The Paper Wasp

by Lauren Acampora

  When I reached Fremont, I turned east. Not an extreme detour but a slightly different route. I slowed as I passed the cornfields and silos of Paul’s hometown, the neat houses with shutters, clotheslines strung with black and white garments. I came upon a boy in a hat and suspenders pedaling a bicycle, like an apparition. After I passed him, I looked in the rearview mirror and thought of Paul as a boy, cycling toward his future. It was possible that one of these houses was his, that his mother had hung its clothesline. The boy on the bike could have been his real-life nephew. I closed my eyes for a moment as I drove, and Paul’s face flickered in my mind. I hadn’t told him anything of what had happened these past few weeks, or what I was doing. I realized that I missed him, his uncomplicated company, and that the feeling of our kiss still lingered in me, a persistent abrasion.

  I continued over the plains, closing the windows against the fetid smell of turkey barns, until I finally crossed into Hesperia. I pushed onward, past a Family Dollar and a Jiffy Lube, full of my own power. All these years I’d resisted coming here. I’d been afraid that once I entered this town’s borders, I’d never get back out. Now, I felt no such threat.

  It wasn’t difficult to find the trailer, which sat just off the main stretch of town. I felt a touch of disquiet as I approached it, the same distress that came in nightmares about pets I’d forgotten to care for. In the dreams, I was afraid to discover that the animal had died, just as now I was afraid to discover what squalor might have swallowed my sister.

  The trailer was blue and rusted at the edges, but had been fixed to resemble a house, with a peaked roof, modest satellite dish, handrail up the steps. There was plastic sheeting in the window frames. At the base of the trailer was a pinwheel garden spinner. I stood at the top of the steps for a long moment, waiting for my racing pulse to steady, studying a set of rusted wind chimes and a wreath of dried flowers. I drew a breath and knocked. Immediately, a dog barked and blitzed the inside of the door. Then, my sister’s voice, loose and loud over the scratching. I suddenly wanted to rewind, go back down the steps, and run for the car. She’d hear me reversing into the road and assume it was someone at the wrong address.

  The door opened slightly, and I saw the dog’s black snout before it was yanked back and my sister’s face appeared. In that first instant, when she hadn’t yet recognized me, I saw her the way she appeared to others. A coarse woman with bad skin and hard blue eyes. Then she saw me. Still bent over, holding the dog’s collar, she said, “Holy shit.” The door closed again. “Just a minute, I need to crate Ozzy.” I heard the scrambling of toenails inside. When the door opened again, all the way, my sister was there in full form, big-chested in a blue Lions shirt with a deep-scissored V-neck. “Holy shit,” she said again. In this first full view of her, I could feel the years that had passed, the seesaw that was always between us, rising and falling. I could see my sister’s metamorphosis from girl to woman. The dangerous thing she’d walked into years ago had been much bigger than her, and now she’d filled it.

  “Oh, my little sister,” Shelby cried and hugged me. The embrace was hard, nearly violent. “I thought you hated me.”

  Over her shoulder, I saw a baby in a bouncer seat on the floor. The dog barked from its crate. Shelby went to the bouncer, picked up the baby, and brought her to the door. Her voice turned lispy and thin. “Bree, this is your aunt Abby.”

  I stepped into the trailer and breathed a blend of sour milk and cigarette smoke. Shelby busied herself as she talked, scraping something from a couch cushion, picking a blanket off the floor. I learned that she was a waitress and worked part-time in a medical office. The baby’s father was long gone. The only evidence of his existence was the bar of metal that jutted from the trunk of the maple outside the trailer. He’d impaled the bar there and tied a rope to it, she said, with the idea of hanging a tree swing for Briella. He hadn’t even lasted to the birth, and now the maple was dying. She’d never seen him again. He was unemployable, useless for child support, not even listed on the birth certificate. She didn’t need his help, though. She and Briella were fine. Her friend Judith was lonely and was going to take care of Briella for free.

  “I’m off today, so we’re going to town for the Labor Day fair. We were just getting ready to leave, so it’s a good thing you came when you did.” She half turned her head. “Ha. I can’t believe you’re here. Come, let’s go.”

  I followed my sister outside to her car and sat in the passenger seat, crushing snack wrappers beneath me. I watched Shelby lift her daughter into the car seat without pausing to brush the crumbs from the fabric. The baby was so small that the straps and buckle covered her whole torso. Shelby dropped into the driver’s seat, and with a cursory glance into the rearview mirror pulled backward out of the driveway. It occurred to me that I’d never ridden in a car she was driving.

  On the way to town, we passed yard sales, people sorting through rubber bins. We parked and walked along the main street. Among the meaty midwesterners ran a strain of young men in sleeveless shirts with tattoos and hollow faces, jittery women beside them. Whether they knew Shelby or not, they didn’t raise their eyes. No one seemed to see me at all. Shelby had clipped Briella’s car seat to the top of a stroller, which she wheeled past the booths of a craft fair. From time to time a matronly woman hunched down to the baby and made a kissy face. “What a sweetie pie,” the woman would say, and Shelby would say, “Thanks,” as if the sweetness were her doing.

  “Oh, look at those,” Shelby said at a craft tent, pointing to a row of soft headbands with red, white, and blue fabric flowers.

  “I’ll buy one for her,” I said impulsively. “No, don’t do that.”

  “It’s what an aunt does.” I wasn’t accustomed to being an aunt, and the word flapped on my tongue. I was a stranger to this girl, no more familiar than the women blowing kisses. As I put the headband on Briella, pulling the fabric over her little ears, she gazed at me with her glossy eyes, and I felt a jet shoot up from a hidden well inside me.

  We watched the tractor-pull contest and ate hot dogs. Sitting beside Shelby, I was able to study her. Her dark hair angled down sharply: longer in the front and chopped shorter in the back. She wore no makeup that I could see, and her skin was pebbled with whiteheads. Her face maintained its heart shape—the tapered chin and widow’s peak—but carved crescents parenthesized her mouth now, as if she were permanently displeased.

  “What last name does Briella have?” I asked, perhaps too suddenly.

  Shelby shifted her eyes to me. “Hightower. I changed my last name a few years ago.”

  I nodded. “Mom told me about that. Why Hightower?”

  “I got it from the Hightower Saloon.” She shrugged. “I just always liked that word. Makes me think of being above it all. Unreachable.”

  An empty pause stretched between us as I turned over this irony.

  “So, what have you been doing with yourself?” Shelby finally asked me. There was a tightness in her voice, and her cobalt eyes were distant.

  “Well, weirdly enough, I’m in L.A. now,” I said.

  She glanced at me and I saw the pure surprise before she said, “Oh, huh. That sounds great. Good for you.”

  I waited for her to ask more, but she didn’t. Instead, she rummaged in her purse and brought out a round plastic compact. She opened it and pinched something out, which she put on her tongue.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  She shot me a look. “Just something for my pain. I had a C-section.”

  It was hard to sit quietly, not to ask more questions, but I controlled myself. When the tractor pull was over, Shelby asked if I wouldn’t mind staying with Briella while she stopped in the beer tent for a few minutes. “She’ll fall asleep soon, anyway. When she does, just put her in her stroller and she’ll be fine.” As she walked away, I saw her reach into her purse and bring out the pill case again.

  I waited on the bottom rung of the tractor-pull bleachers. Hard music came from the beer tent, and bel
ow that the jangle of voices and laughter. The sky darkened, and I thought of Malibu, a fabled city twinkling far beyond the horizon. From this vantage, it seemed as unreal as Atlantis. The night unrolled swiftly here, full and profound, a familiar black afghan of stars. I felt a curious calm beneath this arrangement of constellations that had covered me since childhood. There was comfort in the land that stretched flat forever, simple and fertile and constant, its huddled trees alive with crickets and owls. I had a sense of rightness, sitting here, of gathering certainty. Briella was curled in the stroller, her face clear and untroubled in sleep. I imagined that she was my child, and tried to feel what it would be like to be a mother. I touched the velvet head, warm with dreams.

  A memory came to me of playing hide-and-seek when we were small. I remembered hiding with Shelby in the tub, behind the shower curtain, and watching our mother’s shadow approach. I remembered that moment of apprehension, the tingling possibility that it wasn’t our mother at all, but a monster. The clank of the rings on the rod. How our mother had jumped, too, although she must have known we were there. How we’d all looked at each other, our faces rough mirror images, and laughed.

  When an hour had passed, I wheeled the stroller to the beer tent and found my sister leaning into a man in a leather vest. Other men stood around her like projections of the grinding music. She smiled when she saw me and took me into a clumsy headlock. “My little sister,” she drawled, and I stiffened. “You’re sleeping over tonight, right? You have to! I have a couch!”

  The man beside my sister rubbed his face against hers. I stood still, gripping the stroller handle. Finally Shelby remembered Briella, her gaze shifting downward to her sleeping daughter’s face. With a fluid movement, she pulled away from the man and seized the stroller. I followed her out of the tent. At the car, I lifted her purse off her shoulder and took the car keys. Shelby slid into the passenger seat and closed her eyes.

  When I pulled into her driveway, she didn’t move. I shook her until her head bobbed. Finally her eyes opened halfway and blinked. I went around and opened the passenger door, and she staggered out toward the trailer. I watched her fumble with the door key, nearly losing her balance on the step, then disappear inside. The dog barked, but Briella slept as I unbuckled her and lifted her out of the car seat. I carried the girl against my chest, feeling her hot cheek at my shoulder.

  Inside, I was hit again with the smell of smoke and old milk. Ozzy ran up to me, a stained yellow beast, and circled my legs sniffing. Shelby was already laid out on the sagging couch. I stood for a long moment, holding Briella against me, imagining what would happen if I turned around and carried her back out the door. I could find a small place for us to live. I could make drawings and invent stories just for her. Whatever she dreamed in her sleep I’d try to bring to life.

  The couch springs groaned as Shelby turned on her back and threw an arm over her face. “Just put her in her crib,” she murmured. “She can keep her clothes on, it’s fine.”

  The animal followed at my heels as I stepped over toys and found the crib in a room with vinyl princess decals. I laid the child down gingerly on the blotched mattress. I straightened myself and watched her for a moment, her arms splayed and lips parted. It would be so easy to pick her up again and walk out the door. From inside my ears came a low drone, like a trapped insect. I reached my arms into the crib. Carefully, I took the headband off the baby’s head, for fear it might strangle her in her sleep, then leaned down and kissed her forehead. It felt like a subversive act, the casting of a spell. As I withdrew from the crib, my heart juddered, and the drone in my ears intensified.

  I scanned the trailer’s living room. It was the same room I’d dreamed about, I saw now. And just as I’d known where to find the meteorite in the desert, I knew where the bag would be. I knew from the dream that there was something in it I needed, and so I didn’t hesitate the way I might have. There beside the front door I found Shelby’s purse—fat and slovenly, the fake white leather and pony fringe—and took it with me.

  XVI.

  PAUL‘S CABIN was nearly black in the evening light. As the taxi withdrew, I noticed the places where the wooden siding had been chewed away and saw the rusted trash can that slumped outside. He opened the door, and for a silent moment he stared at me with my suitcase, his face stern, the skin raw and patchy. I noticed flecks of white in his sideburns.

  The cabin’s interior seemed smaller than before, gloomier. Paul switched on the floor lamp, and I saw black punctuation marks where dead insects were stuck to the inside of the shade. The kites hung from the wall like sleeping bats.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  From the kitchen area came the sound of a cabinet creaking open, the clunk of a kettle on the stovetop.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I know this is a surprise.”

  “It’s all right.” He stood in his brown shirt and chinos, blending with the kitchen cabinets, part of the woodwork, a bas-relief. He turned away from me, toward the stove.

  “I’ve been thinking about your project,” I said quietly. “I’d like to try helping again in some way.”

  There was a stretch of silence before the kettle began to clatter. Paul turned the burner off just as the steam started to rise, but before the whistle screamed. He turned to look at me. He didn’t say anything for a long moment, and I began to think I was too late, that he’d already shut me out. I’d have to take my suitcase someplace else.

  Finally, he said, “Are you sure?” He poured the hot water into two mugs. “I was actually planning to go to the shelter tomorrow. Yolanda’s warmed up a lot since you met her that time, and I think it would go much smoother now. She’s ready to talk, if you are.”

  I remembered Yolanda’s face, the searing ray of her gaze. “I’ll come.”

  Paul looked appraisingly at me. “You don’t have to interview her if you don’t want to. You can just stay in the room. Just having you there will help, I think.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  He brought the tea to the table, and we sat together, the checkered oilcloth between us. As he sipped from his steaming mug, I tried to imagine living here with him. I imagined a simple life, sewing kites. I’d see him every day, absorb his shifting moods, watch him in every angle of sunlight and moonlight. We’d talk through the night, the only people in Topanga Canyon, or we’d lie quietly with no need to talk. In daylight, we’d be soldiers. It shouldn’t have been difficult to see, but I couldn’t see it.

  To my relief, he didn’t ask about me, or Elise. He didn’t mention the tabloid reports, although I was sure he knew what had happened. He didn’t even ask why I’d come. Instead, he talked about the refugee children. Armando had been sent back to Guatemala, but new children had arrived at the shelter. There were teenage brothers who’d ridden atop a freight train through Mexico, along with hundreds of others. The migrants called it El Tren de la Muerte, he said. The brothers had seen a man fall between the train cars and be decapitated. Most of the other migrants on the train had been detained, but the boys had escaped. They’d arrived at the shelter with bleeding cuts on their soles of their feet. They were likely to be deported after their cases were reviewed, Paul said. In the meantime, he wanted to get more of their story on film. He wanted to document their pursuit of asylum in the United States. Also, he was beginning to think he needed to go to Central America himself.

  “I want to structure the film as a dual narrative, if I can,” he said, “following one child trying to emigrate to the United States and another child who’s already here, going through the system. The footage would alternate between their stories. But I’d have to go down there in person to follow the journey, to show what they’re escaping from. It might be impossible to do it without endangering them or risking my own life. But I can’t make a responsible film without actually being there.”

  “But that’s crazy. You’ll be killed.”

  He shrugged and lifted his tea mug. “Not necessarily. Other people have done it.
Plenty of journalists have gone down there to report. The BBC has footage of kids sniffing glue in San Pedro Sula, kids working in the dumps, bodies lying in the street. It’s already been filmed. It’s already out there, but people aren’t seeing it. That’s because no one’s bothered to make a commercial, full-length film yet, something people will actually go watch. If I want to do it right, I have to go myself and get my own footage. I have to ride the Train of Death, so to speak.”

  He smiled through the steam of his tea, and I felt a mix of aversion and awe, along with a flash of regret that I’d never introduced him to you, Elise. I was sure you’d never met anyone like him and probably never would.

  You called me at eight the next morning. I shouldn’t have been surprised that you’d seen the tabloid hysteria by now. There was no safe place anywhere, not even in your island paradise. It must have been the middle of the night for you when you called. You must have been suffering, waiting until the hour I’d be awake to answer the phone. I let the call go to voicemail and listened to the message later, while Paul was in the shower. I could barely make out your words, you were sobbing so noisily.

  “I know it was Jessica Starck who did it,” you gasped. “It’s obvious, because she talked about Cecconi’s. She doesn’t even care that I know. I’m going to talk to my lawyer about suing her. It’s libel or slander or one of those. That evil, malicious bitch.” There was a jumbled pause, in which you might have wiped your nose, collected yourself. “Call me back, Abby. I really need to talk to you.”