A Paper Son (19 page)

“Yes,” Mom said, “that sounds about right.”

“So why am I just now remembering this?”

Mom lifted her hands to her head and began massaging her temples with her fingertips. “That's what I don't understand. You weren't home. You were in Iowa, visiting your grandparents.”

That night I dreamed I was alone in a room with walls made of intricate cabinetry. In each one there were hundreds, maybe thousands of drawers. Many of them were opening, slowly, of their own accord. I was terrified of their contents, but I awoke before I had to see what they held. Rain was still drumming against my bedroom window. It was almost noon.

I wasn't quite sure what I should do with myself. I wandered out into the living room. Eva was out, and Lucy had stayed back at our mom's, both of which suited me fine. I wasn't in the mood to talk to anybody. In some increasingly neglected corner of my mind there was an alert about progress reports. Though my senses were much too fogged to hope for a productive afternoon, I shouldered my laptop bag and headed out. I wandered around the neighborhood a bit, not really paying attention to where I was going, watching water run through the gutters. Everything seemed different, secretive. I had the sense that the whole planet and all its inhabitants and contents, even the smallest of things—trash, insects, dust motes—had been somewhere without me, and had come back conversing in references I would never understand. I kept imagining my little stopped heart, gray and inert. Every now and then I had to slip my hand beneath my coat and check on it. After a half-hour of arbitrary turns I found myself in a café I'd never noticed before, sipping a cup of strong black coffee, surrounded by pairs and trios of friends happily talking. They seemed like the sort of people who had been alive continuously since birth, and as such I found them all vaguely foreign. I booted up my laptop and tried to steer my thoughts toward my students and their progress, but I couldn't picture a single one of them. I ended up drifting around on the Internet, looking for stories about people who had died and come back. There were a handful of them—a man in Venezuela who'd awakened during his autopsy, someone's uncle who arose during his wake, a lady who came to in the morgue three times. She made me feel a little better. At least it wasn't a habit with me.

It wasn't until late afternoon that I remembered I was supposed to have dinner with Annabel that evening. I had the staff directory on a spreadsheet in my computer. She picked up on the third ring.

“You caught me at school, where I find myself again impressed with you, Mr. Long!” she said. “You and your most sophisticated celebration of the lunar new year.”

“How's that?” I said. My sense of inhabiting someone else's experiences was growing a little too familiar.

“Chinese calligraphy is quite a step up from the usual dragons-and-firecrackers stuff,” she said.

“I think you've got the wrong guy,” I said.

“Room eight is your classroom, is it not?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I'm not sure what you're talking about.”

“Your classroom window!” she said. “Your students' penmanship is quite lovely.”

“Penmanship?”

There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone, and then she asked, “This is Peregrine, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I'm talking about the Chinese characters you have stretching across the tops of your classroom windows,” she said slowly. “Did someone else put those up?”

I took a deep breath. I still had people coming back from the dead in my browser window, people I had not yet begun to contemplate. I folded the screen shut and yanked the cord out of the wall. I took another deep breath. “They're mazes,” I said. “Those are the mazes you saw me photocopying the other day.”

“Okay,” she said, with a little laugh. “But their solutions are Chinese characters. You didn't know that?”

“No,” I said.

She laughed again. “How funny. Well, where did you get them?”

“I drew them,” I said, “when I was a little kid.”

She stopped laughing. “You drew them?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“I'm on my way,” I said.

As I walked up the hill I felt the last of the tethers that held me to the known world growing thin. I think I hardly would have registered surprise if I had risen from the sidewalk and floated through the rain to the top of the hill. An odd sense of peace came over me. I could die and recover. I was a Chinese calligrapher; I could swim through the planet. Maybe I could even find Henry.

Once on the school playground I saw immediately what Annabel had been talking about. The red ink had seeped through the back of the mazes and somehow spread and flowered into graceful brushstrokes. I got closer and realized what had happened—the seal above the upper window had failed, and the wind had driven the rain through to dampen the sheets. The rainwater had transformed the skinny, shaky ink lines into the wet strokes of calligraphers' brushes. A minute later Annabel appeared and slipped her arm through mine. We stood there for a long time, together.

“So what does it say?” I asked her.

She pointed to each character and gave its Chinese pronunciation. I closed my eyes and listened to the music of the syllables. She reached the end and paused, and when I opened my eyes she was looking at me. “Boat, desire, home, dreaming,” she said. “Traveling, small, a few others.” Her straight black hair clung to the sides of her cheeks like strips of lacquered wood. Beads of rain perched on her eyelashes. “You say you don't speak Chinese?”

“Right,” I said.

She looked back up at the row of mazes. “I find this a little peculiar,” she said.

It was a glorious, refreshing understatement, and I couldn't help but laugh. “I visited my mom's last night, down on the peninsula,” I said, “and I found out that when I was two I died for a little while.”

“Say that again?” she said, returning my laugh. “It sounded like you said that you died for a little while.”

“Right,” I said. “It happened when I was two. I drowned in a wading pool, and I was dead for a while. Nobody really knows how long. I found out last night, when my sister suddenly remembered. Only she was in Iowa the day it happened, and my parents never told either of us about it.”

I wasn't sure I wanted to see Annabel's reaction to that, so I continued to stare at the red characters. Rivulets of rain ran down the sides of my nose and the back of my neck. My raincoat was saturated and leaking.

“And speaking of my sister,” I continued, “it seems she is being haunted by an elderly Chinese phantom who broke into her apartment in New York, apparently just to make
feng-shui-
related adjustments. And I have a houseguest right now who claims to be a descendent of Rose, one of the characters in my story. You remember Rose—you read that first chapter. Or two.”

“Three,” she said.

“What?” I said.

She cleared her throat. “Three chapters. I've read three chapters,” she said.

“Well, that's another item for this list,” I said. “I only actually ever submitted one. I've written several, but I only sent one in. Somehow they're appearing of their own accord.”

That's probably enough, I thought. Best just to leave it at that.

“And speaking of my story,” I said, “I'll tell you where the idea came from.” I pointed through the window to my desk. “It came from inside a teacup. On the first day of school back from break. I saw the family's reflection in the surface of my tea.”

Stop talking, I told myself. You're going to scare her.

“Deep in the pool at the YMCA there's an upside-down river with boats in it. Oh, and I keep hearing strange violin music in various places, music nobody else can hear,” I said.

You're an idiot, I told myself. That was way too much. Find a way to retract at least those last two. Annabel took a small step away from me and reached into her pocket. I stiffened. Would it be pepper spray? Mace? A call to 911? “I'm sorry,” I began, but she shook her head. Her hand emerged from her pocket with her keys. She would have to go now. She would have to go, and there would be some reason she couldn't meet me for dinner.

“I want to show you something,” she said.

“The last time somebody said that to me I was taken to the gravesite of somebody I thought I'd invented.”

“No graves,” she said. “Come with me.” She reached down and took my hand in hers, and led me to her car. She guided the car over to Van Ness, which was knotted up with Saturday night traffic, and down to Geary, where she took a right and plunged into the city's western flank. I watched the blocks tick past, one after the other, their buildings huddling together against the fall of rain. I resisted the urge to ask Annabel where we were going. It was comforting, not knowing. As long as I could keep this small mystery alive, I knew there was at least one question to which there would be an answer. There was at least one knowable thing in the universe. I wanted the city to stretch on forever; I wanted everything to vanish but this rain, these blocks and their concrete and neon, this woman and her car and the trace of warmth her hand had left in mine, and this little pinprick of hope.

The inevitable ocean eventually rose before us, though, and Annabel turned to the south. In the last of the day's light the sea and the storm were indistinguishable. Each turbulent mass of gray reached into the other, as though competing, the border between them marked only by occasional explosions of white froth and foam. In my mind we drove in seconds down the length of Highway 1, through Pacifica and Santa Cruz, through Big Sur, to Mexico, where it was warm and dry, and things made sense. At Sloat, though, Annabel hit her blinker. She turned away from the ocean, took another left, and parked. I followed her out of the car and across the street, toward the row houses that were home to the city's oceanfront inhabitants.

An odd accumulation of items had gathered along the sidewalk, in the gutter, and in the street. There were receipts and ticket stubs, disintegrating in the rain. There were socks and toys, and a T-shirt with the name of a middle school I didn't recognize emblazoned on its front. There was a green baseball cap and a magazine. The collection grew thick—against the iron gate of one of the homes there leaned a knee-high mound of wet papers, backpacks, clothes, shoes, a tennis racket. It looked as though the door had opened and the house had vomited all its loose items into the street. It was here that Annabel stopped. She unlocked the gate and yanked it open hard, scattering the pile across the sidewalk.

“Quick,” she said, “inside.” I followed her over the garbage and the gate clanged shut behind us. “My home,” she said, unlocking her front door. Inside it was warm, and lit by a glow that came from thick glass globes on the walls. The floor was a clean dark wood, the furnishings sparse. Her couches were midnight blue, and low, and looked comfortable and hard to get out of. On an immaculate marble coffee table sat two large books, nothing else. There was a matching pair of low bookcases. Abstract paintings, one on each wall, hung inside wooden frames. It smelled like a just-extinguished fire. She led me into the kitchen and produced a bottle of vodka and a pair of shot glasses.

“You're probably wondering about all that stuff out front,” she said. She uncapped the bottle, poured the drinks, and handed me one. Her hand was shaking. I waited for her to offer a toast, but she declined. We drained our glasses; heat flashed through my bloodstream. She set hers down with a thud. “That mess is part of what I wanted you to see,” she said.

“What is it?” I said.

She poured herself another shot and reached for my glass. The second shot thudded down through me and joined the first. She collected the glasses and sat them next to the bottle, and then seemed not to know what to do with her hands—first she laced her fingers together, and then she unlaced them. Eventually they came to rest on the counter in front of her, palms down, one on top of the other. She looked me in the eye.

“Things find me, Peregrine,” she said. “Lost things. They find a way to get to my door, or in my path, or they get tangled up in my legs when I'm walking. I return what I can. Some things I store for a while, and then I throw them out. Even then, sometimes things come back.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know,” she said, and I saw my own uncertainty, my own hesitation mirrored in her face. In that moment, something inside me revolved and loosened. It rose up, branched, and pushed against the inside of my skin, and when it broke through, I knew I was in love with her.

“There's more,” she said. She circled the counter, took me by the hand again, and pulled me out of the kitchen. She led me up a staircase, through a doorway, and up another staircase. She threw open a door and flipped a light switch.

The entire third floor was a single large room. The front wall was a solid bank of tall windows. I couldn't see the ocean through the room's opaque reflection, but I sensed its tumult before us. Along the back wall stretched a solid line of file cabinets and shelving units that reached the ceiling, and tables, which housed dozens of overflowing plastic bins. On one table sat a laptop, stacks of envelopes and flattened cardboard boxes, packaging tape, shipping labels. The rest of the room was empty but for a single tall drafting chair that sat in the middle of the floor, facing the wall of windows.

Annabel began to walk along the length of tables and shelves and cabinets. Against this wall of debris she seemed small, uncertain. It was strange to see her diminished like this; I had grown accustomed to her ease as she navigated the corridors of school, kindergarteners trailing her like a comet's tail. I followed her across the room.

She stopped in front of a file cabinet, opened a drawer, and produced from a hanging file a dirty sheet of lined paper ripped from a spiral notebook. “Someone's homework,” she said. She showed it to me. A child's unsteady hand had penciled words across the sheet, with little regard to the blue lines. In the corner was the author's name: Madison B. “There isn't much to go on with this one,” Annabel said, “but Madison is or was a student of a Mrs. Zabriskie, and there's mention of a two-hour car ride to Maine.”