by Amity Gaige
“Somebody lives here?” Meadow wanted to know.
“Sure. My cousin raised both his kids here. The setting is really pretty. Over that way”—she gestured into the darkness—“there’s a little brook with real fish. And that way, a hill they liked to sled on. They had everything. A vegetable garden. Tomatoes. Carrots. Dill. Bird feeders. A smokehouse. It was real country living.” She turned to me. “You ever heard of the back-to-the-earth movement? Those couples who sold everything and made their houses out of fieldstones and all their kids ran around naked and they just lived off the land?”
I nodded, still unable to speak.
“Well, I think my cousin was going for something like that. It all went to hell, of course, but you can’t blame him for trying. There were good times. I used to come out here with my boyfriends. I even brought J.J. Torraine from the Minor Miracles, back in the day. All right.” She clapped her hands. “Let’s go in. Leave those headlights on, would you, so we can see. You can carry my duffel, John. And you—little Miss Butterfly—well, you bring your bucket.”
In this way, April motivated us out of our paralysis, and we walked toward the structure in a single line, illuminated in the headlights. In front of me, Meadow’s skinny legs marched below the sagging hem of her oversized sweatshirt. The tag on the back of the neckline was sticking out. Suddenly there was the snap of a sizeable branch as something large moved in the woods. We froze.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered.
I saw Meadow’s expression in the lights—frightened, but also defiant, almost satisfied. Like she was thinking, just you go ahead and try me.
“A moose, probably,” April said, working on the padlock that hung from the front door. From what I could see, the camp’s door was some piece of leather-covered salvage, ornamented with brass bolts, as if it had been pillaged from a church.
When April turned on the lights, we found ourselves in the midst of a strange room. Strewn with small domestic artifacts, left in a hurry, it seemed like some Pompeiian scene, something almost curated—there was a book opened on a table, a worn dog bed still holding its rump-sized impression, and a number of coats hanging from hooks along the wall. Other than these objects, the room was not pretty. The carpeting was of a dark, indoor/outdoor variety, the cinder blocks were unpainted even in the interior, and the drop ceiling was missing one or two panels, revealing strips of pink insulation and wiring. The room seemed to function as an all-purpose family room, with cabinets, a countertop, a propane tank, and what looked like an icebox lined up on the far wall, serving as the kitchen. It was clear that the place had been built and maintained by someone who did not know what he was doing. As confirmation of this fact, a large aluminum canoe, pushed up against the far wall and filled with cushions, seemed the only discretionary piece of furniture in the room.
“Your bed,” April said, gesturing to the canoe.
“A canoe? I’m sleeping in that canoe?”
“What? He took the bars out of it.”
Here I laughed, a little aggressively. “And what does Meadow get to sleep in? A kayak?”
“No, she gets a couple bales of hay out back.” April rolled her eyes. “Kidding. She gets a nice little bed, right there through that door. My cousin saved the best for his kids. But he liked to sleep in a canoe. I never asked why.”
“Sure. Ha. Why pry?”
“You’ve got a problem with this place, John Toronto?”
“No,” I said, rubbing my head. “No.”
April turned to Meadow. “Hon, go ahead, through that door. Go see your room.”
Meadow stepped forward. I could see that her reaction to the strange home was the same as mine: What had happened to these people? Where had they gone so quickly? It made you think they had been endangered, but not for anything they did. Just because they were a family, and the chances were somehow cosmically against their togetherness. She pushed back the accordion door toward which she’d been directed and turned on the light with her shirtsleeve. That room glowed in a warmer, less fluorescent light, revealing a bunk bed and a red beanbag chair. April and I came to the door.
“Like it, hon?”
Meadow nodded.
“I know there’s some toys around here. Good ones. Do you like Lincoln Logs? Look.” April pulled a sagging box from a shelf and dropped it on the floor. “I always liked to build when I was your age. Do you like to build shit?”
Meadow nodded. She reached into the box and began to remove the notched plastic logs. When she seemed absorbed, April stood up and wiped her hands.
“All righty,” she said, and walked out.
I followed her into the kitchen area. She opened some cabinets.
“Yum,” she said, “baked beans.”
“This is kind of you,” I said. “Very, very kind.”
She shrugged. She pulled a can opener from the coffee can in which it stood, and ground away at the tin top. The can opened. She sniffed inside.
“If you don’t mind, I’d love it if you watched your language around the girl.”
“You watch your language,” said April. “You’re the fucking outlaw.”
“You have a right to be mad at me,” I said.
“I’m not mad, OK? Just hungry and tired.”
“She is my daughter, you know. I didn’t steal her. And I’d never hurt her.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“The problem is between me and my ex. She tried to keep me from seeing her. And now, if I go back, I bet I’ll never see her again.”
Sighing, April plugged in the hot plate and sloshed two cans of beans into a frying pan. I reached into the coffee can and gave her a spoon.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I’ll tell you what I’m guilty of. I am guilty of—I am guilty of exceeding my legally allotted visitation period. That’s it. And stealing a car. And falsifying my entire identity.” Here, I laughed. A long, wrung-out laugh, a laugh long delayed. I laughed so long and with such rue that April passed me a dishrag to wipe my eyes. I had to lean with both hands against the countertop until I could pull myself together.
“Thanks,” I said, slowing to a chuckle. “Thanks. Thank you.”
“Here,” she said, getting another spoon from the coffee can and dipping it into the beans. “Take. Eat. This is my body.”
She put the spoon in my mouth. The beans were sweet and warm.
“Thank you,” I said, leaning against her. “Thank you so much.”
The spoon and the pot in her hands, she couldn’t hug me back. I stood there against her anyway, my nose in her hair.
“Hi,” I said.
“Focus, John. Set the table.”
She handed me another spoon. I went to the table and took another look around the room. In a flash, I thought, it’s not so bad. We could stay here for a little if we had to. It wouldn’t take much to make it nicer. A couple of gallons of paint, a sheepskin rug, lamplight maybe.
“So are you sure your cousin won’t be back tonight?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“When will he be back?”
“Unless he gets parole, not for four more years.”
I turned and stared at her. “He’s in jail?”
“Oh, John. Don’t look so shocked. Look, you’re breaking my heart.”
April turned off the hot plate, walked over to me, and took my face in her hands.
“Poor John,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. “You are the worst criminal I’ve ever known.”
I fell against her. We leaned on each other, equal weights. I felt my throat tighten. I covered my eyes with my hands.
“I’m a mess,” I said, into her hair. “A disaster. Everything I touch turns to shit.”
“No. I’m sure that’s not true.”
“I just wanted some time with my daughter. I just wanted to have a vacation with my daughter. I wanted to decide that. I’m her father. I taught her to read. I stayed up with her when she was sick. There’s been
a mistake here, you know—a very grave mistake—a miscarriage—”
“You should have gone to court or something. You should have gotten a better lawyer or something. You shouldn’t have nabbed your own daughter.”
“Please.” I pushed her away gently. “Please don’t take the other side. The whole world is going to take the other side.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. The whole world won’t be paying attention. Miss Butterfly?”
Meadow’s voice sounded small from the farther room. “Yes?”
“Would you like some dinner?”
“No, thank you.”
“You should eat.”
“I’m not hungry, thank you.”
April rolled her eyes. “I’m not even going to say anything. All she eats is donuts. When is the last time she had a vegetable?”
Grinning, I took up my spoon. “You know what? My wife would like you, if she knew you. Even though you’re pretty much polar opposites. I think she would like you. At least, she’d be grateful to you for looking after Meadow.”
April lifted a heap of baked beans on her spoon and blew on it. “Quit looking so grateful. It’s not like I’m in love with you.”
I grinned. “I should have married you. I should have married someone like you. I should have married a woman with a sense of humor.”
“I don’t need to get married. I’ve already got a rock song named after me.”
I watched her across the table, one hand pinning back her hair, her lips blowing little rapid puffs toward her spoon.
“Hey. Do you want to—” I gestured toward the canoe. “After—”
Now April laughed. “Ho-di-ho-ho. I’m not having any more sex with you, Toronto. Especially not in a canoe. The only thing I’m going to do with my ass tonight is save it.”
“Oh. OK. That’s too bad.”
“It is too bad, you know.”
“I like you very much.”
This seemed to make April a little sad. “Hey. How about you go put your kid to bed? We’ll catch up after that. Here. Bring her these.” She pushed a bowl of beans across the table. “She’s probably starving, but too mad to say so. If I were you, I might try to make things right, while I had a chance. Say what you need to. After a lot of trial and error I found the ‘truth will out,’ as they say.”
I sat there for a moment.
“Sorry,” she said. “Did I overstep?”
“No. No, you didn’t. In fact, I was—I was thinking the same thing.”
I stood up. I walked to the door of Meadow’s room. Then I stopped and came back and put my hand on the back of April’s neck. I looked down at her big face, and I smiled. There was a pause—and I mention it here because, well, it was distinctly un-Pinteresque—light, merciful, safe.
“Everything about you is big,” I told her.
“Thanks, I guess.”
“Yes, it’s a compliment. You’re just a little bit more than most people.”
And that was the last time I ever saw April A.
Who’s gonna wanna be your lover next time?
April had been right about the White Mountains. There was something about them, something mysterious, legend making. We had driven through their southern boundary all that afternoon into the evening, along the Kancamagus. To our left rose the promontories of the Franconia Range. The wind was high, and you could feel it hit the car. The silence was broken only when April would say, gesturing with her chin, “There’s Moosilauke. And that one’s Osceola.” Moosilauke. Osceola. Words Meadow and I would have laughed about, had we been on speaking terms. I knew that Mount Washington towered to the north of us. But we couldn’t go there, not anymore. Not in the spirit we had intended.
Now I came to the door of Meadow’s erstwhile bedroom. She had abandoned an impressive metropolis of Lincoln Logs on the floor and was lying on the bottom bunk of the bed, one arm thrown over her face.
“You awake?” I whispered.
A lamp sat on a bureau in the corner of the room. I stepped forward and pulled the chain. She drew her arm from her face.
“You want some dinner?” I said, raising the bowl.
She glanced at me but said nothing.
“You’re still not speaking to me?”
She shrugged and rolled to her side, poking the pillow on which her head rested.
At sunset, nearly out of the mountains, April had announced that she needed to pee and without further comment turned off the highway onto a gravel road bordered by wild rhododendron. We drove into a parking area and got out. April ran into the woods in her fluttering kaftan. Meadow and I walked uphill in silence. When we crested the hill, we were looking at the surface of a crater lake, which sat as smooth as glass inside the mountaintop, as if just the tip of the mountain had been sliced off and filled with rainwater. Large clouds raced overhead in galvanic wind, sweeping purple shadows across the lake. The lake closed and opened with the moving clouds; it almost felt like we were racing through years. Meadow reached out for my hand. This surprised me—that’s why I remember it—that she still had some need for me, however inscrutable, however ambivalent. And I remember her reaching out for me as the reason that I did everything thereafter, which led me to the place in which I now find myself, writing this document. Because I see that moment as the beginning of my disappearance. I mean the disappearance of who I’d been. Of course, I’m still here—everyone knows perfectly well where I am—but when she touched my hand, I felt a falling away of my exterior, of my deception.
In the darkness outside of the camp, I heard a door slam. I squinted through the plastic sheeting to try and see if it was true, if April was leaving us. She started the engine and idled only for a moment before she left us there, just the two of us again, in the shadow of Ragged Mountain. And in this way, my last escape route was cut off. I stared at my dim reflection in the plastic.
“Meadow,” I said. “There are some things I should probably tell you.”
SECHSTER TAG OR DAY SIX
I don’t want to be singled out. I mean, I’m afraid that I’ve made myself too exceptional and that you won’t see me for what I am. Other than my famous last name, there is almost nothing that distinguishes me from all the other sad men and women who have languished in the American family court system. The irremediable decisions, the obedience required by law, in matters of greatest urgency. The issue here is deeper, don’t you think? It is beyond me.
The average American marriage has a life span of seven years. Seven is, of course, an inherently symbolic number. There were Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Seven hills of Rome. The number seven is all over religion (seven days of Creation, seven skies in Islam, seven chakras, and of course, seven sins that are deadly). Let’s take our marriage as a beau ideal of divorce, ending promptly in its seventh year. Its conclusion had a slow, balletic quality. As I’ve said elsewhere, I hardly felt like I was a player in it. And yet, in the year of our parting, Meadow’s fifth year on earth, we joined one million other couples in legal separation or divorce, thereby conscripting our daughter into the ranks of the ten million children living with separated or divorced parents, undoubtedly the largest subset she’ll ever belong to. They say that one out of every seven of those divorces involves a custody battle. This means that in the same year, about two hundred thousand disgruntled parents took their petitions through courts of family law, paying tens of thousands of dollars to end up more frustrated than they were when they began. They became damaged people, really. Deranged people. Because, of course, there is one thing that really deranges us, and that is the disappearance of love.
Even in the year we separated, the year in which you unstuck yourself of me, I never imagined my relationship with Meadow would be jeopardized. She and I were close. Of course we were; we’d just spent an entire year together. Even when that was over, and I’d gone back to work as planned, and she was enrolled over my objections in the Catholic preschool, I believed that our bond was strong. Hers and mine, that is. Our bond—mine and y
ours, Laura—was tenuous at best. While I worked, back on the real estate hustle with a couple other survivors from Clebus, you spent quality time with Meadow after school. When I returned, you gathered up your grading and retreated to the bedroom. So? So what? Love ebbs and flows, right? Alienation from others kicks in a sporting self-reliance. I started playing soccer again. I flirted heavily with the girlfriends who came to watch. The boys seemed much younger to me than they had two years before. I kept wallet-sized photos of Meadow for anyone who’d look. I told myself that the frost that had fallen upon my marriage was natural. A natural evolutionary phase.
From my current position, I see things more clearly now. I think of you. I think of me. I think of Mama. I think of Daddy. I think of Mama, and Daddy, and how the brain makes ice. I think of Vogelgesang. Ich denke an die Vögel wie sie in Treptower Park gesungen haben. And I think of childhood’s density.
If my parents had loved one another once, that truth was quickly buried under too many other things to be of use to me. I remember sitting with my chin on my knees, gazing at the two of them engrossed in separate tasks, Daddy staring into a broken Swiss watch with a headlamp, Mama reading a black market fashion magazine, marveling at their silence. How could two beings be so quiet? How could they concentrate for so long without stirring? It never occurred to me that I was also concentrating. I was concentrating on them. I would lose myself in watching them, wondering what fascinated them so much, and when they might utter a word to one another. I could feel my eyelids swipe the surface of my retinas. I could hear houseflies searing themselves inside the lozenge-shaped sconce overhead. I could hear the banging of pots in apartments on either side of ours. Finally, my mother would look up and give me a kick with her shoe. Snap out of it, she’d say.
Did I love her? Oh, very much. Of this no one ever tried to dissuade me. I loved her and I loved my father and I loved my Opa and I loved the teacher of my nursery school and I loved the sheepdog she relied upon to watch us when she went to do something else. I loved sitting at my mother’s feet, pulling along a series of wooden blocks sewn together with a string, a kind of Cubist caterpillar, while her foot bounced idly in its fashionable boot, a pat of grass stuck to the bottom of the high, stacked heel. Who she was, however, remains hotly disputed. A tart. A fanatic. A collaborator. A communist. It’s very hard to reconcile all this with the mother who walked me around Treptower Park, the material of her synthetic bellbottoms sounding a reassuring washboard rhythm beside me. This was the woman who taught me how to ask, before falling upon some pup on the street, “Is your dog friendly?,” the same woman who—I can only assume—taught me to hold a pen, to read, to write, to waltz, to tie a shoelace, to look both ways before crossing a street. A woman who does that—who teaches you to tie your laces—has a soul. She has a soul even if, as my father once told me in a rage, she did fall in love with some high-ranking party functionary who seduced her with packages of white chocolate.