A Ship Made of Paper (18 page)

Kate picks up Ruby’s radio and walks out with it, into the candlelit hall. These candles were Daniel’s purchase, scented ones, and Kate is repelled by their smell. She walks through the living room, where one candle a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

burns, and into the kitchen, where she has lit a dozen votive candles.They send their plaintive light through beaded glass holders.

She turns the radio off, preserving the batteries, and sets it on the kitchen table.The temperature in the house is dropping, degree by degree, and in the place of homely warmth comes dampness and a growing sense of disorder. She wants something to drink, something to warm her. Something nonalcoholic. Tea. The stove is gas, so it doesn’t matter if there’s no electricity. She brings the kettle to the faucet, but the water pump runs on electricity and when she turns on the cold water, the pipes bang and only a faint unwholesome drool comes out.

Suddenly, she sees a flicker of motion from the corner of her eye. She turns quickly toward the window. At first all she can see is her own reflection. But then she sees it again: something wishing not to be seen.

She reaches for the flashlight, shines it through the window, but it throws its own shining face back at her. Kate then opens the window, letting precious heat escape, letting in a whoosh of snow that sweeps in like the tail of a comet. Now she shines the flashlight into the blizzard. Nothing. Nothing. But then she sees them. Footprints. Cratered into the snow, several pairs, stopping thirty feet from her house.

She feels a fear beyond any she has ever experienced, and she makes it worse by asking herself,
What if they come into the house?
The problem with the question is the answer—
They will rape me
.

Her heart pounding, and her stomach, too, like a second, sour heart, Kate pulls the window closed, locks it. She locks the back door, too, and as she does, she reaches for the phone. She pushes the on button—but there is no dial tone. It’s a cordless phone, it works off electricity. She needs the phone upstairs in her study, the only old-style phone in the house. She is not certain whom she is about to call. Surely the police have too much on their hands to respond to some woman seven miles outside of town who is pretty sure she saw some footprints in the snow. Even if she were to tell them she has seen the escaped Star of Bethlehem kids—

what would the police do? What
can
they do? They can’t drive out in their

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cars, and even if they had helicopters, they couldn’t fly them in this weather. So? Will they all jump onto their crime-buster snowmobiles?

She sweeps the flashlight back and forth as she walks through the house, an oar of light that rows through the sea of darkness. She realizes the only person she can call, the only person she wants to call is Daniel.

Iris will probably answer the phone, and then hand it over to him. As Kate makes her way up the steps, there is a nerve-shattering death of a maple tree not fifty feet from the house, a noble old tree that seems actually to scream as it falls, as if its pulp were flesh. Kate hollers in fear—

not that high, blood-curdling scream of the horror show damsel in distress, but the wavering, angry, monotone cry of real fear. She drops her flashlight, it rolls down the staircase, turning the house end over end until the flashlight hits the bottom and goes dark.

Kate is still making noise—a soft, stunned “oh-oh-oh.” And then she gathers herself and shouts out, “Daniel!” She grips the banister, turns around. She wants to retrieve the flashlight. But no.Why walk back into that darkness? There are candles burning upstairs and the phone is there, too. She turns around again, stops. She remembers she still has not locked the front door, and so once again she turns around. She is turning around and around. And in the midst of all that turning she realizes that she is wet and clammy and there is a smell of urine in the air. Fucking tree. Fucking snow. Fucking gang bangers out there staring at her windows. Fucking Daniel, so far out there, so far away from her.

She clutches at her stomach, presses her hand against the wall to stop herself from tumbling down the stairs. She sits, feels along the side of her pants. Just a little dampness, not so bad. Her underwear, however, is soaked. Okay, that settles it. Upstairs, for a change of clothes. She starts to rise, but then sits again; there’s still the matter of that unlocked front door.

She cannot get up because she cannot decide if it would be better to continue upstairs or hurry downstairs, and the more she thinks, the more unlikely it seems that she will ever be able to make up her mind. She closes her eyes.The darkness within makes the darkness of the house seem like an ice a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

cream parlor. She reaches up, grips the banister, pulls herself up. She sways, and with every bit of her will she forces a decision. She turns around and heads upstairs, where there are clean clothes and a working phone.

By the time she reaches the top of the stairs she hears the urgent knocking at her door. She knows it’s them, the boys, the boys with nothing to lose. All she can think to do is pretend she does not hear it.

The bedroom has always been the coldest room in the house. She opens her dresser drawer, her undergarments feel cold and slippery in her hand.Then she finds a pair of jeans in the closet. She sits on the edge of the bed, undressing, dressing again, and through the noise of the storm she hears the pounding of the boys’ fists against the front door. All she can think of by way of strategy is that if she ignores them they will eventually go away.

Dressed, dry, but still cold, she waits for the boys to give up. She places a votive candle on the bedspread and then holds her hands above it, warming her palms over the tiny flame. She holds her breath so that the sound of her respiration won’t interfere with her trying to hear if the boys are still trying to get in. She hears nothing but the wind and the tortured groaning of trees, their canopies filled with ice and snow, any one of them liable to snap in two.Yet beneath the sounds of the storm, she can make out the urgent knocking of the boys’ fists against her heavy front door.
Gun gun gun.
And then, suddenly, the knocking stops.

Kate pulls the phone off her bedside table and sits with it on her lap, her hand on the receiver. If she hears footsteps in the house, she will call the police. But she doesn’t hear footsteps, she doesn’t hear anything—

all she has is a
sense
that those boys have found their way into her house.

She cannot sit there wondering. She goes down the stairs to see, and when she is halfway between the first and second floor landings she stops. Fresh snow is swirling in the foyer and still more is blowing in.

As quietly as she can, Kate backs up the stairs, and when she is at the top of the landing she turns and walks quickly to her bedroom. There is no lock on the door; she swats a pile of folded laundry off an upholstered chair, drags the chair across the room, and jams it beneath the porcelain

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door handle. Then she blows out the votive candle and the freestanding candle on the marble-topped dresser and the room slips into darkness.

She sits on the end of the bed, folds her hands onto her lap, and breathes as quietly as she can. She feels absolutely and without question that her life hangs now in the balance, that one stupid move, haste, panic, impatience, curiosity, anything but the most profound and disciplined stillness will lead to her death. Her fear—no longer relevant, no longer useful—seems to have been superseded by an exquisite clarity.

The fear remains in abeyance, even as she feels someone coming up the stairs. It is part of the house’s idiosyncrasy that a footstep on the fifth stair vibrates along the master-bedroom floor. At night, she could always hear Daniel’s gloomy trudge upstairs, and by day she could hear Ruby coming up to rouse her. That creaky step, and its harmonic convergence with the house’s inner bone structure, is her distant early warning system; normally, it cues her to feign sleep, to pull the covers up over her chin, maybe place a pillow over her head. But tonight, all she can do is hold her breath.

The footsteps are in the hall, heading in her direction.

She cannot think of what to ask God. Asking for protection is like asking for a pair of skates. If he doesn’t want you to die, then you’re not going to die. If he does, you’re certainly not going to talk him out of it at the last second. You don’t pray for your safety, you don’t pray for a home run, you don’t pray that your next book is a Book of the Month Club selection.The only plausible prayer is for serenity of mind, for faith and acceptance, and Kate finds she has these things right now.

The footsteps stop before they reach the bedroom door. She hears another door close. Where did he go? The bathroom?

Silence. She counts it out to herself to keep from losing her mind, the numbers create a kind of pathway, bread crumbs in the forest.When she gets to thirty, she hears a voice shouting from the downstairs. It’s the voice of a young man, someone she’d describe as obviously black. There is a foghorn quality to his voice, something to be heard over constant noise.

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

“Come on, Kenny, let’s go.”

“Lemme alone,” a voice answers from the bathroom. Kenny. His voice is sharp, high, full of complaint.

“What are you doin’ up there?”

“Taking a shit.”

“Come on. Someone’s gonna come in and find us here.”

“I’m not shitting outside.”

Kate leans back and gropes for the telephone in the darkness. She is not just going to sit here like some poor animal in a trap. She picks the receiver up, pressing her thumb onto the earpiece so that the hum of the dial tone won’t carry.

She dials 911 and waits for one of the emergency police operators to pick up, one ring, two rings, three . . .

“Hey, Cyril,” another voice is saying downstairs, “there’s a bathroom by the kitchen.” This kid pronounces it “baff-room,” just the way Kate’s father did when he did his imitation of his one black patient who always said, “I still wishin’ I could go to the baff-room mo’.” That he might use the bathroom in Dr. Ellis’s office was a subject of joke-camouflaged anxiety—“lock da baff-room,” and “git some bleach fo’ da baff-room” were typical of the remarks Kate’s father made.

Her call to 911 has yet to be answered. How many rings has it been?

Fifteen? Twenty? Fucking hell, what is wrong with those people?

The husky-voiced boy calls up again. “This place is fucked. It’s darker in here than outside. We’re leaving!”

And not a moment after he says this, the maple tree that stands in front of the house, the proud, gnarled, forty-foot tree that as much as any other thing made Kate want to buy this house, suddenly cracks in two from the weight of the snow.The crown of the tree hits the roof, immediately tearing down the gutters; branches, half frozen, covered in snow, thrust themselves like monstrous arms through the windows on the east side of the house. One long branch smashes through the bedroom window; the branches at the end are cold and thin and they brush roughly against Kate’s face. Wind and snow rush in.

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Kate falls off the bed, onto her side, and rolls over on her stomach, covering her face. She uses her elbows and knees to push herself beneath the bed. And while she is there—hiding—she hears the boys leaving her house, screaming crazily, half in terror, half in excitement.

Daniel stands next to Iris in the guest bedroom, holding a flashlight for her while she makes up the sofa bed.

“You don’t have to do this,” he finally says. “I’m perfectly capable of making a bed.” He nervously continues. “In fact, I used to make beds for a living. In college, or in the summers, actually, two years running I worked in a hotel in Delaware. I was a chambermaid.”

“You were?”

“Or a chamberman, or maybe a chamber pot. I made beds, that’s all I know.”

“You can make the bed when I’m snowed in at your house,” she says.

She speaks softly, as if calming an excited animal.

And then, because he cannot let anything stand with her, nothing is enough, he says, “We’re not really snowed in, we’re
treed
in.”

But she doesn’t volley back, she ends the exchange with a smile, brief, insubstantial, that could be weighed but wouldn’t register on any scale. She finishes her work. She has strong, useful hands; she smoothes her palm over the sheet and every wrinkle disappears.

“I don’t even know what time it is,” Daniel says. He tilts the flashlight beam toward his watch; a circle of bright golden light appears on his wrist.

“It’s too cold to stay awake,” she says. “Anyhow, when Nelson goes to sleep, as far as I’m concerned the night’s over.”

As best as he can make out, the sheets she has placed on his bed are dark blue. Surely, as in most households, these sheets have traveled from bed to bed, surely, then, Iris and Hampton have lain upon them in their own bedroom down the hall. He imagines Iris and Hampton on those sheets, their beautiful dark skin on the deep evening blue.

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

Iris steps back from the sofa bed and lays two fingers on Daniel’s wrist. The tenderness of this gesture overwhelms him, it is as if she has kissed him. But all she is doing is redirecting the beam of the flashlight.

She points it at the closet, where she finds extra blankets. “You’re going to be nice and cozy,” she says, dropping the blankets at the foot of the bed, and the proclamation, delivered in a throaty, good-natured voice, devastates him. He takes her to mean: Stay in your own bed. Don’t come creeping into my room.You are here, these are your blankets and stay beneath them, be a good boy, nice doggie, stay.

“Do you have enough blankets in your room?” Daniel asks, bleating it, as if asking for mercy.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

There are so many possibilities for speech or action; he could take her wrist, he could pull her toward him, he could say, “No, I want to sleep with you,” he could sigh, he could say, “I think we both know what’s going on here,” he could play it cool and just say good night, he could place his hand over his heart, he could—somehow this, too, seems possible—