Sighing, I get to my feet and enter the fray.
It is good. It is shockingly good. I am taking a terrible risk. I read chapter one straight through, finding very little to object to, and then read it again.
Eli calls Erin an asshole. Erin yells triumphantly, “I’m telling!” Evan is chanting at the top of his voice; I don’t understand the words, but the tone is clearly smart-ass. The phone rings.
Chapter 7
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Good afternoon.” He gives a pale, grey nod. He’s mad at me. I have no idea why, and after spending the day at Emily’s I’m too tired and worried to play games with this selfish old man who withholds everything from everybody and then has the balls to act like the aggrieved party.
Apparently I’m now the designated bad-news-bearer, on top of all the other familial designations I’ve re-acquired since I’ve been back. Obediently, I announce, “I have bad news.”
“About the infant.”
I bite back the “fuck you” that springs to my lips, settling for infusing “the infant’s” name with as much vitriol as I can. “Bella. About Bella, yes.” He says nothing. He just sits there. “The doctors are saying she was born with cerebral atrophy. She has only about a third of her brain.”
Silence. He gives no indication he’s heard or comprehended what I said, or that it’s of any interest to him whatsoever.
Pity and disgust sicken me, as well as fury that my daughter Emily has failed her child-bearing responsibility—all I have ever expected of her. If her sister is correct, what she has borne can be considered human only in the most technical sense. I refute and refuse any relation to it.
“Probably she won’t live more than a few weeks, but they say there are cases where kids like this live five or ten years.”
This has nothing to do with me. This cannot have anything to do with me.
When the old bastard just sits there stony-faced saying nothing, I figure I’ve done my part and duck past him to use the phone. It’s still on the triangular knickknack shelf in the most public corner of the kitchen, which used to make me crazy when I was a teenager. I’d use my cell phone if I could get decent reception in these damned woods.
Tara answers, knows to accept the charges. “Hi, honey.”
“Hi, Mommy. What’s wrong?”
“What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“You sound funny.”
“I’m—tired. And I miss you guys.”
“Are you mad at me?”
From the first, Tara has been exquisitely attuned to my moods, accurately perceiving when something’s bothering me but unable to distinguish fatigue from anger from work-related stress from preoccupation with something I’m writing from worry over her or her brother. Unlike Ramon, who usually just figures I’m being a bitch for some reason having nothing to do with him, Tara takes the default position that I’m mad at her, I’ve stopped loving her, I’m going to abandon her in one way or another like every other mother she’s known. At least now she can ask, and more or less believe my answer, instead of cutting herself or smearing feces. I kick myself now for having dissembled with her; being away from her for so long is already skating on pretty thin abandonment ice.
So I tell her at least part of the truth, which is sometimes the best we can do. “Your Aunt Emily is having a hard time.”
“Because of the baby? Bella?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a really weird name.”
“I think it’s a lovely name.”
“But it doesn’t start with E.”
“You’re right.”
“Is Bella, like, sick?”
I say. “Not sick, exactly, but she was born with only part of her brain.”
“Eeew. Gross. Why? How does that happen? Did Aunt Emily do something wrong?”
“The doctors don’t know why. Sometimes things like that just happen.”
“Is she going to die?”
I don’t tell her we’re all going to die. She knows that, better than most children her age, and it’s not what she means. “She probably won’t live very long.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’ll be there when you get back from soccer camp, okay?” It isn’t okay with her, or with me, either; I don’t know why adults say that to kids, as if we’re asking for their complicity, when what we really mean is, “Okay? Do you understand?” Of course they don’t.
“I miss you,” she says with heartbreaking simplicity.
“I miss you, too. Are you being nice to Daddy?”
“I guess.”
“You’ll have a good time at camp. You always do.”
“I guess.”
“How’s Ramon?”
“Fine. He’s a brat.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“He’s at his girlfriend’s,” she sneers.
Keenly disappointed, even a little jealous, I make a point of identifying for her the tension she’ll pick up in my voice. “Oh, I was hoping to talk to him. I miss him, too.”
“Why do you miss Ramon?”
She knows why. She likes to hear me say it. I oblige; I like saying it, too. “Because he’s my son and I love him.”
“Oh.”
“Is Daddy there?”
“He went to the store.”
At thirteen, she ought to be plenty old enough to stay by herself, of course, but I’m not confident that she is. “Are you okay staying home alone?”
“Mom. I’m not a baby.”
I swallow hard. “Will you have Dad call me at Grandpa’s when he gets back?” Grandpa. Aunt Emily. These relational terms must mean next to nothing to her, since she’s never met these people. Or maybe, given Tara’s devotion to family and evident understanding of the many nuances of the word, she already knows better than I do what it means to be related to my sister, her aunt, and my father, her grandfather, and the new baby Bella, her cousin, my niece.
She says she’ll give her dad the message. I tell her to write it down, and can practically see her rolling her eyes as she informs me she already did. We say “I love you” to each other, and I hang up feeling utterly bereft.
My father calls, “Alexandra! Come here!” the minute I hang up, and whether I obey him or not I’m still the child to his parent. I go and stand in the doorway but assert my independence by not sitting down. He fixes me with his trademark hawk-like stare but doesn’t say anything, so I don’t say anything, either, and I meet and hold his gaze. There’s a long, taut, stubborn silence.
She is lying. She is withholding information. I will not have this. “What,” I finally demand, “is going on?”
“What do you mean?”
She knows perfectly well what I mean. “What is wrong with your sister?”
When we were kids, “don’t tell Daddy” was our mantra, and telling Daddy the surest way to get back at a sibling even if he didn’t mete out a punishment. So I feel both guilty and smug when I tell him, “Postpartum depression.” He snorts, as if to let me know he knows I’m making this up. I defend myself by going into detail.
“She’s not eating or sleeping much. She can’t take care of herself, let alone the kids. She doesn’t have any milk to nurse the baby.”
Alexandra says these outrageous and unacceptable things to me as if she is making a PowerPoint presentation at a corporate conference. She is calm and collected, voice well-modulated, body relaxed and alert. Her self-possession appals me, although I gave it to her.
Who is this? What is she doing in my house? She is an intruder of the worst sort. What has she done with my daughter?
He just stares at me. I swear he doesn’t blink, like a goddamn snake. He expects me to do something. I have no idea what or how. He just stares at me. Finally I leave the room.
In a gesture of blatant disrespect, she leaves the room. If she l
eaves the house I am not aware of it, yet I do not hear her anywhere in it. Into my mind surge thoughts and images of the defective infant, with the insinuation that she is in some way related to me, and I banish them.
What I want to do is leave the old bastard once and for all, leave this dumpy little house in this claustrophobic little woods once and for all and go home. What I do is retreat into the room I’ve been assigned. I need to sit and think about Bella, until at least the shock subsides if not the sorrow and horror and all the rest of it. I need to come to terms with Emily’s despair in order to calm my instinct to stay away. I need to write, though not yet about babies born with incomplete brains, not yet about Bella herself. Maybe, though, about despair.
The minute I shut the door behind me I know he’s been in here. I’d be hard pressed to say how I know. More than a feeling, not exactly a smell or a taste, nothing visual or auditory about it, the sense that tells me of my father’s intrusion is highly specialized and reliable.
This is his house; he has a right to be anywhere in it he chooses. But my movements become self-consciously gingerly, stealthy, so as not to contaminate the crime scene.
The family portrait on the dresser has been moved; I put it back in the right place. The desk drawer isn’t completely closed. The lid of the manuscript box is askew, and I force myself to ease it all the way off. His tiny, blunt-pencilled handwriting dirties the title page, cluttering up the white space around the title Fatherland. His comment on the title itself is: “Obvious. Too broad.”
It’s been a long time now since I got one of those small white envelopes with my name—“A. Kove”—in the centre and his name—“A. Kove”—in the upper left-hand corner, one or two or ten sheets of pocket-sized notebook paper fringed along one side or across the top where they’d been torn from the spiral. Reading his dense script required a conscious shift from left to right brain, as if listening to experimental jazz or looking at an abstract painting.
This is the same edgy thrill I felt back then, certain every time that a secret vital to my life would now be revealed. It never was. The letters never told me anything new, and I haven’t kept any of them. When I mentioned to Emily that Daddy sometimes wrote to me, she snapped that it wasn’t fair for the one who’d left to get all the attention, as if running away had made me better than the rest of them.
Now my father has had the balls not only to read my manuscript but also to edit it. Flipping through the 312 pages, I see with growing incredulity that he’s made notations on nearly every one. At first glance some appear to be just grammar and punctuation corrections, which really pisses me off. Not a few, though, are paragraphs, skinny in a side margin or filling up the top or bottom white space, occasionally—as indicated by a stern dark arrow—extending over onto the back of a page.
Nobody’s holding a gun to my head. I don’t have to read what he’s written. He can try to give me shit but I don’t have to take it.
I pace. I brace myself against the dresser and the doorjamb. I sit down and stand up and sit down again, repositioning the desk chair several times in an attempt to get good reading light through the window. I prop my feet on the bed, but that’s too high so I rearrange myself again with my feet on my briefcase. I put the box with the whole manuscript in my lap, intending to take out a page at a time, but that’s awkward. After experimenting with several other systems, I finally settle for leaving the box on the floor and working with a chapter at a time. I try three or four pens before one suits me. Then, finally, I set to work deciphering my father’s unsolicited comments on what feels like—though it manifestly is not—my life’s work.
Time seems to pass. Ambient light becomes more grey than yellow. Chill enters the house, which confuses me regarding the time of day and season of the year, and I drift outside, where rain is dripping through grey-yellow leaves and underfoot are layers of unavoidable things I will do my best to avoid by sending my daughter Alexandra where I myself cannot possibly go. If I can find her. I must find her.
By the time I reach about page thirteen, I’ve realized I can’t read a lot of his writing, but I don’t let myself believe it until the end of Part I on page sixty-six. Even then I randomly sample through the rest of the book before I give up.
I can make out letters—o’s and e’s and a’s closed so firmly they’re almost solid, t’s with perfectly horizontal crosses and i’s dotted precisely above their points. A few individual words and phrases are legible—“good” on page twenty-three, “trite” on pages 132 and 246, “nonsense” on page eleven, “derivative of Dickinson” on page 301 (perilously near the end)—but the surrounding comments are indecipherable so I don’t know what he thought was good, trite, nonsense, derivative, or why. Most frustrating, entire paragraphs and pages of his carefully reasoned and closely formed critique are utterly unreadable.
The temptation is strong to crumple the pages and throw them across the room. Better yet, to dump the whole fucking box in the trash or burn it in the fireplace or, melodramatically, bury it in the woods. When I get home it would be easy enough to print out a clean copy, all my words still there and none of his.
Instead, I get to my feet, heft the manuscript box in both hands, and stride out of the room. Enough already. The son-of-a-bitch is going to tell me what he means and what he knows.
He’s gone.
Of course he’s gone. I’m ready to have it out with him, if not once and for all, at least for once. So what possessed me to think he’d be sitting there waiting for me? He won’t make it easy. Well, neither will I.
He’s not in his chair or anywhere else in the living room. He’s not in the kitchen or the mud room. I look behind the open bathroom door and the shower curtain to make sure he hasn’t collapsed in there. I knock on his bedroom door, call through it, finally open it and go in far enough to see that he’s not there. He’s not in what passes for the yard. Cursory phone calls to the homes of my siblings confirm he isn’t with any of them, except for Vaughn who, naturally, doesn’t answer his phone.
I start out of the house with the manuscript still in my hands, think better of it, return it at first hastily and then carefully to its drawer. Empty-handed, I leave to track my father down.
He can’t have gone far. He’s eighty-one years old—yeah, yeah, Galen, eighty-two. He’s somewhere in these yellow woods, and I will fucking find him.
I am walking through the wood. I suppose this is the wood. I suppose this is walking. Two roads, at the very least, diverge here. The phrase about two roads in a yellow wood is familiar. A line of poetry, I believe. Perhaps one I composed in a spurt of creativity so long past it scarcely seems my own. No, of course, it is from a poem by Robert Frost, one of my long-time favourites.
Searching, the free-fall sensation of searching without an object.
Searching. For someone—my daughter—my daughter Alexandra. I have not seen her for a lifetime or more. Would I know her if I found her?
Searching for an infant, a baby girl, come into this world and this family deformed. Like so much else, asking too much of me. No relation to me in any real sense. Not really even of the same species, for much of what defines “human” is lacking. She is something other, something alien. Or I am.
Alexandra. I have the impression that it is someone named Alexandra I am hunting for, and then that it is not.
Hunting. Have I already hunted for her here? Hunted her? In this little glade? Under this tree? In this den, behind this rock, inside that yellow house? Searching.
Searching is futile. Searching is always futile. Futility leads me to a cave under a rock ledge where I may or may not have been before. A snake loops around the entrance. I have the foolish impression that the snake has a name and a relationship to me, but then it is gone, both the snake and the impression are gone, and good riddance. I know to drop to hands and knees, though the motion causes vertigo and my hands and knees ache from impact with the spongy ground. Almost pro
strate to crawl inside, I am out of breath and aching. I seem to be both lost and at home.
Suddenly all is clear. I must find my daughter Alexandra, or cause her to find me, in order to give her the next assignment. She is to love the infant, the infant Bella, because I dare not, and because my life is over.
It’s the hideout I need to find first, for what seems like the umpteenth time, but I still don’t know where it is. I swear there are no landmarks; everything I notice looks like every other tree, dead tree, snake, pile of brush, chipmunk (or are those woodchucks?), bird, rock.
Hardly ten minutes have passed before I’m in a panic, convinced this is the day, this is the moment he intends to kill himself, out of despondency or rage over Bella or a weird sort of competition with her. Stealing the suicide recipe now seems a flimsy stratagem. Why didn’t I tell somebody? I know perfectly well why and it disgusts me—it was our secret, Daddy’s and mine, and I didn’t want to share it with anybody.
Now I can only hope he won’t be able to find the cave, or won’t remember what the bottles and bags are for. But it’s just as likely he’ll be in one of his phases of acute clarity. Where is senile dementia when you need it?
Where is she? What will I do without her? I have been here before. She has left me before. She has left me again. I will not do this again. I will not go back. A thousand paths diverge. I am lost. I huddle in this dim, small space, full of snakes.
I scream and jump back when something slithers right across my shoe. This pisses me off. I am not afraid of snakes. When we were growing up, Daddy wouldn’t have put up with it, and I’ve always prided myself on not being girly about this sort of thing. It’s just that I didn’t see it coming. I’m not scared, just startled. I kick savagely at the mounded leaf duff, but naturally the stupid little serpent has wrinkled and is long gone.
The Yellow Wood Page 9
