When I turn onto Park, he is there, waiting for me in the shadows, his back up against the wall of the church. His hand darts out and grabs my arm. “Here, kitty, kitty.” He flicks open his switchblade.
We’ve been watching public service messages in school. Short black-and-white movies that warn us about rubella, eating lead paint chips, the dangers of heroin, the importance of self-defense. And I remember, now, that I am meant to face my attacker.
“I don’t like Catholic boys,” I say. “They have pink skin. It’s disgusting.” I look directly into his mean, close-set eyes, his acne-scarred face. I stab the instep of his foot with the heel of my shoe as hard as I can. And then I run—panting, terrified, harder than I have ever run in my life—until I reach the safety of home.
5:00 P.M.
“I need to get back.” I stand up and brush the sand off.
“I want to show you something first.”
“I told Finn I’d take him canoeing.”
“Ten minutes.”
I follow him along the top of the dune to where it reaches the edge of the woods. He takes my hand and plunges us into the tree line. Jonas stops in front of an overgrown thicket. “Here.”
There’s nothing but a rage of green.
“Look underneath.”
I get down on the ground and peer under the thicket. There, hidden by the overgrowth, is the old abandoned house. The house Jonas and I found when we were kids. All that’s left now is a foundation and two stone walls; the rest has been devoured by blackberry brambles and catbrier. Indigo weed climbs up the crumbling walls, strangling them in beauty.
“How did you find this again?”
He lies down on the ground beside me. Points to a hole where a door once was. “Remember the kitchen? And that room in the middle was going to be our bedroom when we got married.”
“Of course I remember. You promised to get me a double boiler. I feel kind of cheated.”
He rolls on top of me, pulls the string of my bikini top with his teeth so that it falls away, licks my breasts like a big sloppy dog.
“Stop that.” I push him away, laughing. But I can feel my sex swelling.
“Sorry. I have to.” He stares into my eyes, intense, never once looking away, as he spreads me wide, open. Enters me. When he comes, I can feel it pulsing out of him, filling me.
“Don’t move,” I whisper. “Stay inside me.” Without moving, he reaches down and, like the slightest breath, barely touches the tip of me until I sob, cry out, aching in eternity.
We lie like that, enmeshed, two bodies, one soul.
I wrap my legs tighter around him, trapping him, forcing him even deeper up inside of me. Food and water. Lust and grief. “You should never have left me,” I say. “This is a disaster.”
“You said you wanted Peter.”
“Not then. After that summer. You never came back.”
“I left for your sake. So you could start your life fresh.”
“But I didn’t. I had no one but you to talk to, no way to get any of it out of my head. Even moving to another country did nothing.”
He looks away. A steadying sadness between us. The wind has come up, ruffling the trees. A speckled alder sways, raining miniature grass-green pinecones down on us. Jonas plucks one out of my hair. “Have you ever told Peter about Conrad?”
“Of course not. We swore a blood oath. You practically cut off the tip of my finger.”
“I only meant to say.” He hesitates. “You’ve been married a long time. I would understand.”
“I wish Peter knew. I hate that there has always been a lie between us. It isn’t fair to him. But he doesn’t. And he never will.” I listen to the silence of the woods, the subtle seeping away of the day. Syrupy light spills across the forest floor, turning pine needles into splinters of copper. My words fill me with remorse. I roll free of Jonas, sit up and re-tie my bathing suit top. A dog tick makes its way up a piece of grass. It looks like a tiny watermelon seed. I put it on my thumbnail, crush it in the middle, and watch its legs splay out until I am sure it’s dead. I dig a hole in the soil and drop it in, bury it, pat the soil firm. “Anyway,” I say.
Jonas sits up, wraps his steady arms around me. “I’m sorry.”
“I have to get going. Peter will start to worry.”
“No.” I can hear my own pain in his voice. He takes my hair in his fists, kisses me. Rough, hard, unhinged. I don’t want to give in, but I kiss him back with a love that feels like drowning. The breathless desire to breathe. Moonlight and sweet junk and sharks and death and pity and vomit and hope all combined. It is too much. I need to get home to my children. To Peter. I break away, scramble to my feet, desperate.
“Elle, wait,” he says.
“Conrad ruined everything,” is all I say.
Book Two
◆
JONAS
13
1981. June, the Back Woods.
There are snapping turtles in our pond—massive prehistoric creatures lurking on the bottom, beneath the cool mud. Late in the afternoon, they dig themselves out and make their way to the pond’s glassy obsidian surface, where swarms of water boatmen zip around like quick, febrile catamarans. From the screen porch, you can see the snappers rise: first the ugly black fist of a head, then the cusp of a carapace floats into view. It’s the distance between the two silhouettes that tells you whether you are seeing the Big One—the grandfather of snappers–or just one of his smaller, Galápagos-sized progeny. Few people have ever seen him. Back Woods people say he’s a myth, or long dead—and anyway, snappers are harmless. In a hundred years, no one has ever been bitten. But I’ve seen him. I know he’s out there, living off bullfrogs and baby birds, praying for the quick flash of an orange webbed foot, the soft crunch of duckling.
The first time I saw Jonas, that day by the spring, he was a lost, tangle-headed boy following a bird. I was almost eleven, only three years older, though in my mind old enough to be his mother, when I took him by the hand and led him back to the path. I could never have imagined then that the second time I saw him, four years later, this strange child would irrevocably change my life.
* * *
—
That day I woke up anxious—a hollow, homesick feeling in my chest. My dreams had scared me: a man wanted me to eat jacket potatoes. He said he was going to kill me. I begged to see my mother one last time. There were banjo players. I pounded on the glass, but no one could hear me.
Anna was still asleep. Her spiral-bound journal had fallen open on the floor beside her bed. I was tempted to read it, but I already knew everything it would say. I reached under the mattress and pulled out my own journal. Jade silk, with a teensy lock and key. Mum had bought it for me in Chinatown after our annual New Year’s Day dim sum. Anna had chosen a red T-shirt covered in what looked like Chinese characters, but when you tilted your head sideways it said, Go Fuck Yourself! Mum bought herself a lavender bathrobe. By the time we got home, I’d already managed to lose the key to my journal. I pried open the lock with a safety pin and broke it. Which didn’t matter, since pretty much all I did was make lists of things I needed to do to make myself a better person. Things like “practice the flute for an hour every day!!” or “read Middlemarch!”
It had rained heavily the night before, and the air was waterlogged. Early morning heat raised steam off the damp pine needle paths around the camp. Already our cabin smelled of mildew. I needed to pee.
I closed the cabin door quietly behind me and headed to the bathroom, kicking away sharp, squirrel-nibbled pinecones with my bare feet. The towels we’d hung on the line to dry were soaked and heavy, flecked with bits of debris from the overhanging trees.
When I sat down on the toilet, I noticed blood on my shin. I wiped it off with a wodge of toilet paper and got a Band-Aid from the medicine cabinet. I had one leg up on the toilet seat, struggling t
o open the frustrating wax-papery wrapper, when I saw drops of blood on the floor. I lifted up the hem of my nightgown. The back was stained with blood. Finally. I’d waited so long for this, checking my underpants every day, hoping to catch up with my friends.
I dug around in the linen closet, found Anna’s box of Playtex, and sat down on the toilet seat, little plinks of blood dripping into the water. I knew what to do. I’d stolen her tampons a few times before, practiced inserting them. Becky said I was being an idiot, but I was worried that if I did it wrong, the tampon would break my hymen. I’d studied the little pamphlet in the box with its pictograms of a lunglike vaginal canal, squat legs bent at the knees for just the correct positioning.
I was peeling off the plastic wrapper when there was a knock on the bathroom door.
“Don’t come in!” I shouted. “I’m in here!”
“Well, hurry up, I need a piss.” It was Conrad.
“Pee in the bushes. Are you a girl?”
“Are you a total bitch?”
I listened to him stumbling away into the woods. There were moments when Conrad was bearable. At times I even felt sorry for him. But he had this creepy, insinuating way about him—the kind of guy who’s constantly washing his hands. Recently he’d started following me and Anna when we walked to the beach, always just out of sight. Sometimes, lying on the hot sand, we would catch him spying on us from the top of the dunes, hoping to see our boobs.
I made sure the bathroom door was locked. Sat back down on the toilet, pulled my nightgown high up around my waist and took my underpants off so I could spread my legs wide enough apart. I positioned the pink plastic applicator and was pushing the plunger when I heard a noise. On the opposite side of the bathroom, Conrad’s face was smashed tight against the clerestory window, eyes wide, staring between my open legs. I dropped the tampon applicator and it skittled away across the bathroom floor.
“Get away, you freak!” I shrieked, my entire body vibrating with rage and shame. I listened to Conrad’s sickening laugh as he ran off. By tomorrow, every one of his weirdo friends would know. I sat on the toilet weeping, wanting to die. The second I heard his cabin door slam shut, I ran for my cabin, shoved my bloody nightgown out of sight under my bed, yanked on my bathing suit, and raced to the pond. My only thought was to put as much distance between me and Conrad as possible. I would never be able to face him again, that much was clear. A stack of paddles was leaning against a tree. I grabbed one, pushed our fiberglass canoe off the spongy green undergrowth into the water as hard as I could, lay down on the bottom of the boat as the canoe drifted away from the beach. I hugged my arms to my chest, stared up at the early morning sky. This must be what it’s like to be a Viking dead person, I thought as the boat glided out unmanned.
When I was far enough from shore, I sat up and paddled away as fast as I could. By the time I reached the middle of the pond, I’d decided the simplest option was to drown myself. I would need something heavy to weigh me down. I was a strong swimmer and I knew that, in the end, I would fight for the surface. If I had a big rock, I could tie it to the boat’s painter, wrap the rope round my ankle, and jump. Conrad might never admit what he had done, but he would know, for the rest of his miserable psycho life, that he was responsible for my death.
I paddled toward the swampy, uninhabited side of the pond, where the horsetail reeds stalked out into the pond like an army, and hair-thin tangles of lily pad stems waited to trap your oar. The shoreline here was scattered with glacial debris, ancient rocks and pebbles deposited in the wake of the slow-moving glacial ice.
As I neared the shallows, I dug my paddle hard into the water, gathering momentum, then lifted it high and clear over the lily pads, gliding silently over their spidery web. The crunch of the sandy floor scraped the bottom of the canoe. I was about to leap out and drag it the rest of the way in when I heard a quiet voice.
“Don’t move. Stay in the boat.”
I looked up, startled. Jonas was sitting perfectly still on the lowest branch of a pitch pine that jutted out above my head, over the water. Almost completely camouflaged. Shirtless, wearing a pair of faded army-green shorts, long legs dangling. He was leaner than the last time I’d seen him. Taller, of course—he must be at least twelve by now—his thick black hair tangled below his shoulders. But his eyes had the same older-than-his-years intensity that had struck me the day he found me in the woods.
“Hand me your paddle,” he whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” I whispered back.
He pointed to the reeds beneath my boat.
I leaned over the edge of the canoe, trying to see what he was pointing at, but from my angle I couldn’t make out anything.
“The paddle?” he whispered again.
I stood up, careful not to rock the canoe, and passed the paddle up into the tree. Jonas took a plastic bag of something that looked like raw hamburger meat out of his pocket and slathered it over the end of the oar.
“Watch.” He lowered it down directly in front of me.
The sound will always stick in my brain—the sudden, violent crack of wood as the paddle split. Jonas leaned backward on the branch with his full weight, hanging onto the oar. And then I saw it, rising from the murk, jaws clamped shut around my paddle. It was the Big One, the granddaddy—an ugly snapper as wide as a rowboat. Prehistoric. Chicken-headed. And he was angry. Jonas jumped down onto the shore, pulled on the paddle with all his might. Teeth gritted.
“I need help.”
Giving the snapper a wide berth, I made my way to Jonas and together we dragged the snapper toward dry land.
“I need to unhitch your painter,” he said. “Don’t let go.” He ran to the canoe and undid the thick rope clipped to its bow.
“Hurry, please,” I said. The snapper was slowly eating his way up the paddle toward me.
Jonas made a slipknot in the painter, crept behind the turtle, and lassoed its thick-scaled tail.
“Got him,” he said.
“Now what?”
“We need to get him into the boat.”
The snapper hissed and thrashed, pulling against his bonds. His long neck twisted and turned, groping impotently for the rope, his razor-sharp jaws never letting go of the paddle. He turned his attention back to me with a dead-eyed anger—humiliation at being caught; fury at having been exposed to the world, stripped of his dignity—and began to make his way farther up the oar. He was coming for me now, coming for his pound of flesh, and I understood what he was feeling completely.
“Let him go,” I said.
“No way.” Jonas pulled harder at the rope.
“It’s wrong,” I said. “And he’s going to eat me.”
“I’ve been trying to catch him for two years. My brothers say he doesn’t exist.”
“Well, you caught him.”
“Yeah, but they won’t believe me.”
“Then they’re idiots.”
“According to them, I’m the idiot.”
“This isn’t a great time to argue the point,” I said as the snapper inched toward me. “But if your plan was for us to lift a one-hundred-pound enraged killer turtle into a tippy canoe, then maybe your brothers are right.”
Jonas stood assessing the situation: the massive beast pulling at its yoke, my frightened face, the fiberglass canoe. With a deep sigh, he untied his trophy. I let go of the paddle and we backed away.
For a few long moments, the snapper kept coming. Then, slowly realizing he had been given his freedom, he dropped the paddle from his jaws, gave us a last wary look, and turned his enormous body toward the safety of the deep. We watched as he made his arthritic crawl into the shallows, and when the water was deep enough, we watched him swim for his life.
Nothing was left of the paddle but a shredded stick. We reattached the rope and dragged the canoe around the edge of the pond toward my camp. At some point J
onas took my hand, just as he had done years before, when I led him out of the woods.
* * *
—
Conrad was sitting by the water, watching us approach, a nasty sneer slashed across his flabby face. His sickening cackle from this morning still echoed in my head, but my distress and shame had been replaced by a cold front of anger.
“Who’s that?” Jonas asked.
“My hideous stepbrother. I hate him.”
“Hate is a strong emotion,” Jonas said.
“Well then, I hate him strongly.” I paused. “He’s a pervert. I caught him spying on me this morning when I was in the bathroom. I’m planning to kill him later.”
“My mother says it’s always better to take the high road.”
“There isn’t any other road to take with Conrad. He’s always the low road.”
“What happened to the paddle?” Conrad asked as we neared him.
I walked past him without answering.
“It got attacked by a snapper,” Jonas said.
“Sounds exciting,” Conrad’s snide tone made me want to throw the paddle in his face, but I kept walking.
“It was,” Jonas said. Together we pulled the canoe onto dry ground, turned it on its side in case of more rain.
“I had an exciting morning myself,” Conrad said.
My jaw tightened. Whatever happened next, I was not going to let him bait me.
“I keep picturing it in my head, over and over,” Conrad said. “Who’s your little friend?”
The Paper Palace Page 13
