To Paradise

I turned the cooling suit up to its maximum level and did as David had told me. Once I was in my apartment, though, with the front door safely locked behind me and my helmet removed, I felt like I was going to faint, and I sat down, right on the floor, resting my back against the door and inhaling big gulps of air until I felt better.

Finally, I stood. I checked the locks on the door again, and then I called my husband’s name, even though it was clear he wasn’t at home. Yet I still checked every room: the kitchen, the main room, our bedroom, the bathroom. I even checked the closets. After that, I returned to the main room. I drew the blinds on the windows, one of which looked onto the back of another building, the other of which looked into an air shaft. And only then did I sit on the sofa and reach into my pocket.

It was a package about the size of a walnut shell, of brown paper wrapped around something hard. The paper had been secured with tape, and after peeling it off, I found that beneath the first layer of paper was a second, and then a layer of thin white tissue, which I also tore away. And then I was left with a small black pouch made of a soft, dense fabric and pulled tight with a drawstring. I loosened the drawstring and held out my palm and shook the bag, and into my hand fell Grandfather’s ring.

I hadn’t known what to expect, and only afterward did I realize that I should have been scared, that I could have been carrying anything: an explosive, a vial of viruses, a Fly.

But in certain ways, the ring was worse. I cannot quite say why, but I’ll try. It was as if I was learning that something I had known to be one way was actually another. Of course, that had already happened: David had told me he was not who he said he was. But I had been able to disbelieve him until I saw the ring. I had had what Grandfather had once called “plausible deniability,” which means you can pretend to not know something while knowing it as well. And so, if David was telling me the truth about himself, then were the other things he said also true? How did he know about the disease? Had he really been sent to find me?

Were other countries not like this one after all?

Who was David?

I looked at the ring, which was as heavy as I remembered, its pearl lid still smooth and shiny. “It’s called nacre,” Grandfather had explained. “It’s a kind of calcium carbonate that a mollusk produces, building layers and layers of it around an irritant—like a speck of sand—in its mantle. You can see it’s very strong.”

“Can humans make nacre?” I had asked, and Grandfather had smiled.

“No,” he said. “Humans have to protect themselves in other ways.”

It had been almost twenty years since I had seen the ring, and now I clenched it in my fist: It was warm and solid. I had to give it to the fairy, Grandfather had said. The fairy who looked over you while you were sick. And although I had always known he was teasing, and although I knew there were no such thing as fairies, I think this is what made me saddest of alclass="underline" That Grandfather hadn’t had to pay a price for me returning to him after all. That I had just come back to him anyway, and that, one day, he had sent the ring someplace else, to someone else, and now that it had been returned to me, I no longer knew what it meant, or where it had been, or what it had once stood for.