Page 24 of A Map to Paradise

23

Melanie awoke with a heel poking into her back and an arm across her neck. She knew without turning to look that Nicky had crawled into bed with her again.

Her closed lips curled into a tiny grin. Four nights ago when he’d done this the first time, she’d been annoyed by the intrusion of a four-year-old who stole her blanket and splayed his bony limbs across her body. But the last two mornings felt different. She felt different. Nicky was becoming less and less the little kid taking up space in her life and on her mattress, and more and more her nephew. Her brother’s son. She was his auntie and she was starting to care for him deeply. And it was because of this, she’d made a decision.

She looked across the semi-dark room at the dresser and the envelope atop it that had arrived yesterday by courier. Inside were two one-way airline tickets to Omaha that she’d bought with the last of her savings. She’d be taking Nicky to her parents’ in five days, though they didn’t know it yet. All they knew from her phone call to them last night was that she was coming home to see them after Christmas, and for an as yet unknown length of time.

Melanie had considered for a moment telling her parents she was bringing their grandchild with her, but then she’d just as quickly decided she wanted them to meet Nicky the way she had. A surprise could be both hard and wonderful. Better to experience it in person, she thought. And besides, Nicky, too, deserved to meet them face-to-face.

June had been in Melanie’s kitchen the previous evening to show Nicky how to make popcorn balls when she told June about the tickets to Nebraska.

Melanie already knew June would approve of the trip home, but she surprisingly still wanted her affirmation. It only took seconds for June to give it.

“I’m sure your parents will be very happy to meet their grandson,” June said. “I’m glad you’re doing it.”

Then Melanie told her she was planning to stay in Omaha for a while, though she didn’t know for how long.

“But…but I already said you can stay here with me,” June said promptly, as though instantly worried Melanie’s willingness to play along with June’s deceptions—which had seemed to hinge on that offer of a place to live—was now off the table.

But Melanie’s attitude toward June—and Eva, too—had tempered in the last few days since she’d learned the truth, not just about Elwood and what June had done about it.

She’d come to realize her own stubbornness had complicated matters for herself; it was not just what both June and Eva had done. If Melanie had listened to Elwood and gone home to Nebraska like he’d first suggested, Nicky would surely already be with his grandparents, because she wouldn’t have been in Malibu when Alex showed up out of the blue. He would’ve had to bring Nicky to her in Omaha. And if she’d simply said no, thanks, to Carson’s money as compensation for keeping quiet, she wouldn’t have spent the last five months living in a house he was paying for and having it look like that was exactly what she was doing: getting paid to keep her mouth shut.

And if she’d gone home to Nebraska back when Elwood told her to, she wouldn’t now be part of this insane scheme to make it seem like he’d wandered into the desert to end his life rather than having done so at home in his own bed.

She couldn’t fault June and Eva entirely for the pickle she was in. Part of it was her own fault.

“You don’t have to worry about me saying anything to anybody about where Elwood is,” Melanie said to June. “I’m not taking back anything I said I would do for you if I’m called upon to do it. And I’m still grateful for the offer to stay with you. I might even take you up on it after a few weeks at my parents’ if you’re still here, regardless of what Carson does or doesn’t do.”

“So,” June said carefully, “you’re not exactly with him anymore?”

Melanie laughed ruefully. “Was I ever? I knew it was all pretend, before the blacklist and even after. It was all for show. His show. Irving says he’s heard Carson is in Florida for the holidays. And he’s not alone.”

“Oh, Melanie, I am sorry.”

“I’m not. You know, I can see much better what kind of man Carson is when he’s not here, if that makes any sense. For a while there, it seemed like he was my only friend. It…it doesn’t feel so much like that anymore.”

When she’d said this, Melanie realized with a start that she’d felt like she’d been in the company of friends the last two weeks with Eva and June, strange as that was, and that it had been a long time since she’d felt that way.

A long time.

The three of them were unlikely companions with hardly anything in common, yet Melanie had felt an alliance between them based on the one thing they did share: their desire to recover that exquisite feeling of knowing you are right where you belong, and that you can rest there because no one is trying to take it from you. There had been a time once when all three of them knew what it was like to own a happy little corner of paradise. They’d each found it before without a map, and she had to believe they could all find it again the same way. Because there is no map to paradise. There is only the dream that such a place exists, as does the desire to possess it, and the determination to find it again when it’s been lost.

And she knew now that the people she’d meet along the way would either walk alongside her as companions or they would hold her back as competitors. Moving forward to recapture her bliss was really just a simple matter of figuring out who was who in her life.

Melanie turned over in bed to look at her sleeping nephew with his thumb half in his mouth and his curly hair tousled about his face.

Devotion to Nicky was already replacing the churning fear of being responsible for him. She brushed a tangly lock off his forehead. How had Alex been able to leave him with her like this? How had he been able to be gone for a week already and not even phone her to talk with his son, tell him he missed him, that he’d see him soon?

But then again, Alex didn’t have her phone number.

Still, he could’ve written. Sent a toy or two in the mail for his boy. It was Christmas morning, for God’s sake.

And it was going to be a different kind of Christmas Day, that was for sure. Last year, she had slept in until noon, had eggs Benedict and champagne for breakfast, exchanged gifts with Nadine and Corinne, and then gone from swanky party to swanky party with Carson. She’d worn a lamé sheath that hugged every curve in her body and emerald earrings and shiny Italian stilettos. She’d tasted caviar and drunk expensive French wine and sung Christmas carols while someone with amazing piano skills played an ebony baby grand in a living room with a twenty-foot-high ceiling. The other guests at that party had clapped and told her her voice was beautiful and they couldn’t wait to see her new movie. She and Carson had stayed over at the house of a friend of Carson’s in Beverly Hills, in a beautiful cabana by the pool that was as big as her grandmother’s house in Lincoln.

This Christmas was going to be nothing like that.

Instead, she was having Christmas brunch with a nephew she hadn’t known she had, a displaced Russian maid, and a widow who’d buried her brother-in-law in her backyard.

This made her giggle, and Nicky opened his eyes.

“Did Santa come?” he said, at once awake.

“I think he did.”

“Are there presents?”

“Shall we go see?”

The boy bounded out of bed.

Eva arrived breathless at the top of Paradise Circle just as Melanie and Nicky were about to ring June’s doorbell.

She looked as if she’d run the whole way up from the bus stop.

“Hey. It’s not like we would’ve started eating without you,” Melanie called out as she pressed the button, but as soon as Eva had closed the distance to her, she could tell Eva wasn’t worried about arriving late.

She was afraid.

“What’s the matter? What happened?” Melanie asked.

Eva’s breath was still coming in shallow heaves, but she sputtered out the words, “Yvonne said two men in suits came by for me yesterday. They wanted to talk to me. She said they are coming back tomorrow.”

A thin burst of alarm shot through Melanie. “Who were they? What did they want?”

Eva shook her head, still gasping. “They didn’t tell Yvonne who they were. I don’t know what they wanted. They just asked Yvonne if I was German. She told them I was Polish.”

“You think they were immigration officials?”

“I don’t know!”

The front door opened at that moment and June stood ready to greet them. She was wearing a ruffled white blouse, black pedal pushers, and a red and green chiffon apron sprinkled with smudges of flour.

Her smile quickly turned to concern. “What’s wrong?”

“Two men showed up at the house where Eva lives, looking for her. Asking about her,” Melanie said.

“Come inside.”

Melanie, Nicky, and Eva stepped into the house and June shut the door behind them.

“Who were they?” June asked.

“They didn’t say who they were.” Eva was still slightly out of breath. “Yvonne said they wanted to know if I was German!”

“And they didn’t identify themselves as immigration officials?”

Eva shook her head.

“Did she say they asked about me?” Melanie asked.

“No.”

The three women stood in the entryway in momentary silence. It was possible the two men had nothing to do with the blacklist, Melanie thought. Perhaps Eva’s true nationality had at last been uncovered. Perhaps those men were in fact immigration officials who didn’t know Eva worked for an actress on the blacklist. Or knew and didn’t care.

“I don’t know what to do.” Eva’s voice sounded almost childlike. “There are other things I’ve done…”

“Now, let’s just think about this a minute,” June said. “Come into the living room and set your things down.”

They moved into the next room. Melanie and Eva set their totes of gifts down by the little tree and Nicky ran up the stairs to look for Algernon.

The women sat down.

After a moment June said, “All right. Here’s what I think. I think you should stay here in Malibu tonight, Eva. I will take you back to your place early tomorrow morning, before anyone’s workday starts. We’ll get your things and you’ll come back here like you were going to in a few days anyway. Those men won’t know where you’ve moved to, whoever they are, and they’ll have to find you all over again.”

“But what about Yvonne?” Eva said. “What do I tell her? She knows I was planning to come stay here for a while.”

“Do you trust her?” June asked. “Is she your friend?”

“I think so.”

“Tell her you don’t want strange men knowing where you are. It’s as simple as that. Tell her she’s not to share your new address with them. If these fellas have a legitimate reason for wanting to talk with you, they will give her their business card or something, won’t they? And then you’ll know who they are.”

“Wait a minute. I think I should take her to get her things tomorrow morning,” Melanie said. “I’m not the one just getting over a back injury, and if they happen to be there when Eva arrives I want to see who they are. If they are there because of me, I want to know. And if this has to do with only her immigration, I’ll step in if they start giving her trouble.”

“Okay, but you’re not exactly a lawyer, Melanie,” June said.

“I’m an actress. I’ll act like one.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me, but whoever takes her needs to go early, and I mean early early. Like four thirty or five. Don’t you think? It would be best if you didn’t see them at all, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“But there’s Nicky to think of. He won’t be awake then, will he?” June said.

Melanie thought for a moment. “Could he sleep over here? Just tonight? I could bring him over after you get back from…you know. Palm Springs.”

“Well…I guess I could make him a little bed on the floor by me,” June said. “Okay, then. That’s what we will do. Now, no more worrying about this. The griddle is hot and ready. Let’s eat.”

“But what if…what if those men know what else I did? What if…” Eva’s voice trailed away, as though the words that would’ve completed the sentence were too awful to say.

“For heaven’s sake, stop asking ‘what if,’ Eva,” Melanie said. “Nobody ever feels better asking what-if questions. They only feel worse. And I don’t want to know what else you did. Keep it to yourself and leave me out of it.”

“And it’s Christmas,” June said. “Time for pancakes.”

After their brunch and a time of gift sharing, June put a Mario Lanza Christmas album on the hi-fi and they sipped hot cocoa while Nicky played.

Melanie couldn’t stop thinking how good it felt to be sitting in a cozy living room in ordinary clothes instead of gold lamé, sipping a hot chocolate instead of a Manhattan, and watching her nephew enjoy his new toys instead of nursing a hangover.

She hadn’t missed her family in the last five years as much as she did just then, and she was suddenly overcome with gladness that she had those airline tickets. In five days she would be home. Home. And her parents would meet their grandson.

She’d be going there as Melanie Kolander, the girl who once had a dream. And yet she wasn’t the same girl who had left five years earlier. She was also Melanie Cole now.

She was both somehow.

“What are you thinking about, Melanie?” June asked her, breaking into her reverie. “You look like you’re a million miles away.”

Melanie looked across the room to where June sat with her own mug.

“I was thinking about what it will be like to take Nicky home to Omaha and to be there myself again, I guess. I never thought I’d be so eager to go back there.”

“Home was not a good place for you?” The envy in Eva’s words was slight but unmistakable. You have a home to return to. You have parents…

Melanie considered the question and the underlying tone for a moment. “I’d gotten it into my head that I was someone different now. That Melanie Cole isn’t Melanie Kolander, that they are two different people. But they’re not. And there is no ‘they.’ This stage name Irving gave me is just that. It’s just throwing together a few letters of the alphabet that sound like the name that is really mine. But I’m still me. I am still Melanie Kolander from Omaha. I hadn’t understood that until just these last few days. This thing with the blacklist isn’t fair, and none of it is true, but it’s still real. It’s real and because it’s real it’s part of who I am now and who I will always be. I need to find a way to make peace with that. To somehow own it without it owning me.”

June looked at her thoughtfully. “I wish that Elwood could have heard you say that. That accident took everything from him and he never figured out how to live without the things it took. That accident owned him. And oh, how I wish I had known he’d grown so weary of being possessed like that…”

June’s voice trailed away.

“Elwood made his own choices, June,” Melanie said. “And nobody can know another person’s thoughts if they choose to hide them. You didn’t know. If I’ve learned anything from these months on the blacklist, it’s that it does no good to wish you could change the past. Or the future. It’s impossible.”

June smiled softly. “I used to imagine the closet in the little one-room shack my mother and I lived in was a time machine. When she would leave me to fend for myself I’d go inside it and pretend to travel forward to the moment when she’d come back. I hated being alone like that. Especially at night.”

“Your mother left you alone at night?” Eva asked.

“She had way too much faith in my ability to handle that much independence.”

Melanie cocked her head. “How old were you?”

“Seven and eight. Nine, too, but I was used to it by then. It’s funny. Now I wish I could go backward in time rather than forward.” She sighed. “I wish it all the time.”

“So do I,” Eva said.

“All the time?” Melanie asked. “ All the time?”

June took a sip from her mug and then set it down on the coffee table. “Don’t you?”

“Not all the time. I wouldn’t go back and not make the movie with Carson just so that I wouldn’t have met him.”

“But it wasn’t that movie of his that got you on the blacklist,” June said. “It was dating him, right? Wouldn’t you go back and decide not to do that?”

“That was the studio’s idea.”

“But you went along with it. What if you could go back and not go along with it? What if you told the studio you wanted the movie to be the magic, which it already was, rather than some made-up Hollywood romance? Wouldn’t you do that if you could?”

Melanie sat back against the sofa cushions. Would she do that if she could? “Maybe,” she said.

But she knew she would. She’d go back and make the movie, which she’d loved doing, but not the other things. Nothing about Carson had been about love. Not even the sex. Especially not the sex. What was the good of doing something that had nothing to do with love?

“I would go back those weeks before Sascha and my papa and brother were taken and convince them to leave Russia like other Volga Germans had done. Everything would be different right now if we had.”

“Why didn’t you do that?” Melanie asked.

Eva shrugged. “We did not have anywhere to go. We should have left anyway.”

Melanie turned to June. “What about you? Where would you go back to? The night Elwood took the pills?”

June was silent for a moment, as though unsure she wanted to say what she’d say next. “I guess I’d go back to when I first met him.”

Melanie crinkled an eyebrow. “All the way back to then? To change what?”

June looked away from her, toward the tree made of dyed feathers. “I’ve always wondered what it would have been like to have chosen him instead of Frank. I loved Frank; I did. But I can’t help wondering how my life would’ve been different if I had married Elwood instead.”

“I don’t think it would work like that,” Melanie said.

June turned her head to face her again. “Like what?”

“You going back in time to when you met Elwood. You were dating his brother at the time, right? That’s how you met Elwood. Are you saying you would dump Frank to be with Elwood? He would have to fall in love with you, too, wouldn’t he? No time machine could force that to happen. Besides, can you see Elwood falling for the same girl who broke his brother’s heart? I know I didn’t know him as well as you, but I can’t.”

June frowned in consternation. “Well, I’d have to go back further, then, to before I met Frank. I’d have to meet Elwood on my own somehow. Maybe get a job at MGM instead of Warner Brothers so our paths could cross.”

“And then hope for the best?” Melanie asked. “What if you couldn’t make it happen?”

June seemed to need a moment to ponder this. “At least I would know, wouldn’t I? I could come back to this life and I wouldn’t wonder anymore.”

The three women were quiet as their wishes for what they would change if they could swirled unseen around the room.

“Wait,” June said suddenly, shattering their silence with a word. “No, wait. That’s not what I would do. I know it’s not. It’s not.” Her eyes had turned silver with moisture.

“What do you mean? What would you do?” Melanie asked.

“I’d go back to the night Elwood got into that car,” June continued, emotion thick in her voice. “Of course I would. And I would keep him and Ruthie from getting into it even if I had to slash all four tires.”

“Ah,” Melanie said thoughtfully. “For love. Elwood loved Ruthie. And you loved him. You’d use the time machine because of love.”

Two shining tears tracked down June’s cheeks and she did not palm them away. She smiled. “Is there really any other reason?”

An hour later June’s car was packed with food for the Palm Springs bungalow—including everything for a ham dinner June would cook and eat alone that afternoon, as well as Elwood’s suitcase of clothes, his pipe, and a few of his books.

Before loading the car, June had taken out to the backyard the handgun that Elwood had long kept under his mattress in case of a home burglary, burying it deep in the farthest edge of the rose garden so that when Max or the police asked her if Elwood owned a gun and she answered yes, she could announce in all truthfulness—after pretending to check—that it was missing.

“You’re sure this is how you want to do this?” Melanie asked as June got into the car to leave.

June did not answer.

“What else can she do?” Eva said to Melanie as the two of them stood in the driveway next to the car.

When Melanie said nothing in response, June looked up at her through the open driver’s-side window. “I’ll be home by six. Bring Nicky over anytime after that.”

June put the car in gear, backed out the driveway, and disappeared down the hill.