Paper Things (17 page)

I can tell now that it’s morning. Janna is standing over me with a spoonful of canned pineapple juice. It’s what she always gave us for an upset stomach: canned fruit juice
only,
until we declared we were starving. Then she knew it was OK for us to put something in our stomachs. I lean up on my elbows to get the juice into my mouth. I feel like a baby bird when she feeds me this way. “Gage?” I say as soon as I’ve swallowed.

I can tell by her expression that his name shouldn’t have been the first thing out of my mouth. “Thanks” would have gone over a whole lot better.

“He knows you’re here. I left a message on his phone before picking you up.”

“Thank you. For coming to pick me up, I mean,” I say, in case she thinks I’m just talking about Gage again.

Janna nods. “You’ve got the flu,” she says. “The nurse said it was going around.”

I groan weakly and let my head fall back onto the pillow. The pillow with its clean white pillowcase, one that still smells mountain fresh even though I’ve no doubt drooled all over it.

“I can’t stay home today,” she says. “I’ve got to get to work. Do you think you can fend for yourself”

Now I’m the one who nods. I’ve never stayed alone when I was sick before. Janna, a medical transcriptionist, always worked from home — typing up reports from recordings that doctors sent her. “I’m eleven,” I remind us both.

“I’ll leave this here,” she says, placing the can of pineapple juice next to me. “See if you can’t make it to the toilet if you need to throw up again.”

“May I watch TV?” I ask. I expect her to say no — she’s pretty strict about staying in bed on sick days, and I’m not even sure I
want
to watch TV — but asking feels just like old times, when Janna was my guardian and I would ask her permission to turn on the television or play a game on her computer.

“What would Gage say?” she asks, and leaves the room.

I can’t decide if that was a serious question — if she wants me to act like I would if Gage were in charge, since I’m living with him now — or if it’s her way of saying, “You’re not mine anymore, so what do I care?”

I listen to the sounds of her leaving: the emptying of the coffeepot, the rinsing of her breakfast dishes before she stacks them in the dishwasher, the click of the dishwasher door. She pounds her feet into her boots, and then the kitchen door shuts: once loosely, then tightly. I think about getting up and making sure that the door is locked, which is silly. Janna always locks the door.

I feel drained, empty like the coffeepot. I look around my old room, which hasn’t changed much in the months we’ve been gone. The white furniture is the same; my books are still on the shelves. The only difference is that the framed pictures are gone. There is no picture of me and Sasha on my eighth birthday, no picture of seven-year-old Gage holding me when I was born, no picture of me and Janna and Gage on the day she took us to court to get official guardianship.

I remember telling Sasha once that Janna had adopted us and Gage correcting me angrily. “Not adopted,” he’d said, his face like storm clouds. “Adopting is when someone becomes a parent. Janna is just our guardian.” I never understood why this upset him so much; Janna did all the things a parent was supposed to do and signed all the same forms, and who could blame her for not wanting to become our parent? After all, our track record with parents wasn’t very good.

I get up to use the bathroom, and then I walk around Janna’s house, running my finger along familiar (and always dust-free) surfaces: the windowsills, the glass coffee table, the granite countertop. Despite the fact that I should only be sipping on pineapple juice, I look in the baking cupboard to see if there are any chocolate chips. Whenever Gage and I were alone, we’d snatch some, always careful to take only a few so Janna wouldn’t be able to tell. Janna does have a bag of Nestlé Semi-Sweet Morsels, but it isn’t open. I place it back in the cabinet in its exact place.

Gage’s room is upstairs with Janna’s — both of their rooms are larger than mine. I start to look into Gage’s room but then stop myself. Seeing his things might make me feel sad. And what if Janna has changed his room, moved his things? That would make me even sadder.

I peek into Janna’s room, where we’ve never been allowed. Janna called her room the “sanctuary” — a place where she could be alone and do the things she used to do BK (before kids), like painting her toenails and working on her scrapbooks. I see that there, on the end of her bed, is a neat pile of magazines and catalogs. She used to save them for me, and I wonder if she still does. I sit on the edge of the bed (careful not to make wrinkles) and look through a Mini Boden. There is a page that says, “Bonnie for Babies,” and it has the cutest little kids I’ve ever seen. There is an African-American toddler boy with a red snowflake sweater and a smile that makes my weak body feel stronger. There’s a white toddler girl in a colorful dress with two sleepy owls on the front who looks as if she’s about to take her very first step. I decide to cut the kids out and add them to the day care where Miles and Natalie go. And then, just like old times, I’m going to spread my Paper Things all over my old room. I’m going to play for hours.

I bravely tear the pages out of the catalog, so neatly that Janna might not even notice. Before leaving Janna’s room, I wander from corner to corner, peeking at the pictures of her parents and her sisters on the wall, and the items — perfume, lotion, earring tree, cotton balls — placed ever so carefully on her bureau and vanity. I wander over to the table against the wall, where she keeps her scrapbooks and her carefully organized scrapbooking tools. There are lots of brightly colored papers, and scissors that will cut the paper edges with zigzags or curly scallops. There are also stickers, lots and lots of stickers, of things like barbecue grills, tall glasses of lemonade, and watermelon; clearly Janna is working on summer pages in her scrapbook. I used to wish I could use some of those stickers for my Paper Things, but Janna’s scrapbook stuff was always off-limits. In fact, I’ve never even looked through any of the books. She used to say, “Someday, when you’re older, I’ll show you them,” but she never did.

Now I’m home alone for the first time, and I can’t help wondering what it was that she didn’t want to share. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t stop thinking that this might be the only chance I’ll ever have to see her scrapbooks — and she
did
intend for me to see them, someday.

I sit down in her chair, pull it up to the table, and open the nearest one.

The book begins with old baby pictures, the corners of the pictures rounded like the ones Mama had of her and Dad back in high school. It takes me a second to recognize Janna’s mother, who always asked us to call her Nana. She’s much younger in the pictures and looks like Janna does now. The baby must be Janna. Then there are pictures of Janna as a toddler taking her first steps, Janna as a preschooler asleep with a book on her chest, Janna at her six-year-old birthday party, riding a pony.

I feel a pang as I flip through the scrapbook; Gage and I don’t have baby albums of any kind. Mama always said that our dad wasn’t home long enough to take any pictures of us when we were babies and she was just too plain tired to take any herself. But someone at some point took a few pictures, because I remember seeing ones of baby Gage running around the house without clothes, me in a high chair with baby food smeared all over my face, and toddler me crying because Gage had left the room. I wonder whatever happened to those pictures.

I flip through more of the scrapbook. There are pages with tickets, notes from friends, some report cards (all A’s and some A+’s), and a picture of Janna in a straw hat with a huge polka-dotted bow, next to the one of my mother with her pipe-cleaner hat.

Eventually I come to Janna’s high-school years. There’s a page for field hockey, and I recognize my mother in a few of the pictures. Another page is devoted to prom. Janna’s pressed her corsage into the book. Even all dried and brown tinged, it’s still pretty. I take a closer look at a picture of Janna in her prom dress to see what the corsage looked like when the flowers were fresh. It was a burst of pink daisies tied up with a hot-pink bow. The bow matches the ribbon around Janna’s lacy pink-and-white dress. Janna looks so young, and she’s wearing an expression that I’ve rarely seen on her before: a full smile, which lights up her whole face.

I look over at her boyfriend, wondering who this guy was who made Janna so happy.

At first I think it’s Gage.
What the —?

Slowly, though, I realize that it’s not my brother’s face staring back at me but my father’s.

Holy moly, Janna’s prom date was my dad!

I stare for a good long while, as if expecting the image to change. Eventually, though, I turn the page.

Next come pictures of Janna and my mom. I half expect them to look tense in these pictures — surely Mama couldn’t have been happy that her best friend was going to prom with her future husband! — but in every picture they are laughing, usually with their arms around each other. I trace my fingers over Mama’s smiling face. She didn’t look that different when I knew her — thinner and sadder, sure, but not much older. She was only thirty-two when she died.

I continue flipping through the pages. There are more pictures of Janna and my dad. Lots more. Janna and my dad at other dances, hugging at a basketball game, smiling at Nana’s Thanksgiving table, showing off their Christmas presents.

My confusion grows as each memory passes by. My parents were married right after high school. When did Janna and my dad stop being a couple? When did my mom and dad start? And why didn’t anyone ever mention that Janna used to date my dad?

I can’t stop examining every detail on these pages, and I quickly notice something. As I get closer and closer to graduation, all of the pictures that include my mom or dad have tear marks through them, though they’ve been carefully taped back together. Whatever happened with my mom and dad and Janna had clearly upset Janna at the time.

I close the scrapbook and decide not to look through the others. I already know way more than I wanted to know — though at the same time, I feel like I don’t know anything at all.

“You’re eleven,” says Janna. She’s standing in the doorway to my room. I freeze, my paper mom in one hand and Natalie in the other. “Don’t you think it’s about time you stopped playing with paper dolls?”

I feel caught. Caught-with-my-hands-in-the-chocolate-chips-bag caught. I shrug.

Janna sits down on the edge of my bed, like there’s nothing she’d rather be doing than watching me play Paper Things — though I know that’s not the case.

But I can’t play Paper Things with her there. My paper world is my private world; it doesn’t work if there are people watching me.

“How was work?” I ask, placing my people down on the plush couch in my home.

“Busy,” she says.

“What do you do?”

She opens her arms, looks down at her uniform, and then up at me.

I should have noticed. “You’re a nurse?” I ask.

“Really, Ari. It’s as if you and Gage think I didn’t exist before I took you in. Of course I’m a nurse.”

“Do you work at the hospital?”

“I worked in the ER before I became a medical transcriptionist. Now I work in a nursing home.”

“At Parkers?” I ask. That’s where Gage used to work sometimes, the place where Mr. Lynnfield cheats at cards.

“No, not Parkers. How are you feeling?”

“Somewhat better,” I say. I have a little quilt wrapped around my legs, and my pillow is here on the floor with me. “When the room starts to spin, I just lie down for a while.”

“Back in bed,” she says, which is what I was afraid she’d say. I pull myself up and start to crawl under the covers.

“Oh, no, pick these up first,” she says, sweeping her arm around the whole room. “You won’t like it if I come in during the night and end up stomping all over them.”

I wake when Janna strides in with a mug of chicken soup and a handful of crackers.

“What’s it like, living in a studio?” she asks as I blow on the soup to cool it.

The question catches me off guard, and I’m glad to have the excuse of the soup to buy me more time. I hate lying, but Gage fooled Janna into believing we have an apartment, and I don’t want to get him in trouble. “It’s cozy. We can’t spread our things out, though, or the place turns into a real mess,” I say, staying as close to the truth as possible.

Janna is giving me her I-thought-so look.

And then, for who knows what reason, I blurt out, “Were you and Mama friends for a long time?”

“Your mother was my best friend in high school,” she says. “I’ve told you that.”

I want to ask a gazillion more important questions, questions like: How come you never told me that my dad was your boyfriend? And when did he become Mama’s boyfriend? And is this why you and Mama weren’t friends when Gage and I were growing up? And how did it feel when Mama called you and told you she was dying and that she wanted to make up — oh, and would you mind raising her two children, since her own folks were dead and our dad’s parents had never even met us? (Gage told me once that they’d disapproved of our dad marrying Mama. I wonder now if it was because they’d been hoping he’d marry Janna instead.)