A Paper Son Page 15

  “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.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “How did it get here?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. Maybe some wind blew it onto a freight train. Maybe it got sucked up into the jet stream.”

  I surveyed the bins, the tables, the cabinets. There must have been thousands of items there. “Why do you go to the trouble to return them?” I asked.

  “They go through so much to get here.” She slid the sheet back into its file and shrugged. “It’s just my duty, I figure,” she said.

  We continued our slow tour of the wall. There were boxes of wallets, pet collars, shoes. “What about your sisters? What were their names again?”

  “Bernice, Carla, and Delilah,” she said. “What about them?”

  “Does this happen to them, too? Or do they have other . . . talents?”

  She shook her head. “No talents,” she said. “Actually, that isn’t true. Carla has the talent of fake boobs.” She laughed a small laugh. “You’d be amazed what she can do with those.”

  “What about people?” I said. “Lost people? Do they ever find you?”

  “Sometimes,” Annabel said. “A brother and a sister at the mall downtown. An old Japanese guy who’d been separated from his tour group, up near Fisherman’s Wharf. And once, at Yosemite, a mother who’d been missing for two days. That one was in the news. You can look it up.” We reached the end and she stopped and turned and started back toward the chair in the middle of the room. “To tell you the truth, it’s gotten a bit overwhelming lately,” she said. “Ever since this storm started. My front door didn’t used to look like that. Like a junkyard. I just hope it doesn’t all find me at school.”

  She gave the chair a spin and watched it rotate once, twice. “There’s more,” she said.

  “More stuff?” I said. “Where?”

  “No,” she said. “Sit down.” She patted the chair’s seat.

  I complied, and she turned me square to the windows. Our reflections looked back at us. Together we were dwarfed by the towering, cluttered wall of lost items behind us. She walked over to the doorway and threw the li
ght switches.

  One world vanished and another appeared. Dim black light bathed the room. A web of glowing yellow-green lines emanated from a spot beneath the chair and fanned out across the floor. They reached and climbed the opposite wall and stretched up to the bottoms of the windows. Written along the lines on the floor were tiny glowing words, the same bright color. Our reflections had vanished from the window and in their place the ocean now roiled, churning into the sand on the far side of the Great Highway, where a series of burned-out streetlights rose into the storm.

  “The city used to come out and fix the lights once a month,” she said, “but they gave up. I’ve learned to be a pretty good shot.” She walked carefully out across the glowing web of lines, looking down at them. “From that seat I can see about 400 square miles of ocean. I spend hours in that chair,” she said.

  “What are you searching for?” I said.

  “I’m not the one doing the searching,” she said. “I’m the one being sought.” She sat down on the floor and crossed her legs. “Come take a look,” she said.

  As my toe touched the glowing web a ripple of something like electricity shot up through my leg and filled the rest of me. I squatted and silently read the writing along one of the rays: HMS Prince of Wales, British. December 10, 1941. 3.56, 104.48. Malaysia. 10:56 P.M. August 9, 2008.

  “The Prince of Wales,” I said. “A ship?”

  “Sunk by eighty-six Japanese bombers out of Saigon,” she said.

  “On the tenth of December,” I said. “Latitude and longitude?”

  “Yes.”

  “At 10:56 P.M. What’s the second date?”

  “No,” she said. “10:56 on the night of August 9, 2008 was when the Prince of Wales found me.”

  “Found you?” The words beneath me went fuzzy, and then came back into focus. I sat down across from Annabel.

  “Ghost ships,” she said, when I was settled. The whites of her eyes jumped out of the dark purple light. She gestured toward the windows. “They appear all along the horizon and sail toward me. I identify them, and record their arrivals.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then they disappear.”

  I looked down and read another entry, and then another. There had to be hundreds of rays, maybe a thousand.

  “Sometimes it gets crowded out there,” she said. “If I go away for a week or so and it’s been stormy, I might come back to find a couple dozen ships lined up on the horizon, waiting for me.”

  I stood up, peered through the window, and tried to imagine one of these collections—schooners, battleships, barges, yachts—convening here, just off the coast, searching for a lone figure bathed in black light in a third-floor window. “They just disappear?” I said.

  She shrugged. “They vanish,” she said. “They flicker, and they become even more translucent, and then they’re gone.” I strained my eyes, struggling to see through the storm, but there was only darkness and rain. She joined me there at the window and stood close enough so that our shoulders were touching. “It’s quiet out there tonight,” she said. “Usually nights like this are busy.”

  I put my forehead against the window. The gutters in the street were flooded, and the surfaces of the puddles were a chaos of splashes. The sound of rain hummed in my skull. “Why?” I said. “Why do they need you?” A glint of light from the edge of a pair of passing high beams swept across us.

  “And why you?” she said. She shifted her weight, and leaned into me a little more. We stood that way for a minute or two, watching the rain. “Do you like long walks on the beach?” she asked. We put on our coats and went back downstairs to her gate, where the pile of items had re-formed itself. She shoved it aside with her door and we made our way across the Great Highway and walked across the sand to the waterline. The waves rushed in, fast and angry, and the rain beat down into them. Through it all rose the familiar sound of that violin. I strained over the sound of the waves, trying to locate it. It swelled and receded, swelled and receded, although the wind was holding steady. And then the music and the waves converged and I realized: The song was in the ocean, washing in with the waves and racing back out with the current.

  “Do you hear music?” I asked Annabel, raising my voice to be heard over the rain.

  She shook her head. “Do you see any ships?” she asked.

  I squinted, but with the rain on my face I could barely keep my eyes open. “No,” I said.

  Annabel said something I couldn’t hear.

  “What?” I said.

  She took my arm and leaned in and when she spoke the warmth of her breath filled my ear. “Where do you think you went, when you died?” she said. “Something can’t just disappear and be nowhere and then reappear. You must have gone somewhere.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

  “Try to,” she said.

  “I will,” I said.

  “I’d like to help you,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You should kiss me now,” she said.

  ***

  I stayed with Annabel until midnight or so and then I drove home, climbed into bed, and lay there, wide awake, as you do after a first kiss. But this kiss had been different—it had sealed a strange exchange, an agreement I was just beginning to understand. Annabel had doubled the list of mysteries before me, but she’d also given me herself, her lips and her teeth and her tongue, her own confusion, the humidity of her words in my ear. It was a worthwhile trade—I knew this from the sense of peace and purpose that warmed over me as I lay there, staring through the ceiling, listening to the rain. I eventually fell asleep with the vague shapes of plans forming in my mind, and when I awoke after my brief sleep I went to Eva.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking,” I said.

  She’d been lying on the couch, reading something that looked like a supermarket romance novel. She let it fall to her chest but declined to sit up. “Okay,” she said.

  “I think we should try to be a little more methodical about finding your uncle,” I said.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “I don’t have a specific plan. I just thought we could get a little more organized. Be a little more active.”

  “Great,” she said. “Thanks.” She picked her book back up.

  “Well, what do you think we should do next? Should we go see Rose?”

  “No,” she said. “We aren’t going to do that.”

  I sat down at my desk, considering responses. My newfound resolve wavered but I thought again of Annabel’s words in my ear. “I’m sure you’d understand if that makes me feel like you’re hiding things,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, sitting up now. “That’s because I’m hiding things.”

  “I’m not sure I understand that,” I said.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

  It was taking an increasing effort to fend off exasperation now. “Well, maybe I’d like to,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.

  “I need you to be open,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have even taken you to see Li-Yu’s grave.”

  “‘Open’? What does that mean? Wouldn’t it be better to just tell me what you know? Why do you get to decide this on your own?”

  She took a bookmark from the coffee table, slipped it into her book, and held it on her lap, her eyes down, as if studying the cover image. “If I’m not telling you enough, I can always change that. If I tell you too much, I can’t go back and ask you to forget things.” She looked up. “What’s this sudden change in you, anyway?”

  Outside the city was heavy and quiet as a tomb. Even the rain seemed somehow muffled.

  “There’s a girl,” I said.

  She grinned. “That sounds about right,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “There’s always a girl,” she said. She held her arms out, inviting me to look her over—shoeless, graying unkempt hair, the same blackish wrink
led clothes she’d been wearing since she had appeared at my door two, or was it now three weeks ago—and laughed. “And I’m not exactly leading lady material,” she said. She opened her book and lay back down. “Actually, that reminds me.” She pointed at a manila envelope sitting on the corner of the coffee table. “I found that outside the door last night.”

  There was nothing written on it. She’d already opened it. I upended it and a new copy of the journal slid out. On its cover was a Chinese ink painting, a monochrome landscape of mountains and rice paddies.

  “You don’t need my mom,” Eva said.

  Henry’s school term comes to an end just as the men finish smoothing the paddies. They put the buffaloes back into their paddocks and on a cool spring day they open the floodgates. Li-Yu stands with her children at her side, among the rest of the villagers, and watches the diverted water race across the topmost paddies, through more gates, and into the surrounding terraces. Within a half-day the job is finished and the gates are closed again, and each of the many paddies reflects its own segment of the sky, and holds its own collection of clouds. They gurgle and moan for hours as the men check the walls and channels and gates.

  The seedlings are pulled out of their beds and stacked carefully on wooden rafts, one in each paddy. Everybody in the village who can walk takes to the water. Bending at the waist, they wade backward, transplanting the seedlings in neat rows. Once Li-Yu masters the technique the hours become monotonous, their tedium broken only by variations in her discomfort. She finds herself taken over by thoughts about this new watery world, and all that could be lost beneath it: clothing cast aside and swallowed, shoes lost, personal items dropped—anything could disappear into the dark waters in a single unguarded instant, only to be carried back into the river when the paddies are finally drained. She wonders how many children have been lost to this crop. The planting takes days, and after each of them Li-Yu and her children fall into an exhausted sleep, their backs aching, their feet and fingers raw and pruned, the growing smell of mildew in the air.