A Ship Made of Paper

Just then, Kate hears wracking coughs coming from Ruby’s bedroom.She has been in and out ofrespiratory sickness ever since the storm—the ride home on the snowmobile did her in.

“Can you hold on for a minute?”Kate asks.

”Did you get another call? Don’t take it.”

“No, Ruby’s coughing her brains out.I better look in on her.”

“Where’s Danny boy?”

“Out.I’m not actually sure where.”As soon as Kate says this, two things occur:Ruby’s coughing stops, and a heavy, soggy sense ofemo-tional panic settles over Kate.“Oh good,”she says,“false alarm,”while in fact she is just now feeling her first intimations ofreal alarm.

“He’s out and you have no idea where?”Lorraine says.“That’s not likehim.”

“Well, lately it has been.”

“There’s nothing to do up there, nowhere to go.Where does he go?”

“There’s this place in town, a bar.Lately he’s been going there.”

“A bar?”Lorraine’s voice is full ofthe kind ofscorn that tries to masquerade as incredulity.

“It’s not that extraordinary, is it?”Kate tries to sound bemused, but her blood has begun to race.She has an impulse to simply slam the phone down and get in the car, surprise the little fucker right in his new night-time haunt.Yet just as she is about to hang up, she realizes the reason she has called Lorraine in the first place.“We had this monster snowstorm,”

she says.

“I know, I saw it on Fox.Weird.”

“We didn’t have electricity for four days, no heat, no water, nothing.

And we were trapped here, no cars were moving, every road was closed.”

“You should really move back to NewYork.”

“Last year a water main exploded under your street and your entire apartment was filled with mud.”

“True, but at least I had heat.I had lights, I could read.And I could leave, I could go to my health club, I could have a watercress-and-goat-cheese salad at Cafe Luxembourg.”

“It was sort offun, getting back to basics, the three ofus camping out.

And when the snow stopped the sun came out and it was sort ofmild.”

“I don’t ever want to be in a position where I’m glad the sun cameout.”

“But for the first day I was here alone, andthatwas a little weird.”

“Where were Daniel and Ruby?”

“At Iris’s.”

“You’re fucking kidding.”

“And while I was here alone, some boys broke into the house.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s a home for delinquent boys, mostly black kids from the city.

Some escaped during the power outage and they ended up here.”

“Oh my God.Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine.They never even saw me.They came in to use the facilities.”

“They shit in your house?”

“In the toilet.”

“Well, that was civilized.”

Kate is about to say something and realizes her voice is suddenly not available to her, it seems submerged.

“Were you hiding?”Lorraine asks.“Where were you?”

Kate takes a deep breath.Okay,she thinks.Steady.“I was pretty scared,”she says.“These were not nice boys.”

“They could have raped you, killed you.”

“I suppose.A tree hit the house and they ran like hell.”

“A tree.”Lorraine snorts contemptuously.“And Daniel was at Iris’shouse.”

“That could not be helped.He couldn’t get home.”

“The poor lamb.Listen to me, Kate.Okay?”

“No, please.Don’t be smarter than me about this, don’t open my eyes to the obvious, I don’t want to be pummeled with your insight.”

“I’m just—”

“I know.I’m just not ready.Anyhow, I’m getting out ofhere.”

“Where are you going?”

“To that bar Daniel’s been hanging out at.Windsor Bistro.”

“Good.And ifhe’s there with her—”

“He’s not.”

“Just remember, ifO.J.can get away with it, so can you.”

After hanging the phone up, Kate sits in her chair and finishes her glass ofwine, waiting for her pulse to stop pounding.She goes to the window at the front ofthe house—the repairman who replaced the panes did a sloppy job and there are smears ofputty on the mullions—and looks out at the night.The sky is a steep dome ofbright stars.The moon is pale and wafer-thin;it casts its light down on the split and top-pled trees around the house;a little patch ofbrightness reflects on the chrome ofher car’s back bumper.

She remembers:Ruby, with a kind ofstart, the way you do when you drive away from the house and suddenly remember you’ve left the stove on.How can she go to theWindsor Bistro and leave Ruby all alone? How far away is it?Ten minutes, okay that’s twenty minutes round-trip.Let’s call it twenty-five, allowing for petty delays.And all she would need is fifteen minutes at the Bistro.That’s forty minutes altogether, and possi-bly a lot less.

She walks into Ruby’s bedroom.The room is softly visible through the glow ofa fairy princess night-light.Kate stands over her daugh-ter’s—her captor’s—bed and gazes down at her.She sleeps on her back, with the satin border ofthe blanket drawn up to her chin.Her skin is creamy, her brows dark and sensuous.Deep childish breaths, with a lit-tle bronchial burr at the end ofeach one.Ruby is a deep sleeper, she plunges down through the barely lit terrain ofher own inner life, one hundred fathoms deep, dreaming ofgigantic doors and talking animals.

She almost never wakes during the night—even those wracking coughs left her sleep undisturbed.Forty-five minutes,thinks Kate.She’ll never know the difference.Yet a moment later anxiety takes its customary spot in Kate’s consciousness, sits with the authority ofan old fortune-teller and turns the cards over one by one:here is the child waking, she is calling your name, here is the furnace leaking noxious fumes, here is an invisi-ble frayed wire festering in the wall, here is a thief, here is a kidnapper, and this card is five black boys coming back for who knows what.What are you thinking? What could possibly be in your mind?You are staying in this house.And he knows it.

[10]

The problem was there was no space to walk in;the woods had imploded.They were walking in circles, continually tripping over vines, stumbling over fallen trees, get-ting scraped by branches, stomping into sudden pools of still water, sometimes walk-ing right into a standing tree.It was strangely insulting, like being toyed with.

Isolated in their despair, they walked for half an hour without speaking.

Then, suddenly, a stretch where last month’s storm seemed to have done little

damage.They walked for three minutes without having to change course.And though they didn’t know what direction they were going in, the mere fact of keep-ing a constant course gave them a bit of encouragement.They were not, after all, in the middle of some vast uncharted wilderness.They were only a hundred miles north of the city.How far could you go without ending up on some stretch of asphalt or in someone’s backyard? But then they reached a devastated grove of locusts, the saplings with bark spiked with thorns, like giant, petrified roses.There were so many of them down on the ground, or leaning against each other in a swoon, that it