Paper Wings and Missing Things

Part 4

The year Anna turned eight, her dad got her an origami calendar for Christmas, with a different design for each day of the year. By the end of December 26, Anna's patience in waiting for the New Year was at its limit, and, with a vague misguided notion that she would be punished for not obeying the "rules" of the calendar, she hid in the cupboard under the stairs to study the first entry. Beside her sat a stack of dusty origami paper she had dug out of the attic so she wouldn't have to rip out the pages of the calendar.

She quickly discovered that making each fold cleanly posed more of a challenge than the simple instructions suggested, and she refused to accept anything less than perfection. After hearing at least five sneezes from the closet, her mother opened the door to discover a haze of dust and Anna, lying bunched up, surrounded by sheets of wrinkled paper and proudly surveying a neat origami frog.

Anna tried to infect Jacob with her enthusiasm, but he gave it up after comparing a few squashed-looking attempts to Anna's precise, flawless folds. The one thing that did catch his interest was one of Anna's first endeavors—January 4th—and that was a crane.

One day that spring, Anna sat on one of the kitchen chairs, squinting at the instructions for a lion, while Jacob perched on a barstool, spinning idly around while his fingers flew carelessly over the folds of a crane. The silence of the room was disturbed only by the smooth sound of creasing paper and occasionally the rustle of a failed attempt being crumpled and tossed toward the trash. Anna moved onto a dragon, a bunny, a seahorse, and Jacob moved on to his eleventh crane.

When Jacob became tired of the inactivity, he stood and stretched exaggeratedly, clearing his throat with his distinctive, repetitive cough, which reminded Anna strangely of a hyena. Drawn at last back into the lazy, golden kitchen, Anna blinked at the army of cranes overspreading the counter. Different sizes and shapes, each bird was unique, so unlike Anna's textbook, perfectly cloned origami animals. Strangely, Anna thought, the flattened beaks and crooked wings she would loathe as imperfections in her own work gave the cranes a life of their own. "What are you going to do with them?"

"I don't know."

Casting her mind back to her school reading list from a few summers ago, Anna remembered what Jacob's flock of birds had reminded her of. "We read a book about a thousand paper cranes, didn't we?"

Sitting in Mrs. Okocho's class, Anna had watched Jacob out of the corner of her eye as usual, ready to throw something at him if he fell asleep. But for once he was leaning his elbows on his desk, one eyebrow unconsciously lifted, giving him a look of suspicion. Even Mrs. Okocho seemed to feel his uncharacteristic attention, holding the red-covered book up like a barrier. Of course, Jacob tended to ace English classes, but for once, he seemed genuinely interested in the story of the girl living with the effects of the Hiroshima bomb, folding cranes as if somehow, a thousand paper birds could save her even though all the treatment she was given could not.

"Where do you think the legend came from?" Jacob asked absentmindedly, tipping the barstool so far back Anna swore it was closer to horizontal than upright. "Why a thousand?"

"Eternal youth and happiness or something. If you can fold a thousand."

He scoffed. "Eternal youth? Who would want to never grow up?"

Anna glanced sideways at him. "Maybe...to stop things from changing."

He shrugged. "What if change means winning a million dollars?"

For a moment, Anna considered furthering the debate and dismissing his farfetched notions, but she focused instead on the cranes. "What are you going to do with..." She tried to do a quick count, then, finding the desk too cluttered with wings and tails to make an accurate estimate, gave up. "...a bunch of cranes? You could hang them somewhere."

Jacob held a tiny blue and white crane in the palm of his hand, then he tilted his head to one side. "We should hide them."

"Like a treasure hunt?"

He grinned. "Maybe they're migrating on their way to some faraway land."

"Maybe it's an origami land. Everything's made of folded-up paper—everything's two dimensional."

"How about I hide them upstairs, and you hide them downstairs," Jacob said. "Then we'll have to find them."

When he was gone, leaping up the stairs two at a time, Anna started looking for the best places to hide the cranes. One was tucked against the armchair, one perched atop the curtain rod, one hidden in the silverware drawer underneath some napkins, and one nestled on the piano strings. As she walked into the entryway, holding the small blue and white one Jacob had finished last, she stared thoughtfully around the rooms. It had to be somewhere he would never, ever find.

Her eyes wandered up to the upper walls, along the corners and crevices, past the dusty shelves. They settled on the bowl chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and she stopped under it, looking up. A lopsided smile settled on her face, and she started looking for a way to reach the chandelier.