The Border of Paradise: A Novel (30 page)

I know all the places that will make him emit miniature moaning sounds. I’ve known since I was three the keys to press to form a dominant seventh. I coax his penis to me and he lets it happen, wiggling his hips as Sarah does: with eagerness. For a moment, as he props himself above me, I think I hear her whimper.

September. The leaves shaking themselves off the trees onto the floor of what’s left of the live wood. When I bring them back and scatter them onto the kitchen table, William tapes them to the windows, the way that he will tape up paper snowflakes when winter comes.

Sometimes I ask myself how William doesn’t get bored with the house. With doing the same things over and over again. So I think he’s as stupid as he is smart. The only really smart person I’ve ever known is our father, whose brain worked so hard that it killed him. But take this thing with Sarah, for example. William doesn’t seem interested in her at all. When I sit on the porch and play with her, I can tug on a sock between us for an hour. Everything seems so interesting and pleasurable and easy when it’s just us two, and William stays away, calling her “it.” He sits at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the mountains; he plays the same etudes and reads the same books. How can he not yearn for something different?

Sarah is my something different. But then again, what am I? I clip sweaters to the clothesline behind the house and she comes to lie in the grass beside my legs, a tall dog for a tall girl, and I feel William looking at me through the screen door. I don’t think he’s jealous of Sarah, though it would be easy enough. As the sun sets the night is ready to push down on my shoulders with both of its heavy hands, and I think,
From now till we die our lives will be the same except for the patterns of weather and the gray growing in Ma’s hair, so it’s best to work at being happy with what we have.

I go inside, whispering good-byes to Sarah, and put raspberries on a plate and take a fork from the drawer. I sit at the table
and look at the leaves stuck to the window with tape. William has left the atlas on the table, splayed open page-down. I eat the raspberries one by one until the plate becomes wet with red juice. Yes, it’s a good thing that I am a fool. If I weren’t a fool, I would be dead.

At dinner there’s a knock at the back door and everyone startles. We are so accustomed to being left alone that the idea of someone knocking at our door seems dreamlike and ludicrous. Sarah, though she is tied at the front porch, is barking like a scream. I look at William and then at Ma, who sets down her chopsticks and goes to the butcher block, where she pulls out a knife. She leans against the counter with the big knife in her hand, and no one makes a sound. After many minutes there is shuffling, and then more knocking at the back door. William moves to close the curtains. I see his hand pause before he can pull them shut. If he pulls them shut we might draw attention to ourselves. Any person at the back door won’t be able to see the curtains close if William closes them right now.

The three raps have come and gone. In the silence we’re unable to tell whether the source of the knocking is still standing at the door, and yet it seems likely that the source of the knocking has not left, because there has been no clear sound of footsteps away from the house. Two flies swirl around each other at the center of the table.

But I’m not scared. I feel calm. All I can think is
Gabriel is at the door.

We sit for a long time. Then William gets up from the table and walks to the door, and I am surprised when he opens it. There’s no way that whoever it was can still be there, but on the back porch stands a man about the same height as William, with dark hair and dark eyebrows. He’s a pale man, but not of the same cream-and-flaxen complexion as I am, or of our father.

The man says, heaving his knapsack farther up his shoulder such that we can see it from inside, his voice loud enough to sound above the barking, “I’m sorry to bother you folks, but I lost my home in the fire, and I was wondering if you could spare some—”

“Go away!”
William shouts, and slams the door, locking it, which we do not do, because no one ever comes to our property, and we do not understand how this man has appeared thusly.

William comes back to the table. When he puts his hands on
the table I can see that they’re trembling. Ma still has her fingers wrapped around the large knife. Her wedding band glints thin like the edge of the blade.

“The dog,” I say, and stand to go to the front door, which someone must also lock.

“Sit down,” Ma says. “You just sit down. No one is going to any door. We are going to sit here, and if that man comes back, I am going to kill him.”

On the kitchen table is a bowl of apples sliced into wedges, three bowls of rice in various stages of emptiness, a pan-fried trout staring up with its marble eye. I want to sweep everything off the table and scream.

“Ma.”

“Gillian.”

“I’m worried about my dog.”

“Your dog is an animal. It’s not part of our family.”

“He could still be outside,” William says, “listening to us talk.”

“He doesn’t know what we’re saying,” I say. “But he could be hurting Sarah. She could already be hurt.”

William says, “I don’t want him hearing our voices.”

“He knows we’re in here.”

“I know.”

It’s more than a mutt that a strange man could carry away. It’s me, the princess in the high tower. How else to explain this oddness, this jealousy from William? And what about Sarah? The growing desperation that comes with impending loss. I know before I get up and open the door hours later, as Sarah moans and comes to me with her wide muzzle nosing at my legs, that one day she’ll be gone. Taken away by a stranger, just as we’ve always been told about bad men, the wolf at the door.

Ma says, “Listen to me. You’re never allowed out again. You’re never leaving this house without someone again. You come right here.” She grabs my arm and pulls me into the hallway, down the hall and into her bedroom. The plain room smells like her perfume, as though she’s been spraying to cover some other scent. She puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me down so that I’m facing her chest as I sit on the bed, the made bed, and
the flowers on her dress are shining under the lights. She climbs on top of me and pins my wrists so that they’re pressed against the bed, and I start to cry because it hurts and I’m surprised. I think my wrists are going to break. She shakes me. The mattress squeals. “You are a girl and you are not safe and you are not going anywhere.”

William, where is William? Hiding in his room? Watching from the door? Listening from the hallway?

“I’m a good mother,” she says. “You’ve never been hurt. You’ve never had to sell your body before you even grew breasts. I’ve kept you safe.” She lets go. “You smell terrible. Go take a bath—your hair smells like a greasy pan.”

When I see William in the hallway his face is both closed and open.

“I’m going to take a bath,” I say. And I go into the bathroom. After I strip off my socks and my cotton dress I turn on the bathtub faucet. I climb into the tub and feel the cold water pool around my body until the water runs hot at my feet, which are grayish and dirty under the toenails because I am an animal.

The door opens and William comes in.

“Let me be alone for a little bit,” I say, but he doesn’t go. Instead he sits on the toilet seat and runs both hands through his hair, gripping it, holding his small head in his hands.

“I heard her yelling at you,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s going to make sure the doors are always locked now. I think that’s a good thing. And she’s worried about you, you know, because she loves you. She doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you. I think she’s worried you’re going to run away.”

“That’s stupid. I don’t even know how. I don’t know how to live out there.”

“Promise me you’re not going to run away.”

“I’m not going to run away.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“At the fire you wouldn’t come.”

“At the fire,” I say, “we were going to die.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says.

I turn off the water because the tub is about to overflow, even though I would rather leave it on. I want him to leave, but I don’t want to be alone.

“I’m sorry that I scared you,” I say in the echo chamber.

He stands up and comes to the tub. The water ripples around my body, splashing. He sits cross-legged alongside the tub and rests his head against the side with his hands in his lap as though begging. Or maybe he’s just tired.

The water is burning hot by my feet and cold at my back, so I swirl it around in order to mix the temperatures. William doesn’t move.

“Tell me,” he says, “about something fun that we did when we were little.”

“Noah’s Ark. Jonah and the Whale.”

“Those were fun.”

“They were.”

“I liked to play Noah’s Ark,” he says.

“That’s because you were always Noah.”

“I did the voices of the other animals.”

“You got to do the voices of some of the best animals.”

“I did?”

“But,” I said, “you always let me be the deer.”

William is silent. A rush of love roars out of my heart like a locomotive from my dreams, so strong that I feel like I’m going to faint from its whoosh sprinting from my body. I have never loved anyone like I love William; I have never
known
anyone like I’ve known my brother; I will never know anyone as deeply and fully as I know my idiosyncratic, bombastic, impossibly flawed kin. The only way that I can think of to honor this is to match his silence. So I touch the top of his head with my wet hand, anointing him. I am so confused.

After he leaves I finish my bath, pouring the plastic bucket of water over my head to give my hair a cursory washing. I wrap myself in the crackling towel hanging from the towel hook and let my hair drip all the way to our bedroom. William is lying in bed with the covers up to his armpits, his hands sprawled over the sheets. His eyes are closed, but open when I sit on the corner of the bed, patting my body dry with the towel.

“Come here,” he says. “Please.”

“I’m very wet.”

“But I like you.”

“I know.”

I crawl into our bed, wrapping my hair in the damp towel, and still my hair sops the pillow so thoroughly that I’m convinced it’s
soaked to the mattress beneath it. He puts his arm around me. I make my breath go slow. Ma always tells us never to sleep with our hair wet, it’ll get us sick, but I lie and lie forever with my hair never getting any drier, and William begins to lightly snore with his face pressed against the nape of my neck, which tickles, and is incredibly gentle in nature.
It’s not so bad,
I tell myself.
This is good, to be loved.
Why would I not want this—to be loved, to be loved more than a person loves himself, to be loved so much by people whom I also love, who want to keep me safe and close to them. Isn’t that what life is about? Isn’t that what was meant for us?

In the middle of the night William wakes me, and for a second I don’t know where I am. “You’re doing that thing with your teeth,” he says softly. The lights are still on. “It woke me up.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be sorry. Just relax. It’s bad for your teeth. Wears down the white.”

He puts his hand on my naked back, making small circles with his palm—small, small, circles—until sleep takes his hand and he stops, dropping into slumber, but now I’m awake and I don’t want to be naked in this bed anymore, I want to put on a nightgown or turn off the light or something. But I’m afraid that if I crawl out of bed, I’ll wake him up. So I stay.