The Paper Garden

by Caitlin Vance

  The other driver suddenly noticed Margot talking in her direction. She lowered her own window and asked, “What did you say?”

  Margot paused. “Nothing,” she said. The light turned green and both women drove on.

  my life is the size of a walnut

  Caroline and John never told each other much about their pasts, their families, or the reasons why they were the way they were. They had an unspoken agreement that their relationship was a new phase for both of them, and they preferred to leave the past behind. They knew and loved each other now, and that was all that mattered.

  John was Caroline’s supervisor at the office, and everyone thought he was handsome and charismatic. Caroline was shy and sad all the time, and she thought she wasn’t pretty but she wasn’t ugly either. She’d had boyfriends before, but none of them were that great and none of them ever told her they loved her. John and Caroline started seeing each other in secret, because it was against office rules for supervisors to date subordinates. John was kind and he told her she was beautiful and that he loved her, and she decided she’d do anything for him.

  When they got engaged they told their coworkers, and despite the rule, everyone thought it was okay because they were engaged and that was more important than anything. They received many cards and presents. After the wedding, they honeymooned on a tropical island, got a dog, and put a down payment on a house. Caroline didn’t really like islands or dogs or even houses, but she knew everyone was supposed to like these things, so she pretended. They smiled at each other and held hands all the time and John bought Caroline flowers when he got a little extra money.

  After their daughter Isabelle was born, Caroline stopped going to work. The cost of childcare made her working pointless. Caroline never thought she’d get married or have children, but John wanted a baby so badly that she agreed. Every time the baby drank Caroline’s milk, she’d spit or vomit it out, sometimes all the way across the room like she was possessed. John laughed even though it wasn’t funny. The doctor said the only reason babies would reject breast milk was if the mother was eating something the baby was allergic to. But he ran tests, and Isabelle wasn’t allergic to anything at all. John bought baby formula and fed the baby himself.

  Caroline could tell John loved their daughter more than anything, including Caroline. But Caroline loved John more than the baby. She didn’t tell this to anyone. She had some friends, but she wasn’t close enough with any of them to discuss that sort of thing. She wasn’t close with her family, either. Caroline thought that because John loved the baby so much, it would be better if he stayed home and she went to work, but she couldn’t make as much money as him, even though she had a college degree and he didn’t. She had thought a college degree was a financial investment. But at least in her case, not much good ever came out of getting one.

  On the weekends, John would wander through the rooms and dust the surface of each piece of furniture and scrub the sinks and the insides of kitchen appliances, even though Caroline always did the cleaning during the week when Isabelle was sleeping. Apparently, her cleaning was not good enough for him. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not exactly Suzie Homemaker.”

  John kissed her and said, “It’s okay, sweetheart. I love you.”

  After he cleaned, he’d go into the garage and the yard and find things that he thought needed fixing, then fix them. He’d insist on cooking meals, even though Caroline could cook fine. She thought he didn’t like her cooking. She didn’t really like his cooking, either. He used too much pepper and too many spices. She never told him this.

  After a few months, Caroline and John decided to go to their coworker’s Christmas party at a bar, and leave the baby for the first time. They did not have money to throw away on childcare and John’s parents lived closer than Caroline’s (hers were in another state). They took the baby to John’s parents’ house for the night.

  Caroline did not know John’s parents very well. His mother dyed her hair red and wore cheetah print blouses and too much eyeliner that bled underneath her eyes like black watercolor, and she always had a lot of Boston terriers. Recently she had begun trying to breed them. When John and Caroline walked into the house she said, “Let me show you something.” She led them into the kitchen where, on the counter, she had laid out a litter of dead newborn puppies as if they were something she’d baked that needed to cool off. “Aren’t they beautiful?” she asked. Their eyes were just little closed slits, never opened, and their velvet hair shined like a sad, open eye. To Caroline, they looked peaceful. She reached out her hand to touch one, then realized what she was doing and shot her hand back to her chest.

  John’s father sat in a chair in the living room, and didn’t say anything about the dead puppies. He was always quieter than his wife. He’d been in the military and kept his appearance neat. Although he wasn’t overly friendly, he seemed like a reasonable person, not like his wife, who Caroline thought was a bit stupid and a bit crazy too.

  “Hi, John!” said John’s brother Kyle, coming out of his bedroom. Kyle wore sweatpants all the time and played too many video games and lived with his parents even though he was an adult. He had some sort of addiction and seemed to have suffered brain damage, but Caroline didn’t know the details. “Is that the baby?” he said, even though the thing Catherine held was obviously a baby and he had also met her before. Kyle lunged too quickly and clumsily towards the bundle in Caroline’s arms. The baby began to cry, and Kyle recoiled.

  As the couple left, John’s father stood up and said quietly to Caroline, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of her.” His voice was deep like the sound a sturdy ship makes, Caroline thought. She passed Isabelle off into his arms.

  At the Christmas party Caroline got drunk for the first time in a year. People danced with each other, but Caroline preferred to dance alone. When she squinted her eyes and spun around, the red and green lights in the darkness were like a neon impressionist garden and she was a character in a children’s book. Caroline had never felt like an adult, not even now that she was a mother. She enjoyed being drunk because she could act like a child and have an excuse for it. She often watched children in public and envied them, because only children were allowed to have fun openly, only children were allowed to suffer openly.

  Caroline got dizzy. She had once read in a book that spinning very fast produced an effect in the brain similar to an intoxicant, and that was why children did it so much. She went to sit down and watch other people dance. Because Caroline wouldn’t dance with John, he was dancing with another woman, the woman who’d taken over Caroline’s job when Isabelle was born. The woman did not have a husband or boyfriend to bring to the party. Her name was Kelly, and she wasn’t particularly ugly or pretty but was just a regular-looking woman, like Caroline. The difference was Kelly applied nail polish and curled her hair every day, unlike Caroline, who just let it dry naturally. She had long ago learned that men either didn’t notice or didn’t care about things like nail polish or eyeshadow. Other women noticed, though. The other difference between Caroline and Kelly was that Kelly smiled and laughed more than Caroline did and didn’t seem to hate herself. Men did notice that.

  Caroline got up to use the restroom. In the stall, she saw a piece of graffiti that said: “I am a teenager. My life is the size of a walnut. I don’t care about Afghanistan.”

  “Same,” Caroline scribbled underneath with a black pen. She always kept pens in her purse in case she ever came up with a good idea and needed to write it down. She hardly ever needed the pens. This was the first graffiti she’d ever done.

  The next morning, Caroline had a headache and felt like she hadn’t slept at all, even though she knew she slept more than she usually did because the baby wasn’t there. Next time we leave the baby with John’s parents, she thought, I’m not going to drink.

  “When did I get so old?” she asked John. He laughed from the driver’s seat. He always drove when both of
them were in the car together. “I used to drink like that every Saturday in college, then go to the library on Sunday and write essays about Shakespeare or James Joyce, with no headache or anything. How did I do that?”

  “Beats me,” said John. He put his hand on her thigh and smiled.

  The dead puppies were no longer on the kitchen counter when they arrived at John’s parents’ house. How did one dispose of dead puppies? Bury them or just throw them in the trash? Caroline imagined a black garbage bag filled with that soft hair and those slit-eyes.

  John spoke with his parents about the Christmas party and how Isabelle did last night, and Kyle pulled Caroline aside. “I wouldn’t leave that baby here again if I were you,” he said. “Our mother tried to kill me when I was six. She put Drano in my Kool-Aid.”

  There’s no way that’s true, Caroline thought. “Why would she want to do that?” she asked.

  “Probably she wanted money from the government,” he said. “The government gives people money when tragedies like that happen.”

  “Hmm,” she said, and nodded her head to be polite.

  He moved past her to put a candy wrapper in the trash can. She thought she saw a tiny dog nose, peeking out from underneath a clean paper towel that had probably been used in attempt to cover it.

  Isabelle grew older. She said she didn’t like her birth name, the name Caroline had chosen for her, and she asked to be called Cinderella instead. John called her this, but Caroline refused. She did not like the moral of the story “Cinderella.”

  She was three, then four, then five. She asked to be called Ariel, then Pocahontas, then Mulan. “I want to be a soldier,” she said to Caroline. She asked for a toy sword. Caroline wouldn’t let John buy her one. Isabelle found a stick in the yard and used it to fight John, who had his own stick.

  “Why do you want to be a soldier?” Caroline asked Isabelle.

  “I want to be strong,” she said. “I want to destroy my enemies.”

  Isabelle didn’t get to see Caroline’s parents very often. “Other kids have two grandmas and two grandpas,” she said. “How come I only have one of each?”

  “You have two of each,” said Caroline, “you just don’t see the others very often.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they live in another state.”

  “Can we go see them?”

  “Maybe someday.”

  “Can they babysit me instead?”

  “Why? What’s wrong with the grandparents who babysit you now?”

  She didn’t answer. “Call me Peter Pan from now on,” she said. “I’m going to cut off people’s hands and feed them to the alligators.” She ran off to sword-fight more with John.

  “I want to go to Neverland,” Isabelle said at dinner.

  “Neverland is a wonderful place, honey,” said John.

  “Call me Peter Pan, Dad, not honey.”

  “Oh, my mistake,” he said. “Neverland is wonderful, Peter Pan.”

  She smiled.

  “Why do you want to go to Neverland?” Caroline asked.

  “That’s where the Lost Boys live. They also have mermaids and pirates.”

  “But the pirates are bad,” Caroline said.

  “I know,” Isabelle said. She pouted, then smiled. “But I’ll cut off their hands and feed them to the alligators!”

  “That’s not very nice,” said John.

  “They deserve it,” Isabelle hissed. She never hissed.

  John frowned.

  “They try to kill the Lost Boys. They deserve it. I’ll cut off their hands so they can’t hold a sword anymore. Let’s see them try to kill the Lost Boys then!”

  “Why is she so obsessed with killing?” Caroline asked John as they climbed into bed.

  “Oh, Caroline, it’s just a phase,” he said. “All children are obsessed with killing.”

  “I wasn’t,” she said.

  “Well, you weren’t normal,” he said. He smiled. She tried to smile. He was trying to flirt with her, he was still trying. He kissed her and they slept together, although Caroline’s mind was elsewhere.

  “I really wouldn’t leave Peter Pan here anymore,” Kyle said to Caroline. “My mother tried to kill me when I was seven. She put knives in my pillowcase instead of a pillow. She wanted to stab my brain out of my head.”

  Caroline shook her head. “No way,” she said. She looked over at John’s father. He was sitting on the ground with Isabelle, playing with miniature trains. John’s mother was in the kitchen mixing Crystal Light, sugar-free Kool-Aid. Isabelle wouldn’t drink anything without sugar. She asked for apple juice next to her bed at night instead of water. John encouraged the bad habit. She cried when Caroline tried to give her water.

  John and Caroline left the house and went to yet another Christmas party. It was the same every year. Caroline always got drunk even though she dreaded the headache the next day. She always danced, but only alone, not with John or anyone else. John always danced with Kelly. Kelly had grown a bit more beautiful, Caroline thought. Her face glowed like the red Christmas lights were beneath her skin. Caroline wished she could wear a paper bag over her head. She thought of cutting Kelly’s hands off with a sword.

  John said he had something to do the next morning, so Caroline went alone to pick up Isabelle from his parents’ house. When she got there, Isabelle ran to her and threw her arms around her legs. “Let’s go, Mom,” she said.

  In the car she began to cry. “I want to go to my other grandmother’s house,” she said.

  “Sweetie, your other grandmother lives in a different state.”

  She cried harder.

  “What’s wrong, Isabelle?”

  “I don’t want to go back there anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “Did something happen?”

  Isabelle pouted. She wouldn’t answer.

  Caroline knew something was not right. John’s mother was crazy and so was his brother. John was sleeping with Kelly, probably even right now, while she picked up their daughter from his parents’ house. Children could sense unrest, and Isabelle was unhappy. Soon Caroline and John would be divorced and Caroline would have nowhere to take Isabelle. She’d have to go back to work and pay for childcare, somehow. John would pay some child support. She wouldn’t take Isabelle to John’s parents’ house after the divorce. It was too embarrassing.

  Isabelle said again, “I’m going to cut off his hands and feed them to the alligators.”

  “Uncle Kyle’s hands?” Caroline asked.

  “Grandpa’s hands.”

  Isabelle continued to ask about her other grandparents and continued to tell Caroline she did not want to go to John’s parents’ house and that specifically she didn’t like her grandfather. Caroline never mentioned this to John, maybe because they were his parents and she didn’t want to upset him. She didn’t know exactly why she didn’t mention it. It seemed it would take too much out of her to do it. Caroline stopped sleeping with John and John continued to sleep with Kelly, but he never spoke to Caroline about it, and she never asked him, she just knew. She never asked him about his parents, either. She never told him about the things Kyle said or the things Isabelle said. Kyle was just on drugs, and Isabelle was a child, she told herself. Isabelle was just an imaginative child and she was jealous that other children had two sets of grandparents around instead of one.

  One Saturday night, Caroline got a phone call in the evening from John’s mother. “Come get her,” she said. “She’s acting crazy.” John stayed at the party and Caroline left. She’d only had two glasses of wine, whereas John had drank four and could not drive, he said.

  When Caroline arrived, John’s father was gone and so was Kyle. “Kyle drove him to the hospital,” John’s mother said. “Your daughter tried to cut off his hand with a knife.”

 
“A sword!” Isabelle said. She was lying on the ground, rolling around and beating her fists against the carpet.

  Caroline didn’t even know Kyle could drive. “I am so sorry,” she said to John’s mother. John’s mother crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. A pregnant Boston Terrier rubbed against Caroline’s leg. Caroline didn’t like the Boston Terriers. They were too small and sneaky. She preferred big, obvious dogs, if there had to be dogs at all. The pregnant dog went over to Isabelle. Isabelle got up and walked right out the door.

  The divorce came, and then John’s marriage to Kelly. Caroline went back to work, and she and Isabelle sold the house and moved to an apartment. Caroline hired a pregnant teenager to babysit Isabelle, and they never saw John’s family anymore. Caroline thought Isabelle would give the teenager practice. John paid child support. He and Kelly moved to another state to be closer to Kelly’s dying mother. Isabelle cried every day and saw her father once a year when they could afford plane tickets. She was seven, then eight, then fourteen.

  Caroline never got another boyfriend or husband. Isabelle got a boyfriend and Caroline didn’t like him. His name was Quentin and he made Isabelle cry because he told her he wished her hair was blonde instead of brown and that her breasts were bigger. When Caroline told Isabelle she thought Quentin was an asshole and she should dump him, Isabelle screamed that she loved him. Caroline found condoms in the bathroom and tried not to see pictures of Isabelle and Quentin in her mind, but she saw them. Caroline took Isabelle to the doctor to get birth control pills. Caroline hated birth control pills because of the side effects, and she hated that Isabelle had to take them just to sleep with her piece of shit boyfriend who probably only watched the misogynistic variety of porn because that was the easiest to find, and probably didn’t even know or care what a clitoris was or where it was located.

  Caroline’s mother started to die, too. She took Isabelle to visit her. Isabelle wouldn’t stop texting Quentin They seemed to be arguing. Isabelle’s grandmother stroked Isabelle’s hair and told her she was beautiful. Caroline could tell Isabelle didn’t believe it.