Элин Хильдебранд - What Happens in Paradise

Irene has abandoned the master bedroom; she will never be able to sleep there again. Since she returned from St. John, she’s been using the smallest guest room, originally meant to be quarters for a governess. It’s up on the third floor, across from the attic. The attic is crammed with the bargains Irene scored at flea markets but couldn’t find a place for in the house along with all the furniture from their former home, since Russ refused to let her take it to Goodwill. Russ had remarked many times that he would have been just as happy staying in their modest ranch on Clover Street, and Irene had thought him crazy. Of course, that was before she realized that Russ had a second life elsewhere.

The governess’s room had been all but neglected in the renovation. Irene had simply painted the walls sky blue and furnished it with a white daybed and a small Shaker dresser. Now she appreciates the room’s simplicity and its isolation. She feels safe there—although she can’t seem to hide from these dreams.

“Dad was alive?” Cash asks.

“Alive,” Irene says. This is the third such dream she’s had since returning from St. John. Irene and Cash and Irene’s older son, Baker, all traveled down to the Virgin Islands upon receiving the news that Russ had been killed in a helicopter crash off the coast of Virgin Gorda. He had been flying from a private helipad on St. John to the remote British island Anegada with a West Indian woman named Rosie Small. Irene then discovered that Rosie was Russ’s lover and that Russ had left behind a fifteen-million-dollar villa and a twelve-year-old daughter named Maia. It was a surreal and traumatizing trip for Irene and her sons, and yet now, a week later, all of these shocking facts have been woven into the tapestry of Irene’s reality. It was incredible, really, what the brain could assimilate. “He was talking about a storm. A bad storm, he said. Destructive.”

“Maybe he meant the lightning storm,” Cash says.

“Maybe,” Irene says. The helicopter had been struck by lightning. “Or maybe it’s what lies ahead.”

“The investigation,” Cash says.

“Yes.” The week before, only a couple days after they’d arrived home from St. John, an FBI agent named Colette Vasco called Irene, Cash, and Baker to let them know that the Virgin Islands Search and Rescue team had contacted the Bureau with suspicions that there might be more to the helicopter crash than met the eye.

What does that mean , exactly? Irene had asked.

The damage to the helicopter doesn’t match up with a typical lightning strike, Agent Vasco said. There was lightning in the area, but the damage to the helicopter seems to have been caused by an explosive device.

An explosive device, Irene said.

We’re investigating further, Agent Vasco said. What can you tell me about a man named Todd Croft?

Next to nothing, Irene had said. She went on to explain that she had tried any number of ways to reach Todd Croft, to no avail. I probably want to find him more than you do, Irene said. She gave Agent Vasco the number that Todd Croft’s secretary, Marilyn Monroe, had called Irene from. Agent Vasco had thanked her and said she’d be back in touch.

More to the helicopter crash than met the eye. An explosive device. This was turning into something from a movie, Irene thought. Yet she suspected that it was only a matter of time before the next dark door into her husband’s secret life opened.

“Also, there were chickens in the dream,” Irene says to Cash. “A rooster and two hens.”

Cash clears his throat. “Well, yeah.”

Well, yeah? Then Irene gets it: Russ is the rooster, Irene and Rosie the two hens.

Other than Cash and Baker, no one here in Iowa City knows that Russ is dead; Irene hasn’t told anyone, which feels like a huge deception, as though she stuffed Russ’s corpse into one of the house’s nineteen closets and now it’s starting to stink. Irene quiets her conscience by telling herself it’s her own private business. Besides, no one has asked! This isn’t strictly true—Dot, the nurse at the Brown Deer Retirement Community, asked where Russ was, and, in a moment of sheer panic, Irene lied and told Dot he was on a business trip in the Caribbean.

And he couldn’t get away? Dot asked. Even for this? Dot was fond of Russ; she cooed over him at his every visit as though he had forded rivers and climbed mountains to get there, although she took Irene’s daily presence at Brown Deer for granted. Irene perversely enjoyed watching the shadow of disillusionment cross Dot’s face when she learned that Russ had put work before his own dying mother.

Russ’s footprint in Iowa City all but disappeared after he took the job with Ascension thirteen years ago. Russ used to know everybody in town. He worked for the Corn Refiners Association and was a social creature by nature. He would drop off Baker and Cash at school and then go to Pearson’s drugstore on Linn Street for a cup of coffee with “the boys”—the four or five retired gentlemen known as the Midwestern Mafia, who ran Iowa City. Russ’s coffee break with the boys was sacred. They were the ones who had encouraged him to run for the Iowa City school board, and they’d suggested he join the Rotary Club, where he eventually became vice president.

All of the boys were now dead, and Russ hadn’t been involved with local politics or the Rotary Club in over a decade. Irene occasionally bumped into someone from that previous life—Cherie Werner, for example, wife of the former superintendent of schools. Cherie (or whoever) would ask after Russ and then add, “We always knew he would make it big someday,” as though Russ were a movie star or the starting quarterback for the Chicago Bears.

But who from Iowa City remained in Russ’s everyday life? No one, really.

Now that the business of Milly’s death has been handled—her body delivered to the funeral home, her personal effects collected, the probate attorney from Brown Deer enlisted to settle her estate—Irene has no choice but to face the daunting task of contacting the family attorney, Ed Sorley, to tell him about Russ.

“Irene!” Ed says. His voice contains cheerful curiosity. “I didn’t expect to hear from you again so soon. Everything okay?”

Irene is in the amethyst-hued parlor, pacing a Persian rug that the same Chicago carpet dealer who’d sold her the Excelsior-suite rug had described as “Queen Victoria’s jewel box, overturned.” (Irene had bought it immediately despite the fact that it cost even more than the other rug.)

“No, Ed,” Irene says. “It’s not.” She pauses. Russ has been dead for ten days and this is the first time she’s going to say the words out loud to someone other than her sons. “Russ is dead.”

There is a beat of silence. Two beats.

“What?” Ed says. “Irene, what?”

“He was killed in a helicopter crash on New Year’s Day,” Irene says. “Down in the Virgin Islands.” She doesn’t wait for Ed to ask the obvious follow-up question: What was Russ doing on a helicopter in the Virgin Islands? Or maybe: Where are the Virgin Islands? “When I called you last week to ask about Russ’s will, he was already dead. I should have told you then. I’m sorry. It’s just…I was still processing the news myself.”

“Oh, jeez, Irene,” Ed says. “I’m so, so sorry. Russ…” There’s a lengthy pause. “Man…Anita is going to be devastated . You know how she adored Russ. You might not have realized how all the wives in our little group way back when thought Russ was an all-star husband. Anita used to ask me why I couldn’t be more like him.” Ed stops abruptly and Irene can tell he’s fighting back emotion.