by Monica Wood
“Start the car, Emily,” I say. I try messing with the buttons to get out of the cradle of this seat and can’t find the right ones, end up in a perfect position to be stabbed in the belly if someone so desired. “Emily. Start the car.”
They are upon us now, a ring of faces peering at us from the murk, about six of them, backlighted by the safety lights around the gate, their faces feverish and easy to interpret. I start jabbing buttons at random, trying to get myself worked into a more manly pose. My window sinks soundlessly down.
I hear my name, hear some expletives and two or three obscenities entirely new to me and regional in a way I didn’t expect. I admit my identity. I tell them just who I am. Out of nowhere, like a magician’s trick, they produce a couple of baseball bats, fine blond small bats of the sort you might see on a Little League field.
“Oh my God Daddy oh my God Daddy,” my daughter is calling, and then the sound of the revving motor fuses with the first downward chop of a bat on the hood and my daughter’s high-pitched squeal. The fog lifts and lowers, lifts and lowers, and I see them in pieces—a frayed shirttail, a tuft of hair, a twisted lip. I see a raised arm, the rounded tip of a bat, then hear the splintering of one six-hundred-dollar headlight. For a few moments there is nothing but sound, an enraged battering, high cries inside the car and low grunts and murmurs outside, the nails-on-chalkboard grind of the engine, which my daughter is trying to turn over and over, not realizing it’s already on. She is banging on the console, engaging the wipers, the locks, the air-conditioning, as the windows rise and fall. Finally there is silence. The men stop. My shrieking daughter turns the wheel and the men stand back with no more passion than if we were a taxi pulling away from the curb.
They broke only one headlight. They creased the hood in such a way that the engine was not damaged. They pleated the sides and roof and trunk, but not enough to spring the doors. They left the tires alone. They gave me plenty to get home on, plenty else to think about. They damaged me in such a way that I would not be apt to tell. I believe they mistook my daughter for a girlfriend, a prize package I picked up at an awards dinner or theater opening; their intention was to compromise my manhood, not my fatherhood. It is then that I see what I have on my hands, that my predicament will last longer than I thought, that I am up against not the nobility that my daughter will insist on recalling after her hands stop quaking and we are well on our long way home, but rather the bone-deep stubbornness of men with only one path up against a man who appears to have many.
“I thought they might kill you,” my daughter says as we cross the border back into New Hampshire and feel safe enough to search for a motel. We are tired, it is dark, I have long since taken the wheel.
“No,” I assure her. “They were making a point.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I had no idea.” She wipes her eyes but they keep gushing; she has always cried this way, like her mother, in rivers. “I thought they were going to kill you, Daddy. Really. I thought they would pull you out of the car and kill you and I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop them.”
I pull into the parking lot of a decent-looking motel, the kind with an attached restaurant that specializes in fried fish and kiddie plates. “Garrett and I broke up,” she says, reaching over me to turn off the ignition. A chuffing sound beneath the hood can portend nothing but trouble. “And I dropped out of my program. No doctorate for me, Daddy.” She looks at me, her eyes shiny in the neon reflection of the motel sign, expecting something that I am uniquely unable to deliver. I find myself hoping, God help me, to deliver accidentally. “I can’t get over Mom, is the thing,” she continues. She looks up, eyes brimming. “Garrett got tired of this.”
My daughter waits as I grope for something to say. “He should have helped you,” I manage.
She unbuckles herself and picks up her purse. “He didn’t cherish me. No man has ever cherished me.”
“Well, he should have. He certainly should have.”
“He didn’t. So I’m telling you. There’s a hole in my life that I’m falling straight through. I’m in trouble, Henry, and you’re all I’ve got.”
My name sounds flat and sad. She grimaces in such a way—a twist of her soft mouth, smooth, elegiac—that I lose a little breath.
“You’re it, Henry,” she says. “It was either call you or check myself into a hospital. I’m really sorry.” Just when I think I’m close to understanding what she’s apologizing for, she adds, “You should’ve produced that sister I wanted. Then you’d be off the hook and she’d be on.”
I look into her shiny, wide-set eyes. Another Emily. Imagine.
“I’ve been seeing a shrink,” Emily admits. “This trip was all his idea.” She laughs this awful, humorless laugh. “Obviously he doesn’t know us.”
I fumble out of the car and open her side. “Come on,” I tell her. “I’ll buy you something nice for dinner.” She gets out, looking small and baffled in the thickening dark. “This will look a hell of a lot better on a full stomach, Emily, I can promise you that. That I can promise you.” I wait for her, considering how I might frame an apology, some careful ordering of words that might cover what I’ve done without including who I am. What I have in mind requires a fragility of construction that will not appear to me in this hastening moment. Instead, I shepherd her into the motel lobby, thinking to keep my hand on her shoulder, the way I imagine a father would.
That One Autumn
Marie Whitten, part-time librarian
She figured to die in summer, then in fall, and now it is winter, a mild one, and she sees that her time has finally come. Everything takes on a pleasant fuzz, like the skin on a peach. For days now she has lain still, staring calmly at her own hands, blue and needle-scarred, folded over her favorite quilt, where her tiny dog slumbers within reach of her fingers. Ernie stays by the window, endlessly glancing back at her, believing she can’t die as long as he is watching. In these final hours she has discovered the ability to read his thoughts, and though she is sobered by the expanse of his panic, the bottomless howl he cannot express, she is touched by it, too.
Despite the ice-white sky outside the window, it is not winters past that Marie dwells on, their muffled sense of safety, the cold stars, the hall closet straining with the wet-wool scent and weight of the tangled coats of her husband and son. Instead, it is autumn she thinks of, one autumn in particular, when for a time the days felt like these days: upside down, fraught with meaning.
That one autumn, Marie headed up to the cabin alone. From the first, something looked wrong. She took in the familiar view: the clapboard bungalow she and Ernie had inherited from his father, the bushes and trees that had grown up over the years, the dock pulled in for the season. She sat in the idling car, reminded of those “find the mistake” puzzles James used to pore over as a child, intent on locating mittens on the water-skier, milk bottles in the parlor. Bent in a corner somewhere over the softening page, her blue-eyed boy would search for hours, convinced that after every wrong thing had been identified, more wrong things remained.
Sunlight pooled in the dooryard. The day gleamed. The gravel turnaround seemed vaguely disarranged. Scanning the line of spruce that shielded the steep slope to the lake’s edge, Marie looked for movement. Behind the thick mesh screen of the front porch she could make out the wicker tops of the chairs. She turned off the ignition, trying to remember whether she’d taken time to straighten up the porch when she was last here, in early August, the weekend of Ernie’s birthday. He and James had had one of their fights, and it was possible that in the ensuing clamor and silence she had forgotten to straighten up the porch. It was possible.
She got out of the car and checked around. Everything looked different after just a few weeks: the lake blacker through the part in the trees, the brown-eyed Susans gone weedy, the chairs on the porch definitely, definitely moved. Ernie had pushed a chair in frustration, she remembered. And James had responded in kind, upending the green one on his way out the door and down to
the lake. They’d begun that weekend, like so many others, with such good intentions, only to discover anew how mismatched they were, parents to son. So, she had straightened the chairs—she had definitely straightened them—while outside Ernie’s angry footsteps crackled over the gravel and, farther away, James’s body hit the water in a furious smack.
She minced up the steps and pushed open the screen door, which was unlocked. “Hello?” she called out fearfully. The inside door was slightly ajar. Take the dog, Ernie had told her, she’ll be good company. She wished now she had, though the dog, her first Yorkie, was a meek little thing and no good in a crisis. I don’t want company, Ernie. It’s a week, it’s forty miles, I’m not leaving you. Marie was sentimental, richly so, which was why her wish to be alone after seeing James off to college had astonished them both. But you’re still weak, Ernie argued. Look how pale you are. She packed a box of watercolors and a how-to book into her trunk as Ernie stood by, bewildered. I haven’t been alone in years, she told him. I want to find out what it feels like. James had missed Vietnam by six merciful months, then he’d chosen Berkeley, as far from his parents as he could get, and now Marie wanted to be alone.
Ernie gripped her around the waist and she took a big breath of him: man, dog, house, yard, mill. She had known him most of her life, and from time to time, when she could bear to think about it, she wondered whether their uncommon closeness was what had made their son a stranger.
You be careful, he called after her as she drove off. The words came back to her now as she peered through the partly open door at a wedge of kitchen she barely recognized. She saw jam jars open on the counter, balled-up dish towels, a box of oatmeal upended and spilling a bit of oatmeal dust, a snaggled hairbrush, a red lipstick ground to a nub. Through the adjacent window she caught part of a rumpled sleeping bag in front of the fireplace, plus an empty glass and a couple of books.
Marie felt a little breathless, but not afraid, recognizing the disorder as strictly female. She barreled in, searching the small rooms like an angry, old-fashioned mother with a hickory switch. She found the toilet filled with urine, the back hall cluttered with camping gear, and the two bedrooms largely untouched except for a grease-stained knapsack thrown across Marie and Ernie’s bed. By the time she got back out to the porch to scan the premises again, Marie had the knapsack in hand and sent it skidding over the gravel. The effort doubled her over, for Ernie was right: her body had not recovered from the thing it had suffered. As she held her stomach, the throbbing served only to stoke her fury.
Then she heard it: the sound of a person struggling up the steep, rocky path from the lake. Swishing grass. A scatter of pebbles. The subtle pulse of forward motion.
It was a girl. She came out of the trees into the sunlight, naked except for a towel bundled under one arm. Seeing the car, she stopped, then looked toward the cabin, where Marie uncoiled herself slowly, saying, “Who the hell are you?”
The girl stood there, apparently immune to shame. A delicate ladder of ribs showed through her paper-white skin. Her damp hair was fair and thin, her pubic hair equally thin and light. “Shit,” she said. “Busted.” Then she cocked her head, her face filled with a defiance Marie had seen so often in her own son that it barely registered.
“Cover yourself, for God’s sake,” Marie said.
The girl did, in her own good time, arranging the towel over her shoulders and covering her small breasts. Her walk was infuriatingly casual as she moved through the dooryard, picked up the knapsack, and sauntered up the steps, past Marie, and into the cabin.
Marie followed her in. She smelled like the lake.
“Get out before I call the police,” Marie said.
“Your phone doesn’t work,” the girl said peevishly. “And I can’t say much for your toilet, either.”
Of course nothing worked. They’d turned everything off, buttoned the place up after their last visit, James and Ernie at each other’s throats as they hauled the dock up the slope, Ernie too slow on his end, James too fast on his, both of them arguing about whether or not Richard Nixon was a crook and should have resigned in disgrace.
“I said get out. This is my house.”
The girl pawed through the knapsack. She hauled out a pair of panties and slipped them on. Then a pair of frayed jeans, and a mildewy shirt that Marie could smell across the room. As she toweled her hair it became lighter, nearly white. She leveled Marie with a look as blank and stolid as a pillar.
“I said get out,” Marie snapped, jangling her car keys.
“I heard you.”
“Then do it.”
The girl dropped the towel on the floor, reached into the knapsack once more, extracted a comb, combed her flimsy, apparitional hair, and returned the comb. Then she pulled out a switchblade. It opened with a crisp, perfunctory snap.
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “I get to be in charge, and you get to shut up.”
Marie shot out of the cabin and sprinted into the door-yard, where a bolt of pain brought her up short and windless. The girl was too quick in any case, catching Marie by the wrist before she could reclaim her breath. “Don’t try anything,” the girl said, her voice low and cold. “I’m unpredictable.” She glanced around. “You expecting anybody?”
“No,” Marie said, shocked into telling the truth.
“Then it’s just us girls,” she said, smiling a weird, thin smile that impelled Marie to reach behind her, holding the car for support. The girl presented her water-wrinkled palm and Marie forked over the car keys.
“Did you bring food?”
“In the trunk.”
The girl held up the knife. “Stay right there.”
Marie watched, terrified, as the girl opened the trunk and tore into a box of groceries, shoving a tomato into her mouth as she reached for some bread. A bloody trail of tomato juice sluiced down her neck.
Studying the girl—her quick, panicky movements—Marie felt her fear begin to settle into a morbid curiosity. This skinny girl seemed an unlikely killer; her tiny wrists looked breakable, and her stunning whiteness gave her the look of a child ghost. In a matter of seconds, a thin, reluctant vine of maternal compassion twined through Marie and burst into violent bloom.
“When did you eat last?” Marie asked her.
“None of your business,” the girl said, cramming her mouth full of bread.
“How old are you?”
The girl finished chewing, then answered: “Nineteen. What’s it to you?”
“I have a son about your age.”
“Thrilled to know it,” the girl said, handing a grocery sack to Marie. She herself hefted the box and followed Marie into the cabin, her bare feet making little animal sounds on the gravel. Once inside, she ripped into a box of Cheerios.
“Do you want milk with that?” Marie asked her.
The girl nodded. All at once her eyes welled up, and she wiped them with the heel of one hand, turning her head hard right, hard left, exposing her small, translucent ears. “This isn’t me,” she sniffled. She lifted the knife but did not give it over. “It’s not even mine.”
“Whose is it?” Marie said steadily, pouring milk into a bowl.
“My boyfriend’s.” The girl said nothing more for a few minutes, until the cereal was gone, another bowl poured, and that, too, devoured. She wandered over to the couch, a convertible covered with anchors that Ernie had bought to please James, who naturally never said a word about it.
“Where is he, your boyfriend?” Marie asked finally.
“Out getting supplies.” The girl looked up quickly, a snap of the eyes revealing something Marie thought she understood.
“How long’s he been gone?”
The girl waited. “Day and a half.”
Marie nodded. “Maybe his car broke down.”
“That’s what I wondered.” The girl flung a spindly arm in the general direction of the kitchen. “I’m sorry about the mess. My boyfriend’s hardly even paper-trained.”
“The
n maybe you should think about getting another boyfriend.”
“I told him, no sleeping on the beds. We didn’t sleep on your beds.”
“Thank you,” Marie said.
“It wasn’t my idea to break in here.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“He’s kind of hiding out, and I’m kind of with him.”
“I see,” Marie said, scanning the room for weapons: fireplace poker, dictionary, curtain rod. She couldn’t imagine using any of these things on the girl, whose body appeared held together with thread.
“He knocked over a gas station. Two, actually, in Portland.”
“That sounds serious.”
She smiled a little. “He’s a serious guy.”
“You could do better, don’t you think?” Marie asked. “Pretty girl like you.”
The girl’s big eyes narrowed. “How old are you ?”
“Forty.”
“You look younger.”
“Well, I’m not,” Marie said. “My name is Marie, by the way.”
“I’m Tracey.”
“Tell me, Tracey,” Marie said. “Am I your prisoner?”
“Only until he gets back. We’ll clear out after that.”
“Where are you going?”
“Canada. Which is where he should’ve gone about six years ago.”
“A vet?”
Tracey nodded. “War sucks.”
“Well, now, that’s extremely profound.”
“Don’t push your luck, Marie,” Tracey said. “It’s been a really long week.”
They spent the next hours sitting on the porch, Marie thinking furiously in a chair, Tracey on the steps, the knife glinting in her fist. At one point Tracey stepped down into the gravel, dropped her jeans, and squatted over the spent irises, keeping Marie in her sight the whole time. Marie, who had grown up in a different era entirely, found this fiercely embarrassing. A wind came up on the lake; a pair of late loons called across the water. The only comfort Marie could manage was that the boyfriend, whom she did not wish to meet, not at all, clearly had run out for good. Tracey seemed to know this, too, chewing on her lower lip, facing the dooryard as if the hot desire of her stare could make him materialize.
