Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  Empty rooms? Once the creak of her footfalls was recognizable to whomever was listening, each afternoon seemed increasingly occupied. The puppy’s whine became the whinny of a pony—a Shetland, like the pony she suddenly recalled having mounted to have her photo snapped at a carnival on a day she fell in love with horses. The whinny dissolved into the whistle of a kettle on a hot plate, or was it a violin reduced to a single string? The tapping of an old typewriter reminded her of Blind Pew’s cane in Treasure Island, which in turn allowed her to remember that as a child she’d been read to at bedtime. Like every reminiscence here, it seemed less a memory than a déjà vu. She heard whispers, heavy breathing, sighs, doorknobs rattling, the thump of hooves, but the doors held fast, locked from without, and Auntie slept with the keys. The Girl heard the Old Spice jingle whistled to the scrape of a straight razor, and stooped to the keyhole to inhale a scent of aftershave. She remembered her father.

  Auntie found her by the bay windows. On a pane fogged by the steam of her breath, the Girl had traced the face of the retreating moon. Two slick finger marks ran from its crater eyes.

  “Oh, my, look at the moon,” Auntie said. “But better to cry real tears, my dear. Let it out rather than this apathetic moping. Not that there’s one way to grieve, any more than one way to love. They’re shape-shifters, love and grief, aren’t they, and they have many disguises. Yet one thing’s sure, your mother wants you to be happy. How does Auntie know, you ask?”

  The Girl had not asked.

  “Because, my dear, if there’s a bond even stronger than that between mother and daughter, it’s the connection between identical twins. You’ve heard of twin telepathy? I assure you it crosses space, time, and the border of life itself. I sense your mother’s presence as if it’s my own, and she wants you to grow into a woman—beautiful, confident, and free. That’s the shape my grief assumes—hope for your future.”

  The Girl did not remark that she had supposed the shape of Auntie’s grief was that of a zombie topped by a cocktail umbrella—less a shape, actually, than the odor of 151-proof Demerara. She could smell its fermented cane in Auntie’s air kisses, in the sweats from which Auntie woke moaning, in the wake of her vermilion kimono as she paced the house at night with a candle to the clink of ice cubes, bracelets, and skeleton keys. The odor mingled with the mildewed rot of the cavernous house. Trying to escape it, to draw a free breath, was the Girl’s excuse for ascending the forbidden stairs.

  Up those stairs, she could overhear Fine Feather perched on his swing, reciting poems as if foretelling the future between the pauses he took to strop his beak, and accosting his mirror in narcissistic bouts of lust or rage, when he became incomprehensible.

  Before the chapel of a beach umbrella, the mermaid

  bridesmaids frolic. Half bride, half horse,

  she gallops to the Waffle House

  overlooking waves

  of blood orange marmalade …

  The poems were what raised in the Girl the suspicion that there was only a single roomer behind all the doors, a ventriloquist throwing his voice. He was the mewing kitten, whining pup, chattering monkey; the whinny, grindstone, and whistling violin; he cranked the hurdy-gurdy, put the kettle on, and typed with the tap of a blind pirate. Was he typing the oracular riddles that Fine Feather recited? If he could foretell the future, perhaps he could be trusted to recall her past.

  The Girl stood poised to knock at the blue door, resolved to tell the ventriloquist that she was on to him and to implore his help, when Fine Feather began insistently repeating his own name, and at that moment, the Girl realized that from the very start she had misunderstood his simplest utterance. She remembered listening to an old rock song her father played that she’d thought went, Hey hey you you get offa my clown. What the parakeet had been saying all along was “Find feather.” She looked down to see a neon-green feather slide from beneath the blue door. When she picked it up, a basso profundo voice commanded, “Fan feather.” She fanned and, as if at the beck of a conductor’s baton, the hurdy-gurdy, violin string, kettle, and grindstone played, while a whinnying, whining, caterwauling chorus rose to a crescendo. Above the din, from behind the blue door, in a fake German accent, a loosely clacking mouth shouted, “Fanfare! Fin Farther! Fain Führer! Fond Farter! Faun Fricker!” The shrill accompanying blasts of the lifeguard’s whistle were sure to wake Auntie.

  The Girl could see herself approaching a collision with herself as she raced down the corridor. By the time she reached the black-framed mirror, her pale, emaciated twin was waiting, holding her hands over her ears as she faded into the unreflecting dust.

  “Don’t go, please don’t leave me here alone,” the Girl said, releasing the feather as she reached to touch her twin, and as the feather floated to the floorboards the corridor went silent. The girl in the mirror, though she had no feather to drop, extended her hand, but it was to wave farewell. In a voice not unlike the parakeet’s she said, “Find father.”

  The Girl heard jangling and footfalls slowly ascending the staircase, and she fled up the narrow, spiraling steps to the attic. She expected the attic door to be locked; when it opened, she expected to be swarmed by bats. Instead, she found herself beneath an unfinished cathedral ceiling, in a bare space shot through with sunlight from a triangular window and holes punched through the roof by a blue sky. She could see her breath and hear the creaking of the icy cove. She bolted the attic door.

  A brass telescope stood before the triangular window. A battered steamer trunk decaled with Italian travel stamps occupied the center of the space. Beyond the trunk, a Chinese screen lacquered with emerald storks threw a shadow across the floor. She expected the trunk to be locked; when it opened, she expected to be swarmed by moths. It was stuffed with moth-eaten girls’ clothing, two sets of everything, two Italian sailor hats, one of which she put on, two Communion dresses, two prom gowns still pinned with dried corsages, two pink bikinis, two scarves embroidered with anchors, two pairs of yellow boots. Two balding teddy bears. A hatbox of rusted white petals and loose photographs, each photo torn in half. Only the left halves remained. The same sullen girl glared from each torn print. At the very bottom of the box was a photo of that sullen girl as a young woman posing naked beside a striped beach umbrella, her lip derisively curled at the photographer. The Girl wondered if whoever was on the missing half of the print was naked, too. Another photo showed a woman in the rain, dressed for mourning, beside an open grave. A veil concealed her face, and one arm cradled a bouquet of white roses while the other held an open umbrella whose familiar gay stripe seemed out of place. Her black silk gloves set off her white, bandaged wrists. The Girl studied the photo; through the black veil she could see teeth flashing a smile. It was the only picture in the trunk not torn in two. The girl remembered her mother.

  Wearing the sailor hat, an anchor scarf, and rubber boots, the Girl sat on the closed trunk, glancing from the window to the storks that flew across the Chinese screen. She remembered those birds from her parents’ bedroom, remembered hiding behind such a screen from the somber guests gathered to say they were sorry her mother had gone away. None of them would say where her mother had gone or when she would return. Her father, wearing dark glasses even on such a thundery afternoon, whispered, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell where you’re hiding.”

  The telescope looked out on real birds circling the cove. What had been a distant dot came into focus as a beach umbrella. The umbrella made it possible for her to imagine the ice as a strand of white sand exposed by an ebbing tide. The man out there looked to be ice fishing, with the umbrella for a shanty. Even through a lens that could bring the daylight moon close enough to count its pitted scars, she couldn’t quite make out the man’s face. He was wearing dark glasses—and why not, the day was dazzlingly bright. She could hear the random creak of ice, and another, metronomic creaking coming from behind the Chinese screen where a woman shawled in a vermilion afghan sat rocking.

  “Do you remember me?”

>   “Do you think you are the right-handed twin?” the Girl asked.

  “I am ambidextrous,” the woman said, and smiled. “How could you forget?”

  The Girl could hear someone trying to get into the attic, twisting the doorknob, jiggling keys in the lock, bumping a shoulder against the door.

  “Would you like me to rock you?” the woman asked.

  The Girl shook her head no.

  “Too late for comfort? Then what would you like?”

  “To walk out on the ice and watch the man fishing.”

  “Why?”

  “To breathe in the sea air, to hear the gulls calling in voices I know are theirs.”

  “Ah, yes, to be alive and taste the salt on your lips, to sense the infinite ocean inside, to drown in—”

  “I’d like to see what he’ll pull up through the ice,” the Girl said.

  “And if it’s some monster from below?”

  “I’ll say, Time to cut it loose.”

  “And if there’s nothing at all to catch?”

  “There’s always the pull of the sea itself.”

  “And when the ice melts, my darling, what will you do?”

  “Ride a horse along the dashing waves.”

  5

  Mariel’s beach umbrella was now all she and Bryan could still see of the place they’d staked out on the sand. From this distance one couldn’t tell the umbrella was striped. The hoofprints they’d been following, without sight of horse or rider, were washing away in the encroaching tide.

  “I wonder if we set our stuff high enough on the beach,” Bryan said.

  “You’re limping,” Mariel said. “Do you want to turn back?”

  He’d sliced the ball of his foot on a jagged shell, but he knew, once she was on a quest, Mariel refused to give it up. “I’m not limping,” he said.

  “You’re not? Then what do you call it?”

  “Being Byronic.”

  “Look!” she exclaimed, shading her eyes and pointing ahead. “What is that?”

  “A lifeguard chair?”

  “The height of the Eiffel Tower?”

  “We’ll make it our boundary,” he said. “We’ll walk that far, climb up, and if we don’t see a horse or a stable from there, we head back.”

  “Deal,” Mariel said. “Why’s a lifeguard tower still up? I thought once the beaches officially close they take those in with the rowboats and the volleyball nets. I still remember that feeling of summer vanishing overnight—everything gone including the lifeguards, all those hunky guys named Robbie and Tad my girlfriends and I had crushes on. We’d go to the beach in the bikinis we bought hoping they’d notice.”

  “You ever actually go out with one?” It would have been a routine question, except that Mariel so seldom mentioned men it seemed as if she were sharing a confidence. Bryan wanted her to keep talking.

  “I had a serious love affair my sophomore year in high school, with Robbie—he didn’t have a last name. None of us did. I’d spread my towel near his lifeguard chair, lie on my stomach, and untie my bikini straps. Our climactic moment came when I was eating a hot dog and Robbie said: ‘You’ve got a dot of mustard on your face. Let me get that for you.’ And he kissed my cheek and went, yummm. That was on the day before the beaches closed. ‘See you next year, Pancake,’ he said, and I ran into the water so he wouldn’t see me burst into tears.”

  “Pancake?”

  “As in flatter than.”

  “No way. So, did you see him the next year?”

  “I dreamed of him all winter. I turned my pillow into Robbie, but by spring I’d sprouted breasts and was into tennis players. Our town hosted a qualifier for the Junior Nationals, and that next summer I had my first sexual experience, if you call giving a tennis brat a hand job … Oh, my God, that was Bummer Summer! The beach was off-limits. I’d completely forgotten that.”

  “Red tide? E. coli?”

  “A girl drowned.” Mariel pronounced it drownded. Maybe it was a local accent that he hadn’t noticed before. Maybe he’d never heard her use the word until then.

  “A close friend?”

  “I didn’t know her but to say hi. She was a loner, shy, withdrawn, one of those girls who makes you think anorexia might be a fatal self-absorption. I don’t think she had any friends. Her drownding was a shock—like when any young person dies—but the reason kids stopped going to the beach was that these creepy stories started going around.”

  “Like what?”

  “Look at the birds around the lifeguard chair—must be thousands!” Mariel said. “Maybe we’re extras in a nature film on mass migration. What all are they?”

  “Gulls, willets, sandpipers, cormorants, oystercatchers, curlews. What kind of stories did they tell about her?”

  “That she had a thing for lifeguards—not just crushes, an obsession. She’d wear a skimpy hot-pink bikini, and swim out, ignoring the whistle, and pretend to be drownding. The lifeguard would have to pull her out of the water and she’d be like unconscious. Kids claimed she was doing that all up and down the beaches to get the lifeguards to give her mouth-to-mouth. It was awful how they talked about her. She died because one lifeguard thought she was crying wolf when she really was caught in an undertow. By the time he realized she was in trouble and rowed out, she’d gone under. The guy who didn’t save her tried to take his own life by stepping on an electric rail. His legs were horribly burned, but he didn’t die. They searched for a week but never found her body. Nobody wanted to go to the beach. They made up sick stories—as if being morbid disguised their fear—stories about a beach where kids went to get high at night and skinny-dip, where they heard a girl singing, before her body washed in, all luminescent and rotted and fish-eaten. I’m sorry I’ve remembered any of it. The hoofprints are gone.”

  The hoofprints weren’t so much gone as lost among the encrusted tracks of countless birds, tracks that had accumulated over days, weeks—over summers, perhaps—and had assumed the shapes of fallen leaves, petals, fans, shells, butterflies, arrowheads, hieroglyphs. There was a nonstop throaty mutter, not merely audible but tactile, sonic gusts that stank of wet feathers and of the ocean floor distilled into fermenting fishy droppings. The beach was littered with guano and feathers.

  “There’s someone in that tower,” Mariel said. She’d become quiet, morose, avoiding eye contact after telling the story.

  “It looks abandoned.”

  “I can see his glasses flash,” she insisted, as if Bryan were arguing.

  “Where?”

  “You don’t hear his whistle?”

  He stopped to listen. The birds moved off before them, increasingly agitated and noisy—they’d begun to honk and squawk and cry.

  “My God, you don’t hear that?” Mariel clapped her hands over her ears. “Someone’s swum too far out,” she said. “He’s lowering himself down from the tower, but he’ll have to drag himself to the water across the sand, across the feathers, across the shit.” She turned to look at Bryan. Her face was lined with worry and streaked with tears. “Someone’s drownding. Don’t just stand there. We have to help.” She whirled and raced toward the water, clods of sand flying from her white soles.

  The birds exploded into flight.

  Bryan started after her, but with his gashed foot he was quickly outdistanced. “Was the lifeguard who didn’t save the girl Robbie?” he shouted after her.

  His voice was lost, like the sight of her in the whoosh of wings beating for uplift—drab shorebirds transformed into tumultuous white plumage. The beach itself seemed to rise. A million imprints—petals, butterflies, arrowheads, hieroglyphs—whirled into blinding spirals of sand. As he shielded his eyes, he glimpsed what had panicked the birds; it hadn’t been her sprint for the water, but the riderless white horse galloping from the sea.

  At the tower, he began to climb the peeling ladder. It was even higher than it had looked from the beach, high enough that one might peer over the horizon to determine if those far-off electric throbs were a br
ewing storm. The beach stretched below, unmarked now except for fresh hoofprints. And then he spotted the horse again, running along the surf with a woman riding bareback, naked, her pendulous breasts jouncing, her silvery hair streaming in the wind as they vanished into the distance. He continued his ascent. When he reached the top, he would sit and watch and wait for Mariel to return.

  6

  “And where you off to so fast?” asked the balloon man. He held a bouquet of colored balloons that threatened to lift him into the sky.

  She’d been running lost through the bazaar that lined the puddled, cobbled streets along the pier where the sea whumped the seawall and pitched up spray.

  “It’s these lead boots keeps me feet on the ground,” the balloon man said. “Got them from a deep-sea diver with the bends won’t be needing them no more.”

  He held out a translucent white balloon as if offering a flower, but as she reached to take it, she noticed that all the other balloons were imprinted with the distorted faces of girls trapped inside and looking out.

  “It’s free for you, little doll face. Come back!”

  His boots hammered the cobblestones as he chased her, seemingly unaware that as he labored to run the balloons were slipping from his hand and floating off.

  She outdistanced him easily, her bare feet splashing through puddles, her hair flying. She passed a fire-eater who blew a flaming kiss in her direction, and a contortionist bent in a diving helmet that trailed cut lines, his voice echoing from inside: “You looks like a girlie needs a good hosing!”

  The sea whumped the seawall with the reverberation of kettledrums.