A Ship Made of Paper (6 page)

“Feel my forehead,” Kate says. “I think I have a fever.”

He touches her with his fingertips and then the palm of his hand. A jolt of remembered love goes through him. The car drifts left, the tires bite at the gravel at the side of the road. “You’re warm.”

“I’m dying.”

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

She closes her eyes and their silence reasserts itself.

“Did you have an okay time tonight?” Daniel asks. As his sense of guilt increases, his tolerance for silence decreases. He knows he’s just blather-ing, but she did seem to like Hampton. She who likes no one.

“Not really. It felt like work.”

“You seemed to be enjoying yourself,” he says. “You and Hampton—”

“Fuck me and Hampton,” Kate says, and turns her face away from him, as the two-lane blacktop turns into a narrower dirt road that leads to their secluded old house. They drive past a neighbor’s rolling fields, a pond ringed by weeping willows. A pebble driveway leads from the road to their house, and as the stones crunch beneath the tires, Kate opens her eyes.Their car’s headlights shine on the red wreck of the baby-sitter’s car.

“I hope Mercy treats children better than she treats her car,” Daniel says. He turns off the engine; the lighted windows in their front rooms shimmer before them.

“Why did you tell that story about that little boy?” he asks her.

Kate sits up, rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Did you like that story?”

“I never heard of Leroy before. I thought I knew about every boy who ever passed through your life.”

“I think what I was saying was Leroy and I could never be friends.”

“Why? Because he was black and you were white?” Despite everything, he allows himself to feel indignant. He thinks Kate’s white southern girlhood is asserting itself in a highly unpleasant way.

“Be glad I didn’t tell the story of why we left New York City, how you were scared to death of every black person you saw.”

“Why would you ever say anything like that?”

“Because it’s true, you were.”

“My life was threatened. And the people who made the threat were black. I overreacted, I admit it.”

“You were scared to death.”

“Let’s just drop it,” Daniel says. “I’m over it.” He opens the door to get out, but Kate catches him by the arm.

[ 35 ]

“If it’s any consolation to you, the marriage won’t last.”

“What marriage?”

“Iris and Hampton’s. He’s on edge all the time, looking for little slights against his dignity. She wants to live in a world where a little spilled water is just an accident, not an incident.”

Inside, Mercy Crane is on the phone, which she hangs up without a word of good-bye as soon as Kate and Daniel come in.

Kate goes up to check on Ruby. Daniel pays Mercy and locks the door.

He goes back into the living room to gather up the half-eaten bowl of ramen noodles and the can of Sprite she has left behind. He sees something poking out between the sofa cushions—a half-full pack of Camel Lights, with a book of matches squeezed beneath the cellophane. He tosses them onto the table, hoping for Mercy’s sake her parents don’t smell the smoke in her hair. Her father’s a cop and her mother teaches at a Christian ele-mentary school; both are known to be strict and unforgiving.

After clearing Mercy’s little mess, he falls back onto the sofa and lights one of her cigarettes.When he moved in with Kate, she asked him not to smoke around the baby, and he went with the program and quit altogether. But now he would like to taste tobacco and inhales deeply, blows a smoke ring, and watches it make its way like a jellyfish through a shaft of lamplight.Then he hears Kate’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

“I don’t have a temperature,” she announces. She’s already in her nightgown.

“You’re probably just tired. You should go to bed. I’ll bring you up some orange juice.”

“You’re smoking?” she asks. “You’re actually smoking in the house?”

Just then, the doorbell rings. Daniel flicks the cigarette into the fireplace and goes toward the door, his heart racing, as if this might really be Iris. Kate stops midway down the staircase. Daniel shrugs at her and opens the door.

“My car won’t start, Mr. Emerson,” says Mercy.

“Oh no, poor you!” His voice is booming, as would be expected in a man who has just, against all odds, been offered a means of escape. “I’ll a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

drive you home.” He realizes how eager this sounds, and so he adds, “I’m just no good at automobile repair. If it doesn’t involve a gas can or a jumper cable, it’s out of my league.”

“I could stay here, if that would be easier,” she says. Her voice is plaintive. “I could sleep on the couch. If you wanted, I could make Ruby breakfast in the morning and you and Kate could sleep late.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s really okay.”

For the first couple minutes of the drive back to town, Daniel and Mercy don’t exchange a word. Daniel rolls the window down. There’s a faint smell of skunk in the air.

“I’m really sorry about the car,” Mercy says.

“I hope you can get it running again.”

“My brother’s home from the Army. He can fix it, for sure. Is it okay if we come over in the morning?”

“Of course.” He slows down. There are dark, luminous eyes peering from beneath the trees at the side of the road. Deer.You never know if they’ll come leaping into the path of your car.

“Both my brothers are in the Army,” says Mercy.

“So, are you the youngest in the family?”

“Yeah.” She sighs, fidgets in her seat. He can tell: she is getting ready to ask a question. She circles it like one of the deer tramping down the tall grass. “What rights does a teenager have?” she says.

“About what?”

“What if a teenager wanted to move out or something? Do you ever do that? As a lawyer? Sheri Nack said I should ask you.”

“Does Sheri want to leave home?” Sheri is a doughy, dog-collared girl who looked after Ruby a couple of times—until Kate started noticing liquor was disappearing.

“Not really.”

“But you do.”

“Yeah.”

They are almost in town now. The houses are closer together. A gas

[ 37 ]

station. A plant nursery. The Riverside Convalescent Home. A little empty vine-covered cottage that once was a real estate office—Farms and Fantasies—run by a guy from Yonkers who turned out to be a drug dealer. And then, the blinking yellow light that hangs on a low drooping cable a few hundred yards from the village itself. A soft rain is falling and the wind is picking up, swinging the yellow light back and forth like a lantern held in the hand of a night watchman.

“There are lawyers who specialize in family law,” Daniel says.

“I don’t know any lawyers, except you.”

“What is it you want, Mercy?”

“I want to move out.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen. I’ve got to get out of there, Mr. Emerson. I’ve got to get away from them. Maybe get my own place. Maybe I could be a nanny or something.”

“Seventeen’s a little young. Can’t you wait a year?”

“A
year?
” The cold light of the streetlamps leaps in and out of the car, flashing on her face, with its furious, hopeless expression.

Before he can think of what to tell her, they arrive at her house. It’s a small yellow one-story house, with a steep set of wooden stairs leading to the front door. The porch light is on and two moths fly around and around it, as if swirling around a drain of light.

“Are you all right, Mercy? Are you going to be okay?”

“I’m all right.”

“Are you safe?”

“I’m okay.”

“If you want to come in to my office, and talk about it, you can—any-time. You don’t need an appointment, it doesn’t have to be a big deal.

You can just come in and we can talk.”

“Is there any kind of law for me?”

“There’s something called the Emancipated Minor Act.”

She’s silent for the moment. Daniel has for the most part suppressed a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

his own adolescence, and he finds it difficult to project himself into what exactly it feels like to be Mercy’s age, to be in that jumble of misery and helplessness, hormonal energy and sheer lassitude.

“There’s case law,” he says, “in which the court has required parents to pay for rent and food for emancipated minors.”

“You mean they’d have to pay for me even if I moved out?”

“It’s not really my specialty. I’d have to look it up.”

“I guess I’d feel really guilty,” she says, smiling for the first time.

“Guilty? Why?”

“Well, they’re my parents. I don’t want to hurt them.” But the smile remains.

“You don’t have anything to feel guilty about.You have a right to make yourself happy. You’re not obliged to stay where you’re miserable. Nobody does.”

She nods quickly. She’s heard enough. She opens the door on her side. The light comes on in the car and she glances back at Daniel.

“Thanks, Mr. Emerson,” she says, “really, thank you.” And then, right before she slips out of the car she puts her arms around him and touches her forehead against his chest.

Daniel waits until she is safely in her house, though he wonders if her house is really safe. She opens the front door and waves good-bye, and a moment later the door is closed and the porch light goes off and every window in her house is opaque.

He backs away from Mercy’s house and onto Culbertson Street, the beams of his headlights filled with fluttering moths. He turns on the radio, as if the voice of reason might be broadcasting from somewhere on the dial, but there are only love songs, urging him on.

He tries to pretend to himself that he has no idea where he is going next. But after a minute or two, he must admit that he’s heading toward Juniper Street, where Iris lives. All he wants is to look at her house—

once—and then he’ll be able to return to his own, he’ll be able to walk up the stairs to the second floor, tiptoe into the bedroom, disrobe, slip into bed next to Kate, close his eyes.

[ 39 ]

A few moments later, he’s in front of Iris’s house. The Volvo station wagon is in the driveway; every window in the house is slate black. It means they are asleep. In bed. Together. Daniel’s hands tense, he lowers his head until his forehead touches the steering wheel.
Go home,
he says to himself.

Yet a competing inner voice also weighs in on the matter, a sterner, hungrier, more focused self that he has somehow managed to keep at bay for his entire life, and this voice wordlessly wonders:
All around you life
seethes, grasps, conquers, and here you are, thirty feet from what you desire most
and all you can do is quake, all you can think about is Go home.

He pulls away. He switches on the radio.Van Morrison singing “Here Comes the Night.”

Upstairs, in bed, Hampton sleeps in his customary pose of noble death: flat on his back, his legs straight, his toes up, his arms folded across his chest, his fingertips resting on his shoulders, his face waxy and unmoving, his breath so silent and slow that sometimes it seems not to exist.

He dreams of the train. He is getting on in New York, at Pennsylvania Station, presumably on his way up to Leyden.The Amtrak conductor who directs him onto one of the cars looks familiar, a white guy, the guy who is always on Chambers Street selling souvlakis and hot sausages from his steam cart. Here you go, Mr. Davis, the conductor says, gesturing to an open door. Steam pours up from the tracks, onto the platform.

Hampton walks through the steam and steps on the train, and he wonders why the man has called him Mr. Davis. Has he mixed him up with somebody else, or is that just the conductor’s idea of a black name?

In the dream, Hampton is wearing a Hugo Boss pin-striped suit, a Burberry raincoat, with the lining, a scarf, gloves.The train is hot. Everyone else is dressed for summer; most of them seem to know each other.

Perhaps they are some club on their way to a lake somewhere. He is sweating. He feels sweat in his eyes, feels it rolling down his ribs. Oh my God, he thinks, and presses his elbows in, as if his armpits were the a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

source of the most terrible stench. He scans the aisle for an empty seat.

And he notices a few rows to the rear a couple of black men, real back-country, old school all the way, one dressed in overalls, the other in a yellow velvet double-breasted suit and a purple shirt. They are passing a bottle of beer back and forth and laughing at the tops of their voices.

Hampton does not even want to make eye contact with them, but they make it impossible for him to ignore them.
Hey, man, come on over,
says the one in the velvet suit, and Hampton has no choice but to march over to them and say,
You’re not just representing yourself on this train, you know
. And as soon as he says this, he notices his mother, sitting primly on the other side of the aisle, with her hands folded onto her lap. She purses her lips and nods, as if to commend his job well done.

Next thing, the train has started and he is sitting beside a white woman, who seems to have moved as far from him as the seat will allow.

She leans against the window as if the train has taken a sharp turn. He continues to keep his elbows pressed against his ribs. He thinks,
I wish
they’d turn the air conditioning on,
but not only is the air conditioning not working but the reading lights are sputtering off and on. He looks out the window.They have left the tunnel.The late afternoon clouds lie along the horizon like broken stones, red, orange, dark blue. The river is dark lavender, the prow of a rusting tanker parts the waters in a long luminous chevron.
Beautiful, beautiful,
he thinks. And then he says to the white woman,
My stop is an hour and a half from here
. She smiles at him gratefully, she knows he is trying to reassure her.
I’m just going to close my eyes
for a few minutes,
he says. She looks at him, and then shakes her head. Is she warning him not to?

And then he sees Iris. Like everyone else, she is dressed for warm weather. She is wearing a sleeveless blouse, shorts, sandals. She is walking right past him, carrying a bottle of club soda and a bag of pretzels from the refreshment bar. Somehow, he knows he must not say anything to her. She sits in a seat three or four rows back. She is traveling with a white man, who looks familiar. He takes the bag of pretzels from her, tears them open, but before either of them can eat one of them they