The Paper Palace

by Miranda Cowley Heller

  The first few times we try to put the boat in, it is whipped back to shore before we can get the dagger board down. Conrad yelps in pain as the boat crashes into his shin. My mother watches from the beach, calling out useless directions.

  “You all hop in,” Leo says. “One last push.”

  “This isn’t going to work, Leo,” I say from the boat. “It’s too rough.”

  “You’re probably right. But we’ve come this far.”

  “I think I’m going to bail.” Conrad is clearly nervous.

  “Come with us. It’ll be fun,” Jonas says. But there is a meanness I’ve never heard before.

  At that moment, Leo catches a break between the waves, shoves us hard, and suddenly we are heeling, ripping out to sea. The wind cracks the white sail taut. Conrad sits on the bow, his legs dangling over the edge, skimming the water like thick pink lures.

  “I can’t look at him,” Jonas says to me under his breath.

  “You have to pretend everything’s fine. You promised me.”

  “Why?” Jonas whispers. “How can you even talk to him?”

  “I can’t. But I don’t have much choice, do I? I live with him.”

  “As a matter of fact, you do. If your mother knew—”

  “My mother will never, ever know.”

  “You can’t let him get away with it, Elle.”

  “Shut up!” I hiss. “Pull in your legs!” I call out to Conrad. “You could get bitten by a shark.” Jonas turns away from me, his lips an angry pinch. The waves froth and nip at our little boat as it picks up speed.

  Conrad pulls himself into a crossed-leg position. The bottoms of his feet are thickly calloused, and I can see small hairline splits running up his heels where he has picked the dead skin away. He looks over at me, smiles. “You were right. This is pretty cool.”

  He spits his chewing gum into the ocean. I watch it sink in the foam of our wake. I pull a Fresca out of the cooler. “Want one?” I toss Conrad the can.

  “Thanks.” He pulls off the aluminum pop-top and throws it overboard.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Jonas calls out. “A bird could choke on it.”

  “Right. Like anyone can see me,” Conrad scoffs.

  “That’s not the point,” Jonas says. “I see you.”

  “I think I’ll live.”

  “Asshole,” Jonas mutters under his breath.

  The shoreline dwindles away behind us. I can barely make out my mother waving from the beach.

  A large swell lifts us up and then drops us with a thud.

  “Jesus,” Conrad yells at Jonas as the water soaks his clothes. “I thought the whole point of dragging you along was you know how to sail.”

  “Be my guest,” Jonas says, and lets go of the tiller.

  “Dick.” Conrad stands up and starts inching toward us.

  I feel a shift in the sea as our little boat loses its grip on the waves. “Jonas, please don’t be an idiot. We’ll breach.”

  Jonas says nothing, but he grabs the tiller.

  Another wave brings us crashing down.

  “We’re getting too far out,” I say. “Loosen the sheet, or we’re going to pass the Point.”

  “Fine,” Jonas says. “I’ll come about.” He pulls in the ropes and prepares to turn. “Conrad, sit down. Watch out for the boom,” he yells.

  Conrad gives him the finger. He smiles at me. His teeth look like Chiclets.

  When the boom hits him, I watch him topple, then lurch into the sea. He comes up a moment later, flailing behind the boat.

  “Stop,” I scream at Jonas. “Stop the boat.”

  Jonas slacks the mainsheet, and our boat slows. There’s an orange life preserver in the well, and I try to untie it, but my fingers fumble on the wet knot.

  “Help!” Conrad screams as our boat drifts farther and farther away from him. “Get me out of here!” He is panicking, gagging for breath.

  “Take your sweatshirt off, it’s weighing you down,” I yell, struggling to get the life preserver free.

  “Jesus Christ, you stupid bitch. Just throw me the thingy.”

  “I’m trying,” I say. But I sit down, numb. Jonas puts his hand over mine, holds it still.

  When the next wave comes, Conrad is lifted up out of the water, his face white with terror. He reaches for me.

  Book Three

  ◆

  PETER

  19

  1989. February, London.

  I am racing down Elgin Crescent toward the Ladbroke Grove tube station, trying to make the last train back to Mile End. It’s late, and the damp night air is bone-chilling. I’ve had too much to drink and my bladder is about to burst. I’m considering squatting between two cars, when a heavyset man steps out in front of me and asks for my wallet. He has a shaved head and a swastika tattoo on his neck. The pubs have just closed, and there are people falling into the streets, but there is no way I am saying no to a man with a knife. I hand him the cash in my pocket.

  “Your ring,” he says.

  “It’s nothing,” I say. “It’s worthless.”

  “Fucking ring, slag,” he says, and punches me in the stomach.

  I double over. There’s a scroll going across the inside of my head, reading Stop being an idiot, but somehow I can’t seem to connect thought to action.

  The man grabs my hand and tries to twist the ring off my finger.

  “Fuck you,” I say, and spit in his face.

  He wipes his face with his sleeve before backhanding me so hard my teeth rattle.

  I deserve this.

  1983. August, the Back Woods.

  It is three days before Conrad’s body washes up on shore, a few miles down the coast. A local mother and her two small children find his body. At first, they think the bloated corpse is a dead seal. His ears have been nibbled at by crabs. I am in my cabin under a blanket, hiding from Leo’s wails, when the door opens and Jonas comes in. He is shaking, pale-faced. I crawl out from under the covers and wrap my arms tight around him. Rest my head on his shoulder. I cannot see his face, but it doesn’t matter. I know he is crying, because I am, too.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

  We sit like that for a long time, holding each other in the quiet, Jonas’s heart beating against mine.

  “No one can ever know,” Jonas says. “Blood oath.”

  “No one,” I say. There’s a safety pin on my bureau. We prick our thumbs, each squeeze out a drop of blood, press them together.

  Jonas wipes his hand off on his shorts. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a silver ring with a green glass stone, puts it in the palm of my hand. I squeeze my fingers tight around it. It feels cold; one of the metal prongs that holds in the glass bites at my life line.

  “I love you, Elle,” he says.

  I slide the ring onto my ring finger, put my hand in his.

  I love him, too.

  * * *

  —

  The following summer Jonas doesn’t come back to the Woods. He’s at a camp in northern Maine, his mother tells me in a curt voice when I call the house. Jonas writes me only one letter that summer. The blackflies are terrible, he says, but he is learning to make a birchbark canoe. He has seen a giant moose. Did I know that a group of bears is called a sloth? There are snappers in the lake. He misses me more than anything, he says, but it is better this way. And though I know he’s right and that I am the one who did this to us, I feel devastated, abandoned. As if he has chosen camp over me, not because of me.

  1989. February, London.

  I stumble to the ground, drooling a mouthful of blood onto the sidewalk.

  “I’ve had enough out of you, stupid twat,” the man says.

  I take Jonas’s ring off my finger and am handing it over when someone steps out of the shadows behind hi
m.

  “Hey. Stop that.”

  “Fuck off, ya cunt,” Pig Face says, and then collapses to the ground in front of me.

  A man stands over him looking slightly shocked. He is holding a tire iron in his hand. “I had it in the boot,” he says, nodding toward a banged-up Rover parked behind him. He’s tall and rangy, late twenties maybe, wearing a moth-eaten corduroy jacket and a thin woolen scarf on a freezing February night. Brits always insist on acting as if weather doesn’t exist. It starts pouring rain and they just turn their collars up. I notice, as I get to my feet, that his brown leather brogues look custom made.

  “We might want to fuck off out of here,” he says. “He’ll be a bit cross when he comes to. Can I walk you somewhere?”

  “Shouldn’t we call the cops?”

  “Ah.” He smiles. “American. That would explain the stupidity of wandering London streets alone at night.”

  I still haven’t quite gotten my breath back, but I manage to spit, “Maybe I’m safer here with him.”

  “Right, then. As you like.” He fishes a pack of Rothmans out of his jacket pocket, lights up, drops the tire iron back in his trunk, and slams it shut. “Sure you don’t want a lift somewhere? Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He pulls a parking ticket off his windscreen.

  Pig Face is still unconscious at my feet, but now he moans. I watch, fascinated, as a thin stream of white breath, like cigarette smoke, exhales from his slack mouth. I am tempted to kick him.

  “Are you an axe murderer?”

  He laughs. “Yes, but not tonight. Too cold.”

  “Actually, a lift would be great.”

  “Peter.” He holds out his hand.

  1983. August, Memphis, Tennessee.

  The funeral is in Memphis. My mother meets Leo’s ex-wife for the first time in the shade of an old magnolia, beside an open grave. I watch droplets of sweat run down the priest’s neck into his stiff white collar. Leo plays out taps on his saxophone as Conrad’s coffin is lowered into the moist soil. Halfway through, his breath falters. The saxaphone echoes a ragged sob. My eyes are dry. I know I should cry. I want to, but I can’t. I have no right. The ex-wife looks at me with hatred, and I’m certain she knows. She is wearing nude hose and little pinched-toe pumps. She holds pop-eyed, pasty Rosemary tight against her thin black cotton dress. Rosemary smiles at me and gives a little wave, as if she’s just spotted me across the bleachers at a basketball game. Her mother’s knees buckle. Rosemary steadies her, looks away.

  Afterward, Leo takes me, Mum, and Anna for a quick lunch at a Chinese restaurant, where every dish is full of hearts of palm and none of us speaks. At three o’clock we drop him at his old house for the reception. It is slightly dilapidated—white clapboard with a covered porch held up by big columns. Corinthian, Leo tells us, distracted. They seem too fancy for the house, too hopeful, and it makes me sad. In the front yard are two crepe myrtles, the ground below them carpeted with flowers that have dropped off and turned into bits of colored paper. Next to the front door is an umbrella stand shaped like an alligator with its mouth wide open. I can’t imagine Leo ever living here.

  Mum gives Leo’s hand a squeeze. “Sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”

  “Best not. I need time with them.”

  Mum nods. “When should I collect you?”

  “I’ll take a cab back to the motel,” he says.

  We sit in the rental car and watch him disappear into the sagging wooden house. Inside, I can hear a floor fan whirring. Someone is sobbing.

  We are almost back at the motel when Mum pulls off the highway into a strip mall.

  “I need to make a pit stop.” She hands me and Anna five dollars each. “Treat yourselves.” She disappears into the pharmacy.

  “What the hell are we supposed to do with ten dollars in a Memphis strip mall?” Anna says.

  “Ice cream?”

  “The last thing I need is more calories. I’d rather die.”

  “Nice,” I say.

  “What?” she says. “You want to be fat?”

  “‘I’d rather die’?”

  She looks at me blankly.

  “Very sensitive,” I say.

  “Oh. Right. Crap.” For a second her face freezes. Then she starts to laugh. Suddenly I’m laughing, too, a high-pitched hysteria, so hard that, at last, tears stream down my face.

  “Girls?” Mum walks up to us. She’s carrying a small white paper bag from Fred’s Pharmacy. Her beautiful face looks tired, worn thin. “Care to share the joke? I could use a good laugh.”

  “It must have been the week before Conrad died,” I hear my mother talking on the phone in her bedroom. “We haven’t made love since.”

  We’ve been back in New York for a few days. The city is sticky. The banana-vomit smell of rotting garbage rises from the streets. No matter what we do, we end up with big sweat marks in the armpits of our shirts. Air conditioners drip rancid water onto the sidewalks below. Our apartment is sweltering and close with dust and mothballs and the sweet odor of cockroaches in the walls. Everyone hates being here, but Leo can’t go back to the woods. He blames himself for the accident: he’s the one who insisted we go sailing that day. He pushed the boat out even though the waves were too rough. At night his thoughts, his blame, spiral outward. He stomps back and forth in the living room, scotch in hand, ranting at my mother, a broken record of what-ifs, looking for answers he can’t find. Why didn’t I make him wear a life jacket? Why was the life preserver tied with a double knot? How could no one have noticed? Did Conrad see the wave that took him? Did he know?

  “No,” I say, my throat constricting on itself. “He never saw it coming.”

  Now that Conrad is gone, Anna has her old bedroom back. Every time Leo walks past the room he looks at her as if her presence there is a betrayal.

  “I need to get the fuck out of here and go back to L.A.,” Anna says to me. “It’s like we’re living in a morgue with an angry goat.”

  It makes no sense, but I know what she means.

  “Don’t ask me that,” Leo screams. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it.”

  “It’s not my fault,” my mother pleads.

  The door to their room is closed, but I can hear the shouting through my bedroom wall. There’s a loud crash and then the sound of glass breaking.

  “Get rid of it,” Leo shouts.

  “Stop it,” Mum yells. “Stop it! That was my grandmother’s lamp.”

  “Fuck your grandmother.”

  “Please. I love you.”

  The bedroom door opens and Leo slams past me, runs out of our apartment, out of the building, into the hot night. My mother sobs in her room. I force myself to listen until, unable to stand another second, I put my pillow over my head.

  Five weeks later, Leo tells us he’s moving out. He packs his bags, his saxophone, and kisses my mother goodbye.

  “Don’t go. Please don’t go,” she begs.

  She stands there, gripping his arm, lonely already, even before he has gone. When the door shuts behind him, she goes to the window and waits until he appears, watches as he trudges down the street, away from her. She is already beginning to show.

  1984. May, New York.

  The baby dies during my mother’s labor. The umbilical cord tears, the baby cannot breathe, suffocating in amniotic fluid. They try everything to save it. They rip and pull, tear her vaginal wall, her perineum; doctors screaming, nurses running. It is a boy. Tiny and blue, like a Picasso child. Leo has disappeared and left no forwarding number, so he never learns that both of his sons have drowned.

  My father comes with me to the hospital to collect Mum. He pushes her wheelchair out to the curb, careful not to hit any bumps. There’s a Checker cab waiting for us. My mother’s layette bag of washed and folded baby clothes is slung over the back of the wheelchair. She doesn’t notice, as we drive awa
y, that my father has left it hanging there. Out the rear window, I watch it swinging back and forth before it finally stills.

  The cherry blossoms are in bloom along Fifth Avenue, bathed in sunlight.

  “I love this time of year,” my mother says. “We should have a picnic. We can make cucumber sandwiches.” Her eyes are hollow.

  “Let’s just get you home,” my father says. “Elle made soup, and I put a ripe avocado and a head of Boston lettuce in the icebox. I’ll run out after we get you settled and pick up some bourbon. We can all use it.”

  “I need to find Leo. I need to tell him.”

  “Yes,” my father says, “I’m working on it.”

  There is something different in his voice, an authority and a tenderness I don’t recognize. As the taxi speeds us toward home it occurs to me that for the first time in my life, I have parents.

  The cab meter ticks up slowly. “Do you think this would have happened if he had stayed?” my mother says. Her hair is flat, her strong beautiful face puffy and red.

  My father takes her hand. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “They did everything they could. It’s no one’s fault.”

  “It has to be,” she says.

  And I know she’s right.

  20

  1989. February, London.

  Halfway back to Mile End I ask Peter to pull over so I can pee. It is London, which translates as: every fucking place in the city is closed after eleven.

  “Can you wait five minutes?” he asks.

  “If I could wait, I wouldn’t be suggesting that I pull my pants down in front of a total stranger to piss in the street.”

  “Right. Duly noted. Lovely.” Peter pulls the car over on a narrow, cobbled street. “Off you go, then.”

  I squat down behind a tree, praying that no one looks out of the row house windows behind me. My thighs glow white in the pale light of a streetlamp. I groan, stomach sore from Pig Face’s beating. A puddle forms beneath me on the freezing ground. I move my feet out of the way as it makes a break for my shoes. I have never felt such pure relief. When I stand to pull up my jeans and underpants, Peter is watching me from the car. He laughs when I catch him, covers his eyes in mock dismay.