The Paper Garden

by Caitlin Vance

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, taking my hand. “Dance with me!”

  I wasn’t sure about that, either, but I liked her in a way I didn’t usually like women. I wasn’t sure why, because I didn’t really like pearls or khaki dresses or Hollywood actresses. But I gulped down the rest of my beer and followed.

  We went swimming in the lake that night, despite my concerns about getting in trouble because the park was closed. But she made me feel excited enough to do it. I was also worried about getting dirty, but she said “Who cares?” She kissed me on a bench beneath a pine tree. We went to her apartment, where we talked about Sartre. I had read a book of his, but didn’t feel I really understood it. She seemed to understand everything about him.

  “People think the existentialists are so negative,” she said, pouring me more wine. “But they’re not. They only say there is no inherent meaning to life. That doesn’t mean there is no meaning. It means we are free to create our own.”

  “But what if we don’t know how?” I asked. I thought to myself, for example, what if I am a waitress forever? I don’t want to be and I personally don’t find meaning in it. I didn’t say these words to her exactly. “What if we can’t create meaning, or we create a meaning we don’t like? Then it’s all our fault.”

  “Yes, it is. But that’s the beauty of it. You can always go back and change it.”

  We slept very well.

  A few days later we threw some things in the silver Prius Rachel had received as a graduation present and drove to the ocean. We went to a place where you could pitch a tent on the beach, so close to the sea animals. We thought it was funny to imagine fish sleeping. We talked about what strange things might live on the ocean floor, all the things scientists had not yet discovered.

  After only a few months of dating we moved in together. Rachel said she liked our camping trip and wanted to move somewhere “in the country.” How we came to live in Marysville specifically is Rachel had a cousin, Jennie, who was high up in the management at the nearby casino, and Jennie got me a job there waitressing (the tips were much better than at my previous job). Rachel quit her publishing job because it was now too long of a commute. She did some freelance editing work from home, when work was available.

  Jennie was too skinny in a coke head sort of way, and when she wasn’t working, only wore black T-shirts with names of rock bands on them. It didn’t make sense to me that she was related to Rachel, but Rachel said Jennie’s parents were “different.”

  “I just don’t understand why she sleepwalks at all,” Rachel said on speaker phone with the doctor, once again, poking her head out the sliding screen door while Maggie drew with sidewalk chalk on the patio.

  “It often happens when people are stressed or aren’t sleeping enough,” he said. “Try doing more quiet activities. Not so much stimulus.”

  “We live in the middle of nowhere in a beige house. She’s four years old. How could she be stressed?”

  “Children are mysterious,” he said, which made Rachel huff out more air and fluff her apron to shake off all the bits of flour.

  I had grown tired of Marysville. It wasn’t a nice place. The grocery store was open twenty-four hours a day. The workers wore bright orange uniforms and rode around on giant beeping carts with extendable ladders, restocking the oversized, dented boxes of Cheez-it crackers and Cheerios. At yard sales, people sold used games of Clue and Monopoly for a quarter while bulldogs nipped at their muddy boots and denim pant legs. Rachel and I had been happy there for a time. The upside was, it was very cheap to live there.

  “Jade, could you pick up some herbal tea on your way home?” Rachel would call, the phone cord braided through her fingers. “It might help with the sleepwalking.”

  Rachel stopped doing the freelance editing when she had Maggie (via sperm donor, via her parents’ money). She wanted to spend time with her child. Some people didn’t understand why the one with the college education stayed home, while I, who only had a high school diploma and no skills other than waitressing, worked. But that’s just how it was. Also, she was an English major.

  As for my parents, they had never been very involved. I was the product of a one-night stand and never met my father. My mother had kept me for a few years, while she still lived with her own mother, but then she moved out and left me there. My grandmother raised me until she died when I was seven, and then I went to stay with my mother’s sister, my Aunt Sarah. I saw my mother occasionally, but she was rarely truly cognizant, due to drugs. So, my mother was not very involved, though she did make it clear that if I was a “dyke,” I’d break her heart. I didn’t speak to her anymore. I told her about Rachel. She had hung up on me and didn’t answer when I called back. I stopped trying. I sometimes wondered about my father, but my mother couldn’t remember his name.

  Since the sleepwalking started a year ago, Rachel and I had grown farther apart. Rachel became consumed with it. She’d spend all day at home holding up calming, pastel paint swatches to Maggie’s wall, cutting fresh flowers for her nightstand, skimming all her books and hiding the too-stimulating ones under our bed. She did all of this while Maggie wandered alone outside, doll in hand, throwing stones into the water or dragging sticks through mud. I spent all day at the casino. Originally, I had hoped I could move up to a better position there, but I remained a waitress. Rachel’s failed cures for Maggie were becoming expensive, even in Marysville.

  Rachel showed no signs of planning to work full-time. I would occasionally gently nudge her, but she didn’t seem concerned. Because of her upbringing, she wasn’t used to having to worry about money, and it’s like she was incapable of doing it. I wanted to make enough that I could afford our current lifestyle, which was not even close to what Rachel was used to, but I couldn’t. I had always been weird about money, not having ever had any.

  “Listen, Jennie,” I said one day on lunch break, “I really appreciate you getting me this job. But Rachel’s spending all the money I’m trying to save buying herbal tea and yoga videos for Maggie. I might not mind, except none of it cures her.”

  “You need more money?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Look,” she said, “I can’t get you a promotion here. That’s not how it works.”

  I nodded and looked down.

  She sighed. “I do know a way you could make extra money, if you really need it, but you can’t tell Rachel.”

  That’s how I started working for the Mason family. I never did anything visibly illegal, though I was sure it all was. They’d ask me to go grocery shopping for them and to leave the car unlocked in the parking lot. There would be several large bags, whose contents were a mystery to me, in the trunk, and they’d be gone when I came out of the store. Or they’d ask me to buy something small with a hundred-dollar bill (probably counterfeit) and bring them back the change. Or I’d drive them places and wait outside, even though they could have driven themselves. They were easy tasks and the pay was decent, but I wasn’t supposed to ask any questions or tell anyone about the things I did. I did these errands before or after my shift, raising little suspicion from Rachel.

  The Masons looked normal and were very nice. They were a couple, Mr. and Mrs., in their forties. They offered me coffee and snacks when I went to their house. They had two very well-trained pit bulls and several grown children. Mrs. Mason called me “sweetie pie.”

  I hid the money I made in a small box in the tool shed. Rachel never went in the tool shed. I’d figure out what to tell Rachel once I made enough to make an actual difference.

  Maggie would be starting kindergarten that fall, and asked me to take her to the school playground so she could know what recess would be like.

  “Mommy,” she said as I pushed her on the swing, “how did you and Mom meet?”

  “We met after Mom finished college and we went swimming at night.” I not
iced a hefty man with a red beard standing near the edge of the playground, in the distance, who seemed to be staring at us. I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “I like to go swimming at night, too,” she said, her feet trying to kick at the woodchips below her, only they were too short. We went swimming at night and were stupid enough to think that was beautiful and would make us happy forever.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” I said. “No, we did it when we were awake and much older than you. It’s different.”

  “Okay,” she said. The man in the distance began to walk off.

  I took her to 7-11, and we bought Lemon Heads and some tiny airplanes made of foam, which we flew as the sun set.

  About a month into working for the Mason family, I began to worry. I saw the same man with the red beard a few more times. At first, I thought it was a coincidence; Marysville wasn’t that big and it was normal to begin to recognize certain strangers. But then it was too many times, and I always caught him looking at me. When he noticed that I noticed, he’d look away and leave. He came into the casino a few times, but didn’t play any games or order any food.

  I also began to wonder what was in the bags. They were large, but usually not heavy enough to be guns, not light enough to be marijuana, I thought. As I carried them from the Mason house to the car, it felt like trying to guess the contents of a Christmas gift.

  One evening I decided to check. I had two bags to deliver that night. I knew I shouldn’t, but I thought there would be no way they’d find out; it was my own car, it wasn’t like there were cameras inside it. I pulled off into the parking lot of Maggie’s future elementary school, which was empty this time of day. I climbed out and opened the trunk, and was ready to unzip the bag, first checking around to make sure I was truly alone. I was. Inside the first bag I found a lot of Styrofoam packing peanuts. As I dug through them, I found not guns or drugs but guns and drugs, what looked like cocaine. I re-zipped it.

  The other bag was the same size but lighter. I unzipped it. Again, I found a large number of packing peanuts, but this time I found three smaller bags, each filled with what appeared to be a kidney. I quickly re-zipped the bag. My hands held onto the zipper tight, as if the bag might pop back open of its own accord. I got back in the car and drove off.

  Probably the kidneys were not from murdered people, I thought. Maybe it was just underground market stuff. People selling their organs. I wished I had not looked in the bags. How could I keep working for these people now? Before, I had pretended it was all harmless, but now I felt implicated. Their cocaine was going to people like my mother, possibly ruining lives. And what if these people were mixed up in even worse things? What if I got caught and went to jail? But I couldn’t stop working for them. Would they really let me just walk away?

  “Jade, are you sad you never went to college?” Rachel asked me one night, climbing into bed.

  We didn’t discuss this often. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m sad. But I couldn’t afford it, and it didn’t seem that important at the time.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “My mom?” I reminded her. “She didn’t care.”

  “How could she not care? My parents forced college down my throat since pre-school. Either it would be a way to a good job, or a way towards a partner with a good job,” she said. I frowned. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “Anyway, I’m sure even if your mom wasn’t around, she still wanted the best for you. And what about your aunt? I’m sure she did too.”

  “We lived in different worlds, Rachel. Their idea of the best isn’t the same as yours.”

  “We’re from different worlds, but now we live in the same world. The same house, even.” As if those were the same.

  “Okay, you’re right,” I said, pulling the blankets up to my chin. I didn’t feel like getting into some big discussion right then.

  “When did you know you were gay?”

  “I’m not really gay, not like one hundred percent gay.”

  “Okay, whatever. When did you know you were bisexual?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like I said before, I didn’t think I’d ever be with a woman until I met you.”

  “But how can that be true?” she said. “You’re straight as a pin, and one day you just meet me and soon afterwards decide you want to move in together?”

  “Yes, that’s what happened.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t get why it’s such a big deal,” I said. “I think people just fall in love. I think we just like someone, for whatever reason, and we gravitate towards them.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, rubbing lotion on her hands. “I could never date a man. I mean, not after high school. Everyone always expected me to, since I was girly or whatever. And it’s so hard to not act how you’re expected to in high school. But I could also never date a Republican or someone who enjoyed wrestling.”

  “I dated a Republican man for sixth months and it was okay at the time.”

  “Do you even care that we have so much in common?” she asked.

  “Like what?” I said, without thinking. Oops.

  I guess we did have some things in common. I liked literature too. Just, I read Camus and Woolf on my own and probably didn’t understand them properly, whereas Rachel’s parents paid for some guy in a suit could tell her what it meant.

  “Like, we both like dancing?” she said.

  “That’s true.”

  “We haven’t gone out in forever,” she said. “I feel so suffocated.”

  “You could get out more, you know,” I said. “You don’t have to stay home all the time.”

  “But I do have to stay home,” she said. “Who’s gonna take care of Maggie? We can’t afford daycare.” As if she really took care of her. She was always on the phone all day while Maggie played alone in the yard. “Maybe when Maggie starts kindergarten…”

  “Let’s go out this weekend,” I said. “We’ll leave Maggie with Jennie.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Can we please go? I love you.” She kissed me, then turned away to fall asleep.

  That Saturday, we drove Maggie to Jennie’s.

  “Mom, I don’t want to go to Jennie’s house,” she said. “It smells weird in there, and her voice is too loud and too fast, and so are her dogs.”

  “You’ll be going to sleep soon,” Rachel said, lining her lips in the rear-view mirror at a stoplight. “You won’t have to listen for long.”

  Maggie frowned.

  “Come in,” Jennie said, holding her bulldogs back by the collars, opening the door a crack.

  “You want a beer?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Jade, shouldn’t we get going?” asked Rachel.

  “Um,” I said.

  “I’m just gonna use the bathroom first.” Rachel clinked down the hall in her heels. Maggie gravitated towards the television, which was playing music videos.

  “So, how’s everything going?” Jennie asked.

  “I dunno. Fine, I guess. They give me money, and I don’t ask questions.” I wondered if I should mention the kidneys to her. I decided to play like I didn’t know. “Do you know what’s in those bags?”

  “You can’t ask what’s in those bags.”

  “Is it drugs?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Guns? Something worse? Any chance you know how I could stop working for them?”

  “Jade, just drop it. It doesn’t matter. Just keep plugging away,” she said.

  “But—”

  Rachel returned from down the hall.

  “Okay, Jennie, I brought some supplies for Maggie,” Rachel said, her hands digging to the bottom of her purse, which was embroidered with her initials. “Some herbal tea for right now—not too soon before she goes to bed. A guided child meditation video—she can watch that while she drinks the tea—oh, she should pr
obably stop watching those music videos, they’re so hectic—some of her favorite stuffed animals, her own pillow with the ponies on it—”

  “I think I can handle it,” Jennie said, balancing the jumble of items in her arms.

  “Great. You’re the best. Ready?” she said, turning to me.

  “Sure.”

  We kissed Maggie goodnight and drove to a dance club in nearby Everett. The club was small and kind of dingy, but it was something. And Rachel was right; we needed to get out.

  “So,” I said, “which one of us is driving home?”

  “I can drive,” she said. “In college I’d drive to an off-campus party, take four shots as soon as I got there, wait a few hours, and then drive home. It was fine.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Yep,” she said.

  And so we drank the shots, and then we danced. The club played popular eighties songs and projected the music videos on the wall. Rachel grabbed my hand and spun me over and over again. I still loved when she danced; even when dancing to these ridiculous songs, her limbs reminded me of branches moving in the wind. And her smile was different when she danced, more real.

  I went outside for a breath of air. I went across the street, because there was a large group of men in motorcycle jackets who I didn’t want to talk to outside of the club. I sat on the curb and looked up at the stars. I didn’t know any constellations except the Big and Little Dipper. I bet Rachel did. Rachel knew everything and she was beautiful, and I was a fool not to love her.

  Across the street, I saw the man with the red beard stomping out a cigarette. For what must have been a whole minute after he finished, he just stood there, staring right at me. Finally, he got in his car and drove away.

  I was ready to leave the club when I went back inside. My buzz had worn off and I was over the Eighties music. Rachel had taken two more shots with strangers during the ten minutes I was outside, and had given them her phone number. She always flirted with men in bars, perhaps not because she liked them, but because she was pretty and thrived off making people happy and she felt it was obligatory. Still, I hated that she couldn’t take me seriously enough to stay away from the men.