Paper Cranes in the Rain

The thing nobody tells you about funerals is how much folding there is. Folding chairs. Folding tables. The white cloths folded over the buffet table in the church basement, the programs folded in half, the hands of old ladies folded in their laps while the pastor talked. Nora Callahan had folded her father's shirts that morning because her mother couldn't, and she had folded herself into a corner of the house for three days straight, nodding at people who said so young and so sudden and at least he didn't suffer, which was a lie, because he had suffered for eleven weeks and Nora had watched every one of them. Now the wake was over, it was past midnight, and the only people left in the living room were two cousins asleep on the couch and Nora's little brother Danny, who was pretending to play a game on his phone but hadn't touched the screen in twenty minutes. "Go upstairs," Nora told him. "Sleep." "You go upstairs." "I'm the oldest." "That's not a rule." He was fifteen and all elbows, and he had their father's eyebrows, which Nora had not been able to look at since Tuesday. "Mom said you have to go to the shop tomorrow anyway. For the inventory thing." The inventory thing. Right. Callahan & Daughter, Stationery and Fine Paper since 1994, eight hundred square feet of fountain pens and handmade paper and leather notebooks nobody under fifty bought anymore. It had been closed all week. The suppliers needed calling. The rent was due. Nora had a job at an architecture firm downtown and an apartment in Capitol Hill and a boss who had given her exactly one week of bereavement leave, and none of that felt real compared to the fact that she now had to decide what happened to her father's shop. "I'll go now," she said. Danny finally looked up. "It's one a.m." "I can't sleep anyway." Alder Street at one in the morning was a different city. The old red-brick buildings glowed dull orange under the streetlights, all arched windows and iron fire escapes and painted ghost signs fading on their sides, like the whole block was holding its breath. Nora had grown up four streets away. She had learned to ride a bike on Alder Street and broke her wrist falling off it on Fourth. Every corner here had a version of her stuck inside it. The shop's metal security grate screamed when she pushed it up. She winced and glanced at the windows above, but nobody's light came on. Inside, it smelled the same. That was the worst part. Paper and ink and the sandalwood candle her father lit every morning, the smell soaked so deep into the wooden shelves that it would probably outlive all of them. Nora stood in the doorway with her hand on the light switch and didn't turn it on, because as long as it was dark she could pretend he was just in the back room, humming old Springsteen songs off-key and losing his reading glasses on top of his own head. She turned it on. The overhead light flickered twice and settled. Everything was where it had always been: the glass counter with the fountain pens in their velvet trays, the wall of washi tape, the wooden drawers of envelopes sorted by size. The calendar by the register still said August. Nobody had turned the page. Nora turned it. Then she sat down on the stool behind the counter and cried for the first time since the hospital, quietly, the way you cry when there's no one left to be strong for. When she was done, she wiped her face on her sleeve and went to find the inventory list. Her father's filing system was what he called intuitive and what Nora called a crime. Invoices lived in cookie tins. Receipts lived in old planners. Important documents lived wherever he'd happened to be standing when he decided they were important. She went through the drawers under the counter, then the shelf above the register, then finally the back room. The back room was smaller than she remembered. When she was a kid it had felt enormous, a cave full of boxes she could climb and hide behind. Her father kept a little card table there and two stools, and on slow afternoons he'd sit her down and teach her to fold paper: boats, frogs, fortune-tellers, and cranes. Always cranes. A crane is a promise, he used to say. Fold a thousand, and you get a wish. She found the inventory list in a blue Danish butter cookie tin on the top shelf. And behind it, pushed all the way to the back where you'd only find it if you were looking for something else, she found a shoebox. It was an old Converse box, the cardboard gone soft with age. Someone had written across the lid in black marker, in handwriting so neat and small it was almost printed: For N. — 999. One more to go. Nora's hands stopped working. She knew that handwriting. She had spent four years of high school sitting next to that handwriting, copying its math homework, passing it notes in Spanish class that said things like Mr. Kaplan has spinach in his teeth and meet me at the shop after school and, once, junior spring, a note she had folded and unfolded so many times it went soft as cloth. A note that just said I need to tell you something important. She had waited at the shop that afternoon until her father locked up. He never came. The next week, his family's housekeeper told her he'd moved to London. No goodbye. No explanation. No number. Seven years of nothing. Ethan Prescott. Nora lifted the lid. Cranes. Hundreds of them. Folded from every kind of paper the shop had ever sold: red Japanese chiyogami, pale blue airmail sheets, gold foil, newspaper, pages torn from spiral notebooks with algebra still faintly visible on the wings. They were packed so tightly that the box bulged at the sides. Some were crisp. Some were faded. Some were so old the paper had gone yellow. She picked one up. It was folded from lined paper, and on its wing, in pencil, someone had written a date. March 14, 2015. They had been thirteen. She picked up another. June 2, 2016. Another. October 30, 2018. Every crane had a date. Years of them. She dug deeper, the paper rustling like dry leaves, and the dates kept going, all the way through high school, until they stopped. The last date she could find was the week before he left. Why did her father have this? Why had he hidden it? Why had he never, not once in seven years, not even when Nora cried into her pillow at seventeen and swore she'd never forgive Ethan Prescott for as long as she lived, mentioned that he had a box of nine hundred and ninety-nine paper cranes sitting in the back room? Outside, it had started to rain, the soft, endless Seattle kind. Nora sat on the floor of the back room with the box in her lap and listened to it tick against the window, and for the first time in seven years, she let herself say his name out loud. "Ethan," she whispered. "What did you do?" The rain didn't answer. But at the bottom of the box, underneath everything, something crackled when she moved, like paper that had been burned.