Whisper to Me(34)

“I was messing with you. I knew what you meant. And, yes, I do. One Thousand Mega Joules. ’Cause I’m Julie, and I study—”

“Physics?”

Julie smiled. She wasn’t pretty—her face was a little blunt—but her smile was like the sun when it hits the ocean on a gray still day, and even though the water is flat, matte, it flashes. “Close. Chemistry.” She turned to face back into the apartment. “Hey, Par, this one is smart.”

“I told you,” said Paris’s voice, from an unseen corner of the condo.

“Kitchen’s on the left,” said Julie. “See you soon, I hope.” Then she whisked out. She was someone with her dial always turned to full, Julie. She still is.

I followed the sound of Paris’s voice, across a smooth wood floor. There was a small hall that went straight into the main living room. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked over the beach and ocean, like you were sailing over it. Just to the left, I could see the first pier jutting out over the wide expanse of sand, the Ferris wheel slowly turning. There were a couple of armchairs like you see in magazines—curved metal bases, leather stretched over them. A coffee table made of polished driftwood. It did not look like a student’s condo.

I turned left and into the small kitchen. Paris banged the oven door shut. “I’m baking cookies,” she said. “For the occasion. They’ll be ready in a half hour.”

“Wow,” I said. I was worried about cookies and my allergy, but I didn’t want to put a downer on things.

“I know. I will make someone a fine wife one day.”

I smiled. “Someone eligible, I hope,” I said.

“Oh, Mother!” she exclaimed, in a surprisingly good British accent. “He hath two hundred a year, and a good house.” She did a curtsy. “I ****** love those old books. Austen and stuff.”

“Me too.” I would have said more. I would have said that I had loved Austen anyway, or I would have asked her if she knew that Jane from the library was actually Jane Austin, but I was wiped out from the walk. I just waved vaguely at the living room and reached out for the countertop to stabilize myself, and Paris looked stricken.

“Sorry! Sorry! Go sit down.” She ushered me ahead of her.

I sat on one of the armchairs. It kind of cradled me.

Paris sat opposite me; hooked her leg over the side of her chair. She fidgeted for a second, then leaned over and grabbed a piece of purple paper from a pile on the end table. She started folding it—some kind of origami.

When it was done, she held it up in front of her, and it obviously passed inspection because she smiled.

“What’s that?” I said. My best guess was some kind of bird—pointed head, arched wings.

“Crane,” said Paris.

“Cool. You like origami?”

She shook her head. “Not really.”

“So …”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s this thing. The thousand cranes? You have to make a thousand of them, and when you do, you get one wish. It’s like this old Japanese—I don’t know what you would call it—folk tale or belief or meditation or some kind of mix of all of them.”

“A thousand?”

“Yeah. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth a wish.”

“I guess not. So how many have you made?”

“Two hundred and sixty,” she said. She glanced at the purple crane in her hand. “Two hundred and sixty-one.” Abruptly, she got up from the chair—a motion like a spring uncoiling, quick and elastic. “Come look,” she said.

Paris led the way to a door at the other end of the room. She opened it and flicked a switch—bright electric light burst into being, illuminating a room that was obviously hers. Mess of clothes on the floor, a king-size bed nearly disappearing under books and magazines and plates of food—just a kind of tunnel to climb under the covers like a rabbit.

And all over the shelves on the walls, in among the beer glasses and photos and teddy bears, standing on every available surface: cranes. Paris pointed up and I looked; there was a string from the light shade to the wall, and on it more cranes were hanging. It seemed like more than two hundred and sixty. They were all colors—mostly white, but also red and green and blue and silver and gold.

“Whenever I get the chance, I make one,” she said. “Should hit a thousand in … I don’t know. A year, maybe?”

“Serious commitment.”

“I know. Worthy of an Austen heroine, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

I imagined a thousand cranes, in all colors, filling the room. It was going to be beautiful. I could understand why someone would want to do that.

She picked up a small white crane and pressed it into my hands. “This was the first one I made,” she said. “See how it’s not folded so crisply?”

I looked down at it. I nodded. It was a little misshapen.

She took it back and put it down, gently, on the bookshelf where it had been.

“What will you do with your wish?” I asked.

“If I said, it wouldn’t come true,” she said seriously.

“Oh. Yeah, of course.”

She smiled, and for a second I was dazzled by her smile: it was so warm, so beautiful, so totally unguarded, as if it for no single second occurred to her to think about what anyone else thought of her; very few people smile like that. “A lot of people would have laughed at me there. Probably even Julie, even though she would feel bad about it afterward. But not you.”