The Paper Palace(110)

I call over to Peter. “Wake up.”

He stirs, but doesn’t wake.

“Peter,” I say, louder this time. “Wake up. I want you to see this.” But he is dead to the world.

I go over to his side of the bed, nudge him.

“What?” he says, voice groggy with sleep. “Jesus. What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Early. But wake up. You have to see this. It’s insane out there—like some sort of bird maelstrom.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I think we might be in the eye of a hurricane.”

“There wouldn’t be all this wind—only dead air. It’s just a big storm coming. Nothing to worry about. Now fuck off and let me sleep,” he grumbles sweetly.

A few years after Maddy and Finn were born, long after our lives had meshed into a different song, Jonas and I were walking in the woods one afternoon and passed an oak tree entwined in honeysuckle. There were what seemed like a hundred hummingbirds drinking flower nectar with their needle-beaks.

“Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backward,” Jonas said. “It’s one of those facts that’s always astonished me. They can fly backward and forward at equal speed. Thirty miles an hour.”

“If I could fly backward, I would,” I said. To the safety of branches, to the time when my heart raced for him like a hummingbird’s, 1,200 beats per second.

And he said, as he always did, “I know.”

6:30 A.M.

When I wake again, the heavy rains have passed. Water has pooled on the floorboards next to our bed, soaking the stack of books I keep planning to read. Peter is dreaming. I can tell by the way his eyelids twitch, by the length of his rough-saw breaths. I brush the hair off his forehead, kiss his cheek, his brow.

He stirs, shifts, his eyes crack open.

“Hey,” I whisper. “You’re here,” and cover his face in butterfly kisses.

“Morning, baby,” he says, swatting me away. “You going for your swim?”

“Why don’t you come with me? The pond will be warm after the rain.” I hold my breath, wait. Come with me. End this.

He rolls over, his back to me. “I promised Jack I’d take him into town at nine. Wake me up if I oversleep.”

I press my hand flat against the curve of his shoulder, splay my fingers wide. I like the way his freckles look inside the Vs my fingers make, like constellations of stars. I trace a heart with the tip of my finger across the wide plane of his back.

“I love you, too,” he mumbles from the tangle of sheets.

The early morning air is clammy. I wrap my mother’s old lavender bathrobe tight around me, stand in the doorway looking out. The surface of the pond is motionless, sheet glass, as if the storm never happened, the water lilies shuttered in their circadian sleep. A stillness, the world bathed in a blush of watermelon-pink. On the steps of our cabin I spy a single iridescent feather. I pick it up. Twirl it in my fingers by its sharp bony stem. Across the pond a figure stands. Waiting. Hoping. I can just make out his blue shirt.

The cabin step sags beneath me with a sigh, then springs back with a quiet thwang I’ve heard a thousand times before. This place—every wheeze, every grunt—is in my bones. The soft crunch of pine needles under my bare feet, the waft of minnows, the musk-fishy smell of wet sand and pond water. This house, built out of paper—tiny bits of shredded cardboard pressed together into something strong enough to withstand time, the difficult, lonely winters; always threatening to fall into ruin, yet still standing, year after year, when we return. This house, this place, knows all my secrets. I am in its bones, too.

I close my eyes and breathe in the everything-ness of it all. Jonas. Peter. Me. What it all could have been. What it could be. I take off my wedding ring, hold it in the palm of my hand, considering it, feeling the weight of it—its worn, eternal shape, its gold-ness. I squeeze it tight against my life line one final time before leaving it behind me on the top step and heading down the path to take my swim.

On the far side of the pond, an egg-yolk sun rises out of the dense tree line like a hot air balloon, slow, graceful. It hovers, suspended for a moment, before breaking free of its tethers—the break of dawn. In that instant, the smallest breeze shirrs the water, waking the pond for another day.





Acknowledgments


When I was in my teens and first attempting to write fiction, my grandfather Malcolm Cowley gave me a piece of advice that I have carried with me: the only thing you need to know, he said, is that every good story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, with the end foreshadowed in the beginning.

It took me a lifetime to get there, but I have followed his advice to a T.

There are so many people I am grateful to for pushing, shoving, supporting, and propping me up on this journey—most especially my extraordinary mother, Blair Resika, who taught me how to set a table and raised us in uncompromising beauty. My beloved sisters, Lizzie and Sonia—you are my rocks and my soul.

My father, Robert Cowley, editor and historian extraordinaire, told me when I was eleven years old that the best writing is always the shortest distance between two points. I thank him for that, but even more so for giving me the dazzling whirlwinds that are my younger sisters, Olivia and Savannah.

Thank you to my grandfather, Jack Phillips, for giving us the landscape. My wonderful stepfather, Paul Resika, for immortalizing it. My godmother, Florence Phillips, for a magical can of corn that changed the course of a little girl’s life.