by Gerald Lynch
Shawn was already watching a man and a dog standing some distance to the right along the ribbon of lawn that separated all the macadam from the cinder-block building. Man and man’s best friend stood beside one of those spindly institutional trees that grow no bigger than the day they were planted. He wore a walking hat whose sloping brim was pulled down past his forehead, wrap-around shades, and sported a moustache and goatee. He was dressed way too warmly in a long-sleeved white shirt and black pants, like somebody suffering skin irritation. He stood ramrod straight. The dog, a golden retriever, slumped on its belly at his feet, panting out its body heat on that fat pink dog tongue like an incision.
The queue had stalled, permanently, it seemed, and I felt Shawn pulling toward the dog. I knew what she wanted: to kneel beside it, massage its scruff, learn its name, make a space of private play.
“Can I —”
“Yes, but keep an eye on me. I’m near the door, you hustle back. Don’t make me step out of line. That happens, we go home.” I love you.
She skipped off. I couldn’t hear how she greeted the smiling man, but soon she was doing precisely as I’d predicted: on her knees and confiding to the dog. The man was grinning and talking straight ahead of himself like a blind man (I wanted his shades), looking at me, it seemed, though he had to be speaking to Shawn. There was something strangely familiar about him, but I knew no one who’d wear such a stagey outfit. Perhaps it was just that: that he looked like a disguised detective in a bad movie, a comedy even, a Clouseau or Austin Powers. One thing for sure: he looked like he’d bear watching.
As the line inched forward I turned sideways to keep my eye on them. Shawn glanced at me a few times — good girl — and each time I tapped my watch and wagged a finger at her. She scruffed up the dog, whose tail wagged.
I passed the time thinking of Veronica, of her turning away from me, at night, in our life together, of her growing refusal to understand my devotion to work, which she’d once admired so. Now she repeatedly joked in the presence of our idiot neighbours, the Kilborns, that oncology is the field of being on call all the time. Some joke. And it’s pediatrics oncology. Though I guess it’s not a bad joke.
I was at the door, Shawn cut it close.
“His name is Towser and he’s dying of —”
“Mr. Towser to you, young lady.” How lovely cool it was inside, like slipping through a membrane into a whole other dimension.
“Da-ad.” Scarcely reaching, she slapped my shoulder. You’ve grown again, I thought. “Poor Towser, he can’t keep his tongue in his head he’s so hot. So thirsty. The man said he needs a drink bad —”
“He shouldn’t be bothering you about his drinking problem.”
“Da-ad.” But no slap. “He can’t get Towser a drink ’cause they’re waiting for his daughter who had to go to the bathroom. She’s ten, just like me, and Wy’s her favourite too.”
“That would make her how old in dog years?”
“You just won’t listen. You never listen. You make everything I say a joke.” Her mother’s voice. She compressed her lips and exhaled noisily through her nose. Her mother’s gesture.
“Sorry, I wasn’t listening. What’d you say? Was it a joke?”
No deal, unless deals can be sealed by tighter pinch-lipped disgust.
I needed to get her off the plan to water the dog. She was emptying her account of compassion on that mutt. I knew the symptoms. Owen could walk into the family room missing an arm at the shoulder, squirting blood like a Supersoaker, and she’d scream at him to stop blocking the TV. Especially if Wy Knots was on, with the wise Wy mouthing his Confucius-for-tweens bunk. But a thirsty dog? Stop the world!
She relented: “Can I bring him a drink, Dad, can I, please?”
I was distracted negotiating the ticket purchase. “…No, Shawn, not now. As you can see, or should see, I’m …”
When I turned from retrieving the Visa receipt she wasn’t there. I did a mildly heart-thumping visual search. Milling children, lots of girls who resembled Shawn. No big deal, I kept telling myself. It happened at least once per outing, Veronica had forewarned me. Don’t panic, I told myself. Keep your wits about you. These things don’t really happen, it’s all media scaremongering, such crimes are actually down. Purple tank top, pink shorts, purple tank top, pink shorts — there. She’s already at the concession counter? I moved towards her, temper rising.
I stopped. Took a deep, settling breath. No hurry. Veronica had also instructed me to take it easy on this one day at least, this day of rest. I was to squire Shawn to lunch at her preferred fast-food eatery. I forget which one. I was not on any account to check with oncology reception at work. “In fact,” she’d said in the kitchen, “hand it over.” She’d waited with her right hand flipped out for me to surrender my cell, like a cop confiscating a gun, performing for the kids. A standing joke with her nowadays, my devotion to my vocation.
Shawn was skipping towards me, swinging a large Styrofoam cup upside down at her side like a white bell. She was beaming her most irresistible smile of silver braces. I’d need to brace myself.
“It’ll only take a sec, Dad! The bathroom’s right there,” she pointed. “Please, Dad. Towser’s gonna suffer heatstroke! The man said he had one last week and his daughter had to save him by taking him into the bath!”
“He said what?”
I took her by the frailest of upper arms — no biceps to speak of, just bone and cords of sinew, hot skin still, and still smooth as a baby’s — and began moving her towards the interior.
She resisted strongly: “No!”
Mothers and fathers glanced at me in irritation. You cannot discipline your child in public, sir. That begins in the home. To them I was a display labelled Hurried Sunday Morning Outing for Another Deadbeat Dad Eager to Get to the Golf Course. I even caught a few suspicious looks: Who is that man forcing the little girl to go with him? Foolishly I wanted to declare myself: She’s my daughter! I’m happily married to her mother! We’re as normal as your suburban neighbours!
I took her firmly by the shoulders, squatted and spoke through clenched teeth: “Look, sweetheart, we’re not here to water the dog, okay? The dog will be fine. We’re inside now and we don’t want to waste time going back out.”
“I do.”
“That man and his daughter have got the dog a drink already. Okay?”
We were far from okay. Her lower lip protruded, fat and glistening as an earthworm. She looked down at her chest, where breasts had recently begun to surface, plumping buds signalling gain and loss, hers and mine. But at ten? I’d read somewhere that the onset of puberty has been accelerating in developed nations. No time to lose.
With arm around her shoulders I ushered her onwards. I reached for the Styrofoam cup. She snatched it away with that same ferocious inwardness that would have let her brother pump out his life on the family room floor, away from the TV and the almighty animal-loving Wy.
I tried to jolly her along using my Fu Manchu voice: “This place cold as meat locker, and we, little lamb chop, are meat.”
“Oh, shut up! Towser is so still out there and he’s dying of thirst! The man can’t get him a drink ’cause they are so still waiting for his daughter! And stop making fun of Wy! Wy says if we don’t love our fellow creatures we can’t love anything!”
“So I’ve heard.”
That fucking Wy. I’d run him feet-first through one of those old-style roller wringers! If she kept this up, the day was ruined for me. My one day away from work in weeks. Even the gods get their day of rest, but not so Dr. Thorpe, it seemed.
I again squatted in front of Shawn. She jerked her pained face away, as she did when I snagged her hair the odd times I was charged with brushing it.
“Look, sweetheart, I’ll make you a deal. After we’ve seen the chicks we’ll go back, and if the dog is still there we’ll bring him a drink. Okay? De
al?”
She pinched her mouth again, but she’d brought her face around. “Promise? No joke?”
“No joke. Did you forget the baby chicks already? I thought they were the only thing you wanted to see today, I mean now that you’re all so grown-up and everything?” A flicker of smile for my mockery. “And let me know if you spot any bigger chicks for Dad.”
“Da-ad, you are so gross. I’m telling Mom.”
But deal. When she took my hand and pulled me along, I was in daddy heaven on our living leash.
Every display and interactive amusement was ignored now: the Krazy Kitchen that we couldn’t get her to leave the other times we’d brought her and her brother to my favourite museum; the magenta lightning that comes to your finger on the bell jar, which she always had to be told not to hog from the other kids; the static electricity show where the demonstrator makes your hair look worse than Don King’s (unnecessary in Shawn’s case). All just obstacles now to the chick incubator and her eventual return to the thirsty…Towser.
Yes, children can be so single-minded. Though I would never admit as much to my colleague, flaky Art Foster, I sometimes believed that my patients were deciding whether or not to recover. I thought of little Lu-Ping, who surely was dying on me. She looked a little like Shawn around the eyes, even talked non-stop about the mighty Wy. But then, they all looked a little like Shawn when I was losing them.
I should call… I searched for my cell and found only absence.
I tried to slow her down: “Remember when you were little how you and Owen used to pretend our kitchen was the Krazy Kitchen, reeling around till you knocked something over and Mom had to shout at you to stop?”
She made her frowning-squint face back over her shoulder: “Huh?”
And forged on, dragging the dead weight of Dad and his tempus fugit. Or is it memento mori? In med school we’d learned just the catchy Latin phrases. Ubi sunt? was another. All meaning: remember remember remember. Life passes in a wink. Remember. But in reminding kids of what they did only months before, let alone years, you may as well be discoursing on the hereditary predisposition to foot tumours among Patagonian infants.
My heart ached, a growing pain of absence in my chest. I still had her by the hand and wanted so to hold her back. I actually had to fight the urge to pull her to me, touch her dandelion head, cup it to my chest, hug her forever…because such a display would only have made her mad at me again.
So I let her go.
She grinned back once like a kid allowed into deep water for the first time, then plunged ahead towards the farthest corner of the crowded museum, where the chick incubator waited. I could just make it out, a plastic-domed affair, like some illuminated bathysphere.
Shawn couldn’t get close and I was comforted to see she still wanted to. The kids, most now younger than she, were pointing and squealing, four deep in their eagerness to see the chicks in various stages of hatching out. All around us were the wonders of science and technology — my gods, what I depended on to work my miracles — including an old NASA space capsule bearing the actual scorch marks of re-entry from the peaceful vacuum of space, yet the display the kids always crowded was as common as the nearest farm. One girl was half up on the dome, hugging the glass as if she were hanging on to the cone for dear life.
I was the only adult shuffling forward, as hulking as Dorothy among the Munchkins. The other parents kept their distance, forming a gallery in looming shadow. I tried to take Shawn’s hand but she still held the Styrofoam cup in her right. She made an impatient Shirley Temple face at the girl riding the incubator. I smiled, relaxed more. And as we inched toward the dome, I found my attention taken wholly by its display.
There were a few bedraggled chicks out of their shells, sticky wet. But unlike the lightning mechanism, these stunned newborns wouldn’t come to the kiddie fingers pressed against the dome. Mostly the pathetic things stood catatonic in the shock of post-egg existence, or whatever dawning fowl-consciousness might be, looking perhaps for something or someone to blame or love, some mother hen to imprint… I was getting sentimental. After all, we eat these things, from eggs to roasters.
Only one of the chicks, which must have been near the end of its stay in the incubator, was moving confidently about, pecking at the slimy newborns. That upset the girls, while some boys hooted. Mostly, the dome was occupied by eggs in various stages of cracking. Chicks don’t just hatch out instantly as we’ve been led to expect by cartoons and TV. You can spend forever watching an egg with a small star-shaped indentation, or even one with a fair-sized dark hole, before the unseen beak pecks again. Labour is labour is labour. So no cute yellow Easter chicks leaping fluff-feathered from split shells in a burst of light and cheep-cheeping to beat the clock. Besides which, the light at even the most minuscule crack would be flooding into the shell.
I beamed down at Shawn, who wasn’t there. Gone missing twice in one outing! Too much. We’re going home. No lunch.
As I waded through the swell of kids, I was periscoping the whole corner given over to the history of farming. Everything was freshly painted gleaming red and green and yellow, metallically toothed and tentacled, with glaringly lighted recessed displays as if for alien experiments on humans.
I broke through the periphery and stood searching. Purple tank top, pink shorts, purple tank top, pink shorts. She was nowhere.
I moved along the aisle we’d just hurried down as the quickest route. No sign. I couldn’t conceive that she’d gone back outside without me. But obviously she had. In her mind that was the deal.
Already the stupid crowds appeared to be having loud ludicrous fun, the kids’ screeching laughter was getting horrific, which was made worse by adults acting like children.
My cheekbones needled, I was aware of my esophagus just past my throat, its desiccated meatiness. I realized I was trotting. As a child I’d had a near-drowning experience, and that’s what I was reliving — out of my element, plunging helplessness.
I forced myself to walk. I talked aloud: “This is silly. You’re being silly.” It helped, hearing it spoken.
Veronica had mouthed over the unsolvable mystery of Shawn’s hair: Watch her. She’d known I was out of practice. With Shawn ushered out the door, I’d said something like: Those things don’t really happen here, it’s all media scaremongering. Such crimes are actually down. Besides, it’s just about always a family member or friend.
I again reached for my cellphone and felt its absence as a physical fact, a jolt, like thinking there’s another step down at the bottom of a darkened stairs, or like driving into a wall. I touched my forehead and the fingertips came away wet. Before reaching the door, I’d again felt for my cell, twice.
The hot air outside stunned my lungs, because I’d gasped, because she wasn’t there either and neither were the man and dog. Back inside.
I shouted her name into the women’s washroom. I made a harried mother check for me. She understood immediately.
Security.
I tried to steel myself as I did when going in after a tumour behind a child’s brain stem, praying that my exploration would prove the MRI wrong, that, miracle of miracles, the tumour would be encapsulated after all, not fibroid, so I could get it all, when we hardly ever could. But unlike when operating, my heart was thumping. The sweat that had been instantly produced outside continued in the cool interior.
In the end I gasped out the story to the lackadaisical security guard who’d taken forever to come to the front desk, where tickets were still being sold and children still whined for treats and parents tried to ignore them and all played out as if nothing were happening. For a moment the normality of it all let me think: These things just don’t happen to me.
Then the whole scene began to look unreal, as if it were out of sync with the passing of time in my head. The bad movie was about to freeze, the frame crack…pieces of the bright world would fall and sh
atter, letting the darkness flood in. And no one else was aware of it, especially the stupid guard I was trying to alert. There was something Middle Eastern about him, dusky skinned and spicy smelling, overly precise articulation. I was sure he didn’t fully understand me, or hated me. I wanted to throttle him: You’re not listening to me!
But he was. I wasn’t listening to him.
The search procedure was as slow as frustration nightmares where everybody is talking about meaningless details. You’re a teenager lost in a vaguely familiar house full of relatives and your dead mother is alive and well and asking again why you’re not going out with your friends, while with your hand behind your back you’re failing to make your bedroom doorknob work: “But I have no friends, we move so much.” Somewhere Dad laughs. “There’s no getting away from that!”
We first had to look in all the places where in the past little kids had crawled in and fallen asleep: the old locomotives for boys, the polished wooden boats preferred by girls, and all along the monstrous green velour curtain that hid the rough cinder-block walls.
“She’s ten years old! She’d not crawl in anywhere and sleep!”
“Yes, sir, but we have always been successful following procedure. Relax, please, sir. It always turns out to be just the child’s play, sir.”
After an interminable thirty minutes, I had to demand that he call in the police.
“But, sir —”
“Now!”
I didn’t phone home for another half-hour of prickly hope. I borrowed the guard’s phone. I calmly asked Veronica if, by any chance, Shawn had called… She faked composure for about ten seconds.