Burning Paradise

Leo was almost as quiet as he drove from the motel lot onto the two-lane county road. From where she sat all Cassie could see of Leo him was the back of his head and his reflection in the rearview mirror. He kept glancing at the mirror and at Beth beside him as the road unreeled under trees with branches like outstretched fingers and a sky as flat as tinted glass.

After a while he broke the silence: “Any of you notice a guy in a dark suit, big glasses, old-fashioned hat?”

“Notice him where?” Cassie asked.

“Anywhere we stopped—restaurants, motels?”

Cassie hadn’t noticed anyone like that. Beth shook her head. Thomas ignored the question and gazed indifferently out the side window.

“Because he was in the lobby when I was checking out,” Leo said. “And he looked kind of familiar. I thought maybe… I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“You think we might have been followed?”

Leo frowned. Cassie had come to appreciate that frown, the way it bracketed his mouth. Back in Buffalo, among survivors, she had seen him escalate trivial arguments to the point of shouting, a quality she hated in him. But out here on the road Leo had shown a more thoughtful side. The frown signaled a mood more quizzical than angry. “It’s possible,” he said. “We have to be careful, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Always. Of course.” But she honestly didn’t remember a guy with big glasses and a hat.

Twenty minutes later Leo glanced at the mirror and cursed. Cassie craned her head to check the road: there was a car behind them, far enough away that it disappeared when the road curved and reappeared when it straightened. A midnight-blue car, high-tailed and salted with road dust. It looked like it might be a few years old, though Cassie didn’t know about cars and couldn’t name the make or model. “Same as yesterday,” Leo muttered.

“You’ve seen that car before?”

“Or one just like it. Fuck!”

“So pull over,” Beth suggested. “Pull over and let it pass.”

Leo waited until they reached a gas station, a little two-pump depot where he could idle inconspicuously for a couple of minutes. Cassie and Thomas hunkered down, but Cassie kept her head high enough to see the car as it went by. It didn’t slow. It didn’t speed up. It just whooshed past, neatly centered in the right lane. There was a single driver at the wheel: a middle-aged man wearing oversized eyeglasses and a dowdy, old-fashioned hat.

They sat for ten more minutes before Leo pulled out of the gas station, grit crackling under the tires as he steered back onto the road. He said, “It’s possible we’ve been discovered. So don’t take offence, but I have to ask: did either of you—or Thomas—maybe try to call home, find out what happened back in Buffalo?”

In truth, Cassie had been tempted. In every room they stayed in, every restaurant where they ate, there had been a telephone in plain sight. She was always just one call away from knowing whether Aunt Ris had lived or died. So yeah, it was a constant irrational temptation, like putting poisoned food on a plate in front of a hungry person. But she wasn’t stupid enough to dig in. “No,” she said.

“Thomas? How about you?”

The question seemed to startle him. “What?”

“Call anybody on the phone lately?”

“No! Not since we left.”

“Are you sure about that? It’s okay to tell me. I’m not pissed or anything. I just need to know, right?”

“Right,” Thomas said uncertainly.

“So did you call somebody, talk to somebody?”

“No. But she did.”

She—Beth.

“Fucking little liar!” Beth said promptly.

“I saw her.”

“Nobody cares what you think you saw!”

Leo took his right hand off the wheel and put it on Beth’s thigh, to reassure her or to keep her quiet, Cassie couldn’t tell which. “When was this?”

Thomas gave Cassie a questioning look.

“Go on,” she said quietly. “Tell him. It’s okay.”

“At the motel. Two nights ago.”

“In the room?”

“After di

“I was having a smoke,” Beth said. “Come on, Leo, this is bullshit!”

“You saw her use the phone?”

Thomas hesitated before he spoke. “I don’t know. I thought so. I was looking through the window. It was kind of dark. But it looked like she picked up the phone.”

“I was in the phone booth,” Beth said, “having a fucking smoke, all right?”

The car rolled on, silent apart from the growl of the engine and the asthmatic murmur of the heater. “I’m not passing judgment on anybody,” Leo said. “I just need to know. I mean, it wasn’t snowing or raining—you needed to go into a phone booth to have a smoke?”

After a longer and even weightier silence Beth said, “I never actually talked to anybody!”

“Okay, I guess I understand that. But you called?”

“I just thought… I’m talking about my father… if he picked up, at least I’d know he wasn’t dead.”

“Okay. And… did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Answer.”

“Oh. Well—no.”

“Uh-huh.”

Beth bit her lip and stared out the window. “I’m sorry. It was stupid. I know that. It won’t happen again.”

“Yeah, good.” Leo took his hand off her leg. “See that it doesn’t.”

The road curved through hilly, wooded land toward the Interstate. A few weeks ago, Cassie thought, the hills would have been gaudy with autumn colors, but November had stripped all the trees and burned the meadows brown.

Leo pulled off at a roadside stop, a gravel parking lot and a pair of cinderblock restrooms overlooking a broad valley. Away and below, a river stitched a quilt of forested allotments and freehold farms. The river must have a name, Cassie thought, but she didn’t know what it was. A pair of turkey buzzards drew circles in the cloudless sky.

Cassie and Thomas left the car, ostensibly to look at the view, really to let Leo and Beth talk in private.

Cassie had never been close to Beth but she felt sorry for her now. For more than a year, at gatherings of survivor families, Cassie had watched Beth deliberately and systematicallyingratiate herself with Leo, repeating his opinions as if she had always shared them, smiling when he smiled and sneering at what ever he disliked. Her hostility toward her father, her impatience with the timid and cloistered survivor world, even her raggedy-cuff Levi’s and thrift-shop costume jewelry, all had been calculated to capture Leo’s sympathy. And Leo had happily bought the act, much to Cassie’s disgust.

But a few days on the road had fractured Beth’s pretensions. Maybe Beth had resented her father, but she had cared enough about him to risk a phone call. And as stupid as that act may have been, Cassie understood it and sympathized with it.

“I wish we could just go home.” Thomas tossed a pebble and listened as it bounced down the slope toward the valley. He leaned over the plastic mesh fence meant to keep tourists from falling and hurting themselves. Not that there were any tourists this time of year.

“Yeah, I know,” Cassie said. “So do I.”

“So when do you think we’ll actually live somewhere?”

“It might take time. Try to patient, okay?”

Thomas nodded. Of course, he had already been heroically patient. “I think Beth hates us.”

“She acts like it. But really she’s just scared.”

“So? I’m scared too. That doesn’t mean I have to behave like an asshole.”

Cassie laughed. “You have a point there.”

Was she underestimating Thomas, treating him too much like a child? When Cassie was Thomas’s age she had dreamed of joining the Youth Corps, the branch of the League that sent young people to monitor elections in remote countries where new parliaments were being formed. She had pictured herself defending ballot boxes from marauding bandits (which of course Corps volunteers never really did). The murder of her parents had driven all such thoughts from her mind. Was it possible Thomas harbored some similar ambition? Could he, after all that had happened?