The Paper Palace(87)

I walk around the room turning on lamps. It is far too cold to stay in a cabin with no heat but we can make a fire, sleep in the Big House on the sofas. Tucked under a table are two electric heaters. I plug them into living room outlets. They come on like old-fashioned toasters, thin coils heating to orange-red, filling the room with the smell of burning dust, and always the spark of worry in me that they will burn the house down while we sleep. There’s a pile of wood and kindling beside the fireplace and a stack of fading newspapers—mostly last summer’s New York Timeses, a few Boston Globes mixed in. Someone, probably Peter, has laid a fire in the hearth, in anticipation of next summer. I take the tin of strike-anywhere matches from the mantelpiece, get down on my knees, light the crumpled newspaper, the tinder. The fire hisses, crackles, blazes alive. Behind me, I hear Anna come in.

“We should ice-skate,” she says.

“I’ll open a can of soup. There might be sardines.” I pull a big pile of feather pillows, blankets, and cold sheets out of an old captain’s chest.

We go to asleep listening to the flicker of the fire, the occasional thud of wood chunks falling into the embers. Outside, in the winter moonlight, the world is cold, stark—a bare echo of the place I love, the place where, for me, life begins and ends. Yet, lying here next to my anguished, perplexing sister, her hand within reach, breathing in the smell of woodsmoke and mildew and the winter sea, I can begin to feel its heartbeat. I have no idea what has happened to break Anna like this. I only know that whatever it is, it led her back here. Like a homing pigeon, who, deaf to everything but pure instinct, hears the wind blowing across a mountain range two hundred miles away and sets its course.

At dawn, sodium light seeps in through the porch windows, waking me. The fire has gone out during the night, and already I can see my breath. I put my socks on under the covers, grab my down jacket from the floor, and pull it on over my nightgown. The coals are still red. I add dry wood, stoke the embers, careful not to wake Anna, grab a jug and go down to the pond. I need coffee. There will be an unopened can of Medaglia d’Oro in the pantry. My mother always makes sure to leave coffee, olive oil, and salt. The pond is frozen solid. The ice must be six inches thick. Small twigs and leaves are paper-pressed into it, caught in motion like fossils. But where the ice meets the shoreline, it thins to a sheer brittle. I shatter the surface with a stick, cup my hands and drink from the pond before filling my jug.

The smell of coffee wakes Anna. “Oh good,” she says, yawning.

“She speaks.”

Anna cocks her head, a small gesture, like a winter sparrow. Then her face flushes gray with remembered sorrow.

“Talk to me.” I bring her a mug of black coffee. “There’s sugar but no milk.” I sit down on the edge of the sofa beside her. “Shove over.”

She shifts to make room for me, a hollow space beside her hip. “I’d like to walk to the beach while the sun is out.”

“There must be extra sweaters in the chest,” I say.

She sits up, adjusts a pillow behind her back. “I went to the gynecologist last week. I missed my period.”

“And?”

“I was sure I was pregnant.”

“I spoke to you last week. You didn’t say anything.”

“I was afraid if I said anything, I’d lose it again. I kept thinking ‘third time’s a charm.’” She takes a sip of coffee, makes a face. “We should have stopped at Cumby’s for milk. Anyway, I’m not.”

“Anna. Fuck. That sucks. I’m so sorry.”

She puts her coffee on the windowsill, looks down at her hands, turns them over, staring at them. She traces her finger across the upper line of her right palm. “Remember life lines?”

I nod. “Remember love lines??”

Anna laughs. “Mine had all those little feathers off it. Lindsay called them my slut lines.”

“Whatever happened to Lindsay?” I say.

“I’m never going to have a baby,” Anna says.

“Of course, you will. You’re only thirty-three. You just have to keep trying. You’ll probably end up with four brats that look and act like Jeremy.”

She shakes her head. “I missed my period because I have the Big O.”

“Why would that make your period late?”

“Ovarian cancer,” she says.

“The Big O means an orgasm, you idiot.” The words are out of my mouth before I realize what she has said. The room stops breathing, dust motes freeze in place, sunlight balks at the windowpane, waits. Inside me there’s a silence like cement.

I shake my head. “You don’t.”

“Elle.”

“How do they know it’s not just a fibroid?”

“It’s stage four. It’s already spread.”

“Have you even gotten a second opinion, because if you haven’t, you have to do it right away.”

“Elle, be quiet and let me talk. I mean it. Just. Shut up, okay? They saw spots on my liver. They are going to go in next week, but the doctor says to prepare for bad news.”

“That’s just one possibility. It could also be completely operable. They don’t know yet. You’ll do chemo and radiation. We’ll get the best doctor in New York. You are going to be fine.”

“Okay,” Anna says. “If you say so.”