A Paper Son (18 page)

“Of course you are,” I said. “Why the hell did we just make this trip, then?”

“Because I need you to focus,” she said. “I need to know what happened to my uncle.”

“Right,” I said. “And along the way, you're trying to persuade me to help you. But to do that, you need me to believe that your story is real.”

“It doesn't really matter what you believe.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever,” I said.

“I think it could make a little sense,” Lucy said.

“Thank you,” Eva said.

“How?” I said.

“This is a delicate process,” Eva said.

“I can see that,” Lucy said.

“I have no idea what the fuck either of you are talking about,” I said.

“It doesn't matter,” Eva said. “I've already said too much. I just need you to keep writing.”

“Can we get something to eat now?” Lucy said.

***

I spent the rest of the drive in a state of agitation, consumed by thoughts of Rose. I could sense her presence now, out in the world somewhere, and though I should have come home to start my progress reports I could think only of her exodus from my story and onto the planet. By what mechanism, what act of transformation, could this have happened? When it became too much to think about, I told myself it was a coincidence; it had to be. Of course Eva had a grandmother by the name of Li-Yu—why would she have tracked me down, otherwise? They were parallel occurrences, nothing more. But I couldn't get that to sit right. As the coincidences accumulated it became more and more difficult to adhere to commonplace explanations. Now I had to find Rose. I had to find Rose, and not only was Eva unwilling to take me to her, she was maintaining that her existence didn't matter. The more I thought about it the less sense it made, so later that evening I decided I had nothing to lose and I cornered Lucy.

“Let's go swimming,” I said. The pool was open until ten. I didn't need much time; five minutes would be more than enough.

She'd been at the fridge, gulping orange juice out of the carton. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked over my shoulder toward the windows. “Is that some sort of code?” she said. “Some kind of new Bay Area lingo?”

“It's code for getting into a swimming pool,” I said. “Lots of people do it.”

She wiped her mouth on her arm. “Yes,” she said, “and there's a place for them all this time of year, called Australia.” She took another gulp, put the carton back in, and shut the door. She pointed at the piles of her luggage. “Besides, do you have any idea how long it would take me to find my suit?” she said.

“I need you to come with me,” I said. “I'm going to go change.” I went to my room and came back out a minute later, ready to go.

Lucy had put on her raincoat and found an umbrella. “Look, I'll come with you, just to get you to stop acting weird. But I don't need to get any wetter than I've been, water deficiency or not. I'm bringing a book.”

“Fine,” I said. We walked down the hallway and into the stairwell. The echoes of our footfalls clattered all around us. “So do you want to tell me what that was all about earlier?” I asked.

“What what was?”

“Your comments in the car. You sound like you're on her side.”

“Her side? I didn't realize there were sides.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We've spent some time talking.”

“Great.”

“What's wrong with that?”

We pushed through the door and into the storm, and Lucy's umbrella snapped open. Someone rode past on a bike; a streetlight caught the flat fan of water spraying from its rear wheel. “Swimming?” she said. “You're crazy, you know.”

“So what has she told you?”

“Various things. Mostly what you told me.”

“That's it?”

“What were you hoping for?”

“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.”