Planning for Escape

by Sara Dillon

  I saw the kids tummy down on the beds staring back at her, talking in low, secretive voices. Emmet calmed himself long enough to pat her gently on the head and, amazingly, she seemed to welcome his approach.

  Princess was better than cartoons, better than bickering. They would hold up pieces of clothing that had the telltale white fur across it; Princess had been sleeping there! With great howls, they protested my view that Princess was not in fact the brightest light bulb, but I also found myself chatting with her, especially after the kids had gone to sleep.

  One evening, I found a note that they had left, after much conspiratorial whispering, on my desk: Can we get one more cat or a dog to be frends with Princess?

  She had an awful kind of meow, had Princess; it sounded more like Waa than meow, and her face came apart in a kind of sad bleating, Waa.

  It was certainly strange that, at my age, I could be so pleased with myself for having performed the simple act of getting my children a cat.

  ——

  Almaty; 2005

  It was a dark night when I arrived in Almaty for the second trip. I was to pick up Emmet, who was now my son, get his new passport and other paperwork, and bring him home one week later. This time, it will not be a long trip, I had promised Madina, who was rigid with trepidation.

  Even on the drive in from the Almaty airport in the dark, I could tell how hot it must be in the day. The air was heavy and humid; there were small, half lit businesses in low buildings along the road. Young men stood on street corners. Then billboards and car dealerships, and on into the main part of the city.

  I knew that Emmet had been taken by care takers to a hotel room and that I would find him there. I was increasingly apprehensive as I passed by the noisy casino on the ground floor of the hotel, and through the cavernous lobby. Onto the elevator, down the long corridor. And there, in a crib low to the ground, slept little Emmet, small as a peanut, busy with his dreams. They left me alone with him; he was legally mine now, and I waited until he opened his eyes and looked into mine.

  It seemed he remembered me, but I couldn’t be sure. I had hoped for a more touching reunion, but right away he was up and on his feet, hands outstretched to get out and move about and look into bags.

  And thus we spent an entire week in a hot hotel room on the seventh or eighth floor, nothing to do but run water in the tub, and walk lazily out and around the little park nearby, and back in again. The sun beat down mercilessly. Emmet fussed. Time stood still.

  The plane would leave at the same ungodly hour, two or three a.m., or whenever they got around to calling it. I got Emmet ready early, dressed in the clothes I had brought from home. He hardly looked at me, but ran about the hotel lobby, climbing on chairs and trying to knock over lamps. I put a little white hat on his head, which he in turn pulled off each time and threw to the floor.

  As had happened with Madina, something changed utterly once we checked in our bags and entered the waiting room for passengers who would be on the flight out. Emmet settled in according to some instinct that, yes, this was it. He took his little cars and trucks and, tiny as he was, began shooting them across the broad shiny floor, then chasing them with glee. He stayed within a reasonable orbit, not straying too far, but neither paying me much attention. Once on the plane, he seemed content, and gobbled up the whole of my cheese omlette. For much of the flight, he slept in a restless, shallow sleep, twisting and turning. By the time we entered Frankfurt airport—old, crowded and uncomfortable though it was then—Emmet was my boy.

  There were not many places to go, so we hung out at the McDonald’s, of all venues. There was a little playground, with colored balls on the floor that the children could slip and slide on. Emmet rolled around happily, grabbing the balls and throwing himself back and forth. In the waiting room for Boston, he managed to amuse everyone, running back and forth, checking out sights and noises, climbing under feet and over barriers.

  People watching him did not know what to make of him; he was small enough to be an infant, but with the flitting energy and action packed agenda of a much older child. His teeny white ankles and feet stuck out comically from the baggy blue trousers that had once been Hughie’s. It was on the second flight that all hell broke loose.

  Emmet screamed, simply screamed his lungs out, for several hours. It began when he refused to be strapped in his seat, and nothing I could do would make him stop. His face was red, his eyes closed tight. He didn’t seem to hear my voice, and wouldn’t so much as look at me.

  I walked him up and down, but there was no comfort for him in it. He screamed when we landed and went on screaming, if somewhat more quietly, as we entered the cool dark space of Boston airport. There was no one to meet us, as I had not asked anyone to come.

  I remembered arriving with Madina years back, late at night. Sven came rushing up to greet us and she had stuck out her arms for him to take her, perhaps on the theory that she had used up all I could possibly offer.

  This time, we were on our own. It was an ordinary summer afternoon in Boston. Emmet’s paperwork did not take long; the official looked it over, and sent us on our way. I collected my bags and pushed Emmet along in a stroller. At last, he settled down and stopped crying. He began to look around and I thought I even saw a smile.

  I remembered arguing with the cab driver about the best way back to Cambridge. At last, we drove up to the green house where Madina and I had lived in the attic apartment for several years, but would now be leaving.

  Emmet had fallen asleep. As I stepped out of the cab, I saw what a tiny child he was, sound asleep, not knowing where he was or why, but somehow going with it.

  Book VII

  Spring, 2007

  There was something I didn’t like about Merrill’s Collected Poems coming out. I wouldn’t have said so, but in my mind it was linked with his message about not writing any more. It was a heavy book, beige and brown like early autumn leaves. I preferred slim volumes of poetry when they were first published—quirky and setting out a marker for a certain moment in time. Those thin volumes would date themselves over the years, like kitchen wallpaper and bedroom colors.

  As Leo Ferré said, maybe without meaning it, Avec le temps, on n’aime plus. Leo Ferré always pleased me, I loved the way he stood on stage and faced the audience, in unabashed anguish. I wished I could have met him, but of course, he was gone long before.

  I should have gone to France; that old debate with myself again. Probably all cultures toss up, genetically speaking, a roughly similar proportion of those like me, but some cultures lionize and others punish. I guess I’ve made that point sufficiently. Self-punishing romantic as I always was, maybe it made perfect sense that I chose Japan. I slotted right in. And Kido was the greatest of the Japanese romantics, the most in need of salvation. And we know how that worked out.

  As for Kido’s wife, well, her blog made sense in a way. Having been kept in a box for so long, and facing sixty years old, she decided to write anything that came into her head—pedicures, perfume, who she ran into back stage and what compliments they gave her. What the hell. I understood that.

  Here I was, the adventuress, and my own timidity amazed me. Waiting, watching, a mad woman in a repetitious, noisy conversation with myself. Patient as Job, wacky as Ophelia.

  Still, I was not completely out of my mind. I had seen enough to know that I was not especially lucky, or fortunate, or whatever you want to call it. It was sinful to say that; terrible things had not happened, and in that sense I was better off than the vast majority of humankind. On the other hand, compared to the mediocrities I saw everywhere, I had not enjoyed what one thinks of in the crass sense as success. I lacked the cliché gene. I was stubborn. I resisted.

  Timid and lyrical, stubborn and afraid, I was Emily Dickinson.

  I could live ten years or more on a single gesture, and that was hardly a good, certainly not a useful, quality to have.

  I had imagined it would morph into something else, but morph it did not. I w
aited, and still it did not morph. It was time to break the news to myself.

  It came to me at last just why I had spent so much time in Japan, what the link was. For both the Japanese and for me, there was a sense of never being able to possess what was there before us to possess. For them, it would mean trying to buy all the beautiful things of the world. For me, it led to that never-ending, bitter internal dialogue; better put, a dramatic soliloquoy heard only by myself.

  Maybe I had misheard Leo Ferré. Maybe it was On aime de plus. Or On aime plus. Which if either was grammatical; my French was rusty. My Japanese was rusty.

  It was always like that. I could teach the kids basic Spanish, French, Japanese, even German or Mandarin—but everything was rusty, unusable in real life. I wasn’t sure how I would even do with a lunch menu in the various languages. And music; I could teach basic piano and music theory. I would have a go at Algebra I equations and the life cycle of the grey fox. Not ballroom dancing; not yet, anyway.

  I could do a little of everything. What a waste it seemed at times.

  On these days I had to myself, with the kids at daycare and school, I opened the windows that looked down over into the town. I listened to whatever music I wanted, medicine taken too late.

  Sometimes I had to remind myself exactly where I was; there had been too many motifs, and I would come to, as if out of a trance, wondering exactly where I had arrived this time. We had yet to unpack all our boxes. I wasn’t sure if we would take the house for one more year; the landlord was lackadaisical and I had always been hesitant to face such issues.

  I wasn’t far from Saint Theo’s and, of course, from Merrill. It occurred to me one afternoon that I could quite easily go see him, talk to him. I could look him in the face again; he still existed. I hadn’t changed so terribly much; I didn’t look that bad, surely. He had mentioned that back surgery, how unlike him that sounded. I could go find him after that, we could meet in his office, with John Donne and Randall Jarrell and Mark Strand on the shelves.

  I wouldn’t be restored, nothing could do that. But there would be magic in his office, and he would touch me on the head and something of the past would be brought back to life.

  It was only a sentence or two, but he had wanted me to write to him, wanted to see my name on the e-mail message. I had been asked for something. It was a feeling I had grown very unused to. In the summer, I would visit a Saint Theo’s that still, incredibly, existed.

  Cambridge; 2005

  The very day after I brought Emmet home, we moved to a different apartment, a larger one on the first floor, trading in our cramped third floor walk up. Constantly afraid that Emmet would fall down the stairs or otherwise hurt himself during the move, I had to watch both of them like a hawk, carrying boxes, lifting, tossing, arranging. On one of the last trips out, I asked Madina to run back up and grab something I had forgotten, and Madina said her first big no.

  No, she said, sitting there and looking at the ground. No.

  I had never seen her look like that, helpful little bird as she had been.

  Please, Madina, it would so help me, I said, hot, desperate for someone to swoop in and make things easier.

  She shook her head again and looked the other way. And so began Madina’s new life.

  Whereas Emmet adored her from the first moment.

  He gazed at her, imitated her words and gestures. Dina! He would call out when she was not with us, longing, supplicating. Later, when he could say more, he would cry, Dina, where is you? He opened his eyes on Cambridge and there was Madina, standing over him, sizing him up.

  Well, he doesn’t look Kazakh to me, she said.

  His face was red with heat and from all the tears he had shed. He looked around and began to make strange noises, Uh, uh, uh, rolling over and grabbing all the bright objects he could hold.

  Geesh, he’s big, she said. Not a baby.

  Within a week, Emmet was in a daycare near my office in the law school. Unlike Madina, when he first walked into the place, he looked around, delighted, and took off after the balls, blocks and water table. If he could have talked, he would have said something like, Wow, this is the coolest orphanage I ever saw! His favorite activity quickly became collecting rocks and washing them at the water table. They gave him an empty box to keep them in and let him carry them everywhere he went. He played peek a boo behind the director’s chair, raced up and down the playground on the roof, pushed play grocery carts, and never stopped moving. He despised naptime and it was only then that he pulled a cranky face and stamped his foot at the teachers.

  People had told me that with another child, it is not a matter of one plus one equals two, but rather some exponential increase in demand that has to be lived through to be believed. The in and out of the car, the strapping and unstrapping, the food rejected, the poo in the bathtub, the spills, the cuts, the tears, the moods. Emmet also had a deep suspicion that he would not get enough, not get his fair share, and his good nature turned to angry vigilance whenever popsicles or candy were being doled out. He got over his love of bananas after downing seven of them in a row; he never looked at them again.

  I brought him into Boston on the train with me; just as Madina had loved the stroller, Emmet hated it, squirming and struggling to be let free to run. At the train station, either the escalator or the elevator would be out of order, and I would end up carrying Emmet, stroller and all, up dirty old concrete steps, buffeted by all the twentysomething folks on their way to work. In the office, I worked on my footnotes, writing and writing with one eye on the tenure process. No one mentioned a leave; I never asked. I was afraid that it might interfere with tenure, I guess. I had to stop people from looking at me, discussing me, having meetings to evaluate me. How old was I, for God’s sake? She did what, I imagine they said to each other, she took on another child?

  When school started in the fall, Emmet and Madina posed for photos outside our house. By then at least, they were smiling and holding hands. True, we had had fifteen fights before getting out the door, but they ended up smiling. I read all the therapeutic parenting guides, did hug times and time ins and beyond consequences. To get them to sleep, I tried tough love and standing in the bedroom doorway, reassuring words and refusal to talk after I’d said goodnight, one book, two songs, two books, one song, no song. I put Madina in with Emmet, Emmet alone, Mommy with one, Mommy with both.

  At Christmas time, I had to buy enough to make bliss for two instead of one; cranes and garbage trucks along with American Girl skateboards and Patriot the Foal.

  On snowy mornings, I pushed Emmet’s stroller through the drifts as best I could; Cambridge wasn’t great on shoveling sidewalks. The trains were delayed. I assuaged Emmet with lollipops.

  Mommy, why did you leave me to go get Emmet? Madina asked regularly, never forgetting, especially at night before she went to sleep.

  So you could have a brother, and because it’s fun to have one more child, I would answer. There was some enormous well of grief, something that had happened that she could never explain. Isn’t it nice, having one more? Like a team.

  I still love you the same as I did, I told her. She began to revert to her toddler voice. Sing me song! she would command, kicking her legs under the covers. Get me drink!

  By the time I got tenure in March, I knew that I was being condemned to teach law forever, that there would never be any escape, no return to poetry readings and secret meetings in shadowy restaurants.

  Catherine, good news, the Dean said on the telephone. A positive vote, good support, a positive result for you and for the law school. It was a strange kind of language.

  Thanks, Dean. I won’t let this change anything, I said, moronically, as if taking on his point of view, unable to retain my own. My best to everyone. I do appreciate it.

  I had done it again, jumped through all the hoops, one by one, day after tedious day, walking my classes, unwilling though they were, through the most impenetrable sections of treaties, agreements, statutes.


  Congratulations, Catherine.

  Thanks again, Dean.

  And how are those kids? It was the obligatory reference.

  Fine, fine, they are just fine.

  ——

  Summer of your life; 2006

  What was it about that particular summer, I wonder. I had been through it all many times before, the boom and bust of feeling, the sand buckets, towels, the urge to reach water or mountains, the feeling of conquest and resolution. Dear friends, lovers, well-wishers, By the time you read this, I shall be well on my way towards the heart of summer. Do think of me from time to time.

  It was less believable this time, maybe that was it. Nothing at all would happen, I saw that, realized it completely.

  Summer would be a short burst of urges, like a cup of iced coffee, quickly downed and scarcely remembered. It went by not only quickly, but brutally, mockingly.

  And then August came. The birds went quiet; the dog days came. I left the office and went out onto the streets of Boston. People were hanging about, squinting against the bright light, dejected. I had to begin thinking about law again, MOU’s and protocols, who could take an action, against whom could the action be taken, had such an action ever been taken, and if taken successfully, reversed, and to what extent reversed or remanded, referenced, partially overturned, what time limit, subject matter limit, limits of joinder, rejoinder, rejection, presumption of all facts favorable towards him, you, rejection of all arguments not raised by the date in question, incomprehensible chart pointing sideways, up, down, return to sender.