The Paper Palace(40)

“How did you find this again?”

He lies down on the ground beside me. Points to a hole where a door once was. “Remember the kitchen? And that room in the middle was going to be our bedroom when we got married.”

“Of course I remember. You promised to get me a double boiler. I feel kind of cheated.”

He rolls on top of me, pulls the string of my bikini top with his teeth so that it falls away, licks my breasts like a big sloppy dog.

“Stop that.” I push him away, laughing. But I can feel my sex swelling.

“Sorry. I have to.” He stares into my eyes, intense, never once looking away, as he spreads me wide, open. Enters me. When he comes, I can feel it pulsing out of him, filling me.

“Don’t move,” I whisper. “Stay inside me.” Without moving, he reaches down and, like the slightest breath, barely touches the tip of me until I sob, cry out, aching in eternity.

We lie like that, enmeshed, two bodies, one soul.

I wrap my legs tighter around him, trapping him, forcing him even deeper up inside of me. Food and water. Lust and grief. “You should never have left me,” I say. “This is a disaster.”

“You said you wanted Peter.”

“Not then. After that summer. You never came back.”

“I left for your sake. So you could start your life fresh.”

“But I didn’t. I had no one but you to talk to, no way to get any of it out of my head. Even moving to another country did nothing.”

He looks away. A steadying sadness between us. The wind has come up, ruffling the trees. A speckled alder sways, raining miniature grass-green pinecones down on us. Jonas plucks one out of my hair. “Have you ever told Peter about Conrad?”

“Of course not. We swore a blood oath. You practically cut off the tip of my finger.”

“I only meant to say.” He hesitates. “You’ve been married a long time. I would understand.”

“I wish Peter knew. I hate that there has always been a lie between us. It isn’t fair to him. But he doesn’t. And he never will.” I listen to the silence of the woods, the subtle seeping away of the day. Syrupy light spills across the forest floor, turning pine needles into splinters of copper. My words fill me with remorse. I roll free of Jonas, sit up and re-tie my bathing suit top. A dog tick makes its way up a piece of grass. It looks like a tiny watermelon seed. I put it on my thumbnail, crush it in the middle, and watch its legs splay out until I am sure it’s dead. I dig a hole in the soil and drop it in, bury it, pat the soil firm. “Anyway,” I say.

Jonas sits up, wraps his steady arms around me. “I’m sorry.”

“I have to get going. Peter will start to worry.”

“No.” I can hear my own pain in his voice. He takes my hair in his fists, kisses me. Rough, hard, unhinged. I don’t want to give in, but I kiss him back with a love that feels like drowning. The breathless desire to breathe. Moonlight and sweet junk and sharks and death and pity and vomit and hope all combined. It is too much. I need to get home to my children. To Peter. I break away, scramble to my feet, desperate.

“Elle, wait,” he says.

“Conrad ruined everything,” is all I say.





Book Two


   ◆





JONAS





13


   1981. June, the Back Woods.


There are snapping turtles in our pond—massive prehistoric creatures lurking on the bottom, beneath the cool mud. Late in the afternoon, they dig themselves out and make their way to the pond’s glassy obsidian surface, where swarms of water boatmen zip around like quick, febrile catamarans. From the screen porch, you can see the snappers rise: first the ugly black fist of a head, then the cusp of a carapace floats into view. It’s the distance between the two silhouettes that tells you whether you are seeing the Big One—the grandfather of snappers–or just one of his smaller, Galápagos-sized progeny. Few people have ever seen him. Back Woods people say he’s a myth, or long dead—and anyway, snappers are harmless. In a hundred years, no one has ever been bitten. But I’ve seen him. I know he’s out there, living off bullfrogs and baby birds, praying for the quick flash of an orange webbed foot, the soft crunch of duckling.

The first time I saw Jonas, that day by the spring, he was a lost, tangle-headed boy following a bird. I was almost eleven, only three years older, though in my mind old enough to be his mother, when I took him by the hand and led him back to the path. I could never have imagined then that the second time I saw him, four years later, this strange child would irrevocably change my life.



* * *



—

That day I woke up anxious—a hollow, homesick feeling in my chest. My dreams had scared me: a man wanted me to eat jacket potatoes. He said he was going to kill me. I begged to see my mother one last time. There were banjo players. I pounded on the glass, but no one could hear me.

Anna was still asleep. Her spiral-bound journal had fallen open on the floor beside her bed. I was tempted to read it, but I already knew everything it would say. I reached under the mattress and pulled out my own journal. Jade silk, with a teensy lock and key. Mum had bought it for me in Chinatown after our annual New Year’s Day dim sum. Anna had chosen a red T-shirt covered in what looked like Chinese characters, but when you tilted your head sideways it said, Go Fuck Yourself! Mum bought herself a lavender bathrobe. By the time we got home, I’d already managed to lose the key to my journal. I pried open the lock with a safety pin and broke it. Which didn’t matter, since pretty much all I did was make lists of things I needed to do to make myself a better person. Things like “practice the flute for an hour every day!!” or “read Middlemarch!”