The Border of Paradise: A Novel (43 page)

“I’m glad you think so.”

“We’re going to get William, all right, and then we’re going to go back to Sacramento, and then we’ll get things sorted. You don’t have to be afraid of anything bad ever again, because you have me, and you will always have me from now on, all right?”

“Yes.”

“You will always have me. I haven’t always been in your life, I know. And you have been through so many things that I can’t even begin to understand. But I am your mother, and I will make things right for you. I promise.”

But William,
Gillian thinks,
will always want me.

Soon there is a sign:
WELCOME TO POLK VALLEY
,
POP
. 2100. The rest of the sign is barely visible beneath a sheet of brush. To Gillian, the words are mystical. She needs to get home and see William, but knows that it’s likely William has no food and probably didn’t even cast an eye toward the map she’d drawn him; he’ll need something to eat, she says to Marianne, so they stop at the K & Bee to pick up sandwich fixings and juice. At the cash register, the woman behind the counter looks at Gillian and says, “Your family still sick?”

Gillian nods. She reaches into her tote and hands the woman a crumple of bills. “They’re very sick,” she says.

Gillian directs Marianne to Laurier and Sycamore, and then to the dirt roads that to Marianne look like nothing. She can’t imagine that she can bring a car up these roads, as though Gillian has invented them. But like seeing a doe among doe-colored trees, Marianne soon learns the casual edges of where cars have been. Several times she thinks she will kill them on the foothill drive—not because it’s worse than the mountainous roads, but because the roads, if that is what they will be called, are so much less demarcated. They pass the mailboxes, the trailer park, and the place where Gillian was nearly dragged to her death, which Gillian notices and says nothing about in a small allegiance to Ma.

And here is the house, which seems so small to Marianne now as opposed to how large it was in her memory, but to Gillian it remains enormous, a castle rising out of the fog. The dead grass stands sturdy and yellow. The plants in their pots on the steps. The welcoming arrangement of boulders. Marianne parks behind the Buick, which is encased in a sheer layer of dust, and Gillian jumps out of the car, her tote flapping on her shoulder. She runs up the steps to the door; Marianne has never seen a girl grow so long-legged in her stride. Gillian bangs on the door and calls for her brother. Marianne hefts the groceries in her arms. She was a girl when she last climbed up these steps. She tries to picture herself as that girl as she watches Gillian.

Gillian bangs and calls, “William!” as though she intends to break the door down. She even hops a little on both feet.

The door opens and Gillian sees William. She thinks,
He is bird-boned and sallow, with hair unattended to and like my father’s when he was unwell, wearing pajamas, smelling of unwashed hair and body. I am hesitant to believe that I am here, and that he is still desiring me, but that this desire is now beyond lust or love but something that is pretty much killing him.
Marianne thinks,
This is a malnourished boy with no substance to him and reeking of, what else, canned tuna—how could Gillian have left this boy behind, this vulnerable, desperate creature?

“Gillian,” he says, and falls into her, wrapping his arms around her neck, not noticing the alleged Mrs. Kucharski in his passion or exhaustion.

“Hey there. Hey, you.” Gillian kisses the top of his head over and over. “It’s okay. I came back. It’s okay.” She says something in their language.

They stand there for what, to Marianne, is an awkwardly long time, until Gillian says, “Let’s go inside.”

Marianne had never gone to as many estate sales as David had, but she recognizes the smell of a death house when she enters one. The staleness of the air, as if nothing has moved or breathed or spoken for months, is a gas that fills the hall and then the living room where they sit. Where she sat before. The extravagance of two pianos, she thinks. William is still leaning on Gillian. She is someone new now. She holds her brother to her breast, her hand at his shoulder. Marianne stares openly at them—why not stare openly? The word
incest,
which she won’t allow herself to think, plays at the borders of her mind. What have they done? What have they done with each other? His face is too close to her chest for Marianne’s comfort. There are rotting food smells, too, she realizes. Gillian was right to ask for food. They’ll have a brief snack, and then she will bring them both back to Sacramento with her. They’ll deal with the Nowak house and this terrible brainwashing later. The paint is peeling and nothing has been cleaned in what looks like months or even years. Even the sofa is washed in gray now. She remembers that peach sofa as having a brighter shade.

“Do you remember me, William?” she asks, setting the bag on the floor.

“Yes.”

“I’m Mrs. Kucharski.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here to help you.” She wants to have something better to say, but leaves it at that. She doesn’t know what William will comprehend as “help” or “helpful.”

“What?” William says, with more force than Marianne could have imagined coming out of his diminished frame. His hands are still on his sister. He looks at Gillian. “We don’t need help. Is that why you left?” he asks her.

“Not exactly,” Gillian says.

“We don’t need help. Not from you or anyone else. I’m glad that you brought Gillian back, but you should leave now. We’re
fine
.”

Marianne’s gaze travels down the hall. “Where’s your mother?”

“Dead,” Gillian says. “I told you.”

William says, “She’s right, she’s dead.”

“You are two children who have no parents,” Marianne says. “That’s why you need help.”

“You’ll live with us?” William asks.

“No—I have a home in Sacramento. Do you remember the home in Sacramento? Where you played piano with your sister? You’ll come and live with me.”

“I doubt that.” William grabs Gillian’s arm still more tightly.

She had a plan, Marianne reminds herself. Come to the house. Retrieve William. Allow them to grab a few possessions, and then drive them back to Sacramento. She had, to some degree, counted on Gillian to convince her brother to leave; presently Gillian will not make eye contact with her.
But what am I going to do in the face of refusal,
Marianne wonders,
carry them out of here by force? Call the police?
She wonders if this is what Gillian had planned all along: bringing her to this place only to force her to leave—even if Marianne is Gillian’s birth mother, even if the children are alone and without resources and have been abandoned to this rotting home.

“Let me talk to my brother,” Gillian says. “I just want to apologize to him.” Her shoulders, she realizes, are looser now. She’d been clenching them for weeks.
I am a fool,
she thinks,
to consider that we could ever live a different life—I was stupid and a fool to have wished for anything different. It’s not just William, or a dirty bathroom, the men who shouted filth, or Randy on the train. It is one age ending, and having no beginning to hope for.

Marianne stands.

“Please wait out front,” Gillian says.

Marianne says, “I’ll need the key.”

Gillian looks at her brother. He says, “We have a deadbolt that will keep you out regardless.”

“I swear,” Gillian says. “We’ll let you back inside. We really will.”

Reluctantly, Marianne stands, convinced she is losing an important battle in an obliterative war. She is the adult, she reminds herself. Here, she is in charge. She walks to the hallway and puts her hand on the knob. “No shenanigans,” she says. She is tall and imposing in her olive coat.

The word
shenanigans
is unfamiliar to the children, but they nod, and then Marianne is outside on the stoop. She goes to the car for her cigarettes and matches.
Help me,
she thinks as she pulls open the door in the damp air. The sky is white and dappled
gray. She looks out into the trees at one bird.
I’m going to lose everything,
she thinks.

Gillian is quiet. She says, brushing William’s hair out of his eyes, “I’m sorry I left. It was stupid.”

“I didn’t know what to do after you were gone. I couldn’t believe that you did that to me.”

“I know.”

“You’re not just changing your own life when you do things, Gillian.”

She nods.

The light is coming in through the curtains and shining on William’s face. His cheekbones are pronounced, but even more so now in the afternoon light, making Gillian feel as though she’s speaking to an exquisitely preserved corpse. She almost shudders to touch him.

“Are you scared?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“She’s going to bring us to Sacramento. She knows we exist now, and that we’re alone. She feels like she has to do this for us. She wants to do what’s right for us.”

“For you.”

“Yes, for me. But for you, too. I couldn’t live with myself if I left you here.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“We have to be brave.”

“Despite what you may think,” William says, “I am not brave. I don’t even know what that means. I waited for you to come back, but that was no indication of strength. Perhaps stupidity.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Gillian says. “There are other ways to be brave. Smarter ways.”

“What, you suggest suicide? And what if we don’t die? We get shut up in Wellbrook?”

“Look—”

“I don’t want to die,” William interrupts. “I just want to be with you. I’ve been thinking about this—about what I’d do if you came back. I’ve been thinking about…” He gestures a wide arc. “So this woman takes us into the world. Why not let her?”

“Are you listening to me? I
saw
things.” And she thinks again, just as she has been thinking for the last few hours, of the things she saw in the Natural History Museum: the wolves and the deer,
the hungry lions. She thinks of the mural painted on the wall in the front of the museum, which neither Marianne nor Marty had commented on. They had just walked by as if it were nothing, whereas Gillian could tell right away that something was wrong with the illustration, a timeline, with large and vivid images of animals and hairy, stooped humans that looked like animals. The museum had been nothing to them. It had been one more thing that they already knew to their bones.

“I am listening. Are
you
listening?”

“We can’t change enough. Do you hear me?
We can’t change enough to be out there.
It’s just like when the fire happened. I understand what Ma was trying to do now. She was just keeping us safe here, in this house, with her. I didn’t understand then, but I think you did. You need to believe me.”

“We could kill her. Run away. Live in the woods.”

“We could walk and walk,” Gillian says, “until we get to Taiwan.”

“We could even walk to Eden,” William says.

“But you want us to try to be in the world.”

He sighs. “Yes. Maybe.”

“She’s my real mother, you know,” Gillian says, and William turns to her uncomprehendingly.

Marianne opens the door, ushered in by a gust of wind. She is holding the groceries. “It’s raining out there,” she says, patting her own wet head. “We should go before the road gets sloppy.”

Gillian pauses. “There are some things I’d like to pack. Just a few things,” she says, looking at her brother, “before we leave.”

Marianne watches her carefully. She had anticipated this, the need for the children to bring things from home with them, but is surprised that Gillian has fallen in step with the idea of leaving; she had expected more of an argument. Without one, she suspects that the siblings are collaborating against her.

“I’ll give you half an hour,” she says. “Pack the most important things, all right? We’ll come to get the rest of your things on another trip.” She smiles at them.
There will be another trip,
she is trying to communicate
—we aren’t abandoning your world for good.
For now, she simply needs to get the children away. Once she’s removed them from this place for the first time, she’ll be able to acquaint them with new lives. That acquaintance and acclimation is essential.

At the idea of packing, William nods. So the children, owning no suitcases, fill boxes with no plan and a slothlike deliberation.
Gillian sits in her room with a record crate, empties it, and folds clothes to put inside while Marianne watches her. Marianne, no fool, stays close to Gillian as her daughter slowly sifts through her dresser, pulling out an assortment of frocks (inappropriate, Marianne thinks, all of them shapeless and outmoded, she will need new ones for her new life) and more pairs of ethereal panties that are now tinged with perversion. She can’t bear to see the siblings together and is relieved that William is in his own room, packing his own things.

Later William wanders into the room with a crate. It appears that the sedimentary crate has a layer of clothes at the bottom, books in the middle, and papers at the top. Gillian doesn’t know what the papers are, but if she looked more closely she would see that they’re a diary he’s kept while she was away. “Will we drive in this weather?” he asks. The rain is clattering against the windows.

“I suppose not,” Marianne says. “We can wait for the rain to stop.”

“We get horrible storms near winter,” says Gillian.

“Well, at least you two seem to have your packing finished. I say we settle in until it’s time to head out again.”

Gillian says, “The roads will be muddy. Tires slide. We don’t take the Buick for days after a storm.”

“Days,” William says. He sets down his crate for emphasis and sits on it, his knees open.

“I know how to drive in mud.”

“Of course you know how to drive in mud,” Gillian says. She rises to standing. “But it’s getting dark, and I’m sure William hasn’t had dinner. I’m going to make some sandwiches. William,” she says, “we bought some things for sandwiches. I expect you ate everything while I was gone.”

Left alone in the bedroom with William, Marianne says, “I knew your father when we were young.”