See You in Paradise Read Online Free Page A

Edward calls her Al and she calls him Edward. That happened on the first date. Al and Edward: it went through her head all night long. Then they got married and tried to have a kid for nine years. She didn’t want the drugs; she was afraid of octuplets, and then what? Aborting some, but not others: that wasn’t for her, it seemed so arbitrary. What if they killed the wrong ones? So adoption is it. It’s the right thing to do. They read about the picnic in the paper.
    A child comes to her, a tiny white boy. “Fow me dis!” he says, “fow it to me!” He thrusts a frisbee at her. She draws back, horrified, and it tumbles to the ground. The child picks it up and hands it to her again.
    “Oh! I don’t know …” It’s a test! she thinks, taking the frisbee. It’s a test and I’m flunking!
    The child runs away to a small group of older boys. They are grinning with apparent mischief. “All right!” she calls out. “Get ready! Here it comes!”
    She throws the frisbee, and it wallows in the air and falls ten feet short. “No!” the child says. “Wike dis! Wike dis!” He grabs the frisbee and flings it away, over the heads of the other children, and they chase it and are gone.
    She wanders, watching Edward out of the corner of her eye. He is talking to exactly the wrong kid. She’s done research. Adolescents and teens may already have developed beyond your ability to control them. Sometimes she suspects that Edward doesn’t really want a child at all, and that this secret truth has rendered them infertile. She’s not sure of the mechanics of the thing, but it is as easy to believe as what the doctor has told them.
    At first their desire for children was as passionate and straightforward as a Labrador retriever, and as thoughtless. They liked each other and wanted to make more of themselves. They screwed with delightful abandon. Once it was clear things weren’t working, though, sex became perfunctory. It seemed absurd and implausible, like Twister. They still have it, of course. Sex. They call it “it.” “We should do it.” Neither ever refuses, no matter how unappealing the prospect, because then there would be somebody to blame for their never doing it anymore.
    They are most successful at it when he wears a condom.
    Alison has been thinking these thoughts for a while before she realizes how she must look: slumped, agape, alone. She looks up, startled, at the scene around her. Predatory adults kneeling, touching, telling jokes. I don’t know any jokes! she thinks.
    Then she sees her child.
    Really. He looks like her. He has her long fingers (curled around a plastic bat), her high forehead (sweating, like hers!), her coarse, raccoon-colored hair (though on him, tousled, gently curled, it looks charming). He is so obviously the one that it takes her several seconds to realize that he is already talking to some adults, older adults. Mature adults. The man wears boots and a bolo tie; narrow and bent, he looks like a hick. A rich hick. The woman is freckled and tan. It’s over; the child has been claimed.
    Still, her legs carry her toward the three of them.

    “I don’t want parents,” Nate tells Edward. “I’m fine without them. Pretty soon I’ll get out of high school and I’ll take the money they give me at the home and buy a bus ticket.”
    The speech sounds rehearsed. “Where to?” Edward says.
    “Vegas.”
    “What’s there?”
    “Everything, man. Girls. Money. I want to deal poker. You ever seen those guys? They’re smooth.”
    “I agree.”
    Nate looks off across the park, squinting at the bright hills and water. It would be a piece of cake to live with this kid, Edward thinks. He’d be like a roommate. Because Edward doesn’t want a baby anymore, really, the same way he doesn’t want a sport-utility vehicle or a handheld computer. All the years of fertility brochures and pregnancy books, all the babies who pitch for mutual funds and radial tires and insurance policies and of course