by Alan Russell
Cheever targeted his own heart, smacking his chest, and though Helen still didn’t say anything, Cheever sensed turbulence inside of her. He had this sense that water was on the verge of boiling.
“You also told me that ‘you don’t raise the dead without paying a great price and making yourself a target for mighty enemies.’ I’ve wondered about that, Helen. It was easy to dismiss the statement at the time because I thought you were talking about being the daughter of a healing god, but I should have been more perceptive. I need to know about your mighty enemies. I want to help you vanquish them.”
His plea was met with silence. Was it his imagination or was her entire body slightly vibrating? Was her world(s) being shaken up?
“You know, I keep thinking about those little girls. There’s young Helen who went through a long fugue state, and when she emerged she wanted to be called Holly. Helen was gone. And then there’s Katie Dwyer. And finally there is Caitlin.
“It took me a long time to figure out that Caitlin is an awful lot like both Helen and Katie. She has reddish hair, but it’s a light red, somewhere between Helen’s blond and Katie’s red.
“I don’t think Caitlin’s name is any coincidence. I talked with Dr. Stern just a little while ago and I told her about Kathleen Dwyer. I told her about the dress on your little girl statue being the same dress that Katie was last seen wearing, and then Dr. Stern came up with an interesting theory. She pointed out how the name Caitlin is a combination of the names of two girls: Katie’s first syllable and Helen’s last. Kate and Len. Caitlin. You weren’t misspelling that name all these years. You were revealing what only you knew.
“When Katie disappeared Helen could no longer go on being what she was. That was when Caitlin emerged. She was the only child that could continue to live because the others were lost, lost forever.”
Cheever stopped talking. He wondered if Rachel should have been with him when he revealed these things. But he wondered even more if Helen had heard. Or God. He felt drained. Words, as usual, had failed him. He took his hand, put it atop Helen’s, and joined her in looking out the window.
The sleeper was difficult to awake. She had hidden her soul. Helen had read of others who had done that, put their souls at the top of mountains, or in the middle of a tall tree, or in the back of some hidden cave. By doing that it made them impervious to harm. Their physical bodies could be touched, but not their essence.
But this one’s words had found her hidden soul. She had positioned her spirit, thinking that nothing could touch it, and yet he had. His words (or were they incantations?) had traveled through her thousand-and-one defenses. The first time she had seen him she had wondered if he was the one the gods had chosen to lead her out of darkness. She had looked at him and thought of Orpheus who had tried to reclaim the dead. But Orpheus had failed. He had looked back.
Damn his words. They had found her even though she was deep, so deep, in depths beyond human understanding. It was possible that she could keep going, submerge to a place where other voices could never reach her, but she knew his words had already hooked her and that his line would follow her. She could try to free herself, but the hook was deep. Even now she could feel him working her, pulling her line. He was this old man of the sea who wouldn’t give up. No matter how tangled their lines were, he held on.
It was time for air. She had sounded long enough and deep enough and now her lungs needed filling again. How inconvenient it was to be a mammal. To have to take in bothersome air. To have to expose herself time and again to the harpoons of the world.
The surface. She pushed for it. She sensed some barrier and knew that to break free she’d have to rid herself of encumbrances, of baggage. She didn’t want to just escape. She wanted to be alive. The breach was closer, closer. There was no going back now.
Her scream awoke Cheever from his reverie. Then she was crying, and trying to talk, and shaking, and he found himself holding her and telling her over and over, “It’s all right. It’s all right.” And while he was consoling her, words from his past kept slipping out. Her surfacing had startled him, and he still wasn’t completely awakened from that place he had been, which is why he kept saying, “It’s okay, Daddy’s here.”
And somewhere in her mind she knew that Orpheus had looked back, but it was all right, because they still had each other.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
A little girl was born.
She didn’t come into the world easily, but children rarely do. She came into the world crying, and for a time had trouble getting her breath, as if her lungs weren’t used to the atmosphere around her. When her breathing stabilized and her crying stopped, she said, “It hurts.”
“What hurts?” Cheever asked.
She shook her head and said, “Everything,” then started looking around, moving not just her eyes but swiveling her head in the manner of a curious child, her trauma seemingly forgotten. “This is a big house,” she said.
Her voice didn’t sound like Caitlin’s. It was different somehow. And her mannerisms were distinctive, not Caitlin’s. She acted like a young girl, but not the young girl Cheever had come to know. Her change made him nervous. Was this another personality? He thought he had met the whole lot except for Cronos.
“Who are you?” he asked.
She smiled at him, a child’s smile that recognized an adult game. “I’m Diane, silly Daddy!”
She had called him Daddy before, but that was as Caitlin. Now it was different, even more personal. Diane. Cheever was sure he had never said his daughter’s name in her presence and wondered where she could have heard it. But he didn’t ask her that question. He stood there immobile and silent as she walked around the living room.
“I can see water out there, Daddy,” she said. Her face was close to the window, and as she spoke condensation formed on the glass. She blew some more and started drawing figures into the mist.
“Look what happens when I blow, Daddy,” she said.
“I see,” he said.
“Come and do it,” she said. “It’s fun.”
He walked across the room, and then they both took turns blowing on the glass. Cheever made a sun for her, and she made a flower for him. He drew some waves, and then she drew a three-sided figure that he identified as a triangle, and she disdainfully corrected him, saying, “It’s a pyramid.”
Cheever tried telling himself that he was too surprised at the turn of events to have his wits about him. But that wasn’t it. He accepted the charade because he didn’t want to deny what she offered him. And as they played and talked he could almost convince himself that each of them gave the other something they needed, and that there were enough positives in their behavior to outweigh the negatives.
Though he kept resolving to step out of his role and tell her very firmly that his daughter was twenty years dead, she kept doing or saying things that immobilized his intentions, or so he kept rationalizing. He wanted to protect her, and have time stand still. She was the picture of innocence, and trust, and love, and he needed all three, but most of all he needed the redemption of a living daughter to tell him that he hadn’t failed her. Their relationship was clearly symbiotic. She was dependent on him to be the loving father who would let her be five and who would never violate her young trust. But Cheever knew they were both feeding each other’s weaknesses. They weren’t getting ahead, they were reverting. They weren’t going on with their histories, they were rewriting them, even if their casting wasn’t right. For a time—and a price—they were willing to try to do the impossible and forget twenty years.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked.
“Are you hungry?”
She held her stomach dramatically: “I’m starving.”
“I can make some spaghetti.”
“Yummy.”
They walked out to the kitchen and she sat at the table, playing with the salt and pepper shakers. He rummaged around, didn’t find any spaghetti sauce in a jar, but didn’t expe
ct to either. There were cloves of garlic and some fresh oregano and basil. Rachel’s prejudice against cans didn’t extend as far as tomato sauce, tomato paste, and stewed tomatoes, so he set to opening, mixing, and stirring. There were enough ingredients for him to make a complete mess and something he hoped resembled spaghetti sauce.
“When’s Mommy coming home?”
“She said around eight.”
Mommy, he thought. How easy it was to fall back into old patterns, patterns that should have been forgotten. She was asking about Mommy. Yeah, they were a regular nuclear family, fallout and all.
He found some mushrooms and cut them up along with a clove of garlic and an onion. Rachel didn’t have any butter or margarine, so he used extra virgin olive oil to sauté everything. It worked except for sound effects. The sizzle wasn’t quite the same.
“That smells good, Daddy.”
“Bene, mi amore, bene.”
She giggled and said, “Daddy, you’re crazy,” then went back to work.
So did he. Cheever wished he could put a tap on her brain and listen to her mental dialogues. She seemed so much like Diane in all that she said and did, or was he putting that interpretation on her every action? He thought about closure, one of those in-vogue and overused psychological words, jargon he usually eschewed. But he knew there had never been any closure with the death of his daughter. He had just put the event on a shelf somewhere, hoping there would be an expiration date on emotions. Good only until a certain time.
“So, princess, what’s your favorite meal in the world?”
“Pasghetti,” she said.
Hadn’t Diane mispronounced the word the same way? Was that a universal among children, or was he grasping for straws? “Really?”
“And chocolate cake,” she said.
“That’s a dessert.”
“And I can eat a million pancakes.”
Diane had loved pancakes too. Usually his wife had done the cooking, but he remembered one day when he had pulled out the flour, eggs, buttermilk, and salt and made some pancakes from scratch. That day Diane had eaten more pancakes than the adults. How she put away so many in her little stomach he never knew. She couldn’t have been more than three then, just before her disease first surfaced. “More,” she kept saying, pronouncing the word like “mower.” And she had smiled at the announcement, as if it were a wonderful private joke, as if she knew she was doing something astounding. And each time he had repeated in disbelief, “More?” And she had giggled and said, “Mower.”
“Can we play ‘Go Fish,’ Daddy?”
“Maybe later, honey. We’ll have to see if Mommy has any playing cards.”
Cheever wondered if his relationship with Rachel was similarly based on fantasy. Had he imagined her as something she wasn’t? They had certainly fulfilled needs for one another, but he hoped they hadn’t only been dancing to tunes from the past.
“Pasghetti coming up,” he said.
He had remembered that children weren’t as big on spices, had created a sauce especially for her that was more tomato than not. Rachel apparently didn’t believe in processed Parmesan cheese. He found a wedge of the real thing and a grater.
“I gotta some cheese-a, if you a please-a,” he said in a bad Italian accent.
She laughed and asked for some, but he suspected it was more to get a show than her desire for cheese. He did the grating anyway, and judging by her reaction he didn’t even need the monkey and the organ. Little kids are wonderful for failed comics.
He served himself and was just about to start eating when she announced, “I’m thirsty.”
“What do you want to drink?” he asked, remembering too late that offering options to children can be a lengthy process.
“Chocolate milk.”
“We don’t have any. And we don’t have milk either. I’ll get you some juice.”
He filled a glass, brought it to her, then sat down again. She took a gulp of her drink, made a little face, then vigorously started in on her spaghetti, unmindful of her precariously placed drink. Her elbow toppled her glass, not breaking it, but spilling juice all over the table.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and looked very contrite, even afraid.
“It’s okay,” he said, using Rachel’s cloth napkins to sop the liquid up. “Just be more careful next time.” What had his mother used to tell visitors when he was young? “We have the smoothest table in the world.” And when they looked at the scarred old table she always explained, “Table’s gotten milk baths for years. I don’t know how it couldn’t have the smoothest finish in the world.”
Cheever finally started eating. The pasta wasn’t half bad, even if it was some imported whole wheat stuff. At least it was suckable. That’s what she was doing with it, sucking in long strands and getting the sauce on her chin in the process. It was what kids did with spaghetti. For them, food could be fun. He pictured her that way: a little girl at play. Funny how you stop looking at people, he thought, as soon as you put an image in your mind. She talked and acted like a five-year-old girl, his little girl, and that was good enough for him. The only time he saw a twenty-five-year-old woman was when he forced himself to truly look at her, and that wasn’t very often.
He cleared her plate and tried without success to interest her in some fresh fruit for dessert, but she had a project and wasn’t about to be bothered for anything less than chocolate cake. He found her some colored markers. Judging by her critical face, they weren’t as good as crayons, but they apparently sufficed. While he did the dishes she worked on a drawing. Between his scrubbing and rinsing he listened to her humming some tune. It was catchy enough that he whistled it while he washed.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Here.” Shy but proud, she extended the drawing. “It’s for you.”
Smiling, he said, “Thank you, sweetie,” and then he looked at her drawing. After a moment’s scrutiny he said, “It’s great, honey,” then gave her a gentle hug.
In truth, he liked it more than any of her adult paintings. It wasn’t that the drawing was exceptional; it was what you would expect from a talented five-year-old, somewhat recognizable figures and objects. But what Cheever liked most was its cheery tone. There were three figures—a mommy, a daddy, and a daughter—and they were all smiling. There was a green lawn and a yellow sun and a blue house. It didn’t take much of a stretch of imagination to include your own white picket fence.
The little girl in the picture was blond. The drawing showed she didn’t know his Diane had been a brunette. Or maybe she was finally putting herself in her pictures, finding that face of what she really looked like before her mother and father were born. Cheever wondered if Caitlin was gone for good and also wondered where the other personalities were. He had considered calling Rachel and telling her about the developments, but was reluctant to interrupt her at work. There were other patients who needed her attention. And besides, he would have had to explain his own behavior, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to do that.
“I love it so much, sweetie,” Cheever said, “that I’m going to hang it on the refrigerator.”
“I need to sign it,” she said.
Once an artist, he thought, always an artist. He handed the drawing back to her and she returned to the table. “How do you spell Diane, Daddy?”
He repeated the letters for her slowly and watched as she struggled with each one. She struggled almost as much writing the letters as he did saying them. When she finally finished he found some tape and hung the drawing from the designer refrigerator.
Rachel’s showpiece home was suddenly showing signs of being lived in. Children leave trails, and she was no exception. Shoes and papers and pillows, and whatever had occupied her for a moment or more, marked her path out to the living room.
“Let’s play a game, Daddy!”
“What game?”
“Something fun.”
She didn’t know how to play tic-tac-toe, so he taught her. At first he let her
win, but he soon didn’t have to give her any advantages. For half an hour they staked out their Xs and Os, and when they finished, a sheaf of papers was left in their wake.
“Who wants cocoa?” he asked.
“I do!” she shouted.
Rachel’s kitchen pantry had few indulgences, cocoa being about the most decadent item Cheever had discovered. He mixed the hot water and cocoa together, then carried the cups on a tray out to the family room where they did their sipping in front of the TV. They watched a documentary on the migration of birds, but neither of them was particularly interested in the show. A migration did occur, though. She moved across the sofa onto Cheever’s lap.
“Tell me a story, Daddy,” she said.
Her eyes were heavy, but still expectant. He took her mug from her hands and cradled her close to him, deliberating on what story to tell. He wished there were some children’s books on Rachel’s bookshelves. It would have been easier just to pick and choose that way, to not have to think, to read some words and just hold her. Myths kept popping into his mind, but those were stories he wanted to distance her from. And he didn’t want to tell any stories with witches or goblins or miraculous events. He wanted something wholesome and decent and honest. Mythology of another kind, he thought cynically.
His ultimate decision was colored. He picked what had been one of Diane’s favorite stories. “Let me tell you about the little engine that could,” he said.
He told her about the brave little engine, and the big mountain that needed to be traversed, and all those who were depending on the train’s getting through. As its struggles mounted, as the little engine kept pushing forward, they repeated in unison, “I think I can, I think I can.” The three of them labored together, she and Cheever and the little engine, going painfully along, and for each obstacle they had their mantra: “I think I can, I think I can.”
