The Whole World Over (59 page)

IT COULDN'T BE SNOWING
; how in the world could it be snowing?
Saga stood at the kitchen window and stared into the small
sad yard behind Stan's house. The ground was white, and the air appeared
to be filled with the coiling currents of very large snowflakes. The window
was filthy, its lower panes covered with paw prints and the smearings
of eager noses, so Saga could not see all that clearly. Stan no longer
let the dogs out back, because he worried that someone would report
him to the Board of Health.

She had been staying at Stan's, basically
being
Stan, since Friday
evening. Stan was in Washington, at the nonprofit seminar. He called
several times a day, and though she could tell he was a little anxious
leaving her in charge, he was never sarcastic. Every time, just before saying
good-bye, he thanked her.

And really, his thank-yous mattered. Being Stan was no picnic. It was
harder work than Saga had thought it would be, even with Sonya's help.
Sonya stopped by every evening to help take the dogs on one long walk.
Stan had "pared down" to six dogs for his absence, including a three-legged
collie and a spaniely mongrel that cowered and peed every time
something spooked him. There were also seven cats, one with a litter of
kittens; a guinea pig with an eye infection; and a chameleon someone
was supposed to have picked up on Saturday but hadn't. Saga felt
slightly ashamed that the chameleon gave her the creeps, but at night,
after she turned off the downstairs lights, the lamp in its tank continued
to glow. Its snakelike tongue would lash out, presto—always disturbing
because the lizard's facial expression never changed.

Scott, Sonya's boyfriend, thought the chameleon was "genius cool."
He'd even wanted to take it out and hold it, but Saga told him she didn't
know if he should. (Now she wished she had let him do it, just so she
could have cleaned the smelly tank.) They had come by together the
evening before, and it was nice to have the extra help. While Sonya held
and medicated the squirming guinea pig, Scott told Saga that he was
moving in with Sonya but heading out to California for a little vacation
first. "Do the family thing," he said, the way you might say "Do my
taxes" or "Do my hair," as if it were shorthand for a task that everyone
had to do at some point, more or less the same way as everyone else.

Saga wondered what it would mean, to her, to "do the family thing."
Right now, it meant acting like a deaf-mute in the presence of her warring
cousins, just so she could keep her tentative place in the constellation.
Being Stan was tough, yes (and the longer she stayed here, the
more she admired him), but being Saga at Uncle Marsden's house was,
at this delicate moment, tougher still.

On the Fourth of July, after everyone had watched the fireworks from
the porch, after a hugely pregnant Denise had gone to bed, Michael had
announced that he'd closed on the Cute House. This was no surprise to
Saga, who had gone to see it, as promised, with Michael, Uncle Marsden,
and a real-estate broker. Aside from her uncle's complaints that the
ocean was out of earshot and the garden little more than a "vulgar profusion
of forsythia," there was nothing not to like. And, in a sneaky
way, Michael had won her over at the fancy lunch with the snails and
soufflés.

But that night on the porch, Frida and Pansy were not won over. They
told Michael that they had decided they did not want to be bought out,
that if Michael wanted to live in the big house, he'd have to rent it. This
led to a stormy, teary argument, to Uncle Marsden trying to duck out
for a walk, to Pansy screaming at him that he'd always loved Michael
best, to Michael calling Pansy an ingrate, to . . . well, Saga had simply
sat there, unable to move, as if watching a real war unfold.

It became an all-out cold war—Uncle Marsden and Michael versus
Frida and Pansy—until, one month later, the twins were born. Both
girls: Elizabeth, after Aunt Liz, and a flourishy name that Saga had a
hard time remembering (Leonora? Isadora? Ramona?), after Denise's
mother. They came out from the city for their first visit in the middle of
August. You'd have thought he was expecting royalty, the way Uncle
Marsden behaved. Saga had never seen him clean anything other than
the leaves of ailing plants, but there he was, down on his knees scrubbing
behind the toilets, standing on a ladder sweeping cobwebs out of
hidden corners they'd occupied for months or maybe years. He shook
rugs over the porch rail, bleached countertops, and filled the house with
flowers from his garden. Meanwhile, he moved the houseplants he
knew to be poisonous into his salon of mosses, locking the door as if
they might escape.

"Those babies aren't even close to crawling," said Saga.

"I know, I know," he said, "but supposing the wicked old wind blew
a geranium leaf into a cradle? Mother Nature is cruel!"

Saga decided to take his hysterical preparations as just that: crazy and
amusing. After all, he'd asked nothing extra of Saga. But Pansy and
Frida, who arrived a few hours before the royal family, did not find their
father's behavior funny at all. Frida had called a truce, and she'd made
Pansy come along. Pansy spoke to Denise but not to Michael and hardly
at all to her father. Uncle Marsden didn't seem to care. He only had eyes
for those babies. He couldn't get enough of holding them—one then the
other, the other then the one, as if they were old enough to guess at a
preference—and Saga could see from the looks on both Pansy's and
Frida's faces that they were feeling literally replaced, traded in for these
two tiny, perhaps more promising girls.

Michael seemed gentler. He could not get enough of holding his daughters
either. He still spoke on his phone pretty often, but he kept the conversations
short. During many of these conversations, as he paced the
far wall of a room talking numbers and money trends, his eyes, warm
and adoring, stayed fixed on those babies.

When Saga mentioned his softened manner to Frida, as they washed
dishes together after that first dinner, Frida laughed harshly. "I think
what you're seeing is the effect of losing sleep. But don't be fooled. He
hasn't changed his plans." Saga said nothing; she'd been careful not to
take sides, and thank goodness no one had asked her to do so. Well,
what power did she have?

Later that night, thinking that the others had all gone to bed, Saga
had walked out to the front porch, wanting only to sit by herself and
gaze at the sky. But there was Uncle Marsden, on the swing beside
Denise. They rocked together; Denise, humming faintly, held one of the
babies on her lap. The adults looked at Saga and motioned silence, fingers
raised to their lips in unison.

It was an odd picture: this young pretty mother in her short white
gown, its thin summer fabric almost see-through across her swollen
breasts, both she and her baby watched closely by this much, much
older man. He leaned toward them with an accidental kind of . . . not
lust, thought Saga . . . lechery? No. But it was clear that Uncle Marsden
was thrilled at the intimacy.
Memory,
thought Saga with all the longing
and pain contained in that single word. He was in thrall to his memories,
that must be it, of sitting on this porch with his own wife and his
own babies so long ago. He was in love again, in love with the way he'd
been shuttled back in time, in love with the people who'd sent him to
that happy place.

Saga waved her understanding, went back indoors and up to
her room.

SHE SCRAPED HER HAND AS SHE UNFASTENED
the three locks on
Stan's back door. But finally she yanked it open and stepped out, careful
to close it right behind her. She found herself in a silent storm not of
snow but of paper: torn, shredded, singed, at times nearly
powdered
paper. It brushed her face and hands as it continued to drift to the
ground, settling with a festive leisure.

How could paper fall from the sky? Saga looked straight up. The sky
was perfectly blue. She looked at her feet. At first she was fearful of
touching the paper. Silly, she told herself.

She reached for a sheet that looked almost whole. It was part of a
menu from a Chinese restaurant. Some of the names of the dishes were
red, others green.
Two delight chickens. Gold phenix prawns. Double
happiness. House ginger chicken with dry-greened beans.
The red ones
were starred: spicy, that's right, she remembered. Uncle Marsden didn't
like Chinese food, but she'd had takeout at the bookshop—and with
Stan. Was the menu from Stan's kitchen? He'd shown her where he kept
the menus, but she had forgotten. She looked at the window, as if the
kitchen might have an answer. The spaniel and the German shepherd
had jumped up and were watching her, panting with excitement, licking
the glass. Most dogs loved snow; could they see this wasn't snow? Of
course, they could
smell
that it wasn't snow.

The next several papers she picked up—all whole, barely creased—
were covered with numbers. Rows and columns, with dashes and
spaces: numbers that, without being able to read them, she knew stood
for sums of money. They looked like the pages of numbers in the newspaper
business section.

She waded farther out, up to her ankles. She kicked at the paper. She
thought of confetti, of weddings.

Numbers lay everywhere about her, layer upon layer, shred upon
shred. This could have been a joke of a nightmare for Saga: a blizzard of
the very thing she had lost touch with most permanently, designed to
drive her mad. But of course it wasn't a nightmare. It had to be some
kind of comic mishap. She bent over and pushed away layers of numbers
with her hands, searching for more words. Another menu; anything.
She came up with a page from a magazine: movie reviews on one
side, on the other an advertisement for a hand cream that promised to
kill germs while making your skin soft.

Now the paper had stopped falling. There it lay, in shallow drifts
about her. It did not melt or disappear or flutter about. She looked up.
High overhead, she saw what might have been more paper, floating by
in the sun—or perhaps the wheeling shapes were birds, pale pigeons or
seagulls.

Squatting down, she found memos to people she had never heard of,
a piece of the directions on how to use a copy machine, a photograph of
a group of people posed in front of a boat. They wore matching pink
T-shirts with white palm trees. There were pinholes where the photo
had been tacked to a board or a wall.

One of the watching dogs had begun to bark.

Saga knew suddenly that something terrible had happened. For one
thing, there were signs of burning on some of the papers. Was the building
next door on fire? How would she take all the animals to safety?
Alarmed, she looked up the brick wall to her left: no smoke, no sign of
panic. Could someone have tossed all this paper off the roof of the
building?

She let herself into Stan's house, pushing the dogs gently back, and
refastened each lock. She went to the living room and pulled aside a curtain.
There was paper in the street as well, drifting along the ground.

Saga returned to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. The
problem with things that did not make sense was that they might seem
worrisome or absurd only to Saga. The senselessness might come from
inside herself. She could never be quite sure. She focused on the notion
of paper falling from the sky and whether there was a plausible, ordinary
cause she had forgotten. As usual, exerting her mind, trying to use
it like a muscle, got her nowhere.

She found her notebook and called Sonya's cell phone. She got the
recording and hung up. What would she say? Next, she tried Uncle
Marsden. She got his answering machine and left the message that
she was just checking in (though Uncle Marsden seemed far less concerned
with her whereabouts these days). "Hope you're getting lots
done in the garden," she added, knowing that's where he'd be on a day
this fine. Unless something
hugely
terrible had happened. She thought
about calling Fenno but did not want to make a fool of herself. She
could call Stan in Washington on his cell, but if she told him his yard
was full of somebody's trash, what could he do? It would probably ruin
his day.

She had fed all the animals early that morning and taken the dogs, two
at a time, for walks around the block. She had changed the litter boxes.
She had changed the chameleon's water, shuddering when the long
tongue snapped out and nearly touched her hand. "Buster," she had
scolded the lizard, "I hope you can see that I am not a fly." She'd been
sitting at the kitchen table looking at a big photography book about
dogs when the flurries outside the window had caught her attention.

Now, looking around at the animals, most of them busy in their own
quiet forms of letting time pass till the next outing or meal—grooming,
sleeping, sniffing, pacing—Saga was gripped by a sense of panicked isolation.
She must leave the house and go somewhere, even if she failed to
solve the mystery of the falling paper. She had to know that this weird
thing was happening to someone other than
her.
Rushing, as if fearful of
an impending threat, she filled all the water bowls, put out cat chow and
teething bones. She took food and water to the closed room upstairs,
where the kittens were clustered against their mother in a large cardboard
box.

She grabbed up her book, her knapsack, and the keys to the house.
Out on the street, she saw a confusion of people walking here and there,
looking dazed or angry. Some cried. People stood on nearly every roof,
all facing the same way. Where they faced, often pointing, a billow of
smoke rose from behind the shabby row of stores on the avenue. The
height of the smoke was shocking; something hugely terrible
had
happened.
Was it happening still? Birds fluttered everywhere—or once
again, it could have been paper, literal reams of paper.