See You in Paradise (29 page)

At one point Margaret got up to go to the ladies. She brought her BlackBerry. Belinda showed up at our table in seconds, as if by chance, slipping into Margaret’s seat and resting a fishy hand on my shoulder. “So how are you doing?” she said seriously, and it was clear that somehow she knew everything.

“Oh, fine!” I chirped.

“Good,” she said seriously. “Good.”

Lyn was buried in her paperback—she always brought something to read for the dull moments in life, and I found this habit both endearing and highly respectable—but Rae looked up with shy, alarmed curiosity.

“We’re so glad to be back,” I offered.

Belinda nodded slowly. “You are always welcome here. You know that.”

“I do.”

“Don’t forget,” she said, and tousled my hair, as though I were a child.

When I looked up, Rae was staring at me. I smiled. She quickly bowed her head and moved the scraps around on her plate.

“I wonder what’s taking your mother,” I said.

Rae shrugged. “She brought her phone.”

“Ah. Did she now.”

A nod. At this moment Lyn looked up from her book and glanced at us both. “What?” she said. “What’d I miss?”

“Nothing,” I told her. “We’re waiting for your mom. Then we’ll have dessert.”

“No, thanks,” Rae said from under her hair.

“I think I’ll pass too,” I agreed.

Margaret returned, looking flushed and concerned. I ignored this. She didn’t want dessert either, but Lyn did of course, so we all sat for ten minutes watching her alternately eat an ice cream sundae and read. When she was through, she said, “You people are freaks,” and for once, none of us disagreed.

That night Margaret and I lay awake. The moon was new, the sky had clouded over, and the only light in the room emanated from the bottom bunk, where she was tik-takking away, answering her email. I was thinking about a night long ago, when the girls were babies and asleep in their beds, and I was alone in the studio, writing a song for Margaret’s birthday. I turned off the lamp and played guitar, whisper-quiet, illuminated only by the moonlight through the window and the glowing LEDs and VU meters from my equipment racks.

Oddly I don’t remember if she liked the song, or even how it went. I suppose I have it somewhere, the recording I made, but it hardly matters. It was the doing and the being that I loved, the experience of making something I liked. The perfect moment.

How is it that I gave it up so easily? What was it in me that needed to sacrifice that pleasure? Margaret didn’t need my gear money. I could have gotten a night job. Maybe, I thought, she was right about me. Maybe ambition frightened me. And maybe there was something the matter with that, and maybe not.

“Margaret,” I said to the darkness, “we are going to have to tell the girls something.”

No answer, other than a pause in her clicky thumb-typing.

“If you leave it to me,” I added, “I don’t know what I can say, other than that you’ve left us for Allan.”

This time the typing stopped entirely. I heard her rolling off the bed, and a moment later, her thin face glared at me between the slats of the top bunk.

“How dare you bring them into this,” she said, her teeth clenched.

“But Margaret—”

“You would dare to harm your own daughters for your petty resentment!”

“Am I fucking Allan?” I asked her. “I don’t think it’s me doing that, is it?”

“You bastard,” she spat.

“No, sorry! That’s you, fucking Allan. I’m the one who still loves you and wants to keep our family together, sorry!”

For a moment it appeared that her head might explode. Then, like Neptune descending into his kingdom, the sea, she withdrew from sight and settled back onto her bunk.

Five minutes later, the clicking resumed.

On the afternoon of the third day of our visit, the girls were sitting on the beach, poking the sand with sticks and talking. Margaret was in the house, working. I was in the boat, fishing. Not really. I’d grabbed one of the fishing poles from the bucket on the porch, stuck a worm on the end, rowed out to the middle of the lake, dunked the line in the water, and lay back to look at the sky. Thank heaven for small miracles, it was still blue.

I must have fallen asleep, because my reaction to the commotion on the shore was to open my eyes. I sat up, blinking. The sun had tightened and probably burned the skin on my face, and I felt really old.

The girls were pointing at a hole in the sand that they had dug. They were talking a mile a minute and sort of dancing around the hole in their little bikinis, as if as part of some exotic preteen summoning ritual, an effort to make an anti-zit djinn pop out of the ground. Margaret stood in the shade of the porch, looking on in stern curiosity. Lyn saw that I had sat up in the boat, and frantically motioned me in.

It took me a couple of minutes, by which time Margaret had ventured onto the sand and was peering into the hole with the girls. At the bottom of it was a curved section of smooth metal about three inches in diameter.

“Whoa!” I said.

“Should we dig it out? Let’s dig it out!” That was Rae.

“Mom says it might be dangerous,” Lyn said, trying not to sound accusatory.

“It could be some electrical junction box,” Margaret offered. She seemed to doubt it herself.

We stared at the object for a few silent seconds. Then I got down on my knees and cleared away more sand.

What was revealed was the approximate size of a loaf of Wonder bread, the shape of a gelcap, the color of a toaster. It was bisected by a thin black line of rubber. The metal was corroded, but not too badly. I took hold of both ends, lifted it out of the hole, and gave it a shake. Loose objects clattered around inside.

We all glanced at one another. I gripped one end in my crooked hairy arm and the other in my veined sweaty hand and gave it a sharp twist. It opened with a small groan of what sounded to me like relief.

Immediately something fell out and landed on the sand at Lyn’s feet. It was a Pez dispenser, with the head of Papa Smurf on the end.

“Huh?” she asked no one in particular.

The end of the object I held in my arm contained a collection of papers, toys, shells, stones, and other objects. I reached in and pulled out a folded piece of construction paper. The words on it were printed in a neat, steady hand, using a marker. They read:

The four of us sat around the dining table, the contents of the time capsule spread out before us. There was a strong sense of waning enthusiasm, which we were desperate to artificially prop up: frankly, it was all a little disappointing. There was the obligatory newspaper, of course: fallout from Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court was big news, as was a tornado in Alberta. And people were fighting in Mecca. There was a Pac-Man keychain with no keys on it—Pac-Man was old news in 1987, if I remember correctly, so the keychain probably seemed a small sacrifice to make for posterity. Ditto the Elton John cassette (“Sad Songs (Say So Much)”? My God, what had become of him?), the Danielle Steel paperback, the deck of Star Wars playing cards that I bet had been stolen from the cabin, and which come to think of it might fetch a nice little sum on eBay.

More interesting were the family artifacts that had been provided—a sun-soaked Polaroid of a small and homely family, Dad with his bald spot and paunch; Mom with her squint, her puffy do, and her short shorts; and son and daughter, approximately the girls’ ages, appearing sullen and standing as far apart from one another as possible. There were also neatly folded personal statements from each member of the family, printed in pencil on lined three-hole paper, which we solemnly passed around.

Dad went in for brevity. “A great family, a great vacation. Here’s to 1987. Phil Harris.” Mom was wordier, yet circumspect, as though trying, gently, to ward off future unhappiness. “Thru good times and bad, the Harris family indures. We are loving and friendly and happy to be together on this beutiful lake, in this beutiful time of year. May the finder of this time capsule have peace in their life and happiness on the earth. Sincerly, Ruby Harris.”

The boy had written, “BEN HARRIS. MY SISTER IS A WHITCH. THIS LAKE IS BORING. BE WARE! BEN HARRIS.” Lyn found this note to be hilarious, and laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks.

The girl’s note, on the other hand, sucked the life out of our little party.

The note circulated around the table, and when we had all read it we sat in silence, listening to the dumbfuck lake creeping up the beach outside. Rae studied her fingertips, and I noticed that her fingernails, usually painted with care, were bitten and bare; Margaret stared into her coffee mug full of red wine. Lyn had been the last to receive the note and she continued to hold on to it, pressing it with both hands against her belly and gazing in mute wonder at the objects spread across the table.

I broke the silence by suggesting we fill the capsule with our own artifacts, and this gave everybody something to do. While Margaret and the girls prepared the contributions, I gathered up the Harris family’s stuff and shoved it all into a plastic freezer bag. I used a ballpoint pen to write “1987” on the bag in a near-illegible scrawl, then tucked it into one end of the capsule. Our shitty lives would be interred together, I figured.

Lyn requested that each of us get to be alone while we said goodbye to, as she put it, “our parts of ourselves,” and so I brought our half of the capsule outside and set it on the ground next to the hole it had come from, and one by one we paid it a visit in solitude. I was made to go first, but personally, I couldn’t think of anything to add. I traveled light, and what little I had, I wanted to keep. My life, after all, was the way I liked it, or at least had been until a few weeks before. And look what was happening to me! Look at my punishment, for the crime of contentment! In the end, as a gesture of solidarity, I stripped off my Timex and dropped it into the capsule. Who cared what time it was? It would be better, in the months and years to come, not to watch what remained of my fragile youth drain away into the future’s reeking maw. Now I wouldn’t be able to monitor my descent into bitterness and decrepitude, thank God!