by Robin Black
Shake it harder, Lila. Shake it harder.
“Is that what you said to her?” he asked, as he himself shook the boy, digging his fingers into the child’s skinny frame. “Is that what you told my daughter to do?”
But his young eyes had filled up all too soon, great rivers of distorting, falling tears, his little shoulders convulsing in noisy sobs.
“Yes,” he told Jack, his head flopping in a violent nod, from chest to back, chest to back. “Yes, I did. I did. I told her to. I did.”
And that was that.
And there hadn’t been any good from that. No good at all. There hadn’t been a single moment of satisfaction to be felt. But before he took his hands off the boy, Jack had thrown him to the ground. “Little fucker,” he said, as if that might somehow help. And then he walked away. Left the kid lying there. He walked past the house. Past the garage. Down the street. All of that. All of that for nothing.
Because when he got home, Lila still couldn’t see.
Bess touches Lila’s shoulder and they exchange a few words; then Bess begins to walk toward him. Jack shifts toward the rusted rail, making room for her.
“Lila’s doing great,” she says once she’s close enough for a normal tone of voice. “She talks a good game, your daughter, but she’s a good listener too.” As she sits in the space beside him, a clean soapy smell drifts his way, and he notices a slight haze of freckles across her cheeks and nose. “She’s a nice kid,” Bess says. “She asked me how I was going to feel letting Wally go, asked me how I keep from getting too attached. Not every kid thinks in those terms.”
“I was wondering that myself. How do you?” Jack is half watching her, half watching his daughter on the field.
“Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t.” As she speaks she smooths tiny wrinkles from her jeans. Her hands are broad. A silver ring glistens on her index finger. “I miss the dogs pretty badly when they go. Then, eventually, I get another and start all over. And that helps, I suppose.”
“Did you tell Lila that?”
“I told her something like that.” Her hands settle on her knees. “With a little less emphasis on the sad part. I don’t want her feeling bad.” Jack doesn’t know what to say, but then Bess picks up again. “She tells me you and her mother are having a hard time thinking about her taking off for school on her own next year. That’s understandable. She’s quite a girl.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think all parents probably—”
“She told me something else, too.” She’s turned away a little from him now, so Jack can’t see her eyes. “She told me you weren’t entirely truthful about your wife.”
“Huh.” He looks out toward Lila, kneeling now in her denim skirt, patting the dog along his flank. “Huh,” he says again. “She told you that, did she?”
“You’d be amazed how many people are terrified of dogs.” Bess is smiling a little at him again, but he can’t quite smile back. “I deal with it all the time, Jack.”
“I don’t…” He can’t come up with very much more. “I guess that’s right. I guess a lot of people are.”
“Your daughter’s exact phrase was ‘I don’t know why my dad was so bizarre about this. As if it were leprosy or something.’ ”
Jack smiles at Bess’s imitation, in spite of himself. Pitch-perfect. He looks down toward his shoes. “That sounds like my girl,” he says. “And I’m sorry about the bluff. I don’t know why I did that. Really, in all honesty I can’t imagine why.”
And he can’t. There is no real why. Just a further symptom of how messy everything’s become. Ann’s fears: a symptom. His habitual lies: another symptom.
Bess shrugs. “It doesn’t matter, Jack. I’m not pegging you as some kind of criminal because you covered something up.” She smooths the fabric along her legs again. All the little wrinkles. All the little disturbances. “It probably just felt private to you, which is fine. But I do need to be a little clinical about all this. Something like a doctor, I suppose.” She turns to face him. “I really need to understand Lila’s home life—really understand it. If your wife has a dog phobia, even if it’s just a minor problem, we’ll deal with that. I just have to know about it.” He notices her small, off-white teeth that have never been fixed, a little crooked, a little buck. “We can work around just about anything—I just have to know the truth about what I’m sending Wally into. Wally, and Lila too. They have to trust each other. Which really means that we have to, right?”
As he nods, Jack’s chest rises and falls in a sigh. He’s probably already broken some aspect of Bess Edwards’s personal code of decency, he understands. She’s trying to be kind, but for a moment, sitting there, he’s oppressed by his sense of the bad impression he must already have made. He looks out to Lila, still kneeling in the dirt, her feet sticking out from her long denim skirt, her face right up against the dog’s. Never lie to her. Never lose her trust. Maybe that would be an easier mandate for an animal to follow.
“Listen, Bess,” he begins. “Lila doesn’t know everything.” Jack closes then opens his eyes. “There’s a lot more to our home life than her mother’s fear of dogs.” He leans over and picks up a small stick. “My wife and I are separating, after Lila goes away to school. It’s all been decided. I’m planning on moving out.”
As the words come out, something else occurs to him. This woman whom he barely knows is the first person he’s been honest with about this. Other than Ann. Even Miranda doesn’t know how concrete these plans are. “We haven’t said anything to her yet.” Jack shakes his head. “We’ve had to give our daughter an awful lot of bad news in her life. I guess I just haven’t been able to face doing this. Pretty cowardly, right?” Bess’s eyes give no reaction he can read, and for just a second, he thinks of adding something more. Something about how Ann has told him he’s the one who has to tell Lila, because he’s the one who first gave up on them. Because he’s the guy who wants out. The guy who can’t keep himself from seeking something resembling pleasure somewhere else. That all he can think of when he imagines breaking this news to his daughter is that other terrible conversation. The one he had with her when she was six. The one in which it felt as though with every word, he personally, Jack Snyder, was robbing his own child of any hope. Bess’s eyes are so open to him and so kind, he can easily imagine trying to explain it all to her. Trying to defend his decision to leave. To betray. To run away. Going into the petty, the hurtful, the heavy drag down into failure that has brought their marriage to this end. He can feel this desire to confess and then plead his own case swell like a powerful wind gusting somewhere deep inside his chest. But he stops himself. Closes himself tight against the urge, and for a time, Bess gives no response at all. Just looks away a little from his gaze, and gradually it becomes the kind of moment when the sounds that were there all along are audible, anew. Cars passing by on the distant road. Birds calling out to one another; birds calling back. A plane overhead.
“Actually, Jack,” Bess says finally, looking down, “Lila already told me that too.”
And with just a quick hand to his shoulder, she stands and walks away.
The first few months of Lila’s life, she hollered as if indignant at having been born, maybe as if she saw the injury to come. He so envied Ann back then, the way she could slip her breast into the baby’s mouth, the way Lila would settle, the way Ann could know who she was to her. For all those miraculous months, that was what injustice seemed to be, his wife having that, when he did not.
Out on the path now, Lila and Wally are walking around and around and around. There’s a moment every time when it looks as though they’re heading toward him, but then they stay with the curve, Lila’s arm straightened by the unaccustomed pull of the lead. It takes Jack a while to realize she must have lost track anyway, that she can’t know where the circle starts or ends, when a full rotation is complete, can’t know whether she’s facing him or facing away.
He takes his glasses off so that out among the distant blur of gr
een, Lila and Wally are just another distant blur.
Staring at them, at nothing, he can remember how much it felt like exile those first few months, how he seemed to be invisible to her all that year, how this new, keen, devastating love seemed to bring nothing so much as isolation. And how that changed one night when Lila was crying out, not crying, but yelling for help, for comfort. Maybe it was a tooth, maybe a terrible dream. Ann was either sleeping or pretending to be, so he went in. He found his daughter standing up, just a shape in the nightlight dusk, all her weight thrown against the rail, hollering into the night. He held his arm out, next to hers, and with his other hand he moved her grip so she was latched onto him. He remembers now exactly how she looked as his eyes adjusted to the dark and her little face emerged, curious, trusting, beautiful, as though she were a candle burning through the night. Just hang on, Lila, he told her then, and she smiled at him, she seemed to understand. Just don’t let go.
If I
Loved
You
I.
IF I LOVED YOU, I would tell you this:
I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer. And that is why you should be kind to me. I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer that has spread into my liver and my bones and that now I understand there is no hope. If I loved you, I would say: you shouldn’t be so hard on us. On me and on Sam.
Because it may not even be just the cancer.
For all you know we have a brain-damaged son living in an inadequate institution thirty miles from our house. For all you know, we agonized one long, cold winter night six years ago over whether to send him there. But then, broken, exhausted, we finally stood together in our kitchen, staring hard at each other, both of us the worse for scotch, and just knew, just then, at the exact same moment, that we couldn’t manage him at home any longer. Not with him so big I couldn’t bathe him by myself. Not with him so strong. Not with me just diagnosed and in for my second round of chemo.
There’s so much you don’t know.
For all you know I have three, maybe four months to live and Sam is up every night trying to figure out how he’s going to break it to our brain-damaged son that I won’t be coming to visit anymore. And I’m lying right there next to him, hour after hour, trying not to think about the possibility that our boy will be angry at me for this. Or maybe worse, maybe better, that he won’t even notice that I’m gone.
You want to build a fence between our homes.
It will be wood, you tell us.
You’re tall, and you’re young, and you paid a lot of money for that enormous house next to ours. It will be solid wood, you say, with no space or light between the slats. And it will be six feet high and run along the property line you had surveyed just this week.
Understand, you say, I didn’t ask the surveyors to add land to my land. It just turns out that the line’s much closer to your house than anyone thought. I was every bit as surprised as you.
And for a moment all three of us, you, me, and Sam, stare down at the pachysandra-covered ground.
But if you build a six-foot-tall solid wall, I say, if you build it right where the pink flags are, I won’t be able to open my car door. Not without banging into your fence. Not within twenty feet of my front door, anyway. I’ll have to park at least twenty feet from my door.
You only nod.
Sam walks along the line, from flag to flag, then says, You’re telling me those hemlocks belong to you? You’re saying they’re not ours?
It turns out they’re on my land.
We’ve been paying to have them sprayed for years, I say. It’s been sixteen years. The whole time we’ve lived here. We thought they were ours.
You say nothing. Sam says nothing.
Why six feet tall? I finally ask. It seems awfully high. It’s so close to our house. We’ll just see a wall every time we come outside. We’re used to looking at the hemlocks. We’ve always had a view. Maybe they don’t belong to us, but we’ll feel like we’re walled in.
We will be walled in, Sam says.
I need it that tall because I’m going to get an animal. An animal could jump over a lower fence.
We’ve been staring at these trees for sixteen years, I say. It’s going to be a big change. But that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that we won’t be able to park in front of our house.
You nod. And then you hand me a letter. Our full names are typed on the envelope—complete with our middle initials. You’ve been looking through public records. You are doing this by the book. This is no friendly note held in my hand. It’s a document.
Here is the part I go over in my head:
When I think about you buying the house, having the land surveyed, finding the property line just about in your neighbors’ driveway, telling them you’re going to build a wall, a solid wall, right there; this is the part that I still don’t understand.
You know nothing about the reasons it might matter to us to be able to park right in front of our door.
For example, in the cancer scenario, I’ll grow weak. That’s inevitable. Walking twenty feet will feel like a mile to me. Maybe I could do it, make the walk from the car, if we were just a foot or two from the house. But all the way down the drive, all the way from where there’s room to open the door, that’s just too far.
So Sam is going to have to take out the folding wheelchair from the back. And wheel me up the drive. And then help me out from the chair and then, when he’s settled me in the house, he’ll have to wheel the chair, empty now, back down the drive to the car. And every time he does this he’ll suffer. Every time, his heart will break. Because one day soon, he knows, the chair will be empty for real.
But back inside the house he tries to make me laugh—by imitating you. We’re going to get an animal, he says. An animal! A hippopotamus, in fact.
What’s the deal, I ask, with a man who can’t just say dog?
And then Sam says, Just don’t set a foot onto my land. My land, my land, he says in a Scarlett O’Hara voice, his fist raised in the air. And I try to laugh—for Sam. But eventually I have to raise the question of whether it’s time for us to tell our son. Because I can feel that there are only three or four more visits left in me. Power is running from my legs like sand down an hourglass. Do we tell Todd in advance? Or will I just be gone one day?
We hire a lawyer.
I don’t want to, but your letter quotes township statutes and talks about your rights as a landowner. It’s just possible, Sam says, that we have rights too. He looks so worn and haggard as he speaks. He looks as though this is one thing too many. I say, Go ahead, hon. Hire a lawyer. Let somebody else take this on.
Our lawyer sends you a letter. It says that we want you to hold up on construction while we investigate the situation. We want you to give us a chance to see if there’s any way around this. The phrase adverse possession appears in the second paragraph. We also send you a handwritten note, behind our lawyer’s back, saying we don’t want this to be a legal fight. Please. We just want you to let us open our car door in front of our house—as a courtesy. We only hired a lawyer because you gave us that document, you made it seem so official. We felt we had to do everything we could.
Your response comes hand-delivered, overnight.
“I have every right to erect a fence on my own property.”
It says a bit more. But not much.
There’s a conversation that hasn’t been had, I tell Sam. The conversation human beings have with each other. He isn’t quite treating us like people.
He isn’t quite a person, Sam says. He’s a creature. He’s an animal himself. He’s like a yeti or something.
He is! He looks exactly like a yeti. That scowl on his face. The way he stomps around his land. It’s inspired, I say. He’s the yeti.
And that is what we call you after that.
I suppose it’s this ability of yours not to care that intrigues me so.
If I loved you, I would tell how much you’re mis
sing because of that. I would find ways to convince you that I exist. I would resist erasure every moment that I could.
For several weeks the letters fly back and forth.
You’re amazed that we think we have any rights.
We’re amazed that you think rights are what’s at issue here.
Sam says he’s going to paint a bright red stripe on our side of the line. It’ll be wet paint, he says. I’ll put it down on the day they’re building the fence. So if they set a foot on our property… if they set even one foot on our property…
I’ll sit out there with a shotgun, I say. First one of them steps in red paint loses a leg…
I want to scold you in the harsh, caressing tones of a mother to a child. I want to help you, make you understand more about the ways things should be than you do, make you think more, give you some imagination. I want you to imagine that I have a life. A life that matters. You should care about my life.
Sam stares out the kitchen window every night when he comes home from work.
I’ll miss the trees, he says.
I really will. I don’t give an answer.
Why make matters worse?
Another possibility is that Sam is in danger of losing his job.
What if I have cancer, our son is out there in the institution, and, because the boy and I take up so much time, Sam is having trouble putting the hours in at work? They’ve tried to be patient with him, they know the situation, but the irony is it’s dragging on for too long. If I’d died six months ago instead of four months from now, there might not be a problem. They’re good guys. They do care. But this is too much.