Page 64 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper

Chloe

Her parents picked her up from the Kansas City airport in the ice cream truck. Despite her misery, Chloe couldn’t help herself. She laughed.

“It must have been hell to find room at the curb to park that beast,” she said, gesturing at the behemoth pastel truck.

“I gave some free ice cream to the traffic officers,” her dad said with a wink. “They magically made a space appear for us.”

“Don’t worry,” her mom said with a smile. “I leaned out the window and also handed free ice cream sandwiches to all the drivers who were asked to move.”

“Of course you did,” Chloe said. This was who her parents were and why she loved them so much. She allowed herself to be buried in her parents’ incoming group bear hug. They smelled comfortingly of chocolate and fruit and cream.

“We love you to pieces, Lo-Lo.”

Dinner was Chloe’s favorite meal. The minute she’d gotten off the phone this morning in New York, her dad had fired up the smoker and started a brisket so that when Chloe arrived in Kansas many hours later, she could have his world-famous (really, neighborhood-famous) burnt ends.

Her mom whipped up some cheesy corn, garlic green beans, and fluffy biscuits.

And for dessert, they had peach cobbler out on the back patio, enjoying the summer night while citronella candles burned all around them to keep the mosquitos at bay.

“We missed you, sweet pea,” her dad said. “It’s good to have you back.”

She leaned over in her chair and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “There’s no place like home.”

He chuckled. It was a line that was more than overused when you lived in this state, but somehow it still made her dad laugh every time. Chloe loved that about him.

“So,” Mom said from the porch glider. “Do you want to tell us what’s going on? You don’t have to. But we’re here, Lo-Lo. You know the menu—fix, listen, or hugs.”

Chloe nodded. Her mom and dad understood that sometimes people needed help fixing a situation gone wrong.

Sometimes they just needed someone to listen but they would later solve the problem on their own.

And sometimes words were no good, but a hug and a reminder that they were loved was the best thing a parent could offer.

The thing is, Chloe had already told them the horrible highlights when she’d called—how she’d fallen for a scam, that she couldn’t afford rent, that she had lost absolutely everything.

She just wanted to keep her panic stuffed into the corner of her brain for a little while longer.

“I don’t think I’m ready to rehash all the details quite yet,” Chloe said. “So… hugs?”

“I’ve got an infinite supply of them,” her mom said, patting the spot next to her on the glider, then holding her arms open wide. Chloe climbed up and nestled next to her, feeling simultaneously thirty-two and five years old as her mom stroked her hair.

And yet, it felt like something was missing tonight. Even though her parents were Chloe’s favorite people, and even though they’d pulled out all the comfort bells and whistles, being here didn’t feel the same as when she was younger. It was technically home, but it wasn’t.

Was it true that when you got older, you could never go back?

After her parents went to bed, Chloe unpacked in her childhood bedroom and smiled, the edges tinged with nostalgia.

There were trophies from dance competitions when she was very little, when dance meant twirling in circles on a stage rather than following any kind of choreography, and awards were given to everyone for participating.

Photos from high school student council still tacked to her bulletin board.

A big fleece KU throw blanket with their Jayhawk mascot on it, ratty at the corners from all the football games she’d brought it to from high school all the way through her own time at the university.

But there was nothing of Oliver, even though—short of her parents—he’d been the biggest presence in her life from age seven until sixteen.

Chloe had swept the room clean of his memory a year after his family disappeared from Lawrence.

Much longer than she should have held out hope that he still remembered or cared.

Her feelings about Oliver were a tangled mess of now and then and New York and Kansas. She needed some way to think through it, to sort out what was still real and what she ought to leave behind, like the dance trophies of her youth.

With a deep breath, Chloe went into the hall and pulled down the ladder in the ceiling. She climbed up into the attic—a smallish storage space with angled walls—and pulled on the chain that illuminated the single light bulb hanging from the beams above.

It was, no surprise, dusty up there, and little spiders scampered away at the unexpected onslaught of light. More than one cobweb wisped across her face, and the entire attic smelled of plastic and old cardboard, because that was what was in there—boxes and boxes of old stuff.

Her mom’s breast cancer scare had made pack rats of them all.

Even after the cancer went into remission, they were afraid of losing memories, no matter what they were of.

That’s how Chloe knew her Clover memory box was still up there, even though she’d wanted to burn it after Oliver ghosted her and demolished her sixteen-year-old heart.

She dug behind a plastic bin that contained her parents’ Lawrence High School yearbooks and photo albums, as well as her mom’s cheerleading outfit and her dad’s varsity football letterman jacket, its scarlet red wool and black leather sleeves still richly colored from having been stored out of the sun all these years.

Then Chloe found the smaller plastic bin where she’d stashed the shoebox.

“Do you really want to do this?” she asked herself.

She steadied her breathing, which had gone all jagged with nerves.

Yeah. I do.

Before she could change her mind, she pulled out the memory box, and it was exactly as she remembered, covered in a mishmash of wrapping paper scraps, beads, and sequins, with the word “CLOVER” written in bold glitter glue.

Chloe couldn’t help stroking the lid of the shoebox.

She’d made one for Oliver, too, an almost-twin except, of course, it had been impossible to match the swatches of paper and the other decorative accoutrements exactly.

But it had been perfect that way, because that’s what Chloe and Oliver had been—the same but completely different.

Inside the box, there was a crayon from first grade, which Oliver had stolen from his classroom art cabinet, because Crayola’s midnight blue was her favorite color, but her own set didn’t include it, and she hadn’t been able to bear the thought of an entire summer without it.

There were a half dozen ticket stubs from Spy Kids , their favorite movie of 2001, which they’d insisted on seeing over and over.

A “Best Summer Songs” mixed-tape CD they had burned. A guitar pick from Oliver’s brief stint playing the electric guitar.

The silver charm bracelet she’d worn through middle school and the early part of high school, a gift from her parents (although it had been Oliver’s idea—they’d asked him what Chloe would like best).

It was clear what she and Oliver had been to each other in the past. But what are we supposed to be to each other now?

Like her bedroom, the things in this box felt like a low flame, a pilot light that was meant to keep memories alive but not enough to keep you warm. Maybe her and Oliver’s light had flickered out and their time together had run its course.

Maybe it was time to move on.