Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

“Do you remember me, William?” she asks, setting the bag on the floor.

“Yes.”

“I’m Mrs. Kucharski.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here to help you.” She wants to have something better to say, but leaves it at that. She doesn’t know what William will comprehend as “help” or “helpful.”

“What?” William says, with more force than Marianne could have imagined coming out of his diminished frame. His hands are still on his sister. He looks at Gillian. “We don’t need help. Is that why you left?” he asks her.

“Not exactly,” Gillian says.

“We don’t need help. Not from you or anyone else. I’m glad that you brought Gillian back, but you should leave now. We’re fine .”

Marianne’s gaze travels down the hall. “Where’s your mother?”

“Dead,” Gillian says. “I told you.”

William says, “She’s right, she’s dead.”

“You are two children who have no parents,” Marianne says. “That’s why you need help.”

“You’ll live with us?” William asks.

“No — I have a home in Sacramento. Do you remember the home in Sacramento? Where you played piano with your sister? You’ll come and live with me.”

“I doubt that.” William grabs Gillian’s arm still more tightly.

She had a plan, Marianne reminds herself. Come to the house. Retrieve William. Allow them to grab a few possessions, and then drive them back to Sacramento. She had, to some degree, counted on Gillian to convince her brother to leave; presently Gillian will not make eye contact with her. But what am I going to do in the face of refusal, Marianne wonders, carry them out of here by force? Call the police? She wonders if this is what Gillian had planned all along: bringing her to this place only to force her to leave — even if Marianne is Gillian’s birth mother, even if the children are alone and without resources and have been abandoned to this rotting home.

“Let me talk to my brother,” Gillian says. “I just want to apologize to him.” Her shoulders, she realizes, are looser now. She’d been clenching them for weeks. I am a fool, she thinks, to consider that we could ever live a different life — I was stupid and a fool to have wished for anything different. It’s not just William, or a dirty bathroom, the men who shouted filth, or Randy on the train. It is one age ending, and having no beginning to hope for.

Marianne stands.

“Please wait out front,” Gillian says.

Marianne says, “I’ll need the key.”

Gillian looks at her brother. He says, “We have a deadbolt that will keep you out regardless.”

“I swear,” Gillian says. “We’ll let you back inside. We really will.”

Reluctantly, Marianne stands, convinced she is losing an important battle in an obliterative war. She is the adult, she reminds herself. Here, she is in charge. She walks to the hallway and puts her hand on the knob. “No shenanigans,” she says. She is tall and imposing in her olive coat.

The word shenanigans is unfamiliar to the children, but they nod, and then Marianne is outside on the stoop. She goes to the car for her cigarettes and matches. Help me, she thinks as she pulls open the door in the damp air. The sky is white and dappled gray. She looks out into the trees at one bird. I’m going to lose everything, she thinks.

Gillian is quiet. She says, brushing William’s hair out of his eyes, “I’m sorry I left. It was stupid.”

“I didn’t know what to do after you were gone. I couldn’t believe that you did that to me.”

“I know.”

“You’re not just changing your own life when you do things, Gillian.”

She nods.

The light is coming in through the curtains and shining on William’s face. His cheekbones are pronounced, but even more so now in the afternoon light, making Gillian feel as though she’s speaking to an exquisitely preserved corpse. She almost shudders to touch him.

“Are you scared?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“She’s going to bring us to Sacramento. She knows we exist now, and that we’re alone. She feels like she has to do this for us. She wants to do what’s right for us.”

“For you.”

“Yes, for me. But for you, too. I couldn’t live with myself if I left you here.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“We have to be brave.”

“Despite what you may think,” William says, “I am not brave. I don’t even know what that means. I waited for you to come back, but that was no indication of strength. Perhaps stupidity.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Gillian says. “There are other ways to be brave. Smarter ways.”

“What, you suggest suicide? And what if we don’t die? We get shut up in Wellbrook?”

“Look—”

“I don’t want to die,” William interrupts. “I just want to be with you. I’ve been thinking about this — about what I’d do if you came back. I’ve been thinking about…” He gestures a wide arc. “So this woman takes us into the world. Why not let her?”

“Are you listening to me? I saw things.” And she thinks again, just as she has been thinking for the last few hours, of the things she saw in the Natural History Museum: the wolves and the deer, the hungry lions. She thinks of the mural painted on the wall in the front of the museum, which neither Marianne nor Marty had commented on. They had just walked by as if it were nothing, whereas Gillian could tell right away that something was wrong with the illustration, a timeline, with large and vivid images of animals and hairy, stooped humans that looked like animals. The museum had been nothing to them. It had been one more thing that they already knew to their bones.

“I am listening. Are you listening?”

“We can’t change enough. Do you hear me? We can’t change enough to be out there. It’s just like when the fire happened. I understand what Ma was trying to do now. She was just keeping us safe here, in this house, with her. I didn’t understand then, but I think you did. You need to believe me.”

“We could kill her. Run away. Live in the woods.”

“We could walk and walk,” Gillian says, “until we get to Taiwan.”

“We could even walk to Eden,” William says.

“But you want us to try to be in the world.”

He sighs. “Yes. Maybe.”

“She’s my real mother, you know,” Gillian says, and William turns to her uncomprehendingly.

Marianne opens the door, ushered in by a gust of wind. She is holding the groceries. “It’s raining out there,” she says, patting her own wet head. “We should go before the road gets sloppy.”

Gillian pauses. “There are some things I’d like to pack. Just a few things,” she says, looking at her brother, “before we leave.”

Marianne watches her carefully. She had anticipated this, the need for the children to bring things from home with them, but is surprised that Gillian has fallen in step with the idea of leaving; she had expected more of an argument. Without one, she suspects that the siblings are collaborating against her.

“I’ll give you half an hour,” she says. “Pack the most important things, all right? We’ll come to get the rest of your things on another trip.” She smiles at them. There will be another trip, she is trying to communicate —we aren’t abandoning your world for good. For now, she simply needs to get the children away. Once she’s removed them from this place for the first time, she’ll be able to acquaint them with new lives. That acquaintance and acclimation is essential.

At the idea of packing, William nods. So the children, owning no suitcases, fill boxes with no plan and a slothlike deliberation. Gillian sits in her room with a record crate, empties it, and folds clothes to put inside while Marianne watches her. Marianne, no fool, stays close to Gillian as her daughter slowly sifts through her dresser, pulling out an assortment of frocks (inappropriate, Marianne thinks, all of them shapeless and outmoded, she will need new ones for her new life) and more pairs of ethereal panties that are now tinged with perversion. She can’t bear to see the siblings together and is relieved that William is in his own room, packing his own things.