Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

“I’m sorry.”

Lilou sighed. “After a while, it was less painful to tell people I had no father. Then it became true.”

“So why did you come?”

“You. I thought if someone cared enough about him to find me, he must not be all bad.”

Titi appeared at the door. She moved around the room uneasily. Clearly their presence was an intrusion.

“Would you like a glass?” Ann asked.

“I don’t drink.” Titi wiped her eyes.

Ann kept pouring alcohol as they packed things away, skipping first the sugar, then the water, until they were taking it straight like pros.

Loren had left remarkably little behind, they discovered, as they went through drawers and cabinets.

“Why did he never answer my letters?” Lilou said, slurring her words.

Titi retrieved a shell that they had thrown away. “He found this years ago when we went on a picnic. I want it.”

“You were good to him,” Lilou said, and laid a sloppy arm across Titi’s shoulders.

In a drawer, Ann found her brown bathing suit. That devil. She smiled, quickly balled it up and stuck it into her bag.

Titi found a crude grass skirt. “He kept that! He made it to give me dance lessons. It wasn’t working so he hired a…”

“Dancer?”

Titi flushed.

“A prostitute,” Lilou guessed.

“She danced really good. I won the contest.”

All three were sitting on the floor, the packing forgotten, when Wende knocked.

“Where did everyone go?”

“We’re just…”

“We have turned this into a wake,” Lilou announced.

She regretted her decision to come, odd man out in the life of this stranger, who happened to be her father.

“Can I have a sip?” Wende asked.

An hour later, Wende was cradling a stone statue from Loren’s desk. “It made me angry. Windy, he called me, no matter how I corrected him.”

The other three were laughing, knowing that Loren had found it funny.

“One night Dex and I were fighting. He found me chilling out in the kitchen. He was so kind, so different when we were alone. He said, ‘You should be like my daughter.’”

“He didn’t,” Lilou said.

Ann closed her eyes.

“I didn’t even know he had a daughter,” Wende continued. “He said she had a hard time growing up, but never let it set her back.”

“How did he know?” Lilou put her face in her hands.

“He said, ‘Make your own life. Don’t let others do it for you.’”

Instead of their intended target, the words were affecting Titi.

“I read your letters, then burned them,” she burst out to Lilou. “He never knew.”

The three other women stared at her in astonishment.

“Why?” Lilou asked.

“I was afraid he’d leave. I thought he wouldn’t love me anymore when he had his own real daughter back.”

Lilou’s face was unreadable. The whole nature of the last twenty years of her life recast in an instant.

“Thank you for being brave enough to tell me now,” she said finally.

Each women gathered a keepsake. Ann already had the shark rattle, but she took Loren’s red pareu. Lilou had gathered all the watercolors off the wall for herself, and Ann stared longingly at the pile, not wanting to take anything from someone who had already lost so much.

Titi whispered to Ann, “I have something else for you.”

* * *

The men sat on the beach. Richard stared out at the innocuous waves as if they were obfuscating the fact that they could swallow up a person whole. His infatuation with snorkeling and diving was gone; he would never go underwater again. His recent experiences were irretrievably now forced into nostalgia. He would never forget Loren; literally, he was unable to stop imagining his floating, sunken body. Pure tragedy, both what Loren had done and what he’d missed by mere hours — seeing Lilou. Perhaps she would have changed his mind. Okay, Richard was being a little sanctimonious. He hadn’t really gotten to know the guy very well, other than being jealous of Ann’s affection for him, but now he felt embarrassed for his pettiness.

Dex came and clapped him on the shoulder. They clinked beer bottles.

“Rough one, huh?”

“I can’t believe how.”

Robby yelled from down the beach, “BBC wants an interview in half an hour,” then went back to his cell phone.

Richard did not like Robby, who treated the rest of them like nobodies, which they were in the rock world, but still. A man had died. Show some respect.

“I’ve known a lot of guys who died young. Best thing is to move on,” Dex said.

“It makes you think, though, doesn’t it?”

Actually it didn’t. Ever since the ship incident, Dex had been flying high. It was always great to volunteer oneself and then not have to actually bite the bullet. Take that, Grim Reaper. Personally he thought Loren should have stuck it out, but who was he to judge another man’s pain? The measure of a man’s happiness in life was unknowable to others. We have to go on faith.

Richard looked over his shoulder, making sure no one was within earshot.

“Ann cheated on me.”

“Yup.”

“You knew?”

Dex emptied his beer and opened another. “It isn’t a game changer, is it? She’s amazing. I’d forgive her anything.”

“I wouldn’t forgive Robby. I don’t like him.”

“I don’t like Javi, but these are the people in our lives. The rough edges that make us smooth. Were you the perfect husband?”

“Only in the kitchen.”

“And me onstage. Thank God they put up with us the rest of the time.”

* * *

“I want another drink,” Lilou said. Wende and Titi had left.

When Ann went to the chest, she saw it was the last bottle and hesitated. Loren wouldn’t have tolerated sentimentality; he would want the precious juice to be used up in style, especially by his daughter. After pouring, the women stared into the liquid as if it were a crystal ball.

“Loren told me this quote by Oscar Wilde,” Ann said. “‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not.’”

“What about the rest?” Lilou asked.

“Rest?”

Lilou finished it: “‘Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.’ He used that even when I was a little girl. He learned it from my uncle.”

And like that, she took back possession of her father.

“Titi tells me you two were close. Was he happy at least? Did he have happiness in his life at the end?”

“For some reason … we understood each other. There was sadness in him, that’s true, but I also sensed joy. I did.”

“My mother threatened that without her, we’d be made wards of the state. Even after she was gone, I didn’t try to contact him.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t accept him as he was. I wanted a different father, one like all my friends had. His lifestyle … I never knew what he gave up for us. That he was an artist. That would have changed everything.”

Ann remained silent.

“At least I have the video, thanks to you. Maybe I’ll try to find some of his installations. They must have taken pictures and done catalogs. Resurrect his name? To honor him.”

“I don’t think it mattered to him anymore.”

“But it does to me,” Lilou said. “It makes me proud to be his daughter.”

Dex and Robby walked in.

“Whoa! A harem,” Robby joked. He was the hustler of the band, the one who always had a one-liner ready. He winked at Lilou. “Do we have Skype?”

“Skype?” Ann repeated. Somehow, in the absinthe-soaked recesses of her brain, it made sense that Loren might be reachable via Skype.

“Why?” Wende asked. She had been following Robby to find out what he was up to. In the past, she had fought him mightily over Dex. She didn’t appreciate being demoted to her old role.