Leann sat beside me on a popsicle-orange plastic chair, wearing an over-sized college sweatshirt and gym pants. Her small feet were hooked on the metal rungs of the chair; she had one hand on my knee. The other sleeve was pushed past her elbow and on the pale skin of the inside of her arm was a small patch of cotton fastened with medical tape. She read a pamphlet about colitis; other thin booklets of information, printed on cheap recycled paper, lay in her lap. Stroke, HIV, Acid Reflux Disease — they fanned out across her slim gray thighs. She read them one by one, cover to cover, and then carefully placed them on the low table next to her chair.
“Hey,” she asked me finally, “doesn’t Uncle Mort have colitis?”
“I believe so,” I said.
“It sounds disgusting.”
“That’s always been my understanding.”
Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, momentarily tamed by an elastic, but then it sprang out and fell down in her back in a spray of unruly curls. I thought of the conditioners and balms, the slimy feel of all the products I had pulled through it over the years. She inherited this hair from her father, who kept his cropped close to his head — his was now mostly silver, less peppery than it used to be. He did not know where we were — that is, a hospital in the town where Leann attends college, fifty miles from our home — a visit I had passed off as casual: a lunch, a shopping trip, the purchase of a refrigerator for her dorm room.
A nurse appeared in a doorway then — doors that were that green painted metal common to medical facilities. She was holding a clipboard and she said Leann’s name while scanning the room, her eyes slightly above our heads — even though we were the only people in sight. Leann stood up. She squeezed my hand and smiled — when she did I saw that scar on her forehead, a slash mark between her eyebrows that has been there since she was a baby and fell over in her highchair. She wore no makeup, no jewelry; she had the scrubbed healthy look of a Mormon girl. This was not due to the day’s event, the sober reason for the trip: Leann never wore makeup, never pierced herself; she has been a vegetarian since the age of eight.
Picking her up in front of her dorm earlier — a grim brick building at the edge of a massive parking lot — I watched her peers spill out of the doors, baring their midriffs aggressively, wearing jewelry in the unlikeliest of places — and that was only what was visible to the naked eye. When she skipped down the steps a few moments later Leann seemed like a refugee from a place without television and fashion magazines, the kind of girl on whom the media has had no effect at all. I was grateful for that at least.
“Be careful,” I told her as she walked away, and she turned around and gave me a wink. I watched her put her hand on the nurse’s shoulder as they passed through the doors and the gesture suggested it was Leann who was doing the ushering inside, the one offering comfort.
When she was gone I picked up the pamphlets she’d left and flipped through them. Then I shredded their edges into confetti and poured it from one hand to another. My coffee had gone cold and I dumped it into a potted ficus and snapped satisfying little pieces from around the lip of the cup. I accumulated a handful of this garbage and then looked around for a place to dispose of it. Eventually, at a loss, I tucked it in the silk-lined pocket of my raincoat, where it made a soft little pouch against my hip.
An hour or so ago, when we pulled into the hospital parking lot, Leann was craning her neck, looking for trouble. It made me smile. She more than half wanted protestors thronged at the doors, shouting bloody threats, holding up signs and awful things pickled in jars. It was typical of Leann to want to wade into such a fight, to battle for her rights. She has that kind of self-righteous fire — over the years she has applied it to the plight of circus animals and harp seals, deforestation, dolphins caught in nets, whale hunting, other atrocities I can no longer recall.
Had my mother lived to know this child she would have said: “That girl will come to grief.” And by grief she would have meant disappointment, despair, that the world would never meet her expectations. She would not have meant anything as mundane as this, a relatively safe and routine medical procedure, what I have been calling a D&C, in some attempt at discretion.
In the hospital parking lot, while I was getting a ticket from the machine, I said to her, “This isn’t a clinic, honey. It’s a hospital.”
“Oh,” she said, and I could tell she was disappointed. “Why not a clinic?”
“Why?” I repeated. Primarily because it would never have occurred to me, was why. Because clinics are shabby and unpleasant and the walls are covered with cautionary posters that are too late for the girls forced to read them. And because I am a planner and a believer in research and references; because hospitals have modern equipment and well-paid doctors with daughters of their own, and mostly because I am something of a snob and believe the more you pay for something, the better it will be. But I shrugged and told her it was the closest place.
The other reasons would not have satisfied her; she would have preferred an atmosphere that provoked penitence, one that did not stop reminding her of this mistake, this unfortunate biological glitch. An error of timing or clumsiness, I didn’t know which. To my knowledge she did not even have a steady boyfriend and it was clear she had no intention of saying names. Still, I didn’t believe Leann capable of casual sex, of casual anything. However this happened, and with whom, I was certain of one thing — there was a kind of love involved, and some tenderness, however momentary or fleeting.
Some small amount of time passed in the waiting room. Not nearly enough, that is, before the door opened and the nurse stuck her head out. Her eyes roamed the empty room again; they rested on ordinary objects like chairs and windowshades and a hanging fern with browning tendrils. Then she looked at me.
“She’s gone,” she said mildly. “Have you seen her?”
“Gone?” I didn’t leap out of my chair or raise my voice — I wasn’t yet sure what she was saying.
“Right,” the nurse nodded. She was a woman about my own age, wearing a flowered smock and heavy lipstick. A blood pressure cuff dangled from her hand. She held it up, like evidence. “I went to get this and when I came back she was gone.”
“I thought she was having anesthesia,” I said, stupidly.
The nurse looked at me as if stupidity was something she was accustomed to dealing with. “Yes,” she said slowly, “But she wasn’t in surgery yet, obviously. There are procedures.”
“Well, did she say anything?” I was standing, tightening the belt of my raincoat.
“We were talking,” she said. “About the procedure, the risks. The usual stuff. She asked a lot of questions.”
“She does that,” I said. She had done it in the weeks preceding this appointment, in the car on the way here, on the telephone the evening before. I had mapped it all out–the possibilities, the risks — and they were negligible in my estimation, frivolous, when held beside the vast blank slate of Leann’s childless future.
Leann, when I found her, was in the cafeteria, drinking coffee, wearing a surgical smock over her sweatpants. I recognized her by the bones of her back, visible above and below the ribbon that tied the smock. I’m all too familiar with the depression in her back, where most clothes pull away from her in a small point, signaling that she’s too thin. I had it too as a young girl and remember the feel of my thumb and forefinger rolling denim into a crease behind me when I was nervous. But Leann’s fingers, anxious or otherwise, were not engaged in any inherited habits.
I slid into the seat across from her. “Coffee?” I said. “That’s uncharacteristic.”
She twirled the container between her hands, looked into it as if she might be interested in the contents.
“It tastes terrible,” she said.
“I guess it depends on your addiction,” I said. “It goes well with cigarettes.”
She crinkled her nose. “Are you going to quit?” she asked.
“Again. Soon. This isn’t helping.”
She shook her head. “Excuses,” she said. “You promised.”
That was true. I promised when she was ten and watched those school slide shows about tobacco. I promised again when she was twelve, during those months when she was obsessed with death — her own, and that of others. I never really meant what I said, or more accurately, I meant it when I said it. But for Leann promises are inviolate — they are shackles, leg-irons. She has a memory like the kind elephants have for water.
“I don’t smoke that much,” I said, but at that moment I was wishing for, craving, a cigarette.
She wagged her head at me; the curls bobbed, bounced around her face. Her mouth wrinkled in disapproval.
“What are we doing here?” I asked her. “You can’t have suddenly developed a need for caffeine.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Have I told you about my boyfriend?” she said. “His name is Jim, and he’s going to Australia next semester, on a marine biology thing.”
“Really?” I let that sink in for a moment: it was information that seemed both relevant and supremely extraneous.
“Also, I was thinking,” she said.
“Thinking?”
“Yes, thinking. Remember that accident?”
“Accident?” I said. “What accident?”
But I knew, of course, what she was talking about. The face she made at me over the rim of her cup said she knew it too, and that she was too old now to be fooled so cheaply.
Part Two
Leann was twelve that winter — it was a year when storms rolled in relentlessly, all season long. The lake where I walked the dogs froze solid — the ice heaved and cracked like a giant, living thing. Our housekeeper at the time had a girl Leann’s age and I remember she used to bring me her report cards to exclaim over. I had tried to provoke a friendship between the girls, but it was a disaster. I should have known that twelve-year-old girls cannot be friends when one’s mother washes the other’s bed linens. Many of Leann’s clothes made their way into Daniela’s closet and cast off shoes and coats of mine traveled to Colombia into the hands of our housekeeper’s extended family.
The housekeeper — her name escapes me — would bring Daniela with her during school vacations and the two girls would sit stiffly in front of the television. It was also the year Mark started his own business and the winter we lost so many trees to the weather — one afternoon a twenty-foot hemlock had simply fallen over in the backyard. From the window where I was watching, the tilting of the tree was so slow, such a remarkably tender movement that I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. It had fallen with a soft rustling of limbs and feathery needles, landing in the rose arbor, near the edge of the porch. To this day, a stump remains where the tree was, in the middle of a circular spread of mulch — its absence makes an ugly disruption in the tree line and reveals the gabled corner of a neighbor’s roof. I had looked at it just that morning. Odd, these memories, considering their intense banality.
What we heard that winter evening was a sound, a distant but near sound — I thought immediately of the ice shifting in the park and then the Labradors rushed the front window, howling. Leann was doing her homework on the coffee table in front of the television — a bad habit we had allowed her to fall into. She barely looked up. We had the sliding door cracked to help the fireplace draw, and the next thing we noticed was the smell — dark, viscous, strange.
It had a texture, that scent, and a slickness: I could imagine how it might slide between my fingers, or feel beneath the worn treads of my sneakers.
“Oil,” Mark said immediately, and I thought: heating oil, leaking tank, hideous expense.
“Motor oil,” he said and then stood up and went to the drawer for a flashlight.
I followed him outside. The flashlight played across the driveway: illuminating the bluestone gravel, a band of grass, a stripe of picket fence.
The car was hunched against a tulip tree that sat on our property, directly beside the mailbox — it was at an angle, tilting up the banked earth, the hood in accordion pleats. The driver’s door was open and there was the faint chirping noise of keys left in an ignition. It was confusing at first, because a passerby had stopped already and so the numbers were wrong — two cars and just one person.
He turned to us, this man, raising a hand against the flashlight, and said, “Have you phoned the police?”
“What happened?” I asked this question. I was wearing pajama bottoms and a sweater of Mark’s, my hair fastened on top of my head. It was a Sunday evening and I was settled in, expecting no excitement.
“Whoever wrecked the car ran off. Drunk, no doubt.” He said this slowly and certainly, as if he had worked it out, decided it. He was the sort of man who exuded that kind of surety; he would have been a financier, an insurance executive.
I went inside to call. Leann had given up on her books and was watching television, no longer even pretending to be studying. The dispatcher I talked to sounded bored: other calls had already been placed. I went back to the street to find that the scene had changed somewhat. Other cars had stopped, though only a few moments had passed. People stood around the way they do at an accident, postulating theories, relating their own stories of car accidents, sharing that familiar, morbid interest. There was a particularly horrible older woman–a busybody, a vulture — who would not stop talking about an accident she once had and the pain it still caused in her lower back. Almost paralyzed, she kept saying. Such a near miss.
Another car arrived then and it disgorged three people. By then the street was busy with lights — headlights, taillights, flashlights taken from glove boxes. Farther down the road I saw the approaching beams of police cruisers. A scene was developing, a hubbub. The three people from the new car were a couple and a boy of about seventeen — the driver of the car it turned out; he had walked home after the accident, just a block or so away. He was complaining of a headache but nothing else. His mother went to the car and bent inside it, searching for something. His stepfather — this is what he told us — stood near Mark and I, at the edge of our driveway, and grew loud about irresponsibility and teenage drivers. The boy had been changing the radio station, he said with arch wonderment, and had stepped on the accelerator instead of the brake. You could tell he was already working on an anecdote: the time my stepson wrecked the car playing with the stereo. The car was a clunker, he kept saying, but only two weeks old. And if he thought he was getting a new one, he had another thing coming. There was walking in that boy’s future, that was for certain. These were the kinds of things he was saying.
The others were warning the mother not to rummage around in the car the way she was, that it was at a precarious angle and might roll backward. She was a woman about whom everything was thick — her body, her glasses, her dark sweater.
“I can’t find his glasses,” she kept saying. “He needs them.”
The police came, and because we live at the very corner of three different towns, it seemed as though every emergency vehicle in the county had been summoned. This is where it became farcical — a dozen uniformed men arguing over jurisdiction, not really wanting it but eager to determine which of them was responsible. Because of all this confusion neither Mark nor I noticed when Leann wandered down the driveway, roused finally by the swirling lights through the windows — but who knows, perhaps a commercial had simply interrupted her show.
It was Leann who said, in a voice uncharacteristically small, “What’s wrong with that boy?”
The mother was still half inside the car, the stepfather was talking about a television program he was missing, the police were discussing town lines and no one registered anything for a long beat. I swiveled around, and then back, following Leann’s index finger. By the side of the road, where he had been standing just seconds before holding his head — in embarrassment, we’d thought — was the boy, crumpled oddly on the ground, in a heap. He began to convulse. Paramedics closed in, voices were raised; the mother emerged from the car, her face a sheet, her mouth a strange, contorted circle.
Beside us the stepfather clutched Mark’s arm and began to stutter, to say, “Oh God. Oh God.”
And suddenly it was clear that we no longer had an anecdote on our hands, but a tragedy. What should have happened then was that Mark or I took Leann back to the house, with a hand between her shoulder blades and many empty, comforting words. Suitable, reassuring lies. Bedtime stories. But neither of us did that. Instead I stood with my arms folded around her chest; she was straining forward and the revolving lights — cherry red, ice blue–stroked her wild hair, over and over.
The boy escaped resuscitation, just seconds after they’d gotten him onto the stretcher. Blood, other substances, bubbled from his mouth and nose, one arm — in a knit sweater with frayed cuffs — hung from the edge of the stretcher, twitched and then was still. That stillness — it might have emanated from the boy and crept into the air and covered us all like a blanket — prevailed for what seemed like long seconds. And then the street exploded in predictable ways. Tires squealed, ambulance doors slammed, people screamed — there was a broken, startled sobbing coming from all directions — even from the strangers who had stopped, and especially from the awful woman with the bad back.
Then — then! — we took Leann inside. The moment for lies had passed by then — and that became, in years to come, my most lingering regret of the event.
Part Three
“What about this Jim?” I asked Leann. I saw no point in rehashing the past, in worrying it any further. Mistakes were made, no doubt, but what of it now?
Leann shrugged. “He’s fine,” she said, as if I had asked after his health.
I was exasperated — tired of the smell of over-sweetened coffee, over-cooked vegetables, really, the general sense of over-kill that permeated the conversation, the poorly-lit cafeteria.
“Do you have plans?” I asked her. “I’d love to hear them, if you don’t mind.”
Beyond Leann’s shoulder I noticed the nurse from earlier, carrying a tray carefully, her plum-colored lipstick had been freshened — it glistened, slick and wet. She caught my eye and I waved her off. Leann didn’t notice.
“Plans?” she said thoughtfully. “I thought this was a plan.”
“It’s seeming less and less like one.”
“Well, it was yours to begin with,” she said. “Your brilliant, convenient, tidy idea.”
I don’t recollect that specifically but arguing the point seems unimportant.
Leann goes on. “You know who Jim reminds me of? It’s why I was thinking about it. He reminds me of Keith a little. He wears glasses too.”
“Who’s Keith? Keith who?”
“Mom!” she said, obviously annoyed. We regarded each other across the table; her face took on an expression I have seen on my own — stubborn, frustrated — it was prettier on her. Mark has said to me, Look at your face, listen to yourself. Do you hear the way you sound? He means that I am harsh, often unkind; my face shifts into expressions I don’t plan and sometimes don’t even mean; ones he’s told me are transparently contemptuous.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You saw him for seconds. Five minutes.”
“It was quite long enough,” she said. “And there are pictures.”
“What pictures?” I cast back, but the memories are elusive. And perhaps she meant that all boys look alike in one way or another — as they now do to me. All the young men I see these days blur into a composite — an undercooked blend of shyness and overconfidence, thin in the shoulders, chins jutting, their small backsides in blue jeans seem an exceptionally lovely thing. I notice them cutting lawns and bagging groceries at the supermarket, jogging down my street wearing headphones, nuzzling up to girls in the movie store. They both repel and fascinate me. I have a hard time looking them straight in the eye, knowing what they see in my face makes me nearly invisible to them, another inhabitant of the faraway world of adulthood, damaged by time, and irrelevant.
Still, and immaterial as it was to the matter at hand, not long ago a young man had flirted with me — he was the son of an acquaintance — he had come dog walking with us. He was a stocky, personable boy, recently out of college, only a few years older than Leann. On the walk through the woods he had stuck to my side, met my eyes, teased with me in a way that seemed sweet, until I looked back at his mother’s face and saw what was there. It brought me up short, her expression, and a little rush ran through me, and though I should have turned my attention to the mother then, I didn’t. I allowed my steps to match his; I picked up his teasing tone. He had long lashes and flushed cheeks, he lacked the gangly awkwardness of boys, or the cocky, studied pretense of men. He was perfectly in-between.
It hadn’t ended there. When the walk was finished, it seemed he had lost the car keys, which his mother had given him to hold. He did not seem embarrassed, or chagrined, and when she had said, “Sam! For the love of God!” he had merely turned his broad hands up and said, “Sorry. I didn’t do it on purpose.”
My phone rang a week later. He reminded me of who he was: Sam, from the walk the other day.
I remember, I said.
“Did you find the keys?” he asked me. His tone was steady, inquiring.
“I looked,” I said. “But no. That place has claimed several pairs of my sunglasses, among other things.”
“Oh,” he said, “I thought you had.”
“I would have called your mother,” I told him.
“Are you sure?” he said, “That you didn’t find them? Because if you did, we could meet and you could give them back.”
“Sam,” I said, “Are you OK?” As an adult I am always looking for evidence of wrongdoing in young people — drugs or incipient insanity, criminal intent, general delinquency.
“Jennifer,” he said, “Get with it.” He spoke clearly, and meaning crept into his voice. Then he articulated very slowly, “I never lost the keys. They were in my sock the whole time.” He laughed, but then went quiet very suddenly.
He said, “See what I mean?”
I did. I saw it exactly.
Part Four
After the car accident our lives went on, altered momentarily but at first not appreciably changed. For a time Mark and I held each other in forgotten ways. We did not see those parents again, though I looked through the papers for a memorial service, thinking to send flowers, a card. I could not even say where they lived, though I studied each house — looking for what exactly I didn’t know — when I had occasion to drive past. In my mind I singled out one house and marked it as theirs — a weathered farmhouse, devoid of charm, from whose roof protruded the metal pipe of a wood-burning stove; it pumped gray smoke continually all that winter.
For days we smelled oil. When they finally towed the car late that night the odor grew stronger — all of it had spilled out by then and made a thin, slick trail along the street, away from the tulip tree, toward the nearest town. The largest pool spread in the street in front of our house and the smell seeped into the air and became for us synonymous with the event — the imagined taste of it, its dark, syrupy smell. I thought I’d never get it from my nostrils; I imagined I smelled it in the folds of my sweaters and on the fingertips of my gloves.
In the days following the accident a small makeshift memorial grew up around the tulip tree — a wooden cross, nailed of spare wood by some stranger’s hands, cheap bouquets of flowers wrapped in plastic, notes thumb-tacked to the tree bark, a gaudy religious figurine. I left it for almost a week. At the time, it was Leann I believed I was thinking of. I wanted to erase this for her; to have the memory scabbed over by others — by a flurry of ice-skating and movies, special treats and excursions. I wanted none of us reminded of it — daily, hourly, every time a car slowed at the opening of our driveway. I went out one night when she was sleeping, without telling Mark, taking with me a large cardboard box and a hammer. I pried the notes from the tree, gathered up the flowers, the cross, the garish Virgin, and packed them all away.
Mark looked up when I came in with the box. He didn’t say a word but took it away and disappeared out the back door, toward the garage. When something else appeared at the base of the tree, I went further. I penned a note: This tree is private property. Please do not deface it. On the following day I discovered our housekeeper, Daniela’s mother, bringing another religious statue and carrying it out to the road. I fired her on the spot. The note I pinned to the tree remained there through several seasons, growing stiff and battered, the ink blurred and running.
At night, sitting at the edge of Leann’s high bed, my feet on the stepstool she used to climb into it, I told us both outrageous lies. That the boy had recovered, that she was mistaken in what she thought she’d seen; that she, Leann, would never die. Her face — even then it could be stern and remonstrative — surrounded by pillows with blue sprays of wildflowers, was mostly expressionless. She said little. Occasionally her forehead would crease, her eyes skeptical — that scar between her eyes the only real betrayal of her thoughts. Mark accused me of trying to alter what could not be changed, of whitewashing, compensating. Our fights grew acrimonious, the tension in our home thickened.
We separated briefly, although the accident was no longer the primary cause — it was as if we had opened a cellar door and found that what was inside was rank, moldy and spoiled. I was distant, I learned, and moody as a cat, selfish and sexually aloof. I told Mark he was childish, that his sulking left me cold, the touch of his fingers on my skin — cool, thick as sausages — made it crawl.
Mark stayed, for a time, above the office he had been renting in town. For Leann, we resorted comfortably to lies, telling her that he was on an extended business trip, or working so hard at his new business that it was easier to sleep at the office. In my memories of this time, there is no indication of whether she believed us or not. I had the dogs, with whom I walked to exhaustion, and I often did Leann’s homework for her in the evenings, my patience was so thin, my need for distraction so great. The smell of oil dissipated, lingering only in my memory, becoming something my nose twitched and tested for, finding only the cleanness of new snow, the smell of fir trees. But the ice remained on the lakes, the running water still halted in its rippling tracks, often my prints — the waffled marks of my hiking boots — and the pawprints of the Labradors were the only marks not made by deer or coyotes, squirrels, the forest’s other unseen inhabitants.
I began walking on the ice while Leann was in school. I had seen the steps of deer crossing the expanse of lake, once even the thin blade marks of some skater, so I knew it must be solid, many inches thick. Near the water’s edge my boots sank in slush, alarming me, but then I stepped onto a soft snow cover that made the water feel safe as a field, solid as my own alabaster lawn. From the middle of the lake, the view was new, foreign, though I knew the place as well as my own house. The dogs tucked their tails and whined, following me reluctantly, their wiser instincts telling them that water was water, and not to be fully trusted, whatever its appearance. But in the center of the frozen lake we were ringed by trees — by land that circled and seemed to hold us in a great white palm.
I walked on the lake until even the dogs would not follow anymore but stayed on shore, pacing and crying. There were fissures by then and the ice shifted under my feet and grew soft. One day, when the sky was a bolt of blue cotton, I began to hear something new. Birds were at work in the trees and above me a small hawk was gliding, his white undersides spread, attuned to the lifts and vagaries of air. What I was hearing was water running and stirring under my feet, just below the ice. I saw a peak just beyond where I stood, a place where the ice was rupturing. A frozen wave, lifted by the movement of the water: the inevitable return to motion, the desertion of that lovely, temporary stasis. I didn’t go out on the ice again and the dogs were grateful; within days the ice split and the lake swelled. We jumped newly made waterfalls and sank to ankles and hocks in the mud that came to characterize that particular spring.
Mark came home when the ice broke, an irony apparent to no one at the time. He came in one night with his briefcase and resumed his nightly routine. He checked Leann’s homework and set the table for dinner. He kissed the side of my nose and nuzzled the dogs, who had missed him terribly. We fell back into our old ways — we were never people for lengthy postmortems of arguments. The rift between us closed like water rising over ice, obscuring the shards of truth we had flung at each other, smoothing our lies and disappointments, returning us to the people we were most comfortable being — calm and unruffled, fluid but contained.
Part Five
Enter to win a copy of Beth Helms’ new novel, “Dervishes,” by joining the FiveChapters mailing list with a note to editor@fivechapters.com.
In the hospital cafeteria, the light had changed. A collection of debris was gathered on the table in front of us, where we were still sitting, hands touching lightly across the Formica. In my pocket were the shreds of this morning’s pamphlets, my car keys, some coins that had come back as change from all the coffee we had consumed. Leann seemed drowsy, although she’d had as much coffee as I had.
Shifts had changed in the building; I had watched the hands of the clock sweep its face again and again. The room was strangely serene, in that pause between the evening’s disasters — gunshots and bloody accidents, coronaries and intentional violence — and the morning’s rush — flu’s and earaches, appendectomies and other daylight emergencies.
It was past midnight. It occurred to me that I had never listened to my daughter talk that way: without interruption, without advice, without a glossing over of certainty. In truth, for much of the evening I had been lost in my own thoughts; the sound of Leann’s voice became background, as unintrusive as elevator music. It is a strange moment when a parent takes their hands off the lives of their children–you can imagine the wheel shimmying between their untested fingers, and all the unanticipated hazards: the other drivers, the wildlife, trees that will come out of nowhere.
Something occurred to me. “Was this an accident, this?” I waved my hand vaguely, taking in the hospital, her, the whole situation. “Or not?”
“That’s a good question,” she said. She seemed genuinely interested in the answer. “I don’t know exactly.”
“In that case,” I told her, “you should lay off the coffee.”
She thought it over. “That’s probably true.” She took her empty cup and upended it on the table.
One of the things I have agreed with tonight is that she is most certainly going to die. As will I, her father, as did the two yellow dogs I coaxed onto the ice all those years ago. In the strange, dark evenings that followed the accident I told her she wouldn’t. I swore it. The look on Mark’s face, overhearing these conversations, shamed but did not deter me. Now I tell Leann, far too late, that that episode — her father’s absence — was entirely my doing. I even tell her about the box of things I callously took from the tree, about what I thought I was doing.
She said, “I know that already.”
I was surprised. “How?”
Then she told me a story that shocked me, and it was clear that many things in my life, and that of my family, have happened without my knowledge. It was the feeling I’ve had seeing the people I know best out in the world without me — passing Mark standing on a street once when we were separated, or seeing Leann slouched in front of a movie theater with some friends. My heart skipped, to see these creatures I thought of as my own, moving animatedly, confidently through their lives with no guidance from me. For an instant it was if I didn’t exist at all; later I realized that thinking was backwards — it was they whom I’d believed were suspended somehow, somewhere, outside my presence. It was the look on Sam’s mother’s face in the woods that day, when her son became a complete stranger right before her eyes: a boy she had diapered, now capable of seducing a grown woman.
Leann told me that she and Mark had taken the box to Keith’s parents. I didn’t believe her.
“It’s in the garage,” I said. “I saw it recently.”
“You didn’t,” she told me. “We gave it to them.”
“We didn’t even know where they lived. You couldn’t have.”
But it unfolds, this strange information — now nearly a decade old. She and Mark had learned where the family lived and knocked on their door one evening. The mother, in a bathrobe and those thick-rimmed glasses, had stepped into the porch light and greeted them without recognition, without warmth. She had taken the box from them and said some harsh words about us, and especially about me. Leann remembers Mark stepping inside the doorframe for a moment: she described his concerned face, his eyebrows beetling, that expression he has when he’s defending us.
I shook my head back and forth, a beat too long.
“What did the house look like? Which house?”
Leann’s face was smooth, the slash between her brows not visible; her thin, pale forearms at rest on the table. I studied the veins that were most prominent. Purple rivers, all those small geographies, written in the flesh of her arms. The bandage from the morning was crumpled into a sticky wad on the table. The cotton pad, with its rusty stain, lay between two plastic coffee stirrers.
The fluorescent lights hummed above us; at a table nearby residents were rolling unlit cigarettes between their fingers, slurping artificially sweetened coffee. I heard the clash and clatter of trays on metal rails, the leering laughter of some young man behind me, the soft noise of hospital shoes shushing the floors.
“Which house?” I asked her again.
She cocked her eyebrows, raising one. The slash emerged and then vanished. In truth I am responsible for that mark — I had dropped her one morning, in some retrospectively trivial mayhem — but in the version of the story I told to others she had rocked the highchair over, having a tantrum.
“I don’t remember,” she said.
Actually Leann was never a tantrum-throwing child — her preferred method of resistance was mulish passivity, the kind dogs use when you suggest a bath, that ability to hunker down, to inexplicably increase their body weight four-fold.
“Try,” I insisted.
She closed her eyes, squinting her face up. “Blue?” she said. “Colonial? Sort of. With some kind of spaniel? Springer?”
“No,” I said, “That’s not it.”
She opened her eyes slowly, slid her brows up. “How would you know?” she said. “I was there.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.” But I don’t.
She put her hand on mine over the table. It was amazing, that hand of hers, lying across mine; it was one hand doubled, but also, it was not mine at all. Looking at it I saw Mark in her fingers — the turn of her thumb, the unpolished nails that were bigger, stronger than my own.
In the car driving home I asked her something. “Did you ever intend to go through with this?”
“Yes,” she said. “Or no. I definitely stole their smock though.”
All the way home I was still thinking of the wrong things — of finding that box, of proving them wrong. I thought of that boy Sam and the lunch date I had made but hadn’t kept. On the other side of the gearshift, Leann tripped through her own thoughts. And while I should have been concerned with the conversation that would soon take place in my living room, of the look Mark would wear and the way the house would change, the things that needed to be unearthed from the garage, I could not halt that mental inventory. In the box labeled: ‘Tree’ — I had scribbled that upon walking into the house — were the notes in written in unfamiliar hands, flowers long dead, a photograph of the boy Keith. Now his features will forever be those of all boys–all those lost or leaving: the Jims, the Sams, the Marks. I remembered seeing the box last between the Christmas tree stand and a ladder; it was under another box filled with random photographs, stacked with earthenware pots, a coil of garden hose, a flimsy saw.
Leann, the slightly pregnant girl slumped in the seat beside me, was already talking about Australia, of its equivalent dangers and beauties. Her voice trailed off and returned; her fingers plucked the leather of the headrest.
“Jim says that in Australia just about every third thing can kill you. Isn’t that fabulous?”
“Marvelous,” I said.
My headlights rose and fell, in time with Leann’s meandering soliloquy. I took the turns slowly, dimming my lights, anticipating the landmark that meant home: the tulip tree. When we turned into the driveway I saw Mark in the window, behaving like the dogs, the new Labradors, black ones now. He was throwing himself at the window, a parody of their lovely, welcoming insanity.
