Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  We repacked the beachmobile in a daze and must have driven off leaving the folded umbrella leaning against a tree I’d parked beneath for shade.

  That night, Mariel called to say she’d just realized her Italian umbrella was missing. I felt I’d left something behind, as well, though I couldn’t say what. Truth be told, the umbrella was ratty—lopsided, rust-stained, mildewed—an anomaly, given her otherwise tastefully chosen beach gear. When I offered to buy her a new one, she was insulted that I’d think it was a matter of money. Her sense of loss over an umbrella seemed at odds with her avowed disregard for the past. It was well after dark when she called, and the beach we’d happened upon was an hour and a half away down an unlit back road. I wasn’t sure I could locate it again even in daylight. Although I didn’t hold much hope for finding the umbrella, I offered to go back with her the next morning.

  In the middle of the night, unable to sleep, Mariel unhitched the horse trailer from her pickup and drove back alone. The entrance to the beach was unmarked and she wasn’t sure she’d found the right turnoff. Her headlights followed a sandy two-track to a crest of hissing pines. On the other side, a dune descended to the water. She could hear the scuff of combers. She dug a balky flashlight from the glove compartment and stepped out but she couldn’t identify the tree we’d parked beneath. She searched around each tree as her flashlight flickered and died. While she pounded the battery chamber against her palm, marbled clouds parted above, revealing a moon of luminescent blue.

  Oh, look at the moon! she told herself.

  The vision was worth the drive. Then, across the beach, near the water’s edge, she saw the silhouette of an umbrella. She distinctly remembered uprooting her umbrella as we’d gathered our things from the sand, and my asking her, “How could I not love you?” to which she’d replied, “A rhetorical question?”

  Wind in her face, she skidded down the dune, and jogged past the embers of a driftwood fire reflecting off shards of wine jugs, expecting the silhouette to be revealed as an optical illusion, a mirage of moon glow. A snatch of song stopped her in her tracks. You saw me standing alone: over the surf, a voice carried the melody of “Blue Moon” before a gust blew it away. Shadows thrusting beneath the umbrella seemed to possess the substance of bodies. It’s just kids, lovers, she thought. At the same instant, she realized how alone she was—no one even knew she was there. The wind thrashed the water and drove the sky. A fuming collision of clouds snuffed the moon just as a draft lifted the umbrella off the sand, whisking the shadows beneath it into darkness. Mariel had the urge to flee back to her pickup before she was erased, but she’d come too far to give up.

  She chased the umbrella as it wheeled along the shore and was sucked into the surf. She waded in, grabbing for the canvas canopy, but the backwash ripped it away, knocking her off balance. She floundered to her feet, lunged for the umbrella, and was knocked down again. Choking, she fought to surface against an undertow of raking hands. She was clubbed across the mouth but managed to seize the bobbing pole of the umbrella and, in a momentary trough between waves, drag it ashore.

  She knelt on the beach gasping for breath, already shivering, suddenly aware the waves had shredded her blouse. The umbrella, waterlogged and caked with sand, was as ungainly in the wind as the sail of a dismasted boat. Its ribs were bent, but she was able to fold it partially and lug it up the dune. She’d lost the flashlight and was terrified she’d lost her truck keys, too, but they were wadded in wet Kleenex in the pocket of her jeans.

  By cab light, she dabbed the Kleenex over her bloodied breasts looking for where she’d been cut until she realized the blood was drooling from her split lip. It felt to her tongue as if she’d chipped a canine. She loaded the umbrella into the truck bed and, careful not to spin the tires in the sand, got the hell out of there.

  The next day, when she told me the story, I chastised her for going alone. “You should have called me,” I said.

  “I wasn’t going to wake you at two a.m. If I hadn’t gone then, I’d have lost it.”

  When I asked what it was about the umbrella that made it so important, she answered that what had drawn her to me was that I seemed to understand instinctively that a person is defined by the present—and by the possibility of change that living in the present affords. The past, as far as she was concerned, was another word for stasis; the only means of changing the past was to lie about it. She’d thought I agreed that it wasn’t necessary for people to know every little boring, neurotic detail about each other. The way she said it implied that maybe her assumptions about me had been wrong.

  I didn’t reply, but her rebuke bothered me, and not just because it was unfair—from the time we’d met I’d been anything but overly inquisitive. What I found disturbing was that the more defensive she became, the less she seemed to realize how sketchy her past actually was.

  I had presumed that part of the attraction between us was that we were both loners. As loners do, we’d made a private world together. What did I care, at least at first, about her past? The relationships I’d had until then never lasted long enough for history and its supposed predictive power to matter. It seemed enough that Mariel was beautiful to me. If that was a questionably romantic basis for a relationship, then I was willing to admit, at least in retrospect, to having chosen—in that unconscious way one chooses without being aware that one has—a life of sensation over a life of meaning. Maybe the real choice I made was to accept the consequences. Perhaps beauty was different in Keats’s time, but I never expected that beauty, at least physical beauty, would equate with truth.

  The lost umbrella, a small thing in itself, was a turning point. Until her strange behavior about it, I hadn’t admitted to myself that Mariel was in hiding, perhaps simply hiding how disconnected she was. Isn’t that, after all, the secret we most keep both from the world and from ourselves—not what we know, but the extent of our ignorance? True or not, the thought consoled me. The incident with the umbrella confirmed what she had already intimated: the kind of men Mariel was attracted to were the kind who didn’t ask questions. That had narrowed the field to someone like me.

  She didn’t begrudge me a past. I’d told her my well-rehearsed repertoire of stories about growing up as an alienated army brat, the pacifist son of an alcoholic drill-sergeant father whose reassignments from military base to military base—not to mention all the schools from which I’d been expelled along the way—ensured I was from nowhere. She’d listen politely, but did not reciprocate. After a while I stopped recounting my past, as if I didn’t have one either. But rather than accept ours as a relationship in the present tense, I secretly began to imagine for her a past preferable to my own, with the beach umbrella at its epicenter.

  3

  With no more origin than a wildflower, the umbrella sprouted, gaily striped, from the pebble beach of a nameless cove where she went to sunbathe nude. That was the summer when, after graduating from art school, she’d taken her first trip abroad. If not for the umbrella, the cove wouldn’t have been visible from the water. It couldn’t be accessed by land. She had discovered it one morning when, following a pod of dolphins, she pedaled her rented pedalo beyond its usual range. Stretched in the umbrella’s shade was a young man with golden hair and bronze skin, wearing green swim goggles. There was no beached boat, no indication of how he’d arrived, and she had the curious thought he might be the lifeguard there until she noticed his trident spear.

  Each successive morning she returned to find him waiting.

  Each evening she retired to an affordable pensione that had formerly been a convent for an order of nuns who’d taken the vow of silence. The converted cells were clean and spare: desk, chair, a narrow bed lit by a vigil candle. Above the washstand, where one might expect a mirror, a crucifix hung on the whitewashed wall. There, behind the bolted door, instead of keeping a journal she sketched from memory studies of the shapes that her body had composed that day in concert with the young man’s.

  Those figure dra
wings were the only subject in the leather-bound sketchbook she had bought in Florence. If she colored in the shadow of the umbrella in charcoal, then she drew their bodies in pastels. If the umbrella was sketched so that its stripes swirled like a psychedelic color wheel, then their bodies were inky shadows shaded with graphite. No matter how kinetic the image, the tension between light and shadow suspended it upon the stillness of the deckled page. Still, as the pages turned, the swish of ocean, the foam soaking into pebbles, the scuttle of crabs, the hum of swallows swooping along the cliff walls, the punctuated language of dolphins cruising just offshore, became audible. In school, she had been taught to control the medium. What she learned in the shade of the umbrella and then transcribed in her cell was surrender. Her drawings were not about release, they were release—an immersion into an ungovernable invention that swept her beyond anything she might have conceived in school, let alone anything she might have dared to reveal.

  On the night she drew on the last page in the sketchbook, she fell asleep and dreamed that she continued to draw, first on the bedsheet, and then across the white walls. Aroused by the scenes she’d depicted, she opened her eyes to find the drawings from her dreams frescoed across her room. That morning, before leaving for the cove, she took the crucifix down from the wall now illuminated as if to make the cell a temple to Venus, and hid it beneath her mattress. She packed her suitcase and set it beside the door. She sealed the sketchbook in waterproof wrappings with candle wax and brought it to give to the young man.

  But as she pedaled up and over swells, the marker of the umbrella was nowhere to be seen and the location of the secret cove had disappeared with it. Crystalline reflections of water marbled the outcroppings of cliffs, fish leaped around her, and when she gazed along the light shafting into the clear indigo, it appeared as if the pedalo were suspended on a glittering shoal of sardines. Dolphins shot through the fish in a frenzy of feeding, and then she saw the flash of the young man’s body. The tint of water gave his golden hair and skin a verdigris cast. Staring up at her, trident in hand, he ascended with a surge of such streamlined force that for a moment she wondered if he’d forgotten she was bound to air and might be rising to carry her under. His lips brushed the underside of her reflection, and he arched down without breaking the surface, which was now mirror-slick with the oil of the sardines. She realized then that during those timeless earlier days the pod had circled, waiting, calling the dolphin-rider back. Pursued by plunging gulls and cavorting dolphins, the school of fish moved out to sea. She didn’t follow.

  The folded umbrella bobbed amid the flotsam along the salt-bleached, guano-stained dolomite cliffs. She lifted it dripping from the water, and in return released her sketchbook to the sea. “Someone will find you,” she whispered as it floated into that blue expanse of water between the parentheses of horizon and cliffs. She knew that when she returned to the pensione, her suitcase would be waiting outside the gate and the gate would be locked.

  4

  After her parents were numbered among the victims of a rogue wave that took the cruise ship Guarda La Luna to the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle, she was placed in the care of her only living relative, an aunt whom she’d never met—had never so much as heard of—her mother’s identical twin.

  At least, that was the account she was given of how she came to awaken in this drafty, listing house that creaked in time to the creaking of the frozen cove. Supposedly, upon hearing that her parents were lost at sea, she fainted and fell, striking her temple on the runner of a rocking chair. When she regained consciousness, she had amnesia. The doctors had assured her aunt that in such cases memory usually returns, though they couldn’t say when.

  The Girl tried to visualize a room with a rocking chair, perhaps because she could summon up its creaking with each gust off the cove—or had loss struck so suddenly that she became acutely aware of the teetering of a once-stable world? But the detail of the rocking chair failed to promote any recall of the house where she’d been born and raised.

  “Your mother, bless her soul, shawled in a vermilion afghan, nursed you on that rocker. Even after you were weaned, my dear, whenever you were upset or afraid, your mother would swaddle you in that afghan and rock you to sleep,” her aunt told her. “If she could, she’d rock you now.”

  The Girl stared out the bay windows at the cove, unsure as to whether her amnesia might be gradually lifting, or if she were merely growing familiar with the absence of all she’d forgotten. She could hear an ocean hidden beneath the ice, one that maintained its intimate connection with the moon. Its tides still rose and fell, its waves washed in and out. The rhythms entranced her. Within the trance, the past signaled at her peripheral vision, too elusive to be seen directly. Remembering was like trying to call back a dream whose fragmented imagery and troubling emotion had bled into her waking hours. Its protean transformations defied the logic of language and the linearity of a story.

  “Imagine a white sea visible from a deserted house whose windowpanes flash as if the house were wearing spectacles. How myopic that house must be to need so many pairs! It has no idea of who could be looking out and yet each window has a different view.”

  “My dear, you must be careful not to confuse amnesia with all that’s missing, all that’s mysterious in life,” Auntie replied. She wore a vermilion kimono that kept falling open to expose her breasts; silver bracelets jangled up her forearms when she drank, revealing scarred wrists. Before a window streaming light and dander, she sipped what she called her afternoon zombie from a cut-glass tumbler shaded by a toothpick parasol. “I’d guess any number of quote ‘normal’ folks feel to some degree a disassociation similar to what you’re describing, my dear, not to mention all the garden-variety mystics, seers, and poets. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to re-create the past. Once it returns, you might find yourself grateful for your respite from it.”

  The Girl didn’t disagree. She became convinced that finding herself wasn’t an exercise in recalling her prior life—that was futile, anyway. Rather she needed to dream it. When after her fall she’d regained consciousness, but as a stranger to herself, she had been told her name. Instead of accepting it on faith, she was determined to wait until she remembered it unaided before she accepted it. Until then she would continue to regard herself in the third person as “the Girl.”

  Auntie always addressed her as “my dear.”

  “My dear, come summer when the lifeguards return, the sea air will do you good, but it’s too dangerous to set foot outside now. The ice appears firm, which only makes it more treacherous.”

  “My dear, this house is your home now. Feel free to treat it as your own, but I must ask you not to venture up the stairs. The upper floor is in disrepair, and the attic a den of rabid bats. I lack the funds to rehab. Besides, there’s nothing up there of interest.”

  “My dear, if you are going to sit all day staring out, at least put on a sweater. This old house is drafty. Here, this belonged to your mother when she was a girl, or perhaps it was mine, we shared everything. Our parents couldn’t tell us apart. Even we couldn’t tell each other apart except that one of us was right-handed and the other left. Now, isn’t that more comfy?”

  The corridor warped with dampness on the forbidden second floor was lined with locked, empty rooms. Auntie complained that when winter turned bitter enough to freeze the cove, the sprawling house became too expensive to heat and she’d had to take in roomers, but they’d repeatedly defaulted on the rent, leaving her no choice but to lock them out and keep their personal belongings as collateral. Others—a lifeguard, a scissor-sharpener, a hurdy-gurdy man, and a ventriloquist among them—simply disappeared, leaving the tools of their trades behind. Tragic outcome aside, Auntie said, the Girl’s parents had had the right idea of escaping to the Tropics. Auntie herself could only fantasize about such a trip, as what scant funds she had were tied up in this ramshackle place.

  “At least, my dear, once the settlement comes in you won’t have to scrape by as
I have. We—you—should have collected something already but for the crooked lawyers’ claim that the cruise line is exempt from liability in the case of a rogue wave. It’s a game to lawyers to dicker over the price of grief. But the day of reckoning will come.”

  Until it did, Auntie kept her own reckoning. While Auntie slept through the late afternoons, with the zombie tumbler tumbled over beside her canopy bed, the Girl would sneak into the study and open the black ledger. In ink the shade of grenadine, beneath columns labeled MY DEAR! a running account in Auntie’s smeary left-handed scrawl detailed each steaming cup of cocoa, each bobbing marshmallow, each animal cracker—enumerated by name: giraffe, monkey, kangaroo—each bonbon, macaroon, and petit four. There was a separate column for SOAP—a fresh bar every morning: lavender, verbena, coconut, chamomile, rosemary. Auntie had overlooked the sliver of brown floor soap pried from the bottom of a bucket. BUBBLEBATH shared a column with SHAMPOO. RIBBONS included bows, barrettes, combs, tiaras. There were columns for SILK & SATIN, UNDIES, DOLLS & TEDDY BEARS—and a figure beside each item for what Auntie was owed. Each page concluded with an updated tabulation plus the usurious interest on the ever-larger reimbursement Auntie expected when the settlement came in.

  The Girl stood at the end of the corridor of locked doors, before the full-length mirror framed in black like a sympathy card. Through a fog of dust a girl in a moth-eaten sweater who lived on prunes, stale oyster crackers, and a faint snowfall of Kraft’s Parmesan stared blankly back, her hair unwashed for weeks, bangs trimmed with a serrated bread knife that likely had been used to butcher liver. As usual, the Girl’s own gaunt twin seemed in no mood to commune. Somewhere a toilet flushed. The water in the old house gasped out gritty with rust and too cold to bathe in.

  The first time the Girl heard the mewing she became alarmed that, unbeknownst to Auntie, one of the roomers had abandoned a kitten. Then it was a puppy whining, and then a chattering that caused her to wonder if the hurdy-gurdy man had left without his monkey. She proceeded door by door along the corridor, and heard a parakeet repeating what presumably was his name: “Fine Feather, Fine Feather.” The puppy’s whines intensified into the sparking squeal of a grindstone honing shears. She paused to twirl to a tarantella freshly cranked from an ancient barrel organ. That wooden clacking from behind the blue door—the only painted one—was, she supposed, the ventriloquist’s abandoned dummy silently singing.