The Paper Wasp

by Lauren Acampora

  My pulse responded to the sound of your voice. Its inflections were so familiar and sweet, like sugar in my ear, so that my first instinct was to call you back, to say the words that would soothe and reassure you. It was difficult, as I knew it would be, to listen to the message and do nothing. But I’d closed that door, for your good and my own, and it had to stay closed.

  At the shelter, Paul led the interview while I assisted with the camera. Yolanda wore a fuchsia sundress that brightened her face, and although she spoke in a clipped, halting way—attempting to pepper her Spanish with a few English words—it was clear that she wanted to tell her story as well as she could. Paul nodded when she paused, gently encouraging her. His voice was soft and reassuring. Ronald, the gruff middle-aged cameraman, demonstrated the camera’s operation. I hovered, watching his movements while listening to the translator’s clinical rendition of Yolanda’s saga. For a thousand dollars, her parents had hired the coyote who raped her in transit. It was part of the deal, he told her. Her parents had known that, he said. He paid off the gang that approached them, but not before allowing one of the members to assault her on the side of the road near Tenosique. He told her afterward that they’d wanted to do worse, but he’d saved her life.

  While she was detailing the next stage of her journey, I felt my phone vibrate in the back pocket of my jeans.

  I listened to the message later, while riding in the car with Paul. Your voice in my ear again: “We’re coming home early. It’s terrible, Abby. Raf isn’t even defending himself. He’s just shrugging it off, like it’s no big deal, like my career isn’t going to be totally ruined by this. Abby, call me back. I need to talk to you.”

  I turned the phone off without comment, and Paul didn’t ask who’d called. Your drama seemed so small now compared with the plight of the children. You seemed more self-absorbed, shallower than ever. Paul and I went to a diner and ordered pancakes for lunch. I still heard your words as I listened to him talk about the film. Abby, call me back. I need to talk to you.

  “It’s just about collecting raw footage now,” Paul said. “The more the better. I don’t know yet which strands we’re going to follow.” As he poured syrup, he said, matter-of-factly, “I’m thinking we should go to Yolanda’s hometown in Honduras to film, because she’s told me so much about it already.”

  I chewed my pancake quietly. It didn’t seem right to interrupt him, to tell him I had no intention of going to Honduras. I said nothing as he complained that we couldn’t leave sooner. First, he had to crew the next studio project he’d signed on for—a dumb comedy in Atlanta. “You’re welcome to stay in my house while I’m gone, if you want,” he said, and those were the words I wanted to hear.

  Back in the cabin, I unpacked the rest of my things. When I took the drawings out of my backpack, Paul said, “What are those?” and I showed them to him. He looked at my pictures silently, his eyes traveling across each page.

  “There are more of them back in Michigan,” I offered. I waited for words of admiration but reminded myself that he wasn’t the effusive type. Still, I was stung when he nodded and said nothing. I pulled the drawings away from him and slid them into a drawer.

  Later, we lay down on the futon together, and he helped me undress in his slow, deliberate manner. I said nothing about my inexperience. I was unable to speak. I thought of you and Rafael together, remembered the rising sounds from your bedroom. Paul’s body was pale, spiked with coarse hair, and muscled in a way that put me in mind of an archangel warrior. I let him put my limbs where he wanted. As we folded together, naked, I tried to turn off my scrabbling mind, to simply feel the sensations as they came, to let my unconscious and conscious selves merge in harmony. But as we moved on the futon, I couldn’t override the feeling of being dangerously exposed. I imagined the two of us in Honduras, the drug gangs executing us both, a bullet to each of our heads. I imagined our bare bodies left in the road to be scavenged by buzzards.

  The next message you left was distraught. “Abby, I found your letter. Please come home. You can’t leave me now.” You were crying, shouting on the phone. “I understand you want to break out on your own. I get that, I really do. But you have to just come back for a little bit. I can’t get through this by myself. Raf and I had a huge fight and we aren’t speaking. I need you, Abby.”

  The desperation in your voice was like a riptide. I took the phone away from my ear and put it in my pocket. I breathed deeply. It wouldn’t be easy to stay the course, but I’d come this far already. I had to be strong, because you weren’t. Only alone could you possibly recognize the mistakes you’d made, with Rafael and with me. Only alone could you learn.

  The phone continued to vibrate in my pocket until I finally turned it off and buried it in my suitcase, deep under my clothes.

  When Paul went to Atlanta, he left me the keys to his car, and I drove to the Rhizome. In my session, I told Tello about my recurring dreams.

  “I knew you’d be an extraordinary student,” he told me. “Yes, any returning scenario is worth incubating through lucid dreaming.”

  I balked. This hadn’t been a topic in Perren’s book. “I don’t have lucid dreams.”

  “You’ll learn to create them,” he said. “First of all, while you’re awake, get into the habit of asking yourself if you are, in fact, dreaming. The cliché is to pinch yourself, and there’s some use in that. You don’t actually need to pinch, per se, but you could tug your hair or bite a finger. You can also try jumping. If you’re dreaming, you’ll float down lightly. If you build the habit of questioning your waking life, the habit will bleed into your sleep, and you’ll begin questioning your dreaming life, too. That’s what brings about lucidity, when you recognize the dream as a dream and can become an active participant.”

  Once I’d grasped the steering wheel of lucidity, Tello said, I should move about in my dream and explore the terrain. It was a balancing act, he warned, to remain both within the dream and without—at a slight remove—both participant and observer.

  “Keep a small object with you during the day as a reminder to do reality checks. You’ll see that the object will follow you into your dreams and help erode the barrier between day and night. In fact, you may even have a lucid dream tonight,” he added as I was going to the door. “It’s not unusual to experience lucidity the same night you first learn about it.”

  I thanked him for the guidance. As I was preparing to leave, he spoke again.

  “Abby, I’ve noticed that you seem to have a special gift for this work.” I turned back toward him and studied the puzzle of his face—its oval shape, the obsidian eyes, the features that never quite harmonized. “Do you agree?”

  “I don’t know.” My face heated. “I’ve always had vivid dreams.”

  “I suspect that you may be having premonitory or veridical dreams.”

  I paused. “Yes.”

  Tello leaned forward. “It’s very important that you listen to those dreams. Their messages can be truer than life.”

  “Truer than life,” I repeated.

  I began using the meteorite to incubate lucid dreams. If the meteorite changed shape when I squeezed it, I knew I was dreaming. I became omnipotent then, able to string the dream to the next scene and the next. When I dreamed of the white house on the hill now, I could follow the children into its hidden rooms. They took me to a room of clocks and showed me how the clocks were manipulated to run backward. Upon waking, I drew the gears of the clocks and the worried eyes of the children.

  When Paul returned from Atlanta, I helped him with the documentary. Eventually, I learned to operate the camera on my own when Ronald was unavailable. I stood silently in the room while Paul interviewed the children, some as young as five.

  “I never want to have children,” I told him one day, after shooting. The words were corrosive on my tongue, but I made myself say them, to mask this one truth.

  Paul blinked and looked thoughtful. “I understand that,” he said. “If anything, I’d want t
o adopt. Or be a foster parent. There are so many kids who need us already, without bringing any more in.”

  I was touched, despite myself, to hear him use the word “us,” and felt sorry for my lie.

  “You know, it would actually be great to talk with foster families who’ve taken in migrant children,” he said. “But not yet. First, I have to convince ICE to let me do a ride-along. That might take a while to accomplish. They won’t even talk to me.”

  I was quiet for a moment. “But I have to ask, if they ever did let you film a ride-along, do you really think it would help?”

  “What do you mean? Of course it would help.”

  “No, I mean, more generally.” I stopped, trying to stanch the flow of my words, but they were leaking out of me. “I mean, do you really think that making this film will help? Even if you get the funding, even if it’s a wonderful film and millions of people see it, will it change anything?”

  Paul sat across from me at the card table, his posture rigid. “You’re doubting the purpose of making the film at all?”

  “I’m not doubting the purpose, just the assumption that anything will come of it.” I wasn’t sure why I was saying these things to him.

  A shadow passed through his eyes, a prowling hawk. “It’s about awareness, Abby. People don’t even know what’s happening. Or they do know, but they think of these kids as aliens, not worth their concern. Our job is to show that these are human beings who are suffering.”

  “But the people who’ll actually go to see the film already know that. I just keep thinking of the children, putting their pain on camera. There’s something wrong about it. And there’s something wrong about putting all those anguished kids in people’s faces, making their hearts bleed, when there’s nothing they can do to help.”

  Paul’s mouth was a taut line. “They can demand policy change.”

  I was quiet. It would be unkind to continue.

  For weeks, you continued to call and leave overwrought messages, even though I never called back. Instead, I wrote a letter with pen and paper. In the letter, I asked you to stop trying to reach me. It was interfering with the distance we both needed and sabotaging any hope you might have of saving your marriage. It hurt me to write the words, but I wrote them well, in a tone that was kind but detached. I sent the letter without a return address.

  You stopped calling after that, and over the next months, I went back to following you through the tabloids. When Paul was away on a shoot, I sat alone paging through them, witnessing the course of your crisis. The cover of Us Weekly featured a photograph of you and Rafael with a jagged rip down the middle. Divorce proceedings were under way. As much as I welcomed this news, I failed to feel gladdened by it. Anonymous sources claimed to be privy to your state of mind; you were devastated but stoic, they said. You were a strong woman, and this challenge would make you even stronger. Someone used the word “empowered.” The photographs, however, told another story. You looked terrible. I gasped when I saw a picture of you outside the natural food store, with bony shoulders and a distorted abdomen, heavy makeup overpowering your features. Your expression in the pictures was contemptuous. You were drifting around Hollywood. You’d been spotted in nightclubs on Sunset Boulevard, and there was a link to a seedy musician that made me cringe, but that I didn’t believe. I had the sense that you were utterly alone. It was a necessary education, I knew, but the process was painful to see. The pictures grew steadily darker, the captions uglier. Rafael, in the meantime, had been photographed with Mireille Sauvage, who stood of equal height beside him in a necklace of yellow jewels, identical to the one she’d worn in my dream.

  I wondered if, at any moment during your downfall, you’d remembered my engagement card. I wondered if you’d ever reflected on the verse I’d inscribed inside. The wild-briar had finally withered, as it had been destined to do, but the holly would have remained green and true. It had been your mistake to scorn it.

  The bridge dream always began the same way, but this time I was aware of its beginning, as if I’d chosen to play the reel. I gripped my meteorite and watched it flatten in my hand, betraying the dream. I walked toward the bridge, the fresh snow beneath my feet, the darkened apartment blocks, the enchanted descent of a million snow crystals. The air seemed to harden and become brittle as I pushed onward. There was no feeling in my feet. When I looked down, they were no longer touching the sidewalk, but hovering a few inches above. And then: the bridge, the headlights.

  I tipped over the railing. But this time, I was a camera, able to zoom in on details at will. There was no fear but instead a sense of wonder as I plummeted, twisting my body in midair to look at the sky, the glittered confetti falling alongside me. I had time to study the graffiti on the bridge abutments, the pink interlaced letters spelling “Mom,” the blue cartoon mouse with a wedge of cheese. The open eye, staring. I was able to slow my velocity, to feel the impact on the icy water—and what I expected to be hard, neck-breaking, was not. Instead, it was a soft invitation, a pleasant sucking, and I relaxed into it. The interior of the river was dark-veined emerald. A welcome return to a forest, a slow cradle.

  XVII.

  IN APRIL, just after Paul left for Honduras, the tabloids reported the birth of your child. When I saw the picture of you with the baby, my heart stopped. It was a vetted photograph, clearly preapproved by you or your publicist, if you still had one. You were in a hospital room, with full makeup and hair brushed over one shoulder in that virgin-mother way. The child was bundled in your arms—Amara was her name—just a pink face and dark eyes. A new feeling came through me. It wasn’t joy or jealousy, or any popular emotion, but a peculiar, discordant feeling of foreboding—a kind of instinctual awakening. A vibration began inside me, disturbing my blood. Again, as in Shelby’s trailer, a low drone came into my ears.

  For a long time, I stared at the picture of you and your daughter. I looked hard at your eyes, past the reflection of the photographers, and tried to read the message in them. The smile you gave the cameras was tightly artificial. But in your gaze I saw the truth, the proof of my suspicion. You were suffocating, silently screaming for help. You were unable to be a mother, unable to give yourself to someone else. You didn’t have enough inside you to share.

  Over the next few weeks, you appeared regularly in the magazines. Drunk in public with your baby. The sources said you were “experiencing some of the bumps of new motherhood,” but your drunkenness was plain to see from the languid eyelids, the lazy lopsided smile, the ubiquitous thermos of booze. The eye makeup was worse than before, and the clothing you wore—once carefully earthy and offbeat—now seemed sloppy. The earlier sympathy I’d felt for you barely broke through my antipathy now. You were even weaker than I’d thought. Carrying your child in some sort of woven wrap, you looked like a slattern.

  I saw the pleading in your eyes, but I knew enough to wait. I stayed in Paul’s cabin while he was gone and worked on my drawings. I drew at the card table at first, then spread the paper out on the floor. It was emancipating, a thrilling release after all the pent-up months. It felt almost adulterous to kneel in Paul’s cabin and draw. I drew the children huddled in the white house, surrounded by clocks. I colored the stripes on their blanket, and when I filled in their faces, I shamelessly borrowed the features of the young refugees.

  Paul had given in and bought a smartphone for his journey, and he kept in irregular contact. I skimmed his emails, skipping over the harrowing details of child prostitutes and bullet-riddled bus drivers. Between the lines, I gathered that he was in a town near the capital with Yolanda’s mother and younger sister. He’d seen the maras in person, the gangs with horrific face tattoos. His purity of hope was beautiful and sad—his mission the mission of a child. He’d surely be killed in Honduras. I’d written him a one-line email that said, “Come home while you still can,” which he didn’t acknowledge.

  While he was gone, I put in a request for more shifts at the Rhizome and spent almost every day there, sitting for ses
sions with Tello and tending the babies. There seemed to be a radiant new aura surrounding my charges now. They were imbued with deeper identity and purpose, each of them; they held more value than ordinary infants. The pale-eyed among them were ethereal saints, while the dark-eyed were oracles. I cherished each of their singular, exceptional faces. There were Marco and Dante, elvish twins who never cried. There was plump, golden Harper. There was serious, colicky Helen—a recent addition, adopted from China—whose mother had just begun breastfeeding her. Apparently, there were ways to do everything if the desire was strong enough.

  As much as I wanted to be in the nursery continually, I continued to avoid Wednesdays. I didn’t really think you’d return to your schedule, but I couldn’t risk seeing you. It was best to remain hidden in just two places: room seven with Tello, and the confines of the daycare. Going to the restaurant or into the gardens was too dangerous, as much as I hated the possibility of missing Perren. Of course, the chances of encountering him during the course of my narrow routine were minimal. But I was certain this would change, that this was a temporary limbo. I was certain we’d find each other soon.

  I was intimate with all the daycare occupants now, and so on a Thursday in June, I noticed the new arrival at once. I’d known, of course, that this day would eventually come, and yet it was an epiphany, like lightning from the gods. I went to the crib where the tiny infant lay. She had a shock of black hair and wide, elliptical eyes. She was neither you nor Rafael. She was something else completely. I stood staring. The women in the room seemed to be watching me, even as they hovered over other cribs or worked at the changing tables.

  There was a fog to the girl, as if she were still affixed to the tendrils of creation. Her skin appeared silted, still coated by loam from the source, and the big black eyes had knowledge in them that came from Before, that flowed straight from the Spring. She was beautiful, an exquisite dark jewel. The moment I saw her, the iron cuff at my ankle was cut. All my dreams had been advancing toward this, preparing me. I believe that on some deep level you knew what you were doing, Elise, when you brought her to me. Rationally, there was no way you could have known I was here, that I was waiting, and yet I felt that you knew.