by Beth Kephart
That all he needed was you.
And a car.
He painted you paintings.
He was a stage 4 narcissist.
Don’t think I don’t understand, because I do.
But there are counts against you.
There is a sentence.
Nine months. Nine months of time you’ll do. They gave you ten days between the judge and juvenile hall. You’re spending those ten days here—restitution—and those days are slipping.
We’re both the victims here, Caroline. We’re two butterflies with our wings pinned to a board. I know this is true, I know he was bad, I know you regret, I know you are sad, but I don’t know if I can ever forgive you.
Will forgive you.
88
YOUR FATHER’S FRIEND TOOK A hacksaw to the wall behind his prison bed and started to drill a little hole.
You could say that’s when this whole mess started.
January, before my mother’s cancer had been diagnosed, when she was just really tired, really crabby. When it was hard for her to clean the house, hard for her to talk to me, hard for her to go to work, hard for her to do most anything. Maybe cancer feels like being sad. Maybe it confused her. She’d quit the Tin Bar. She’d stopped bringing new friends home. She’d let her hair grow out to its natural dark and strands of white—the white she didn’t expect, she said, but it was a good fit with her new job at the Sunset Retirement Village. She worked the early shift, receptionist, when she could get there. She spent more time on our couch. I learned to make casseroles, one for each day of the week, or tuna fish on English muffins, cheddar cheese with apples, or chocolate dipped into peanut butter, or lemonade from concentrate. On Saturday nights we’d drive to the Pancake House for our very big night out. And she’d look at me, with the gray beneath her eyes, and I’d look at her and think: Sadness.
By March, when I’d come home from school, I’d find her sitting in the TV chair without the TV on, her head thrown back, her eyes closed, her mouth open, the half of the house that had been furnished by my uncle’s finds in a snowy drift of dust.
By April she hardly even heard me.
“Mom?” I’d say, and she’d open her eyes, blink, try to smile, run her fingers through the dark and white of her hair. She’d ask me about school and I’d tell her something about the names of archipelagoes or the state bird of Ohio or the art teacher who had been seen kissing the assistant principal or the butterfly I’d found, perfectly still, beneath a bush, and I wouldn’t be halfway through most of it before she’d close her eyes again, put her head against the chair, pull her thin blanket to her chin.
“I’m listening,” she’d say.
If there were pecan Sandies in the pantry, I’d get us some.
If there was milk, I’d pour us each a glass.
If there was something I could do, I tried to find a way to do it, but I was getting scared.
“Mail came,” she’d murmur, when she really wanted to sleep. That was our cue. I’d stand up and go look for it, hoping for the best days, because the best days were the days I’d find Matias inside the coupons and the flyers. Those watercolor postcards he made himself—his paintings and his MB mark. Light on the rails of subway tunnels. Skyscrapers that climbed straight off the page. New York City at the hour of trash trucks. Yellow taxis in the snow. The library lions. People with long necks and window boxes with long flowers and the big BoltBuses that looked ten feet off the ground. And then, again, between all of that, the summer of our true adventure. The angle of every painting was tilted by the height Matias was. His paintings were his words. Every now and then, in the middle of winter, he’d send a painting of the coffee farm and the parakeets and the bougainvillea that was the roof of the house he’d left in Santa Tecla, El Salvador. He’d send El Salvador and then, a few days later, he’d send New York or the snow-white house in the six million acres, and I always knew what the story was.
I always wrote Matias back. Making pictures out of words.
After that, Mom still asleep, I’d climb the steps to the upstairs phone and call Uncle Davy. He’d do most of the talking, so my talk wouldn’t wake my mom. He’d start in on the estate gossip, a Judy Garland memory. He’d talk about TV, columns, the snow that had fallen over the rhubarb beds and all those acres, and the white owl he’d seen, thought it was a snowbank falling.
When he asked me how I was, I whispered back. “I made the relay team.” “I sewed you up another Day-Glo apron.” “Matias went to Bryant Park for Christmas.” “Maybe I will run for student council.”
When he asked me about Mom, I’d tell the truth. “She’s tired and she misses you. She doesn’t like her job. She says it is depression, but I think—”
“Lizzie,” he’d say. “How can I help?”
But we both knew he couldn’t because Mom didn’t want his help. She refused to answer his calls, she refused to open his letters, she refused it all; he wanted out of the estrangement. He had asked for me to stay on in the schoolhouse cabin for the year, and she heard the words like a betrayal. Like him saying she had failed as a mom, that she couldn’t be trusted on account of all those friends, that I was better off without her. She couldn’t forgive him for that. Wouldn’t. Because I was what Mom had, I was who Mom loved, and maybe I was the bridge between Uncle Davy and Mom, but I was also the original reason for what had come up between them. I was the cause of it.
It wasn’t until May that the diagnosis came. Not until then that Mom went to a doctor and got the news she hadn’t seen coming. I came home from school and found the diagnosis there, hanging over Mom and the TV chair. Her eyes were glossy with all the crying she had done.
“Thyroid cancer,” is what she finally said. Pills. The radioactive kind. The kind that make other people sick if they hang out too close, too long.
“I’ll need the summer, Lizzie,” she said. “I’ll need a summer alone with the medicine. That is the best chance I have.”
“Choose your summer adventure,” is what she said. Tears in her eyes as she said it.
There was only one choice. We both knew that. She needed me to leave. I needed to believe leaving would help.
We both needed my uncle Davy.
I was the one who told him that.
I’m the one telling you.
Because yes, the people in our lives will ask us for things, and then we will have to choose. I chose to leave my mom so she could take the pills she needed to get better. You chose to help your dad carry out a crime that messed up the lives of innocent people.
Because, despite everything, we were. Innocent. We were, Caroline.
89
I WAS A DAY AND a night and a dawn away from the snow-white house and Sergeant Williams and my phone, from the Bondanzas and their CNN, from my mom asking questions. I was miles I couldn’t count, and could never track back, except for the bones I’d laid out like arrows. I was out of granola and out of water and out of fruit and my clothes were a crust and my teeth felt cracked from all the shiver in them.
By the lake of loons I sat. The sky was mostly blue, with clouds. The bugs were out—striders on the lake and dragonflies above it and mosquitoes I didn’t care about anymore. I turned and looked behind me at the sweep of woods and the trail gone cold.
90
THEY’LL TAKE YOU AWAY, YOU’LL be gone.
You’ve shown me his paintings. You’ve told me what you’ve done. You say you had no choice, you want me to agree, you want me to say I understand and I forgive you, but the paintings don’t help, Caroline. The paintings were how he fooled you, they say what I’ve said: Your father loved the green beyond the windows best, the blue breeze, the purple light he couldn’t find in honor block, the wild blues. He stood at the door of your heart and knocked and you opened the door.
You chose your future.
You and a jury of your peers.
91
I’LL TELL YOU HOW IT ends.
92
THE SUN WAS CLIMBING. THE slope bet
ween the trees was steep. The rain of the previous day had left gullies, pools, little landslides, places where the moss had scrubbed off, mushrooms like chimneys fallen down. I looked for notched bark, boot prints, beer cans. I saw the sun between the leaves inside the shadows. A tiny bird with a broken wing.
The biting bugs hung low like clouds. I pulled the bills of my two caps around, tugged them down, forced the bugs off at an angle. I kept my distance from the darkest shadows. Sometimes the trees opened up onto paths of pine needles, and sometimes it was so tight between the limbs that I had to take the backpack off and hunch my way through, the low branches slapping me back.
So many crows and no bitterns and the earth kept rising, until finally I had to stop and look out and what I saw was like what your father painted through the windows of the rooms where I didn’t find you. Green with blue and blue with pink and the kettles and the creeks and the till.
Somewhere out there was my uncle, who had traded an ocean for the mountains. Somewhere was Matias. And there was me, and ahead of me, the earth was rising still.
93
THAT’S WHEN I HEARD IT. Like a dream I’d had. Long. Low. Pushed out on two breaths.
One note. Two breaths.
Near or far, I couldn’t tell. Behind? Ahead? Impossible. I dropped the pack, knocked off my caps, pulled the hair away from my ears. When the note played again, I was sure of what it was: the Moravian bird.
Fill it with water and it sings.
You have the knack for that.
One note. Two breaths. The song was out in the woods, rattling around off the kettles and the tree stumps, the snake nests and the shadows.
Fill it with water and it sings.
Like that.
If it was Matias whistling the bird, he was alive. If he was alive, I would find him. If my uncle was alive with him, we’d muck, trek, crawl slosh back to the schoolhouse cabin and the old potbellied stove and we’d call Sergeant Williams and we’d call Mom and we’d call the Bondanzas, and we’d be safe again. If. I slipped Tiburcio’s machete from its sleeve. I lifted it to the sun between the trees. A touch of the tip to the heart of whoever tried to stop me now.
Don’t try to stop me now.
There are murderers with hearts of gold.
The note was a song and it played again—two breaths, silence, starting in the east, I thought. The pack was on my back, the caps were smashed back on my head, the machete was back in its sleeve, and I ran. Over the knobs of stones and the thatch of grass, another fallen nest, my sneaks so blown up by then that I couldn’t feel my feet when they hit the ground.
Where are you?
I’m coming.
No turning back.
The path between the trees was crooked and leaking and thin. I long-jumped the creeks. I walked the wet stones. I slid across a natural bridge of stone, and then I was running again and I didn’t stop until I reached a waterfall that was spilling gently down over what looked to be rock stairs. A dozen stones going up and white-blue water running down, and far away, near to the sky, I heard the song again.
Where are you?
I’m here.
There was only one way up that hill, and that was by taking the stairs—walking into the gentle tumble of white-blue gush. The water went up to my ankles. The stones were slippery with moss. There were branches and little rafts of bark to walk around or through, and it was cold as the hotel pool where I’d nearly drowned, but I hadn’t, and now my strength was coming back.
The hope of everything.
A dozen steps and then they stopped. There was a wide basin of rock—a kettle overflowed with water that had begun from some ledge even higher above. It was a straight-down rumble of white, cold gush, and the only way up was the pile of rocks off to one side—big and slick and sliced into by water and weather and winter ice.
Maybe there’s always another, better way in the woods, but I didn’t have the time.
Because time was that bird. The song I couldn’t hear over the commotion at the falls. I had to climb fast, not look back, which is what I did—squeezed myself between the boulder cracks and the skinny starter trees and the sudden purple flame of wildflowers. My knuckles. My knees. Whatever it took. My pack trying to throw me back, the machete knocking around on the rocks, the spray of the waterfall in my eyes, and it was a long way up, and I could tell you how it felt, but you don’t have the time for that. It’s noon. The Dixie daisies died days ago. The blue moon won’t be back this way again. I’ve seen the paintings and I’ve heard what you said and I reached the top. It happened.
I counted ten more steps before I slipped up onto a mossy path where a snake had left its skin and a stone stood and stretched—a turtle, I realized. The machete in its sleeve was like a sash against my chest. The knees of my jeans were the color of rust. My knuckles were a hot scrape. I looked up into the hollow of a tree and saw the yellow eyes of a saw-whet owl—the famous secret saw-whet owl—right there, watching me. It blinked.
Hope is the thing, and the Moravian bird had started to sing.
It was possible.
They were this close.
I was on it.
94
WHEN I SLEEP, I DREAM, and when I dream, I see it all worse even than it was. I see red in the blink of the saw-whet. I see the turtle like a monster Galápagos. I see the on and on and on of the trees like the bars at Little Siberia. I see me on the moss floor of the six million acres and I hear the one note pushed out on two breaths and I can’t move, I can’t stand up, I stay where I am, and the world ends.
I open my eyes and I’m alone, and I thought that if I told you the whole thing, start to end, I would bend the truth, peel it away, make the truth something I could stand—that’s what the doctor said. Tell your story until it is a story, until it feels like you watched it on TV, until you believe it wasn’t you out there in the woods.
Tell your story until the story heals.
I can’t get my story to feel like that.
It hurts so much more at the end.
95
LISTEN: CAROLINE. I’M SORRY FOR what happened. I’m sorry for how many times you have had to tell your story—to the jury and the judge, to me, to those men who drive you here each day, who wait for you outside. You have told your story and reporters have told your story. Your story keeps getting told, over and over again. Everywhere you go, there will be a version of you according to CNN, and then according to the people who watched CNN and tell your story in their own way. Everyone who hears your story will have to decide if you can be forgiven, if your paintings are a defense, if you should have been fooled like you were fooled by your dad.
If you had a choice.
We’re going to Nova Scotia, he said.
You can help, he said.
We need a car, we need a girl who can get us there.
I am your dad, he said.
You aided and abetted. You took that car to that place on the map he had drawn for you—pencil lines on the back of a painting I’ve never seen because it lives in a bag marked EVIDENCE. He drew the place and put an arrow to it.
Sweet Caroline, he said.
You bought a Honda Accord with six digits full of miles. You bought it with your camp counselor stash. Twelve hundred dollars. Cash. You were living with your aunt. You had nobody to ask. It was April when he asked you, May when you said yes, end of May when you bought the Honda with every nickel of your cash. Three summers as staff artist at Sky Hop bought you that. Everything you had you gave because you thought he’d redeemed himself.
Your mother had abandoned you because she’d loved him once—she had loved that man—and you were the proof, the evidence, half his blood. Your aunt was a drinker, caught her Saturday fish, stayed to herself, and in that small room in the cabin in the woods where you slept there was darkness all day, the room closed in by the trees, the bears out there in the trees, the dangerous owls. You had no future in that cabin and no way to escape the darkness it was, or the fact of your blood fl
owing with half of that man.
I’m your dad, he said.
End of May, coming closer to June, you filled the Honda with gas. You bought two secondhand shirts and two pairs of thrift-shop jeans at the sizes he wrote in beside the map. You bought two jars of peanut butter and peach jam, crackers in an economy-size box. You stashed it all inside the Honda, and then the day of reckoning showed up. The promise you’d made despite yourself.
Meet them in the early dawn. Meet the two men who had crawled through the holes in the honor block and slithered through the tunnels and popped the cover on the manhole and stood up—waved to a couple and their dog.
Top of the morning to you.
Top of the getaway.
You drove the car to the promised place. You hunched behind the wheel and watched as, through the mist, two men trampled up from Little Siberia. Two men. One father. Down along the abandoned railroad tracks they walked, nobody on the chase, not yet. In the valley, below the ridge where the car was parked, they walked. Hands free. Heads high. The tall one laughing, the short one catching the start of the sun on the gleam of his bald head, and now, just beyond them, somewhere east, you saw that couple’s puppy running for them, wagging its tail like it wanted some fun, going up on its hind legs like a circus dog, yapping. Just a puppy with a wagging tail and a joyful bark, out for some harmless toss and catch. A cat-size mutt, no harm in it, at least from what you saw.
The bald man stopped.
Leaned down.
Scraped up stones from between the tracks.
He had aim like you don’t want to think about.
One stone. Another stone.
All those stones, Caroline, that he threw at the pup. That little, adorable, innocent pup—long ears on it, shaggy coat, a red spot broken on its yellow fur. You saw it. You testified. You said. Your father, the one you tried to save, was stoning a poor pup.