“I insisted you were luggage.”
“I need a cheeseburger,” I groan.
“For my beautiful blackout-drunk bride, anything.” Peter wipes my hair back from my brow.
“It was the champagne. I can’t drink champagne. It’s the sugar. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Watching you throw your garter to my father was the highlight of the day.”
“I’m going to shoot myself.”
“That, and marrying the woman of my dreams.”
I reach up and put my arms around his neck, look deep into his eyes. “I need to brush my teeth.”
* * *
—
When I wake much later, a dream lingers on the tip of my mind. I’m on a cloud, scudding across the sky. Below me the sea is bright blue, infinite. A pod of whales migrates north, grandly oblivious to the smaller creatures in their wake. A white sail appears, riding fast on the chop. There are two children on the boat. Behind them, an enormous sperm whale dives, sounds the depths. I am underwater. I watch as the whale torpedoes toward the surface, aiming for the triangular shadow of the boat. A house floats by. Red ribbons flow through a broken screen door.
The room service tray is on the bedside table. Peter is passed out next to me, a smudge of ketchup on the corner of his mouth. Most of the fries are gone. I am married.
1997. February, the Back Woods.
Two months after the honeymoon I get a call from Anna. At first I’m not certain it’s her—she’s crying so hard I can’t make out what she’s saying, and Anna doesn’t cry.
“Slow down,” I say. “I can’t hear you.”
I listen to her sobs for a moment or two before she hangs up the phone. When I try to call back, it rings and rings until the machine picks up. I call Jeremy at his office.
“She’s good,” he says brightly. “She’s been doing a lot of work on herself.”
My throat constricts in knee-jerk disgust. “That’s great.” I force myself to keep the judgment out of my voice. “She sounded pretty upset when she called me just now.”
“She had group therapy today. That might have loosened up some silt.”
“When you get home tell her to call me, okay?” I loathe him.
“So, how’s it going?” he says, not taking his cue to hang up.
“Fine. Great.”
“You certainly had a good time at your wedding.”
“Tell her to call me,” I say.
* * *
—
The highway is desolate, barren—a cindery streak, salted for black ice, its sandy verges frozen hard and flat. A few dark pines punctuate the woods, but most of the trees here are bare, their last remaining leaves, rattle-dead brown, waiting sorrowfully to be taken by the next icy gust. It’s not even three p.m., but already the winter light is fading. Anna hasn’t spoken since I picked her up at Logan airport in a rental car. She looks haggard, empty, her eyes rubbed red. Anna is tough. A rock. Caustic and funny. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. This is not my sister. I listen to the swish of tires on wet road, the salt spray. Fiddle with the radio. Nothing but AM. I hate the Cape in winter.
Every house we pass on our way into the woods is closed up for the season. Not a single sign of life. Just beyond the turnoff for Dixon’s house, a fox runs across the road in front of the car carrying a small animal in its mouth. It freezes in our headlights, looks at us for a moment, before moving on.
The pond is thick ice. Hoarfrost covers the dead brush, bright red berries on a thin silvery branch. The camp looks naked, all its faults exposed. I pull in next to the back door, turn off the engine. We sit there in the quiet, the warmth, the deepening hues. Anna rests her head against the window glass.
“Stay in the car. I’ll get the heat on.”
The back door is padlocked. I go around the side of the house, wade through a pileup of dead leaves, reach up under the eaves. Even after all the years, I’m always amazed and relieved when my fingers find it—a single key hanging on a rusty nail. The same key to the same ancient Master Lock that has been here since we were children.
“Got it,” I shout to Anna. I open the door, stumble over the doorsill into the dark pantry, make my way to the fuse box on the far wall. My fingers feel their way down the braille of circuit breakers until they find one switch thicker than the others—the main. It takes a bit of force to turn it over from left to right. The refrigerator has been propped open with a broom to keep it from moldering, and the interior light goes on as it rumbles to life. The living room is clean-swept, empty of color, the sofa pillows and throws stored inside big black contractor bags. It feels colder inside than out, like a walk-in freezer, filled with the boxed-in chill of dead air. The water has been turned off, so the pipes don’t freeze. I’ll have to wait until the house has warmed up before flushing out the antifreeze and getting the water going. For tonight, we will get water from the pond.
I walk around the room turning on lamps. It is far too cold to stay in a cabin with no heat but we can make a fire, sleep in the Big House on the sofas. Tucked under a table are two electric heaters. I plug them into living room outlets. They come on like old-fashioned toasters, thin coils heating to orange-red, filling the room with the smell of burning dust, and always the spark of worry in me that they will burn the house down while we sleep. There’s a pile of wood and kindling beside the fireplace and a stack of fading newspapers—mostly last summer’s New York Timeses, a few Boston Globes mixed in. Someone, probably Peter, has laid a fire in the hearth, in anticipation of next summer. I take the tin of strike-anywhere matches from the mantelpiece, get down on my knees, light the crumpled newspaper, the tinder. The fire hisses, crackles, blazes alive. Behind me, I hear Anna come in.
“We should ice-skate,” she says.
“I’ll open a can of soup. There might be sardines.” I pull a big pile of feather pillows, blankets, and cold sheets out of an old captain’s chest.
We go to asleep listening to the flicker of the fire, the occasional thud of wood chunks falling into the embers. Outside, in the winter moonlight, the world is cold, stark—a bare echo of the place I love, the place where, for me, life begins and ends. Yet, lying here next to my anguished, perplexing sister, her hand within reach, breathing in the smell of woodsmoke and mildew and the winter sea, I can begin to feel its heartbeat. I have no idea what has happened to break Anna like this. I only know that whatever it is, it led her back here. Like a homing pigeon, who, deaf to everything but pure instinct, hears the wind blowing across a mountain range two hundred miles away and sets its course.
At dawn, sodium light seeps in through the porch windows, waking me. The fire has gone out during the night, and already I can see my breath. I put my socks on under the covers, grab my down jacket from the floor, and pull it on over my nightgown. The coals are still red. I add dry wood, stoke the embers, careful not to wake Anna, grab a jug and go down to the pond. I need coffee. There will be an unopened can of Medaglia d’Oro in the pantry. My mother always makes sure to leave coffee, olive oil, and salt. The pond is frozen solid. The ice must be six inches thick. Small twigs and leaves are paper-pressed into it, caught in motion like fossils. But where the ice meets the shoreline, it thins to a sheer brittle. I shatter the surface with a stick, cup my hands and drink from the pond before filling my jug.
The smell of coffee wakes Anna. “Oh good,” she says, yawning.
“She speaks.”
Anna cocks her head, a small gesture, like a winter sparrow. Then her face flushes gray with remembered sorrow.
“Talk to me.” I bring her a mug of black coffee. “There’s sugar but no milk.” I sit down on the edge of the sofa beside her. “Shove over.”
She shifts to make room for me, a hollow space beside her hip. “I’d like to walk to the beach while the sun is out.”
“There must be extra sweaters in the chest,” I say.
She sits up, adjusts a pillow behind her back. “I went to the gynecologist last week. I missed my period.”
“And?”
“I was sure I was pregnant.”
“I spoke to you last week. You didn’t say anything.”
“I was afraid if I said anything, I’d lose it again. I kept thinking ‘third time’s a charm.’” She takes a sip of coffee, makes a face. “We should have stopped at Cumby’s for milk. Anyway, I’m not.”
“Anna. Fuck. That sucks. I’m so sorry.”
She puts her coffee on the windowsill, looks down at her hands, turns them over, staring at them. She traces her finger across the upper line of her right palm. “Remember life lines?”
I nod. “Remember love lines??”
Anna laughs. “Mine had all those little feathers off it. Lindsay called them my slut lines.”
“Whatever happened to Lindsay?” I say.
“I’m never going to have a baby,” Anna says.
“Of course, you will. You’re only thirty-three. You just have to keep trying. You’ll probably end up with four brats that look and act like Jeremy.”
She shakes her head. “I missed my period because I have the Big O.”
“Why would that make your period late?”
“Ovarian cancer,” she says.
“The Big O means an orgasm, you idiot.” The words are out of my mouth before I realize what she has said. The room stops breathing, dust motes freeze in place, sunlight balks at the windowpane, waits. Inside me there’s a silence like cement.
I shake my head. “You don’t.”
“Elle.”
“How do they know it’s not just a fibroid?”
“It’s stage four. It’s already spread.”
“Have you even gotten a second opinion, because if you haven’t, you have to do it right away.”
“Elle, be quiet and let me talk. I mean it. Just. Shut up, okay? They saw spots on my liver. They are going to go in next week, but the doctor says to prepare for bad news.”
“That’s just one possibility. It could also be completely operable. They don’t know yet. You’ll do chemo and radiation. We’ll get the best doctor in New York. You are going to be fine.”
“Okay,” Anna says. “If you say so.”
“I say so.”
“Well then, we have nothing to worry about. Let’s walk to the beach.” She throws off her bedding, pokes me in the hip. “Move, please, so I can get out.”
“I know you hate physical affection, but I’m going to give you a really big hug, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”
“Fine. Give me a second to prepare myself.”
I put my arms around her and hug her so close. “I love you, Anna. It’s going to be fine. I promise.”
“Love you back,” she says. “I don’t know why I hated you so much when you were little.”
“I was annoying.”
“I was angry.”
“You were terrifying. You still sort of are.” I laugh.
“Do you remember that time Conrad sucker-punched me on the porch?” Anna asks.
“Yeah.”
“Leo grounded him and he fell down and cried. I still feel bad about it.”
“Why? He hit you.”
“Because I goaded him. I wanted to get him in trouble.” She stares out the big plate-glass window at the pond. The sun is hitting the ice at a perfect angle, so that it shimmers like crystal, throwing off sparks. “I was so mean to him,” Anna says.
“You were mean to everyone.”
“After Leo sent him to his cabin, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. I have no idea why.” She gets up and goes over to the stove, picks up the metal jug, pours water into the kettle. “I saw some mint tea in the pantry,” she says.
“I’ll get it,” I say.
“It’s weird, the things we remember. There were probably a million worse things I did back then, but when the doctor told me about the cancer, that day with Conrad was what came into my mind. How horrible I’d been. And then he died the next summer.”
“It was two summers later,” I say. “You were working at that kibbutz in Santa Cruz.”
“Why was I doing that? A kibbutz? I must have been on acid.” She laughs, and for a moment she’s entirely herself again. “I keep thinking if I’d been a nicer person, this wouldn’t be happening to me. What if that whole karma thing is true? I could come back as a centipede. Or a blood clot.”
“This is not your fault,” I say. “And there’s no such thing as karma.”
“You don’t know that.”
But I do. Because if karma existed, I would be the one with cancer, not Anna. I take a deep breath, knowing what I have to do. All the years, I’ve kept my promise to Jonas. But Anna has to know this isn’t her fault. “Do you remember how Leo kept ranting around the apartment screaming why? Breaking things and yelling at Mum?”
Anna nods.
“He blamed himself for Conrad. But it had nothing to do with him. It was my fault.” I take a deep breath. “That day on the boat, when Conrad died—”
“I don’t want to be dead, Elle,” Anna says, interrupting. “I don’t want to be nothing anymore . . . no more trees, no more you—just a pile of flesh rotting away. Remember Mum? And the worms?” She’s half laughing, half crying.
“You won’t,” I say. “I won’t let you.”
“Poor Conrad,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “I wasn’t even sad.”
28
1998. May, New York.
The top of my mother’s kitchen table was once an old barn door, its sharp edges softened by decades of family dinners. There is still a keyhole where a lock once fit, and woodworm boreholes like pinpricks, filled with years of food grime turned the consistency of earwax. When I was little I loved to root around in each hole with a fork, making tiny piles that seeded the tabletop like termite droppings. I sit here now, poking at the table with the tip of a ballpoint pen. Peter should have been here by now. It’s Mum’s birthday and we’re taking her out for dinner. Our reservation is at eight. I pick up the kitchen phone and call the time. “At the tone, the time will be . . . seven . . . twenty-five . . . and fifty seconds. . . . At the tone, the time will be . . . seven . . . twenty-six . . . exactly.” The new kitten walks into the kitchen. Marmalade back, white paws, yellow eyes. He looks up at me, wanting attention. I put him on the table and he starts eating the termite crumbs. Somewhere in the apartment I hear a crash. I push back my chair and go down the hall.
Mum is on a stepladder, alphabetizing the bookshelves.
“Oh good,” she says. “You can help me with the poetry section.” She pulls a stack of books off the shelf and hands them to me.
“Peter’s running late.” I sit down on the floor and start sorting books. “Does Primo Levi go in poetry?”
“I can never decide. Put him in philosophy for now.”
I pick up The Collected Poems of Dwight Burke from the top of a pile and open it. On the front page is a handwritten dedication, scrawled in faded blue fountain pen: For Henry’s girls, who are sweeter than pachysandra, with hope that your lives will be filled with poetry and spice. Love, Dwight.
“This is mine.”
Mum glances down from the ladder. “I believe it’s yours and Anna’s.”
“You’re right. I’ll send it to her.”
“I’d keep it here. It’s probably worth a fortune by now—a signed first edition of Burke. Jeremy will just want her to sell it.”
On the back cover of the book is a faded black-and-white photo of Dwight Burke in a seersucker jacket and polka-dot bow tie. His face has the same kindly expression I remember from my childhood, a pleasant WASPiness.
“He was a nice man,” I say.
“Such a tragedy,” Mum says.
“He wor
e penny loafers with nickels in them. I should write to Nancy.”
“Your father always thought he was a homosexual.”
For years after Dwight Burke drowned, there were rumors he had killed himself—that Carter Ashe, the man he had gone to return the book to that spring day when my father and I went to collect his boxes, was Burke’s lover. That Burke, a devout Catholic, was overcome with shame and guilt. My father insisted the rumors weren’t true. Burke’s clothes had been found in a careful pile on the banks of the Hudson, perfectly folded—everything but the boxer shorts he was wearing when they pulled him out of the water. “If he were planning to drown himself,” my father had said, “why keep on his boxers? Dwight would have wanted to go out of the world the same way he came in. He was a poet. He loved symmetry.”
“Author or subject?” Mum says. She’s holding a book about Gandhi. She has moved on to biography.
“Subject. No one really cares who wrote it.” I open the book of poetry in my hand. The poems are alive, odd, buzzing with insects and tender grasses. As I skim through, a verse catches my eye.
At the crest of the hill two stallions
backs black against a nectar wash
graze on the green-tang clover,
acorns to sniff out.
We lie together beneath the flowering hawthorn,
your white collar unbuttoned.
Once, I heard the sound
of wind under water, breathed in the sea
and survived.
I hope my father was right, that Dwight’s drowning was an accident. I hope he left his lover’s house that morning wanting nothing more than a bracing swim; that he lay on the banks of the Hudson River, listened to the water flowing past, breathed in the crocus blossoms, the sour-tart smell of crabgrass. He stripped down to his underwear and waded out into the muscular water, floated, watched clouds run across the sky, the flocking birds. He turned to swim back, but the landscape had changed. Now he was drifting past an unfamiliar shore, pulled by a current too strong for him to fight.
The Paper Palace Page 27
