The Paper Shepherd

by Olivia Landis

  “You’re quite a good swimmer,” Tony said, striking up conversation.

  “I’m not sure I would say I’m a good swimmer.”

  “You gave Max a run for his money.” Tiar laughed.

  “Max has many good qualities, but he’s a lousy swimmer,” she said, matter-of-fact.

  “Well, if not his grace in the water, what is it about Max you like the most?” Tony asked.

  “I don’t know,” she giggled, embarrassed.

  “Come on,” Tony said. “There must be something.” Tiar thought about it for a while.

  “His eyes,” she said, sighing. Tony was surprised to hear her say something so superficial considering the discussions they had been having all week.

  “What is it about his eyes?” he asked.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said, staring off into the distance, as though she could see them in front of her. “They’re like God’s eyes.”

  “God’s eyes are blue? I don’t remember that in the Bible.”

  “It doesn’t say they’re not, either,” Tiar reasoned. “It’s like we learned in physics. Blue light has the longest wave length, so it can bend around things and get really far. That’s why the sky is blue, because the light can bend around the atmosphere.”

  “I thought the sky was blue because it reflected the ocean,” Tony conjectured.

  “No, silly,” Tiar said, laughing. “The ocean is blue because it reflects the sky.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The sky is still blue in the middle of Kansas.”

  “Yeah, but the ocean is really big,” Tony insisted.

  “Okay,” Tiar said, still giggling. “Bad example. Now, think about if you pass a house at night.”

  “Okay.”

  “If someone in the house is watching TV, the light that you see reflected on the ceiling is blue, no matter what is playing on the TV.”

  “Okay... You lost me,” Tony said, confused.

  “Yeah, I lost me too,” Tiar acknowledged. “But the point is, no matter what else is going on, no matter why, blue is always the color that gets through. So, that’s what color God’s eyes must be, because they can see us no matter what else is going on.”

  “Ti-Ti,” Tony interjected. “That’s a great story, but I don’t think the color of your eyes has anything to do with how much you can see. You see with your retina, not your iris.”

  “I know,” she whined. “But I came up with this theory when I was ten, and I didn’t know that yet.” Max, who had returned from his shower, ducked into the back of the tent to grab some warmer clothes. Hearing voices, he stayed still for a moment to listen.

  “The point is, I always felt like Max could see into my soul. He could always tell how I was feeling, if I was lying, if I was sincere, or if I was trying to hide something. No matter how much my face and my words tried to hide things, as soon as I walked up the stairs into his room, he could already tell how my day went and if I had done anything I was proud or ashamed of. And no matter what everyone else said about me, no matter how much trouble I got into at school or with my uncle, I knew he could see my insides. He could see who I was down deep. And it made me want to be a good person on the inside, like he is. I figure if I try hard enough, some day when he looks at me with those eyes, he’ll see that I’m a good person, too. And, if I can be worthy of that, I can be happy with who I am.”

  When Max heard this, his heart sank. He had never heard, read, or thought such a tender expression of love from any one, for anyone ever in his life. If Tiar only knew how superficial he was capable of being, how much he was attracted to her body and how much pain that attraction had caused her over the past two years, she would revile him. He felt like he was lying to her, letting her think so well of him. But, things were going so well between them now. How could he risk spoiling their relationship with the truth?

  He would make what she said the truth, he vowed to himself. He would toil night and day to fill her ideal of love, to be the man she wanted him to be, the man she thought he was. He would find some way to make himself worthy of her, and someday he could be honest about who he really was, and she would love him anyway.

  15

  Their eighth day in Canada, Tiar, Max, Tony, and Kenny awoke to find the sun shining brightly through their tents. Tiar happily cloistered herself in the coffee shop of the bookstore with a stack of books about the Algonquins, determined to find out if Max’s dog sacrifice assertion held any merit. A waitress whose face was now as familiar as many in Hectortown came over to her and set a third cup off coffee in front of her. The waitress wore a prim, pink, polyester uniform with a white oval on the left breast on which was embroidered “Jez”.

  “You again?” the older girl asked, a friendly smile across her face conflicting with her accusatory tone. Tiar smiled back reflexively. “You just move here?”

  “No,” Tiar said, closing her book. “Just visiting.”

  “Visiting relatives?” Jez inquired.

  “Vacation, actually,” Tiar corrected.

  “Vacationing in Pembroke? Ontario?” Jez repeated, dubious. “Now I know you’re lying.”

  “I’m with some friends who are working on the dig over on the other side of the river,” Tiar explained defensively. “The archeology thing.”

  “I think I read about that in the newspaper,” the waitress nodded. “So, you staying in town?”

  “No,” Tiar said. “I just don’t really care for digging so I’m hanging out here. We’re actually staying at the campground over the border.”

  “And your friends just stay there all day without you?” Jez said provocatively.

  “Well, it’s my boyfriend and two of his friends from college,” Tiar disclosed.

  “You’re sleeping… just you and three young men…And your parents are okay with that?” Jez asked with feinted shocked. Tiar bit her bottom lip. Jez laughed to herself. She really didn’t care about propriety at all. She just enjoyed messing with people. And this teenager was almost too easy to fluster. Almost too easy.

  “I don’t really have...” she hesitated. “It’s complicated. The one I’m sharing a tent with, I’m dating, but we’ve known each other forever. The other two are his friends. But they’re completely safe. They’re in a seminary.”

  “A seminary. Like, they’re going to be priests,” Jez said, happy for a more awkward vulnerability to exploit. The sleeping arrangement argument was running out of steam.

  “Yeah,” Tiar replied sheepishly.

  “And that doesn’t make you nervous?”

  “Why should it?” Tiar asked.

  “Your boy friend’s two best friends are going to be priests,” Jez reiterated. “You don’t think as soon as he goes back to college and you’re at home, they’re going to try to recruit him?”

  “Recruit him?” Tiar asked, confused.

  “Try to convince him to join them in the seminary.”

  “No. Why would they do that?” Tiar demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Jez said. “You don’t think he’s tempted?”

  “I don’t think it works that way,” Tiar postulated.

  “You’re probably right,” Jez agreed, her attention drifting to some customers who just sat down. Fresh meat. “What would I know. I’m Unitarian. But, take my advice. Keep him entertained.”

  “Entertained?” Tiar asked, befuddled. Jez delighted at how rattled she seemed.

  “You know,” Jez said, winking. “Entertained. As soon as he gets bored with your girl assets...” She shook her head, a sad expression coming over her face. Then, she turned on her heel and walked off leaving Tiar alone and confused.

  The rest of the week was enjoyable and uneventful. Despite their best efforts, the group still had $17 left when Dr. Alfred’s next car payment came due—this despite Tiar paying for gas for Tony’s car, movies, tour books, and national park fees. Still, Tiar felt vindicated and predicted that her uncle would not try to take advantage of her again. To celebrate their last
night together in Canada, the group took extra preparations getting the dirt from under their nails, took out their least grungy camp clothes, and went out to the fanciest restaurant they could find. Tony and Kenny split several bottles of wine. After dinner, Max drove the group back to the camp where they decided to take one last stroll along the river. The moon shone a magical silver off the water. With Tony and Kenny mellowed out by the finely aged Merlot, the conversation remained subdued and far from any contentious matters of faith or philosophy. After an hour, Tony and Kenny were too tired to stay up. Max and Tiar decided to retire, too, a long day of driving awaiting them.

  Back at the tent, Tiar lay on her side looking at Max for a long time. Tomorrow afternoon, they would drive back to Hectortown. In four days, he would drive back to college again and it would be months before she could see him. She wanted to remember every detail of this trip to last through those months. Tiar lay listening to the sound of the rapids watching Max’s chest slowly rise and fall.

  “What are you thinking, Little Bird?” Max asked her. Even with his eyes closed, he could tell she wasn’t sleeping.

  “Nothing, Max,” she answered, propping her head on her hand.

  “You’re working awfully hard for thinking nothing.”

  “I was just wondering... never mind,” she said, and lay on her back.

  “Never mind what?” She closed her eyes, feeling braver not being able to see him. Tiar couldn’t believe she was giving this fear a voice but figured exposing it was the only way to keep it from nagging at her.

  “Tell me the truth, Max,” she prefaced. “Do you think you will ever get bored with me? I mean, it’s okay if you do, I guess. But, I’d like to have some warning.”

  He propped himself up on one elbow and with his other hand brushed her hair away from her face.

  “What would make you ever think that, Little Bird?” Tiar though about the bizarre exchange in the coffee shop. It was probably best Max not know about Jez’s prophesy. She could come up with a more innocent explanation.

  “It’s just something Jen said, when you and Jay were getting popcorn at the movie the other night. She said she started dating him because she had known almost all the other guys at school since she was in first grade and was bored with all of them. I just figured that meant since we met when you were in fifth grade, in four years you might start getting bored with me.”

  “Bird, listen to me,” he said seriously. “I can’t predict the future. I can’t promise you we will always be together, but I can promise you this—I will never get bored with you. As long as I am capable of love, I will love you. Okay?” She smiled weakly.

  “Okay.”

  The next morning, Max awoke just as the first perceptible rays of dawn broke through the night sky and the birds on the shore below began their daily chorus. He heard a rustling of leaves as the late summer breeze blew over the campsite. He breathed in deeply the scent of flowers, struggling to keeps his eyes closed as long as possible, enjoying this warm sense of well being, wanting it never to end. Tiar had rolled up against him in the night and he could smell her familiar shampoo. Even through his sleeping bag, her body felt warm against his.

  “Are you cold, Little Bird?” he asked.

  “Humm.... cold,” she answered, still half asleep. He unzipped his sleeping bag and crawled into hers, pulling his sleeping bag on top of both of them. Tiar, who had been lying tightly balled up, every muscle contracted against the cold, began to relax. She was like a beautiful wax dummy melting in his embrace. Max pulled Tiar close to him, rubbing his nose against her tan neck. He would marry her, he thought. It was less a decision than a revelation, as though he had accidentally seen a later page in the script for his life. He didn’t know when this would happen, but he knew with complete certainly that it would, if he waited long enough.

  16

  Tiar finished toweling off and looked in the full length mirror in her bedroom. It was her first Friday back at school—the first week of her senior year. She and Max had returned from their camping trip ten days ago and her mosquito bites were all but gone. Only the steaming water of the shower made them stand out now. Tiar reached for her bathrobe and caught a glimpse of her profile in the mirror. Her breasts hung from her chest roughly grapefruit sized, tapered in a continuous natural line from her shoulder. Her nipples pointed slightly outward and upward like two people avoiding eye contact. She wondered if this is what all those silly romance novels Dana was always reading meant by “pouting breasts.” How could Max possibly get tired of these? she wondered. As she pulled on her bathrobe she realized, because he’s never seen them.

  Tiar tied her bathrobe closed and lay on her stomach on her bed. The pharmacy on Elm Street had closed for a few days due to a death in the owner’s family. To Tiar’s disappointment, her pictures from Canada had not gotten developed until yesterday afternoon. Max had returned to St. Andrews the week before and she had no one to share them with. Tiar set about sorting the double prints, making two complete sets. She lingered over a picture Kenny had taken of herself and Max in the park in Pembroke. She could almost hear the rapids and the birds. If she really concentrated, she could almost feel Max’s arms around her. Tiar pulled a permanent marker out of her book bag and drew a heart around her and Max’s heads in the picture. She couldn’t remember the last time she had drawn a heart. It was probably on a Mother’s Day card she had been required to make in art class in fifth grade, an assignment Tiar had tried to opt out of since she did not have an address for her mother. She gave the card to Eleanor instead.

  Aside from required art projects, Tiar had never been a doodler. She always felt like hearts looked silly anyway, as though the shape could only make sense between the words “I” and “Unicorns” or as the dot over the “I” of the hypothetical married name of a middle school girl with a crush. Now there’s an idea, Tiar thought, laughing at herself. She flipped the picture over and wrote on the back Maxwell and Tiar Franklin putting hearts over the “i”’s. Giggling, she slid the edge of the picture between her mirror and its frame where she could see it every day.

  Tiar stuffed one set of pictures into an envelope and licked the back, sealing it. If she hurried after school, she could send the pictures off to Max today. He would be so happy to get something in the mail from her. Soon after they started dating, Tiar had tried writing letters to him. She eventually stopped for fear that Max would continue to write back. His words were tender but his hand writing was so poor, Tiar could barely read it. She lived in constant apprehension that he would ask her something important in one of these letters and she would simply not respond, leading to a terrible misunderstanding. It was far safer, she thought, not to communicate at all and just await each other’s presence.

  This year would go by quickly anyway, Tiar thought to herself as she dressed for school. It would be a year full of excitement and challenges. Two veterinarians who had a practice in town offered Tiar a part time position for twice what she was making at the animal shelter, where she was still paid as if she was on the cleaning staff. To Tiar, the biggest benefit of this was that they were continually teaching her new techniques and “grooming” her for veterinary school. On top of that, there would be college plans, advanced placement classes, drivers’ licenses, basketball games-- a year full of surprises.

  17

  It was unseasonably warm for October. Max was sitting in his usual seat next to the open window overlooking the main quadrangle. He turned his text book to the page for today, beginning the era of the “Bad Emperors” of the Roman Empire, when he found a picture Kenny had taken of he and Tiar in a park in Ontario. He had been studying in the library two weeks earlier when Tony summoned him for lunch and the two had stopped by the post office on their way to the cafeteria. Max immediately wanted to look at the pictures Tiar had sent him from their vacation. This picture was his favorite. He stuck it into his text book for safe keeping. Looking at it now, he could almost feel the warm sunshine on their shoulders, almo
st recreate the feeling of Tiar’s tiny body in his arms. Max’s reverie was interrupted by Dr. Henderson, his professor, coming into the classroom his customary three minutes late.

  “Before I begin our lesson for today,” Dr. Henderson started. “I wanted to share a question a student posed to me after class last time about whether the fall of the Roman empire was foreseeable for the people living through it. This is a simple question with a very complicated answer. But here goes…” The middle aged man in jeans and a thin sweater turned toward the chalk board and began dividing it into four quadrants.

  “If I want to know what people in a particular time and place ate or wore or what they used to build their houses, I can use archeological evidence—actual residual artifacts of these items. If I want to know how much people paid in taxes, how they organized their court systems, et cetera, and I am lucky enough to be studying a culture with well preserved written records like the Romans, I can know much of this with absolute certainty. If I want to know what people in a certain culture were thinking, I need to use different primary source material like people’s letters, diaries, speeches, songs, plays, and so on. Unlike the ledgers and censuses, this other source material, I need to know how to interpret.” Max found his eyes drifting downward toward the picture in front of him. He loved Dr. Henderson’s lectures; but Max understood this particular lesson implicitly as if it were coded in his genes, passed to him from his mother who taught history for a living at the time he was born. Unwittingly and uncharacteristically, his mind began to wander outside of class.

  “When we are examining primary source material, we need to consider a number of different things: the author, the intended audience, the context, and the intent.” I wish I were there with Tiar right now. “If the author was a historian or chronicler, their intended audience was all posterity, and the intent was to record what was going on at the time, we do not need to do much interpretation.” It’s already been six weeks since I saw her. Six more. Ugg! “We need to be cognizant of bias— like if a particular historian hated a particular emperor for personal reasons, there may be a tendency to over emphasize all the bad things.” She is so beautiful. No, not just beautiful. Hot. She must be the sexiest girl in the whole state of New York. “But, for the most part, we can accept it as is. We would expect to see optimistic messages from the historians writing during the reign of the “Good Emperors.” In the unit starting with 180 AD, the section of history we are about to go into, we may see more gloom and doom.” How am I going to make it another two years without her? Or six if I go to graduate school here? She’ll go to Brighton. Then we’ll be even further apart. Don’t think about that now. She’s yours. Just think about that. This gorgeous girl loves you, Max. Gorgeous. Smart. Funny. God, do I miss her smile… and legs, and…