Paradise

  (a new short story by Juliet Johnson)

I drove up to Napa and stopped at Harris Ranch because of the grass fed beef steak, delicious. It's the halfway mark. I didn't want to drive the rest of the way because I'm heading into the funeral, into the family that is the closest I have to family and the little one is dead because of alcohol and drugs.

I don't have to charge the car anymore because I got a new one at Galpin Ford, Jesse gets me a new deal everytime, this is an upgrade, but I can afford it and the gas mileage savings wasn't that great anyway with a hybrid so I'm back to this car for awhile and it's functional, it's a good deal, it's new and I like it.

He wasn't a baby, wasn't really little actually, he was 47. It's just when it's your godson, or the brother of your godson, and you've seen him born and grow up, he's still the baby of the family. Even though he's caused his parents and everyone heartache for years, with his addictions and his rehabs and his promises of quitting and his starting over and his stealing and his car accidents, and then his mother finding him dead sitting in a chair dressed for work after being fired from one job for being constantly late, and somehow miraculously three days later finding another job, a new one that would give him a chance and then coffee sitting cold in the mug and he's sitting at the apartment kitchen table dead. And sweet Sarah says oh it must have been a heart attack, and he was peaceful, because as a mom finding a son like that who has tortured himself and herself, even though she did everything for him, she was president of the PTA, she fed him organic food. No he had a heart attack. He's all done fighting the demons now. She felt relief, on top of her complete, bitter and annihilating depression, devastation. And disappointment.

I get to their house and there are tears, this is the journey with all the tears, I know it will be that because there is no way around it. But I'm in WINE country, and there is joy in the long cool bottles and oh my god, that is a 1963 cabernet and the cork slides out and I feel the wine's breath on the inside of my cheeks and I smile at Nick and Sarah and feel the gloss in my throat and it doesn't matter, the wealth, I become a better man for them.

It's three days of crying, a large group of us, only one day where we have to put his urn in the ground and the daughter of my godson is standing under a tree in her sixteenth year, reading a poem of a Bob Dylan song and then reading Goodnight Moon like he used to read to her when he wasn't loaded and this makes me choke far into the fat back of my head because this is not how it's supposed to be, out under the tree with the spiky oak leaves that poke through your shoes and make your feet bleed, out in this bleached California valley where everything's supposed to grow on vines. Where a few months ago there was a huge fire up the hill that completely wiped out an old town called Paradise. Wiped out, like gone. The vineyards, the old folks home, the trailer park. The little houses in the woods. People burned to death. People were staggering out covered in white ashes as their town disappeared, burning up the empty road behind them, all on a Saturday.

Back in the twilight kitchen there's a woman laughing so hard, everyone is dressed in casual formal wear, we are on a ranch but we put a child in the ground. Celebrating the life of he, as they say, when really mourning the death of or it's a swirl, the deadliest emotional swirl. She's laughing and I see the wine jolly, the glugging as it's poured like elves coming out of the mines with diamonds, fill my glass up, there's no counting. The colors are so bright, so deep, so red, so expensive, so rare. The connaisseurs all around me are vapid or insipid and rich and I've known these same scattered friends for years, on and off, and they annoy me but we are laughing because there's wine and then we're crying because there's death of death of the family, and then there's cognac, square thick bottle and the room in me stills.

I have wrecked cars. I have woken up in airports in cities I didn't know I was going to. I have lost lovers. I have tried to go forward but this place always gets me, it's that liquid.  My brain is functioning overboard, washed by tumultuous expensive wine and the storm of the boy in the ground, but the wine whipped ocean is steering the ship.

A part of me is hushed silent, there's a place I can't feel because that stuff kills the place in me, all the places in me. It is rare because they are rich and I am not, I used to be but those days are for fuzzy pictures on my Instagram, my prized stag I tote back on the roof of my car and display on Throwback Thursday. Cognac is still happening here, and I better stay away from that stuff. Cognac is poured for them. And then me.

The woman is still laughing and she throws her head back and thinks her bar stool has a back to catch her but it doesn't and she tips off and breaks her arm. There's much scuffling and shouting and I turn to look too quickly and slip and I'm falling and crack my head on the counter and my tooth goes into my lip and my face is covered in blood.

The hubbub of the hobnob still seems to be around the woman and her arm although someone helps me up, I think it's Nick because he is looking at me that way that I don't like, the one where his eyebrows are angry and mixed and it looks like pain, I made more pain, than he already had on his plentiful pained face. On this pained lacking rain lacking one son all these well meaning but sad friends weekend in viney vineyard Napa.

I hobble off to the quaint motor home near the vines where I'm sleeping on the ranch, the sky touches the land here like a wide universe umbrella, a limitless white cover and not comforting. I climb the metal step and get inside and it's only 6 o'clock on my apple watch and put one leg on the couch and I'm gone. There's pounding at the door and are you allright. Mark Fitzpatrick are you allright. He's using my two names so I know he's worried. Sarah is really  mad at you, he's yelling. I hear his feet kicking gravel. Sarah's been mad at me for 30 years, my loud growls back, noticing the blood flakes on the back of my hand. I put my hand to my face. There's blood on my face somehow.

When I get back to L.A., I text my girlfriend and I don't understand what she's talking about, why do I disappear. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere, I text back. That must've been really difficult, she says, I know it was a funeral but why do you drink. Why do you do that.

Nobody got out of control, I write back.