight, southern breeze gently tossed the needled branches and danced the heads of the pink and white flowers that bloomed everywhere. There was no one else in the cabins, except for the one, of course, right next to mine. An old blue Lincoln was parked in front with a worn-out bumper sticker: “God is my co-Pilot.” I waited for the people to come in or out, just to talk to someone, but everything was quiet. It was still early, and I had to find Tara’s school, and Tara’s house perhaps, to see where she lived. Candy had told me that they lived in a trailer park. I could get a cab there, but did cabs go inside trailer parks? Maybe I could just look at it from the outside. The girl attended Pearson Elementary; how far was that from here? A map would’ve
been helpful. I told the woman in reception I’d be keeping the room for another night. She in turn gave me a map, told me Pearson was just off the Skyway, and that the Paradise Trailer Park was right behind Skyway, too, and nowhere near Tara’s street, Lovely Lane, which apparently had no trailer parks on it, only small private homes. On the bad local map of the town, I found Lovely Lane.