A Paper Son Read online

  “Oh, I don’t know. A few minor tidbits, like an explanation for why one of my characters is buried in Colma, and why another one’s walking around somewhere.”

  “Don’t get pissy with me about it,” she said. “I’m just along for the ride.”

  “I’m not pissy,” I said. “I just want to know what she told you, and what you told her.”

  “What I’ve told her about what?”

  “About anything,” I said, but my thoughts were turning to the pool. What was I planning for Lucy, for this exploration? She hadn’t brought her suit, so I couldn’t ask her to come in with me. Would I simply ask her to keep an eye on me? Was that going to sound insane? Did I just need to have the reassurance of her company?

  Doris let Lucy in for free and instead of heading for the changing rooms I went directly for the pool. We stepped through the doorway and into the awning’s small shelter.

  “It’s a fucking outdoor pool?” Lucy said. “I never for a moment considered that possibility. When did you lose your mind?”

  But her words and the Y and the storm all belonged to a receding world now. The chasm beneath the pool’s surface was rising and spreading, and even before I had stepped out from beneath the awning’s fragile shelter I was engulfed. I had only a slight awareness of movement through rain and Lucy shouting things, about my clothes, about how I was freaking her out, and then the water was rising to meet me.

  Beneath me all was blue-white, and endless. I floated down, easily, awash in a sudden surprising calm. Something in me turned—it was as if my organs had all somersaulted, and now down was up, and up down, and I was swimming upwards, toward a narrow glowing ribbon that looked like a far-off river. It took me what seemed like whole minutes to reach it. I began to see the undersides of flat-bottomed boats, their brown planks tinted with algae. High above, a wavering sun sent thick bars of light plunging into the green water. I struck for the surface, anticipating breaths of air that would taste of the countryside, and sunshine. Just as I began to feel the pressure decrease of shallow waters, everything inside me somersaulted again and the boats and sunlight disappeared, and that heavy blue-white emptiness returned. I looked up and saw, through what seemed like a hundred miles of water, the oblong, spinning lights of the pool’s deck. Only then did I feel the strain in my lungs. I pushed for the pool’s surface, fighting hard, and finally broke through, breathing heavily.

  Cold air seized my head. I kicked for the shallow end, my clothes thick and heavy, my heart clattering in its cage, and got my feet onto the pool’s floor. I would have to convince Lucy to come in with me, somehow—without her I had no way of making sense of anything. She was gone, though. The space beneath the awning was empty and the deck was clear. I climbed out of the water and headed for the door, a sense of that cartwheeling feeling still turning in my chest. I concentrated on the light streaming through the glass doors; I fought to keep my wet clothes from dragging me to the floor. And then Lucy’s still-open umbrella blew across the deck and struck my leg. It caromed off, and climbed on an updraft over the wall and out into the night. I ran the last few steps to the door and found Lucy inside, sitting in the hallway as though she’d been shoved backward through the door. She had one arm wrapped around a knee and the other hand pressed against the wall behind her. Her face was white.

  “Lucy! What happened?” I said. I squatted down and put a hand on her shoulder. She was trembling.

  When she spoke it sounded as if her voice was coming from somewhere far beyond this hallway. “I just remembered something,” she said. She was staring past me, through the glass door at the water.

  “What is it?” I tried to pull her up, but she pushed my hands away, her movements clumsy and abrupt. She looked at me, and back at the pool, and then back at me, and then began to rise on unsteady trembling legs. I put a hand on her arm and readied myself to catch her if she fell again.

  “We have to go see Mom,” she said, “right now.” And suddenly she was on the move, a burst of frantic energy barreling down the hallway. “We have to go right now.”

  On the drive down, dull green rivers crossed the sky, small quiet boats traversing their lengths like blimps. The bay tipped and groaned, as though it had grown weary with its horizontal repose. Lucy was silent, and I glanced over at her frequently to make sure she was still there. I held to the taillights in front of me and hoped my instincts would carry us to our mom’s door.

  We managed to arrive. Mom answered the door. Her joy at seeing her daughter evaporated when she saw the look on Lucy’s face. “Sweetie,” she said, “whatever . . . .”

  Lucy took a half-dozen strides into the house and pulled her coat off. She whirled around and her eyes flashed and when she spoke her voice rolled out like thunder. “Something happened to Peregrine.” She pointed a finger at my chest but her eyes continued to bore into Mom. “What was it?”

  I had just closed the door and now I froze, standing just inside it. All around us the leaves of her crops trembled in the gently cycling air of her ventilation system.

  “He’s fine,” Mom said, her voice quiet. She turned and looked me over. “Aren’t you?”

  “When he was little, I mean. What was it?”

  Mom turned back to Lucy. “Lots of things happened to him. What’s made you so angry?”

  “Something about a pool,” Lucy said. “We had that little kid pool and something happened.”

  Mom twitched at the mention of the pool. She went very still. I came a step closer. Lucy’s eyes were round as planets; she seemed to be watching events unfold in the air above us. And then my mom muttered something I couldn’t quite make out.

  “What did you say?” I asked, stepping closer to her. “Lucy, what are you talking about?” I could picture the pool. It was one of those little blue ones with the plastic edge that always caught your toes. I could see it in the corner of our yard in Redwood City, killing a four-foot circle of crabgrass.

  Mom shook her head. Her face had turned red. She sank down onto one of the kitchen stools and planted a heavy elbow on the counter. Her hands were shaking. “Who told you?” she said. “How did you find out?”

  “Find out what?” I asked. Numbness reached up my legs and began to squeeze at the bottoms of my lungs.

  “There was an ambulance,” Lucy said.

  “But you didn’t—you couldn’t know that,” Mom said.

  “Was there an ambulance or wasn’t there?” Lucy yelled.

  “There was,” Mom said. She turned to me, a look of helplessness on her face I’d never seen before. “I’m sorry, Peregrine,” she said.

  “For what?” I said. “What the hell are you talking about? Lucy, what is this?”

  Mom closed her eyes, shook her head again. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” she said, her voice thin. She turned back to Lucy. “How did you find out?”

  “I just remembered,” Lucy said. Her shoulders rose and fell with her heavy breaths. The anger on her face had turned to pain. “I watched Perry jump into the pool at the Y and it just suddenly came back to me.”

  It seemed like an hour before Mom turned back to me. Everything in the room went flat, two-dimensional. “You fell in,” she said. “When you were two.”

  “And?” I said.

  “You were playing in the back, and we had left the empty pool in a corner of the yard. At least, we thought the pool was empty. But the neighbors had been watering at night, and with a few months and the chain-link fence, a couple of inches built up in the bottom.” Her eyes were wet now. “We should have checked, Peregrine. The pool should have been upside-down, or leaning against the fence. We never really went back there.” She was no longer looking at my face, but downward, into my chest, as if studying my heart, my lungs. For a time she didn’t speak. Hints of expressions, nearly imperceptible, flashed across her face and then vanished, as if she were watching events spool out inside me.

  “Finish the story, Mom,” Lucy said. Her voice was soft but urgent.

  “You
were playing back there, in the grass, with some of your toys,” Mom said. She still wouldn’t look at my face. “I had been checking on you every couple of minutes, but the gate was closed and latched, and there was no way you could get out, and not much trouble you could really get into back there.” She closed her eyes. “And then I looked out and you weren’t on the grass, or anywhere I could see from the doorway.” She was crying now, and her face twisted with the effort of speech. She was almost unrecognizable. “I ran outside and found you in the pool, with your face in the water. I pulled you out and you weren’t breathing. I had no idea how long you’d been there like that.”

  She went still again. We watched and waited as the memory passed through her face, as its reverberations flattened and eased. Lucy stayed where she was, her hands on her hips, her eyes riveted on Mom. I couldn’t feel anything in my body. I might have been floating in lukewarm water.

  “You came back, obviously,” she said. “You came back in the ambulance and you were fine. But you hadn’t been breathing. Your pulse had stopped and there’d been no heartbeat. You’d gone. Completely gone.”

  The room turned gray. I couldn’t even smell the reek of her plants. My throat felt like it was full of water.

  “They kept you at the hospital for a couple of nights, but then you were back, happy as ever. We never told you it happened because we didn’t want you to be scared of water. We didn’t even get rid of the pool.” She slumped an inch. “And also, I suppose we weren’t eager for you to know you had the sort of parents who could let this happen to you.”

  “And all this was when?” I said. Now I was picturing myself lying in the back of that ambulance, a tiny blue-gray figure on a white gurney, full of tubes.

  “That’s what I can’t understand,” Mom said. “It was when you were two. But it was summertime.”

  “I remember seeing him through the window,” Lucy said. She closed her eyes. “I remember him lying on the grass, surrounded by paramedics. He was wearing his Spider-Man shirt and his diaper. There were three men and one woman, and one of the men was bald.”

  “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.”

  NINE

  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.