The Paper Palace(35)

I open the flap.

“A mysterious stranger will soon come into your life.” She reads what I have written in a whisper. “And he will put his penis in you.”

“I did NOT write that. Psycho,” I say.

“Wait.” Becky leans across me and unzips her father’s duffel, careful not to let him hear. She pulls out a white book with no cover. “You think I’m gross?”

The book is filled with black-and-white drawings. Picture after picture of a couple doing it. The woman looks like the wife on The Bob Newhart Show, except naked. The man has long dark hair and a beard. He is wearing an open shirt and nothing else. His penis dangles out from the bottom of his shirttails. He’s revolting. I think about Anna having sex with that college guy. The thought of her with someone she barely knows makes me feel sad for her, and I wonder if, deep inside, she regrets it. Because once you do it, you can never undo it.

Becky turns the page to a different illustration: the woman is leaning against a wall. The man is on his knees with his face in her crotch.

“Blech,” Becky whispers. “Can you imagine anything more disgusting? She probably tastes like pee.”

“Ewww.” We start laughing so hard it hurts.

“What’s the joke?” Dixon asks from the front seat. “I want in.”

Becky shoves the book back in her dad’s duffel.

“We were reading,” I say.

“Elle, you know reading in the car makes you sick,” Mum says. She opens the glove compartment and takes out a plastic baggie. “Just in case.” She hands it to me. “But for god’s sake, if you do feel sick, try to hold it until we can pull over. The smell of vomit makes me want to vomit.”

4:10 P.M.

I let my lungs ache until, unable to bear it another second, I wrench my head out of the water, breaking for air. Something bites my ankle, sharp, quick. I panic, feeling its pull. Jonas pops up out of the water in front of me. He laughs at the look of panic on my face.

“Are you insane? I thought you were a snapper.” I swim away from him, furious, but he grabs my bikini bottom.

“Let go.”

“I’m not letting go.”

“You’re a jerk.”

“I’m not.” He yanks me closer to him. “You know I’m not.”

“You were late.”

“Your children are fish. They wouldn’t come out of the water.”

“I know.” I sigh. “Sometimes I want to put their boogie boards through a wood chipper. I don’t know how Peter has the patience.”

We tread water, apart but together.

“Gina senses something,” I say. “There was a weird moment when I first got there.” In the distance, Maddy and Finn chase each other around on the shore. Behind them, my mother hangs a white linen tablecloth on the line. I hear a door slam, the linger of Gina’s laugh. Jonas hears it, too. I look away from him.

“It’s all right,” he says.

“It’s not all right. There’s something wrong with me. I should be filled with agonizing guilt. Instead, on the beach with Gina, I felt smug. Like I’d won. That heart in the sand.”

“You have.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“It is,” he says. One of the things I’ve always loved most about Jonas is his ability to admit his fault lines, a shrug-shouldered peace with who he is. “I love Gina. But I carry you in my bloodstream. This isn’t a choice.”

“Of course it’s a choice.”

“No, it’s what I have to do. And I accept that. That’s the difference between us. Acceptance of the choices we made.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.” Whatever secrets my stepsister Rosemary revealed when Peter and I were in Memphis last week, however much it may have changed how I think about the past, Jonas and I will always have to be the sacrifice, the penance. “I’m not going to leave Peter.”

“So that’s it? This just ends?” Jonas says. He looks away from me to the wild, uninhabited side of the pond. Gazes at the reeds, the rushes, the place where we first became true friends: a small boy, hidden in the tree line, straddling the low-hanging branch of a tree, patient, pin-drop quiet; and a gangly, angry girl who wanted to die that day. The tree is still there, but its branches now reach high into the open sky.

Jonas sighs. “So many years.”

“Yes.”

“It grew so tall.”

“That happens.”

He nods. “I love the way trees grow up and down at the same time. I wish we could do that.”

All I want to do is kiss him. “You should swim back.”

“I told Gina I’d walk home from the far side of the pond and meet her back at the house.”

“No. Swim back to her.”

Jonas looks at me, his expression unreadable. “All right,” he says. “Maybe I’ll see you at the camp.”

“Maybe,” I say, hating everything about this: the distance left by the shift of his body away from mine, the familiar hole I carried for so many years inside of me opening back up. But I have to let him go, even if this, us, is what I’ve wanted my entire life. Because Jonas is wrong, this is wrong, and it is too late. I love Peter. I love my children. There isn’t any more than that.