The Paper Palace(42)

“Watch.” He lowered it down directly in front of me.

The sound will always stick in my brain—the sudden, violent crack of wood as the paddle split. Jonas leaned backward on the branch with his full weight, hanging onto the oar. And then I saw it, rising from the murk, jaws clamped shut around my paddle. It was the Big One, the granddaddy—an ugly snapper as wide as a rowboat. Prehistoric. Chicken-headed. And he was angry. Jonas jumped down onto the shore, pulled on the paddle with all his might. Teeth gritted.

“I need help.”

Giving the snapper a wide berth, I made my way to Jonas and together we dragged the snapper toward dry land.

“I need to unhitch your painter,” he said. “Don’t let go.” He ran to the canoe and undid the thick rope clipped to its bow.

“Hurry, please,” I said. The snapper was slowly eating his way up the paddle toward me.

Jonas made a slipknot in the painter, crept behind the turtle, and lassoed its thick-scaled tail.

“Got him,” he said.

“Now what?”

“We need to get him into the boat.”

The snapper hissed and thrashed, pulling against his bonds. His long neck twisted and turned, groping impotently for the rope, his razor-sharp jaws never letting go of the paddle. He turned his attention back to me with a dead-eyed anger—humiliation at being caught; fury at having been exposed to the world, stripped of his dignity—and began to make his way farther up the oar. He was coming for me now, coming for his pound of flesh, and I understood what he was feeling completely.

“Let him go,” I said.

“No way.” Jonas pulled harder at the rope.

“It’s wrong,” I said. “And he’s going to eat me.”

“I’ve been trying to catch him for two years. My brothers say he doesn’t exist.”

“Well, you caught him.”

“Yeah, but they won’t believe me.”

“Then they’re idiots.”

“According to them, I’m the idiot.”

“This isn’t a great time to argue the point,” I said as the snapper inched toward me. “But if your plan was for us to lift a one-hundred-pound enraged killer turtle into a tippy canoe, then maybe your brothers are right.”

Jonas stood assessing the situation: the massive beast pulling at its yoke, my frightened face, the fiberglass canoe. With a deep sigh, he untied his trophy. I let go of the paddle and we backed away.

For a few long moments, the snapper kept coming. Then, slowly realizing he had been given his freedom, he dropped the paddle from his jaws, gave us a last wary look, and turned his enormous body toward the safety of the deep. We watched as he made his arthritic crawl into the shallows, and when the water was deep enough, we watched him swim for his life.

Nothing was left of the paddle but a shredded stick. We reattached the rope and dragged the canoe around the edge of the pond toward my camp. At some point Jonas took my hand, just as he had done years before, when I led him out of the woods.



* * *



—

Conrad was sitting by the water, watching us approach, a nasty sneer slashed across his flabby face. His sickening cackle from this morning still echoed in my head, but my distress and shame had been replaced by a cold front of anger.

“Who’s that?” Jonas asked.

“My hideous stepbrother. I hate him.”

“Hate is a strong emotion,” Jonas said.

“Well then, I hate him strongly.” I paused. “He’s a pervert. I caught him spying on me this morning when I was in the bathroom. I’m planning to kill him later.”

“My mother says it’s always better to take the high road.”

“There isn’t any other road to take with Conrad. He’s always the low road.”

“What happened to the paddle?” Conrad asked as we neared him.

I walked past him without answering.

“It got attacked by a snapper,” Jonas said.

“Sounds exciting,” Conrad’s snide tone made me want to throw the paddle in his face, but I kept walking.

“It was,” Jonas said. Together we pulled the canoe onto dry ground, turned it on its side in case of more rain.

“I had an exciting morning myself,” Conrad said.

My jaw tightened. Whatever happened next, I was not going to let him bait me.

“I keep picturing it in my head, over and over,” Conrad said. “Who’s your little friend?”

“Jonas, meet my stepbrother Conrad. He is living with us temporarily while his mother decides whether or not she wants him back. I have a horrible feeling we’re going to be stuck with him forever.”

“You wish,” Conrad said. And though I had ended up on the low road, the genuine look of pain on his face was almost worth my tampon humiliation.

“Come,” I said to Jonas. “Let’s go tell your brothers what happened.”



* * *



—

That summer Jonas became my shadow. When I swam or canoed across the pond to go to the ocean, he’d be waiting for me on the shore, knowing I’d appear. When, instead, I walked to the beach along the path through the woods, I would find him sitting on a fallen tree trunk, drawing in the little sketch pad he always carried with him—a broken branch on a pitch pine, a darkling beetle. It was as if he had an internal compass—a magnetic field that picked up true north. Or maybe, like a carrier pigeon, he could smell my odor on the wind.