Page 51 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
Sixteen years ago
After the Joneses left Kansas and Oliver vanished without a word, Chloe’s once bright world paled to a washed-out version of its previous self. At school, she dropped out of student council and rebuffed other students, because none of them could take the place of Oliver. At home, she ate very little at dinner with her parents and then holed up in her bedroom in the evenings, doing the bare minimum for her homework and spending the rest of her time drowning her sorrows in the songs of Oliver’s favorite emo bands. The confessional lyrics reflected her heartbroken teenage soul.
Everyone wanted to talk to Chloe about Oliver’s family, about his mom: Was is true that Jennifer had sold fraudulent Caribbean timeshares to half of Kansas? That she’d been a broker of ancestral land in Scotland that turned out not to exist? That she was in cahoots with shady enemies of the United States and had laundered money for them?
Chloe didn’t believe any of it, even though the FBI had started poking around town, asking questions. Because Mrs. Jones had seemed like a completely normal Midwestern mom. She baked pies for block parties, cheered on Oliver at math competitions, and took Ben to cooking classes. Every first Saturday of the month, she and her husband had a date night in downtown Lawrence, beginning with dinner at either the burger joint or the BBQ place, then a movie, and ending with a shared sundae at the Ice Creamery.
It all had to be a big mistake.
Every so often, she tried to google Oliver. But he’d always hated LiveJournal and MySpace and anything online; his attitude had long ago convinced Chloe to keep herself off those social networks, too. Who needed the “likes” of strangers, anyway? Oliver had even refused to sign those standardphoto permissions whenever he went to math competitions. He might as well not exist, as far as the Internet was concerned.
And Jones was such a common last name that any searches Chloe ran for Ben, Richard, or Jennifer Jones came up useless. Even searches for “Jennifer Jones + scam” were fruitless; the FBI must have been keeping the story offline till their investigation ended.
So the only thing Chloe could do was try to stay patient and wait for Oliver to come back. Maybe he’d visit in the summer, she told herself. When he didn’t, she pushed the fantasy to the autumn, when maybe he’d come back and surprise her and take her to Homecoming.
When the trees had all shed their leaves and snow began to fall, Chloe held tight to the belief that he’d come for Christmas, because she couldn’t remember hanging a single ornament or going door-to-door singing carols without him there beside her. She even wrote a letter to Santa that year, childish as it was:All I want for Christmas is Oliver.
But he never came back. He didn’t even write or call to wish her a Merry Christmas. Was that how little Chloe had meant to him, that he could so easily discard her and all their history? Had he found someone new, someone better, to replace her?
In the meantime, Chloe’s musical tastes had sunk from emotion-baring to something darker. On New Year’s Eve, there was a party in the woods, and Chloe—empty and rudderless without Oliver—decided to go. At first, she was hesitant to drink too much because she hated how her face turned purplish-red with alcohol. But when Lissa, a girl from her biology class, told her that the vodka would help her forget, Chloe knocked back the shot, and then had another and another.
After that, she decided that being numb was preferable to pain. Chloe no longer wore her colorful dresses. She stopped going to her classes or washing her hair, and unread books lay splayed open and ignored on the floor like a library had been demolished there and no one had cleaned up the rubble.
Life as it used to be was replaced instead with the blurry nothingness of not caring, not trying, not… anything.
Until one afternoon when Chloe came home to find her bedroom had been cleaned.
“Mom? Dad?” she shrieked. “What the hell did you do?”
Her dad appeared at her door, face ashen.
“You have no right,” Chloe screamed. “This room ismine, and—”
“Mom has breast cancer,” he said quietly.
Chloe froze mid-tantrum and stared.
“She needs you now, Lo-Lo. I know you’ve been sad, and things have been hard since Oliver left, but…” Her dad broke down into sobs. “We need you back, okay, honey? We… I can’t do this without you.”
The sharpness of emotion slammed into Chloe hard. She wasn’t used to it anymore, not under the fog she’d let mist over her mind, and her knees buckled under the weight of her fear.
Her dad collapsed next to her, and they held each other on the carpet in the middle of her room, crying. Cradled against him, she realized how much she had missed human touch, how much she had missed being a part of her family. Chloe had been so fixated on the past, she had forgotten that there was still life to live in the present.
She hoped there was still time to spend with her mom.
“Where is she?” Chloe asked when she managed to slow her tears.
“At the Ice Creamery,” her dad said. “Serving scoops with a smile, because she says if she has limited time remaining, she wants to spend every second spreading as much happiness as she can.”
Chloe swiped away the tears on her face.
“Mom’s going to need help.”
Her dad rubbed at his own red eyes and nodded.
“Give me a minute, then,” Chloe said.
When he stepped out of her room, she took the “Clover” memory box she’d once treasured—the one containing all the ticket stubs and doodles and other evidence of her friendship with Oliver—and buried it in the back corner of her closet. Then she stripped out of her all-gray clothes and dug out a bright yellow tulle skirt. She paired it with a pastel-pink Ice Creamery sweatshirt embroidered with a sprinkle-topped sundae and the slogan “Serving delight since 1991.”
