Planning for Escape

by Sara Dillon

  On her first night out of the orphanage, Madina got quietly out of bed and dressed herself. She found her coat, put her boots on the wrong feet and stood by the door, waiting patiently to be let out. She must have thought she should return to the orphanage. When I tried to get her back to bed, she stiffened up and cried, not knowing where she was or where she was going.

  Several days later, she stepped through the metal detector at the airport in her provincial home town, and danced out into the light that came through the plate glass window, with bright snow spread out before her. She hopped back and forth in her red coat, pointing. It was fun to be naughty, she realized. From then on, for five years, it was all Madina’s way.

  I often said later that with Emmet you could not get him into a stroller, and with Madina you could not get her out. She liked to get a ride, all around the city, into shops, up hill and down dale. But when it came time to jump out and play ball or roll down a hill, she pouted, digging in her heels and pointing to the stroller. She loved her ride; quiet, peaceful, looking around. I would let her choose the hair clips for the day, and she wanted lots of them; kips, she called them, all colors and shapes.

  On her first day of preschool back in Dublin, we walked together into the old brick building. I had been telling her about “school;” she would be going to school and wouldn’t that be fun. We packed her a bag, and along she came. As we stepped inside the door, she got the scent of children, groups of children; the milk, the food, the spills, the diapers. As soon as she smelled it, she began to howl. She raced for the door and covered her face, kicking, resisting any attempt to turn her around to look. It was a smell she knew very well, the kind of place she remembered.

  I managed to leave her there in any case. By the time I got back in late afternoon, she had positioned herself with a big box of toys, sitting at a table with her arms linked possessively around it. She saw me and seemed surprised; maybe she’d thought I wasn’t coming back. Maybe she had decided that this would be it, and she looked up at me from a long way off and shook her head resolutely. Mine, she seemed to be saying. My box.

  I sat on the rocks at Sandymount, looking out over the bay. Madina dug in the sand with her new shovel, bright green. She was deathly afraid of dogs, and would climb right up onto my head when one came near her. She wore her dark yellow sweatshirt with the zip and hood; her sturdy shoes were caked with wet sand; the shovel went up and down, not very convincingly. It was hard sand, packed down flat and hard all along the narrow beach.

  I spoiled her, I guess; it was just the two of us, after all. I felt it keenly when she was cross and when she was happy. I marveled over her every new word and every drawing. I held her hand and walked her from room to room. We went on trips together, down to West Cork, where she ate her lunch on the brow of a hill overlooking the sea, squinting into the sun. Madina was never to be left uncomforted, or lonely. Still, there was something in her, a sadness that moved slowly, always hidden from view, a reluctance.

  Mama, Tubby Tubbies is on, she cried, running from the television and back to me. Tubby Tubbies! Tubby Tubbies!

  Her love for Dipsy, or was it La La, was fierce and intense, unshakable and relentless. When the Teletubbies appeared on the television, she could hardly believe her good luck.

  One day she tapped her hand on the wall of the apartment, then on a side table.

  Dis is Dina house, she said in wonder. Then she tapped her hand on me. Dis is Dina mama.

  The road; 2007

  They drive fast, Vermonters. Una always said so, and Una was right. They drove like wildfire up and down the road that went past the Lakeview Inn. The Inn had been closed for a couple of years; it troubled me. I worried about it. In years gone by, during our week or two up here, we used to go get our coffee inside the Inn and then sit on the porch, half pretending to be residents. I often went with Sven, who was always up for an outing like that, especially one that involved escaping for a few minutes from the kids.

  Why didn’t anyone buy it, I kept wondering. Una had joked that we should buy it and run it, but God, could you imagine. Guests from Montreal or Indiana throwing up in the bedrooms, domestic quarrels, fussing about bills, trying to keep the restaurant stocked with food. I had enough trouble remembering to buy Cascade for the dishwasher.

  Still, some people like those things; why didn’t anyone drive by, see that long, long and utterly wonderful view of the lake from the road as you enter Greensboro and say, By George, we’ll take it and run it! Such things happened all the time; or was that the case only in poorly written novels, where a plot conceit is urgently needed?

  It seemed the Miller’s Thumb, the gift shop where we spent so much time, and so little actual money, every summer, was also to close. Only Willey’s would be left, but Willey’s at least would never close. And the little post office. It was a short drive to Hardwick, to a book store and the diner. Still, it wasn’t nice to think of Greensboro as, well, going out of business. There was the ice cream place; the kids loved that, though it was strictly seasonal. There was the Greensboro Free Library, where Hughie and Madina used to go to pajama parties during vacation weeks when they were little, and where I now gravitated to check out the internet and see who if anyone had written to me.

  The same houses were on the market; a funny thing was that they could be on the market for years on end, yet no one ever dropped a price.

  The paint was peeling a bit on our house; the owner really needed to do something with it; the front porch, the door frame. Madina always wanted to open the door herself, but it was a difficult lock and it stuck. She would give up and hand the key back to me, cross and pouting.

  I liked being up high; that was why I had always liked this house, even before, when I could not have imagined we would be living in it. It looked down over the Grange Hall and the lake, the meadows. I would get depressed in a house down too low or too flat; there had to be something going on in the landscape that had me moving along with it; there had to be motion, activity, a rise, a vista. I hated to see houses built in the trees, especially in a valley. A brown log house in the brown trees on the brown dirt; nothing would make me want to get away from folks enough to make that attractive.

  In our white house with the peeling paint we sat in the front window where I had moved the table; we sat and ate our dinner. If you asked Emmet his favorite food, he would tell you, Tofu.

  Madina; 2000

  She never knew that it was even going on; I fibbed to her about it from the beginning, as I couldn’t bear to have her worry.

  It was the blood test that showed the Irish doctors something was wrong, but nothing they could figure out. My view of Irish doctors was that, without touching you at all, they simply asked you what was wrong and what you thought it might be yourself. There were two approaches to being Irish and dealing with the medical men: see them ridiculously often, or hardly at all, maybe just for the odd sore throat, go get a Lemsip recommended. I was in the latter category; my mother and her cousins in Ireland in the former.

  She may have a disease of the liver, the young doctor at the children’s hospital was saying; the color was no doubt draining from my face. She was sick, strong little Madina was sick and it could be serious. Strong like a young pony or a camel, Madina was sick and we needed to find out what it really was.

  Back and forth to doctors and clinics we went; sending blood samples through the post to England, writing to foundations, reading up on symptoms. The young specialist hemmed and hawed; he wasn’t sure.

  I pretended that everyone got this many blood tests; see, Mommy got them too, and ouch they did hurt. How she cried, Madina, her round face red, her mouth open wide in misery. The doctor urged me to take her out of the preschool, to place her in private care until we got to the bottom of things. Poor Madina, strong Madina in her red coat, singing along with all the songs at her school, making the gestures so nicely for Wheels on the Bus, round and round, swish, swish, swish. I drove her all around the city in the rain, trying
to find out what was wrong. She sat so patiently in her plaid car seat, looking out at the changing scene, growing sleepy, her head falling sideways until she was fast asleep.

  Madina liked to go to Park Baun. I put her to bed in the room with the small hand-carved mantelpiece and stone fireplace. I would make a lovely fire before putting her to bed, and lie down to trick her into thinking it was my bedtime then, too. As she slept, the firelight played on her face and hands. The wind was noisy in the tall evergreen tree that stood near the gate at the road.

  The young specialist did not know what was wrong with Madina, but there was something worse than that about it. He really didn’t care much. Not to sound like Gramma, but in fact he did not care. For him, it was a bit of a nuisance, this child plucked from another part of the world and brought to him for some kind of insight.

  Were they related, her parents? he asked me off handedly.

  What do you mean?

  There could be some genetic link, you know, carriers. Were they of the same family?

  Instead of lab reports, the doctors sent letters, typed by their assistants, round to one another. Doctor such and such feels that it is not such and such, it is more likely to be such and such; the like of that. Had they looked at the labs and cut out the letterhead, we might have found out a bit faster what on earth it was about.

  I heard of an opening from an American lecturer I knew at Trinity. He’d been offered a visitorship at a law school in New York, then had to call it off, and would I be interested by any chance. It would start in just a few weeks, but he would put in a good word for me if I wanted. I was already packing my bags, sorting and tossing. After seven years I was going back.

  Health insurance, does health insurance go along with it? I was asking their personnel department. Will I have coverage for my child?

  Yes, they assured me I would.

  Completely, no carve outs, no exceptions? I asked them again and again.

  Yes, they repeated, everything, no exceptions.

  I arranged for a Dublin solicitor to cover my courses, and told the Dean I wanted a leave of absence. After six or seven years of teaching in the castle, I knew I would not be back. I didn’t care what I would have to teach in New York, or whether American casebooks were familiar any more. I had to get Madina to America, I had to find out what was wrong.

  We arrived in Brooklyn in a huge snow storm. From our apartment, we could see the Statue of Liberty. Enormous barges passed by right under our windows. Across the way was the Manhattan skyline. I would teach something, something or other, European Union, Trade, International Business Law, anything, just so long as Madina would be well.

  New York City; 2001

  After every visit to the hospital, we got off the subway mid journey to stop at a toy store. I let Madina pick out anything she wanted. We would trundle back onto the train, carrying in turn a plush horsie on a stick, a big plastic doll house, a Madeline doll with a real blue coat and straw hat.

  The American doctors had figured out in twenty four hours what was wrong; it wasn’t good, but we could live with it. Madina would have to be monitored. She had no idea, of course; I told her we were checking her tummy to make sure that something she’d had as a baby was all better.

  Meanwhile, I had to teach American law students. I had only days to get ready; I hadn’t taught from those chopped up casebooks before, and I’d forgotten the system. I’d also forgotten how in your face the American law students were, how demanding, how skeptical. I got out of bed as quietly as I could at four a.m., setting out my books and notes on the kitchen table that overlooked the river and the Statute of Liberty, and began the long slog that was the start of the story of the rest of my life. Details and more details, cases and more cases. And out would come Madina, rubbing her eyes and whimpering, Me come too.

  What did anyone mean when they said they loved it; loved it, of all things? To love law teaching, love a law school; have you hugged a law school today? Whatever about lecturing in the castle, fearing that all the students would drop my course at once and I’d be left talking to an empty room, compared to this that had been easy as pie, reading from my notes, sometimes funny, sometimes impassioned, sometimes outright boring, as what could you do with the Sale of Goods Act? But this was something different, the anger in the room and the silent accusations, the awful smell of ironed white shirts after a full day of wear in an office. It’s for you, Madina, I am walking into the classroom like a robot, my past is gone and I am not really here, I am a lost soul, but I will continue to do it, just for you.

  I could still hear Alberti, faintly.

  What leaves and never returns:

  Wind that in shadow

  Dies down and flares up.

  Look for me in the snow.

  I didn’t think or write a word, there was no room for anything but to read on in the casebook, read ahead, make notes on the issues, ask questions upon questions, What about, and did you consider, and what if? That was the worst one of all, What if, what if the case had been brought in such and such a place, what if the plaintiff had actually told them such and such a thing, God I don’t know, I’ve enough trouble with the this is, never mind the feckin’ what ifs, but I had to pretend that I loved it, loved the what ifs.

  There came the one I wanted,

  The one I called for.

  Was I dreaming it, that I sent out a few letters, half-heartedly, without any real hope of escape, to say that I wished to reenter an old orbit, that I was seeking a position as a, well, combination poet thinker lover of art and writer of verse, ancient and young, wise and foolish, ready to teach on a light schedule, not too much wear and tear on the psyche if you please, shall teach readily and upon your application anything from the theory of courtly love to the self negation of the Japanese artistic will, narrative and sanity, highways of the soul, if that does not make up a course as you would like to see it appear on your course catalogue, make me an offer and we can always discuss it, I am easy, easier than you could ever imagine. In short, I can and will teach anything at all, anything; anti-narrative surrealism, Eva Trout, John Donne (shall try), goodness but only if I truly have to Edgar Allen Poe.

  A couple of professors wrote back, as I had only sent out a few and far too hesitantly, that I was just the sort of person the world should be seeking out and seeking out with a vengeance; I could not agree with you more, I thought, but alas, it is not turning out that way. The world should be beating down your door, one wrote. Indeed. As for the job ads, all I could come up with were notices for applicants for the position of, say, Visiting Assistant Professor of Acupuncture; Associate Dean of Budget and Accounts; Adjunct Lecturer in Bacterial Science.

  I prayed for Madina and she got well; miraculously and suddenly well. Her illness blew away on a sweet breeze. As we were checking into a New York hospital for her treatment, the doctor came rushing into the room.

  Hold on! he cried. The blood tests are normal; everything has fallen back into normal range; she is fine, you can go.

  I had convinced her that the hospital stay was going to be great fun, a real lark, and so she was a little miffed at not seeing the clown. I hustled her out to the taxi stand on an Upper East Side street, and held her close as we drove down, down across Manhattan. Sturdy little Madina, made to ride horses on the steppe; we had been touched by divine kindness.

  The Red Line; 2001

  I came to earth with a thud somewhere in Boston; they hired me to teach trade and European things and international transactions; it sounded awful, the word transactions. I would have said they wanted me to, but whether they wanted me at all remained an open question. Who were they looking for when they found me? They always spoke in terms of “pools” of people, a deep pool or a shallow pool, how superior or inferior the pool, whether few or many had applied and whether they had enough “comparison” and choice.

  It seemed funny to think of people that way, résumés and pools, great for us if we can compare them one to the other, woe betide
if we have too few to put one next to the other, as in a line up. It made no sense to me, but then, I likely made none to them either. Couldn’t you remember those you’d met before, and just quietly compare in your own mind, the way we tend to do anyway when meeting people in any other context, put them in the basket of other memories of people, how they look and talk. This was something else, the references and numerical evaluations telling whether they’d scored a 3 or a 5 when observers were asked, Would you recommend this person to others? for God’s sake.

  And what about that one from Ireland, hardly a bit of teaching in an ABA-accredited institution, no clerkships, no practice experience even; what has she done with the international bar? Will she bring in conferences, moot court teams, foot traffic generally to the law school? Alas, no, my principal impulse was to hide beneath my desk.

  I wonder why I worried so much about survival. It was a character flaw that would dog me every step of the way, though it wasn’t part of my conscious life in my younger days. Back then, I would have spent hundreds on a phone bill without blinking an eye, or headed off to the airport with a wad of bills and sorted out where I might go once I got there. As time went on, maybe I developed the Swedish hostage syndrome or whatever it was called; the sense of identifying with my own captivity. But that is too hard on me; I would have left it, if I had seen anything beckoning. I did write letters, if half heartedly, as I said. Reading about those transactions was hard, though. God, I’d already spent so much time on that kind of stuff.

  Madina and I went everywhere together. At her insistence, I carried her about in my arms, even when she was a big kindergarten girl. She would help out by sort of hopping up on me and making herself lighter. We went to the pizza shop at the end of our street in Cambridge; we spent endless hours in the playground where she tried again and again to go all the way across on the monkey bars. Our third floor apartment would get roasting hot on a warm day; the roof baked in the sun and even our floors were hot to the touch, but she never complained. She was spoiled, she was happy. She drew pictures and played with her Barbie furniture on the floor in the corner.