J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

I dug out my wallet and handed him two twenties.

“Sorry about all this,” I said.

He didn’t ask if I needed change as he returned to the restaurant, passing the girls on their way out. I suddenly recalled their mysterious plastic-wrapped package on the beach and felt a wave of love for them as perfect and as melancholy as a song. They gave their mother a wide berth and slipped in the open doors of the car.

I helped Margaret to her feet and took her into my arms. “Let go of me,” she cried, but she didn’t resist, and I held her there, in defiance of the mustache man, in defiance of her disgust, of my lost ambitions, of the unraveling of my family. I ought to have gotten angry, I know, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. She was so sad, and it was summer, and tomorrow was another day.

I was heading east through central Washington in my rented car, hours behind me and hours ahead. The land was flat and brown all around and the trees very small, set far apart from one another a great distance from the highway. The sky was clear and dark blue and wallpapered with tiny weird clouds. So intent were my eyes on the incessant approach of road that the stationary world inside seemed to race away when I looked at it, and I felt like I was falling helplessly through space.

At a desolate exit I stopped for gas and bought a frozen something-or-other, which I heated in the microwave in the gas station and ate standing while I looked at boxes of rental videos. Back on the road, I drove until night fell. When I got tired I pulled over at a rest stop and dozed next to an idling tractor trailer. For what it was worth, I was more than halfway home.

A telephone woke me. When I opened my eyes I was surprised to find myself in a car. It was a cellular phone, bolted to the hump between the seats. I hadn’t asked for it at the rental office, but they had provided it gratis, as if it would be of some use. Outside, the rest-stop parking lot was illuminated by streetlights around which no insects swarmed. Beyond the light there was only blackness. The glowing digits on the dash read 1:25.

The phone kept ringing. I picked up the receiver and pressed a button marked START.

“Hello?”

For a moment I heard only shallow breaths.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” came a woman’s voice.

“Don’t hang up,” she said. The voice was hoarse and slow, a nighttime voice, the sort heard when everyone else has left the party and the floor is littered with half-empty plastic beer cups. “Okay, good,” she said. “Don’t. Hang up. Please.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know why I’m calling. I know it’s late.” She let out a long, acid sigh that ended with a hitch, and I thought she’d cry. But the moment passed. “First of all, I want to say, I want to apologize, and please don’t say anything, please, I would like to finish before you say anything or hang up on me. First of all, I am very, very sorry, and I know that may not mean anything to you right now, and I understand that, but I am sorry. I just got home and all I could think about on the drive back was what a terrible mistake I made and that I would do anything, anything in the world, to be able to take it back. Okay. Just let me finish. Second of all, I just want to say that I know you won’t take me back and I don’t expect you to just because of this phone call, but if it’s any consolation to you for what happened I am never going to forget this and I will probably go to my grave thinking that it was the worst mistake I ever made. I mean, and I can barely imagine this, I guess there will be somebody else someday”—she was sniffling now—“but even so I think that no matter what happiness comes to me I will always remember this unhappiness and think how much better my life would have been if I had thought … I mean if I had thought for even a second, but there’s no point in saying that now. And the third thing, I guess there is no third thing, except just that I love you and I know that means nothing to you now, or maybe just makes you angry thinking it’s a lie or maybe even if it isn’t a lie it just doesn’t matter to you anymore, because you can’t love a person you cannot trust. I shouldn’t sit here and tell you — but I will, I’ll tell you because I have to say it — you can trust me, if you took me back, which I know is out of the question, you would never hear a lie out of my mouth again.” A pause. “So I’m sorry,” and her voice broke on “sorry,” before she lost it to sobs.

I was still not awake enough to realize that I’d been asleep for some time, and my mind tried to peek around this monologue and find the missing hours. I was awake enough to know that this voice on the phone belonged to no one I’d ever spoken to.

The day before had been my thirty-sixth birthday. I was supposed to fly from Newark to Minneapolis, then connect to Marshall, Montana, where I lived alone in a two-room apartment in a crumbling part of town known as West Hill. I had been in Newark to attend my mother’s deathbed, which failed to work out: by the time I arrived, less than twenty-four hours after she had called to tell me she was dying, she had already arranged for a car to take her home from the hospital.

Choppy air roiled over the East Coast, and some kind of accident in Denver had delayed flights across the country, so my plane idled for hours on the runway, stuck in traffic. To save myself the trouble of carry-on luggage, I’d foolishly packed the books I’d brought into my duffel, which was checked through to Montana; now I had nothing to read. Instead I listened to my fellow passengers cobble together a narrative from the fragments of crash rumor they’d overheard back in the terminal.

“It was a UPS plane. The crew escaped, but all the packages were burned up. Guarantee my J.Crew stuff was in there.”

“I think it was a military transport. Some general or somebody got killed.”

“They saw it go down in the mountains but can’t get to it.”

“It was a private jet. I hope it was Bill Gates’s.”

I checked and double-checked my arrival and departure times in Minneapolis and the gate map in my on-flight magazine, trying to calculate the latest the plane could take off and still allow me to meet my connection. I saw myself sprinting down a crowded concourse, unencumbered by luggage, toward a far-flung terminal. Outside, men and women in dayglo jumpsuits zipped around on their little vehicles.

“There’s a massage station back on concourse B,” somebody said. “For fifteen bucks you can get a half-hour back rub. I ought to have done it.”

“In front of all Newark!”

“I’m not ashamed.”

We took off with apologies from the pilot at about the time we were supposed to have begun our descent into Minneapolis — Saint Paul. I fell asleep, ate dinner, fell asleep again, and disembarked in the muggy and lake-spangled Midwest.

“Flight 157 to Marshall?” I asked the ticket agent.

She laughed. “Long gone.”

“Put me on a later flight?”

“No such thing. I can get you out at nine fifteen tomorrow morning.”

“Will you get me a hotel room and a ride to it?”

She reached under the counter and pulled out a coupon: 10 percent off at the Super 8. “We can give you a discount,” she said. “No accommodations for weather delays, sorry.”

I refused the coupon. “I thought it was a crash. In Denver.”

“That was O’Hare. And I wouldn’t call it a crash.”

I persisted. Could I get out of Minneapolis that night? I didn’t know anyone in Minneapolis, and didn’t want to sleep huddled against the refrigerated terminal air on an ass-worn seat in the waiting area. She asked how about Seattle at 9:00 PM, then Marshall at 2:10 in the morning, and I said okay.