That night my dad flipped aimlessly through the network channels, something he never does.  The TV’s usually just stuck on PBS.  We happened upon a news entertainment show.  A woman’s pleasant voice said, “Celebrating birthdays on December twenty-second are Ralph Fiennes, who turns thirty-six today; Diane Sawyer, fifty-three; and the Bee Gees’ twin brothers Maurice and Robin Gibb, both ‘stayin’ alive’ at forty-nine.”

Suddenly my dad bolted from the couch, leaving the TV on (something else he never does), and went to his room.  I gave him his space, but through the doorframe I saw him open the closet and go inside.  He stayed in there while two more sitcoms played, then got ready for bed.

Once I heard his apnea kick in, I got up from my bed and crept over to the closet door.  It was still open an inch or two.  I wedged my nose in the crack and pushed it open until the automatic light inside turned on.

It was a rare walk-in Manhattan closet, and the cedary scent of his clothing around me was like him cradling me in his arms.  I looked around, unsure what had kept him in here for so long.

Then I spotted, hidden underneath a row of hanging pants, a warped Adidas shoebox, its top slightly askew.

He was still snoring, and the light from the closet was barely penetrating the room.  I nosed the shoebox top a little, and it slid off.

There was a stack of pictures inside, but I could only see the top one.  It was a Polaroid of my smiling mother, younger and prettier than I could ever remember, leaning over a table, about to blow out a candle planted in a cupcake like a watchtower.  Snow crusted the panes of a backgrounded kitchen window I didn’t recognize.  In the frame’s center, my dad’s sheepskin coat hung on the back of a high chair, haloing like a lion’s mane the downy reddish-brownish-blond pate of a drooling infant.  Swaddling his body was a blue blanket — my blue blanket.

I couldn’t see any more pictures beneath that one, and I didn’t want to.  I got out and closed the door with my paws.  The bedroom darkened suddenly.  I lay down on my bed and smelled the Kung Pao leftovers my dad exhaled through his mouth.

*   *   *

My mother ran around greeting guests and checking in with the caterers at her New Year’s Eve party.  After I’d fruitlessly humped Trevor a second time earlier in the week, she caged me for a full day, with just one walk.  Since then I’d left him alone — I had to, he’d practically moved in by now — and my reward was free rein of the apartment during the party, except her bedroom, which she kept closed to store the guests’ coats.  I hid under the dining room table through most of it.  I didn’t want a bunch of drunken idiots manhandling me.

She introduced all her friends to Trevor.  His broad shoulders filled out his tux, and she’d been riding the exercise bike an hour daily the last two weeks to fit into her new black Donna Karan dress.  She was wearing this incredible vanilla perfume for special occasions.  My dad, I knew, would be watching “The Honeymooners” marathon on Channel 11, like he did every New Year’s unless my mother forced him to attend a party.

After a while the adults gathered around the TV and counted down like children playing tag.  My mother and Trevor and all the other couples kissed as noisemakers assaulted my ears.  He whispered in her ear, and she nodded and smiled, a full teeth-baring I hadn’t seen from her in a long time.

When the buzz subsided, my mother tinkled her flute of champagne with a fork in the center of the room.  “Everyone, I have an announcement.”  She transferred her glass and fork to one hand, then slid the other onto Trevor’s lower back and rubbed his black coat.  I had a bad feeling in my stomach, and my nose suddenly went warm.  “The New Year seems the appropriate time for this.”  She looked around expectantly, proudly.  “All of our dear friends here are invited to my and Trevor’s wedding on the first day of spring.”  Everyone applauded, and my mother kissed Trevor again.  Shelly and the other women hugged her, and all the men shook his hand.

I walked up next to my mother, who continued fielding well-wishers on the Oriental rug, and, unnoticed by the adults towering over me, evacuated everything I’d eaten and drunk that day.

Only when the last few droplets of urine were dribbling out did the stench hit her.  She inhaled sharply, as if punched in the stomach.  “No!” she said, ignoring her coworker Amy.  “Oh, you bad dog!  You bad, bad dog!”

She yanked me by the collar past the guests into the bedroom, calling me a bad dog the whole way, and closed the door behind us.

One hand still on my collar, she turned on her bedside radio and cranked up the volume.  An unidentifiable classic rock guitar solo screamed out and yielded to a DJ’s obnoxious baritone.  If I was going to be locked up with the radio on to muffle my potential barking, at least she could have tuned it to NPR.  I dug my claws into the carpet.

“You may be miserable living here,” she said as she finally forced me into the cage, “but get used to it — you’re as much mine as his.”

I turned around as the vertical spring-lock pins on the door shot into place with a rifle’s blast.  Through its steel bars I watched her stalk to the door in her high heels.  I wasn’t going to let her have the last word.

Baring my teeth, I growled gutturally to warm up, summoned my inner Johnny, and unleashed from within my bowels the loudest, sharpest, angriest bark of my life.

And what came out were three perfectly enunciated words:

I hate you.

I don’t know how it happened.  It was a normal male human’s voice, of indeterminate age, but it issued from my lungs.  My mother’s hand froze on the doorknob.  I could tell she was trying to convince herself it was the DJ, even though he’d already put on “Piano Man,” a song I detest, mawkish tripe my dad would never subject me to.  I bet she didn’t even think about the singer’s name.

The first verse ended as he sang the lines, “But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete / When I wore a younger man’s clothes,” and I thought, as she stood by the door in her black dress and I scented the evaporating trail of vanilla, All you need to do is open up my cage.  Open it up, smother me in your arms, kiss me like you used to, and all will be forgiven, even Trevor.  I’m here.  I’m still here.

I opened my mouth.  Out came a wailing bark.  Her ears winced, and I knew that was it.  She turned the knob and strode out, her heels clacking on the wood like a horse’s hooves, and then I heard only the sound of the door slamming shut.

Trevor came over Friday night for Vietnamese.  He chewed up beef tips and greasy spring rolls without putting his napkin on his lap, passed gas silently without my mother’s noticing, howled at his own jokes, and when she said something amusing, stone-facedly responded, “That’s so funny.”  She picked at her steamed vegetables, no rice.  She had once considered being a chef.

Before dinner I obeyed my mother’s new commands — heel, roll over, give me your paw — like a sycophantic show dog, and was even nice to Trevor.  I waited until they were in the middle of dinner, walked under the dining room table, and humped his bent knee with everything I had.

“Ugh!” Trevor said, trying to shake me off, but I hung on like Odysseus to his mast.  “Get him off me!” he yelled at my mother.

She tried to prise me off his leg, but I had a mission: I was going to come all over Trevor’s Yves Saint Laurent pants.

He stood up and managed to kick me free just before I was ready.  My head knocked against a table leg, and I couldn’t suppress a whimper that came out as pathetically as the squeak from my porcupine.

“Bad dog!” my mother said, shaking her finger and collaring me.  “Bad, bad dog!”

Stooped over, she led me to the bedroom, left, and closed the door.  I heard a tone of apology to Trevor and what sounded like angry words from him.  He repeated the word “tomorrow” a few times, but the rest was muffled.

He left right after dinner.  She yelled at me after he left, but whatever: mission accomplished.

That night, as I lay on the bathmat next to the belching radiator, she cried in the shower.  She hadn’t done that in there since my dad had moved out, when she did it every Monday morning after he left for school.  I watched her weep through the strawberry candlelight.  (I don’t have a problem seeing my parents nude; they see me naked all the time, and sleeping in their bedroom for years desensitizes you pretty quickly.)  The showerhead sprayed right in her eyes, so I couldn’t see the tears, but her sobs were loud and spastic.  I couldn’t believe Trevor could inspire this, of all people.  After a few minutes I left for my love seat in disgust.

The next day my mother retrieved my cage from the closet and locked me inside after my midday walk.  She called down for Ricardo, who helped her carry me out to a cab.  “Seventy-ninth, between Amsterdam and Broadway,” she told the Haitian driver.

The vet.  I’d had my checkup recently and was in excellent health.  There was only one reason to go there.

My cage was facing the taxi door, away from my mother.  I turned around and frantically clawed the heavy-duty plastic wall, as if buried alive in a coffin.  I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear her shift in her seat and her perfume’s jasmine base weakened, and I knew she had turned to look out the window.  I yapped and growled the whole way over, and when the driver asked her to keep me quiet, she just whispered, “Sorry.”

*   *   *

I was back at my dad’s.  Buried in work, he still hadn’t noticed, despite my sluggishness and lack of appetite the first few days, and I wasn’t really eager for him to see; it was humiliating.  I never realized how much I felt them — their mere presence, that is; I wasn’t a self-licker — until they were gone, two plucked cherries.

He was on Christmas break, but was grading at his desk.  The phone rang.  He didn’t have a cell.

He checked the caller ID and picked up.  “Hello,” he said.  I couldn’t hear the other line, so I moved closer.  “That’s tonight?  I thought it was tomorrow…Look, I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can be ready for a black-tie Christmas party in five min — I was going to rent it tomorrow… Karen, calm down and just listen—”

He got an earful for a minute; I still couldn’t parse the words, but I knew what that pitch meant, and he began secreting a sour, anxious odor.  “Wait, I’m coming down,” he said.  He put on his slippers and left the apartment.

He returned two hours later looking a decade older.  I recognized that expression from his fights with my mother.  He slumped in his desk chair and intertwined his hands atop his balding head.

I went over and put a paw on his leg.  He ran his elegant fingers through my white chest tufts.  I slept atop his bed that night.

*   *   *

The next day was warm for December and he took me to Central Park, one of the first times since he’d moved.  Though it was a Saturday, a semi-grassy spot next to Sheep Meadow was all ours, and he threw a grubby tennis ball every which way for me to chase down.  We intermittently played the game where we face each other and make a lot of lateral moves to deke the other out.  I’m not sure who’s trying to catch whom, but you really work up a sweat.  He can’t do it for as long now as he used to, though.

We kept going until the sun went down, the airborne ball half-illuminated in revolution like a tiny planet.  When it finally got too cold, he whistled and clapped his hands on his pants.  I scampered over and burst into his arms.

He pretended to be bowled over and we wrestled on the ground.  “Arghh!” he roared.  “Acquiesce to my Herculean show of strength!”  He still has a decent sense of humor.

Then he stopped.

“What the hell?” he said, as I lay on my back.  He inspected my shorn groin.  “How could she do this without asking me?”

He quickly leashed me and we marched out of the Meadow, west.

*   *   *

“Hello, Mr. Alterman,” Ricardo said as he opened the front door for us.  “I thought you leave Wally here on Sundays?”

“I’m going upstairs,” he said.  He was usually much nicer to Ricardo.

He was silent in the elevator but he tapped his foot.  The elevator dinged at the eighth floor and we got out.  It must have been strange for him to tread on the red-and-black hallway carpet again.

He banged his fist against the door several times.  No one answered, so he banged even harder and rang the bell a few times.  Finally we heard footsteps and the turning of several locks.

Trevor opened the door in his pajamas.  Even my dad could sniff out the sex from his crotch.

“Oh,” he said.  “Hello.”

Seeing Trevor punctured my dad’s anger, and when he recovered his voice was flat.  “Is Pamela home?”

“She’s in the shower.  You want to wait?”  I hadn’t realized how much bigger he was than my dad — a real athlete’s frame.  His day’s worth of stubble also seemed manlier, somehow, than my dad’s cropped beard.

My dad tried to peer past Trevor, not for my mother, I think, but just to see the apartment he’d lived in for seven and a half years.  “I’ll email her,” he said, the words shrinking into his throat.

He turned, but the elevator had already gone down, so we had to wait there a full minute while Trevor stood in the threshold, not yielding any ground, the sound of the shower audible to us all through the open bathroom door.

My dad’s eyes were riveted on the floor-number lights as they changed haltingly.  I wished I could have said something, told him that Trevor was an asshole, that mom was only with him for the security and out of fear of being a lonely divorcée, that I bet she’d take him back if he promised to be good and make things work.

Yet even I knew the last part wasn’t true, and all I could do was thump my stubby tail on the carpet like an up-tempo metronome.

My dad started dating Karen, the Jack Russell’s mother.  They watched foreign films at the Angelika and dined at hole-in-the-walls in the outer boroughs, satisfying my dad’s twin loves of multiculturalism and thriftiness.  I think she was slightly allergic to me, because whenever she was around her eyes were rheumy, though she never mentioned anything.  Her armpits sweated a lot and she used a men’s sports antiperspirant to cover it up.  She seemed like a good match for him, insofar as he had a good match.

The Jack Russell, however, I couldn’t stomach, and unfortunately Karen wasn’t allergic to him.  His name was Tommy, and he was a spoiled little shit if I ever saw one.  They forced us into long walks and dog runs together, and he was constantly boasting to me and other dogs we encountered about the gourmet biscuits his mother fed him from some boutique in California called Dog-Eat-Dog-Eat World.  I wasn’t quite sure how Karen, who worked at the Met in some administrative capacity, afforded them, but when she walked ahead of me I noticed her sad, cheap shoes that smelled like mushrooms.  Even well-intentioned mothers can produce brats.  A lot of it’s out of their hands.

One interminable Saturday together along the putrid East River, Tommy finally mustered the curiosity to ask me about myself, sort of.  “What kind of treats does your daddy get you?”

“Milk-Bones,” I said.  I considered mentioning it was the variety pack, but knew it would smack of overcompensation.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Sucks to be you,” he said, lifting his left hind leg so the urine pooled around his front paws.

“At least I still have my testicles,” I said, unable to bite my tongue.  It was true; my mother had always wanted to breed me so we could have puppies, but my dad said one dog was enough, so the compromise, I guess, was that I got to keep my balls, just in case.

“What’re testicles?” Tommy asked.  It’s surprisingly hard to insult someone whose collar carries more ballast than his brain.

Trevor started sleeping over on weekends.  I growled whenever he neared me, and he soon learned to keep his distance.  When he was there they moved my bed to the living room.  I could still scent his piss when he went in the middle of the night — always reeking of the scallion cream cheese he slathered on his bagels in the mornings.

My mother was showering before they went out one Tuesday night to Lincoln Center.  Trevor was a classical buff and loved lecturing my mother on the subject, who feigned enthusiasm for it.  “Listen to this movement,” I once heard him say to her, his eyes clenched in ecstasy.  “Poetry.”  My dad would occasionally listen to jazz on a low-watt station for background music, but he wasn’t a music lover.  I suppose it was something she liked about Trevor, or at least could brag to her friends about — “Oh, Trevor just adores Schubert, too.”

Trevor was watching the Knicks game while sipping Chardonnay.  I was lying on the rug pretending to be asleep.

The Knicks called a timeout after yielding a string of unanswered points.  “Who’s in charge of this stupid team?” he said to the TV.  “Never shoulda let Riley go.  Downhill ever since.”

He looked away in disgust and down at me.  “All right, dog,” he said.  “Let’s make nice.”  The Chardonnay bottle was half-empty.  My mother takes a long time in the shower.

He got down on all fours in the beige chinos he stored at the apartment, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and tentatively patted my back.  I sprang up, turned, and with a violent bark snapped my jaws right near his hand.  I could’ve bitten him if I’d wanted.

“Jesus Christ!” Trevor said, pulling back and examining his spared fingers.  “Dumb goddamn beast.”

I maintained dominant eye contact to let him know I didn’t give a fuck what he called me.  When my mother came out of the bathroom he ran to her immediately.  “Wally tried to bite me,” he said, closer in tone to a whiny child than he probably would’ve liked.

“Oh, my God!”  She cinched the towel under her armpits.  “Really?  Did he get you?”

“I think he nicked me a little.”  It took all my restraint not to lunge at his deceiving throat.

“Poor baby,” my mother clucked.  “Where’d he get you?”

“My arm,” he said.  His forearms were like black shag rugs; you couldn’t have seen the teeth marks of a wolverine.

She jutted out her bottom lip and made an excessive frown.  “Would your boo-boo wike a wittle kiss?” she said, her voice rising several registers.

“My boo-boo would wuv a wittle kiss.”  If they’d fed me dinner yet, I’m sure I would’ve vomited.

She kissed his arm a few times in various spots, then pulled him into the bedroom.  In a few seconds I heard violins from NPR on full blast, and the light in the space under the door went out like a snuffed candle.

*   *   *

She called my dad that week and told him I’d started growling at people.  I sat on the sofa so I could hear his voice.

“He never growls at people on the street with me,” he said.

“Well, he growls at friends of mine in the house.”

“Which friends?”

“Shelly, for one.”

“I don’t remember him growling at her before.”  He was silent for a few seconds and cleared his throat unnecessarily.  “Maybe he’s being territorial.”

“Whatever the reason, I want him to get some obedience training.  The Y has a three-hour session Thursday night.”

“Absolutely not.  Those programs thrive on cruelty.”

“This one isn’t like that, and I’ll be there the whole time.  I can’t have him terrorizing guests.”  I badly wanted to interrupt, to somehow signal that she was being dishonest, but if I so much as yelped it would be further proof of my insubordination.

“And how much does the privilege of canine Nazification cost?”

“I’ll pay for it.”  Which meant Trevor would pay for it.

“I can pay for half,” he offered, and I almost fell off the couch.  My dad isn’t one to pass up freebies.

“No.”  Using her metallic reflection on the back of the remote control, she yanked a strand of gray hair her hairstylist had failed to dye blond.  “This is clearly a problem only with me.”

He acquiesced without much of a fight.  A year ago he never would have let her do this to me.

*   *   *

Chuck “C-Squared” Conti, a few inches above five feet in thick-soled shoes (he’s not fooling anybody, least of all those of us near the ground), an open-collar shirt exposing a silver necklace buried in a thicket of chest hair that crawls up his neck like ivy, in his perpetually constipated voice, on discipline:

“You gotta show the canine who’s boss.  Masters, you gotta! Or else you know what that canine’s gonna do?  He’s gonna show you who’s boss.  That’s the C-Squared equation for discipline, masters.”

Chuck on housebreaking:

“Masters, how do you stop a canine from going pee-pee and poo-poo in your house?  You don’t housebreak; you will-break.  To clarify, because it confuses people: meaning you break the canine’s will, not that you, the master, will yourself break.”

Chuck on barking:

“Canines should be seen and not heard.  The C-Squared motto?  ‘The more they bark, the more you ignore.’  It doesn’t rhyme, but you’ll remember it.  I get masters telling me, ‘Oh, oh, I just can’t ignore him when he’s barking.’  You know what I tell them?  ‘Hey, master, do you want a canine, or do you want a dog?’  Because a dog barks; a canine obeys.”

I’ll never get those twenty-one dog-hours of my life back.

During a coffee break, as our mothers chatted, I talked to a hyperactive bulldog named Johnny, who had some kind of bumpy rash on his chest, like an archipelago of superfluous nipples.

“You don’t want that motherfucker having kids with her, do you?” he said after I told him about Trevor.  “Here’s what you do.  Tonight, while he sleeps, you’re gonna pull away the blanket with your teeth, ever so slowly, and sic ‘im in the balls!”

“They keep the door closed,” I said.  It was a dumb idea — my mother had threatened me with a muzzle if I ever tried to bite him again — and I also didn’t want to reveal to Johnny that I wasn’t a biter by nature.  Rescued from a pound, he mistakenly assumed I was a ruffian like him and unlike the other coddled Upper West Siders, many of whom were leashed to Hispanic nannies.  I kind of enjoyed the association.

“Okay, okay, how ‘bout this,” he said, twirling in circles to help himself think.  “You hide in the shower, right?  You wait ‘til he comes in to do his thing.  Then, just when his pants are down—”

“I sic ‘im in the balls?” I said.

“Tear those fuckers off!” he shouted in a high pitch, leaping and pawing his petite mother’s thighs.

“Down!  Down, Johnny!” she screeched.

Johnny was insane, but he had a point.  I needed to do something.

As I predicted, we didn’t spend much time together that week.  He’d walk me in the morning, again when he got home from school, and once more before bed, all jaunts to the corner and back.  When he was home I’d lie down next to his desk while he prepared lesson plans and graded, and every twenty minutes or so he’d absentmindedly reach down with his left hand and ruffle my neck.  He got a cold on Friday, so I didn’t clamor for a long walk on Saturday; I just let him do that week’s Times crosswords on his couch all day while he sipped green tea with honey.  He didn’t eat too healthily or get any exercise besides our walks, but he took a dozen vitamins every morning, pink horse pills of vitality.

He drove me back home on Sunday and left me with the doorman, Ricardo, while my mother came down to fetch me.  Just before he departed he fed me a bacon Milk-Bone from his pocket.

On Tuesday night my mother talked on the phone with her best friend, Shelly.  “What do you think I should wear?” she asked.  She poked the slightly flabby wing of her bent telephone arm and jittered her left heel near my face, making an annoying swish sound on the carpet.  “I never look good in that. It’s too… it’s too something.”

She didn’t eat much of her Waldorf salad that night, and the next day she skipped her cottage cheese-and-cantaloupe breakfast and munched on celery sticks with peanut butter for lunch.  At night she spent about an hour in the bathroom after her workout, and when she came out she shut the bedroom door to dress, which she doesn’t normally do.

Finally she came out, in heels and a black dress that showed off her arms and calves.  My mother never wears dresses, though she does frequently dress in black, because it’s slimming.  She doesn’t wear other colors too often.  I once heard her tell her old therapist over the phone that she could never even look at the color cyan, because the term for a deoxygenated baby is cyanotic.

Before leaving she opened the hallway closet door and scrutinized herself in its full-length mirror. Rotating to profile, she sucked in and smoothed down some ruffles in the material around her stomach.  A very flat stomach for a woman her age.  She had a shelf full of videotapes whose titles all promised ferric abdominals in workouts lasting between three and eight minutes, and often watched TV or talked on the phone while sitting on a silver exercise ball.

“Well?” she said, and bent down to adjust her heel.

I padded over, my claws pattering the hardwood floor, and licked her right arm, my tongue fine sandpaper on her skin, just the way she likes it.

“Oh, shit!” she said, and recoiled. She looked at the thin ghostly trail of slime above her elbow, sighed loudly, and went into the kitchen.  I heard the sink run and the vicious unraveling and severance of paper towels.

When she approached me she put out her palm like a crossing guard and said, “No… stay!” and swung the front door quickly behind her.

I scampered over to the love seat, my favorite perch when home alone, and surveyed Central Park in the darkness.  I come from a strong breeding line and my myopia isn’t terrible, and my night vision is superb.  (Of course, I do have red-green color-blindness, but I’m pretty good at picking up on verbal cues to know, say, that my pillow’s green, or the hallway carpet is checkered red.)  A roan horse hauled a hansom cab down Central Park West, and a couple in their early thirties huddled under a heavy blanket in the back.  It was a nice scene, especially with the whitish nimbus around the streetlamps like in an Impressionist painting, but when they stalled at the light, I didn’t feel like watching them anymore.

I bounded over when she opened the door three hours later, expecting her to hug me like she usually did when she got home.  But she went straight to the cordless and dialed.  She waited a little, I heard a beep, and then she said, “Shells, I didn’t have my cell on me.  But… very promising.  Details tomorrow.”

I pieced together the story and stats the next day.  Name: Trevor Jenkman; age: 47; vocation: bankruptcy lawyer; marital status: divorced; kids: no; hair: yes; height: six feet; alma mater: Amherst; neighborhood: Gramercy Park; plays squash: twice a week.  Her co-worker Amy at the Y had set them up.  He paid for dinner at Balthazar and gave her a twenty for cab fare home against her objections.  They hugged and kissed on the cheek, and he made sure the driver looked trustworthy before gallantly closing the door for her.  Their next date wasn’t until Monday; Trevor had a very busy schedule.

Monday night I watched my dad read the Times Op-Ed page over his carton of Kung Pao chicken (he didn’t have time to read it in the mornings when he drove to school).  “I can’t believe Safire gets away with this horseshit,” he muttered.  He was talking to himself more these days.  My mother never responded to those kinds of comments, anyway, but at least someone human was listening.

He dropped a piece of chicken on the floor without noticing.  I snatched it up and licked the saucy residue; he’d never get around to cleaning it, and after a while it would get so sticky even I couldn’t mop it up.  The apartment had a minefield of problems — the front door scraped the floor wretchedly whenever it closed, the living room window let in a draft, our octogenarian neighbor’s incontinence suffused the hallway with an odor more pungent than cat urine — and he still hadn’t called the super.

I looked at the microwave clock.  My mother and Trevor were an hour into their date.  I wondered what they were talking about.  Billy?  Probably not — she wouldn’t want to scare him off on their second date.  Their exes?  Same thing, I’d guess, although it’s probably a subject divorced daters laid out on the table right away: their most obvious thing in common.  But it would be hard to talk about their divorce without discussing Billy.  His name didn’t surface in every argument — he hardly came up at all, really, because what can you argue about, other than the crib and smoking—but he was always there, behind every invective, every recrimination, every silence, whether they knew it or not.  I recalled something she told Shelly a few years ago: “Hal has never tried to understand what it was like for me to lose a child.”  At the time I thought she wasn’t giving him enough credit, but maybe she was right.  Every time they watched a movie with a child’s death (a plot device more common than you’d think, when you’re attuned to it), she would turn into a waterfall by the credits, and he’d just rewind the tape and bring her toilet paper to blow her nose with.

At ten he took me downstairs for my walk.  Just outside, by the curb, a wiry woman in a hooded jacket stood with her Jack Russell terrier as he pissed a marking with minor lamb notes on the street.  “Nice terrier,” my dad said.

“Thanks.”  The streetlight glinted off her thick glasses.  “English cocker?”

“Yep.”

“Nice coat.”

My dad scratched behind my ears.  “Yeah, not many are tri-colored.”  I’ve got tan eyebrows.  Big deal.

“I meant yours,” she laughed.  He was wearing the sheepskin coat he’d had forever and wore only when he walked me in cold weather.  “It’s got character.”

“Oh,” he said.  “Thank you.”

I was about to remark to the Jack Russell on the clumsy flirtations of our parents, but he decided that was the appropriate moment to squat.  His mother smiled sheepishly, unballed a crinkly Food Emporium shopping bag with the receipt still inside from her jacket pocket, and scooped it up.  I had to go badly, but held it in once they started talking out of deference to my dad.  Some dogs have no sensitivity to humans’ issues with feces.

“I haven’t seen you around before,” she said, knotting the top.

“I just moved in.”

“Well,” she said, dropping the bag in one of the garbage cans by the entrance and smiling again, “take care.”

“Take care,” he repeated as she and her dog slipped inside the building.

My dad took me for a longer walk than usual that night, all the way around the block and over to East End, and he whistled “Take Good Care of My Baby” to himself.  When we got upstairs he tossed me a Milk-Bone, even though I’m not supposed to have any past dinner.

*   *   *

My dad deposited me with Ricardo on Sunday night, and my mother waited a few minutes to make sure he was gone.  As we went up the elevator she bent down to pet me, then sniffed.  “Did he just give you a Milk-Bone before he left?” she said.  “I can’t believe that man.”

The next day she got me a new chew toy to replace my tattered one.  It was a little stuffed porcupine that squeaked when you squeezed it.  “Where’s your new baby?” she said, hiding it behind her back, then flashing it for a second.  “Where’s your baby?  Where is he?”  She tossed it up to me.  “Here’s your baby!”

I let it drop to the ground, then walked away.  I know when I’m being bought.

She invited Trevor over to dinner on Friday.  He’d come straight over from work and was still in a dark suit and a tie with wavy diagonal stripes.  (I could already picture the GQ sidebar he’d swiped the idea from: “You Are Your Tie: Eight New Patterns for Winter.”  Wavy diagonal stripes meant, surely, that you were “master of your destiny” but weren’t afraid to “go with the flow.”)  I sat by the love seat and pretended to be asleep as she gave him a tour of the apartment.  Even from across the room I could tell he used way too much Eternity for Men.

“And this is Wally,” she said.  “Looks like he’s—”

“Hiya, boy,” Trevor said, and battered my ears with his hairy fingers.  He immediately struck me as possessing inept fine motor skills.  He would never value my mother’s craftwork, although I suppose my dad really only appreciated the fact that she could mend his clothing for free.  “What is he?”

“English cocker spaniel,” my mother said.

I growled, low and sustained.

“Whoa!”  Trevor withdrew his hand.  “Does he bite?”

“Never,” she said, smoothing my back.  “He’s a good boy.”

Trevor backed up a few inches and clasped his hands behind his back.  I could practically taste the fear pheromones exuding from his cowardly pores.

My parents started fighting when I was five.  Or maybe I just became aware of it around then, began identifying the high-frequency notes of hostility in adult voices.  We quickly established a vicious triangle.  I would hear bickering behind what they thought was a closed door, would nudge my way into the room, and, in my own way, try to mediate.  Out of frustration, one would snap at me to shut up; the other would yell not to talk to me like that.  Then they’d fight even harder and I’d slink away.  The door would slam shut a little later, invariably with them on opposite sides, the gunshot sound reverberating throughout the apartment.

Afterwards, as if in recompense, my father would take me on long walks through the park, but I knew it was really an excuse to escape my mother.  He blabbed non-stop, an evacuation of all his resentments, telling me how stifled — that’s the word he always used — she made him feel.  Sometimes he reminisced, with a kind of rueful nostalgia, about when they first got together, before Billy was born and before me.  How they would go to the matinee on Sundays and sneak into a second movie after to save money.  Or how they used to cook elaborate Indian dishes together in the nude, and when whatever chickpea-based stew was simmering they’d fool around in the kitchen.  I mostly kept quiet on these walks.

When we got back he’d toss me a bacon-flavored Milk-Bone, my favorite in the variety pack, and scratch behind my ears, and I’d forget they were ever fighting.  I think he did, too, but then my mother would scream, in shrieks that pricked the stapedius muscles behind my ears, that he was spoiling me and trying to make me play favorites, and it would start all over again.

In the most abject of times I would pull out my “I ruff you” trick, where I put my tongue back against my molars and tilt my head back and bark three times in succession, and it sort of sounds like “I love you” if you’re listening for it.  Once they were fighting, though, they didn’t hear me, or they didn’t care, and I felt pathetic for even trying, because it made one thing painfully clear: My love wasn’t enough of a balm for their blistered marriage.

Not that there weren’t some good times — at one point they enjoyed each other enough to get married, after all — but the divorce the summer I turned seven was eminently foreseeable.  My dad had been sleeping on the brown pull-out for the previous four months.  I split my nights between them.  The first few hours I dozed on my green L.L.Bean circular pillow in my mother’s room, and if it was a cold night or the A/C was on high, she’d cover my body with this little, soft, blue blanket I’d had forever that she’d knitted.  She’d always stroke my back a few times over the blanket — a nice little ritual.  Around three in the morning I’d get up, muzzle the bedroom door open, and curl up at the foot of his bed, on top of the scratchy military-style wool blanket from his college days he insisted on using over the puffy down one for guests.  My blue blanket was a hundred times more comfortable than the wool one, but I had most of the day to make up the sleep.

They kept the wrangling over property pretty civil.  She got the apartment, which they owned and paid low maintenance on thanks to the will of her rich childless uncle, and he got the car, which was only fair because he needed it most days to get to his high school in the Bronx.  Other than that I don’t think there was really much to fight over; you’d be surprised by how few ambiguous possessions a couple can rack up over a decade-plus of cohabitation, which was maybe part of the problem.  My mother bought as much mail-order home décor and clothing as their budget allowed, and I had a hard time remembering my dad’s ever buying anything inedible besides books and school supplies.

He found a one-bedroom on the Upper East Side, way over on York Avenue.  He tried to sell me on the prospect of long walks by the East River.  I’d been there before, though, and it smelled like a fish market, not in a good way.  He claimed we’d still go to Central Park, but I doubted we’d make the seven-avenue excursion that often.

And then one Saturday he piled a few boxes into his gray ’92 Volvo and left, closing the door behind him so quietly, as if afraid of waking an infant, even I didn’t hear it click into place.  My dad wasn’t the type to make emotional farewells, and I suppose he figured he’d see me again soon.

The plan was for me to stay at home until he got his place in order, and then they’d exchange me weekly.  It took him about a month, but I understood — it was obviously a rough time for him.  Meanwhile, it was strange living alone with my mother.  She worked only two and a half days a week at the 92^nd Street Y, teaching knitting and other arts and crafts to elementary schoolchildren, so we’d always spent a lot of time together.  When she watched Lifetime movies about victimized mothers and wives and massaged my back with her fuzzy-slippered foot, nothing was technically different from how it used to be while my father wrote comments on his ninth-graders’ Greek-history-through-literature papers in the study in his meticulous handwriting.  Yet it felt different, in a thousand small ways.  Knowing my dad wouldn’t pass through the living room to refill his coffee mug and glance at the screen and make some crack like, “I find intellectual self-paralysis such a turn-on — I want you, now.”  Or if the phone rang he wouldn’t call out, with Pavlovian predictability, “I’m not here unless it’s Steve,” the history chair.  The place smelled off, less musky without his yellow-pitted undershirts, more citrus and floral notes from the scented candles my mother placed in every room and the backup supply in the linen closet.

When it was finally time for me to switch one Sunday afternoon, my mother got out the leash and whistled.  “Come on, Wally.  Here, Wally,” she said in that high voice she reserved just for me.  I trotted over and she leashed and ruffled me.  “Good boy, Wally!  What a good boy!”  In the elevator, baby-voicing it up even more, she said, “We’re gonna go for a nice long walk across town, aren’t we?  Yes, we are!  Because Hal refuses to drive or pay for a cab!  But that’s not news, is it? No, it isn’t!”  I was afraid she’d bring up his refusal to buy a new crib and mattress for Billy in favor of his niece’s hand-me-down, like she sometimes did during their fights over money.  (His constant rejoinder, one I could smell a mile away, was that she could’ve quit smoking well before she got pregnant.  As far as I could tell from a PBS documentary I once watched with her, the pros and cons of new and used mattresses canceled each other out, and it made no difference how long before pregnancy you quit.)  But she just cited a few more flaws I’d heard before — he didn’t try to relate to her friends, didn’t have any friends himself, was emotionally closed-off, fancied himself intellectually superior to her and anyone who was a bigger financial success — and I sat there silently and watched the elevator floors count down while she petted me.  I wag my tail instinctively when someone pets me, but I focused and restrained myself.  I doubt she noticed, though.

It was a long walk, although my mother’s in tip-top shape for her age — she rides the exercise bike half an hour a day and does bikram yoga twice a week at the Y — so I didn’t see why she considered walking outdoors on a beautiful October afternoon with me a punishment.  If anyone should have been displeased, it was me.  She was always so jumpy on our walks, afraid every passing car would hit me, as if my reflexes aren’t ten times quicker than hers.  She’s not Jewish, but I challenge anyone to find a mother more neurotic.

Excepting her scream of “Asshole!” at a cab that committed the grievous offense of driving within ten feet of us, we arrived without major incident at my dad’s shabby, six-story apartment.  She buzzed 5C, and from my angle I could just see that the directory still listed the previous tenants’ names in blocky label-maker lettering: MARLEY/WILLIAMS.  It was exactly the kind of minor nuisance that bedeviled delivery men and that my dad would never correct.

He came down in a couple of minutes, breathless and wearing his typical lumberjack-meets-’70s-liberal Sunday outfit: jeans with knees pale from a decade of wear, red-and-black plaid flannel shirt, and the same green-striped Adidas he’d had years, long before they unexpectedly became popular, not that he was aware.

I thought my mother would rip into him, like she had over the phone earlier.  But she just handed the leash to him, said, “Don’t feed him ‘til six,” and strolled away.

My father took me inside the building.  Through the chicken wire cross-hatching of the door’s reinforced window, he watched her walk down to Eighty-sixth for the crosstown bus until she vanished.  “I’ve been getting a real workout on these stairs, Wallaby,” he said as he took them two at a time.  “Already lost two pounds,” he wheezed when we hit the third floor, but he looked the same to me — a little paunchier, if anything.  Despite his ostensibly vanity-free appearance, I think he always felt a little insecure about his looks compared to my mother’s, and habitually mocked her obsessive exercising.

His fifth-floor apartment wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.  He’d cleaned it decently so far, and he had all the basics.  The walls, though, were completely bare.  I hadn’t realized my mother had kept all the pictures — the framed museum exhibition posters, the old French liqueur advertisements, the Renoir prints.  No photographs on the walls.

“Just like your other one, right?” he said, showing me my bed.  It was a green circular pillow, though I could tell right away it wasn’t from L.L.Bean when I lay down and the material felt like nubby concrete.

But I wagged my tail and rolled onto my back so my dad could rub my belly.

Emily tracked down her biological father in a small, industrial town in Northern Germany. Henry Bean had ducked out of Emily’s life when she was only six months old, not long after her mother had left him for another man.

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re gorgeous.”

They met for the first time at a bar in his neighborhood. He paid for her beer.

“Thanks,” she said quietly. She did not want to appear to be too happy. Already, she adored him.

He looked nice, Emily’s father. She liked the way he was dressed: a crinkled white linen shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans. His almost long hair fell in his eyes. They had the same sandy brown color hair. He was tall and lanky. Like Emily. His eyes were sad. It looked like he hadn’t shaved in several of days. There was dirt under his fingernails. If he weren’t her father, Henry was just the sort of man she would fall for. She was, in fact, smitten.

“Your mother broke my heart,” he said.

He said it in such a way as if to imply that twenty-four years later, he was still hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said.

Emily knew she willing forgive this man, this stranger, everything. She had been raised by a mother and a father. Her mother had settled down with an appropriate husband, a liberal Jewish banker. Emily had not actively missed the man who sat next to her.

“It was your mother’s idea to get pregnant,” her father said, and then taking a long drink from his beer. “She didn’t consult me, if you can believe that. She went off the pill and flat out neglected to tell me. I mean come on. What kind of cruelty is this? There we were, married, with this howling fussy little baby who doesn’t sleep and she meets someone else?  It’s not that you were a mistake. You weren’t. You were just your mother’s idea.”

Emily had no idea how to respond. She was surprised that this man remembered her so vividly. So unfavorably. He had known her, seen her, held her, and he had left her. Emily sipped her beer. Even in Germany, where the beer was supposed to taste better than anywhere else in the world, Emily still didn’t much like it.

“I’m not sure what you expect of me,” Henry said.

He flipped over his hands, showing her his empty palms.

“I’m broke,” he said.

Emily shrugged. “I’m not expecting anything,” she said. “I’ve never been to Europe before.”

She wondered if this statement could be true. She was twenty-four years old and had never traveled. If her biological father had lived in Texas or Alabama, maybe she wouldn’t have bothered to actually meet him. Maybe she had never dreamed of going to Germany, but it was still part of Europe. There were places she wanted to see: Paris, Venice, Madrid. If things did not work out with Henry Bean, she would travel. She had packed guide books. It occurred to Emily as she sat at the bar, wondering where she would go next, that she was not a person of depth. Those had been the very words of her ex-boyfriend; he had broken up with her not long after she informed him that the marriage of Britney Spears to her backup dancer, the one who had left his eight-months pregnant girlfriend, wasn’t legal.

Emily was surprised her father would think she might want money from him. She was grown. Her expensive college education had been paid for in full. She was a banker’s daughter. Emily forced herself to take another sip of beer. She counted silently to five, and then looked up at her father. He was looking intently into his tall glass of wheat beer. He had long, beautiful eye lashes for a man. She knew little about him, pretty much only what he had told her that same afternoon, when they had talked on the telephone to arrange this meeting. He had married a German woman, they had divorced, but he decided not to return to America. Emily’s mother once said that he was sweet and funny, but he couldn’t make money worth a damn.

Henry Bean. Her father. Who looked like her. Emily was three inches taller than her other father, the man who had adopted and raised her.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “my buddy Otto and I are planning on driving to Amsterdam.”

“Oh,” Emily said. “Okay.”

She was surprised how awful this piece of information made her feel. He was cutting things off before he even got to know her.

“We’re going to buy some pot, go look at the Van Goghs. Would you like to come along?”

Emily nodded. She had been invited. She covered her face with her hair. Tears welled in her eyes, but she blinked them away, hoping that he wouldn’t notice. He might think it meant something to her, this offer, when in fact, it was pathetically easy to make her cry.

“Yes?” he asked. “You want to come?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Ok,” he said. “Good.”

Henry ordered Emily another Pilsner, even though she had only finished half of the one in front of her.

“I’ll drink it for you,” he said.

Part Two

Henry’s friend Otto had gray, shoulder-length hair and wore little round wire glasses. He greeted Emily as if he had expected her for some time.

“The lost child,” he said, staring at her intently. “It is a delight to meet you.”

Emily understood she had been discussed. The idea pleased her. It occurred to her that Henry might have regretted leaving her. Otto continued to stare long and hard at Emily until she blushed. She had hoped to look out the window, contemplate the scenery during the long drive, but wanted to make conversation. Otto was German, but he spoke fluent English.

“What do you do?” he said.

“Do?” Emily said. “Me?”

The truth was she did not do anything. All of her friends from college had gone on to fancy things: grad school or non-paying internships at magazines, high-paying jobs at corporations. Whereas Emily floated from one temp job to the next. She had spent an entire year trying to please the boyfriend who had dumped her, buying seductive underwear to keep his interest, wearing lipstick and high heels, taking him out for expensive dinners.

“I don’t know,” Emily said. “I type, I guess.”

Emily could type fast, seventy-five words a minute, though it was not a skill she was proud of. She did not like the open way Otto stared at her. He seemed to understand, right away, that she had nothing to offer: not to him, her father, or anyone else. The expression on his face was kind, almost pitying.

“What do you do?” Emily asked him.

“I manage the Schloss where your father is staying. He told you about the place?”

Emily had never heard of this Schloss before. Much to her relief, Otto told her, changing the conversation to a subject that was mercifully not Emily. A Schloss, she learned, was a castle. Otto leaned over the back seat and explained to Emily the set-up of the place while Henry drove. “It’s not like an ordinary museum, where you stand back and look. You are not a passive participant here. At the Schloss, you come to experience reality in a brand new way. To unfurl the mind and senses. We have experience stations where you can truly explore the sense: how the ear hears, how the nose smells, the fingers touch, the feet understand the earth, the lungs breathe, the blood pulsates, and the body vibrates.”

To Emily, this sounded like a speech Otto had delivered many times before. Her first instinct was to be cynical. The Schloss, in fact, sounded idiotic to her, but she smiled, nodding her head, pretending to be interested. She wasn’t fooling Otto anyway. He only had disdain for her.

“I like the gongs,” Henry said.

Otto described a dark bar in the basement, a room where you could have drinks in absolute blackness. The bartender was blind.

“This guy here,” Otto said, resting his hand affectionately on Henry’s shoulder, “nearly had a panic attack. For the first time I can remember, he couldn’t finish his beer.”

“It was insanely dark,” Henry laughed. “It was way too dark for me.”

“I would love for you to experience it, Emily. At the Schloss, you get to appreciate senses you’ve only before taken for granted,” Otto said. “I think you would enjoy it.”

“I’d like to,” Emily said. She thought it was possible Otto did not hate her.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’re having a concert. A flute player from Hamburg. She plays some wild stuff. You’ll come.”

“Okay,” Emily said.

She looked out the window of the tiny blue car, at the fields of wheat, the flat European landscape. The cows looked like all the cows she had ever seen before. The autobahn was narrow and Henry drove fast. His car made a dangerously loud put-put noise. Emily sat on her hands. She tried to listen to Otto talk but really she was busy wondering if he was gay. Otto was handsome and somehow delicate. Her father was tall and rough. They lived together in this strange crumbling castle. It was possible that he was her father’s lover. Because they did seem comfortable together, like a couple.

Eventually, Otto stopped speaking, and they drove the rest of the way in silence. Henry pulled the car into a parking lot of a campground, five kilometers before the exit to Amsterdam.

“Here we are,” he said.

He looked at Emily’s confused face, and began to unload the trunk: tents, sleeping bags, a heavy knapsack. “Hotels cost a fortune in this town.”

Emily’s leg started to shake. She had not camped a single day in her life. Her mother did not believe in sleeping on the ground. Emily had no camping gear. She needed to tell them that that she couldn’t stay there, but she desperately did not want to be any trouble. She watched Henry and Otto carry everything to their little plot of grass. They had packed for her. She had her own little gray and blue nylon tent and an orange and purple sleeping bag. Their allotted space was on a patch of grass not far from where they had parked the car. Her tent was next to Otto’s, which was next to Henry’s, which was next to two teenage Dutch boys, who were next to a young Australian couple.

She let Henry and Otto do everything. After they finished setting up the tests, she followed them wordlessly to a bus, allowed Henry to pay first her bus fare, which deposited them in downtown Amsterdam. Emily felt young and small and helpless. She trusted these strange men as if they were her new, gay parents. She was convinced that she loved them both.

Part Three

In a café in Amsterdam, Henry Bean presented to his newly discovered, grown daughter a thick joint and a glass of fresh orange juice.

“This is weed like you have never tried before,” he said. “The buds are so fresh. Smell. See how delicious that is?  You take the first puff.”

Emily had only smoked pot a couple of times in her life. Every time, the people she was with made fun of her for coughing. But her father’s face looked expectant, as if this were her birthday and his heart would be broken if she did not accept his gift. She looked at him. And then she looked at Otto, who had taken off his cable knit sweater to reveal a tie dyed Grateful Dead t-shirt underneath, and she imagined what her mother would say if she could see her now. Emily had been in Amsterdam for less than an hour. She didn’t want to be inside this dark room, getting high. She wanted to be in the bright sunshine, taking it all in. Emily hadn’t known that there were canals in Amsterdam. She thought they were only in Venice.

“The arrogance of America,” Henry had said. His voice had been contemptuous. “They teach you nothing about the rest of the world. Not even simple geography.”

Emily wanted to stand at the edge of a canal and gape. She wanted to marvel at the old stone buildings, the kind that could only be in Europe. She was in love with the cobblestone streets. She wanted to breathe the stink in the air, but Otto and Henry hadn’t given her a chance to catch her breath. They headed straight to a fast-food stand where they bought French fries with garlicky mayonnaise, and then, hunger satisfied, into the dark café where they bought their pot.

“Emily?”

It was the first time her father had spoken her name.

Emily felt herself blushing.

Yes, of course, she was still smitten. Emily hadn’t been sure of her feelings for him back at the campground. She questioned them again while she watched her father devour his French fries, mayonnaise covering his fingers. Who was this man? Why was she here? Her mother had told her that it was Henry’s job to look for her. She strongly advised Emily not to take this trip. She said that no matter the circumstances, she should not give him any money. Emily knew she had been warned. Her mother was right about most things. Emily looked at him, overwhelmed. He would disappoint her, he would disappoint her, he would disappoint her. Henry said her name and she melted.

He was looking at her, stubble on his face, long beautiful eyelashes. Her father was still holding the thick joint out to her. She reached for it.

“Go easy,” he said. “This is some strong stuff.”

She leaned forward so that he could light it, and then Emily sucked in the smoke.  As much as she could. She looked up at Henry, and when he nodded at her, she let it all out, and then, started to cough.

Otto took the joint from her unsteady fingers.

Tears streamed down her cheeks, the back of her throat burned, and as much as she wanted to, as hard as she tried, she could not stop coughing. Her legs were shaking, out of her control. Emily wanted to run and hide. She wished she had never decided to try to find her father.

Henry handed her the glass of orange juice and everything instantly got better. The juice tasted delicious. It was freshly squeezed. It soothed her burning throat. She wanted to apologize for all of her most recent thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am an idiot.”

Otto patted her gently on the back.

“What are you talking about?” he said. “You got a good hit.”

“That’s the purple haze talking,” her father said, grinning. “Terrific stuff.”

Henry took the joint from Otto, brought it to his lips, and took what seemed like a crazy long puff. “This is nothing like the junk you get back home.”  He handed the joint back to Otto. When it came back around to her, Emily shook her head. She wiped the tears off her eyes with a paper napkin. Otto and Henry finished the joint, smoking amiably, without talking, just like they had been in the car, and on the bus, and in the campground, while they wordlessly set up the tents. These men were not judgmental. Emily felt safe and protected around them. It was all right to cry, to cough her head off. Maybe she belonged with these two quiet, older men. Grown up hippies living in Europe. She could be their little mascot, their puppy dog.

On the counter at the bar, there was a round goldfish bowl. The gravel was purple and green. There were two plastic dinosaurs and three orange and white goldfish, swimming round and round.

*   *   *

Emily stood for a long time in front of a Van Gogh painting. It was called “Wheat Field Under Thunderclouds.” Emily was literally dumbstruck. Struck dumb. Because the painting was so simple. So simple but also wonderful and powerful in its very simplicity. The paint was crazy thick, rising off the canvas. The wheat field was yellow and light green and dark green. There were red flowers in the foreground, quick brush strokes, nothing defined. The sky was a smeared blue, with a couple of round, low hanging clouds. And then some random strokes of white. Emily had never seen this painting before. It wasn’t one of the well-known Van Goghs: “Starry Night” or the famous sunflowers. It wasn’t an earless self-portrait. But still, somehow, she was floored. Emily wanted to touch the painting. She wanted to feel the thick swirls of paint beneath her fingers. The depth of the blue sky. She felt as if the field itself could suck her in. She could close her eyes, open them, and she would be in the painting, wandering barefoot through the landscape.

Emily understood that she was high.

She felt as if she had never properly looked at a painting before. She also felt happier than she had ever been. She wanted to share how happy she felt, and looked over to the tall, lean man who stood next to her. She wanted it to be her father, but instead it was Jim Jarmusch, the American independent film director. She recognized his shock of albino white hair. He was staring at the same painting. He turned his head in Emily’s direction, as if to acknowledge Emily’s presence, but then he looked right back at the painting, taking a small but obvious step away from her.

Emily felt hurt, snubbed. She wanted to cry. She wouldn’t have bothered him; she didn’t want his autograph. She loved the painting. It was her right to stand in front of it for as long as she wanted to. Only now she couldn’t. Emily’s moment had been smashed to smithereens, and she knew she had to get away from Jarmusch as fast as she could. Even though she loved his movies. All of them, except maybe “Dead Man,” with Johnny Depp, which had made her fidget all the way through.

Emily practically ran across gallery floor, straight to Otto who she knew would not shun her. Her heart was racing. She didn’t think she could concentrate on Van Gogh anymore, but then she did. This painting was also heartbreakingly beautiful. A simple bedroom, a narrow bed against the wall, a desk and a chair.

Otto grinned at her.

“Do you like it?” he said.

Emily nodded. She didn’t even need to answer because he already knew. He could see it in her face. Emily loved how Otto, who had talked so much about his castle on the drive to Amsterdam, also knew how to be quiet. He held her hand as they stared at the painting. She felt warm and happy, like his little girl.

Part Four

There were no stars in the sky at the campground. Emily could hear Bob Marley coming from the tent next to her. She could smell marijuana smoke in the air. Henry and Otto had finished off another joint, sitting out in front of their tents, but it wasn’t just them. The aroma was all around her. Emily saw bright flickers of light coming from inside tents the campground. If she concentrated hard enough, she could hear the muted sounds of the Australian couple having sex. The cool breeze felt good. Emily wore Otto’s sweater over her own. She closed her eyes and she could see stars in the back of her eyelids.

It was perhaps the strangest, most eventful, interesting, and meaningful day Emily had ever had in her dull, safe life — even considering the fact that Emily had trouble piercing together what had happened. After the Van Gogh museum, they had sat on the grass in a park; Emily remembered looking at her reflection in a pond, she remembered a family of swans swimming in the water. Next, they were in a dark restaurant. Emily drank a beer, and she had been so thirsty that she had been able to finish it on her own, without any help from her father. She must have eaten some food. They had gotten lost on the way back to the bus, and then Emily found herself in a crowded alley, essentially naked women pressing their bodies against the glass window displays. These streets were thronging with men. The red-light district. Emily had been scared. Otto and Henry held her hand until they had made it through the crowds.

They had sat on a bench, drinking beers on the street, tall cans of Heineken’s, while they waited for the bus to come. Her father began to rant about America. And global warming. The war in Iraq. Tax cuts for the rich. And then back to the war.

“One-hundred thousand dead civilians and you re-elect the man,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said.

“Your stinking president is no better than Darth Vader.” Henry Bean was yelling in the street. Emily could not understand this sudden outburst of anger. They had had a wonderful day, she had thought. “He’s no better.”

“I guess,” Emily whispered.

She had an image of Darth Vader in her mind, the hard black plastic suit and the helmet head, but she barely remembered the Star Wars movies. She figured Bush had to be a whole lot worse. She wondered if she should have said this, she wanted to, but Emily was always nervous when she had to make a case for herself. She felt unsure, disagreeing with her father, especially when he seemed to be drunk. She wished that Otto would quiet him down. But he only looked at Emily and shrugged. His look seemed to say, what can we do? She decided that Otto must be the woman in the relationship.

“You guess,” Henry said. “You don’t have a defense for your nation?”

“I didn’t vote for Bush.”

“And none of the Germans were Nazis during the goddamned war. Citizens always place the blame on someone else. It’s incredible.”

It wasn’t fair: that her father was insulting her for being an American, for the wrongdoings of her country. He was also American. It didn’t matter where he lived. He was not one to talk about responsibility. All her life, he had stayed away.

“That’s not fair,” she said.

Emily did not like being compared to a Nazi. She knew that she was not as good a person as she could be. She was aware of a large number of atrocities taking place in the world: genocide, natural disasters, suicide bombers, poverty, AIDS. All of it. But the truth was, Emily really only worried about herself. Was she pretty enough? Was she smart enough? Should she buy a drink when she went out for a meal or stick with water which was free?

“I am not part of the evil empire,” she said, feeling stupid. The balmy spring night had turned cold. There was no bus. There was only the hard bench on which she sat. “I’m not.”

She was grateful when she felt Otto rub her hair.

“You’re fine, Emily,” Otto said. “We know.”

And then, somehow, they were back at the campground. Emily had no recollection of being on the bus. She had woken up only when it creaked to a stop. She was wearing Otto’s thick sweater. It was time to fall sleep, but Emily was stupidly wide awake. She could never sleep in a tent. Her father, it turned out, hated her because of her nationality. It occurred to Emily than the man might very well be an asshole.  Her mother must have had a reason to leave him the way she did.  She must have had many reasons to take such drastic action.

Emily was in a campground somewhere outside of Amsterdam. Because of her father. She wanted to be in a hotel room, lying on a made bed, watching cable TV. She looked at him, his handsome face, the similar features, and she gave him a hopeful smile.

“We had a good day,” Henry said. “Didn’t we?”

He gave Emily a rough pat on the head, zipped open his tent, climbed in, and zipped it back up from the inside. And then he was gone.

She was alone, she realized, with Otto. He leaned over and gently gave her a butterfly kiss on the lips.

“It’s funny how Henry starts talking about America when he gets drunk,” Otto said. “I think he misses the place, you know, so instead of recognizing his sense of loss, he gets angry.”

Otto placed his hand on the back of her neck.

Emily touched her lip.

She wasn’t really sure if her father’s best friend had just leaned over and kissed her. She had been stoned since early that afternoon, and perhaps nothing Emily felt or thought could be taken at face value.

“You’re not lovers?” she whispered. She looked in the direction of her father’s tent.

Otto’s mouth dropped open. He shook his head and then he started to laugh. He laughed so hard Emily was sure he would wake her father and the Australians and everyone else around them. She looked down at his sweater. She felt uncomfortable, knowing that it was his. She had understood the entire day all wrong. She had held his hand in the museum.

“Sometimes I almost feel that way, you know?” he said. “About Henry. We share a lot of meals together. We are comfortable. It’s a good friendship. He’s done a lot of good work at the Schloss. Painting and gardening and giving tours. But since he’s moved in, there has also been some trouble. I have to get on his case to clean up after himself, you know? Do his dishes, clean his paint brushes, and then, I sound like a nagging old wife. He really is lazy, your father, when it comes to cleaning up. But no, Emily, we are not lovers. You really thought that?”

The campground seemed much too quiet.

Emily didn’t notice when exactly the Bob Marley music turned off or the lovemaking Australians had fallen asleep. She could hear her father snore through his tent. Emily wondered if she was still high, even now, hours and hours later. She did not understand her present circumstances. She had wanted Otto to be gay. He would have been her adopted gay stepfather.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said. “I hope I didn’t offend you.”

“Offend me?” Otto smiled. “No. I find you delightful.”

Otto ran his hands through Emily’s hair; he leaned over to kiss her again. She felt his tongue go into her mouth, and not wanting to hurt his feelings, she returned the kiss. But Emily’s thoughts were running wild. This man, Otto, whose last name she did not know, was not her father’s boyfriend. He was German. He had a thick German accent. He was into her. He was also her father’s closest friend. Her father was a belligerent drunk. She wondered if Otto must be a bit of a scum bag. He had to be at least twenty years older than she was. He wore faded tie died T-shirts. But she also remembered how good it had felt, her small hand folded up in his, standing in perfect harmony in front of the Van Gogh. She had held Otto in higher esteem than Jim Jarmusch, whose movies she might never watch again. She was disgusted by Otto. And thrilled that he wanted to hiss her. Emily dislodged Otto’s round glasses, leaning in to kiss him harder. Every time Emily kissed a new man, she felt somehow proud of herself. Otto’s lips were thin and rubbery. His skin was scratchy like sandpaper. She had never kissed an older man before. She had not spent her life looking for father figures. She was not messed up in that particular way.

“Can I come with you?” he said. “Inside your tent?”

“My tent?” Emily said.

She looked over at her father’s tent.

She felt Otto’s hand, softly rubbing her neck. His hand was warm. She closed her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I just want to hold you.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

Emily had had sex with men before just because she wasn’t sure if she wanted to refuse them. She didn’t think of herself as desirable and this made her a little bit desperate. Emily was aware of this. She did not like this about herself. Otto had a nice face, a beautiful smile. Warm hands. While Emily crouched in the corner of the tent, stripping down to her t-shirt and underwear, Otto attached his sleeping bag to Emily’s. She climbed in, looking away, as Otto took off his clothes. He climbed in next to her, also wearing his underwear. Otto slid his arm beneath Emily’s neck, and then he wrapped his other arm over her. They lay side by side, spooned around each other. Now Emily could hear herself breathe. She could hear Otto breathe. She could hear her father snore. She hated camping. She was afraid to move. She closed her eyes, and then she opened them. She was aware of Otto’s hands wandering over her body. Up and down, traveling the length of her legs and then over her chest. Emily felt deeply ashamed of herself. She pretended she was asleep. She wished that Otto would undress her. She sucked in her breath when he slid his hand into her underwear.

The whole thing felt like incest.

Part Five

The next morning, Henry’s car wouldn’t start.

“Are you sure?” Emily said. “Are you sure it won’t start?”

Henry turned the key in the ignition. Nothing.

“What happens now?” she said.

Henry shrugged. He pulled the bag of weed, purple haze, from his jeans pocket. He removed the rolling papers from the glove compartment and in the bright light of the day, he started to roll a joint. The day before, it had been fun getting high with her father. Now she wasn’t sure. She looked at him full of hate. He was a stoner, that was it. She needed to take a shower, to drink good coffee, to get away from these men. Henry passed the joint to Otto. Emily crossed her fingers, hoping that he would refuse. This man, who was almost her lover. He ran a government-funded castle for the senses.

Otto took a hit and then he offered it to Emily.

“Sweetheart?” he said.

Emily did not like the way he had stopped addressing her by her name. She got out of the car; she slammed the door.

Henry laughed.

“Emily’s mother was like this,” Henry said.

The window to the car was open. Emily understood that this comment was intended just as much for her as it was for Otto. Her father was insulting her when she had done nothing wrong. “She had no patience. Had to have whatever she wanted, the second she wanted it.”

Emily started to pace. She decided she was furious. Furious at them both, Henry and Otto, who was not the sensitive hippie good guy he advertised himself to be.

“What’s the hurry, princess?” Henry called out the window. “Where do you need to be? Right now? You have plans? This is how it works, bonding with good old dad. Weren’t you warned about me?  Didn’t your mother tell you? I am a walking disappointment.”

Otto put his hand on Henry’s shoulder.

“Hey man,” he said. “Let’s not go there. Not now.”

Henry shook Otto’s hand away. “Did you know that I dropped you, daughter? I was changing your diaper. You were kicking, howling like a little demon, and then somehow you fell right off the changing table. Splat. You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

Emily sat down on the curb, put her head between her knees.

She did not want to know this information.

“I show the girl her first canal,” Henry said, his voice was growing louder and louder. Emily wondered if he was screaming. She had put her fingers in her ears. “I get her high, I show her a great time and still the girl is unhappy. I’ve shown you all my tricks. And still it’s not enough. I am never enough.”

Emily lifted her head from his knees and looked at him.

He was absolutely right. This man, her father, was not enough, not nearly enough. His eyes were bloodshot. His hair was dirty, his linen shirt rumpled and there was dried ketchup on his collar. She had remembered seeing him only two days ago at the bar. He had been so handsome. She had adored him. But now she knew; he had never loved her. He dropped her on her head when she was just a tiny baby.

“You haven’t tried all that hard,” Emily said.

The words surprised her. They had come out of her mouth. She had said them. All along she had promised herself that no matter what, she would not blame Henry for the past, that she was only interested in the present. But that was exactly what she had just done. She was pissed off, she probably had been so for a long time.

Henry pushed his hair out of his eyes.

He looked at Emily and she saw that she had done it, she had gotten to him. She had made him squirm in his seat. She had actually caused him pain. Henry banged his head against the steering wheel of his car. It bounced off the felt covering and back down again.

“This stupid, stupid, stupid car.”  Henry banged his head on the steering wheel every time he said the word stupid. The tiny car shook. Emily watched, fascinated. Her actions had caused this moment to happen, she had orchestrated her life in such a way that she was here in this parking lot in this foreign country with her father and his best friend Otto. This was her life but it was also Henry’s.

“Stupid,” Henry said. He lifted his head. His face was bright red. Emily could see the braided pattern of the steering wheel imprinted on her father’s forehead.

“Okay,” Otto said. He’d leaned over, grabbed Henry’s shoulders and pushed him back into his seat so that he could not continue to smash his head. “All right. I think that’s enough drama for today. We won’t fight anymore. We’ll deal with the immediate problem at hand, yes?  Let’s get this car fixed, yes?  We’ll find a garage. I saw one not far down the road. We’ll go back to Germany. We’ll show Emily the Schloss. She’ll come to the concert. The flutist from Hamburg?  I think you will enjoy it, Emily. And Henry, you will show her your paintings. Your exhibit. Yes? You two have to get to know each other. Slowly. Okay?”

“Slowly,” Emily repeated. As if she would listen to him, after he had promised that he wouldn’t touch her. Emily had no desire to see her father’s paintings. He had dropped her when she was just a baby. Dropped her on her head. She couldn’t get over that fact.

Otto was able to convince Henry to stop banging his head against the steering wheel. It was Otto who arranged for the car to be towed to a garage nearby. The Dutch mechanic wore a yellow jumpsuit; there was a large red tulip stitched on the back. He was young and he was cute and he smiled at Emily in a way that had to be considered flirtatious. There was a yellow Labrador retriever tied to a tree outside the garage. Emily scratched the dog between his ears, and the dog wagged its tail in delight. She knew that both her father and Otto were watching play her with the dog.

It was almost nightfall before the car was ready.

Henry couldn’t afford to pay the bill.

He asked Otto for a loan.

“I run a non-profit Schloss, my friend,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I spent all my money on the weed.”

Otto looked at Emily. His expression was almost bemused, regretful. Her tall, beautiful father slumped against the wall of the garage. The yellow lab wagged its tail. The mechanic waved the keys to the car.

“Yes?” he said, waiting. “The car is fixed.”

Emily paid the six hundred Euro bill with her credit card. She remembered what her mother had told her, but they were stranded somewhere outside of Amsterdam.

The mechanic handed her the keys.

“No.” She shook her. “Not me.”

She gave the keys to her father.

“This is how it is, kiddo,” he said. They stood there, looking at each other. Her father really was not that much taller than Emily. She had gotten her height from him. Henry Bean touched the tip of her nose.

“We have the same nose,” Emily said.

Henry Bean gave Emily a hug. “You are a real sweetheart,” he whispered into her ear. “I am glad to know you, but now you understand. My life is a disaster.”

Emily did not know what to say. She wanted to be angry, about the money, about Otto, but she only felt sad.  She also wanted to keep on forgiving him for everything. This was her father. Emily climbed into the back seat and put on her seatbelt. The car revved up, as loud and shaky as it had been on the way to Amsterdam. She said a silent goodbye to the yellow dog.

*   *   *

Emily found the flute player from Hamburg profoundly disturbing. She was a tiny woman, wearing a long dress that went all the way down to the floor. Her hair was green, shaved close to her scalp like a soldier. She wore clunky yellow glasses, and she swayed while she played. She was barefoot. Emily was fascinated by the spectacle of this woman who could not possibly be real except for the fact that there she was, standing on a wooden platform, creating high-pitched, atonal sounds from her small silver instrument. The music was so awful it made Emily start to sweat beneath her clothes. She chewed on her hair. She clenched her eyes shut. She was sure that she would have to scream.

The Germans at the Schloss, however, seemed to be enjoying themselves.

The performance had already started when Emily arrived. She had hoped that her father might save her a seat but she could not locate him in the dark. She could see Otto in the front row. His eyes were closed, his head moving to the beat of the atrocious music which was getting worse with every passing second. The flute player had begun to repeat the same series of high pitched notes, again and again and again, like a broken car alarm.

This wasn’t music, Emily decided. It was liquid pain.

Emily rushed for an exit. Instead of leaving the building, she found herself running down a winding passage that lead her further into the Schloss. It felt like a scene from a horror film, the only possible end being her own bloody death. The hallways were dimly lit. The lights were turned off in the actual galleries. With every step, the flute playing receded.

Emily walked into a gallery, feeling along the wall for a light switch.  In the center of the room hung an enormous golden bell.  That was it. The room was otherwise empty. There was enough room for at least three, maybe four more golden bells. The walls needed painting. She looked at her reflection in the bell. Her face was contorted, too long and too narrow. Her skin was shiny. She remembered her father saying that he liked the gongs. Gongs. Why would you go to a museum to play a gong? The place, Emily decided, was idiotic.  She switched off the light and continued through the Schloss. She could hear her footsteps echo through the empty halls.

Emily wasn’t sure what she was looking for, until she found it, down a flight of stairs, next to the sign for the bathroom. Her father’s exhibit. The light to this room was already on, as if she were expected.

Emily wandered back and forth in front of the paintings, not sure what to think. She wished that she was stoned. In Amsterdam, she knew just how to feel. Like the Van Goghs, the paint was spread thick on the canvas. These were abstract paintings, dark and moody and inscrutable. Somehow, still, they seemed appropriate considering the circumstances, a suitable match for the flute playing. These painting were the stuff of nightmares.

“Look who is here. Emily Weinberg. Fruit of my loins.”

Emily screamed.

“Oh my God,” she said, but it was only her father, Henry Bean, standing in the doorway. He was wearing a clean linen shirt, a clean one, and a pair of blue jeans, darker than the faded ones he wore when they met. Emily’s heart raced, terrified that that he would be upset with Emily because she didn’t appreciate his paintings.  Then, she realized that her father could not read her mind. She could lie to him. He was not all powerful. He had no idea what she was thinking.

“I didn’t think you would come tonight,” he said.

Emily didn’t know what to say. She was in a small town in Northern Germany. She had bought a plane ticket, traveled across an ocean. To meet him. He had finished her beer. Emily wanted to believe that she could be happy with Henry Bean and his friend Otto,  in Germany, like she had been in Amsterdam. She had a sudden, wild hope they would invite her to stay. She would never have to type again.

“I like them,” Emily said. “Your paintings.”

“No you don’t,” Henry said. “No one really likes my paintings or I wouldn’t be almost sixty years old, hanging my stuff in the basement of a non-profit castle for the senses. I know my work is good. I don’t have the energy to care about the public.”

“I am not the public,” Emily said. “I am your daughter.”

“Technically speaking.”

“Yes,” Emily said. “Of course.”

“I didn’t pay child support,” Henry Bean said. “Or go to your high school graduation. That is what fathers do. Jonathan Weinberg is your father. I will never repay you for the car.”

“Oh,” Emily said. “All right.”

Though she could no longer hear the flute player from Hamburg, Emily felt as if she had somehow returned to the concert upstairs. There was a loud, persistent beep going off in her head.  She could hear the atonal trills, they were pulsating her brain. Emily tried to blink back her headache. “That doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “The money.”

“Maybe you think it doesn’t.” Henry walked over to her. “But it does. Or it will.”  He tucked a loose strand of hair behind Emily’s ear. “You need some confidence, girl. You need to stand up for yourself. Otherwise, I’ll have to start worrying about you. So where are you going next from here? On your big European adventure.”

Emily bit her lip. He would worry about her? She needed an answer to his question. She had told him, from the start, before they met, that she was traveling. It was probably why he had agreed to meet her.

“Paris?” she said. She would go to Paris. She had always wanted to go.  ”Paris.”

She looked at Henry Bean. His nose, his hair, his eyes. Her genetic blue print. It seemed impossible that their relationship would end because of six hundred Euros and a fight about nothing.

“Do you want to come?” she said. “With me?”

Immediately she realized her mistake. Her father had no money. He did not love her. But maybe he liked her, just a little bit. Emily reached into her pocket and pulled out her wallet. “I have money,” she said.

She caught her breath. She imagined sharing a tiny blue-tiled bathroom in a Parisian hotel. She pictured toothpaste smeared along the sink, dirty socks strewn across the floor. She imagined him sprawled out drunk on the bed while she tried to sleep on a chair.

“We can eat croissants and drink café au laits.”

Emily surprised herself, the way she kept going on. She could not make the ghost of the flute player shut up. There was something wrong with this place. With Otto. With her father. He lived here. This was his life. Emily wanted to go to Paris by herself. She wanted to walk along the Seine, the wind blowing in her hair. She wanted to be lonely, all by herself.

“We could go up the Eiffel Tower, ” she said. “That would really be something.”

Emily looked at her father, imploring him. He closed her fingers over her wallet.

“You are really something,” he said. “You are a lovely girl.”

Upstairs, Emily could hear the sounds of people clapping. The flute player from Hamburg had finished her performance. The noise had stopped, and it was safe to leave.

The next morning, Henry’s car wouldn’t start.

“Are you sure?” Emily said. “Are you sure it won’t start?”

Henry turned the key in the ignition. Nothing.

“What happens now?” she said.

Henry shrugged. He pulled the bag of weed, purple haze, from his jeans pocket. He removed the rolling papers from the glove compartment and in the bright light of the day, he started to roll a joint. The day before, it had been fun getting high with her father. Now she wasn’t sure. She looked at him full of hate. He was a stoner, that was it. She needed to take a shower, to drink good coffee, to get away from these men. Henry passed the joint to Otto. Emily crossed her fingers, hoping that he would refuse. This man, who was almost her lover. He ran a government-funded castle for the senses.

Otto took a hit and then he offered it to Emily.

“Sweetheart?” he said.

Emily did not like the way he had stopped addressing her by her name. She got out of the car; she slammed the door.

Henry laughed.

“Emily’s mother was like this,” Henry said.

The window to the car was open. Emily understood that this comment was intended just as much for her as it was for Otto. Her father was insulting her when she had done nothing wrong. “She had no patience. Had to have whatever she wanted, the second she wanted it.”

Emily started to pace. She decided she was furious. Furious at them both, Henry and Otto, who was not the sensitive hippie good guy he advertised himself to be.

“What’s the hurry, princess?” Henry called out the window. “Where do you need to be? Right now? You have plans? This is how it works, bonding with good old dad. Weren’t you warned about me?  Didn’t your mother tell you? I am a walking disappointment.”

Otto put his hand on Henry’s shoulder.

“Hey man,” he said. “Let’s not go there. Not now.”

Henry shook Otto’s hand away. “Did you know that I dropped you, daughter? I was changing your diaper. You were kicking, howling like a little demon, and then somehow you fell right off the changing table. Splat. You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

Emily sat down on the curb, put her head between her knees.

She did not want to know this information.

“I show the girl her first canal,” Henry said, his voice was growing louder and louder. Emily wondered if he was screaming. She had put her fingers in her ears. “I get her high, I show her a great time and still the girl is unhappy. I’ve shown you all my tricks. And still it’s not enough. I am never enough.”

Emily lifted her head from his knees and looked at him.

He was absolutely right. This man, her father, was not enough, not nearly enough. His eyes were bloodshot. His hair was dirty, his linen shirt rumpled and there was dried ketchup on his collar. She had remembered seeing him only two days ago at the bar. He had been so handsome. She had adored him. But now she knew; he had never loved her. He dropped her on her head when she was just a tiny baby.

“You haven’t tried all that hard,” Emily said.

The words surprised her. They had come out of her mouth. She had said them. All along she had promised herself that no matter what, she would not blame Henry for the past, that she was only interested in the present. But that was exactly what she had just done. She was pissed off, she probably had been so for a long time.

Henry pushed his hair out of his eyes.

He looked at Emily and she saw that she had done it, she had gotten to him. She had made him squirm in his seat. She had actually caused him pain. Henry banged his head against the steering wheel of his car. It bounced off the felt covering and back down again.

“This stupid, stupid, stupid car.”  Henry banged his head on the steering wheel every time he said the word stupid. The tiny car shook. Emily watched, fascinated. Her actions had caused this moment to happen, she had orchestrated her life in such a way that she was here in this parking lot in this foreign country with her father and his best friend Otto. This was her life but it was also Henry’s.

“Stupid,” Henry said. He lifted his head. His face was bright red. Emily could see the braided pattern of the steering wheel imprinted on her father’s forehead.

“Okay,” Otto said. He’d leaned over, grabbed Henry’s shoulders and pushed him back into his seat so that he could not continue to smash his head. “All right. I think that’s enough drama for today. We won’t fight anymore. We’ll deal with the immediate problem at hand, yes?  Let’s get this car fixed, yes?  We’ll find a garage. I saw one not far down the road. We’ll go back to Germany. We’ll show Emily the Schloss. She’ll come to the concert. The flutist from Hamburg?  I think you will enjoy it, Emily. And Henry, you will show her your paintings. Your exhibit. Yes? You two have to get to know each other. Slowly. Okay?”

“Slowly,” Emily repeated. As if she would listen to him, after he had promised that he wouldn’t touch her. Emily had no desire to see her father’s paintings. He had dropped her when she was just a baby. Dropped her on her head. She couldn’t get over that fact.

Otto was able to convince Henry to stop banging his head against the steering wheel. It was Otto who arranged for the car to be towed to a garage nearby. The Dutch mechanic wore a yellow jumpsuit; there was a large red tulip stitched on the back. He was young and he was cute and he smiled at Emily in a way that had to be considered flirtatious. There was a yellow Labrador retriever tied to a tree outside the garage. Emily scratched the dog between his ears, and the dog wagged its tail in delight. She knew that both her father and Otto were watching play her with the dog.

It was almost nightfall before the car was ready.

Henry couldn’t afford to pay the bill.

He asked Otto for a loan.

“I run a non-profit Schloss, my friend,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I spent all my money on the weed.”

Otto looked at Emily. His expression was almost bemused, regretful. Her tall, beautiful father slumped against the wall of the garage. The yellow lab wagged its tail. The mechanic waved the keys to the car.

“Yes?” he said, waiting. “The car is fixed.”

Emily paid the six hundred Euro bill with her credit card. She remembered what her mother had told her, but they were stranded somewhere outside of Amsterdam.

The mechanic handed her the keys.

“No.” She shook her. “Not me.”

She gave the keys to her father.

“This is how it is, kiddo,” he said. They stood there, looking at each other. Her father really was not that much taller than Emily. She had gotten her height from him. Henry Bean touched the tip of her nose.

“We have the same nose,” Emily said.

Henry Bean gave Emily a hug. “You are a real sweetheart,” he whispered into her ear. “I am glad to know you, but now you understand. My life is a disaster.”

Emily did not know what to say. She wanted to be angry, about the money, about Otto, but she only felt sad.  She also wanted to keep on forgiving him for everything. This was her father. Emily climbed into the back seat and put on her seatbelt. The car revved up, as loud and shaky as it had been on the way to Amsterdam. She said a silent goodbye to the yellow dog.

*   *   *

Emily found the flute player from Hamburg profoundly disturbing. She was a tiny woman, wearing a long dress that went all the way down to the floor. Her hair was green, shaved close to her scalp like a soldier. She wore clunky yellow glasses, and she swayed while she played. She was barefoot. Emily was fascinated by the spectacle of this woman who could not possibly be real except for the fact that there she was, standing on a wooden platform, creating high-pitched, atonal sounds from her small silver instrument. The music was so awful it made Emily start to sweat beneath her clothes. She chewed on her hair. She clenched her eyes shut. She was sure that she would have to scream.

The Germans at the Schloss, however, seemed to be enjoying themselves.

The performance had already started when Emily arrived. She had hoped that her father might save her a seat but she could not locate him in the dark. She could see Otto in the front row. His eyes were closed, his head moving to the beat of the atrocious music which was getting worse with every passing second. The flute player had begun to repeat the same series of high pitched notes, again and again and again, like a broken car alarm.

This wasn’t music, Emily decided. It was liquid pain.

Emily rushed for an exit. Instead of leaving the building, she found herself running down a winding passage that lead her further into the Schloss. It felt like a scene from a horror film, the only possible end being her own bloody death. The hallways were dimly lit. The lights were turned off in the actual galleries. With every step, the flute playing receded.

Emily walked into a gallery, feeling along the wall for a light switch.  In the center of the room hung an enormous golden bell.  That was it. The room was otherwise empty. There was enough room for at least three, maybe four more golden bells. The walls needed painting. She looked at her reflection in the bell. Her face was contorted, too long and too narrow. Her skin was shiny. She remembered her father saying that he liked the gongs. Gongs. Why would you go to a museum to play a gong? The place, Emily decided, was idiotic.  She switched off the light and continued through the Schloss. She could hear her footsteps echo through the empty halls.

Emily wasn’t sure what she was looking for, until she found it, down a flight of stairs, next to the sign for the bathroom. Her father’s exhibit. The light to this room was already on, as if she were expected.

Emily wandered back and forth in front of the paintings, not sure what to think. She wished that she was stoned. In Amsterdam, she knew just how to feel. Like the Van Goghs, the paint was spread thick on the canvas. These were abstract paintings, dark and moody and inscrutable. Somehow, still, they seemed appropriate considering the circumstances, a suitable match for the flute playing. These painting were the stuff of nightmares.

“Look who is here. Emily Weinberg. Fruit of my loins.”

Emily screamed.

“Oh my God,” she said, but it was only her father, Henry Bean, standing in the doorway. He was wearing a clean linen shirt, a clean one, and a pair of blue jeans, darker than the faded ones he wore when they met. Emily’s heart raced, terrified that that he would be upset with Emily because she didn’t appreciate his paintings.  Then, she realized that her father could not read her mind. She could lie to him. He was not all powerful. He had no idea what she was thinking.

“I didn’t think you would come tonight,” he said.

Emily didn’t know what to say. She was in a small town in Northern Germany. She had bought a plane ticket, traveled across an ocean. To meet him. He had finished her beer. Emily wanted to believe that she could be happy with Henry Bean and his friend Otto,  in Germany, like she had been in Amsterdam. She had a sudden, wild hope they would invite her to stay. She would never have to type again.

“I like them,” Emily said. “Your paintings.”

“No you don’t,” Henry said. “No one really likes my paintings or I wouldn’t be almost sixty years old, hanging my stuff in the basement of a non-profit castle for the senses. I know my work is good. I don’t have the energy to care about the public.”

“I am not the public,” Emily said. “I am your daughter.”

“Technically speaking.”

“Yes,” Emily said. “Of course.”

“I didn’t pay child support,” Henry Bean said. “Or go to your high school graduation. That is what fathers do. Jonathan Weinberg is your father. I will never repay you for the car.”

“Oh,” Emily said. “All right.”

Though she could no longer hear the flute player from Hamburg, Emily felt as if she had somehow returned to the concert upstairs. There was a loud, persistent beep going off in her head.  She could hear the atonal trills, they were pulsating her brain. Emily tried to blink back her headache. “That doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “The money.”

“Maybe you think it doesn’t.” Henry walked over to her. “But it does. Or it will.”  He tucked a loose strand of hair behind Emily’s ear. “You need some confidence, girl. You need to stand up for yourself. Otherwise, I’ll have to start worrying about you. So where are you going next from here? On your big European adventure.”

Emily bit her lip. He would worry about her? She needed an answer to his question. She had told him, from the start, before they met, that she was traveling. It was probably why he had agreed to meet her.

“Paris?” she said. She would go to Paris. She had always wanted to go.  ”Paris.”

She looked at Henry Bean. His nose, his hair, his eyes. Her genetic blue print. It seemed impossible that their relationship would end because of six hundred Euros and a fight about nothing.

“Do you want to come?” she said. “With me?”

Immediately she realized her mistake. Her father had no money. He did not love her. But maybe he liked her, just a little bit. Emily reached into her pocket and pulled out her wallet. “I have money,” she said.

She caught her breath. She imagined sharing a tiny blue-tiled bathroom in a Parisian hotel. She pictured toothpaste smeared along the sink, dirty socks strewn across the floor. She imagined him sprawled out drunk on the bed while she tried to sleep on a chair.

“We can eat croissants and drink café au laits.”

Emily surprised herself, the way she kept going on. She could not make the ghost of the flute player shut up. There was something wrong with this place. With Otto. With her father. He lived here. This was his life. Emily wanted to go to Paris by herself. She wanted to walk along the Seine, the wind blowing in her hair. She wanted to be lonely, all by herself.

“We could go up the Eiffel Tower, ” she said. “That would really be something.”

Emily looked at her father, imploring him. He closed her fingers over her wallet.

“You are really something,” he said. “You are a lovely girl.”

Upstairs, Emily could hear the sounds of people clapping. The flute player from Hamburg had finished her performance. The noise had stopped, and it was safe to leave.

There were no stars in the sky at the campground. Emily could hear Bob Marley coming from the tent next to her. She could smell marijuana smoke in the air. Henry and Otto had finished off another joint, sitting out in front of their tents, but it wasn’t just them. The aroma was all around her. Emily saw bright flickers of light coming from inside tents the campground. If she concentrated hard enough, she could hear the muted sounds of the Australian couple having sex. The cool breeze felt good. Emily wore Otto’s sweater over her own. She closed her eyes and she could see stars in the back of her eyelids.

It was perhaps the strangest, most eventful, interesting, and meaningful day Emily had ever had in her dull, safe life — even considering the fact that Emily had trouble piercing together what had happened. After the Van Gogh museum, they had sat on the grass in a park; Emily remembered looking at her reflection in a pond, she remembered a family of swans swimming in the water. Next, they were in a dark restaurant. Emily drank a beer, and she had been so thirsty that she had been able to finish it on her own, without any help from her father. She must have eaten some food. They had gotten lost on the way back to the bus, and then Emily found herself in a crowded alley, essentially naked women pressing their bodies against the glass window displays. These streets were thronging with men. The red-light district. Emily had been scared. Otto and Henry held her hand until they had made it through the crowds.

They had sat on a bench, drinking beers on the street, tall cans of Heineken’s, while they waited for the bus to come. Her father began to rant about America. And global warming. The war in Iraq. Tax cuts for the rich. And then back to the war.

“One-hundred thousand dead civilians and you re-elect the man,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said.

“Your stinking president is no better than Darth Vader.” Henry Bean was yelling in the street. Emily could not understand this sudden outburst of anger. They had had a wonderful day, she had thought. “He’s no better.”

“I guess,” Emily whispered.

She had an image of Darth Vader in her mind, the hard black plastic suit and the helmet head, but she barely remembered the Star Wars movies. She figured Bush had to be a whole lot worse. She wondered if she should have said this, she wanted to, but Emily was always nervous when she had to make a case for herself. She felt unsure, disagreeing with her father, especially when he seemed to be drunk. She wished that Otto would quiet him down. But he only looked at Emily and shrugged. His look seemed to say, what can we do? She decided that Otto must be the woman in the relationship.

“You guess,” Henry said. “You don’t have a defense for your nation?”

“I didn’t vote for Bush.”

“And none of the Germans were Nazis during the goddamned war. Citizens always place the blame on someone else. It’s incredible.”

It wasn’t fair: that her father was insulting her for being an American, for the wrongdoings of her country. He was also American. It didn’t matter where he lived. He was not one to talk about responsibility. All her life, he had stayed away.

“That’s not fair,” she said.

Emily did not like being compared to a Nazi. She knew that she was not as good a person as she could be. She was aware of a large number of atrocities taking place in the world: genocide, natural disasters, suicide bombers, poverty, AIDS. All of it. But the truth was, Emily really only worried about herself. Was she pretty enough? Was she smart enough? Should she buy a drink when she went out for a meal or stick with water which was free?

“I am not part of the evil empire,” she said, feeling stupid. The balmy spring night had turned cold. There was no bus. There was only the hard bench on which she sat. “I’m not.”

She was grateful when she felt Otto rub her hair.

“You’re fine, Emily,” Otto said. “We know.”

And then, somehow, they were back at the campground. Emily had no recollection of being on the bus. She had woken up only when it creaked to a stop. She was wearing Otto’s thick sweater. It was time to fall sleep, but Emily was stupidly wide awake. She could never sleep in a tent. Her father, it turned out, hated her because of her nationality. It occurred to Emily than the man might very well be an asshole.  Her mother must have had a reason to leave him the way she did.  She must have had many reasons to take such drastic action.

Emily was in a campground somewhere outside of Amsterdam. Because of her father. She wanted to be in a hotel room, lying on a made bed, watching cable TV. She looked at him, his handsome face, the similar features, and she gave him a hopeful smile.

“We had a good day,” Henry said. “Didn’t we?”

He gave Emily a rough pat on the head, zipped open his tent, climbed in, and zipped it back up from the inside. And then he was gone.

She was alone, she realized, with Otto. He leaned over and gently gave her a butterfly kiss on the lips.

“It’s funny how Henry starts talking about America when he gets drunk,” Otto said. “I think he misses the place, you know, so instead of recognizing his sense of loss, he gets angry.”

Otto placed his hand on the back of her neck.

Emily touched her lip.

She wasn’t really sure if her father’s best friend had just leaned over and kissed her. She had been stoned since early that afternoon, and perhaps nothing Emily felt or thought could be taken at face value.

“You’re not lovers?” she whispered. She looked in the direction of her father’s tent.

Otto’s mouth dropped open. He shook his head and then he started to laugh. He laughed so hard Emily was sure he would wake her father and the Australians and everyone else around them. She looked down at his sweater. She felt uncomfortable, knowing that it was his. She had understood the entire day all wrong. She had held his hand in the museum.

“Sometimes I almost feel that way, you know?” he said. “About Henry. We share a lot of meals together. We are comfortable. It’s a good friendship. He’s done a lot of good work at the Schloss. Painting and gardening and giving tours. But since he’s moved in, there has also been some trouble. I have to get on his case to clean up after himself, you know? Do his dishes, clean his paint brushes, and then, I sound like a nagging old wife. He really is lazy, your father, when it comes to cleaning up. But no, Emily, we are not lovers. You really thought that?”

The campground seemed much too quiet.

Emily didn’t notice when exactly the Bob Marley music turned off or the lovemaking Australians had fallen asleep. She could hear her father snore through his tent. Emily wondered if she was still high, even now, hours and hours later. She did not understand her present circumstances. She had wanted Otto to be gay. He would have been her adopted gay stepfather.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said. “I hope I didn’t offend you.”

“Offend me?” Otto smiled. “No. I find you delightful.”

Otto ran his hands through Emily’s hair; he leaned over to kiss her again. She felt his tongue go into her mouth, and not wanting to hurt his feelings, she returned the kiss. But Emily’s thoughts were running wild. This man, Otto, whose last name she did not know, was not her father’s boyfriend. He was German. He had a thick German accent. He was into her. He was also her father’s closest friend. Her father was a belligerent drunk. She wondered if Otto must be a bit of a scum bag. He had to be at least twenty years older than she was. He wore faded tie-dyed T-shirts. But she also remembered how good it had felt, her small hand folded up in his, standing in perfect harmony in front of the Van Gogh. She had held Otto in higher esteem than Jim Jarmusch, whose movies she might never watch again. She was disgusted by Otto. And thrilled that he wanted to hiss her. Emily dislodged Otto’s round glasses, leaning in to kiss him harder. Every time Emily kissed a new man, she felt somehow proud of herself. Otto’s lips were thin and rubbery. His skin was scratchy like sandpaper. She had never kissed an older man before. She had not spent her life looking for father figures. She was not messed up in that particular way.

“Can I come with you?” he said. “Inside your tent?”

“My tent?” Emily said.

She looked over at her father’s tent.

She felt Otto’s hand, softly rubbing her neck. His hand was warm. She closed her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I just want to hold you.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

Emily had had sex with men before just because she wasn’t sure if she wanted to refuse them. She didn’t think of herself as desirable and this made her a little bit desperate. Emily was aware of this. She did not like this about herself. Otto had a nice face, a beautiful smile. Warm hands. While Emily crouched in the corner of the tent, stripping down to her T-shirt and underwear, Otto attached his sleeping bag to Emily’s. She climbed in, looking away, as Otto took off his clothes. He climbed in next to her, also wearing his underwear. Otto slid his arm beneath Emily’s neck, and then he wrapped his other arm over her. They lay side by side, spooned around each other. Now Emily could hear herself breathe. She could hear Otto breathe. She could hear her father snore. She hated camping. She was afraid to move. She closed her eyes, and then she opened them. She was aware of Otto’s hands wandering over her body. Up and down, traveling the length of her legs and then over her chest. Emily felt deeply ashamed of herself. She pretended she was asleep. She wished that Otto would undress her. She sucked in her breath when he slid his hand into her underwear.

The whole thing felt like incest.

In a café in Amsterdam, Henry Bean presented to his newly discovered, grown daughter a thick joint and a glass of fresh orange juice.

“This is weed like you have never tried before,” he said. “The buds are so fresh. Smell. See how delicious that is?  You take the first puff.”

Emily had only smoked pot a couple of times in her life. Every time, the people she was with made fun of her for coughing. But her father’s face looked expectant, as if this were her birthday and his heart would be broken if she did not accept his gift. She looked at him. And then she looked at Otto, who had taken off his cable knit sweater to reveal a tie dyed Grateful Dead t-shirt underneath, and she imagined what her mother would say if she could see her now. Emily had been in Amsterdam for less than an hour. She didn’t want to be inside this dark room, getting high. She wanted to be in the bright sunshine, taking it all in. Emily hadn’t known that there were canals in Amsterdam. She thought they were only in Venice.

“The arrogance of America,” Henry had said. His voice had been contemptuous. “They teach you nothing about the rest of the world. Not even simple geography.”

Emily wanted to stand at the edge of a canal and gape. She wanted to marvel at the old stone buildings, the kind that could only be in Europe. She was in love with the cobblestone streets. She wanted to breathe the stink in the air, but Otto and Henry hadn’t given her a chance to catch her breath. They headed straight to a fast-food stand where they bought French fries with garlicky mayonnaise, and then, hunger satisfied, into the dark café where they bought their pot.

“Emily?”

It was the first time her father had spoken her name.

Emily felt herself blushing.

Yes, of course, she was still smitten. Emily hadn’t been sure of her feelings for him back at the campground. She questioned them again while she watched her father devour his French fries, mayonnaise covering his fingers. Who was this man? Why was she here? Her mother had told her that it was Henry’s job to look for her. She strongly advised Emily not to take this trip. She said that no matter the circumstances, she should not give him any money. Emily knew she had been warned. Her mother was right about most things. Emily looked at him, overwhelmed. He would disappoint her, he would disappoint her, he would disappoint her. Henry said her name and she melted.

He was looking at her, stubble on his face, long beautiful eyelashes. Her father was still holding the thick joint out to her. She reached for it.

“Go easy,” he said. “This is some strong stuff.”

She leaned forward so that he could light it, and then Emily sucked in the smoke.  As much as she could. She looked up at Henry, and when he nodded at her, she let it all out, and then, started to cough.

Otto took the joint from her unsteady fingers.

Tears streamed down her cheeks, the back of her throat burned, and as much as she wanted to, as hard as she tried, she could not stop coughing. Her legs were shaking, out of her control. Emily wanted to run and hide. She wished she had never decided to try to find her father.

Henry handed her the glass of orange juice and everything instantly got better. The juice tasted delicious. It was freshly squeezed. It soothed her burning throat. She wanted to apologize for all of her most recent thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am an idiot.”

Otto patted her gently on the back.

“What are you talking about?” he said. “You got a good hit.”

“That’s the purple haze talking,” her father said, grinning. “Terrific stuff.”

Henry took the joint from Otto, brought it to his lips, and took what seemed like a crazy long puff. “This is nothing like the junk you get back home.”  He handed the joint back to Otto. When it came back around to her, Emily shook her head. She wiped the tears off her eyes with a paper napkin. Otto and Henry finished the joint, smoking amiably, without talking, just like they had been in the car, and on the bus, and in the campground, while they wordlessly set up the tents. These men were not judgmental. Emily felt safe and protected around them. It was all right to cry, to cough her head off. Maybe she belonged with these two quiet, older men. Grown up hippies living in Europe. She could be their little mascot, their puppy dog.

On the counter at the bar, there was a round goldfish bowl. The gravel was purple and green. There were two plastic dinosaurs and three orange and white goldfish, swimming round and round.

*   *   *

Emily stood for a long time in front of a Van Gogh painting. It was called “Wheat Field Under Thunderclouds.” Emily was literally dumbstruck. Struck dumb. Because the painting was so simple. So simple but also wonderful and powerful in its very simplicity. The paint was crazy thick, rising off the canvas. The wheat field was yellow and light green and dark green. There were red flowers in the foreground, quick brush strokes, nothing defined. The sky was a smeared blue, with a couple of round, low hanging clouds. And then some random strokes of white. Emily had never seen this painting before. It wasn’t one of the well-known Van Goghs: “Starry Night” or the famous sunflowers. It wasn’t an earless self-portrait. But still, somehow, she was floored. Emily wanted to touch the painting. She wanted to feel the thick swirls of paint beneath her fingers. The depth of the blue sky. She felt as if the field itself could suck her in. She could close her eyes, open them, and she would be in the painting, wandering barefoot through the landscape.

Emily understood that she was high.

She felt as if she had never properly looked at a painting before. She also felt happier than she had ever been. She wanted to share how happy she felt, and looked over to the tall, lean man who stood next to her. She wanted it to be her father, but instead it was Jim Jarmusch, the American independent film director. She recognized his shock of albino white hair. He was staring at the same painting. He turned his head in Emily’s direction, as if to acknowledge Emily’s presence, but then he looked right back at the painting, taking a small but obvious step away from her.

Emily felt hurt, snubbed. She wanted to cry. She wouldn’t have bothered him; she didn’t want his autograph. She loved the painting. It was her right to stand in front of it for as long as she wanted to. Only now she couldn’t. Emily’s moment had been smashed to smithereens, and she knew she had to get away from Jarmusch as fast as she could. Even though she loved his movies. All of them, except maybe “Dead Man,” with Johnny Depp, which had made her fidget all the way through.

Emily practically ran across gallery floor, straight to Otto who she knew would not shun her. Her heart was racing. She didn’t think she could concentrate on Van Gogh anymore, but then she did. This painting was also heartbreakingly beautiful. A simple bedroom, a narrow bed against the wall, a desk and a chair.

Otto grinned at her.

“Do you like it?” he said.

Emily nodded. She didn’t even need to answer because he already knew. He could see it in her face. Emily loved how Otto, who had talked so much about his castle on the drive to Amsterdam, also knew how to be quiet. He held her hand as they stared at the painting. She felt warm and happy, like his little girl.

Henry’s friend Otto had gray, shoulder-length hair and wore little round wire glasses. He greeted Emily as if he had expected her for some time.

“The lost child,” he said, staring at her intently. “It is a delight to meet you.”

Emily understood she had been discussed. The idea pleased her. It occurred to her that Henry might have regretted leaving her. Otto continued to stare long and hard at Emily until she blushed. She had hoped to look out the window, contemplate the scenery during the long drive, but wanted to make conversation. Otto was German, but he spoke fluent English.

“What do you do?” he said.

“Do?” Emily said. “Me?”

The truth was she did not do anything. All of her friends from college had gone on to fancy things: grad school or non-paying internships at magazines, high-paying jobs at corporations. Whereas Emily floated from one temp job to the next. She had spent an entire year trying to please the boyfriend who had dumped her, buying seductive underwear to keep his interest, wearing lipstick and high heels, taking him out for expensive dinners.

“I don’t know,” Emily said. “I type, I guess.”

Emily could type fast, seventy-five words a minute, though it was not a skill she was proud of. She did not like the open way Otto stared at her. He seemed to understand, right away, that she had nothing to offer: not to him, her father, or anyone else. The expression on his face was kind, almost pitying.

“What do you do?” Emily asked him.

“I manage the Schloss where your father is staying. He told you about the place?”

Emily had never heard of this Schloss before. Much to her relief, Otto told her, changing the conversation to a subject that was mercifully not Emily. A Schloss, she learned, was a castle. Otto leaned over the back seat and explained to Emily the set-up of the place while Henry drove. “It’s not like an ordinary museum, where you stand back and look. You are not a passive participant here. At the Schloss, you come to experience reality in a brand new way. To unfurl the mind and senses. We have experience stations where you can truly explore the sense: how the ear hears, how the nose smells, the fingers touch, the feet understand the earth, the lungs breathe, the blood pulsates, and the body vibrates.”

To Emily, this sounded like a speech Otto had delivered many times before. Her first instinct was to be cynical. The Schloss, in fact, sounded idiotic to her, but she smiled, nodding her head, pretending to be interested. She wasn’t fooling Otto anyway. He only had disdain for her.

“I like the gongs,” Henry said.

Otto described a dark bar in the basement, a room where you could have drinks in absolute blackness. The bartender was blind.

“This guy here,” Otto said, resting his hand affectionately on Henry’s shoulder, “nearly had a panic attack. For the first time I can remember, he couldn’t finish his beer.”

“It was insanely dark,” Henry laughed. “It was way too dark for me.”

“I would love for you to experience it, Emily. At the Schloss, you get to appreciate senses you’ve only before taken for granted,” Otto said. “I think you would enjoy it.”

“I’d like to,” Emily said. She thought it was possible Otto did not hate her.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’re having a concert. A flute player from Hamburg. She plays some wild stuff. You’ll come.”

“Okay,” Emily said.

She looked out the window of the tiny blue car, at the fields of wheat, the flat European landscape. The cows looked like all the cows she had ever seen before. The autobahn was narrow and Henry drove fast. His car made a dangerously loud put-put noise. Emily sat on her hands. She tried to listen to Otto talk but really she was busy wondering if he was gay. Otto was handsome and somehow delicate. Her father was tall and rough. They lived together in this strange crumbling castle. It was possible that he was her father’s lover. Because they did seem comfortable together, like a couple.

Eventually, Otto stopped speaking, and they drove the rest of the way in silence. Henry pulled the car into a parking lot of a campground, five kilometers before the exit to Amsterdam.

“Here we are,” he said.

He looked at Emily’s confused face, and began to unload the trunk: tents, sleeping bags, a heavy knapsack. “Hotels cost a fortune in this town.”

Emily’s leg started to shake. She had not camped a single day in her life. Her mother did not believe in sleeping on the ground. Emily had no camping gear. She needed to tell them that that she couldn’t stay there, but she desperately did not want to be any trouble. She watched Henry and Otto carry everything to their little plot of grass. They had packed for her. She had her own little gray and blue nylon tent and an orange and purple sleeping bag. Their allotted space was on a patch of grass not far from where they had parked the car. Her tent was next to Otto’s, which was next to Henry’s, which was next to two teenage Dutch boys, who were next to a young Australian couple.

She let Henry and Otto do everything. After they finished setting up the tests, she followed them wordlessly to a bus, allowed Henry to pay first her bus fare, which deposited them in downtown Amsterdam. Emily felt young and small and helpless. She trusted these strange men as if they were her new, gay parents. She was convinced that she loved them both.