The Paper Palace(77)

“I’m here to see my grandmother.”

The woman behind the counter stares at me blankly, as if she has never seen a visitor before. She looks at her watch. “Visiting hours are over.”

“No. I still have fifteen minutes. Myrtle Bishop?”

She sighs. They don’t pay her enough to deal with this crap. “Sorry,” she says. “You’re too late.”

I practically stamp my foot. “I just drove up from New York. It was bumper-to-bumper traffic. She’s old and frail, and she’s waiting for me. Can you just be nice?”

“Ma’am,” she says, “Mrs. Bishop passed away an hour ago.”



* * *



—

Granny is buried next to my grandfather in the old cemetery across the road. It occurs to me that she spent most of her life looking out at the place where her body will rot. We stand under a threatening sky next to a raw hole in the ground. The graveyard has expanded up the hill. The old suicide grave where Anna and I used to play is now surrounded by the tombstones of nice, normal people. Anna stands beside me, looking elegant and thin in a black wool dress. Granny would approve. She squeezes my hand tight as the first shovel of dirt thuds heavily on ebonized wood. Rain begins to fall, tat-tatting the coffin like an accompaniment. My father stands across the grave from me, shoulders heaving with tears. His umbrella lists away from him. Raindrops land on his black felt hat. I have been sick at heart since Granny died, my mind stuck in a loop of regret and self-recrimination. Why didn’t I act sooner, rush to protect her the minute my father and Mary threatened to move her? She was the one person in my life who made me feel safe when I was a child, who protected me from ghosts, read me to sleep, fed me protein and a vegetable, whose love never wavered. And I failed her. She was, literally, scared to death.

The minister closes his dog-eared Book of Common Prayer. My father’s sobs have turned desperate, guttural. He stumbles toward Mary. She opens her arms wide to embrace him, but he passes her by and throws his arms around me instead. I feel a momentary triumph when I see her red-slash lips tighten in humiliation.

I hold my father close, feel the sodden chill of his trench coat against my cheek. “You have no right to cry,” I whisper in his ear.

After the funeral, we all walk across the road, up the steep driveway to the house. The rain has let up, but the trees in the orchard—the crabapples and plums still heavy with unpicked fruit—weep into the tall grasses under their boughs.

I leave Anna and Peter mixing drinks in the living room, discussing the case Anna is working on. Anna is a litigator at a fancy law firm in downtown L.A. “Well, I would have preferred you did something in the arts, but I suppose it’s good you found a way to put that frightful argumentative streak of yours to work,” was Mum’s congratulations when Anna first called to tell her she’d gotten the job. I wander down the hallway to our old bedroom off the kitchen. It is exactly as it has always been: our twin beds made, our favorite children’s books still on the shelf, a red tobacco tin filled with crayon stubs. I know if I go into the guest bathroom and reach up blindly onto the top shelf above the toilet I will find a pack of menthol cigarettes, hidden where she thinks no one will find them. The most wonderful thing about my grandmother, among many wonderful things, is that everything is always the same. The lovely lemon-wood smell of the house, the little bottles of ginger ale pushed to the back of the icebox for hot days. The silver thimble her mother gave her when she was a girl, nestled in a lavender box on her bureau.

I open the cupboard in our room. As far as I’m concerned, my father and the Bitch can have everything. They’ll take it anyway. Anna can fight them for the four-poster bed and the first edition of Gatsby. There’s only one thing I want to keep. I reach back behind the dusty pile of board games—the old Scrabble box and Chinese checkers. The Game of Life. My hand searches for our treasure box filled with the paper dolls Anna and I made. But the box isn’t there. I take everything out of the cupboard and pile it on the floor in a heap. Check the closets, under the bed. Nothing.

Anna is in the dining room on her cell phone. “No. You stay on the 22. Past Pawling,” I hear her say as I walk past. Her new boyfriend Jeremy has just flown in from L.A. “And don’t rush. The roads are wet and you’ve already missed the funeral.”

In the living room, mourners are eating Triscuits and Brie, stiff drinks in their hands. My father sits alone on the sofa, staring into space. There’s a streak of mud on one of his polished black leather shoes. He looks perplexed, as if he’s waiting for his mother to appear from the kitchen, apron still tied around her waist, holding a plate of sugar cookies.

“Dad.” I sit down next to him. “I’ve been looking for a brass box that lives in our bedroom cupboard. It was there last time I looked. Can you think where Granny might have put it?”

“The paper dolls?” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “I looked everywhere.”

“Mary’s niece was here with us a few weeks ago. She liked them. Mary said she could take them home with her when she left.”

I stand up. “Well, I should go. The sooner everyone’s out of the house, the sooner you can sell it.”

I reach over to the bookcase behind his head, pull my grandfather’s treasured first edition of The Great Gatsby off the shelf. “I’m taking this for Anna.”