“Mum.” My heart starts beating so fast I can see its tremoring on the surface of my chest. “It wasn’t Leo.”
“What wasn’t?”
“It wasn’t Leo,” I say again, my voice barely more than a whisper. “It happened, but it wasn’t Leo.”
She looks utterly confused. I watch her puzzling out what I’ve said, putting the pieces together. I recognize the exact second it comes clear to her: a twitch, an imperceptible shift, the nervous dilating of pupils.
“Conrad?” she says at last.
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Not Leo.”
“Not Leo. It was Conrad. Conrad raped me.”
For a long time, my mother says nothing. In the darkness, I feel her energy slipping, dimming. She sighs, a heaviness upon her.
“I’m sorry I let you blame Leo.”
“Leo left me. Our baby died.”
I can see from her face that she is preparing for the worst as she asks me the next question.
“And Conrad drowning?”
“The boom hit him. He fell in.”
Her look of relief is palpable, and I so wish I could leave it there.
“But we both knew he wasn’t a strong swimmer. We didn’t throw him the life preserver.”
“We . . .” There’s a flicker of confusion. “Of course, Jonas was with you. I’d forgotten.”
“He knew everything,” I say. “He’s the only one.”
She nods. “You two were inseparable. He had such a crush on you back then. I think you broke his heart when you married Peter.”
“I did.”
An image of Jonas comes to me. Not the man I have loved, eaten, wanted, ached for today, but a small, green-eyed, dark-haired boy, lying beside me in the woods on a bed of velvet moss. I do not know him yet. But we are there together, lying by the spring, two strangers with one heart.
“I loved him, too.”
My mother is not one for warmth, but she puts her arms around me, cradles my head against her neck, strokes my hair the way she did when I was a little girl. I feel a thousand years of bile and bitter and silt seeping out of my veins, my muscles and tendons, the darkest places, pouring into the pocket of her lap.
“I’m sorry, Mum. I meant to be good.”
“No,” she says. “I’m the one who let Conrad in the door.” She pushes herself up off the sofa with a heavy creak. “My bones are not what they once were. I’m going to find a Maalox and hit the hay.”
On her way past the big picnic table she clears the children’s ice cream bowls, takes them inside to the sink, spoons clinking. “These can wait until morning.”
She pauses at the screen door, an odd expression on her face, as if she’s tasting something, digesting it, trying to decide whether or not it’s good. When at last she speaks, her voice is decisive, the way it’s always been when she’s given me serious advice.
“There are some swims you do regret, Eleanor. The problem is, you never know until you take them. Don’t stay up too late. And remember to close your skylight. They say we may get two inches of rain.”
I wait until I hear her cabin door click shut before following her down the path. There’s a ring around the moon. The rains we hoped for are finally coming. I can feel it in the brooding air, the impatient sky. Outside Anna’s and my old cabin, where my children sleep, I pause. All their lights are off—even the dim glow of Jack’s computer. I listen to the silence, imagine I can hear their soft, safe breathing. No demons, no monsters. If I could protect them from every terror, every loss, every heartbreak, I would.
A swath of moonlight stretches toward me from the center of the pond, widening as it approaches. I push my way through the bushes to the water’s edge. The pond is low. In the wet, sandy shoreline, raccoons have left a trail of sharp footprints. I take off all my clothes, hang my dress over a tree branch, and wade naked into the silk water, the pond obsidian clear, the croaking of bullfrogs, the whisper of moths. I can feel the molecules Jonas has left behind him all around me in the water. I cup my hands in the pond, put them to my mouth, and drink him. In the distance, lightning fractures the sky.
I stop on the path outside our cabin, count the seconds, listen for the faraway rumble of thunder, watch as the acid strobe fades away, watch as darkness takes itself back. My body feels like a sigh—relief and regret. But for which swim? I climb the steps of our cabin, knowing the answer. For either. For both.
Peter is still in his deep, satisfied sleep. I unhook the skylight, lower it softly into place. I climb into our bed beside him, spoon him, latch on to him—the familiar warmth of his body, the comfort of his calming breath—and wait for the storm to make its way inland from the sea.
4:00 A.M.
At four in the morning, when the winds come up, it’s the cabin door rattling against its hinges that startles me awake. Outside, pine trees are bent sideways, limbs howling in rage. I climb out of bed and go to the door. A beach towel has flown off the laundry line and landed on the roof of my mother’s cabin. Birds tumble through the stormy sky like fall leaves wheeling through the air, helpless in the wind, the relentless, circular current. Wrens and finches, skylarks—airborne, but not in flight. I stare out into the dreamlike predawn light. A few inches beyond the screen, a ruby-throated hummingbird is thrumming, fighting to hold its ground in the air, trilling against the tide, its iridescent wings beating invisibly fast, a flash of gemstone in the gray sky. It is flying backward. Not pushed by the wind, but deliberate, frantic with purpose, pressing for shelter in a thicket of white-blooming clethra outside our cabin. Its wings, attached with minuscule wrists, make figure eights—infinity symbols.
I call over to Peter. “Wake up.”
He stirs, but doesn’t wake.
“Peter,” I say, louder this time. “Wake up. I want you to see this.” But he is dead to the world.
I go over to his side of the bed, nudge him.
“What?” he says, voice groggy with sleep. “Jesus. What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Early. But wake up. You have to see this. It’s insane out there—like some sort of bird maelstrom.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I think we might be in the eye of a hurricane.”
“There wouldn’t be all this wind—only dead air. It’s just a big storm coming. Nothing to worry about. Now fuck off and let me sleep,” he grumbles sweetly.
A few years after Maddy and Finn were born, long after our lives had meshed into a different song, Jonas and I were walking in the woods one afternoon and passed an oak tree entwined in honeysuckle. There were what seemed like a hundred hummingbirds drinking flower nectar with their needle-beaks.
“Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backward,” Jonas said. “It’s one of those facts that’s always astonished me. They can fly backward and forward at equal speed. Thirty miles an hour.”
“If I could fly backward, I would,” I said. To the safety of branches, to the time when my heart raced for him like a hummingbird’s, 1,200 beats per second.
And he said, as he always did, “I know.”
6:30 A.M.
When I wake again, the heavy rains have passed. Water has pooled on the floorboards next to our bed, soaking the stack of books I keep planning to read. Peter is dreaming. I can tell by the way his eyelids twitch, by the length of his rough-saw breaths. I brush the hair off his forehead, kiss his cheek, his brow.
He stirs, shifts, his eyes crack open.
“Hey,” I whisper. “You’re here,” and cover his face in butterfly kisses.
“Morning, baby,” he says, swatting me away. “You going for your swim?”
“Why don’t you come with me? The pond will be warm after the rain.” I hold my breath, wait. Come with me. End this.
He rol
ls over, his back to me. “I promised Jack I’d take him into town at nine. Wake me up if I oversleep.”
I press my hand flat against the curve of his shoulder, splay my fingers wide. I like the way his freckles look inside the Vs my fingers make, like constellations of stars. I trace a heart with the tip of my finger across the wide plane of his back.
“I love you, too,” he mumbles from the tangle of sheets.
The early morning air is clammy. I wrap my mother’s old lavender bathrobe tight around me, stand in the doorway looking out. The surface of the pond is motionless, sheet glass, as if the storm never happened, the water lilies shuttered in their circadian sleep. A stillness, the world bathed in a blush of watermelon-pink. On the steps of our cabin I spy a single iridescent feather. I pick it up. Twirl it in my fingers by its sharp bony stem. Across the pond a figure stands. Waiting. Hoping. I can just make out his blue shirt.
The cabin step sags beneath me with a sigh, then springs back with a quiet thwang I’ve heard a thousand times before. This place—every wheeze, every grunt—is in my bones. The soft crunch of pine needles under my bare feet, the waft of minnows, the musk-fishy smell of wet sand and pond water. This house, built out of paper—tiny bits of shredded cardboard pressed together into something strong enough to withstand time, the difficult, lonely winters; always threatening to fall into ruin, yet still standing, year after year, when we return. This house, this place, knows all my secrets. I am in its bones, too.
I close my eyes and breathe in the everything-ness of it all. Jonas. Peter. Me. What it all could have been. What it could be. I take off my wedding ring, hold it in the palm of my hand, considering it, feeling the weight of it—its worn, eternal shape, its gold-ness. I squeeze it tight against my life line one final time before leaving it behind me on the top step and heading down the path to take my swim.
On the far side of the pond, an egg-yolk sun rises out of the dense tree line like a hot air balloon, slow, graceful. It hovers, suspended for a moment, before breaking free of its tethers—the break of dawn. In that instant, the smallest breeze shirrs the water, waking the pond for another day.
Acknowledgments
When I was in my teens and first attempting to write fiction, my grandfather Malcolm Cowley gave me a piece of advice that I have carried with me: the only thing you need to know, he said, is that every good story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, with the end foreshadowed in the beginning.
It took me a lifetime to get there, but I have followed his advice to a T.
There are so many people I am grateful to for pushing, shoving, supporting, and propping me up on this journey—most especially my extraordinary mother, Blair Resika, who taught me how to set a table and raised us in uncompromising beauty. My beloved sisters, Lizzie and Sonia—you are my rocks and my soul.
My father, Robert Cowley, editor and historian extraordinaire, told me when I was eleven years old that the best writing is always the shortest distance between two points. I thank him for that, but even more so for giving me the dazzling whirlwinds that are my younger sisters, Olivia and Savannah.
Thank you to my grandfather, Jack Phillips, for giving us the landscape. My wonderful stepfather, Paul Resika, for immortalizing it. My godmother, Florence Phillips, for a magical can of corn that changed the course of a little girl’s life.
Boundless thanks to my brilliant, thought-provoking editor, Sarah McGrath, whose keen eye never misses. Huge thanks, too, to the entire Riverhead team, and to the Valkyries of Viking, Venetia Butterfield and Mary Mount.
Thank you, Anna Stein, my gorgeous, kick-ass agent, for making my dreams come true, and for choosing me. I am beyond lucky to have Will Watkins at ICM, Susan Armstrong at C&W, Claire Nozieres at Curtis Brown, and Jason Hendler at HJTH on my team.
Mark Sarvas. Mentor and friend for life. You held me steady every step of the way. Words will never be enough, but I won’t stop trying. Thank you, Adam Cushman, for believing in this book before I even knew it was a book. Jack Grapes, for teaching me that fiction is poetry. Thank you to all the writers in the Novel Writers Group who workshopped The Paper Palace with me. Among them, Andrea Custer, Samuel Stackhouse, Ondrea Harr, Victoria Pynchon, Catherine Ellsworth, and Joel Villaseñor, wordsmith extraordinaire, who caught the Metrecal. My compadres at PEN America. My fellow board members at the Fine Arts Work Center.
Stepha, for anything and everything. Faran, for the trees. Estelle, for her wisdom and heart. Jimmy, for bringing the light. Tanya, for keeping it lit. Nick, for the joy you brought me from Day One. Christina and Olivia, for keeping my world spinning on its axis. Lily and Nell, for making sure it can still spin out of control. August, whose fine, strong drumbeat we all hope to follow. Lasher, Calder, and Sebastian— tiny scrumptious beings. And Georgia, oh Georgia, my woodland sprite, for inspiring the dreaminess.
I was raised in a world of strong women with strong voices and constant hearts. I thank each and every one of you for your remarkable friendship. It has been the greatest blessing. Thank you, Margot, Angela, Laura, Nonny, Tory, Busby—my Girls for life; Charlotte, who read it first and said “yes”; Nina, who sat beside me day after day, both of us typing away; Kate, for your boundless optimism; Nicky and Louise for your sweet support; Laura B., Evgenia, and Elizabeth—whip-smart friends and early readers; Libby, who made me get off my bum and finish the damn thing; Zoe and Lucy, for your sisterhood; the magnificent women in my family—Antonia, Susannah, Hayden, Saskia, Cosima, Rachel, Nicky, Frankie, Lula, Lotte, Grace, Louisa, Millie. Each of you shapes the path.
My sons, Lukas and Felix—I love you to the moon. But you know that.
Lastly, and above all, thank you, Bruno, for the roads we walked together, and for the amazing journey.
About the Author
Miranda Cowley Heller has worked as senior vice president and head of drama series at HBO, developing and overseeing such shows as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, and Big Love, among others. This is her first novel. She grew up spending summers on Cape Cod, and now lives in California.
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