J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

The note circulated around the table, and when we had all read it we sat in silence, listening to the dumbfuck lake creeping up the beach outside. Rae studied her fingertips, and I noticed that her fingernails, usually painted with care, were bitten and bare; Margaret stared into her coffee mug full of red wine. Lyn had been the last to receive the note and she continued to hold on to it, pressing it with both hands against her belly and gazing in mute wonder at the objects spread across the table.

I broke the silence by suggesting we fill the capsule with our own artifacts, and this gave everybody something to do. While Margaret and the girls prepared the contributions, I gathered up the Harris family’s stuff and shoved it all into a plastic freezer bag. I used a ballpoint pen to write “1987” on the bag in a near-illegible scrawl, then tucked it into one end of the capsule. Our shitty lives would be interred together, I figured.

Lyn requested that each of us get to be alone while we said goodbye to, as she put it, “our parts of ourselves,” and so I brought our half of the capsule outside and set it on the ground next to the hole it had come from, and one by one we paid it a visit in solitude. I was made to go first, but personally, I couldn’t think of anything to add. I traveled light, and what little I had, I wanted to keep. My life, after all, was the way I liked it, or at least had been until a few weeks before. And look what was happening to me! Look at my punishment, for the crime of contentment! In the end, as a gesture of solidarity, I stripped off my Timex and dropped it into the capsule. Who cared what time it was? It would be better, in the months and years to come, not to watch what remained of my fragile youth drain away into the future’s reeking maw. Now I wouldn’t be able to monitor my descent into bitterness and decrepitude, thank God!

Margaret went next, and was back in a flash: either she’d flung her contribution in irritated haste, or she hadn’t participated at all. The girls went out together, bearing something or other wrapped in a plastic grocery sack. When they were through, I carefully fitted the Harris half of the capsule onto ours and screwed them tight, before calling my family out to the burial. They came slowly, purposefully, their faces grave. The girls were holding lit candles — not sure where they found those. Margaret had her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her shorts, and in the moon- and candlelight appeared to have briefly been crying. This surprised me, and I gazed at her with a question in my eyes, but she never looked up to answer it.

I knelt on the beach and pressed the time capsule to the bottom of the hole. Rae took the initiative of pushing the sand back over it. When she was through, her sister stamped on the mounded sand with surprising vehemence, then she turned on her heel and marched back into the house, her arms straight down at her sides.

“Can we go home tomorrow?” Rae asked Margaret and me.

“We still have a couple of days left!” I protested, but I wanted to leave too.

Rae sighed and crossed her arms over her chest.

“I do have a lot of work to attend to,” Margaret said, the only words she’d spoken since we’d read Natalie Harris’s note. It occurred to me, suddenly, that we hadn’t left a family statement in the capsule, identifying ourselves. The future wouldn’t recognize us. I grew depressed.

Rae and Margaret waited, not looking at each other, not looking at me.

“If it’s what your sister wants,” I said, and Rae went inside to share the good news.

For a few minutes, Margaret and I stood facing each other across the packed sand, before I turned to face the lake. I wasn’t even sure if she was still behind me when, some time later, I said, “If you’re still planning to leave, I’d like you to do it as soon as we get home.”

There was no answer, though I thought perhaps I heard a small motion, perhaps that of a woman covering her face with her hands.

“Are you still planning to leave?” I asked her.

And again, no reply, and I considered that good news, if in fact she was still behind me.

“I still love you,” I added quietly, and this time the silence was a bad thing, and I wished I hadn’t spoken. I should have turned, to see if she was standing there, if she had heard me — it would have been best if she’d left between “Are you still planning to leave” and “I love you”—but instead I sat down on the damp beach, then lay down, then curled up and went to sleep.

The following morning we drove away in silence. I had prepared a playlist for the ride home, too, but it didn’t seem very fun anymore, and both girls had their headphones on, and each stared out her respective window at the passing scenery. I didn’t think we would ever see this road again, not the four of us anyway, not together. We passed Belinda’s place, and though I tried to peer in the windows, I couldn’t see her, and I thought maybe someday I could come back alone, and Belinda would still be there, and would sit down beside me the way she had the other night, and put her arm around me, and whisper poor baby, and I would see for the first time the little apartment behind the restaurant, the little bedroom where she slept.

We made good time and found ourselves at Mister Bip’s before the menu changed from breakfast to lunch. We ordered the exact same things we’d ordered on the way to Lake Craig and ate them listlessly, saying little between bites. I happened to glance at Margaret’s hands as she ate. Her wedding ring was gone. Halfway through her omelet she excused herself, grabbed up her satchel, and headed for the ladies’.

Lyn and Rae watched her leave with what appeared to me undue interest. They stole a glance at one another, and then at me, and then quickly returned their attention to their meals.

“What?” I said.

Rae didn’t look up. Lyn gazed at me innocently and offered a puzzled shrug, but her hand snaked over and found her sister’s, and they came together in a white-knuckle clutch.

A moment later, Margaret emerged from the ladies’ and headed straight for the exit. We watched through the window as she opened the trunk of the car and began rummaging around through our things. After a while, she opened the passenger door, and then the driver’s, and then the rear doors, leaving them all open. She appeared to be searching under the seats for something.

I wiped my mouth and went out to see what was up.

“Okay,” she said, “where is it.” The expression on her face was one of barely repressed anger and panic.

“What are you missing?”

“My BlackBerry, Dave.”

“Oh. No. Where did you have it last?”

Her eyes flashed like broken glass; her body was a tree bending in a gale. She said, “Fuck you, Dave! Give it back to me!”

Across the parking lot, an elderly couple ducked their heads and hastened their progress from their Cadillac to the entrance. I raised my hands.

“Whoa, take it easy. I don’t—”

Margaret reared back and hit me in the head with her satchel. Something in there really packed quite a wallop — an eyeglass case, maybe? — and I staggered a couple of steps to the side. I could see the girls through the window, staring at us with huge round eyes, and half the rest of the patrons besides.

“You infantile, jealous piece of shit!” she shouted. “This is so like you! So like you! Do you think this will make me love you again? You fucking moron!”

I stood perfectly still, my hand to my head, as Margaret trembled, buckled, and slumped to the ground, sobbing.

A man was standing beside me, holding a piece of paper. “Here’s your bill,” he said. “We’d like for you to leave immediately. So the police don’t need to become involved.” His mustache and eyebrows were epic. They looked like props.