Paradise Returns

Paradise woke up with a start and looked out the window of the Greyhound bus. They rolled along the curve of the Northern Michigan lakeshore, approaching their destination. She had been traveling north for eighteen hours. The lake was to her right, a black icy expanse at midnight, and she thought to herself that it was one of the few things she had missed for the last two years. Her eyes moved from the blackness of the lake to the blackness of the window glass.

She felt panic suddenly. Was that her mother’s face in the window? It was pale and ghostly. No, it was the reflection of her own face, light skin framed by white blond hair. She knew she had the same hair as her mother and the same skin, but she told herself that she would never let herself go that way. Her mother’s skin had turned dull, and her hair had lost its shine, and her body had become heavy and slow, far too quickly.

As she looked at the lake, she thought about a picture that she had painted last year in her freshman art class. The picture was of her hometown with the long sweep of the lake, blue and light and half frozen over, and towards the left -- not too far away from the shore -- a little row of houses that were brown and small and grainy. To the right side of the canvas, on the main street in the middle of a steep slope, was the place she was named after, the Paradise bar. There was a string of Christmas lights over the front window that stayed up all year, and a crack in the window where a customer had forgotten to take his car out of reverse one night.

In the picture she had painted she included the lights and the cracked window, but she left out the sign with the bar’s name on it, because it was a project that was meant to be handed in. She never told anyone at school where her name came from. If they asked her she would just smile. She hoped that they were thinking of tropical islands and warm breezes.

Paradise raised her hand up to brush her hair back behind her ears. She heard the squeak of the brakes as the bus slowed down to turn off the highway. They would soon be pulling into the station. She looked at her nails which were bitten back and swore again to stop biting them. She took a peppermint out of her pocket to let the sweet chalky taste distract her and started to collect her things. She knew that Arthur would be picking her up. She could sleep on his couch and wake up early and get dressed for the funeral tomorrow.

When she walked into the little station Arthur was standing on the marble tiles in front of the snack machine. He had let his beard grow out again and it was pure white. It made him look twenty years older than he really was and she wondered why he wore it that way. They stepped into the parking lot together and walked past the dirty snowdrifts to Arthur’s truck. She walked slowly to match Arthur’s slow stride. The old truck smelled the same. Cigarette smoke, with a bit of paint remover and Orange Kleen hand cleaner mixed in. There were paint cans and brushes and rollers in the back, because he worked for himself as a house painter. “Cold, eh?” said Arthur. It was characteristic of him to use so few words. She nodded. Of course it was cold, she thought. It was cold here ten months out of the year. She looked at the unassuming, gentle slope of Arthur’s shoulders. It was hard to believe he used to belong to a motorcycle gang.


They walked up a steep flight of wooden stairs to Arthur’s apartment. He lived on the second floor on top of a pizza place. Arthur smoked his last cigarette of the night while she unpacked her dress and put it on a hanger. She settled down on the couch and lay there staring at a wave sculpture that Arthur had had in his living room since the 1970s, wishing for the next day to be over as quickly as possible.

Why had Arthur kept that sculpture there for so long? He seemed to take a liking to certain things and keep them forever. She guessed that was something she should be grateful for, because he had been there for her, even after the paternity test told him that he had no legal obligation to be. She thought about the times he bought her school clothes at the local Shopko. There wasn’t much choice in fashions, but it was better than nothing, she thought, and she had a sudden image of her mother gathering up empty beer cans. Each can had a ten cent deposit. When she had enough she would trade in the lot to buy a six pack.

Paradise hid her hands inside the long sleeves of her flannel sleep shirt, curling them up, and hugged her arms around her stomach. There was something sharp pressing against her back. She rolled over trying to find a comfortable position. The furnace kicked on with a droning sound, and warm air blew out of the vents on the wall. A bitter taste filled her mouth. She had another peppermint to take the taste away, and went to sleep.

While she slept she had a dream that she was driving along and saw a possum dead on the side of the road. Its body was stiff and the big dark eyes were staring into space. She felt a surge of anger. Why couldn’t it run fast enough to get across the road? Dumb slow thing, she thought.

In the morning, Paradise woke up to the sounds of a snowplow on the road outside, and the bubbling of Arthur’s old coffee pot, which sounded like it was ready to explode. She took a shower, and put on makeup that she did not usually wear. She put on her black dress and took her black gloves out of her suitcase. Arthur was sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Christine, one of her mother’s drinking buddies, knocked on the door. She had brought them a pack of sweet rolls. She put them on the table, sat down with a cup of coffee and lit her own cigarette.

Paradise took a sweet roll but all she felt like doing was tearing little pieces from the sides and dropping them in her coffee and watching them float, sink and disappear. She looked at Christine and thought she didn’t look too good. Her hair was gray at the roots and the whites of her eyes were pale yellow. She told Paradise and Arthur that she had quit working at the prison and gone on disability. Paradise said, “I guess you miss working there.”

She remembered hearing Christine tell her mother, years ago, about seeing someone gang raped by a group of other prisoners. He was a young guy who had been sentenced for murdering a woman one night out by the airport. So Christine said he had it coming to him. And all the other guards thought so too. Nobody stepped in to stop it from happening. Paradise tried to stop thinking about this, but she looked at Christine and she couldn’t think about anything else. She thought she must have been around ten when Christine was telling her mother that story and she wondered if her mother had noticed her listening.

They drove to the Lutheran church, all three in the front of Arthur’s truck. Inside the church, there was a hum of low voices, and rustling as they took off their coats. It wasn’t a big crowd. Paradise thought that she should feel sad for her mother, having so few friends to mourn for her, but she didn’t know whether the emotion she felt was sadness or something else. People sat down in the pews. Paradise let Christine and Arthur go in ahead of her and she sat next to Arthur near the aisle. She couldn’t stand the thought of sitting next to Christine and thinking about the prison any more. She left her gloves on and slid the palms of her hands up and down the smooth wood of the pew on either side of her.

The service was starting. She didn’t want to lift up her eyes and look at the pulpit or the pastor; she didn’t want to look around her at Arthur or Christine or any of the elderly people who were just there because they came to every funeral. So she looked into the wood of the back of the pew in front of her and tried to concentrate on its surface. It was really shiny, so shiny she thought she saw her reflection. Was that really her face?

Paradise closed her eyes and wished for the funeral to be over so she could get back on the bus and return to a life where she could reinvent herself. The pastor was saying a prayer, and she heard his deep, raspy voice but she could not understand his words. Please take it all away, she thought. She imagined the cold water of Lake Superior swelling over the shore and filling up the church, dissolving everything inside it.