by Hannah Tinti
She climbed the stairs, pulled a blanket and an extra pillow from the closet in her bedroom. Outside her window, the telescope Hawley had bought her was standing alone, pointed at the heavens. Loo slid open the sash and stepped onto the roof. She set her eye against the lens. Overhead the stars and planets were going about their business. The moon hovered in the shape of a crescent, only two hundred and thirty-eight thousand miles from the earth. Listening in the dark, she felt closer to that hunk of ice and rock than to the men talking below, their voices soft beneath the running water.
“I thought you said Pax would take care of the cars.”
“He did. I told you. Pax is great. Always clean. But then he called me back afterward with a job up here. A big exchange with some merchandise we’ve dealt with before. The buyer’s willing to pay half now and a bonus if we can go verify the goods.”
“I’m not interested.”
“It’s a lot, Hawley. These wristwatches will cover the cost of the boat. But Pax’s job will be enough to really retire. Get out of the business and never look back. The request had both our names on it, though. So I had to ask. Half of it’s yours if you want it.”
Loo held her breath and leaned over the edge of the roof. Down below in the kitchen the men had stopped doing the dishes but the water ran and ran and ran.
“Suit yourself. I’ve cleared my conscience. And I’ve got your cut for the cars.”
“I told you I didn’t want it.”
“You doing that good?”
“I’m okay.”
“That tragic fucking mess in the bathroom doesn’t say okay.”
Loo could hear steel wool scrubbing around and around inside an iron skillet.
“It’s how I remember.”
“That’s not remembering. That’s burying yourself alive.”
The dishes clattered. They sounded like they were breaking.
“I’ve been buried before.”
A flash of light streaked overhead, followed by an explosion that shook the roof of the house. Loo could feel the echo of it in her lungs. She crawled back through the window and hurried down the stairs.
Hawley was wiping down the counter, and Jove was standing over the sink, pulling off the rubber gloves he’d worn earlier to staple her father’s arm.
“That sounded like thunder.”
“Fireworks,” said Loo. “We can see them from the beach, if you want.”
The men blinked at her.
“Where’s the blanket?” Hawley asked.
Loo went back upstairs and the men grabbed a bottle of whiskey and some glasses. As they made their way through the woods, they could hear the crackling of the rockets. Then the path opened onto the shore and they stepped against a sky sparkling with gold and silver, long trails of smoke left hanging in the air.
Loo spread the blanket. They took off their shoes. Jove carefully wiped off his cowboy boots and set them side by side on a pile of seaweed. Then he poured out the whiskey. Loo watched her father lean his head back and drink.
“Jesus, Hawley, what happened to your foot?”
“I stepped on something.”
“What, a pitchfork?”
Her father wiggled his toes. The big one and the pinky moved, but the ones in between didn’t. On the sole of his foot the skin spiderwebbed in pink lines where it had been split and sewn back together.
“Still works. That’s all that matters.”
Jove poured himself another glass and raised it at Loo. “Here’s to keeping your dad out of trouble.”
A burst of white stars shot across the harbor and they all lifted their faces to the sky. A moment later, when Loo looked back, her father had buried his twisted foot in the cold, dark sand.
“Never thought you’d settle down like this.”
“Things change,” said Hawley.
“Sure do,” Jove said. “I even joined the YMCA.”
“I don’t believe it,” Hawley said.
“Scout’s honor. I’ll prove it.” Jove saluted and started to unbutton his shirt. And then he was running toward the ocean. He went full-tilt and then he hooted and hollered as he jumped into the waves and dove under. After a minute he rose to the surface, his toes up, floating.
“Who is this guy?” Loo asked her father.
“He’s a taker,” said Hawley. “He takes things.”
“And you used to work with him?”
“A long time ago.”
“Come on in,” Jove yelled at them. “Water’s fine!”
“He’s an idiot,” said Loo.
Hawley stood up. He pulled his T-shirt over his head. Even in the shadows she could see his scars. The skin was different there. Puckered and ghostly. And now she knew the story behind one of those ghosts. She imagined Jove’s hands searching her father’s back, finding the bullet, digging it out—with what? His fingers? A knife? A spoon? None of the instruments she thought of seemed possible.
They walked to the shoreline. A wave came and splashed them both to their knees.
“It’s cold,” said Loo.
“A little,” said Hawley.
“You have to keep moving,” said Jove.
“You know, there’s sharks out there,” Loo called.
Jove stopped paddling.
“She’s kidding,” said Hawley. And then he walked into the water. He walked all the way up to his waist, not stopping but not rushing, either, and then he sank under the black surface of the ocean and disappeared.
“I can’t believe it!” said Jove, after Hawley surfaced next to him. He splashed his friend in the face. “Since when do you swim?”
“I took classes with Loo when she was little.”
“He was the only adult,” said Loo.
Jove hooted. “I would have paid to see that.”
Another flare went up from the staging area across the harbor. Blue bursts, then a set of screaming meemies popped and spun out across the sky, curling in bright spirals, illuminating the rippling water and the faces of the men. Loo went back and sat on the blanket. She rubbed her feet together. There were sand fleas and her legs were getting bitten.
She remembered Hawley tucking her hair into a tight rubber cap, the smell of chlorine on their skin from the heated pool. Before class, they’d sit with just their legs in the water. They’d kick up a storm, Hawley’s ruined foot flashing through the waves next to her own. They’d learned how to blow bubbles together. He’d talked her into walking the long length of the diving board. And she’d been there the very first time he’d dog-paddled across the pool without a float. She remembered that all the kids had cheered for him. And she remembered that when her father looked back from the other side, gripping the concrete ledge, breathing hard, there was no joy in his face.
She still had the watch on her wrist, but it was too dark to read the numbers. The fireworks were supposed to end at ten o’clock. A grand finale and then the folding of lawn chairs and a traffic jam as everyone went home. She waited for the next burst to hit. It seemed to take forever. She watched the men swimming and thought of the scrapbook hidden in her closet. All those details and numbers. She had believed the facts would change things. But her father was still her father.
She could hear the crowd hooting and blasting their air horns in anticipation across the harbor. A flare went up. And then another. And then another and another and another. She saw the smoke trails intertwining, and then the burst of rockets and pinwheels and dragons and hydras that ignited and extinguished in a barrage of cannons. Jove shouted and clapped. It seemed like the explosions would never end. Loo fought every impulse to cover her ears. To dive under the blanket. She leaned into the surge of maddening noise, and watched the light expanding and reflecting off her father’s wet skin, until his body was dappled in red and orange, and his whole back looked as though it had caught fire.
Seven, Eight, Nine
WHEN LOO WAS FIRST PUT in Hawley’s hands at the hospital, he felt nothing at all. Just a fear of dropping the baby or hurting h
er somehow or tipping her head wrong. It was such a soft head, the neck loose, the black, downy hair brushing against his callused fingers. Her skin was red and blotchy and her limbs out of proportion. He touched her arm and he could feel the bones underneath her pudgy flesh. Bones so new they felt like plastic—pliable and easily broken. Hawley had the urge to bend the baby’s arm to see how far it would go. As soon as he could, he gave her back to Lily. Then he took out the camera and flashed the flash. He held the Polaroid between his fingers and together they watched it develop, the chemicals mixing into the shape of his wife and daughter.
“Look at that,” said Lily. “It’s your family.”
After Alaska they had moved to Wisconsin—away from both coasts—and settled near the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, in a small cabin with a trail leading through a grove of balsam firs to the shore of a private lake. Every inch of their home was covered with things for the baby—blankets and toys and cribs and formula and diapers and a special bathtub and tiny socks and tiny clothes, mobiles of sheep that hung from the ceiling, side sleepers and Snuglis and carriages and multicolored blocks and board books and the smell of cream meant for rashes and talcum powder and warm, piss-soaked Pampers that were deposited into a Diaper Genie that lived in the bathroom next to the toilet.
At first Lily was too tired, too focused on the baby, too busy sleeping and feeding and flowing with hormones to notice Hawley’s indifference toward their daughter, but as the months passed and the baby grew larger and learned to roll over on her own, and then cut her first tooth, and then swallowed her first bite of rice cereal, Lily began to sigh whenever he made an excuse to leave the house—sighed when he went for a walk, sighed when a diaper needed to be changed and he slipped out of the room, sighed when he feigned sleep at the baby’s 2 A.M. feeding. These sighs grew in length and volume and pitch, until the day of their daughter’s baptism, when Lily spooned pea puree into the baby’s mouth, and then bathed her and wrapped her in a white gown and bonnet, and then squeezed herself into an old sundress, and brushed her hair, and put on lipstick, and stood by the door, expectant and waiting, and Hawley said he was going fishing.
Lily shifted Louise from one hip to the other. Then she inhaled the biggest sigh yet, a sigh that sucked in with the roar and power of a vacuum, and pushed out a torrent of air. “You are not going to catch any goddamn fish today,” she said. “You will go upstairs. You will put on a goddamn shirt. And then you will drive us to the goddamn church and get our daughter baptized.”
Hawley didn’t know why she cared. Lily wasn’t religious. But she said she had memories of attending mass as a child, and those memories were good memories and therefore important. Kneeling down, lighting candles, saying prayers—all of it had made Lily feel safe and connected to the universe somehow, and they needed to do the same for their daughter. It didn’t matter if they believed in God or not.
“We’re parents now, and baptism is part of the job,” Lily said. “It’s an insurance policy.”
“For what?”
“In case there’s heaven and hell. I don’t want our baby stuck in purgatory. It’s like a waiting room where your name never gets called.”
The ceremony was just the three of them and the priest, who spoke English with a French-Canadian accent. They didn’t bring any godparents, but the man knew Lily from the meetings she went to down in the church basement, so he just wrote their names twice on the baptismal certificate. Then he slipped a purple robe over his shoulders and cinched it around his waist with a gold rope. He lit some incense and said some prayers and had Lily hold the baby over a bowl. He poured water on the baby’s forehead and then he poured oil.
The church smelled like the cold underside of a rock. On every wall there were stained-glass windows that obscured rather than filtered the light. In the shaded colored panes Hawley could make out figures and symbols. Crucifixes and lambs, a severed head on a plate, a heart with seven swords jammed through the middle and a man stepping out of a cave, over a pile of skeletons.
“Father,” the priest said, “at the very dawn of creation Your Spirit breathed on the waters, making them the wellspring of all holiness. By the power of the Spirit give to the water of this font the grace of Your Son. You created man in Your own likeness. Cleanse him from sin in a new birth to innocence by water and the Spirit. May all who are buried with Christ in the death of baptism rise also with Him to newness of life.”
The priest asked Hawley to hold the baby and Lily passed their daughter into his arms. Red and orange light from the windows fell across them both. It made him think of the emergency hazards on Lily’s truck, flickering over his body as he crawled along the floor of the diner, the crunch of broken glass cutting into his palms. The baby shivered as the priest poured more water onto her face. Then she threw up pea puree all over Hawley’s clean shirt.
He waited out the rest of the ceremony in the back of the church, stretched out in a pew in his undershirt, the button-down Lily had asked him to wear balled up in the trash. The priest said his goodbyes and slipped behind the altar, and then Lily made her way up the aisle, dragging the car seat, her dress askew, the baby’s bonnet tied around her wrist.
“You could have helped.”
“Sorry,” Hawley said, though the truth was he’d been relieved to have an excuse to step away, to sit and watch the colors paint the ceiling. He pointed at the man climbing over the skeletons. “What’s that one supposed to be about?”
Lily shifted the baby onto her other hip. She turned and peered up at the window behind them. “Lazarus. Or maybe the resurrection. It looks like Jesus rising from the dead.”
“And now our kid gets to rise along with him, to the newness of life.” Hawley snorted. “You really believe that crap?”
His wife’s lips pressed tightly together. She snatched the keys from him and marched to the parking lot and took the driver’s seat. She didn’t say another word the whole ride home. He spent the trip trying to come up with ways to make it up to her, but the baby was crying and he could barely think. When they arrived at the cabin Lily pulled over but kept the truck running.
“Take Louise,” she said. “Take her and get out.”
“Where are you going?” Hawley asked.
“I need to drive. I need to drive until I don’t feel like driving anymore,” said Lily. “I’m sick of being a mother. And I’m sick of being a wife.”
Hawley unstrapped the car seat. He took the baby and slammed the door. Her cries were pulsating now, one after the next, enough to make his hands shake. “What am I supposed to do with her?”
“Figure it out,” said Lily. And then she pulled away.
The baby didn’t look wet. Hungry, Hawley decided, and carried her in the car seat into the kitchen. He searched the diaper bag and found an empty bottle as well as the baptismal certificate, folded in half and slipped into the side zippered pocket. He threw the certificate into the living room, then dug up a container of powdered formula and mixed it with water. He shook the bottle until the liquid inside was frothy. Then he put the bottle in a pan of water and lit the stove. Louise continued to howl in the car seat. Hawley walked back and forth from the pan of water to the carrier. Whenever the baby saw him getting closer she would start kicking her legs.
“You’re not the only one who feels bad,” said Hawley.
The bottle took forever to get warm. He’d seen Lily test the milk on her wrist, but Hawley had scars there, so instead he stretched out his tongue and squeezed a few drops. The formula didn’t taste like much. He expected it to be sweet but it was more like unflavored yogurt. Tangy, with a scent of wheat.
When the milk was warm enough he turned off the stove and took the bottle to his daughter. He leaned over and tried to put the nipple into her mouth but it was too big. The baby kept screaming, her face red, her lips pulled down. She mouthed the rubber a bit but the tears kept coming, and then some of the milk dribbled down her throat and she gagged. The baby coughed and her eyes went wide
. Then she started crying again, louder this time.
Hawley put the bottle down and went to the door and opened it and stood out in the yard, looking for Lily. He half-expected her to be parked down the block, waiting. But she wasn’t anywhere he could see.
He went back inside and unbuckled his daughter from the carrier. Once his fingers were cradling her skull, he lifted her out of the bassinet. He pulled her close to his chest. She was squirming and screeching and her body was hot. Hawley sat down on the couch and laid the baby across his knees. He tried putting the bottle in her mouth again but she wouldn’t take it. He got some baby food out of the fridge and tried spooning it into her mouth but she spit it onto the floor. He leaned over and sniffed the diaper, but it seemed clean enough. She reached up and grabbed hold of his ear. She had sharp fingernails. A lock of his hair tangled in her small fingers and she yanked it out and then held the strands like a wilted bouquet.
“You think you’re tough?”
He turned the baby onto her stomach. Then he turned her back. He jostled his legs up and down like a carnival ride. He put her on his shoulder, then he tried the other shoulder. He walked the room. He lay down on the floor with her. He rocked her in the crook of his arm. He tried sticking his finger in her mouth. It didn’t do any good or stop the screaming.
At this point Hawley was desperate. He went back to the front door, holding the baby this time, and opened it again. It was getting dark outside, and he stared into the darkness, as if he could conjure Lily out of the night sky, out of the stars and the gathering moon. But there was no sign of her.
Hawley closed the door and went down into the basement, the baby still crying. He brought down a metal box from the shelf above his workbench, got the key from where it was hidden behind the boiler, unlocked it, reached inside and took out a flask.
At night Hawley still dreamed of the clepsydra, the feel of it filling with water and being ripped from his hands. He woke up sweating with the same dread he’d felt when the glacier cracked and the blue ice fell. The only thing that settled his mind was a drink. So he’d started to keep bottles stashed around the house, in places he hoped that Lily would never find. After the mess he’d made in Alaska, Jove had done his best to cover for him, but in the end King had sussed it out. Now both he and Jove were on the line for all of that lost money.
