This Is My Daughter

by Robinson, Roxana;

  “Is she all right?” he asked. His heart was thundering. Emma shifted, and he could see something inside the car, pressed against the windshield. Fear filled him, panic, but he refused it: this was the wrong shape, the wrong color, to be Tess. This was crumpled, glittering with dark fluid.

  “Call nine-one-one and bring me a blanket,” Emma said. In the second before he could answer she said, “Go! Go!”

  In the silent kitchen he turned on the sudden lights and dialed. He stood waiting, alone in the house, feeling the signal that he had sent go out through the night, across the waters. He waited. He could feel his heart inside the cavity of his chest, huge, terrified, thundering along. He would make things right by force of will.

  A woman’s voice said, “Nine-one-one.”

  “I want to report an accident,” Peter said clearly, proud of himself.

  “What kind?”

  “A car accident,” he said. He wondered suddenly if that were accurate: there was the car, the tree, the girls. But was that what you called it, a car accident?

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “Yes,” Peter heard himself say.

  “How many people are hurt?”

  “Two,” Peter said, “children.” His throat closed on the word.

  “Where are they?” Peter gave her directions, and his name.

  “Hold on,” she said. “Do not hang up.”

  The line went silent. Peter held on to the telephone tightly. He felt the seconds tick through his body. He thought of Emma out in the darkness, her bathrobe spreading around her like a cloak as she climbed down into the dark well of the car. With every second this wait became worse. He felt like shouting into the phone, Hurry. Hurry.

  The woman returned. “Don’t move them,” she said. “Do you understand? Don’t pull them from the car, don’t shift their positions in any way. You could damage their spines. Don’t pick them up.”

  “All right,” Peter said. He wondered if Emma had pulled Tess out.

  “Keep them warm. They’re in shock. Wrap them in blankets without moving them. The police are on their way, and an ambulance. A helicopter team is on alert. The police will decide if you need the helicopter. If you do, it will arrive within thirteen minutes of the call.”

  “Yes,” said Peter, “good.” He loved this woman devoutly. He pictured her, sitting by the telephone, on her nocturnal vigil. She sat before a cluttered desk. There were phones, radio transmitters, a computer. She was in her fifties, short graying hair. Glasses. He loved her.

  “Do you know the names of the victims?”

  He hesitated: it was the last moment before he had to acknowledge this, name it. He told her. The sound of their names was terrible.

  “And are you Peter Chatfield?”

  “Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”

  “Your phone listing came up on my screen,” she said. “What is your relationship to the victims?”

  “Father,” Peter said. In his mouth the word felt like a confession. He heard it resonate with guilt. It struck a vast gong, and now all the world knew. It had been his responsibility, his fault.

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman, but she went right on. The name of his doctor, medical insurance, addresses. Peter answered all her questions dutifully, part of his brain wondering how he would apologize, how he would explain to her, afterward, that none of this had happened, and the girls were asleep, upstairs, in their beds. He saw Tess there, vividly. She slept often on her back, her head turned sharply to one side, one palm open on the pillow. That was how she would be now, really.

  After Peter hung up with the nine-one-one woman, he went upstairs for the blankets, leaping the steps three at a time. In Tess’s room he turned on the light switch and looked: she might be in her bed, she might, this might easily be a mistake. Amanda could have gotten it wrong, he had misunderstood. The bed was tossed, empty. He pulled the blanket off, the quilt. He ran back downstairs, out into the terrifying night.

  When he returned to the car Emma was inside it, leaning strangely from the window. He kept his eyes on her face as he gave her the blanket. He did not dare look down inside the car.

  “The police and ambulance are on their way. The helicopter is on alert. Wrap them up but don’t move them, don’t shift them in any way, it could damage their spines.”

  Emma said nothing, taking the blanket with her and vanishing back inside the darkness of the Volvo. Peter took the quilt over to Amanda. She was now standing, facing the tipped car. One arm was held across her chest, the other hung limp at her side.

  “Let me wrap you up,” Peter said. He set the quilt carefully around her shoulders. She winced again and made a sound. He wrapped her lightly and stood behind her, feeling the solid rise of her young woman’s body before him. He felt fear, a sense of waste. He thought of Byron: She walks in beauty, like the night of something climes and starry skies. He opened his mouth. He was panting with fear. This was his daughter.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I missed the turn,” Amanda said.

  “You were driving?” he asked, sickened.

  He saw her nod.

  “Is your arm all right?” he asked.

  “I can’t move it,” she said. She sounded hopeless. Very carefully Peter kissed the top of her head, he could not hug her. At that, the touch of his mouth on her hair, he felt her sob, and she leaned slightly back, against him.

  The ambulance, thrilling its nasal cry, appeared around the corner, drew up, stopped. A circling red light threw urgent beams onto the scene, alarming, disorienting. Two men in dark jackets jumped out of the ambulance and came over to Peter.

  “She’s inside the car,” Peter said. Emma appeared in the car window and began to climb carefully out. In the lurid shifting rays of the ambulance light her hair was wild, her eyes gleamed, she looked demonic.

  The man climbed carefully into the car. A police car pulled up behind the ambulance. The policeman got out and came over to Emma. He put his hand on her elbow and walked her over to Peter. It was a local man, John Garth. Peter knew him. They sometimes fished together, on the beach, in the evenings. Now, in this erratic scarlet light, Garth was a stranger, his manner stiff and official.

  “Over here, please, Mrs. Chatfield,” he said, herding her away from the car. His arms were raised, curved, open. “Keep back.”

  “No,” Emma said, pulling away from him. “That’s my daughter.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’ll have to keep you away while the emergency crew is working on her.” Garth had a thick brown mustache, and he wore sunglasses. Sunglasses, thought Peter, at four o’clock in the morning. Peter took Emma’s arm, pulling it close to him. The policeman stood in front of them, his arms up, his body a shield from the sight of the car. He kept turning, himself, to look over his shoulder.

  Emma stood by Peter’s side. She did not look at Amanda.

  The second man from the ambulance approached the Volvo, carrying a small stretcher, and a bag. The ambulance headlights were trained on the car, and a big lamp had been set on the ground nearby. In the frightening glare the men worked quickly. Garth asked Peter and Emma to stay where they were. His eyes sought Peter’s, as the one he could trust. Peter nodded, and Garth went over to speak to the rescue workers. He stood wide legged, still blocking the view. He unhitched his walkie-talkie from his belt and spoke into it in a low voice.

  Beyond Garth, around his body, they saw Tess, strapped now to a short board, lifted into the light. Wide white tapes held her tightly to the board; her nightgown was dark and brilliant. As her body rose into the light of the flares, Peter could see, like a terrible secret, that her head was dark, covered in blood.

  They laid her on the larger, waiting stretcher with its open blanket. They lapped the blanket closed over her small form, so slight it vanished underneath the cloth. Peter could see her face, glistening, dark. Over her face was a mask, covering nose and mouth.

  Tess, strapped down, began to struggle. In the glare they coul
d see her head jerking, her shoulders twitching horribly. Emma started toward her, and the policeman moved back to bar her way.

  “Let me by,” said Emma, her eyes on Tess.

  “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to keep back. The rescue squad is going to take her down to the airstrip. We’re waiting for the helicopter right now. They want both girls, and the helicopter will hold only one more person. If you want to go with them, now’s the time to go and get ready.”

  But they were hypnotized by the sight of Tess. Under the blanket she thrashed fiercely, her head jerking, shoulders twisting, as though she wrestled with invisible attackers. The policeman now held his hands up, to obstruct the view. They could not take their eyes from her. His raised hands moved steadily back and forth, distracting, maddening, interrupting but not concealing the sight.

  “Ma’am, the helicopter will not wait for you. Right now speed is very important. If you want to go on it, you’d better get ready.”

  The rescue workers carried the stretcher to the back of the ambulance. Tess, still heaving, vanished within the double doors. One of the men came for Amanda. The girls were gone. The ambulance began to pull slowly away, wallowing along the verge until it reached the pavement, its grid of red taillights horribly irradiating the road behind it.

  In the bedroom, Peter and Emma moved back and forth without speaking. The room looked plundered: bed unmade, closets gaping, clothes strewn about.

  “What will I need? What will I need?” Emma asked suddenly. Her eyes were wild.

  “When?” Peter asked stupidly.

  “Where am I going?”

  “Take everything,” Peter said. “You’re going straight to the hospital. Take a jacket, take your pocketbook. I’ll bring the car down on the first ferry.” It was unnatural, dressing so early in the morning.

  Outside, the police car waited for them. They had no car, Peter realized, there was no car to bring on the ferry. Emma sat in front, with Garth, Peter in back. They drove along the dark silent roads. Outside, the trees began to declare themselves against the lightening sky. The car drew up at the tiny paved strip at the western end of the island. The three of them got out and stood waiting, their faces toward the mainland. The ambulance stood beside them, its red lights on, its doors shut.

  They saw the helicopter before they heard it. It was Emma who saw it first, a bright steady star, moving toward them through the night sky. She lifted her hand, pointing, and then they all saw it, passing among the other stars, shouldering them out of its way. As it neared, they heard it, a mechanical stutter, louder and louder. By the time it landed, the roar was deafening.

  The landing lights shone downward, illuminating the strip. There was the worn concrete runway, the long summer grass flattened by the wind from the circling rotors. As the helicopter descended it swayed, settling like a nesting bird, making a half circle as it sank down to earth. The rescue men sprang from the ambulance and opened the rear doors. By the time the helicopter had touched lightly onto the airstrip, the men had lifted two stretchers into the noise and glare. The forms on them were swathed and motionless.

  Emma stepped forward, away from Peter. She followed the men carrying Tess. She climbed lightly into the open door of the helicopter after the stretchers were lifted on. Peter came with her halfway to the helicopter, then stood still, his hand lifted to wave. Emma did not look back at him until the very end, as the door slid across the open doorway. Her eyes met his without a sign of recognition.

  The door snapped shut, and without a pause the helicopter began ponderously to rise from the airstrip, drawn upward by the thundering, flickering blades. Slowly it wheeled in midair, then, responding to some mysterious internal signal, set off diagonally, rising as it moved, the cabin leaning against the slanted course, as though it were drawn magically from above. It flew steadily into the lightening sky. Peter watched it until it faded from sight. He was alone.

  27

  It was the fifth day.

  Peter stood outside the closed door of Caroline’s apartment, holding a small elegant paper bag. For a moment he wondered whether or not to open the door without ringing, and step inside, like a family member. For he was a family member; at least a member of his family lived here. It was hard to lose the habit of intimacy, the sense of natural domain. But no, of course he should ring, he knew that. He had no place here. He dreaded this visit.

  He pressed the button next to the door and waited. The button was small, brass and highly polished. The door itself was black and glossy, and the floor was a black-and-white marble checkerboard. The ceiling was high, with plaster moldings. Peter had never seen this new apartment of Caroline’s. Her father had died a few years ago, and she had come into some money. It had been during a dip in the real estate market, and Caroline had bought this snappy place at Seventy-third and Madison, where the doormen were tall, and wore hats and gloves.

  Tall doormen were a sign of status, he supposed. Doormen were drawn from the most recent wave of immigrants, and they hadn’t grown up on American vitamins. Their children would be tall, but they were not. For years, New York doormen had been Irish; then the Hispanic wave had begun. Now they were short and broad and impassive, with dark Aztec faces. Those Latino faces: Peter had seen a man, on a crowded midtown street, whose features he had seen carved over and over on the walls of a temple outside Cuernavaca. It was a stone-age emperor’s face, flat and pitiless, with long narrow eyes and a broad brutal nose. The man on Fifty-fourth Street wore a white chef’s jacket; he was delivering pizza.

  You never saw black doormen. Peter wondered if that were racial discrimination, and if so, which race was doing the discriminating. Poor blacks wouldn’t take menial jobs, nothing domestic: it was hard to understand that, hard to sympathize with it. Poor Latinos took any job they could get. Koreans kept those corner markets open twenty-four hours a day. The kids washed vegetables, swept floors, kept their grades up, went to Harvard. The blacks did nothing like that. But before civil rights and television, poor black people had worked hard: what had happened to the work ethic? Maybe all the ones who’d had it had left, and were living in the suburbs now, sending their kids to Yale. Maybe there was no one left in the ghetto except lost souls, nothing there but despair. It was America’s worst problem, the trapped black underclass, impotent, enraged.

  The newest wave was Russians. Peter’s West Side garage was run by pale-skinned men, hawk nosed, with wild liquid black eyes. They spoke a broken and explosive English, and radiated a predatory cunning. With them it seemed that everything was negotiable, not in the mild, accommodating way of Italians but in a dangerous, threatening one. Peter was never quite sure, when he arrived at the garage, if he was going to be given his car or held up at knifepoint.

  Peter pressed the bell again. There had been no audible response, and now he wondered if the bell worked. This time he held the button down for a long commanding buzz. He felt a silent sizzle under his finger. He listened for Caroline’s footsteps, his heart sinking.

  He had not seen Amanda since the accident. By the time he had reached New York, that awful day, she had been sent home from the hospital. She had a broken collarbone and contusions, nothing more. She was told to rest. Peter had spoken to her every day on the phone, but this was his first visit.

  Behind the door he heard sudden footsteps. The door opened, and Caroline stood there in red silk and pearls. She looked sleek and impeccable, as though to remind Peter of her competence at life, even without him. Her head was high, her mouth was set.

  Peter nodded. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” Caroline said, stepping back with a militant sweep. Her perfume was new, strange to him. Inside, the front hall was dark, polished. A large gilt-framed mirror he had never seen before hung over a mahogany table. Carefully, Peter did not look around.

  “How is she today?” he asked.

  “She gets tired easily,” Caroline said. Her voice was harsh. “She gets up in the morning and she’s exhausted.”

 
; “She should rest,” Peter said, nodding. “Not overdo it.”

  Caroline made no response. She stood, her hand still on the doorknob.

  “Where is she?” Peter asked.

  “In her room,” Caroline answered. She still did not move.

  “Can I see her?” Peter finally asked, vexed that she’d made him.

  Caroline shut the door and turned without speaking. She walked down a carpeted hallway.

  Peter followed. He’d known she would be rude. She had been rude to him for the last eight years, offhand, dismissive, contemptuous of his ideas. Sometimes, at the end of a conversation on the phone, she would say abruptly, “Good-bye,” and hang up before Peter could reply. Each time she did this he felt a brief flush of anger, though he never responded. He mustn’t rise now, he told himself. The last thing he wanted was a fight with Caroline. He had said all he had to say to Caroline. He was here to see Amanda. Caroline opened a door and went in, without looking back at him.

  Amanda’s room was square and good sized. Chintz curtains hung at the tall windows; a good mahogany bureau stood against one wall. There was a pretty needlepoint rug on the floor. The place was a shambles. Lying haphazardly on the carpet, as though hurled there, were shoes, clothes, magazines. The closet door stood open, and the closet light was on. The bureau top was messy. The bedside table was crammed with magazines, wadded Kleenexes, dirty glasses. A big television stood on a low bench by the window. The picture was on, but not the sound. The screen was angled to face the four-poster bed. In the bed lay Amanda, propped against a pillow. She held a magazine in one hand. Her other arm was in a white sling. She looked at Peter over the top of the magazine.

  “Hi, Nanna,” Peter said. His heart, crowded with anger, moved painfully at the sight of her. She looked so dreary, in this cluttered messy room, surrounded by the sad trashy debris of sickness.

  Amanda waved the magazine at him, a slow flap.

  Peter crossed the room and sat on the end of her bed. The bed was a hodgepodge of rumpled sheets; the blankets and bedspread were sliding off one corner.