“Maya was supposed to outlive us.” Dad would break into a sob.
“But Mom and I are here now.”
“And I need to keep you both safe,” he’d say.
“You need to let go.”
“You and your mother are all I’ve got.”
“I want the old you back,” I would say. “The way you were before.”
A glimmer of hope would cut through the darkness, brighter than fire. We would hug the kind of hug that changes you for life. Arms stretched as completely around the other’s body as possible. Torsos touching. Body heat mixing into a vaporous concoction that carries more positive energy than a lightning bolt. It’s the kind of hug you might get five times in your life, if you’re lucky. The kind that elevates the soul and makes you want to open a soup kitchen or become a Himalayan monk. The kind that if you get enough of them, you’re guaranteed to be the next Gandhi or MLK Jr. or Florence Nightingale.
As the closing scene of Dad and me hugging fades from gray to black, I gaze into the moonlit snow. The snowflakes infuse the darkness like diamonds, making the air sparkle. And for a brief moment, I wish I believed in magic.
Mom rips a page from her spiral, and I jerk upright.
“You were thinking about something, Peg,” Dad says. “I’ve never seen someone stare so intently into the darkness.”
“You’re worse than Becky Bartholomew,” I say, a little disappointed in myself. Despite my sweet scenario, I have chosen to say this with just enough disdain to thwart any further conversation. Right now, I’d rather listen to the fire pop, gaze out into the diamond-studded black, and imagine a heart-to-heart with Dad rather than actually have the real thing.
“Who’s Becky Bartholomew?”
“She’s the one who picks Peg apart in class,” Mom pops her head out of her notebook. “The one who sits behind her in Social Studies.”
“Is her father Craig Bartholomew from the Comp Lit department?” Dad asks.
“No, honey.” Mom drops her head back in her book.
“News flash, Dad. The world doesn’t revolve around you,” I say, strangely possessive of Becky.
“Maybe it’s my way of engaging,” he says.
“Maybe you should try another way,” I say, piling on the contempt.
“Do tell, Peg, what’s your engagement method?” Dad’s ticked.
“If I want to engage, Dad, you’ll know it,” I say.
The unspoken in the air is as palpable as the popping embers. The darkness is no longer protective.
“Bad stuff happens, Peg, and it hurts.”
And without any warning, I feel myself being dropped into a conversation—the conversation—I’ve been dreading for six years. It has taken a power outage and a single heat source for my borrowed time to expire.
“But secluding yourself is not healthy, Peg.” Dad leans in toward me and I try to push myself farther into the cushiony back of the armchair.
“What are you talking about, Dad?” Playing dumb is the only line of defense I have, but the delivery is hollow. I do know what he’s talking about. I guess I wasn’t the only one playing out a scenario in the quiet darkness. I dig my fingernails into the armrests and brace myself as I enter his dimension. I’m locked in.
“Mom and I are still here. And we need you.”
I can hear Dad choking up, but I’m not going to fall for it. I empty my arsenal of cynicism to seal all doorways to my heart. I’m unbreakable. My shoulders are dropped, my eyes dead. I imagine words running as freely as water through one ear and out the other in preparation for what’s to come.
“You need us,” Dad says in his Droopy-doggish I-care-about-you voice. “You need to have some fun.”
“You don’t know what I need,” I say. “And by the way, who died and made you the judge of fun?” The problem with that statement, I realize after I say it, is that I know exactly who died. “You were the one who threw out our bikes, Dad. Not me.”
Mom hasn’t said a word, but she scoffs loudly when I say this, which tells me that she is on Dad’s side, or at least not on mine.
“Ever since the accident, you stopped taking those long hikes through the woods,” he says. “You never go to Lake West.
“I’m not ten anymore.”
“The door to your childhood locked shut that day.” Dad may be right, and this simple fact is infuriating because when it comes to me, his role is to be consistently wrong. Like every other father on the planet.
“Say her name, Dad.” If Mom and Dad’s scenario is anything like mine, then this dare takes it rogue, making us all prisoners.
Mom speaks up with unusual firmness. “Peg. Stop.”
“I don’t need to say her name to remember her. To know she’s with us,” Dad says.
“I need you to say it,” I say. “I can’t build my life around her anymore.”
“Maya.” His voice cracks in the second syllable. “Maya Bao Wú.”
Maya Bao Wú. I haven’t heard her full name since we spread her ashes over Lake West. I was the one who had wanted her there. We’d had our last talk along its bank. I remember the perfect overlapping of her fingers—her short, chubby thumbs resting over my thumbs, her pinkies over mine—as we tied the string around the rocks to fish. I crumple into the armchair with tears gushing down my cheeks, a tingling sensation running along the tops of my fingers as if her little hands are still on mine. Cynicism, my battle strategy of choice, has no place here.
“We can’t bring her back,” Mom says.
“Maya was—” But there is no word to describe her. Bao, her middle name meaning treasure, comes closest.
“Maya was Maya. In all her perfect imperfection,” Dad says.
“But there were no imperfections!” I cry out. My walls of composure have crumbled. The dams have let loose. Tears flood my eyes.
“Now that’s a big sister talking if I ever heard one,” Mom says.
“She was perfect in your eyes, wasn’t she?” Dad asks, already knowing the answer.
I wipe my cheeks and neck, and when I lift my eyes toward the hearth, Mom is bent over my chair, searching me with her intense stare. Despite the chalky gray of the night, I catch that glimmer of understanding and intellect in her gaze. The glimmer I don’t have. I wonder what light there is in me to focus her attention.
“You don’t know anything about being a big sister,” I say. “You were the baby.”
“Exactly,” Mom answers. “I was the baby.”
“I give up playing the know-it-all game with geniuses,” I say. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Do you remember that day you taught Maya how to ride her bike without training wheels?”
I grunt a “yes” as that strange sense of possessiveness washes through me like it did with Becky Bartholomew. I own that moment with Maya. I can smell it, can practically touch it. I remember every detail. Her wool cable-knit tights bunched around the ankles, how she gripped the handlebars until her knuckles turned white. When I squeezed her against me, I could feel her heart beating hard and fast, smell her sweaty-sweet skin.
“I was watching from the office.” Mom hesitates. “I couldn’t see Maya’s face, but I could see yours clear as day. The look in your eye, Peg.” She shakes her head. “A look like that, a split-second look like that, and you’re a changed person.”
“You made her perfect, Peg,” Dad says. “You did that.”
The raw honesty closes over me like a monster wave, taking my breath away, pummeling me, and leaving me for dead. The emotions rumbling to a deafening pitch under the peaceful pop of the dying fire overpower me. I am quietly drowning in a sea of transparency, the only buoy in sight is the one marked “sarcasm,” and it is too far away, too many conversational segues away, for immediate relief. As I struggle, I find the answer—knitting machine fixer—and rush to cling on to it.
“We got the results of that career test today.”
“Don’t tell me,” Dad says.
The ease with which I am able to change the topic hints that I may not have been the only one drowning.
“You’ll never guess.”
“So it’s on the obscure side,” he says, trying to game it up. Maybe Dad and I are not as spectrum-opposites as I’ve always figured.
“Veterinarian!” Mom blurts.
I shake my head.
“Marine biologist!” Dad rubs his hands together eagerly.
“That was someone else in class.”
“President of the United States!” Dad says.
“Not exactly obscure, Dad.”
“Ninja Turtle Princess,” he says.
“It’s not a Halloween costume,” I say.
“Some of those costumes are preeeetty obscure,” Dad says.
“Knitting machine fixer,” I say. “That’s it.”
“Who was dressed as that last year?” Dad scrunches up his face like he’s just bitten into a lemon.
“It’s a real job, Dad.”
Mom shakes her head and drops it back into her notebook.
“You sure about that, Peg?” Dad chuckles knowingly. “Sure it’s not a costume? Who’s the lucky one with that bright future?”
“Peg is, David!” Mom sighs. “Peg got the knitting fixer thing.”
“I don’t think the art of knitting needs fixing, Mom,” I say.
It’s not that they’re stupid, Mom and Dad. But knitting machine fixer is so far below their intellectual parlay that I might as well have been slotted as the Ninja Turtle Princess. “It’s knitting machine fixer,” I say slowly and with a wide mouth, the way idiotic people like Ms. Welsh and Mr. Adams, both chemistry teachers, talk to the foreign-exchange students.
“Have you ever seen a knitting machine, Peggy?” Dad asks Mom.
“Honey, I’ve never picked up a spool of yarn!” Mom answers proudly, as if yarn were a remedial math class or a speeding ticket or a bad book review.
“It’s a skein of yarn,” I blurt, a bit concerned that I know that.
“Aren’t you good enough to run the machine yourself? To be a knitting machine operator?” Mom asks.
“That’s right!” Dad says. “Aren’t you good enough to operate the damn thing?” He pauses to scratch his head. “And the word ‘fixer’ doesn’t work at all.”
“‘Knitting machine’ isn’t much better,” Mom says.
“If this thingamajig is going to survive, it’s got to have a catchier name.”
“Knit-o-meter!” Mom yells out the way you do when playing Yahtzee. I guess, in the end, we’ve found a decent replacement for poker.
“Knit-mare!” Dad offers.
“The Knitter?” Mom’s words stretch into a yawn.
After the unexpected Maya discussion, the idea of knitting machines and my future job fixing them don’t make for hefty conversational fodder. The knitting machine name game fizzles quickly into silence. Unlike before, however, the air is light. Even the fire seems livelier, popping as loudly as a fireworks finale. And maybe the Maya talk that’s been six years in the making is a finale of sorts. I roll into the corner armchair and savor a fullness, an emotional fullness that is new to me, and I wonder how long it will last. I know there will be other conversations about Maya; but for right now, tonight’s talk is good enough.
“It’s standardized nonsense,” Dad says, breaking the silence. “You know that, Peg. Right?”
“Obviously,” I scoff, even though I’m far from convinced. But whether the test is a career blueprint or not, there is more to life than a profession. There is more to me than a profession. Maya is my unwavering proof that there is more to life than work. But there is more to me than Maya too. Through my mind, she is faithfully riding her bike with that smile, that twinkle in her eye, that high-pitched squeal. I admire the familiar, comforting vision but recognize for the first time that a piece of that vision has been missing. Words. Tonight is the first time that she has been translated into the spoken word. I press the missing piece into place and admire how much more vivid it has become, and somehow more manageable too.
For the moment, the quiet here in front of the fire is tension-free; but if the silence persists, it threatens to take us back to that raw place we’ve just left. As soon as I recognize the threat, I begin to feel the air grow thick, and this makes me a bit anxious.
“I’m going to give that generator another shot,” Dad says as if he’s read my mind.
“I’ll help.” I wriggle out of the armchair, sure that some frigid air and wind will whip away the residue of tonight’s excessive honesty.
As we reach the door leading to our unattached garage, Dad mumbles about how the lid on the generator’s gas tank doesn’t fit very well and how that could be the reason why it won’t start. How there’s a possible fire hazard because of it, but how if anyone—other than himself—had any common sense, they’d know that there wasn’t any real danger.
I zip up, but only after a current of cold air runs down my neck to my shoulders, making me shiver. The fire inside seems galaxies away as my teeth take on a chattering life of their own. The quiet is different here. There isn’t the pop of the fire or the scratch of Mom’s pencil on paper. Snowflakes silently fall onto the billions of others below them. Layers of time, like the rings through the trunk of a tree. History in the making. It is an unspoken, temporary history, which is why it’s magical. The flakes of history fall on my coat and melt, leaving a dark spot smaller than a freckle. With each flake that falls on me, I am led deeper into this other world.
Dad has rushed ahead of me on the sidewalk and is wrestling a crate from under the workbench in the garage, scraping it across the bumpy cement floor, cutting through the perfect silence of nature. In fact, Dad is to nature what blasphemy is to religion. This is about the most honest SAT comparison you’ll ever find. As Dad mumbles something about a wrench, I stare into the white stillness and diamond-studded black. Dad’s words slowly fade into the background as I turn to the deep snow toward the wetlands. Something in this stillness catches my eye. Movement. Even the tree trunks and branches are covered; that is how sticky and wet this snow is. “Sticky rice,” Jeb once called it in class. And as idiotic as it is to compare frozen white to a Chinese-staple product, he has a point. Now all I see around me is white rice, and this idea, as well as the accompanying image of Jeb, rob the scene of a little of its magic.
When Dad bellows something about “this archaic machine,” I see a pointy brown ear pop through the snow. I squint to see another ear and the tiny face of a fawn.
“Watch it!” Dad’s holler startles me to a halt. I look behind me to find the generator at my heels.
“What did you see out there?” Dad asks but doesn’t wait for an answer. “This damn thing,” he huffs through his teeth.
“Let’s get back inside, Dad.” The more outbursts about generators and gas-tank lids, the bigger the chance that the fawn will run off. In other words, Dad’s got to get inside or my chance at a rescue mission is lost forever. “The wind’s picking up,” I lie. “We’d better get in.”
“I hate the wind.” Dad drops his tools and heads into the snow toward the house.
I lag behind to take a quick inventory of the garage. Plastic trash cans. Some old cloths stiff with kerosene and grease. Burlap bags folded neatly in one corner. Tools piled in another. A bin of cut grass from Dad’s one spring mow of the year. Not exactly a wild animal sanctuary.
Once inside, Dad hands me the flashlight.
“Take this back to the garage for me, Peg.”
I grunt and make a turn into the pantry instead. I flash the weak white light over the shelves and find that other than canned goods, potato chips, and a supersized bag of Twizzlers, we are ill-equipped for a blizzard. But my w
andering eye stops hard on the sports thermos I’d given Mom for her birthday three years ago. I pull it down from the top shelf by the tags still hanging around the cap, turn off the flashlight that should be back in the garage, and head toward the open kitchen, where Mom is half-asleep in my armchair. Dad is hunched at the hearth, warming his hands.
“Freezing out there,” he says.
“You should go to sleep like Mom,” I say.
“Not tired,” he says.
“Well, I’m tired.” I fill the thermos with water, close the top tightly, and open the refrigerator. In the dark, I rustle through plastic bags to find the semi-hard hot dog buns from dinner a couple of weeks back. The milk is easy to spot on the door. “Good night, Dad.”
As I scurry through the room behind him with my thermos, carton of milk, and hot dog buns, I pull the afghan from the back of the armchair. Mom murmurs something as I slip it from behind her, something about sugar cookies in Elizabethan English, and I feel my lips turn into a smile. Her brain is running wild the way mine does. I wriggle the flashlight from my coat pocket and head up the stairs to my room. It is about halfway up that the cold hits me. I shine the light under my chin, exhale loudly, and search in vain for my breath in the dusty, mechanical ray. On my bed, I spread out my rescue materials—afghan, thermos, milk, and bread. I rummage through my closet for last year’s snow pants and down jacket and add them to my lineup. From upstairs, I can see the moon, bright and round, its light shimmering on the smooth snow below. I click off my flashlight to admire the magic and to watch for movement, for life, in that corner of the yard bordering the wetlands. A little brown speckle is there, barely visible.
“Just a little longer.” I’m silly to whisper, I know, as if human/fawn telepathy were possible. I press my hands against the cold windowpane and watch an icy fog appear around my fingers. I breathe into the glass and draw my initials. I exhale onto the pane again and draw a heart. I repeat and draw a better heart. I look back up to the moon and then to the snow before exhaling again. I write Maya’s name for no particular reason, maybe some conversational residue still clinging on. I exhale into the pane once more but write nothing.
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