Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  “Meadow,” you said, tapping her leg. “It’s almost time for Dora. You can go and watch Dora while me and Daddy have some sharing time.”

  I smirked. Sharing time had such a punitive ring to it, I could hardly hear it without laughing. Your speech had become rife with institutionalisms. I watched Meadow wipe her mouth and push off from the table, her cane-juice-sweetened Os distended in their inch of milk. After she was gone, you leaned in.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Eating breakfast.”

  “What are you doing collecting dead animals? What the hell makes you think that’s a good idea? Who are you trying to turn her into, Wednesday Addams?”

  “That’s funny, Laura.”

  “This is not funny. I have had it.”

  “Had it with what? It’s nature. Death is natural. She’s not scared of it. She’s wiser for it.”

  “She’s not supposed to be wise. She’s supposed to be three and silly and to laugh a lot and not worry.”

  “Well, she asked.”

  “I don’t believe you,” you said. “That’s the problem. I don’t believe you anymore.” You pressed both hands to your brow. “I don’t believe you. I don’t trust you. Help me, Eric.”

  I sat there wishing for something to do, a satisfying punishment of the sort we used to get in grade school in Dorchester when we were bad or rude, and we were instructed to endlessly rewrite our error until we had filled pages and pages with the chant

  I pushed in line

  I pushed in line

  I pushed in line

  I pushed in line

  I pushed in line

  I pushed in line

  We’d write until our hands ached, and we were totally purged, ready to begin again, ready to be better.

  I looked up to see tears dripping from your jaw, untouched. You toyed with the handle of your coffee mug.

  “Please don’t cry, Laura. It was just a dead animal.”

  “No,” you said. “No, it was not.”

  “I’m not sure what you want,” I said. “Something that I can actually give you.”

  “I want to know how this happened. How we became so different. So opposite. How this huge space grew between us.” You looked at me pleadingly. “Were we always like this? I don’t think so. I miss who I thought you were.”

  And then you just let go, you just let yourself sob.

  It’s not totally relevant for me to sit here and describe what it feels like to watch your wife cry in despair about something you did—no—some way that you are that doesn’t even seem strange or remarkable to you. Despite the fact that I have clearly lost the PR battle here—I mean, I broke the law, in countless ways—I’m still curious to know whether or not I did the wrong thing with the fox. Because in the end I really don’t know what I should have said, and I spend a fair amount of time sitting here wondering how I could have been more like who you thought I was, which sometimes feels productive, and sometimes feels like a rare form of self-battery. And so I have devised a multiple-choice questionnaire, for the reader of this document, whomever she may be if she is not you, Laura, in an effort to conduct, as it were, a sort of study. Here it is:

  Is it appropriate to tell a three-year-old child that everything that is alive will die and decompose, including the human body?

  Yes or no?

  If no, why?

  a) Because that is a lie. A dead body does not decompose, but rather is borne off completely intact on the shoulders of a bevy of celestial heartthrobs.

  b) Because the question is irrelevant. The teacher has been discredited, for reasons that have multiplied exponentially since then, and therefore whatever he said, whatever factoids he once offered his exceptionally intelligent child, were spurious.

  c) Because a guy in his position really should have deferred to his wife, and if he had a brain in his head, he would have known that his wife wasn’t going to like it, and the fact that he went ahead and desecrated a dead fox is proof that he probably didn’t love her anymore anyway, or had given up on her, or had given up on her ability to accept him for who he was, and the fact that they were fighting so viciously over a science experiment was probably a red herring, and underneath it they were probably asking each other the standard late-stage question: Why don’t you love me? / Why don’t you love me?

  Circle your answer and return to:

  Erik Schroder RN # 331890

  CCI ALBANY

  COUNTY CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION

  P.O. BOX 3404

  ALBANY, NY 12227

  ANOTHER SURPRISE

  The frog was still alive. When Meadow settled the bucket into the pond water and removed the chicken wire, he startled to life and began to rapidly stroke away from us, deep into the murk. We turned around and traced our steps toward the dirt road.

  Just as we reached the road, we heard a car approaching. The car came rapidly over the rise and sped past us, only to come to a dusty halt farther on. Taillights flicked on; the driver turned around and backed up, rolling down the passenger-side window. It was April.

  “Well, hello again,” she said.

  I couldn’t help but smile. I leaned over and put my hand on the roof of her car. Her arm was hooked over the seat back. Since I’d last seen her, she’d changed into a long, angel-sleeved sheath of yellow, green, and red. In the backseat, I saw her belongings: several crates, a sleeping mat, a duffel bag, a bunch of celebrity magazines.

  “I was trying to get used to the idea that I’d never see you again,” I said.

  “Not necessary,” she said. “Get on in. I can move all that junk.”

  I shook my head. “Thanks. But we were just about to head back and clear out ourselves. You know, head home. Time’s up.”

  April leaned forward and gave Meadow a warm smile. “Hey, Chrissy.”

  “Hi,” said Meadow, hanging back but smiling a little.

  April waved me around the car. “Com’ere,” she said. “I should tell you something.”

  I walked to the driver’s side, and leaned forward.

  She spoke into my ear. “So. If you head back now, you will be greeted by three Vermont State troopers. Three squad cars. The one came first, and the others came with their sirens off. They’ve already been inside your cabin. I’d say whatever you had in there is now property of the state. Cheese singles and all. There will be more coming soon, is my guess. That poor lady is in a state. She kept saying she had a bad feeling about you.”

  I raised my head. The top of the dirt road ended in sky. Everything was quiet.

  April leaned forward to peer at Meadow, who was toying with her bucket. “Find any butterflies, baby?”

  “No.” Meadow inched closer to the car. “But we freed the frog.”

  “Good. That’s good. That’s right.” She looked up at me. “So, Sir John. What will you do? You’ve got about sixty seconds before I take off. I can’t believe I’m even talking to you.”

  I opened my mouth, but I could not speak. My mind jammed. All I could think of was—the old lady had a bad feeling about me? April sighed and got out of the car. She moved the duffel into the trunk. Then she gestured to the open door.

  “You should see your face,” she said to me.

  “I have some things—,” I said. “Some things in the cabin—”

  “So what?” April said. “They’re gone. They’re not yours anymore.”

  Meadow was staring at me. Her face must have mirrored mine, if only because mine frightened her so much. That’s when I thought of it, of what I had left to do.

  “Get in, sweetheart,” I said.

  “And don’t slam the door,” added April.

  “Be quiet.”

  “Why, Daddy? What’s wrong?”

  “Get in.”

  And there they were—male voices, down by the water, amplified by the lake, sounding closer than they were. They sounded as if they were right beside us on the road, invisible men. The dogs were barking out of their minds.

  I
couldn’t buckle my seat belt. I couldn’t feel my fingers. I tried and tried. We were already moving very fast by then.

  FALLING ROCK

  The road for all seasons and reasons,” Route 2 sweeps you through Vermont’s niche industries, a series of diverse, minor attractions like the winery at Calais or the “cornfusing” corn maze at Danville. And if the traveler doesn’t have time to stop, if he is, in fact, desperately trying to cross state lines, he may just gaze out the car window at the legendary Vermont woodland, through which, if he lives that long, the traveler may return on a charter bus from his retirement home in some distant leaf-peeping season. And if he closes his eyes, he can see it already, although it is only June: autumn’s mosaic of yellow and copper and red, the sad magic of it.

  Meadow had not spoken a word to me since the outskirts of Burlington. She sat steely eyed in the backseat, her hands clutched in her lap, looking small and unfamiliar without the added height of her booster seat. I had tried to speak to her several times, but at the sound of my voice she snapped her head to the side. She’d been upset to abandon her backpack (“and my toothbrush and my new bikini”). All she now possessed, in fact, was an empty bucket. As for me, I carried only my wallet and keys and the clothes I’d been wearing for four days—a pair of flat-fronted khakis, still rolled to the knee and wet with pond water, and a blue-checkered collared shirt with a wilted buttercup in the breast pocket. Everything else in our cabin was currently being turned inside out by some square-jawed woodhick with a CB radio. (Found something, Dawson.) Of course, at the core of this, there was an image that made my stomach tighten. (What is it, Peterson? Looks like a passport.) I saw him coming toward me—not the cop, the boy—in his knee-high athletic socks, his knockoff Bruins jersey, circling me like some hungry fish.

  Erik Schroder, it says. Who the hell is Erik Schroder?

  “What’s that sign mean?” Meadow said suddenly, pointing out the window.

  We were driving through a mountain pass of blasted granite.

  I cleared my throat, trying to summon a steady voice. “Falling rock.”

  “Oh great,” Meadow said. “Now rocks are going to fall on us, too?”

  The wind was high, swabbing the clouds back and forth across the sun. Whenever we plunged into shadow, Meadow’s eyeglasses became reflective, giving her face a cold, mechanical look.

  “April’s driving too fast,” she muttered. “She’s driving too fast to miss the falling rocks.”

  “Hey,” April said into the rearview mirror. “As my mother used to say, don’t should on me, and I won’t should on you.”

  Meadow crossed her arms and snapped her head to the side again. “I don’t care what your mother used to say.”

  We plunged back into silence. Probably none of us, in our whole lives, had ever gone so long without talking. I glanced over at April, who was holding on to the steering wheel with a high two-handed grip like an old lady. Was I that bad, was I that desperate, to become the goodwill case of a woman like her?

  “Hey, April,” Meadow said darkly.

  “Yeah, hon?”

  “Chrissy’s not my real name.”

  April laughed. “I didn’t think it was, honey.”

  I didn’t turn around.

  “My name is Meadow. Meadow Kennedy.”

  “Well,” said April, “my name really is April Almond. Even though it sounds made up.” She laughed again, this time a little uncomfortably. “Funny how people are always trying to tell me the truth, even when they shouldn’t.”

  “My daddy doesn’t always tell the truth. He tried to shut me in the trunk of a car once.”

  I swung around. “What?”

  “You did.”

  “But I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t shut you in it. And besides, I’ve apologized for that several times.” I looked at April. “I apologized for that.”

  “Don’t tell me about it,” said April.

  “And Mommy said you lied sometimes.”

  “When?”

  “When I was little. And you took me all sorts of places.”

  “Like the library? When I was taking care of you? And she was at work?”

  “No. Like the church where everybody was crying? Mommy said that was not for kids.”

  Again I turned to April. “An AA meeting. I went to support a friend.”

  “You took her to an AA meeting?”

  “A mistake.”

  “Well, I told Mommy all about it,” Meadow declared.

  “You can’t tell Mommy things like that, Meadow. She doesn’t understand them out of context.”

  “Still!” Meadow shrieked. “You’re not supposed to lie. If it was good you would have told!”

  “All right, all right,” April said. “You know what? I really don’t want to know any more about all this. I’m sure you are both very important people. You deserve a ticker-tape parade for living, OK? Anyway, cheer up. We’re heading to New Hampshire, a great state. We’ll drive over the Kancamagus. Gorgeous. You won’t believe it. Much better than this. The White Mountains blow the Green Mountains out of the water. Who wants to listen to the radio?”

  She screwed irritably at the dials. In the distance, mountains tumbled into mountains. The nearest ranges were dark and green, the farther ranges fainter and higher, echoed by fainter mountains farther still, the jagged horizon a series of studies for a mountain.

  “I want to thank you,” I said to April, my voice thick and wounded. “You’ve been—you’ve been—”

  “No problem. You’re welcome.”

  “I’m not a bad person.”

  April sighed. “You may or may not be a bad person. You’re just a lot less bad than the other people I know.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “Like I said.”

  “I mean, thanks for taking us to your place. I just need a quiet place to stay. To collect my thoughts.”

  “You won’t be staying anywhere, John.” April turned and looked at me hard. Then she glanced backwards at Meadow, who was scrutinizing us from behind. Finally, Meadow rolled her head away and pretended to stare at the landscape. April turned up the volume on the radio. “And I didn’t say the place was mine. The place is my cousin’s. A camp near Ragged Mountain.”

  “No, listen. I don’t want to involve anyone else.”

  “My cousin’s not there. It’s a long story, but let’s just say he’s in Georgia. I check in on his place now and again.”

  “Better to stay at a motel. You can drop us off at any motel.”

  “Slow down. At my cousin’s place, you’ll have privacy. You can give her a home-cooked meal, and you can think about where to go next. But you won’t be able to stay anywhere, is all I’m saying. I mean, if your idea is that you’re going to keep running. With or without her. There are lots of people out there living like that.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Jesus. I’m not going to force your hand. But she will. Look at her.”

  I looked. My daughter’s arms were wrapped around her orange bucket. Her mouth was set in a wry smile, and I could almost hear her making wild promises to herself. Her white hair was being sucked in ribbons out the window, giving her a bizarre, mythical look. This, I thought, this is what I wanted? This rumpled, sandy child with an abnormally high tolerance for upsetting turns of fate? With a sick twisting in my conscience I saw that I had been waiting to see if she could do it, if she had the capacity to tolerate the world as it was according to me—a mess, a random and catastrophic mess—and if she could stand it. And there she was in the backseat, standing it, the third in a trio of missing persons, and there she would be, in some ways, forever, wouldn’t she? Because when she was older, might her familiarity with people like me or April consign her to their company, so that she would be drawn to them and would travel with them in their VW vans or the sidecars of their motorcycles, forever along the edges of things, until she would be, in the end, more comfortable with freaks and eccentrics than with the main army? I shuddered inwardly, experiencing the firs
t cold pall of regret, a sense that this victory was the wrong victory, a sense that you had been right.

  We arrived in St. Johnsbury in the late afternoon. April pulled up to a coffee shop across from a white New England public academy and took Meadow inside to use the bathroom. School was letting out for the day, buses lined up along the street, parents gathering slowly.

  I sat and watched the parents gather. Several of them wore muddy work clothes and trucker hats. Some of the women were visibly pregnant. They stood together, murmuring. I rolled down the window and tried not to stare.

  A flash of blond hair behind the café window. Meadow had turned around and was talking to someone I could not see in the interior of the coffee shop. A waitress? She was nodding. What was she being asked? She reached out her hands, accepting something.

  Say it, I thought. Go ahead and say whatever they teach you to say to save yourself.

  Then there was April behind the glass, smiling through fresh lipstick, joking, explaining, scooting Meadow along. Cowbells jangled. A man on the street tipped back his hat, and out came my daughter, holding a donut.

  RAGGED MOUNTAIN

  We arrived at the camp in darkness. In the headlights, the place looked as if someone had extracted an apartment from the worst Dorchester housing project and rebuilt it cinder block by cinder block in the middle of a field in New Hampshire, and then covered it up with dirt, like a cairn. The car ground to a halt and our tense silence acquired another layer. April shoved the gearshift into park, took a tube of lipstick out of her purse, and ran it back and forth across her lower lip.

  “Well,” she said, “if you think it looks bad now, you should see it in the light of day.”