The Border of Paradise: A Novel (38 page)

“Marty,” I said, “is there anything? Leftovers? Sandwich fixings?”

“I think there’s meat loaf,” Marty said.

“Please.”

He went to the kitchen. I said, “Where is your mother? Where’s William?”

She looked to the side. “She’s dead,” she said. “Ma and William died in the Buick on the way to town. I wasn’t with them.”

“I thought it was you and your father who had died.” A proliferation of alleged car accidents, one crashing after the other. But she herself was not dead. “Are you sure?” I asked, and then
corrected myself. “No—I’m sorry. Of course you’re sure. What about your father? Where is he?”

“He’s dead,” she said simply.

I asked, “How?”

“He stabbed himself. Didn’t you know? I don’t know why you’d think
I
was dead.” She turned her head. “What’s that sound?”

“The microwave. It’s heating your meat loaf.”

“Microwave. We don’t have one of those.”

“Not everyone does.”

She looked around the room. I tried to see it through her eyes: green walls, botanical illustrations in frames, refurbished furniture bought on resale. We remain frugal with David’s money. Blood money, Marty calls it with hatred, and yet he has no job and lives off it all the same, having been dishonorably discharged from the navy for years now.

“Everyone is dead,” she said.

“What?”

“Ma and William were in the Buick and a car hit them. I’m all alone.” She stared at me. Her eyes were, I realized, the color of mine. They’d changed over the years from hazel to a brighter shade of green, and they gleamed as she said, “I came here, Mrs. Kucharski, because I didn’t know where else to go. You’re the only other person I know.”

Everyone is dead. David killed himself. I’d wondered for all those empty years if it was going to happen, his self-obliteration, and there it was. He was dead, had stabbed himself. I tried to imagine it. As a teenager his demons had repelled me, but with age came a deeper understanding of demons. Always there had been that potential death. Here it was. Everyone was dead but Gillian. In the end, Gillian was left behind for me. The occasion: an extraordinary one, and terrifying if true; I had wanted her returned to me, and perhaps it was my endless desire that tangled up truth and fiction, the succession of accidents that were simultaneously true and false. I was her old piano teacher, and she’d had to come a long way to reach me. She hadn’t called. She hadn’t even written a letter. Surely there would be someone else who could help an orphaned child—someone who saw her regularly, perhaps a schoolmate’s parent or her own teacher. This was a miracle, I thought again. She is here
because of a miracle.
And then I wondered if this was what a miracle felt like—to
be commanded by an archangel and to encounter my phantom daughter being the same thing, all things considered—a miracle thus inducing the swollen hot lump between my ribs and forcing electricity along my limbs.

Marty brought the meat loaf into the room and put it on her tray next to the milk. Gillian picked up the fork and cut herself a piece, and then she began to eat ravenously, gulping it down. Once the plate was clean of meat, she scraped the sheen of ketchup onto her fork and sucked it off the tines, and the entire time I didn’t look at Marty and I knew that Marty was looking at us and trying to see the resemblance. She had my hair. It was the color of David’s, too, but with a wave to it like mine.

“It was good?” I asked.

“Yes. Thank you.” She hesitated.

“Do you want more?”

She nodded, not shyly.

“I’m tired,” she said after a moment. “I’m really very tired.”

“You must be. You came from Polk Valley?”

“I came a long way. Rainstorms on the land for a good while, too. Where’s your bathroom?”

I told her. Gillian went, leaving her canvas tote. The living room suddenly felt devoid of life. Out of curiosity, I lifted the drooping tote and peered inside. A Bible, a change of clothes, a drawstring coin purse, a notebook. An enormous knife. I stared at the clean, heavy blade and its worn handle, not comprehending the implications of this weapon, because what could it be but a weapon and a danger to myself and to Marty. And yet the fact that she
had
a weapon compounded my guilt for snooping; I stared at it, not knowing what to do, and Gillian returned as I put the tote and its knife back on the sofa. She wiped her hands on her dress. “You have a nice bathroom,” she said. “I like the green tiles and the bottles.” She sat down again, touching the glass of milk. “We don’t drink milk at home,” she said.

“Would you like something else?”

“Yes. Water.”

I knew that Marty wanted me to pry. Why was she really here, and how long did she intend to stay? Someone must miss her back home. Her school would be inquiring. I did not want to tell Marty about the knife, which would remain a secret; if he knew about the knife, he would never let her stay. He was suspicious
of her, but I couldn’t afford to be suspicious of her. I had been the one to let her go, after all, and I was her mother; it was my job to protect her from everything, and if my brother was one of those things, so be it. So be it, I thought, as Marty came back with the glass of water and Gillian swallowed it down. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and I saw for the first time moon-shaped marks on her palms. Her eyes kept darting to Marty as she ate the second piece of meat loaf, a bit more slowly this time, and then she said, “I’d like to sleep now.”

I said, “You can have my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“I want the couch,” she said. She paused. “Please.”

When I returned with some linens and a quilt I saw that she was lying on the sofa on her side, reading a notebook with her head propped up on one hand, and Marty had gone into his room, which was one relief.

“Do you keep a journal?” I asked.

“No.” She closed the notebook. “It’s not mine.”

I tucked her in. Had I dreamed of this? Had I imagined the movement of my hands with a blanket gathered in them, lifting the cloth over my daughter’s body to say good night? As I wrapped the blanket around her, she said, sleepily, “Why are you crying?” She put the notebook on the TV tray and my heart bled full into my chest. Could I kiss her forehead? I dared not. Instead I sat on the floor, next to the sofa, and though I hadn’t prayed in years, I did then.

In my diary on that night, I wrote:
She came home.
I waited for something more to come to me.

At six thirty Marty comes into my bedroom with coffee. He hands me a mug and says, “We should do something fun today. Bring that crazy kid of yours. We could take her to a diner. Visit a museum. Chuck pennies from a balcony at strangers.”

“Mmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Yes, let’s do something—something fun.”

Marty says nothing. How I hate this adult habit of his. I think it may come from years of psychoanalysis. Conversion therapy. He, of all people, ought to understand perverse desires.

“It’s hard,” I say.

“What’s hard.”

“She’s here. It’s a dream come true in the most literal sense.”

“But…”

“But all the old things come up…”

He makes a noise between a throat clearing and a snuffle. “Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?”

“Let’s forget I said anything.”

“No,” he says, “really. Just say it. Go ahead.”

I’d spent the morning thinking of David. I didn’t want to, but he was as present as our daughter in the Orlich home.

I said, “I’m not angry with him. I mourned Gillian—I was devastated about Gillian—but he did love me, I’m sure of it. We did love each other. There was no way we could be together, but he loved me. Isn’t that worth something?”

“Like what?” Marty asked, and I can tell from his tone that I’ve made an error in judgment, but he has begun to respond and it is too late. “It couldn’t have been any clearer to him that it was a bad idea. He was
married,
for God’s sake. You were going to become a nun. A
nun
. He let his prick get the better of him, and then he had the stones to go ahead and say, ‘Okay, I’m rich, and you live in a garret, let me take your baby. But don’t worry, I’ll let you see her once a week, and if you’re lucky, maybe you can hug her on her fucking birthday.’ Annie, I don’t call that love. I call it bullshit.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

His voice softens. “Loving your daughter, that I understand.”

“She’ll be awake soon.” I press my fingers to my throat; I don’t want to cry again. I am so tired of my own pain.

He pats my knee and squeezes it. “All will be well,” he says. So the saint said.

She is on her knees, leaning over the back of the couch with her hands parting the gauze curtains at not much of a view. The bottoms of her feet are made of rock, calluses on top of calluses.
Even the lines that carve through are calluses themselves. Canyons. Marty is gone; he takes walks to clear his head before coming home to write, or he goes to see Leo—his lover, the printer.

“Good morning,” I say.

Her head turns. “Good morning,” she says, serious.

I boil water for oatmeal while I call in sick at the office.

“Eleven new articles came in over the weekend,” says Rob. “We go to press this week.”

“I’m really sick,” I tell him.

“You sound fine. Healthy as a horse, in fact.”

“I might feel better by Wednesday.”

He sighs. “I expect to see you by ten.
Today
.”

When I hang up, Gillian is in the kitchen doorway. “Who were you talking to?”

“My boss. Everything’s fine. I’m not going to work today,” I say, and smile. “I’m going to spend the day with you.”

“How can work be a place?”

“Work… is a job. My job.”

“A job is where you do things to make money.”

“Yes.”

“My parents didn’t have jobs,” she says. She looks out the window for a moment, as if they’re on the other side of the glass. “But we had money anyway.”

The water boils. In go the dry oats, cascading like rain. “Your parents were in an unusual situation. But your friends must have parents with jobs.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to tell me about them.”

“Sure.” And then, “We’re going to have a nice life together.”

This last line of hers reverberates, and I don’t know how to answer.

I ask, “How do you like your oatmeal?”

“Is that what you’re making?” She moves to stand behind me. I feel her height, her shoulders inches above mine. “Oh,
owsianka
.”

“Yep,” I say, my eyes stinging, “
owsianka
.”

“This is something my dad ate.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Ma put a fried egg in hers, and so did William. I did whatever my father did, so I had fruit and brown sugar in mine.” She wanders to the refrigerator and opens it, expelling a chill
into the already cold kitchen. She leaves the door open for a long time, examining its contents.

“Where’s your husband?” she asks, her head still in the fridge. “Did he leave?”

I say, “I don’t have one.”

“But there’s the man who lives here.” She closes the fridge.

“Marty? He’s not my husband. He’s my brother. He lives with me because it’s easier.”