The Lost Daughter Collective

by Lindsey Drager

  But Father, the girls would press, I don’t understand. In what order should the body be?

  THE POINT IS NOT to forget them, but just to remember less. They know without the meetings they, too, would be lost, a group of lost boys missing the echo of their girls.

  And sometimes, usually at the meetings held at night, the men with daughters who are Alices—Barber, Smith, Wainwright, Angler—break off to talk about the women those girls would make. These phantom women mimic the moves of the men with missing girls as they navigate town; the women who look twice at the men in the bar or who make quick smiles at the bus stop—the women who slide shyly by in the grocery store.

  That could be my daughter, they say. I saw a woman who could be. I saw a woman—daughter. A woman who could be—did I see my daughter? I saw a woman: Daughter. Who could be, that could be my daughter. A woman who could be. A daughter. Mine.

  A WOMAN IS A catalyst for chaos. Proof lives in the territory women occupy and then abandon. For examples of such territory, see a father’s heart.

  The women their girls were to become live in the cleft between fiction and fact. To conjure them requires suspended disbelief. This is how the men with missing daughters can think of them in safe, clean ways.

  For here lies the locus of guilt: fatherhood is about control. The governing father has failed when the domestic ties untether.

  As the men imagine the women their girls were to become, they learn to swallow malice. Because while the past can haunt, the future always does.

  After a daughter exits, most movement hurts. This is because the daughter-father paradigm mutates. It starts as a thick cord pulled taut with no slack. Then the cord splits into many lines and the lines extend and fold around each other to create a net in which both are caught. When daughter-exit occurs, the net dissolves, leaving the father free to be haunted by the ghost of his girl.

  When the men speak of the women their girls were to become, their conversation launches open-ended questions that are never resolved.

  For example: At what point in the lifespan of a woman does her identity as daughter end?

  For example: Was the notion of the daughter invented or discovered?

  For example: Are fathers born or bred?

  When another person takes your daughter—either abducting her alive and toward an unknown, or ending her life, her womanhood amputated—the limits of the possible collapse. Your world becomes a woman you will never know, who loiters spectral in the places where you are most vulnerable: coming out of the shower, or with the dust of thirst in your mouth, alone at night in the bad parts of the city. Put simply, it is a loss equal to a forfeited tongue. It is a loss like the loss of the knowledge that one thing plus another makes two.

  In short, when the men want to summarize the women their girls were to become through theory, it comes out something like this: without horizon, a landscape portrait from very far away is just a map.

  DAUGHTERS FEEL MOST GONE in the morning. There is no young form to climb into bed to wake fathers from slumber, no breakfast to prepare or pajamas to lift over a soft head. There is no hair to braid, no shoes to tie. There are no teeth to brush.

  But why did the ice girl have shadow maidens? the girls would ask, in line at the market or walking down the street, raking leaves or watering the plants.

  The ice girl lived a lonely life and so she invented friends.

  What about her father?

  Her father had important business in the World of Thought and Books.

  Where was the World of Thought and Books?

  It was transposed over the ice girl’s home, the same way you are sometimes a daughter and sometimes a friend and all the time both, though one stays dormant when the other is called on.

  What’s doormat?

  Dormant, dear child. Dormant. It means concealed, like the place inside you from which your tears come, the men would say, picking up their girls and securing them on their hips. But this was so long ago! This was long, long ago, in the time when women still bled.

  But women bleed now, the girls would say. I have seen cuts on the fingers of ladies.

  This is true. But women also used to bleed regularly from the place where their legs meet. For several days a year, following a pattern that related to the moon and the way the sea behaved.

  The girls allowed this to sink in. They were just starting to understand that the mysterious occupation known as womanhood lurked at the end of their own narratives. Why did they bleed? the girls would finally ask.

  Because the place where their legs meet was thought to be a wound, the fathers would say. Now, of course, we know it as a device.

  THIS IS HOW FATHERS imagine their daughters understand the relationship between the past and the future:

  This is how daughters really think:

  CHARLOTTE AND HER FATHER

  THERE ARE SOME STORIES that do not work toward cataclysm but open in the midst of it. Whether that story begins with a discarded wife locked in an attic or a mother kept in a room with yellowed walls, the story opens at a precipice. This is how some stories—from the initial word—are all about descent.

  Charlotte was born and raised in a house behind which lay a graveyard for the patients her father could not save. As a result, her life revolved around The End and was therefore cloaked in mourning, a heavy, evolving sadness that materialized in unexpected ways.

  For years she coped with what her father called her illness of the head. Medicine was his practice, and because he had treated several other girls, he thought he knew the best methods for making her well. The most successful had been to place a girl in a room and shut the door and go away.

  One day her father informed her he was to be gone for several weeks. He pulled her covers up to her chin and kissed the places where her bangs met her brows. Before he left the room, he turned around and requested that she smile. She obliged him, but when his back was to her, the smile faded quickly. She thought this: which is more dangerous—a door, through which one can only imagine what lies beyond, or a window, which exposes its possibility like a baited lure?

  Because women have a history of being tended to like a sculpture made of already cracked and failing glass, they also have a history of defying. As soon as the house was empty of him, Charlotte wrapped herself in coats and left to walk the city. There she came upon the town’s Language Museum, a building saturated in books, those mysterious devices that allowed one to exit the world in which one’s body moved and enter a plurality of others.

  For the fortnight he was gone, she removed books from the Language Museum for no cost at all, only the promise that she would return them. And by the time her father returned, she had realized the antidote to her strife—that the way to quell her illness was not through carefully curated passivity, but through rigorous thought.

  When her father returned a day early, on the eve of her twelfth birthday, and, in the hopes of surprising her, swung open the door to her room without knocking, what he witnessed was a sight for which he was unprepared. There was his daughter—his offspring and his patient, both; his charge and his work—eagerly consuming the conduit for that risky enterprise known as contemplation.

  The next morning, her father made a deal with the Manager of the Language Museum, that he would donate copies of his most rare texts if the Manager promised not to lend his daughter any more books. And when next she snuck away and pulled open the grand doors of the Language Museum, the Manager shook his head and pushed her back and locked her out.

  Now her desolation took new shape, for she knew what would quell it, but was forbidden access to the corrective. Now her sadness meant walking into swift rivers with the aim of not walking out, going barefoot into woods hoping never to be found. Now her sadness meant screaming the opening lines to her favorite books while she hung naked from trees in the yard.

  The morning he came to tell her he would place her in the Home for the Harmed, he put his ear to the door and heard laughter. And as he twisted
the knob, his stomach sank. For he felt and then saw that she was gone, the window dressing moving in the breeze. The laughing was coming from the sound machine—she must have recorded herself.

  Years later, he would find her books at the Language Museum, though he would never know the words were hers, for they bore men’s names. And—reading with a physician’s eye—he would think these narratives were those of a sick man. The books contained the stories of women who were abandoned—in an attic while her husband fell in love with an orphaned governess below, or in a room with bars, the acrid, amber wallpaper teasing her. He would think the work powerful but failed because it contained such aggression. Yet he found himself irresistibly drawn, compelled, in fact, to reading such dim and lurid tales. It was on these evenings, after reading the stories he could not know were born under his roof, that he would draw closed the drapes, synch the sound machine, and drain a glass of liquor, listening to the fractured record of his little girl’s laugh.

  AS THE MEN WAIT on the thirty-third floor for their leader to arrive, they watch the city from the wide window. Butcher refills the tray of biscuits and puts on another pot of coffee before he joins the others, already entering debate.

  Maybe he’s prepared to move on. Or maybe it has to do with the secret of his daughter.

  The men sit back in their chairs as they contemplate this theory.

  Woodsman says, leaning in, We have waited to hear his narrative for years. We do not even know his last name. It could be that his daughter’s story has shifted or is changed. We should be prepared to be supportive, however that support takes shape.

  Sometimes they get mad at their girls. Sometimes their voices grow loud. When the men try to point to the element that most angers them, it is the threat of wonder and marvel that makes girls curious.

  It is a paradox, they know, as curiosity is the method by which we gain knowledge through the hazardous realm of investigating the unfamiliar. Generally speaking, this means quaint adventures and structured escapades. But once in a while, girls venture toward territory they do not know without instrument or acquaintance. And it is then that girls chance getting lost.

  For the fathers, this means avoiding curiosity. And for the FOLD in particular, this means not asking about Peter’s girl. For they have learned the hard way that knowledge must be managed or else it will destroy.

  WHAT PETER THINKS BUT cannot come to say:

  That his daughter left daughterhood behind.

  That he started the FOLD to cope with the isolation that defines a fatherhood of radical loss, no matter how that loss takes shape, whether in the known world or in the contours of the father psyche.

  That he is ashamed. That he is ashamed to reveal his particular form of daughter loss because he lost only one iteration of his daughter, not the flesh being.

  That the truth in its completeness is this: Peter’s daughter is now his son.

  HOW DO WE KNOW the story of the ice girl? the girls would ask, between bites or pulling on their boots, folding back the covers of the bed.

  I’m not sure what you mean.

  From where did the story come?

  It was passed through mouths and hands and performances from people of one set of years to the next until it exited my mouth en route to fill yours.

  But Father, the girls would say, who told you?

  And here the fathers would pause. They would take a moment to think, scratching their beards or scrunching their brows, tapping fingers to lips. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. It is a tale so woven into the fabric of our world that it feels as though the story has always lived.

  The girls will contemplate what this means. Who will I tell?

  My dear, the fathers would say, picking up their girls to get a closer look at them. Our stories are told to teach. You will one day care about someone enough to relay this story.

  But aren’t our stories told to entertain?

  That was true once upon a time, but that was long ago.

  But Father, why must I tell someone I care about? Why could I not tell someone who has hurt me or with whom I am angry? Why could I not tell a stranger? Shouldn’t we also teach people who are full of vice and malice? Shouldn’t we be teaching them most of all?

  The fathers would look at the ceiling or out the window; the fathers would look at the floor. I love you very much, the fathers would say, holding their girls tightly, and I hope you will respect me when I say that you have asked plenty of questions for today.

  WHILE THE MEN WHOSE daughters are missing speculate on where they are now, the men who father Dorothies—Miller, Woodsman, Butcher, Baker—do not have the luxury of imagining the terrain of elsewhere their girls navigate. When the men whose girls are missing break off, the men whose girls are dead are left only with the sad and ugly task of chronicling where and when their daughters are not. Where and when and how and why their daughters are not. Where, when, how, why, and also what. What their daughters are not.

  A DAUGHTER IS NOT dark clouds on a winter day.

  A daughter is not the quilt that covers sick legs, a spoiled celebration.

  A daughter is not a minor chord, nor the rope binding a pair of struggling feet.

  A daughter is not an abandoned cup of tea gone cold, nor the paper links of a chain made by hands now grave.

  A daughter is not an undeveloped photograph, nor the broken leg of an antique chair.

  A daughter is not the spice rack, nor the sugar bowl, the driveway that ends before it meets the road.

  A daughter is not a frail and failing sweater, the cracking paint on a wall behind which dark tasks are undertaken.

  A daughter is not hot milk, nor the pavement, nor what we have come to understand as adventure.

  A daughter is not a brave sun that dares to rise the morning after an important death, the craters of the moon or the stings of a wasp.

  A daughter is not a weather catastrophe, fruit, or music.

  A daughter is not a knife, nor a fingernail clipping; a daughter is not a satchel, nor a damp pair of underwear, nor a cutting board.

  A daughter is not the stairs that lead to the cellar, nor your debt.

  A daughter is not the lesson that less is more.

  A daughter is not the act of winding, the wind, a healing wound or coils of wire wound round a neck.

  A daughter is not a vehicle, soft glass, tomorrow.

  A daughter is not gravity, nor the drawing of the blinds.

  A daughter is not a son.

  In a dark hollow in a wood at twilight, a daughter that was

  is not.

  BY THE TIME THE clock chimes three, the men are occupying themselves with tales about the day they learned their daughters were going to be born. They discuss the moment they found out and how their elation was followed by daunting fear.

  Then the men speak of learning the babies inside the bellies of the women who were going to be mothers would be girls.

  At first it is a kind of relief—the child will not have to go through boyhood. The child will be relieved of the struggles that accompany being a boy-child in this world.

  This brief reprieve is followed by a sinking revelation, which is this: their daughters will live lives they cannot know. Because daughters are vague and haunted, complex devices that must be maintained.

  Eventually, the men break for their only meal of the day. To-day—as on every Daughter’s Day—the men have packed their lunches in memory of their girls. Quietly they pull out their daughters’ favorite meals.

  Outside, the bells chime five and the men think not when will Peter come, but will he?

  WHAT PETER THINKS BUT cannot come to say:

  That though he does not know what it is like to experience a child who’s passed on or is missing, to witness a child engaged in long-term suffering is to be at the bottom of what he imagines to be an equally deep abyss.

  That it started through mentions of feeling misplaced and a request that he call his child son. That at first Peter thoug
ht it had to do with imagination and play. But as the insistence moved outside of the safe realm of theater at home and into the public sphere, Peter realized this desire to be called a boy-child was not a byproduct of make-believe. And this is when Peter began to feel in the core of his father-being that the dialogues were no longer in service of creating an environment for play. The performance grew ever more convincing, more deliberate, until a day came when it was made clear that this was not a role cast but a life craved.

  That at first Peter thought a child this size could not know the scope or scale of Life to Come. That the more Peter tried to tell himself that this was the thrill and enchantment characteristic of childhood wishing, the more he could not determine where his child’s performance ended and identity began.

  That eventually his minute child, the offspring raised by his own hand, had used the word intolerable to describe the situation. That his thoughts went immediately not toward the statement itself but toward the effort the child must have put into learning the word. That his child had said, standing in the kitchen wearing only a pair of boy-child underwear, arms crossed and eyes closed tight, This is intolerable. Peter interpreted this not as a threat, but a foreshadowing, an omen. And so, both languidly haunted and nudged into action by what this statement meant, events began to unfold.