The Paper Palace(96)

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“Wasn’t your stepfather from Memphis?” Peter says, throwing a few things into a carry-on bag. “Socks.”

“He was.” I pull open a lower drawer and take out four pairs of socks.

“Have you ever been?”

“Once. For Conrad’s funeral.”

“Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“How old was Conrad when he died?”

“Jack’s age,” I say. “Do you need undershirts?”

“Christ. How do you ever get over something like that?” Peter throws a few last things into the bag—a pack of gum, a comb, the book from his bedside table—and zips it.

I sit down on the edge of the bed. “You don’t.”

Down the path, I hear Finn and Maddy arguing. “No shouting on the pond,” my mother yells from the porch.

“I can’t believe you’re abandoning me with that crazy woman.” I chip at the red nail polish on my big toe. My heels look like they are made of rhino horn. “I need a pedicure.”

“Come with me. We can have a romantic getaway.”

“In Memphis?”

“Anywhere we can have sex without your mother hearing us.”

“Much as I love you, Memphis is the last place on earth I ever want to see again.”

Peter sits down beside me on the bed. “I’m serious. It’ll be cathartic. I’ll take you out for barbecue spaghetti.”

I stare out the cabin door, mind searching for a simple excuse. The pond is golden, glassy, tipping toward evening. Here and there a few small turtle heads have popped up like thumbs, basking in the last of the sun. I wonder whether Peter is right—whether there could ever be such a thing as catharsis.

“Come,” he says again. “You’ll be rescuing me from four depressing days on my own in the murder capital of America. We can have loud sex. You can get a pedicure.”

“I doubt Mum’s willing to watch the kids,” I say. But even as I sidestep, I hear my mother’s voice in my head, the pep talk she would always give me and Anna when we were afraid of anything—the dark, a bad grade in social studies, the idea that, one day, she would die and rot: “We are not a family of cowards, girls. We face our fears head on.”

“Let me ask her,” Peter says. “You know if I ask, she’ll say yes.”

“True.”

“And you can visit Conrad’s grave.”





30


   Three Days Ago. July 29, Memphis.


The cemetery is prettier than I remember—an arboretum of mature flowering trees and shaded slopes giving way to wide lawns dotted with the gray teeth of the dead. Carved angels cling to the edges of tombstones. It takes me half an hour to find Conrad’s grave. I make my way through row after row of Chinese headstones and crumbling Confederate graves. Groups of tourists wander the cemetery listening to an audio tour of Dead People Greatest Hits. I watch them move like lemmings between the tombstones.

His marker is small, strewn with spongy fallen petals—pale pinks browning to rot. A flowering dogwood towers above, shading and littering his plot. Nearby is a large granite obelisk with a nice low ledge to sit on, the ground around it carpeted with thick green grass. Someone has recently left a bouquet of fresh flowers. I move the flowers to one side and sit down on the cool stone seat. Anna hated grassy graves. “They’re grassier because there are more worms in the soil. Think about it.” Instead, I think about the picnic lunches Anna and I had as children, when we would visit our grandparents. Sitting on the cool marble tombstone of the suicide grave, playing with our paper dolls. Mine were awkward, bulbous stick figures with rounded feet and simple faces. Anna’s were always magazine-perfect—girls with Susan Dey hair, boys with brown shags. An endless wardrobe of miniature clothes—hip-huggers and purple clogs, French sailor sweaters, bandana bikinis, Fair Isles, kilts with teensy safety pins. Our secret one-dimensional world—the world we pretended was ours as we sat on a sad man’s grave eating ham sandwiches on buttered white bread, looking out across the old cemetery to our grandparents’ house on the hill, the fields of cows and cud beyond.

I stand up, brush off the back of my skirt, walk over to Conrad’s grave. The grass here is weedy, sparse. This at least would have made Anna happy. The headstone is plain. No inscription. Only Conrad’s name and dates: 1964–1983. He was barely eighteen when he died. A stupid kid who dreamed of being Hulk Hogan, who loved his mother more than she loved him, who wanted his father’s approval. It would have made him so happy to see Leo desperate, falling to pieces, after he drowned—to know how much his father truly loved him. I try to picture Conrad doing pull-ups in his doorway, arguing with Anna, his ugly terry cloth bathrobe, reading a comic on his cabin steps. Anything. But all I can see is his face, white with fear, terrified, pleading, while Jonas sat beside me on the boat and stayed my hand. The sudden understanding in his eyes before the waves sucked him under. I think about the choices I’ve made—the ones I’ve spent my life hiding from. The choice Jonas and I made that blustery day. The choice I made to keep Conrad’s secret from Mum; if I had had the courage to tell my mother—to allow her life to fall apart instead of mine—Conrad would still be alive. It wasn’t only Conrad’s dreams that died. Stupid, stupid children. Conrad ruined everything. Jonas ruined everything. I ruined everything.