Page 37 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper

Oliver

Sixteen years ago

All the girls at Lawrence High were obsessed with charm bracelets, and Chloe was no exception. The day after Oliver kissed her, he went to the Pandora jewelry store in the mall. Because Valentine’s was tomorrow, the display cases were full of trinkets like linked hearts, x’s and o’s, and red lips.

“Excuse me,” Oliver said to one of the saleswomen. “Do you have any St. Patrick’s Day charms in the back that you haven’t put out yet? I’d really like to buy a clover.”

The woman tilted her head, confused, but a sale was a sale, and she did, indeed, find the next holiday’s stock and brought Oliver three different clovers to choose from.

There was a diamond-encrusted one that he couldn’t afford, as well as a big green enamel one. He pointed to the third, a small but delicate silver clover. “This one is perfect.”

“For your girlfriend?” the saleswoman asked with a smile.

“We’re not official yet,” Oliver said. “But I hope we will be.”

He ended up also buying something from the Valentine’s display case—an infinity symbol where the two loops were hearts.

It was like a math pun in jewelry form, and infinity was an elegant way to give Chloe the forever she had asked for when they’d kissed.

She’d forgive him that the charm itself was a little bit cheesy.

That night as his brother, Ben, made dinner—a budding chef, Ben had taken over cooking for the family two years ago, at age ten—Oliver wrapped the jewelry box with the clover and infinity charms in a glossy page from one of his music zines, then carefully tied a bow with a red satin ribbon.

Tomorrow, when candy grams were being passed out in the classrooms, Oliver would have this box delivered to Chloe.

His heart beat faster now, just thinking about her opening it and knowing exactly what it meant.

The door from the garage flung open and slammed closed, shaking the whole house.

“We have to go!” Oliver’s mom, Jennifer, shouted.

“What?” Oliver stepped into the hall at the same time that Ben popped his head out from the kitchen. Their dad followed a second later from the living room.

“Now! Right now!” Jennifer said as she shoved past Oliver, her shoulder slamming into his. “Everyone pack only the essentials and leave everything else behind!”

“Jen?” his dad, Richard, said. “What’s going on?”

“I fucked up!” Her voice came from inside her bedroom, along with the sound of suitcases hitting the bed. “The Feds are onto me. They’re coming. We have to go!”

“The Feds? What are you talking about?” Richard asked. “And we can’t leave. What about our business? This is our home.”

Jennifer came back into the hallway, jaw clenched.

“There is no business or home anymore,” she said. “I lost it all. Our real estate agency, our savings, our house… everyone else’s money.”

Richard frowned. “I know the housing market has been sluggish, but I thought your timeshare business was going well…”

She didn’t say anything. And that’s when Richard hung his head. Apparently—shockingly—not surprised. “Oh, Jenny. You promised, no more get-rich-quick schemes.”

“This was supposed to be a surefire thing, baby. It was going to set us up for life. It just, well, didn’t quite pan out. But it’s okay, babe. We’ll start fresh. Don’t worry, I got this.”

Oliver and Ben stared at their parents, uncomprehending. Behind them, whatever Ben had been cooking started to burn. And Oliver still held Chloe’s Valentine’s gift in his hands.

Their mother fixed her gaze first on Ben, and then Oliver. “ Just the essentials,” she said. “We leave in an hour, not a minute more.”

They drove through the night, stopping only in a Walmart parking lot in St. Robert, Missouri, to steal the license plates off another car and swap out the ones that Jennifer had previously stolen before they left.

She wouldn’t let them sleep in a motel, because they were still too close to home, and besides, they barely had any cash in their wallets.

Credit cards—traceable by the cops—were absolutely out of the question.

So they drove and drove, and when Jennifer caught Oliver trying to text Chloe on the chunky silver Nokia he’d worked all summer to save for, she swiped away his phone, pried out the SIM card, and threw it out the window of their moving car.

“What did you do that for?” Oliver gawked behind him at the freeway zooming past.

“Are you kidding me right now?” His mom turned around to face him, her eyes wide. “The Feds can probably track you with this. In fact…” She moved to throw the entire phone out the window.

“No!” Oliver lunged from the back seat and snatched it back.

“You’re right,” Jennifer said. “We can pawn it.”

“I won’t let you,” Oliver said. He and Chloe had bought their phones together. They matched. They’d even gotten phone numbers one digit off from each other.

“I’m your mother, and you’ll do as I say.”

“If you were a good mother, we wouldn’t be fleeing in the night for god knows what you did,” Oliver snapped.

“Everyone!” his dad shouted, which was a big deal, because Richard never raised his voice. “Please,” he said from the driver’s seat. “This is hard enough as it is. But we need to stick together. We’re family.”

Beside Oliver, Ben was shaking. He was only twelve, still a kid. The fury Oliver felt for their mom didn’t go away, but he crammed it inside for his brother’s sake. For now.

“Hey,” he said to Ben. “Look what I brought.” Oliver dug inside the duffel bag at his feet and pulled out two slim box sets of three DVDs each.

“ The French Chef !” Ben grabbed the Julia Child videos and pressed them to his chest. Then he leaned over to Oliver and whispered, “But why? Mom said we could only bring the essentials.”

Oliver pulled his little brother into a hug. “Because I knew it was essential to you .”

Two days later, they stopped running. At least for a little while.

Oliver snuck out and bought a postcard for Chloe. He didn’t know what to say, so he wrote out her address first and stuck a stamp on it.

Dear Chloe,

My mom got a new job at the last minute and she had to start right away, so…

He knew it was a lie that didn’t make sense, but he couldn’t tell her what had really happened.

He hardly knew himself. It would be another year before he fully unraveled what she had done, before he realized his mom had been part of a timeshare resale scam based overseas that had cost not only his family’s home but the money of a lot of the other people in their town.

And the Feds had gotten involved, because a lot of those timeshare cons could be traced back to drug cartels.

She’d been betting a dangerous hand and lost it all, for all of them.

For now, though, Oliver was a sixteen-year-old boy whose loyalty between his family and his best friend—and the love of his young life—was being tested.

But even from this far away, he could hear the hurt squeak Chloe would make, the quiver in her voice when she said, So you just left? Without saying goodbye?

Oliver squeezed his eyes shut, leaning hard on the pen.

Suddenly, a hand clamped on his shoulder. Oliver froze.

“What do you think you’re doing?” his mom hissed.

Oliver swallowed hard.

She snatched the pen from his hand.

He grabbed the postcard and ran. The big blue mailbox was right across the street.

“Get back here!”

A car careened around the corner, headlights momentarily blinding him. Oliver jumped in the road anyway. The driver slammed on his horn, tires screeching, and Oliver barely dodged it.

Oliver sprinted into the mailbox at full force.

The impact knocked the wind out of him. But behind him, Jennifer was screaming and getting close.

He yanked open the deposit slot, but before he could throw the postcard in, Jennifer slammed into him from behind, seized him by the hair, and jerked him around.

She snatched the postcard and tore it in half, then in half again and again until it was just trash.

She threw the pieces into the street and they scattered. “I thought you were supposed to be the smart one,” she snarled. “And then you go and try to send a letter that will have a location postmark stamped on it?”

“I didn’t sign it!”

She slapped him hard across the face. Oliver felt his lip split, the salt of blood spilling onto his tongue.

“Fuck you, Jennifer.”

“I am your mother. You don’t call me by my first name.”

“Fuck. You,” Oliver said. If he couldn’t call her Jennifer, he wouldn’t call her anything at all. Hell if he was addressing her as Mom.

And that was why Oliver never reached out to Chloe in the months that followed, because from then on, Jennifer watched him with hawk eyes.

But what would he say to Chloe anyway? He couldn’t lie to her. Clover had been a single unit; they’d known everything about each other. Lying to Chloe was like jamming a knife into who they were and slicing to shreds all he had loved.

And even if he could have gotten himself to a pay phone or written a letter, he couldn’t tell her the truth—that his family skipped from homeless shelter to homeless shelter under false names, that he had to homeschool his brother the rest of the school year because Jennifer wouldn’t let them stay in one place for too long, that Oliver had to steal study guides from the library in order to keep up with what would have been his own classes.

It was more than two years of life like that, and by the time his family truly stopped running, Oliver felt it was too late for him and Chloe.

It was halfway through senior year and he had taken the GED, unable to step foot on a regular high school campus again because he was too different from the other kids there, with their normal parents and normal lives.

Whereas he had been open and warm with Chloe, he was now closed, a fortress of one against others.

Because when your own mother betrays you, you no longer know who else in the world you can trust.

He never forgot about Chloe; it was impossible to erase someone who had been your other half for the vast majority of your life.

But Oliver hoped she had forgotten him , because the alternative was even more unbearable: that she remembered how he had kissed her and told her they were forever, then abandoned her the next day without even a goodbye.

All he’d left her with was a lie.