In the hospital cafeteria, the light had changed. A collection of debris was gathered on the table in front of us, where we were still sitting, hands touching lightly across the Formica. In my pocket were the shreds of this morning’s pamphlets, my car keys, some coins that had come back as change from all the coffee we had consumed. Leann seemed drowsy, although she’d had as much coffee as I had.
Shifts had changed in the building; I had watched the hands of the clock sweep its face again and again. The room was strangely serene, in that pause between the evening’s disasters — gunshots and bloody accidents, coronaries and intentional violence — and the morning’s rush — flu’s and earaches, appendectomies and other daylight emergencies.
It was past midnight. It occurred to me that I had never listened to my daughter talk that way: without interruption, without advice, without a glossing over of certainty. In truth, for much of the evening I had been lost in my own thoughts; the sound of Leann’s voice became background, as unintrusive as elevator music. It is a strange moment when a parent takes their hands off the lives of their children–you can imagine the wheel shimmying between their untested fingers, and all the unanticipated hazards: the other drivers, the wildlife, trees that will come out of nowhere.
Something occurred to me. “Was this an accident, this?” I waved my hand vaguely, taking in the hospital, her, the whole situation. “Or not?”
“That’s a good question,” she said. She seemed genuinely interested in the answer. “I don’t know exactly.”
“In that case,” I told her, “you should lay off the coffee.”
She thought it over. “That’s probably true.” She took her empty cup and upended it on the table.
One of the things I have agreed with tonight is that she is most certainly going to die. As will I, her father, as did the two yellow dogs I coaxed onto the ice all those years ago. In the strange, dark evenings that followed the accident I told her she wouldn’t. I swore it. The look on Mark’s face, overhearing these conversations, shamed but did not deter me. Now I tell Leann, far too late, that that episode — her father’s absence — was entirely my doing. I even tell her about the box of things I callously took from the tree, about what I thought I was doing.
She said, “I know that already.”
I was surprised. “How?”
Then she told me a story that shocked me, and it was clear that many things in my life, and that of my family, have happened without my knowledge. It was the feeling I’ve had seeing the people I know best out in the world without me — passing Mark standing on a street once when we were separated, or seeing Leann slouched in front of a movie theater with some friends. My heart skipped, to see these creatures I thought of as my own, moving animatedly, confidently through their lives with no guidance from me. For an instant it was if I didn’t exist at all; later I realized that thinking was backwards — it was they whom I’d believed were suspended somehow, somewhere, outside my presence. It was the look on Sam’s mother’s face in the woods that day, when her son became a complete stranger right before her eyes: a boy she had diapered, now capable of seducing a grown woman.
Leann told me that she and Mark had taken the box to Keith’s parents. I didn’t believe her.
“It’s in the garage,” I said. “I saw it recently.”
“You didn’t,” she told me. “We gave it to them.”
“We didn’t even know where they lived. You couldn’t have.”
But it unfolds, this strange information — now nearly a decade old. She and Mark had learned where the family lived and knocked on their door one evening. The mother, in a bathrobe and those thick-rimmed glasses, had stepped into the porch light and greeted them without recognition, without warmth. She had taken the box from them and said some harsh words about us, and especially about me. Leann remembers Mark stepping inside the doorframe for a moment: she described his concerned face, his eyebrows beetling, that expression he has when he’s defending us.
I shook my head back and forth, a beat too long.
“What did the house look like? Which house?”
Leann’s face was smooth, the slash between her brows not visible; her thin, pale forearms at rest on the table. I studied the veins that were most prominent. Purple rivers, all those small geographies, written in the flesh of her arms. The bandage from the morning was crumpled into a sticky wad on the table. The cotton pad, with its rusty stain, lay between two plastic coffee stirrers.
The fluorescent lights hummed above us; at a table nearby residents were rolling unlit cigarettes between their fingers, slurping artificially sweetened coffee. I heard the clash and clatter of trays on metal rails, the leering laughter of some young man behind me, the soft noise of hospital shoes shushing the floors.
“Which house?” I asked her again.
She cocked her eyebrows, raising one. The slash emerged and then vanished. In truth I am responsible for that mark — I had dropped her one morning, in some retrospectively trivial mayhem — but in the version of the story I told to others she had rocked the highchair over, having a tantrum.
“I don’t remember,” she said.
Actually Leann was never a tantrum-throwing child — her preferred method of resistance was mulish passivity, the kind dogs use when you suggest a bath, that ability to hunker down, to inexplicably increase their body weight four-fold.
“Try,” I insisted.
She closed her eyes, squinting her face up. “Blue?” she said. “Colonial? Sort of. With some kind of spaniel? Springer?”
“No,” I said, “That’s not it.”
She opened her eyes slowly, slid her brows up. “How would you know?” she said. “I was there.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.” But I don’t.
She put her hand on mine over the table. It was amazing, that hand of hers, lying across mine; it was one hand doubled, but also, it was not mine at all. Looking at it I saw Mark in her fingers — the turn of her thumb, the unpolished nails that were bigger, stronger than my own.
In the car driving home I asked her something. “Did you ever intend to go through with this?”
“Yes,” she said. “Or no. I definitely stole their smock though.”
All the way home I was still thinking of the wrong things — of finding that box, of proving them wrong. I thought of that boy Sam and the lunch date I had made but hadn’t kept. On the other side of the gearshift, Leann tripped through her own thoughts. And while I should have been concerned with the conversation that would soon take place in my living room, of the look Mark would wear and the way the house would change, the things that needed to be unearthed from the garage, I could not halt that mental inventory. In the box labeled: ‘Tree’ — I had scribbled that upon walking into the house — were the notes in written in unfamiliar hands, flowers long dead, a photograph of the boy Keith. Now his features will forever be those of all boys–all those lost or leaving: the Jims, the Sams, the Marks. I remembered seeing the box last between the Christmas tree stand and a ladder; it was under another box filled with random photographs, stacked with earthenware pots, a coil of garden hose, a flimsy saw.
Leann, the slightly pregnant girl slumped in the seat beside me, was already talking about Australia, of its equivalent dangers and beauties. Her voice trailed off and returned; her fingers plucked the leather of the headrest.
“Jim says that in Australia just about every third thing can kill you. Isn’t that fabulous?”
“Marvelous,” I said.
My headlights rose and fell, in time with Leann’s meandering soliloquy. I took the turns slowly, dimming my lights, anticipating the landmark that meant home: the tulip tree. When we turned into the driveway I saw Mark in the window, behaving like the dogs, the new Labradors, black ones now. He was throwing himself at the window, a parody of their lovely, welcoming insanity.
