Page 49 of The Paradox Club

Since the time she was four or five, Tess had been allowed full access to the island. But that liberty did not come without rules. Before she learned to swim, she had to stay a few feet away from the lake itself. Before she was a strong climber, the tree branches were off-limits. But essentially, the island was hers to explore, and explore it she did, learning its every rise and fall, befriending each tree and shrub, building miniature cairns out of smooth stones or crude shelters out of dead branches. By the time she was ten, she knew the island more intimately than most children knew their own homes. The freedom to gain that intimacy had also built Tess’s sense of independence—the true purpose, she suspected now, of her parents’ giving her the run of the place.

But one spot on the island had always been forbidden: A circle of trees a short distance to the north of the house surrounded a clearing about twenty feet wide. The trees were tall, slender pines whose branches did not spread far enough to prevent sunlight from falling in the clearing at midday in the summer. A small patch of grass grew there, and a few laurel bushes almost enclosed the space, leaving a gap on the side facing the house just wide enough for an adult to pass through. This clearing was Harry’s sanctum sanctorum—the one place on the island where not only Tess but also Marie and Vivian were forbidden to set foot.

“I used to read there as a child,” explained Harry when Tess had asked him why she couldn’t enter the circle. “And my parents agreed that whenever I was there, no one would disturb me. So, it became special to me, my little retreat. And I’ve kept it that way over the years.” Harry himself only ventured into what he called his “private circle” occasionally. Sometimes a whole summer would pass without him slipping through the laurel bushes and disappearing for an hour or so.

But now, Tess watched as Harry led Vivian into his most private space and felt betrayed. There was no other word for it. Tess was Harry’s family, his flesh and blood, the rightful heir to the private circle. Marie was his wife, the person with whom he should share the most secret and intimate parts of himself. Yet here he was leading Vivian into the very place from which both Tess and her mother had been barred.

She watched as the flashlight moved around within the laurels and then heard, in between the claps of thunder, the sound of music coming from Harry’s radio. Romantic music, thought Tess. Some love song from the days when young men took their girlfriends to secret spots in the woods.

Tess had a good grasp on the basics of sex by this time. Neither Harry nor Marie had given her “the talk” that she had heard some of the girls at school blushingly refer to. But she had talked to Vivian, and Tess read and listened and had even peeped through the keyhole one Sunday afternoon when Harry and Marie were “taking a nap” and glimpsed something that, while not wholly comprehensible, was certainly not nap-taking. Most importantly she understood that sex was a type of intimacy that a loving husband enjoyed only with his wife, that sex with someone else—with Vivian for instance—was the sort of thing that presaged anger and fights, accusations of betrayal and broken promises, separation and divorce.

Tess felt a great pull inside herself, as if a game of tug-of-war as wide as the universe passed its rope directly through her gut. “Under no circumstances should you ever set foot in my circle,” Harry had said, reiterating, “No circumstances.” But what if those circumstances were the possible implosion of the family that she loved: the destruction of her tender, kindhearted mother; the expulsion of one of her parents from the family home; a dagger in the heart of the friendship between Marie and Vivian; and the condemning of Tess to an adolescence of misery and a broken home? Weren’t those circumstances dire enough to lift the ban on setting foot on some meaningless piece of ground? Wasn’t saving her family a cause noble enough to justify defying her father?

Even as these questions tore at her, she saw the flashlight extinguished and she fell back into her desk chair. She was too late. In front of her, the uneven ends of her colored pencils stood silent witness to the fact that this was all Tess’s fault. If she had only obeyed the voices. They had told her something bad would happen. If she didn’t sharpen the pencils properly, something bad would happen. And she hadn’t sharpened the pencils properly and now her happy childhood was over, her family rent apart, and the man she had loved and trusted most in the world stood at the center of that betrayal. She threw her head down on the desk and cried, finally falling asleep in the chair to the smell of pencil shavings and the rumble of thunder.

Tess started awake to the sound of voices shouting. Vivian and Marie shouting. One word, over and over: “Harry!” Not shouts of anger or frustration like Tess heard from each of them at times. No, these shouts bore the emptiness of utter despair. They sounded, at first, as if they came from right outside her window, but they quickly faded. Marie and Vivian were running away from the house.

Tess lay on the floor. She must have woken when she slipped out of the chair, she thought. Sweat poured down her face, as it sometimes did when she awoke after a nightmare, but her sleep had been dreamless as far as she could remember. While the voices in the distance continued shouting, the voices in her head were uncharacteristically silent. Tess felt breathless, hot, confused, and disoriented, but the absence of those voices calmed her, and she reached for the leg of the chair to pull herself up. As soon as she wrapped her fingers around the metal she jolted into a higher state of alertness. The chair leg was so hot it burned the flesh of her hand. Tess let go immediately and tried to sit up. Only then did she realize that the room was filled with smoke and flame. If she hadn’t slipped to the floor, she thought, she might already be dead. The bed where she ought to have been sleeping was ablaze and she watched in horror as flaming scraps of blanket fluttered to the floor. In trying to listen for the voices, she hadn’t noticed the roar of the fire but now it pounded in her ears as she began to choke on the smoky air.

She squeezed her eyes shut and felt panic welling up in her throat. Only the floorboards were slightly cool, and she pressed her cheek against them. Why didn’t Vivian and Marie come and rescue her? Why were they moving away from the house instead of toward her? And where was Harry? Harry would know what to do. And then Tess realized, Harry did know what to do.

“What kills you in a fire?” Harry had asked one night as he sat before the fireplace with Tess watching the flames leap up to welcome a new log.

“Why do you frighten her like that?” Marie had said from across the room.

“I’m not frightening her,” said Harry. “I’m keeping her safe.”

“By giving her nightmares,” said Marie. “‘How does a fire kill you?’ ‘What happens to your head if you don’t wear a bike helmet?’ ‘What are your chances of surviving a crash without a seat belt?’ It’s morbid.”

“Have you noticed that she wears her bike helmet and her seat belt?” Harry said.

“The smoke,” Tess said, loudly, hoping to end the spat between her parents.

“Yes,” said Harry. “The smoke. And where does the smoke go?”

“It goes up.”

“So, to escape a fire…”

“Stay low and crawl,” said Tess.

Stay low and crawl. Harry had repeated those words hoping to keep Tess safe. Now she had a chance to prove that she had been listening, that he had not been wasting his breath. She pulled her T-shirt over her nose and mouth and began to shimmy across the floor toward the door, squinting to see through the smoke and her tears. The poster of Einstein by the closet peeled off the wall and landed next to her, spurring her on as his eyes charred and flaked away. Through the door and into the hallway. The smoke was just as bad here, but there was less fire, making navigation even more difficult as she moved in near darkness. Twice Tess bumped her head into the wall, but finally she made it into the open space of the living room, where flames licked the walls and spread out across the ceiling.

She wanted nothing more than to stand up and sprint for the door, but Tess kept hearing Harry’s voice. Stay low and crawl. The braided rug in front of the door was already ablaze. Tess wasn’t sure she could stay low all the way to the door, but she did her best, choking and wheezing from the smoke, her eyes burning, snot flowing from her nose. She made her way across the room until she reached the rug, then stood and dived toward the flame-filled doorway, hoping the door was open. She burst onto the front porch and stumbled down the stairs, still feeling the intense heat behind her. She looked down to see the left leg of her sweatpants on fire and remembered the other thing Harry had told her about fire. Stop, drop, and roll.

She fell to the grass and rolled down the hill toward the dock, coming to a stop about halfway between the house and the lake. She checked to see her clothes were no longer burning and turned to see the entire cabin blazing so fiercely the yard was lit up brighter than daylight. To one side of the cabin, she saw something that froze her to the ground. The circle of trees that enclosed Harry’s private spot were burning like torches, crackling loudly and sending black smoke high into the sky.

What had Harry done? Had he taken candles into the trees to light his assignation with Vivian? Had the radio malfunctioned, sending off a spark unnoticed by either of them because they were in each other’s arms? And had Harry escaped from that ring of fire that must surely be visible from miles away? Then she turned toward the lake, where the reflected flames made impressionistic patterns on the rippling water. On the dock she saw two figures—Marie and Vivian. Harry was nowhere in sight.

She wanted to pull herself upright, wanted to run to her mother’s embrace, but she felt she had to try to get some clean air into her lungs first. She lay on the grass, gasping in air, coughing up murky colored phlegm and watching, heartbroken, as the cabin blazed. Then her mind, clearing from her ordeal in the house, once again admitted the sight of Marie and Vivian on the dock. A wail of anguish erupted from Marie, and she lunged toward the house, but Vivian wrapped her arms around Tess’s mother, holding her back from rushing into the inferno. Vivian’s face was bright red and streaked with tears and her body wracked with sobs. For several minutes, Tess lay on the ground, panting and coughing while the sounds of Marie’s wailing and Vivian’s sobbing rose over even the roar of the fire. They both finally quieted for a moment, lying in a heap on the dock, then Marie pulled herself away from Vivian and stood with a look of such fierce anger on her face Tess could hardly believe she was watching her own mother.

“I can’t believe you would do this with him!” screamed Marie.

“I tried to stop him,” said Vivian between sobs. “I did! But you know Harry.”

“Do I? Do I know Harry? Because the Harry I know wouldn’t have done this. Wouldn’t have risked this.”

“He wanted to try.”