The Paper Swan(83)

This was where Skye had chucked up chocolate peanut butter ice cream. Well, whatever hadn’t landed on his shoes.

Here, he’d watched her scrutinize her reflection and ask him to make her a cardboard tooth.

Here, they’d held hands in a circle—him and MaMaLu and Skye—before Skye said her bedtime prayer.

As Damian swept the room and cleared the cobwebs, the memories became sharper, clearer, more painful, but at the same time sweeter, like little shards of glass candy that dissolved into pockets of nostalgic flavor, to be sampled and tasted and savored, again and again.

Damian rolled up the dusty bed covers and pried the plywood off the window. The sun streamed in, lighting up the walls and corners and bookshelves. The tree outside Skye’s bedroom had grown taller; the branch he’d used to climb in was now scraping the roof. Damian tilted his head back, following it, and saw a pair of brown legs dangling through the leaves. It was the nut-busting girl, with her scuffed-up, nut-busting shoes. She was leaning against the trunk, reading a book, unaware of being observed.

Damian instinctively cupped his balls.

What the f*ck was she doing back here?

He ducked back inside and considered boarding the window up again. His balls still ached, but he had to hand it to her. She wasn’t one to tangle with. He laughed and started sorting through the shelves, thumbing over the books that MaMaLu had once read to him and Skye. The best stories were the ones that weren’t there, the ones she’d made up. They hung suspended around him. Damian took a deep breath, wanting to inhale them, to fill up his lungs with MaMaLu’s voice and her words. He stretched his arms out, rotating three hundred and sixty degrees, taking it all in and . . . stopped short.

A pair of dark eyes was watching him.

The girl was sitting on one of the lower branches now, level with the window. She was wearing a school uniform again. Her book was tucked in the waistband of her skirt and she looked like she’d been ready to scoot down the tree when she’d seen him.

It wasn’t Damian’s finest moment, chest puffed up, spinning around in a dusty room like a would-be ballerina. He put his hands down and met the girl’s stare. Perhaps if he gave her the old western, squinty-eyed glare, she’d resume her descent.

She didn’t. She squinted back at him, smug in the knowledge that the branch wasn’t going to support him, so he couldn’t get to her even if he tried.

A few seconds into the stare down, Damian felt the corners of his mouth lifting. He managed to transform it into a snarl and turned away, busying himself with the task of cleaning up the room. He kept the girl in his periphery. He wasn’t about to drop his guard in case she decided to go all ninja on him again.

He was almost done when he found a pile of colorful papers, the kind he’d once used for origami. Skye had gotten them for him, and he had an instant flashback of the delight on her face whenever he made her something.

It seemed like another lifetime, but Damian’s fingers yearned for the feel of that paper. He picked up a green sheet, yellowed and faded now, but still the brightest thing in that room, and folded it into a swan. It was the last story he remembered MaMaLu telling him and Skye, before all of their lives had changed. Damian felt like he was picking up where he’d left off, except MaMaLu wasn’t there anymore, and Skye wasn’t there anymore. No one was. Except a little girl who was watching him like he afforded her more entertainment than the book she was now pretending to read.

Damian offered her the swan, but she ignored him, keeping her eyes on the book. So, he placed it on the windowsill, picked up two bags filled with garbage and went downstairs to dump them. When he came back up, she was gone. And so was the paper swan.





DAMIAN WAS PAINTING THE KITCHEN when he spotted the girl again. She seemed to stop by at the same time every day, after school. She was kneeling by the pond, feeding the fish that he had just reintroduced into the water. A half peeled orange lay on her lap. She nipped each segment with her teeth and turned it inside out, picking out some of the flesh for the fish and eating the rest.

To Damian, it was one of those perfect snapshots of childhood, the way her world was condensed into an orange and a fish pond, surrounded by sunshine and grass. She was completely immersed in that moment, free of past and future, in it for the sheer enjoyment of the here and now—the things that can be grasped and lived and experienced. It was a lesson Damian needed to learn. He had let the past overshadow his life. He didn’t know what the future held, but he had now. And now was a beautiful, cloudless day. Damian pictured the ocean before him, calm and endless. Although his boat was docked nearby, he hadn’t been on the water since prison. He’d been so caught up with restoring Casa Paloma that he hadn’t taken the time to enjoy his freedom, and more importantly, he hadn’t felt like it. But as he watched the little girl finish her orange and rinse her hands in the pond before leaving, Damian yearned for the wind and the sea again.