The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily

by Laura Creedle

  “You shouldn’t call it a kill ratio. Your robot will get ideas. Before you know it, you’ll have to send your father back in time to save the world.”

  Abelard didn’t respond for a long time, long enough for me to wonder if he’d actually seen any of the Terminator oeuvre. It was quite possible that he hadn’t wasted as much of his childhood watching old movies in front of the TV. Because—Latin lessons.

  “If my father traveled back in time, it wouldn’t be to save the world,” he replied.

  There was something mournful about this. I’d always liked Terminator. I liked the idea that if I sent my father back in time, he’d be great at destroying homicidal robots. Thinking on his feet. Dad was strong and quick-witted, and better suited for saving the world than he was for filing his tax returns on time.

  “He wouldn’t save the world? Not even if he knew he was the future’s last hope?”

  “He would probably use the time machine to send us all back to different eras. He’d probably send me back to fight in the Crusades or something equally doomed.”

  “Like the librarian in Star Trek?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” Abelard replied. “You know Star Trek? Truly, you are mistress of the most polite arts.”

  I beamed at the quote and the compliment. Of course, I owed this bit of trivia to Humberto, the Star Trek therapist. In the librarian episode, the sun is about to supernova, and the librarian sends everyone into the past to survive. But when the away team arrives from the Enterprise, all the good time slots are gone; all that’s left are the Salem witch trials and the Great Ice Age on some alternate planet. World of suck. Humberto’s contention was that I got pushed through the time portal to the worst moment in history to be an ADHD person. Bad luck of the draw. This is how he talks, Humberto. Oddly comforting.

  “My dad wants you to come over on Saturday and watch a movie.”

  “Interesting. Your father wants me to come over?”

  “He believes you should watch The Seventh Seal with us. It’s about the Middle Ages.”

  This would seem odd, except that I’m used to Rosalind’s parents. Film is literature, and everyone has a favorite lesson to teach. Apparently.

  “OK, Saturday.”

   Chapter 22

  Friday, Rosalind found me in the hall before lunch.

  “Can you come work the stage tonight? Next Thursday is opening night, and we’re down two stagehands. I’ll give you a ride home. Richard has agreed to crew but . . .”

  “Of course,” I replied. “But you do know that with my GPA . . .”

  Rosalind rolled her eyes.

  “You know Mr. Turner has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy about GPA, right? See you at lunch.”

  Rosalind dropped me off at home after theater, but she didn’t come in.

  “How was the theater?” Mom asked. She sat in the living room, alone.

  “Good, I guess. As good as running back and forth in a squat position can be,” I said. “Mostly it was talk tonight. We’ll get to staging next week.”

  “Ah.” Clearly her mind was elsewhere. “I’ve made a salad if you’re hungry. Iris and I have already eaten. Come sit down. I want to talk to you.”

  I followed her to the dining room. A bowl of Asian chicken salad sat on the table, and a bag of those weird crunchy sticks that exist only for Asian chicken salad. I was suddenly not at all hungry because serious conversation was in the offing. I had to remind myself that she’d already seen my report card for this six weeks. How much worse could it get?

  Mom inhaled and sighed deeply. “Lily, I want to talk to you seriously about going to the doctor.”

  Okay—worse. It could get worse.

  “I told you I’d only go if you let me see Dad.”

  “You know, your dad has his own life. I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

  “Can’t I at least talk to him about it?”

  Mom handed me her cell phone.

  “Your dad doesn’t have a cell phone right now. I tracked him down through one of his friends. This is his girlfriend’s number.”

  Girlfriend’s number. My chest tightened, which was stupid. Of course my dad had a girlfriend. It wasn’t like he’d been in stasis for five years.

  I hit talk. It rang twice, and a woman answered.

  “Hi, um, can I talk to Alexander Michaels-Ry—I mean Alexander Ryan?” I asked.

  “Splur,” the woman said in a voice so percussive, I wasn’t sure she hadn’t just insulted me. She was gone so long I wondered if she’d forgotten.

  “Hello?” My dad’s voice. It’s not like you ever forget the sound of your dad’s voice.

  “Hi, Dad. It’s me, Lily.”

  There was a momentary silence on the other end, long enough to hear him breathe. Like he was running through the names in his head trying to remember who Lily was. Which—okay—I’m slow on the phone. Names go with faces, but they don’t make any sense without them.

  “Lil,” Dad said finally. “Hey, kid, how’s it going?”

  “Um, pretty good, I guess. School not so good, but I have a boyfriend.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “So, yeah, it’s good,” I said.

  “Hey, Lil, that’s great!” Dad said.

  I heard the woman’s voice talking in the background, an impatient sound. Dad put a hand over the phone.

  “Just a minute,” he said in a muffled voice.

  I didn’t have much time.

  “So, Dad, do you remember when you said that I could come to Portland and milk goats with you and stay on the farm?”

  “Farm?”

  “Yeah, farm. You know, where you make goat cheese?” I paused. “Home-brewed Belgian ale?” I was trying to be funny, but I realized I was just parroting what Dr. Mitchell told me, and it sounded bitter and mean.

  “Belgian ale?” Dad said.

  “You told me I could come stay on your farm,” I said, impatiently now, because Mom was sitting next to me rubbing her temples nervously, looking like she wanted to rip the phone out of my hands.

  The impatient woman said something in the background.

  “Ohh . . . !” Dad said, like it just dawned on him what a farm was. “Farm. But, Lil, that was years ago. God, I haven’t thought about that place for a while. You know, you’d think it would be great to live on a farm, but really farm life is sooo . . . stultifyingly boring. Lil, you could not imagine how totally mind-numbingly tedious farm work is. It reminded me of Anna Karenina and all the scenes where Konstantin deals with the peasants—”

  “Dad, I haven’t read Anna Karenina.”

  “Well, you should. It’s on the shelves, isn’t it? I think I left it behind.”

  Left it behind. I wanted to drop the phone and go look at the shelves. The mention of the bookshelves was the first sign that I was talking to my actual dad, not some frightening alternate-universe version of him where everything went wrong.

  “So where are you now? Can I come stay with you?” I asked. “Mom said I could come to Portland if—”

  “Did I tell you?” Dad said. “I’m in a band again. We have a really good singer. She’s a scrubby crumb lurker . . . a New Pornographers sound, or maybe Arcade Fire? Scooby like Arcade Fire?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I replied. I’d lost his train of thought, lost the point of our conversation. Scooby-Doo, Arcade Fire, Anna Karenina—lost.

  “Alex, we’re going to be late,” the impatient woman said, audibly now. “Do you want to miss Caleb’s graduation?”

  “Lil, I’ve got to go,” Dad said.

  “Who’s Caleb?” I asked quickly. “Graduation?”

  “Caleb? He’s only the sweetest kid ever. You’d like him. He’s going into kindergarten . . . his daycare . . . graduation ceremony. It’s not a big deal but—”

  “Alex!” the woman said.

  I heard a small child Muppet voice in the background, undoubtedly Caleb, “the sweetest kid ever.” A bunch of run-on sentences strung together wit
h long stuttering pauses and repetition. I only caught one word: Daddy. Some kid I didn’t know called my father Daddy.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later, okay, Lil?”

  He hung up the phone.

  I held the phone out and had the dim sensation of it being taken out of my hands.

  “What did your dad say?” Mom asked softly.

  “He said I should read Anna Karenina,” I mumbled.

  “I mean about you going to Portland.”

  I closed my eyes, congealed in misery, hoping that if I stayed perfectly still, the world would forget about me. Mom would get up and go to bed, and I would open my eyes and find myself in a quiet room. Alone.

  “Yeah, that’s not going to work out.”

  Mom put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Lily, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?” I asked. “For not telling me that Dad had a new family and a new kid?”

  “What? He has a child? How old?”

  “Five.” I stole a glance at Mom. She’d gone to some inward place, mentally calculating the age of Dad’s kid against the time he’d last lived with us. It hadn’t occurred to me that Dad might have cheated on Mom. From the look on her face, I don’t think it had occurred to her either, and I felt sorry that I’d called Dad. I’d always thought she drove him away. It had never occurred to me that he might be to blame.

  Mom sat down on the love seat next to me. “Your dad loves you. He was just never good at keeping up with people or finishing—”

  “I get it.”

  I was done hearing about my dad. My dad: funny, smart, literate. Failed history graduate student. Dropout goat cheese maker. Father of “the sweetest kid ever.” How long before he left Caleb and the impatient woman in the dust to hunt for gold in the Arctic? Like he’d left everything else.

  Like he’d left us.

  Guess I was just like him. We were both irrevocably broken.

  “Make the appointment with the doctor,” I said.

  “I already have,” she said. “Tuesday at ten thirty.”

  “Lily?” he’d texted. And then later, “Where are you?”

  It was 7:13 when I finally ended up in my room.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I texted back.

  We talked about robots and chess and The Seventh Seal. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Abelard about my father. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him there wasn’t going to be a trip to Portland.

   Chapter 23

  Every day is new. Every day is a giant reset button. Along with my algebra homework and my favorite T-shirt, I’ve lost memory of yesterday’s conversations and the reason my eyes are puffy this morning. The flood of experience, the unexpected rain last night and the cool and moist air, the bran muffins Mom made and the smell of vanilla and raisins in the house, is the now that matters. I have a today with Abelard.

  But I also have a dull spot in the center of my chest that is my father sitting on a couch playing Arcade Fire songs for Caleb, “the sweetest kid ever.” Some things are bigger than cool rain, bigger than vanilla and raisins, bigger than the reset button. Some things even I can’t forget.

  And I’m the queen of losing things.

  Saturday afternoon. I lost track of time. And then I was late.

  “Lily! I’m so glad you’re here.” Mrs. Mitchell wore a gigantic amber pendant that had what looked like a prehistoric spider or long-legged bug folded up around some ants.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Oh, honey, you should have called me.” She lowered her voice. “It’s almost two forty. I think you had our Abelard a bit worried.”

  I looked past her to Abelard on the couch, sitting with his arms folded. He looked agitated.

  “Hey, Abelard,” I said.

  “Lily.”

  “I’m making some more lemonade. Would you like some? Abelard, you’d like some lemonade, wouldn’t you?”

  Mrs. Mitchell fluttered away to the kitchen before Abelard had a chance to answer. I sat on the couch, an arm’s distance away from him because I was feeling jumpy from being late.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to say more, but for once, words failed me.

  Mrs. Mitchell burst through the door carrying a tray with two glasses of lemonade.

  “Are you going to start the movie, Abelard?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she picked up the remote. I watched the simple white credits on a black background, as the sound of a gong faded ominously into silence.

  “Do you two need anything else?” Mrs. Mitchell asked.

  “Popcorn,” Abelard said.

  “Honey, we don’t have any popcorn,” Mrs. Mitchell replied.

  “Popcorn goes with movies,” Abelard said, his voice rising.

  Mrs. Mitchell smoothed her perfect white hair with one hand and sighed. “All right, Abelard, I’ll go to the store. Feel free to help yourself to more lemonade, Lily. Abelard, you’ll be okay while I’m gone, won’t you?”

  She picked up her purse on the table by the front door and left.

  The movie started with a scene of clouds in black and white, and a gorgeous shot of a hawk circling. I reached for my lemonade and drank it quickly because I was thirsty and anxious.

  Abelard moved closer to me, and the swirl of frustration and anger at myself for being late subsided. I inched his way, conscious of his hand on the couch.

  On the screen, the scene changed to two dead or sleeping guys lying on a rocky beach next to a chessboard. Someone was speaking in Swedish, and words scrolled by the bottom of the screen faster than I could possibly read. I only caught random phrases: “silence in heaven,” “half an hour” . . . Nothing made sense.

  “The Seventh Seal.” Dr. Mitchell emerged from his study. He stood behind the couch, looming over us.

  “Hello, Dr. Mitchell.” I craned my neck back to look at him.

  “Hello, Lily. Have you ever seen this movie before?—oh wait, there’s Death.”

  I turned toward the TV. True enough, a man with a white face, a long black cape, and hood showed up at a rocky ocean beach edge and began talking about chess.

  “You know the painter the knight is referring to is Albertus Pictor, but of course he shows up later in the film,” Dr. Mitchell said. “You know his last name, Pictor, comes from the same Latin root as our word picture, because at this point in history, Sweden had not yet fully begun to use patronymic names and—”

  “Dad,” Abelard pulled away from me and sat with his hands in his lap. “We’re watching a movie.”

  “What?” Dr. Mitchell replied. “I thought Lily might enjoy a little background about Swedish history and . . .”

  Dr. Mitchell resumed talking. In the movie, Death and the knight sat down on the beach and began to play chess. I formulated a new opinion that hell is having someone describe the entire history of medieval Sweden in English while other people converse in Swedish and you try to read subtitles. I didn’t want to say anything because I was already feeling stupid, hoping to hide my inability to read the subtitles fast enough to have a clue as to what was going on in the movie. Because—dyslexic.

  “Dad!”

  Abelard moved to the far end of the couch and ran his left hand over the edge of the coffee table, five inches one way, five inches back, over and over. Smoothing the edge over and over. Agitated. He moved his head side to side.

  “Calm down, Abelard,” Dr. Mitchell said.

  Abelard remained at the end of the couch, relentlessly running his hand over the edge of the table, lost in some deep personal annoyance.

  Without thinking, I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder. He flinched and pulled away like I’d burned him.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Abelard made a strange grunting sound as though I’d hurt him.

  Did it hurt to be touched sometimes?

  “Oh, dear,” Dr. Mitchell said. “Normally Abelard’s mother would be here . . .”

  I looked at Dr. Mitchell a
s he trailed off. He had moved away from the couch and was looking longingly toward the front door as though he could will Mrs. Mitchell to come home.

  “What should I do?” I asked him. I was talking like Abelard wasn’t in the room, and I hated it. I hated feeling this helpless.

  “You shouldn’t have been late. Abelard is very punctual.” Dr. Mitchell glanced around the room, looking for something. “He has a blanket he likes sometimes at moments like these.”

  There was a loud pong, a reverberation on the glass table. I turned. Abelard had hit his head on the table. His sunglasses were on the floor, his hair about his face. He lifted his head, and I had the feeling he was going to hit his head again. It was too much. I couldn’t do anything for him, and I felt like if I didn’t get up and move around, I would explode.

  “Should he be doing that?” I wanted to stop Abelard from banging his head, but I didn’t want to touch him again, if touching him only made it worse. That was all I could do—make it worse.

  “Perhaps if you gave us a moment?” Dr. Mitchell said. He grabbed a pillow from the couch and slid it onto the coffee table.

  I picked up my mostly empty glass and headed for the kitchen.

  I left Abelard alone with his father as a woman in a royal dress holding a baby appeared in the middle of the forest.

  The kitchen, hidden behind a swinging door, was cool and crisp, white on white—white subway tiles, white marble counters streaked with gray and white plates stacked neatly in glass cabinets. On the marble center island sat the giant pitcher of blue and orange and yellow speckled glass and lemon slices, glowing in the light from the bay window in the breakfast nook. I heard the sound of the movie in Swedish, the occasional murmur of Dr. Mitchell’s voice.

  I’d never seen Abelard like this. I wanted to help him, and I couldn’t.

  I turned my glass over and emptied the ice and lemons into the stainless-steel sink. The bottom of the glass was thick—more than half an inch of heavy, pale-green glass like an old Coke bottle. It calmed me. The thickness of the glass was somehow satisfying. A little offset from the center bottom was a tiny half bubble of glass where the glass blower had finished the work and pulled off the long blowing tube. At least, that’s how I thought that the bubble got there. I looked at the giant pitcher half filled with lemonade. Did all blown glass have this imperfection?