by James Dodson
It struck me as odd that Wendy hadn’t made any comment on my story—the conflict that would define Maggie’s life, to some unknown extent, for the rest of her days. Perhaps Wendy was too young to have an opinion on marriage or was simply too busy calculating whether we could make it back to the ranch before the storm broke. A few minutes later, though, she turned in the saddle and thoughtfully said to me: “I think the important thing is for your children to always know how much you both love them and for neither you nor Maggie’s mother to try and use the children against the other. My mother was so angry at my father she tried to use my brother against him, and it really screwed him up for a while.”
I smiled at her and thanked her for the advice; she was obviously wise beyond her years. She gave me a nice smile and added, “If you wouldn’t be offended, I’d like to say a prayer for you all.”
I said I wouldn’t be offended in the least to be included in her prayers and that I thought I could speak for Maggie in that regard: We would be pleased to be prayed for. Then I leaned back as Poncho went down a steep slope over windfallen aspens and I tugged my cowboy hat down to keep it from blowing away.
—
The rain drenched us to the bone before we reached the corral. Lightning bolts bleached the evergreens almost white. I ran up the hill to our cabin feeling almost lightheaded from the unexpected pleasure of my ride into the mountains with the three Muses and anxious to convey to Maggie Wendy’s comments about her riding skills. This was our final night at Colorado Trails and the farewell dinner was about to begin, followed by the weekly staff variety show. I’d laid out Maggie’s best dress on her bed for the occasion.
I found her sitting in the darkened cabin watching the storm, still wearing her damp bathing suit, wrapped in a towel and shivering slightly. I flipped on the lights and asked why she hadn’t showered yet. I reminded her the farewell dinner started in just a few minutes.
“I don’t want to go,” she said.
As I peeled off my soaked duds, I paused to look closer and realized she’d been crying. I sat down beside her on her bed and asked what was wrong. It took a few minutes to coax the story out of her. The girl cousins she’d been pals with all week had for some reason turned “mean and bossy” at the pool and informed her they didn’t wish to sit with her at the farewell dinner. I asked if perhaps she’d been bossy to them first and she gave me a look of almost pure fury and vigorously shook her head.
“Well,” I suggested, water dripping from the end of my nose, “let’s talk about it, can we?”
She nodded but didn’t want to talk, so I did. I said something about kids being kids and having notoriously short tempers but also famously short memories and tried to assure her that all fences would be mended by the time we pushed ourselves to the grub table. If not, well, she could make a new friend for the variety show or just sit with me in the Old Fogy section.
“I don’t want a new friend,” she snapped at me.
“There’s no reason to bite my head off,” I said calmly, then tried to explain why making new friends was so important.
“Dad,” she said, “you just don’t get it.”
I smiled and kissed her forehead. The smile was intended to reassure her that everything would sort itself out with time and a nice hot shower, but she took it to mean I thought she was making a mountain out of a molehill. Lightning blasted a tree somewhere on our ridge and we both flinched.
“Guess the drought’s over,” I said.
“Dad, Jessica said I must be a baby or something because I still have Susie Bear and she said there’s no such thing as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus and how would you like it if she said that to you because she said only babies believed in Santa and the tooth fairy and even angels aren’t real…they’re just, like, like, made up or something and I said, yeah, well, what about Jesus and God I bet you believe in them and she said no they weren’t real either, Dad. How about that? How would you feel if somebody said that to you?”
I nodded, suppressing a smile at her impressive run-on sentence and trying to remember who Jessica was in this little drama. I thought a moment and said there was always somebody around who wanted to challenge what you believed in and no shortage of rude people in the world with whom you would sometimes have to share a swimming pool. That was part of growing up, I told her. You had to learn to ignore the jerks, because life was full of them. You had to learn to defend your beliefs.
“But, Dad, I can’t.”
I sighed. “Oh, Maggie. When are you going to grow up?”
I regretted uttering this bromide of parenthood the instant it came out of my mouth. The truth was, I didn’t want her to grow up and it wasn’t really what I meant to say.
“Oh, Daddy.”
She burst out crying and blew straight out the cabin’s screen door into the storm. I kicked off my wet jeans and gave chase and was fifty yards from the cabin when I finally caught up to her. I caught her arm and spun her around. She was sobbing almost inconsolably. The rain was hammering down. I kneeled and put my arms around her and pulled her close but she tried to shove me away. I squeezed tighter.
“Maggie,” I said firmly in her ear, “please stop. This is…silly.”
Once again, another poor choice of words for a man who makes his living finding the right words. Who was calling whom silly: I was the one kneeling in the middle of the ranch’s main road in my boxer shorts and a soaked polo shirt, trying to repair the unintentional damage I’d done.
“No it’s not,” she said with a small hiccup. “You broke your promise.”
“What promise, darling?” My mind groped for some Gatorade or tourist trinket I’d neglected to buy, some tourist haunt we’d failed to see.
Out of the corner of my eye, as she collapsed on my shoulder and sobbed anew, I saw an entire family assembled at the front door and screened windows of their cabin and realized that one of them was the strange potato-shaped man I’d seen wandering around the ranch all week with a Sony video camera plugged to his eyeball. If he’s videotaping this, I thought, I’ll throw that camera off a cliff and maybe him with it.
I picked up my daughter and began walking slowly with her in my arms back to our cabin. “Maggie,” I said quietly. “What promise did I break? I just can’t seem to remember.”
She hiccuped into my chest, refusing to look at me. Her voice was slightly muffled by my wet shirt.
“You swore to me that you and Mommy would never get a divorce. Don’t you remember that?”
I heard the words but it took a moment for their meaning to sink in. When they did, I was stunned. Stunned by the power of her accusation and stunned by the accuracy of her incredible memory. I did remember this promise, given with tremendous overconfidence one night several years ago when Maggie came home from her day-care center talking not about the adventures of Barney or the latest intrigues from the sandbox but about a pint-sized chum whose parents were divorcing. She’d asked me what divorce meant and I told her with that slightly smug reassuring tone grown-ups employ to dispel the terror of unknown shapes in a darkened room that it was what happened when two married people fell out of love and realized they were better off living apart than together, but it was certainly nothing she or her brother needed to worry about.
Pinkie promise? she’d asked.
Pinkie promise, I’d promised.
And now I’d broken that promise. That wasn’t my interpretation, of course, but it was hers and that was all that really mattered at this moment. A pinkie promise was the ultimate promise and I’d broken one, pure and simple. That’s what this was really about and this was clearly what had been churning around in her head and eating her insides up for weeks as she put on such a brave face to the world and to me. The questions about the ring, the questions in the bar…they all added up now. Foolish, stupid, unseeing me. We were surrounded by happy, two-parent family units on vacation, recounting tales of their day’s adventures over cookhouse grub, laughing and squabbling with the easy immunity of people who simply co
uldn’t imagine their well-made lives suddenly falling apart. No wonder having her belief in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the existence of angels teased and challenged was such a moral affront, such an earth-shattering thing. They were simply too much, the final straw, and this was her last good defense against the unknown shapes that terrorized her room and her life. She’d finally dug in her heels and made a stand against the chaos.
I was speechless. As I thought all this, tears began to come to my own eyes. I couldn’t think what to say and I remember thinking how matters weren’t helped much by having this flood of raw emotions come pouring out so publicly amid a rollicking thunderstorm—a backdrop straight from a cheap stage melodrama or some shameless movie director who was stooping to use an unmistakable metaphor from nature.
On the other hand, it could have been snowing and we could have been stark naked for all I really cared about Mr. Potato Head and his family. Their curiosity wasn’t my concern. This was my daughter who was crying her eyes and heart out, wondering if her world would ever feel as safe again. And I damn sure had to somehow find the words to help her believe it would.
I hugged her to me as I walked, feeling the rain on my face. She clung to me like ivy on a post.
—
“Maggie,” I said, “here’s your milk shake.”
This was an hour later. The thunderstorm had blown over and I’d walked up to the trading post to fetch us both chocolate milk shakes while she showered and put on new jeans instead of her dress. Passing the dining hall, I could see that the farewell dinner was almost over. A knot of little girls, including Becca and her cousin Lillian, tumbled out the door and Becca asked me in a chirpy voice if Maggie was coming to sit with the Buckeroos at the variety show. Such sweet faces and short memories. At least I’d been right about that.
“Yep. She’ll be right along,” I assured her. “Save her a seat in the front row.”
Maggie came out to the front porch, where I was sitting on the wet steps waiting for her to finish dressing. She was combing out her hair. The storm had scoured out the awful heat and left a tinge of coolness in the air. There were a few stars reemerging to the south. She sat down beside me and I handed her the chocolate shake.
“Dinner is served.”
“Thank you.”
I didn’t know where to begin, so I began by saying I was sorry I’d told her to grow up. The last thing I really wanted was for her to grow up anytime soon. I wanted her to be my beautiful firstborn baby girl for as long as possible.
“I know.”
I knew she knew. Furthermore, I said, she’d been right—I had promised her that her mother and I would never get a divorce. “When I made that promise to you,” I said, “I genuinely believed there was nothing that could tear apart our family like this. I think it’s safe to say neither your mother nor I envisioned anything like this happening until…it did. But sometimes things happen we can’t explain. Something changes. Worlds come and go. It may take us years to begin to understand it. The one thing that doesn’t change, though, is the love your mom and I feel for you and Jack. That’s like a star.” I pointed to a star glimmering in the silver spruce trees. “You may not always be able to see it but it’s always there shining.”
She sipped her shake and said nothing, looking up.
“Yesterday,” I kept going, “I went with some of the other fathers down to the San Juan River. As you know, the San Juan is one of the greatest trout rivers in the world. Fly anglers come from everywhere to experience catching a fish there. I was so incredibly prepared for a wonderful fishing experience, for catching the trout of my dreams, and guess what?”
“What?”
“I didn’t catch one. I saw a bunch of huge trout in the water and I saw a beautiful lady deer. But I didn’t catch a trout.”
“Were you sad?”
“Not sad exactly. Just disappointed. Especially since the other fathers seemed to catch their weight in big fish.”
“Is that why you didn’t go back with them today?”
“No. I didn’t go back to the San Juan with them today because I hadn’t taken a good trail ride and I knew you wanted me to see those aspens and get to know Wendy, who, by the way, says you’re one of the most special girls she’s ever met. I think she sees herself in you—the way you handle a horse, the way you jump right into things.”
“You really liked her?”
“Wonderful girl.” Shame Wendy’s not thirty, I thought, and immediately asked for God’s grace.
“We can go fish the San Juan tomorrow if you want,” Maggie said.
“Well, we’ll see. We’ve only got eight days to make it home before Jack’s birthday.”
“I miss Jack.”
“I know.”
“And Mom, too.”
“I know.”
“And Amos.”
“Well, the good news is you’ll see him tomorrow.”
“Do you think he misses us?”
“He’s probably asleep.”
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Sure.” I said I hoped she would want to ask me stuff until the day she died—or at least the day I died.
“Dad,” she said, “that’s not funny.”
“Sorry. Ask away.”
“Do you believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy?”
I smiled. “Of course. If you don’t believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy they can’t possibly exist. Belief keeps everything alive, like rain on roses. Some call it faith. I have faith that Santa will come every Christmas Eve, and guess what. The old geezer has never let me down. I have faith in the tooth fairy, too. I mean, she’s never failed to leave you money for a tooth, has she?”
“Just once when she didn’t come and then left too much.”
Once again, her memory was dead on target. The night Maggie lost two teeth at once, her mother and I slipped up and thought the other had already played tooth fairy; it took some fast talking to convince Maggie that the TF had been so busy that night she’d run slap out of pocket change and that under Section Three, Rule 2F of the Tooth Fairy Procedures Manual she would have to pay double for her mistake. Unfortunately, we hadn’t yet established the standard per-tooth rate and her mom and I, determined to make amends but performing a scene from the Keystone Kops, each made nocturnal trips to her room to make the necessary deposit. Not having the proper change, I slipped a ten under one corner of her pillow, failing to find the four bucks already waiting there. In the morning Maggie wondered why the tooth fairy left her fourteen bucks and we had to explain to Jack, who was evidently short of funds and suddenly pulling on his teeth, that the tooth fairy’s math skills were somewhat lacking.
I could just picture Maggie’s agnostic Scottish grandmother shaking her head at my predicament, amused that I’d painted myself into a theological corner where I’d more or less equated God with the tooth fairy—nice, polite fairy tales, she would argue, that we eventually outgrow the need to believe in. At the other end of the spectrum, my Southern Baptist grandmother would be spinning in her grave that I’d reduced God to an image of a generous, jolly fat man in a bright red suit. Well, they had their beliefs and I had mine. Maggie would someday have hers, too, independent of what we all thought, and there was probably precious little or nothing the three of us could do about it at this point.
“Well,” I said. “That just goes to show. Not even the tooth fairy is perfect.”
“I know. Do you, like, believe in Jesus and God?”
She knew I believed in them. She simply wanted or needed me to say I believed in them. I was tempted to try and say something funny but I couldn’t think of anything funny to say, so I resorted to the simplest answer.
“Yes.”
She nodded, as if thinking it over, and drank her shake.
“Dad,” she said a minute or two later.
“What?”
“Do you think we’ll be, you know, going home soon?” She looked at me and managed, at last, a smile. She
quickly added: “Not that I’m homesick or anything.”
I slipped my arm around her. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m kind of homesick,” I admitted. “I’ve been worrying about my roses. I think they may need watering. Would you mind very much if we went home?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Letter from a Hill
Deer Dad,
I am sory to make you madd last night and miss the fairwell dinner. If you want to go catch trowt in the san won river today its okay with me. Thank you for taking me to the veriety show and to the ranch. It was very funny and I liked it alot. This has been a grate trip and I’m not really home sick.
Love, Maggie.
P.S. would you please write me a leter sometime too.
It would be nice to have one. Love, Maggie.
The note was lying on my seat in Old Blue, waiting for me when I opened the door to crank up the truck. I’d just tossed the last of our bags into the back and used the atlas to calculate that it was 2,300 miles home, give or take a state.
I drove up to the dining hall, where Maggie had just finished her pancakes and was saying lengthy good-byes to Becca and Lillian. The Sabbath morning air was crisp with a hint of autumn and a man on the radio was reading the Book of John in his native Navajo tongue. Maggie started to walk toward the truck but then saw Wendy standing on the steps of the trading post and suddenly sprinted that way. They embraced and Wendy walked her back to the truck.
“Where’s your next stop?” she asked me.
I said we’d discussed driving to Mesa Verde on our way down to Albuquerque but that wildfires had temporarily closed the ancient cave dwellings to the public so we might drive through some of Chaco Canyon instead to see what we could see there. Chaco Canyon is home to the extensive ruins of what’s believed to be the largest pre-Columbian city in North America, the greatest architectural achievement of the Anasazi people, a true lost civilization that baffled the European mind when a U.S. Army surveyor stumbled on the site in 1838: thirty-five square miles of circular kivas and abandoned Great Houses, scattered villages and formal planned cities made of sandstone and mortar, joined by extensive roadworks. I’d first heard about Chaco from an astronomer who annually camped on a mesa there to look at stars, and I’d picked up a bit more information about it from a guidebook on the region I’d been noodling.