The Paper Palace(14)

On the back side of the grave is a wide marble step. It’s meant to be for flowers, Granny tells us, but as far as she knows, no one has ever visited. On very hot days, Anna and I like to sit there, hidden from the road, in the cool shade of the tombstone. We’ve started making paper dolls. We draw them on paper and cut them out. Anna always does the faces and hairstyles: ponytails, Afros, Pippi Longstocking braids, pageboys. We make teensy clothes with square tabs that fold around the dolls—striped purple bell-bottoms and hip-huggers, kitchen aprons, leather jackets, crayon-white go-go boots, maxiskirts, neckties. Bikinis. “Every doll has to have its own wardrobe,” Anna says, carefully cutting out a microscopic handbag.

We are sitting on the grave step when we hear a car turn into our gravel drive across the road.

“He’s here!” Anna says.

Our father is coming for a whole week. We haven’t seen him in ages—he’s been traveling for work. He misses his bunny girls he tells us when Granny lets us speak to him on the phone. He cannot wait to see us. He’s taking us to the Danbury Fair and swimming at Candlewood Lake. He is bringing a surprise. We may not recognize him, he says. He has grown a moustache.

We pack up our paper dolls and race down the hill, calling his name, excited for our surprise. He gets out of his car at the top of the driveway. Then the passenger door opens.

11:00 A.M.

In the wake of my argument with Peter, his car engine gunning away up the driveway, Finn and Maddy have settled back into their books and machines like seabirds after a swell.

“Mind if I squeeze in, chublets?” They make room for me without bothering to look up. “One more squidge.”

“Mom!” Maddy says, annoyed at another disruption.

I lean back between them, close my eyes, grateful for my children’s familiar smell, their eggy breath, a momentary reprieve. Jack is still in his cabin, sulking, single-minded, refusing to come out. Which is typical. Jack was stubborn when he was still in my womb. No matter how many liters of cod-liver oil I drank, he refused to leave his safe watery nest. He finally agreed to emerge two weeks late, after an agonizing and interminable labor. I remember being certain, at one point, that I was going to die in childbirth. By the next morning, I was convinced my baby was dead inside me, though the doctor had seventeen monitors attached to me all pinging Jack’s solid heartbeat. It was the terror of losing the thing I loved most in the world, without ever being allowed to love him. But out he came, pink and squalling, long frog feet, pleated and wrinkled, fish-eyed, blinking. A creature of water. Primordial. Wiped off and swaddled in blue. Handed to me. A softness wrapped in softness wrapped in my arms, inside of me and outside at the same time.

When the nurses took Jack away to let me rest, I sent Peter home. We had both been awake for so many hours. I woke in dimness. I could hear Jack’s snuffling breath, tiny squeaks of dreams, just there, beside my head. The nurses had wheeled him back to me while I slept. I cradled him out of his bassinet, tried to latch him to my breast, no idea what I was doing, feeling like an impostor pretending to be a real mother. Wept as we struggled to connect. Happiest and saddest. Inside and out.

There was a knock on the hospital-room door. The nurse, I thought, relieved. But it was Jonas who came through the door. Jonas, whom I had not seen or spoken to in four years. Who had walked out of my life in anger and hurt when I married Peter. Who was married to Gina now. Jonas, my oldest friend, who stood in the doorway with a massive bunch of white peonies wrapped in brown paper, watching me sob onto my baby.

He came to the edge of the bed, lifted Jack from my arms, gently, not asking permission, knowing he had it. Pulled the blue baby blanket away from Jack’s soft cheek, kissed him on the nose, and said, “Is it me, or does she look a little bit masculine?”

“Fuck off,” I smiled. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.”

“Is it your perineum?” he asked, concerned.

“Oh my god.” And I laughed through the weeping. Happiness and loss.



* * *



—

I picture Jack now, lying on his bed, hands crossed behind his head, earphones cutting out the world, trying to decide whether or not he should forgive me—wondering whether I will forgive him. “Yes, and yes,” I want to shout to him, down the path. There is no such thing as unforgivable between people who love each other. But even as I’m thinking it, I know it’s not really true.

A fly has gotten itself trapped inside the porch. It buzzes against the screen, wings and legs rasping the metal filaments. Every so often it stops to rethink and the porch goes silent, only the sound of pages turning, Finn’s spit bubble popping with a faint plip as he concentrates on his game. Across the pond, on the small public-access beach, people are already staking out their patch of sand for the day, unpacking picnics onto cotton tablecloths to prevent anyone else from impinging. I should never have let Peter convince me to meet Jonas and Gina at the beach. The thought of facing Jonas in the stark light of day, eating Gina’s tuna sandwiches and rehashing last night’s dinner party; the lie in my smile. There’s no reason I have to go. Peter made the plan. He can take the kids. No one will care. Except me. Because then they will get to be near Jonas and I won’t. They will get to lay their towels next to his in the hot sand. And the thought of not seeing him fills me with an agonized tangy ache to touch him, brush his hand under the surf, a hunger. An addiction. A siren. A siren with a penis, I think, and laugh out loud.