Papers

Their new beginning.

They were so excited.

“I do—I fold, babe.”

And then he adds, as she pushes his hand away.

“I mean. Yeah, for the first one’s name, at least,” he says, winking at her.

“You fold that easily?” She is not convinced, but keeps his hand on her.

“Fine with me,” he laughs.

In the big picture, he doesn’t care if there are extra letters, so long as it’s the name he’s always wanted, that had been in his family.

“I’m the one having her… it’s really my choice how we spell it, right?”

With his hand on her stomach, Dave asks, “We ever going to talk about how we’ll spell her name?”

The baby kicks just then, and Mia asks if he wants to feel.

“Spring cleaning, but actually.”

Mia says she wants their little family to be one of those good families with rituals and healthy habits, and that they should start before the baby comes.

Dave asks Mia why so many piles and bags; has the nesting finally kicked in?

Her husband, Dave, comes home with fresh bread and their prescriptions from the pharmacy, both in paper bags.

Mia folds it again, then throws it into the black bag for garbage.

Receipts, bag tags, printed out and mashed up After Visit Summaries, interview notes, abandoned lists.

Some plastic bottles half-empty, or empty-empty, of travel-sized toiletries, claw clips missing tines, expired medicines and empty orange cylinders.

The other, mostly paper.

One of the bags has old sweatshirts and tees, work pants that no longer work, a flag that looks like origami, old backpacks, a couple faded throw pillows, and clingy dresses and painful dirty shoes from a single life.

She shakes her head, confused where it came from.

Win a boat.

Adopt a kitten.

She unfolds it.

Mia doesn’t remember this, it looks older than her other saved notes.

Mia looks back at the box, sees an old paper fortune teller.

Mia gently puts the folded blanket into one of the black garbage bags.

Mia grabs and refolds the old afghan.

Mia sets the box beside the rocking chair, and then returns to the heaping piles of fabric on the floor.

But soft padding; the only properly made bed in this home.

Nothing the baby could strangle or smother itself in.

This room will be the nursery; it has a neatly made crib.

Very.

Mia is pregnant.

Mia walks the box down the hall into a room she’s never slept in, where there are piles on the floor.

Mia needs a moment.

One day, Mia struggles to bend down, slide the box out, open it up, and unfold some of the notes.

Mia keeps the box of notes under her unmade bed her entire adult life, from one home to another.

Mia never hears from her parents again.

One day she thought she saw him standing near a park bench, two tarp bags stuffed at his feet, wearing duct-taped shoes.

Tony stops coming home.

Mia sees less of her father.

Mia stops going to school.

When Mia hasn’t heard from her mother in over a year, she looks back at all the notes she never read but always kept in a box under her bed.

Nobody says aloud what they think.

Anjelica disappears in the other country.

The counselor tries to help, tries to make it make sense.

The counselor asks someone who might know.

“How old was she again when it happened?”

Mia is in high school now.

“It happens more than you would think.”

They realize Mia is dyslexic, and has been struggling to read and write; she’s barely operating at a second grade level.

Mia starts meeting with a counselor at school.

Rose tries to help her son and her granddaughter.

She makes her bed every morning before school.

Then, more like mulch.

Tony’s paper doll becomes a wisp outside seedy motels nobody sleeps or bathes in.

He relapses.

He apologizes.

“You have no idea how lucky you are, and all I ask is this, Mia.”

He gets mad at her, his ungrateful daughter, and yells at her to just make her goddamn bed every morning, if nothing else.

He apologizes.

Tony gets clean.

Takes herself to school, handles her own lunch.

Mia gets older.

Rose doesn’t press him.

Rose tries to help her son.

He relapses.

He asks Rose for help.

Mia seems to only want to do the minimum, or what is convenient for her.

Anjelica agrees, but still writes.

"It's faster."

Mia finally says to Tony, “I don’t know why she doesn’t just call me more, it’s easier.”

Anjelica persists.

Mia calls.

Mia doesn't write back.

Mia said sometimes they must’ve gotten lost in the mail.

Mia wouldn’t always open the notes, acknowledge the stacks.

Once Anjelica is settled on the other side under some semblance of safety, she tries to start sending letters back and forth, stacks of notes for Mia.

He cries one night, knowing Mia needs him, vowing to never touch folded foils and heated spoons again.

Tony feels terrified.

He revisits vices he dabbled in before he became a father, the kind of things he pretended to put in a black bag and toss with an “old” version of himself, before ironing his paper doll to be good and straight and clean from then on.

Here.

Tony doesn’t know this country anymore, can’t hear himself think, feels terrified to raise Mia.

Celebrate people like her being taken.

Tony stews about how he didn’t shoot a gun-wielding kid in the desert to save the lives of other privates who’d come home and vote to disappear her.

Tony feels like a perfect paper doll got sent away to another country, left to be shredded into extortion note confetti in gang territory.

He didn’t even know Anje did that, exactly how perfect she was.

When Tony made Mia’s lunches, he didn’t put notes inside.

She presses him to do better.

Rose tries to help her son.

The kid with the peanut allergy didn’t die or anything.

When Tony made Mia school lunch, unbeknownst to him he broke some of the rules; but the teachers gave him a pass, as they do for dads generally, and dads in his predicament especially.

Mia saw her father angry, even though he tried to not let her see.

Mia and Tony spent the whole day in waiting rooms together, Tony sometimes inside the offices they were waiting outside, meeting with attorneys who couldn’t help.

Mia didn’t go to school on Thursday.

She’d have said she was afraid to return, but they didn’t give her a chance.

Anjelica was deported on a Wednesday.

The bakery got raided; Anjelica was taken in a cloud of flour and crying.

Sprinkling seeds.

Brushing egg wash.

Slapping and kneading dough with her hands.

Anjelica works at a bakery during the schoolday; doing pastry, wearing aprons, dusted in flour.

The icepack melted, note and food disappeared.

Every day, Mia brings her lunch pail back home.

Every school day, tucked inside the pail, Mia gets a little affirmation.

When their daughter, Mia, begins school, every morning Anjelica makes Mia a lunch note she folds up, lays atop Mia’s little pink lunchbox.

Paper hearts.

Anjelica is a loving mother, and values putting pen to page, rounding the borders with scissors.

Uses them to smoke, forget, numb a little; turn down the volume on life, the ringing in his ears.

Tony gets papers and pens.

His girlfriend, Anjelica, laying next to him and carrying his child in her belly, tells him that’s beautiful, he should write it down, put it on paper.

Tony believes his doll got left behind in that other country, starched dry in the desert heat.

He feels like everyone is a paper doll, and his is all crushed and ripped.

Sealed, my love.

Rose declines, telling Tony that chapter of life is closed.

"What was my dad like?"

Before he becomes a father and makes Rose a grandmother, Tony asks Rose to tell him about his father, whom he never knew anything about.

He falls in love with one of the waitresses.

Here he holds the line.

He pushes dough into the oven, considers this penance for everything in the desert.

Back home, Tony goes to work in the back of a pizza restaurant.

But doesn’t.

Tony gets papers and pens.

Considers writing notes to their families.

The others, whose funerals happened while he was still deployed, he makes up for by visiting their tombstones.

He performs the flag-folding ceremony, before his friend—what remains of him—is buried.

Back home, Tony participates in the funeral of one friend who was killed.

Making beds wasn't all that hard.

When he hears calls to prayer, fainter now, his eardrums ruptured, he wishes he could have just steamed already clean sheets, making them cleaner still, like his mom.

And much of his hearing.

Tony loses his own internal compass.

One day, Tony sees one close friend blown up, all the fabric inside him unraveling.

Praying doesn’t save them, at least not in this desert here.

Tony knows there are women here too, but he never sees them on the rugs, their faces, their fabric-covered bodies folding.

Tony sees the men unbend themselves, roll their rugs back up, and return to their days.

The men fold and bend their bodies onto their rugs.

Sees men unroll rugs, point them in the direction of their internal compasses.

Tony hears echoes across the dry hot land, and soon learns they are calls to prayer.

Tony’s plane lands in a desert.

Tony gets deployed.

Tony makes new beds more tightly, minus the afghans.

But Tony also doesn’t want to get drafted, go to war, die young, or kill anybody.

Tony doesn’t want to work at the same facility as his mother, as many of the neighbors do.

Tony considers becoming a pharmacist himself, maybe a doctor.

And something else he can’t remember.

She loves it nonetheless, and how he wrote inside that she would “win a boat” and “meet the love of her life” and “adopt a kitten.”

The squares are uneven, rub each other the wrong way.

One day in May, Tony tries again to make one for his mother, but admits he didn’t get it quite right.

The pharmacist can make anything with paper, like origami cranes and boxes, and hands them out to kids who loiter outside.

Tony plays with the fortune teller all afternoon, but never quite knows how to make it himself with fresh paper, despite his deconstruction, reconstruction of the original.

Tony is given a paper fortune teller one afternoon by the pharmacist while he sits on the curb outside the general store, listening to the door bells jingle and jangle as other families file in and out.

Rose launders the makings of strangers’ beds every day, sometimes burning her arms if she’s tired or daydreaming.

Tony starts to make his bed every day.

Rose works her whole life at a facility that does large amounts of laundry, pressing and folding hotel sheets with chemicals and hot steam.

With the afghan folded flatly on the bottom.

She presses him to do better.

He forgets to make his bed.

Rose shows Tony, speaking to him in a serious tone, the right way, the only way, to make his bed.

“You need to learn to make your bed every day, my love.”

Rose tells Tony about the afghan she keeps over the foot of his little bed, how his grandmother Francine made it when she was only a teenager.

On her own too.

When Rose becomes a mother, she raises a boy, Tony.

Francine has to close her parents' bakery.

Francine never makes the second afghan.

“But, I made this with love,” Francine tells Rose, stroking her daughter's hair that reminded Francine of Rose's father.

“And if you fold it up the right way, it looks better, you’d never notice really.”

In a box, in a folded flag, in the mail in papers detailing the benefits she’d receive now, to thank her for his sacrifice.

Well, he does come back, but not really.

Francine’s husband gets sent to fight a war and doesn’t come back.

To get it right this time.

Francine said she’d try to make another one.

Francine tells her quickly growing daughter—Rose, who has spent many collective days sleeping tucked into the afghan—that she learned a lot making the afghan, but wasn’t very good at it, all the mistakes you can still see if you look closely.

When she finished, nearly a year later, she was a new mother.

When Francine first began making the afghan, she was still a girl.

Francine did not know how to make an afghan.

Francine was going to make an afghan.

Enough to buy yarn.

A little.

She took out just some.

One night in the fall, as frost and darkness descended into their routines, creating condensation on the bakery windows with their name painted on them, Francine took a little money out of the envelope.

Francine, once she had saved a whole dollar, took that money out of its envelope, counted it twice, put it back in the envelope, folded it, and tucked it under her mattress.

Francine tucked things under hers, too.

The box stayed tucked under their bed.

If you looked closely, you could almost make out the names they arrived with, before the processing agent on the island translated.

Inside the box, that first paper they received here, thin and folded.

Francine’s parents kept all their papers that rooted them to the country—titles and deeds, birth and death certificates, business licenses, poems and letters from the old country—in a box.

Letting it rest.

Slapping dough.

Kneading, folding every day.

The oldest daughter, Francine, grew up working in the bakery.

Two died in their infancy.

Had five children.

God is good, they’d agree.

"So blessed."

Every time Marie would become pregnant, Antonio’d put his hands on her stomach, saying how lucky, how blessed they were.

Antonio and Marie worked hard together, making that better life for their future children.

Marie picked up English more easily, called customers by their names.

They decided on the bakery’s name.

“Our real name, or the other one?”

“Which name should we call it, though?”

Pinch of salt.

So they opened a bakery together, using their hands, flour, water.

Antonio had a hard time finding work; he especially didn’t want to work for someone who told him his English was exactly as bad as he thought it was.

They didn’t want any trouble.

Folded themselves into a grateful bow, and from that moment began using the misspelled identity to save any trouble, rushing along so as not to hold up the lines.

Not knowing what else to do, they shrugged to each other.

“It is now. Welcome to America. Next!”

“No? Is not our name,” they politely protested.

“That’s not our name,” they whispered to each other.

A little fear.

Suddenly, the excitement turned to disappointment.

They looked at the paper, its newness, its promise.

Antonio and Maria were so excited.

Their new beginning.