This Vacant Paradise Read online

  Later, she woke and staggered to the bathroom, her feet cold on the tile. Her stomach was turning, as if filled with jelly, and everything around her seemed ominous and unexplainable. It was this image of her father and Scott kissing that came to her as she vomited over and over into the toilet.

  Her father came to the bathroom—she must have woken him. “Sweetheart,” he said. He looked helpless and sad, and she wanted to tell him that she’d seen him make a mistake. Because that was what it must have been—a mistake. Her real father was separate from the man she had seen in the doorway. It was as if some other person, a stranger, had possessed her father.

  4

  IT WASN’T MUCH warmer sitting at the bench of the bus stop, though the bus stop shelter did cut the breeze. The silvery sun gone, it was just beginning to get dark, and the streetlights and the Christmas decorations and the noises of traffic made Eric Wilson think it was like being at a movie—no, that his life was inside a film and he wasn’t really here, he was just acting his part.

  With his eyes closed, the lights and visions and noises passed through him, strangely comforting. He slumped lower, the side of his body leaned against the backdrop of the shelter, his chin tapping against his chest.

  “Hey there,” he heard, and he opened his eyes and straightened his frame to find that Rick was walking toward him, his hand doing a sideswiping, hip-level hand wave. Rick wore a purple sweatshirt with the word PEACHES in yellow cursive across the chest, and Levi’s.

  Rick seated himself on the bench next to Eric. It had been simple and easy to be friends with Rick when they had been active drug addicts together, united by the intimacy of procuring and injecting heroin, drugging their senses, nodding off together; but now, underneath the bus stop shelter, cold and hungry, Eric did not want to speak, knowing that if he did, he might reveal the hideous emotions that he felt for himself, and for Rick, who he knew was sober.

  Rick had a grease-speckled paper bag from the nearby Winchell’s. Eric’s stomach did an excited flip, but he wouldn’t eat anything in front of Rick. Rick might imagine that it was a concession or an admission of defeat.

  Rick began unfolding the opening, and Eric shook his head, indicating that he did not want a donut or a Danish or whatever else might be in there. Rick shrugged, placing the paper sack to the side of the bench, and Eric knew that he would leave it for him to eat later. They were silent, and then Rick reached out and gently touched Eric’s shoulder.

  Eric flashed him a hint of a glare and then looked away.

  “You remind me of your sister,” Rick said, and Eric returned his stare. Rick seemed to be in thought. “I want to help her,” he said, “but she’s like you.”

  “Okay,” Eric said. Years ago, Rick had overdosed and Eric had driven him to the ER, sat beside him while his stomach was pumped, lied to the police about everything that had happened when they came to make their obligatory report, waited the whole thing out. Ever since, Rick had taken it as his duty to pay Eric back, and although he didn’t like it when Rick wanted to save him, he didn’t mind the thought of Rick helping Esther. “Okay,” he said again, and he knew that Rick wanted more from him: to eat a donut, ask for help, go to an NA meeting.

  Rick laid it out almost every time, asked him the same types of questions. Eric gave him a full glare, hoping to stifle what was coming. But it was no use.

  “Eric?”

  Eric closed his eyes, faced the other direction.

  “Do you want help? Are you ready?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Eric didn’t answer.

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “No.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing. For you to leave.”

  “All right,” Rick said, and then Eric felt Rick’s fingers spread across his shoulder, and despite everything, Eric’s heart lurched with tenderness and affection. A shifting of shadows and the soft rustling of clothes indicated that Rick was standing and leaving.

  When he was sure Rick was gone, Eric leaned forward and held his hands together, eyes still closed. For a second, he wondered what he looked like—if it looked like he was praying. Words floated in his head, without his speaking them. Leave me alone, he thought. Everybody just leave me the fuck alone. Go away.

  He was getting no answers, he wasn’t feeling anything, and then he was ashamed. But the feeling didn’t overtake him, because it was as familiar as his own breath.

  After eating the donuts (one glazed, the other chocolate iced with rainbow-colored sprinkles), sucking the excess sugar from his fingers, and then wiping them against his shirt, he got up and walked to the corner, where there were four coin-operated newspaper machines.

  The first two had nothing inside, but when his index and middle fingers slid into the coin-return slot of the third, he felt the ridges and the cool firmness of two quarters against his fingertips.

  5

  ON THE INDEX finger of Grandma Eileen’s fleshy and wrinkled right hand was a luscious ten-carat radiant-cut diamond set between two tapered baguette diamonds. On the middle finger of her age-spotted left hand, she wore an eleven-carat cushion-cut pastel-blue sapphire. Sunlight slicing through a crack in the balcony curtains reminded Esther of the diamond—how a fiery blaze could exit the crown and be seen as a ghostly flashing across a room. The rings looked better on her young fingers. She’d tried on the jewelry more than once, fishing the rings from the sudsy-slick jewelry cleaner in Grandma Eileen’s bathroom, after making sure the bathroom door was locked.

  Esther turned her head from the wedge of sunlight. She lay in bed with a headache. Was it a hangover from her two martinis last night? Was it emotional residue from her dream? She’d dreamed of Grandma Eileen’s death. She would get money, maybe even one of the rings, but her relief had turned into a melting of sorrow, and she’d woken sweaty and crying, her silk pillowcase damp and cold. She was not a crier.

  Because it was the Sunday before Christmas, she was expected to attend the late service at Maritime Church, and afterward visit her great-uncle—Grandma Eileen’s brother-in-law—at the convalescent home, along with Grandma Eileen, Aunt Lottie, and Mary. Women’s duty.

  Esther lived with Grandma Eileen in her one-of-a-kind three-story home, which, curving forward from the cliff edge, bottom deck secured by sea-discolored metal columns, balanced over rocks and ocean. Grandma Eileen had taken Esther in after her father had died. She’d been broke and in debt.

  Aunt Lottie and George Famous had their own two-story home in Newport Shores but visited Grandma Eileen often, under the noble guise of “taking care” of her, though they could usually be found from morning till afternoon on a nearby golf course, and in the evenings at one of their favorite restaurants.

  Rick had been hired over two years before for the less agreeable responsibilities, such as toilet duty. He lived in an apartment in Costa Mesa, commuting in his dusky-green Mercury Grand Marquis, but he might as well have lived with them, since he was in the house from early morning until late at night.

  Esther’s bedroom on the first floor was an afterthought, converted from a playroom long since unused by Mary’s teenagers. Her room had a separate bathroom and kitchen and extended from the house, with its own door to the outside.

  As Esther rose from bed and made her way to the bathroom, she felt the familiar vulnerability of living off her grandmother. She paused to part the balcony curtain, and the view was level with the sea, as if she existed on the ocean’s surface. Grayish whitecaps, threadlike clouds, and a brilliant morning sun . . . the beauty was corrupted by the detail that it could be taken from her. Her life was provisional. She let the curtain swing back.

  What had started as prostate cancer had progressed to bone cancer, but the rumor was that her father had died of AIDS. The tangle of emotions she had for Grandma Eileen was reinforced by the fact that her father had never truly blamed his mother for disowning him, even at the end, when all his savings had
gone to paying hospital bills. And despite everything, Esther had affection for Grandma Eileen, and not only because of her impending death and will. She might not have fallen sway if she hadn’t had the sense that she was necessary and important: “Nobody else understands me,” Grandma Eileen liked to say, to the mortification of Aunt Lottie and Mary. She would’ve liked to hate her grandmother, and at times hatred was the clear and prevailing emotion, but she appreciated Grandma Eileen as her father had, and she was aware of the great power she had in Grandma Eileen’s reciprocation.

  While she showered, she thought about how she wanted to come upon age like Grandma Eileen: no longer dependent on being beautiful, slim, or gracious, and with enviable influence. But she wouldn’t be prejudiced and cruel-hearted. She would enjoy her wealth and spread it to the deserving.

  Grandma Eileen’s husband, Grandpa Gurney, with the financial backing of his family, had made his fortune in real estate, and he’d let his brothers in on the business and all its gains. But there was no question that Grandpa Gurney was the financial genius and their superior.

  In the late sixties, at the height of his success, Grandpa Gurney had unexpectedly and inconveniently died from a brain aneurism, sending shock waves through the family and inciting a scuttle for control. Grandma Eileen had surprised everyone by taking the reins, firing disingenuous lawyers, and fortifying her role, as if she’d morphed into her husband.

  There hadn’t been a challenge since, although Aunt Lottie watched her mother closely, waiting for clear proof of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. But when it came to business, money matters, and the various details of her will, Grandma Eileen remained as sharp (even sharper, Esther believed, though most wouldn’t admit it because she was a woman) as Grandpa Gurney in his heyday.

  As Esther began her grooming routine, her headache lessened. She felt a resolve, a reinforcement of her goals: a future full of the things that she loved, with no one to take them from her. Blow-drying her hair, feeling the silky length along her bare arms, witnessing her beauty in the mirror bolstered her. She wore a nude-colored Chantelle French bra and panties, and she admired her breasts.

  Peering closer to the mirror, she noticed the lines forming at her mouth, the familiar sense of time moving in on her. She set the adjustable lighted mirror to a less critical notch, a happier glow. Newport was full of women desperately clutching youth, well beyond menopause, and one of her fears was that she would become one of them. But by worrying about it, she would only hasten the progression.

  She thought of Charlie—how strange that they would have talked so openly—but it was best that she not see him again. Her thoughts centered back to her objectives (Paul Rice), leaving Charlie behind.

  After deliberation, she decided on a turquoise cotton skirt and a white blouse, humble and womanly, knowing that her appearance should please Paul, whose attendance at Maritime Church was a given. She slipped flat sandals on her feet. Boring and feminine.

  “Horrible, horrible,” she heard, knowing that Grandma Eileen was coming, hearing the thunk of her cane against the stairs. Grandma Eileen’s voice was deep, like a man’s. She was alternately lucid and delusional, and sometimes the two were mixed. She talked about herself in the third person, which was unnerving. When she was in her element, she was as sharp as a knife slicing through the soft flesh of a melon, and could do as much damage.

  It wasn’t a good sign that she was making her way to Esther’s room, as she did so only when agitated. Esther’s indulgent behavior had backfired. Her suspicion was that Slick Rick was sent out into the world as a spy. She would have to come up with a plausible explanation, as Grandma Eileen considered Charlie a failing, and Esther wasn’t quite sure if she disagreed.

  Her door was pushed open, and Grandma Eileen, stooped forward, leaning on her black walnut cane, scrutinized her with a direct gaze. She wore her deceased husband’s sleeveless vest-jacket, with fly-fishing patches covering the front, over a peach-colored polo shirt, and her pale-cream polyester slacks embroidered with miniature lemons. Along with her rings, at her neck, hanging beneath the wrinkled lump of her throat, was an eight-carat princess-cut diamond.

  “So what’s this I hear,” she said, with sharpened eyes, “about your romantic evening with the Socialist?” She began her heavy tread across the room.

  “Charlie’s a sociology professor,” Esther said, knowing that this wasn’t better. Any kind of academia, especially those of the humanities and social science varieties, were deeply suspect. “We took a walk.”

  “He’s a Communist.” Grandma Eileen tapped her cane against the floor, hand clutched at the brass golf-ball knob. “That’s what he is. And from what I’ve heard, he likes to screw married women.” Her body was soft and pillowy, spread with wrinkles. “His poor parents,” she continued. “Ungrateful bastard, turning away from his family’s business. Screwing married women. Clinton-loving liberal philandering piece of shit.”

  Esther was silent, waiting for Grandma Eileen to finish. Charlie’s parents were fellow members at the country club, and she knew that this was where Grandma Eileen garnered most of her information.

  “Frank and Karen are good kids,” Grandma Eileen said, referring to Charlie’s older siblings. “But they got a bad seed with that Commie-lover.” Her legs, unaccustomed to supporting such girth, had become bowlegged. Standing defiantly, she breathed heavily, waiting for an explanation. “What about Paul?” she said when none came.

  “Paul and I are dating; we like each other very much.”

  “Do you think he appreciates that you took a romantic stroll?” Grandma Eileen’s tongue popped out, made a brief, grotesque appearance, and went back inside its cave. “Don’t waste your time,” she said, “on losers.”

  Rick’s familiar steps could be heard as he made his way down the stairs. He was never far from Grandma Eileen. Wearing faded Levi’s and a white T-shirt, he leaned against the doorway, an indulgent pout to his mouth.

  “This gives a whole new meaning,” he said, fingering a $100 bill, “to money laundering.”

  Grandma Eileen was known to carry sizable amounts of cash on her person, and often some of the bills went through the washing machine. Grandma Eileen had been making the accusation that someone was stealing her cash. Esther believed that Rick, more than providing a play on words, was ensuring his trustworthiness.

  “You have to be more careful,” Rick said, crossing the room and handing the bill to Grandma Eileen.

  “I’m missing two hundred,” she said, folding the money and slipping it into the vest-jacket pocket. She yanked the zipper shut. “George took it, last night.” Aunt Lottie’s new husband, George Famous, was an easy target, and for that reason Esther believed him innocent. While it was obvious that Grandma Eileen was paranoid, someone was probably stealing from her. Esther herself had recently taken $300 from a roll of cash, rubberbanded and left thoughtlessly on the kitchen counter.

  “Did you take all your pills?” Rick asked.

  Grandma Eileen moved two more steps, so that she stood directly in front of Esther. Long lines streamed from her nose to the corners of her mouth, as if carved in her skin. She had fine silvery hairs on her chin and her upper lip. “Looky here,” she said, thrusting her arm forward, arm fat swinging. She fisted and unfisted her left hand, leaning with her right on the cane. Her eyes were a transparent blue, ambiguous as they opened themselves to Esther, taking her in like empty pools. “I took my pills. No pain,” fist; “no pain,” unfist; “no pain,” fist. “Not bad for Eileen Marie Wilson. Huh? Not bad for Eileen Marie Wilson.”

  “Not bad,” Esther agreed, if only to get the fisted arthritic hand away from her face. But in truth, she felt privileged, as she always did when Grandma Eileen allowed her to truly see, holding nothing back, as if to say, Here I am. This is me.

  EVER SINCE GRANDMA Eileen had failed her driver’s test, unable to bribe the woman who handled the vision chart, her driver’s license had not been renewed, and Aunt Lottie had become the offi
cial Sunday driver. Grandma Eileen saved her worst venom for her daughter, badgering and cruel, and Esther sometimes wondered if Grandma Eileen was preparing Aunt Lottie for an eventual takeover—to become savage in business—but she knew that she was giving her undue credit.

  “That’s a yellow light,” Grandma Eileen said, “not a red light. Slow, slow. Not stop!” Esther, sitting in the backseat next to the heavily perfumed Mary, could feel the way Aunt Lottie struggled to maintain her cool, her hands gripping the steering wheel as the Mercedes idled at the signal. Aunt Lottie’s shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. A seagull was perched in the red light of the stop signal, its dark outline visible, and when the light changed to green, Grandma Eileen said, “Green! Go! Go!”

  “I know, Mother,” Aunt Lottie said. Even from the back, she looked like Grandma Eileen, her hair cut short and curled in a helmetlike manner. She wore a vest covered with patches of U.S. license plates.

  Grandma Eileen’s spacious Mercedes was the preferred means for driving to Maritime Church, and the parking attendants, also know as Parking Pastors, wore Hawaiian-print short-sleeve shirts and waved white-gloved hands, directing Aunt Lottie to the handicapped-parking spaces.

  “That way, that way,” Grandma Eileen said, and Aunt Lottie shot her a disgruntled look. “I’ve got to go where they tell me,” she said. Grandma Eileen made a reach for the wheel. Aunt Lottie slapped her hand away. “Stop it!”

  “That way! That way!” Aunt Lottie made an unexpected sharp turn, a Parking Pastor waving frantically and trotting after the Mercedes. Mary, nudging Esther on the thigh, whispered, “Here we go,” as if they were on an adventure together.

  Esther smiled, her face tight with effort. “How are Caitlen and Bailey liking high school?”

  “Caitlen is adjusting, trying out for cheerleading, but Bailey, with his dyslexia, is having some trouble; he’ll do fine in water polo and golf.”