Forces

Nothing grows old in Paradise. Stillman figures it's because nothing lasts that long. A still driveable if suffering car above the driveway has a bumper sticker on its back window: "HONK IF PARTS FALL OFF!"

He has not seen so many dinged, rusting vehicles since he lived in the upper Midwest with all the salting of the winter roads. He knows it must be the sea air. Sometimes he thinks he can taste it in the rain—or maybe it's just sweat. And park a car in one place for a week and vines will remove the hubcaps and do a giant squid on the bumpers and transmission. It's a tough neighborhood for anything that lies still too long. Rip Van Winkle would never have been seen again if he'd drifted off in Paradise.

It's definitely hard on some cottages that someone left and has yet to return to, and are unlikely to now. They perch dark and drowning on hillsides above and below the roads and steep drives. Moss-slick stone stairs lead down or up, but they don't go far before disappearing. Rusty blemishes like pimples form and grow into sores on corrugated roofs. Mold mutes bright pastel colors. The empty windows are black. Washing machines that will never cycle again slump on the covered porch, their white porcelain finishes in a siege lost to salt air. Dark orange cement mixers darken to splotchy brown and settle, unlikely to turn again. Signs like "Whazzit-Whazzit Villa" and "Casa de Whazzit" go gray, recede into evergreen shadows. Overgrowth tears apart rock walls in slow motion, like an eminently patient octopus worrying a clam.

Somebody loved those places enough to try to build dreams there, at least in Stillman's imagination that tends to romanticize romance and the end of romance. Somewhere there may be pictures of those days and those places in shelved photo albums, and perhaps memories that go with them. A couple or family may have lost track of who and why and what that key in the kitchen drawer once opened. Perhaps the builders —now far away and facing chillier days—still drift off and have a glimpsing dream of ten thousand rainy fingers tapping on the roof, of the wall they pulled from the hillside itself, of the new cistern they poured to contain all the rainwater they were certain would come year after year, next season if not this one.

But nothing lives forever here except the jungle vines that reach and twist and pull apart with a patience only possible in Paradise.