White Plains

by David Hicks

  He is Unknown Man.

  He does this all weekend. He can make himself invisible at will, and he has accumulated a variety of weapons with which to slay villains—an old film canister filled with thumbtacks (to flatten the tires of their getaway cars), a cracked travel mug filled with dust (to dash in their faces, blinding them), a long string with a grappling hook (in case he needs to scale a wall or tree)—but his favorite is the “death disk,” a soup-can lid wrapped in duct tape that, when flung properly, could decapitate a 300-pound man, to say nothing of the countless evildoers inhabiting the Pennsylvania woods. He hides behind trees and leaps out like a man with his head on fire, flinging the disk. His enemies, cleverly disguised as pine trees, are instantly vanquished. He laughs triumphantly, retrieves his weapon, wraps himself in the cape, and dashes off (invisibly) to his next mission.

  It starts off as a game, but it soon becomes his identity. He keeps the cape on all the time. He sleeps with it on. At breakfast (French toast with powdered sugar, blackberries, and real maple syrup), he uses it as a napkin.

  I’m lying in the hammock. Janey is by her favorite tree, which she calls “Tall Tree,” singing a song to herself while studying a ladybug on a leaf. Suddenly, Unknown Man jumps out from behind the wood shed and flings his weapon. The disk rises and dips at an odd angle and Janey shrieks, grabbing her foot. From twenty feet away I can see a bubble of blood. I scramble out of the hammock, imagining my daughter without a big toe—she’ll spend her whole life off-balance. I look down the road, but I don’t know where the nearest hospital is. What’s wrong with me? I should know where everything is—hospital, doctor, all that stuff. Ice. I’ll pack the sliced-off part of her toe in ice.

  But it’s only a cut, and it’s not too deep. Janey’s eyes are wide, though: Mon frere, mon assassin. I try to remember if she’s had a booster for tetanus. Shouldn’t I have copies of their medical records?

  I scoop her up in my arms while looking around for Unknown Man. A bit of duct tape must have torn off from the aluminum lid. What would have happened if it had sliced her mouth? Her eye? Her jugular?

  I clean Janey’s wound in the kitchen, but I don’t have any gauze. I don’t even have band-aids. When I was a real father, I had a fully stocked first-aid kit at the ready at all times. I wrap her toe in a clean dishtowel and keep pressure on it until the bleeding abates. Then I carry her upstairs, set her down on her bed, surround her with her books and stuffed animals, elevate her injured foot, tie a clean napkin around her toe with a shoestring, and tell her she gets to be Princess for a Day. She asks if she can have pancakes for lunch—in the shape of a fish, maybe? With a blueberry for its eye?

  “No,” I say, and in an instant she’s crying again..

  I go outside, looking for Nathan. I need him to understand how stupid that was, flinging a sharp object in the general direction of his sister. How would he feel if somebody did that to him? But I find him by the creek, curled up in the canoe, crying. I didn’t mean it. I was aiming for the tree. Is she okay?

  *

  The following weekend, Louise comes up. On Saturday morning, we go on a long walk in the woods, and I take pictures of her in the airy streams of sunlight. On our way back, I spot the name on a rusted mailbox belonging to a house set far back into the woods: Siczlytsky. I stop and stare at it as Louise keeps walking. What are the odds?

  We make an early dinner together (ratatouille, made with organic vegetables she picked up at the Wegman’s in Wilkes-Barre), but we stay up late, messing around, laughing at each other’s lame jokes, singing and dancing to Motown CDs, and watching the tube, until it’s eleven o’clock and we’re both hungry again. So we hop in the car, wearing our pajamas and glasses, and drive to the only place that’s still open, the Loaf and Jug. We roam the aisles in our slippers, ending up with a cache of Tastykakes—double-cream for me, peanut butter and chocolate for her—which we eat back home while watching An Affair to Remember and holding hands under the blanket. The next morning we stay in bed, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday Times, and in the afternoon we take a hot bath together in the enormous tub, with the windows wide open so we can hear the hummingbirds.

  Two weekends later I pick her up in Wilkes-Barre, meet her parents (her mother is a nurse, her father a math teacher), and drive her two hours to my sister’s house, where we have lunch with my family (“Much better, Flynnie,” my sister yells out as we leave; “Muuuuch better”), then take Metro-North into the city, where we meet up with my old friend Peter and his husband and walk around the Village so they can see where we used to hang out, and even though most of the places are gone, it’s a great day. Afterwards, I take Louise to Little Italy for dinner, then go to Café Palermo for cannoli afterwards. “I’ve never been with anyone so decisive,” she says when I suggest we top off the evening with a drink at the Jane Hotel, and I have to think that one over. It’s a remarkable thing, to be known as decisive. I must have gotten that from Casey.

  Maybe, I think, this is what life is like: we learn from everyone we are with, even if it doesn’t work out. It’s unconscious. We choose people because they have something we secretly want, even if it’s the very quality we don’t like about them, the quality that ends up killing the relationship.

  I can already tell what I’m learning from Louise. Patience. Empathy. Love. A soft voice. She processes her thoughts. She deliberates. She takes care. She protects herself.

  So what did I learn from Rachel?

  *

  When we get back to Louise’s house after our big day in the city and sleep in her childhood bed, she drops off immediately, her mouth demurely closed, her face serene, and I tiptoe around the room, looking at the pictures of her when she was a girl. Then I kneel beside the bed and watch her sleep.

  Look at you. Just look at you.

  *

  We’re doing well so far, but our relationship is almost entirely weekend-based. Almost entirely Rachel-dependent. I know this is something we should discuss, but I don’t bring it up, because I don’t know what I can do about it. What I say, officially, is that I’m so desperate to see the children that I don’t ever want to say no to Rachel when she says they’re available on my off-weekends. But the truth is, I’m afraid of saying no to Rachel, period. Always have been.

  Judy Lee and I aren’t friends anymore, so Louise and I make Thursday night our weekly Date Night; no matter what, we have that time to ourselves every week. And whenever the subject of the weekend comes up, Louise says that if we can spend it together, great, if not, she totally understands; but I can see it’s not great and she doesn’t totally understand. It’s as if I’m dating the female version of my younger self: she never gives me a straight answer; she suffers from intense migraines; she sacrifices her own needs four times an hour; she cries easily. For all I know, she wishes she was still with her ex-boyfriend. He may not have been very interesting, but at least he didn’t have this much baggage.

  So I make a proposal. I’m in this big house with plenty of room, I say; she’s living with her parents; I’m closer to the Orchards, where she works; the kids are here most weekends but otherwise it’s just me and Noah. Why doesn’t she just move in?

  So she does. And the whole house is transformed. When her little dog, Tess, tries to get Noah to play with her, Noah looks five years younger. When we go grocery shopping together, I realize why there are so many cabinets in the kitchen. When she puts up curtains in the living room, the living room suddenly looks like a living room. When she bakes me black-cherry oat bars, I understand what love tastes like. When she takes a bath, the whole house smells like lavender. When she wraps herself in my old towels, the towels seem to regain their color. When she comes out to the back terrace in her robe, I understand why Rand, the owner, saw fit to install the porch swing.

  But one evening when we’re sitting there, watching the creek turn from blue to silver and waiting for the heron to swoop over the water, a squirr
el scurries out from the eaves behind us, leaps out over Louise’s head, and sails down to one of the trees by the creek. Another squirrel does the same thing, and then another, and then a whole platoon of them. I’ve witnessed this before, of course. I call them the Furry Paratroopers. It’s like some low-budget adaptation of the monkey scene from The Wizard of Oz. But this is a first for Louise. She shrieks, ducks, whacks at her hair, scrambles off the swing, and runs inside.

  I do see her point. The squirrels probably shouldn’t be living in the house. Plus they keep Janey up at night, scratching over the ceiling above her.

  I notice other problems, too, now that Louise is here. An attic door that leads to nothing but thin air. No screens on any of the windows. Bats in the slats. Bears in the woods. And a front door that doesn’t lock. Can’t lock. They’re old French doors that open inward; even when they’re locked, all you have to do is push hard from the outside and they swing right open.

  One day, when I’m at a work site and she has the day off from the Orchards, Louise calls to tell me there’s a squirrel in the living room. Tess is going crazy, she says; the dog has torn apart couch pillows trying to get at it. A lamp is broken, the screen to the balcony is bent, and the squirrel now seems to be hiding in my desk drawer.

  “Where’s Noah?” I ask.

  “Sound asleep.”

  When I come home, I find Louise locked in the bedroom with Tess, with sheets stuffed into the crack under the door. Out in the living room, I see a trembling tuft of fur sticking out of my desk drawer. I open the sliding door to the back terrace, tip over the couch so that it’s a boundary between the terrace and the living room, find the broom, and jerk open the drawer. The squirrel scampers out, I swipe at it, it dashes outside and leaps onto a tree branch.

  I shut the sliding glass door, put the couch back where it belongs, and go into the bedroom, where I find Louise under the covers. “This house is clean,” I say, in the voice of the little woman from Poltergeist.

  Louise peeks out from the bed sheet. “This might not be the best situation for me,” she says.

  *

  Whenever I have the kids for the weekend, she drives back to her parents’. She doesn’t want to cause any discord; she knows how desperate they are to be with me, and she knows how Rachel would react to her being there. Sometimes she stays until they arrive, so she can say hi and give them hugs, but then she leaves, waving to us as she drives away. But this, too, is getting old. So the next time I know I’m going to have the kids for the weekend, I ask Louise to stay put. You live here, I say. This is your home. They like you, and you like them. Let’s be a family.

  She raises an eyebrow.

  When I pick up the kids in Binghamton, they do what they usually do, talking over each other, trying to give me all the news of the week even though I talk to them on the phone almost every day now, and after they settle down we play the Animal Guessing Game; but during a lull in the proceedings, with the Susquehanna and then farmland and then the low mountains and then the woods out the window, I tell them what’s going on. I tell them Louise and I love each other and we’re living together now. She’ll be with us all weekend, I say, and every weekend from now on. Okay? We’re a couple. You know what a couple is?

  Nathan shrugs. “Yeah! Mom and Sam are a couple.” Then he starts telling me how he was the hero of his last soccer game. But Janey curls up in the back seat and starts sucking her thumb, an old habit I thought she had given up.

  I didn’t tell Rachel, of course. She wouldn’t have let me pick them up. Anything out of the ordinary evokes a reaction. When Nathan told her he had met Louise and her cute dog, Rachel accused me of neglecting the children for my new girlfriend, and for the next month there was a strange sequence of “family events” that meant the kids needed to stay in Binghamton. Then there was the time I drove the kids to “downtown” Nicholson, which is two blocks long, and as Janey and I went into the thrift store, I gave Nathan a ten-dollar bill and sent him to the grocery store, Lochen’s, for some pasta and bread, just as my mother did when I was ten. He did great—he came out of the store beaming, and handed me the change—but when he called his mother later and bragged to her about it, Rachel told him to hand the phone to me and started screaming before it was even at my ear. How dare I let him out of my sight, even for a minute? Do I realize how many children have been abducted, this year alone? What kind of father am I? Then she threatened to call Social Services and I didn’t see them for three weeks.

  I see the “Welcome to Pennsylvania” sign in the distance. On our past drives, the first one to shout out that they see this sign wins one of the Jolly Ranchers I keep in the cup holder. Later, when we exit the highway and make the turn towards Nicholson, they start looking for the massive concrete railroad bridge, and the first to see it shouts out “I see the bridge! I see the bridge!” and wins another candy. But this time, the border sign passes without remark; and after we exit I-81 and turn towards Nicholson, Nathan looks up from his cartoon book, says “I see the bridge,” and takes a Jolly Rancher without checking to see if it’s watermelon. Janey is still sucking her thumb, still looking out the window.

  Once we bump our way over the ruts of Tom’s Lane and arrive at our little house in the woods, Louise steps outside to greet us. Nathan is all sweetness and smiles, but Janey goes immediately to Tall Tree, plops down, and starts ripping up grass, ignoring Noah, who brings her a stick, and Tess, who laps at her arm. When Nathan runs to the garage, grabs the big stick he calls Excalibur, and tries to get Janey to play Dragon Slayer, she just stares at the ground until he calls her a big baby and stomps off.

  I approach Janey, but she looks at me as if I’ve violated a sacred trust. After squatting down and trying to coax her into telling me how she’s feeling, only to be met with silence, I get annoyed, so I go to the car to bring in their bags.

  Louise decides to give it a shot. She sits on the pine needles next to Janey. I bring the bags upstairs and watch them from the kids’ bedroom window.

  Louise smooths back Janey’s hair, which is the same color as her own, like a wheat field in the sun. They have always gotten along, but this is different. Louise talks softly to Janey. “I know how much you love your father,” she says. She puts her hand over her heart, trying to get Janey to look her in the eye. “And I promise I would never do anything to jeopardize your relationship with him.”

  Use smaller words, I want to say.

  She rests her hand on Janey’s arm, and that—my girlfriend’s long fingers on my daughter’s tender, sunbrowned skin—does something to me. “I also know how much you love your mom,” she says. “And I promise I will never try to take her place.”

  Uh oh.

  Janey looks up, as if she can feel me watching her. I back away from the window.

  Louise talks a little more, and Janey nods, drops her head, and goes back to ripping grass. Louise pats her on the shoulder and comes back inside.

  I meet her on the steps.

  “Maybe I should leave,” she says.

  We go into the bedroom. I tell her it’s going to take time, that’s all. It’s a big adjustment. For everyone.

  “But what if she’s this bratty all weekend?” Louise asks. “I don’t know if I can take it.”

  I lean back. Does she know who she’s calling a brat? The daughter I thought I would never see again, the one who could have wound up with a different man as her father? Does she realize how hard this must be for a kid who has been without her dad for a year, whose daily fantasy is that her parents get back together and live happily ever after?

  “I didn’t mean that,” she says, and I exhale.

  “No, you’re right,” I say. “She’s being a brat. Nathan would agree.”

  “But she’s only six,” she says. “This is hard for her. For both of us.”

  Janey continues to sulk by Tall Tree, then eventually comes inside. She climbs in my l
ap, clings to my leg, tugs my arm, peppers me with pointless questions. She sits on the back terrace with me at twilight, watching the squirrels leap out from the eaves, then cries as I seal off the eaves with screening to prevent them from getting back into the house. That night she comes into our bedroom and tells me she wet the bed, even though her sheets are completely dry. The next night she calls out for me and says she’s had a nightmare, even though she hasn’t fallen asleep yet.

  “Sing me the song,” she says, and I sing it: Good night, it’s all right, Jane. “Sing it again.” And I do.

  “Again.”

  At no point all weekend does she look Louise in the eye; it’s as if this woman, the one who is sleeping with her father in the place of her mother, is invisible.

  On Sunday, about six minutes after I drop off the kids in Binghamton, Rachel calls me on my cell phone. How dare this young girlfriend of mine tell Janey she would never take her mother’s place? Janey knows damn well who her mother is! And what kind of father am I, shacking up with someone during this important time in my children’s lives? Don’t I realize how much they need my undivided attention right now?

  I try to interrupt: “It’s the same age difference between you and Sam”; “That’s not what she said”; “Jesus, Rache, she was just—”; “Well Sam’s living there with you, isn’t he?” But she keeps going and then hangs up on me.

  For the next month, Rachel acts like I’m getting the kids every weekend, but every Friday something “very important” comes up—a birthday party, a family get-together, a soccer game, a sudden illness. It’s in the visitation agreement that one party may reschedule so long as there is “advanced notice” and “agreement from both parties,” but she takes a liberal view of the word “advanced,” and I have a hard time legally disagreeing. Louise and I make plans; I cancel them; we reschedule. I drive up to watch Nathan’s soccer game, but it turns out there is no game. The next Friday I get on the highway, but then I get a call—sorry, Janey says she’s sick, and Nathan better stay home too, his head feels warm—I exit I-81, turn around, and head back home. I complain to Louise about how manipulative Rachel is being, and she looks at me as if I may have lost my balls somewhere on the highway.