What Happens in Paradise(2)

At eight o’clock on the dot, Irene wakes Cash. He has started calling her Mother Alarm Clock.

“I had another dream,” she says.

Cash props himself up on his elbows in bed. His blond hair is messy and he’s growing a beard; he hasn’t shaved since they left the island. Irene has put him in the grandest of her five guest rooms, the Excelsior suite, she calls it. It has dark, raised-panel walls with a decorative beveled edge at the chair rail and an enormous Eastlake bed with a fringed canopy. There’s also a stained-glass transom window that Irene got for a steal at a tiny antiques shop in Solon, Iowa, and a silk Persian rug in burgundy and cream that she purchased from a licensed dealer in Chicago. (She’d thought Russ might veto a five-figure rug, but he told her to go ahead, get it, whatever made her happy.) Irene’s favorite piece in the room is a wrought-iron washstand that holds a ceramic bowl edged in gold leaf; above it hangs a photograph of Russ’s mother, Milly, as a young girl in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1928. Irene remembers the joy and pride she’d felt in refurbishing this room—every room in the house, really—but at this instant, she can’t understand why. The Victorian style seems so heavy, so overdone, so tragic.

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.