by Margo Catts
“But I wanna see the puppies!” Sarah shouted. Then she actually stamped her foot. My head swiveled around to stare at her.
“Behave yourself,” I said without thinking, then instantly felt my face flush. I’d never disciplined the children in front of their father and wanted to reel the words back in before I’d even finished saying them.
“Don’t act like a baby!” Paul snapped. My head swung back in time to see him stiffen and straighten. “I mean—calm down. You can see the puppies but not if you act like that.”
Why did he have to be here? My need to get away from Paul now outweighed my duty to start easing away from Sarah.
“Okay, come on, then,” I said, holding my hand out to Sarah. “Let’s just go now.”
At Poppy’s, I could hear TV through Mama Ruth’s open window, a yammering of puppies, and Sugar snarling at the baseboard, but no one answered the door. Of course Poppy would be at work—I knew that. But I’d read the banner as if it was her actual voice, calling from across the road. I tried twice. I didn’t want to go back.
“Do you want to go up the road and look for some flowers for the table?” I asked.
“I’m hungry,” Sarah said.
“Okay.”
She slid her hand into mine and pulled. Dinner. I couldn’t remember what was in the fridge but I could busy myself pulling something together for them to eat and then excuse myself. Somehow.
Sarah reached the front door first. A river of shouting poured out as she pushed it open.
“Could you even think of anything else to do wrong? Don’t go in mines! Don’t move if you get lost! Don’t ever leave your sister! You’re supposed to take care of her! Always! Can you tell me anything that was going on in your head? Tell me! Tell me!”
The voice came from down the hallway, muffled sounds of crying threading themselves into the pauses. Not a river—a flash flood, with fury and terror and blame tumbling over each other and splattering the walls. Sarah stood frozen beside me, her hand thin and limp like a piece of cloth in my own. I should have taken her and fled. Found high ground.
“I’m sorry, Dad!”
Kevin. I hauled Sarah onto my hip, no matter how far too big she was to be carried. Her arms twined around my neck like vines. I ran the length of the hallway toward him.
“Stop it! Stop it!” I yelled. The door was open. I saw Paul, just releasing Kevin’s shoulders to swivel toward me. “Let go of him!”
Kevin darted toward me and threw himself against my hip and Sarah’s legs.
“What are you doing?” A sob had pushed my voice up into my face, high against my cheekbones. Sarah slid from my hip as I dropped to my knees and pulled the two living, healthy children into my arms. And started rocking and crying. Crying and rocking.
I extracted the arm I had around Sarah, who pressed against my belly, and pushed against the center of Kevin’s chest so I could look up into his face.
“This was not your fault! This was not your fault! Do you hear me? Don’t ever let anyone tell you different! This was not your fault! You’re eleven years old! You were playing! Sarah’s fine! And you saved her!”
Kevin didn’t answer. I pulled him close again.
Only then did I lift my eyes to see Paul. He sat on the edge of Kevin’s bed, hands lying limp on each side as if his knees had given out and he’d collapsed there.
“How could you say something like that?” I sobbed to him. “This was my fault! Not his. I pushed him too hard to spend time with those kids. He knew they were bad. He knew it!”
Paul bit his lip and looked down, shaking his head. I could see the trembling in the mattresses before I saw it in Paul. After a moment he looked up at Kevin, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. The birthmark covered his throat like a bruise.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I was just so scared I’d lose you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was just so scared. I need you two. I can’t lose anybody else.”
He doubled over, catching his forehead in his hands, and curled himself around his great gash of grief.
We cried together, the four of us.
*
Tuah brought goulash and a bowl of mixed lettuces.
“How did you know?” I whispered. She wore a Coors T-shirt and baggy jeans and a gray cardigan. She smiled.
“I told you. It’s how it is here.”
I fought back a pressing urge to cry. She handed me a paper bag with string handles, which I hooked on my wrist as I took the soup tureen in both hands.
“Do you want to come in?” I said.
She looked at the window, then up somewhere over the top of the door, then back at me. That’s when I saw it, too—the membrane of grief that sealed us in the house together. She shook her head.
“No, I don’t think so. You just take care of those children.” She rolled her lips together. “And that poor man. Your bed’s ready, and I’ve got more goulash on the stove if you want it. But I won’t wait up for you.” And she turned on her heel and strode back to her truck with her head down.
So I reheated the stew and the four of us ate together, leaning toward one another over the table like branches over a pond. I sent them all to shower and bathe while I washed the dishes. Sarah finished first and came to me with a comb and a stack of books—The Very Big Word Book, The Way the World Works, The Book of Greek Myths—which seemed to have nothing in common except that they were all large and long. Kevin was next, who nestled into the other end of the sofa and started to flip through the available books. As soon as his father reappeared—freshly shaved, in a clean T-shirt and jeans and socks—I dished out ice cream with no regard for the ice crystals on top. The children drizzled chocolate syrup over it, and I heard the first giggles as Kevin said his looked like a butt.
Finally we found our way to Sarah’s room, where Paul sat on the foot of the bed while the rest of us huddled together on the floor to read. I told Sarah I was going to wait until she went to sleep, but then I’d be going back to Tuah’s house because I missed my bed just the same way she’d missed hers. Just as her eyes widened and she started to blink faster, Paul spoke up.
“I think this is a good night for a campout,” he said. “Right here in Sarah’s room. What do you say, Kevin? I’ll get the sleeping bags.”
“Really?” Sarah squealed.
“Really. Can you let Elena go home if we do that?”
She hesitated only a beat, then nodded rapidly, chin bobbing against Buffers’s ears.
“Kevin?”
They looked at each other for a moment, just a moment in which I saw something pass between them and connect them. Not a challenge. An alliance.
“Sure.”
Kevin and Paul spread sleeping bags on the floor, and we read far into the night, the stick-figure families on the walls linking arms around us. When Sarah started breathing deeply and I kissed her cheek, Kevin was already asleep. I slipped out of the room, turning on the night-light before I turned off the lamp.
I made my way to the living room, where my purse waited by the door, switching off lights as I went. Paul appeared, silent on stocking feet, as I hooked my purse over my shoulder. His voice was low.
“I—I’m real sorry about what happened earlier but I’m glad you were here,” he said.
I nodded. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I just think of him as being so grown up and I was so mad and so afraid, and I just blew up. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I could take it back—”
“It’s okay now.”
“—but I have to tell you something else. You said you were sorry. You said it was your fault. It’s not. You have to know that.”
I bit my lip. “Look—I’m not a mom. I don’t know what I’m doing. I pushed him out there. He just didn’t want to be a coward in front of those other boys. When he went in that mine, he was making the best decision he could. And every decision after that, too. He’s just a kid. If the kids had stayed to help him out, none of this would’ve
happened. We’d scold him and tell him not to do it again, but then it’d be over.” I shook my head. “It just isn’t fair.”
There was a long pause. I hitched my purse higher on my shoulder. “I better go,” I said.
“Wait—” Paul started to put a hand out, then stopped himself. Whatever he was about to say was a struggle. “You’re not—the mom. But you need to know something about their mom. She wouldn’t have known they were lost. She would’ve lost track of what time it was or forgotten where they went or thought it was part of a game.” He plunged his hands into his pockets. “I don’t understand anything. I miss my wife. I wish I had her back, no matter what. What happened was awful. But I’d be lying if I told you my kids weren’t better off the way things are now.”
The inflammable, unsayable words, once said, turned to smoke that hung in the air around us. And like smoke, they permeated the carpet, the paint, my hair, and my clothes. They clogged my throat and stopped my mouth. I stood with my thumb hitched under my shoulder strap, unsure whether it was all right to move or breathe.
“I—I don’t know,” I finally said. Which was true.
“I do.” Paul reached around me for the door and pulled it open. In the wash of fresh air, the smoke dissipated. “Thanks for everything, anyway,” he said. “Good night.”
I stepped over the threshold. I noticed each breath as I walked to the car, my chest widening, my shoulders lifting. I stopped with my hand on the door and looked back. Paul’s silhouette raised a hand before stepping back. A haze of light I hadn’t noticed was there disappeared and the front door clicked shut.
27
I was always aware that my father seemed older than other people’s parents, but a week later, when he stood from Tuah’s kitchen table in Leadville to greet me, I was struck by how very old he looked. What had happened this summer? He was far too old to be her son. Her second child, even. Tuah had told me yesterday that he was on his way, but I still stopped in the service porch doorway, taken aback.
“Hey,” Tuah said, only barely glancing up from the beans she was snapping into the kitchen sink.
“Hi, Elena,” my father said, opening his arms.
“Hi, Dad.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me forward so we could meet, ear to ear, clavicle to clavicle, bent forward at the waist to just barely make contact. Had I ever embraced him the way Sarah embraced me?
“How are you?” he asked, lowering himself back into his chair, one hand on the table, the other on the edge of the seat. He wore twill pants that might as well have been draped over a stick. I stayed standing.
I glanced at Tuah. “I’m fine.”
“You look good. You look really good. Mountain living suits you. Sit down—you must be tired.”
Must be? Just before I left the Koffords’, the children and I had been lying on our backs in the backyard, squinting up through the leaves, having contests over who could hold a breath the longest, who could show the most teeth at once, who could wiggle ears or make a tongue taco or whistle the highest or lowest. Shade was different here—brighter, more open—than in California, where live oaks closed like hands around the deep portico at my father’s front door. I hadn’t felt tired at all. But now suddenly I did. And I didn’t want to.
“Tuah, can I help with anything?”
“You could probably wash the greens.”
“Thanks,” I said automatically. She glanced at me, eyes narrowed.
“Anytime,” she said.
“You don’t want to sit down?” my father said.
“No, I’m fine. We can still catch up.” I opened the refrigerator and doubled over to reach the bottom drawer. I found more of the garden greens Tuah had brought down from the cabin, heaped like loose pillow stuffing in produce bags. I fished a colander out of a cupboard, and Tuah edged over to give me access to the faucet. What on earth was there for us to talk about? If only the kitchen was bigger, and I could be farther away.
“So what’s new?” I asked, starting the water and dumping the leaves into the sink as I plugged the drain. “Let’s see—did the Howards move out?”
“Yes, and just like I expected, they left the place like a junkyard. I look out the front window and all I see are weeds, weeds, weeds. I don’t know how anybody is going to buy it. Paint peeling, roof needs work. It’s terrible.”
“That’s too bad.”
“It’s a simple thing to take care of a place. A little maintenance. A little self-respect. A little care for other people.”
I thought of Poppy’s front yard—the haphazard flowers and grasses, the sprawling potentilla, the spruce wrapping itself around the corner of the house, the wind chimes and ornaments and figurines. I doubted she owned a working lawn mower.
“For sure,” I said. I shut off the faucet and swirled my hand through the water, watching the lettuces part like leaves on a pond, then close together again, trying to think of something, anything to ask that would keep him from running a cheese grater over my nerves. “And how did school wrap up? I guess I left before you were done.”
“Fine. Fine enough. A lot of low grades in geometry. Those sophomores are going to be a tough bunch the whole way through. It happens every few years—one class that just has a bad personality. I don’t expect to see many of them next year. They’ll quit math, you can take that to the bank.”
“Probably so,” I said. So perhaps there was no subject he couldn’t turn into a judgment. I scooped the colander through the water, pulling up all the leaves I could, then caught the fugitives with my hand and tossed them in with the others. I yanked out the plug.
“How about you?” he said. “What’s new here?”
I looked over at him. He sat with one elbow on the table, leg crossed, sock piled around his ankle so that an inch or two of bony shin peeked out from under the hem of his pants. I looked back down at the sink. Rivulets of sand had started to form as the water drained away. How about you? Where could I even start?
“Well, the kids take up most of my time.”
“How old are they, again?”
“Kevin is eleven and Sarah’s five. Almost six. She’ll start first grade in the fall.”
“Phoo,” he breathed out, shaking his head. “Tough ages. That’s tough.”
Tough ages? What did that mean? I felt an irrational desire to shield them, or the idea of them, from his judgments.
“How long do you have them at a time?” he went on. “A day or two?”
“More like a week, usually.”
“Oh my. That’s a lot. You’re doing a lot. I really don’t think most people could do that.”
I turned the water back on and started swishing sand down the drain. He was wrong. Had I never really listened to him before—or just never understood? My father’s voice, the narration of my life to this point, now sounded so brittle and harsh and out of place. Most people couldn’t do what I was doing? Tuah would do it. She had, in fact, for the children and for me. Poppy. Joan. Mindy. An entire community of people had done what I was doing now for months before I came. Then add Paul, who had dug himself in for a lifetime of supporting a wife who couldn’t care for him, or his children, or sometimes even herself. A string of men had gone into a dangerous mine to look for children they didn’t even know. And Leo, bless him, didn’t hold my bad behavior against me, volunteered to join them, hauled me back from danger, and after we found Sarah, held on to a vomit-stained boy when I was too distraught to think of him.
I don’t think most people could do that.
My father was wrong. People cared for other people all the time. And I had become one of them.
The realization stunned me. But I managed to keep my discovery to myself.
“Oh, come on, Dad,” was all I said as I shut off the water. “Sure they could.”
*
I’d always noticed that my father was different here. Ordinarily he saw the world quite clearly and settled himself onto his worn heels to make pronouncements, hands cap
tured in the side pockets of his jackets. People were good or bad. Actions were right or wrong. Good people took right actions and good consequences followed. Simple. Only here did he defer to anyone else’s opinion, and it was clearly a superhuman effort. But the dynamic was such a baseline condition of the visit that I’d never been conscious enough to bother identifying the source of the change. Tuah, I could see, was different as well now that my father was here. This was the woman I’d been slightly unsure of when I was little. Sharp. Curt. Displeased.
I’d forgotten.
Within an hour, my father had already gotten into one argument with his mother over whether a man he saw earlier was and always would be a liar because of a disagreement over a spyglass when they were children in Hat Creek. Another had almost erupted when he told me to be careful about getting “stuck” here because this was “one of those situations where people start having things done for them and start to expect it.” I think Tuah bit her tongue only because she believed I had more right to be offended than she did. Shortly after that, I decided we needed some different salad dressing and that I probably had a few other unnamed errands that had to be done right then.
I left the house like a refugee from a natural disaster. The torrent of judgments and absolutes had washed the ground out from underneath me. Fragile ground, apparently, because I’d never had a problem like this before. Had he always been like this? Always? All I knew now was that he was wrong, and while living alone with him, I’d never noticed. Now, I didn’t know what to stand on anymore.
I rolled through town slowly, without stopping, and found myself following the course of the river. I meandered alongside it, well below the speed limit, and eventually pulled onto the dirt shoulder at the spot where I’d taken Sarah and Kevin to make their boats, allowing the cloud of dust to clear before I opened the door. I got out and glanced up at the sky. A storm was building, later than usual. I wouldn’t have an excuse to stay out much longer but I couldn’t bear to go back.
My canvas shoes were ill-suited to trudging over the uneven grass clumps and boggy hollows. By the time I got to the bank I’d turned my ankle twice and my feet were soaked. And I still couldn’t say exactly why I was here.
