by Peter Wright
Chestnut leaps from the couch, hackles raised. The click of nails and a barking charge into the living room. My father and mother close behind. A single lamp shines, and across the floor, a constellation of glass shards. Chestnut sniffs the brick upon the carpet. The streetlight slants through the shattered window. The curtain snares on the jagged aperture, and through the opening, voices from the dark. The brick with a crude design, white paint, a cross within a circle. I step forward to pick up Chestnut, then the stab in my bare foot. I hobble to the steps and cross my ankle over my opposite knee. Blood trickles down my arch and heel. My mother close, soothing words as she pulls the sliver. I bite my lip, the pain sharp then gone, the bloody shard cradled in my mother’s palm. My father stands on the porch, the door flung open. “We’re your neighbors! We’re not your enemy!”
I walk through the late afternoon sun to my father’s campus. Actually, I’m walking back a block, my attention unmoored, a turn I’ve made a hundred times ignored. I readjust my backpack, its load heavier, the last of my texts assigned, and in my stride, a painless hitch, the snug-sneaker fit of my bandaged foot. My thoughts wandering from the could-have-been ghosts of quantum mechanics to the yin-yang of equilibrium studies, and as I missed my turn, I was picturing a tightrope walker above me, spangled and beautiful, another ghost, the balancer of a thousand fulcrums—light and dark, warmth and cold, sated and starving. The forces in equilibrium systems are changelings, dependent one moment, independent the next, an ever-fluid dance of position and power. I feel these forces crowding me these last four days. The stares as I walk to school or with Chestnut. My stares in return, the wondering who threw the brick and who nodded in approval when they heard the news.
I make my delayed crossing onto campus. The day’s plan—a rendezvous with my father after practice, an excursion to the gym’s new climbing wall. Wide lawns spread before me, open areas anchored by buildings of brownstone and ivy and trees that date back over a century. The newer buildings radiate out, structures of brick and glass, and surrounding me, the company of ghosts. The natatorium where I learned the breaststroke. The faculty parking lot where my father ran beside me and my wobbly two-wheeler. The observatory where I watched the earth’s shadow cross the moon. The field where I cheered my father in the annual faculty softball game.
The quad close but still out of sight. I love this walk, the shadows and flowerbeds, the brick and stone that rise like cavern walls. Black-eyed Susans tangle at the base of the founder’s statue. Chapel bells peal the hour. Ahead, the only elm within thirty miles, the survivor of disease, the gnarled trunk and spreading shade, and just beyond, my father’s office window.
Four years, and if we survive McNally and the world doesn’t devour itself, I’ll be here. I’ll envelop myself in theory and thought. A math major, perhaps science. Perhaps both. Perhaps neither, my mind burning with a passion I’ve yet to discover. I’ll walk these sidewalks with my books, and I wonder if I’ll feel as gown up as I once imagined college girls to be. I’ll make time to meet my father for lunch. Sometimes I worry that we’ve drifted—just a breath but enough. The Shut-In’s tensions, the things I can only tell my mother, the lost days of how easy it had once been to reach out and hold his hand. “Love you,” I said before stepping out this morning. A reassurance, an apology. A thanking for the space he’s always given me.
I emerge from the chapel’s shadow. The quad opens before me but my steps slow. Across the grass, hundreds of students. All sitting, all silent, so many bodies and so little sound, a disconnect, the physics of dreams. The students face the police gathered along the quad’s east end. The police three-deep, identical in their riot gear, the dull sun reflected on their helmets and visors. In front, German shepherds that whine and pull at their leads. I hurry behind the police line and slip into a side entrance in my father’s building.
Tall windows line the stairwell, and through them, slants of milky light. The stairs steep, and I grab the handrail. A woman hurries down, the box she carries overflowing, a fluttering of papers in her wake. I retrieve the nearest, a typed page, a circle graph—but by the time I stand, the woman’s reached the bottom landing. A push of her hip opens the door, and the stairwell fills with echoes. Barking dogs. A megaphone’s blared commands.
I hurry up the last flights, and I’m out of breath by the time I reach my father’s floor. Dimmer here, the floor’s dark tiles, the wainscoted walls. I slow as I pass the lit diorama of riverside life. A stuffed otter perches on a log and, in the reeds, a fox and her kit. As a child, the diorama fascinated and unnerved me, perhaps because it embodied the trickiest tightrope walk of them all. A balance of artifice and reality. A sense of frozen time. A pantomime of life and death.
The diorama’s stillness radiates, a greater stillness I recognize all around me, an incongruity with the building’s normal bustle, a stillness that threatens to claim me until I break into a jog. I enter my father’s office. Papers cover the department secretary’s usually immaculate desk, her computer and phone left behind, the framed pictures of her cocker spaniels gone. My pace quicker as I enter the narrow hallway lined with professors’ offices. I pass a choked bulletin board, announcements for plays and lectures, the other offices vacant, their doors open, the only sign of life coming from the clatter at the hallway’s end.
I near the last open door. “Dad?”
He stops. A potted plant in his hands, his fingers lost beneath delicate tendrils, a look of confusion, a pause amid the chaos of open filing cabinets and a paper-strewn floor. “What’re you doing here?” The large window behind him, the elm on one side, a glimpse of Old Main’s clock on the other. My father the balance between the two.
“The climbing wall. After practice, right? I wouldn’t have come if—”
“I’m sorry.” He sets the plant in a cardboard box. “I should have remembered. You shouldn’t be here.” He hands me the box. Inside, wedged arrays of green, his bred strains. He grabs two stacked boxes. A collective cry rises from the quad, and we draw to the window. Arcs of smoke trace the autumn blue, and when the canisters land, the students scatter, coughing, their mouths covered. Many lost in the fog. A few hurl the canisters back toward the onrushing line of blue. The police’s helmets replaced by gas masks, their faces hidden beneath curved insect eyes.
“Come on,” my father says. Screams fill the quad. The police batons slash through the smoke, and before them, a stumbling stampede.
My father behind me: “We need to go, honey. Please.”
Our steps hurry through the light spilled from the riverside diorama. My reflection flashes in the otter’s glass eyes. My father leads us down the back stairwell, this one narrower, windowless, the clatter of pots from our boxes. We step outside, and in the building’s shadow, the tiny faculty lot and my father’s truck. Students sprint past, many coughing, tears on their cheeks. A girl clutches a grimacing boy, his face streaked with blood. My father places his boxes in the truck’s bed and opens the passenger-side door. “Just hold onto it,” he says.
I gaze into the box balanced atop my lap. In me, a sudden sympathy for the readers of tealeaves and crystal balls, for written in the tangled stems and vines waits the truth—my father is in trouble. Plants and speeches about brotherhood. Neighbors who live behind fences and hedges. The human clouds overhead all these months, and I’ve been blind not to see it all before. I speak as he turns the key. “We need to leave.”
More students stream around the building. The faster ones pull the injured and dazed, a tugging of arms. A girl with swollen eyes. A boy limping, his jeans torn. The police dogs close behind, their handlers pulled forward, batons raised. The girl with the swollen eyes trips, and one of the dogs pounces. Its front paws upon her chest, its snapping jaws inches from her covered face.
My father jerks the gearshift. The truck, always moody, sputters forward, the jostle of failing engine mounts, the rusted bed that hauled tons in the building of our home. The gas filters around the building, a low haze, and I f
eel its sting in my throat and eyes. I cover my mouth. “Daddy,” I say, fighting the tightness in windpipe, “we need to leave.”
“We are, don’t worry.” He cuts the wheel and shifts again. I lurch as the front tire bounces over a curb. Another pack of students scrambles across the lot. My father stops and yells, and they climb into the bed. Two boys and a girl, all of them urging the fourth, a heavy boy, his eyes streaming with tears, and my father waits until they’re able to haul his bulk over the gate. The police close in. The fastest strikes the gate with his baton, and the blow reverberates through the cab. My father tromps the gas. A cough of exhaust and the commotion fades behind us. A half-mile later, we drop the students off. A goodbye in a narrow alley, an urging for them to be safe before driving off.
I dab my stinging eyes. A sandpaper-catch in my throat and the pain of speaking. “We need to go.”
He manages a smile. “We’re OK now.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I clear my throat, but my voice remains whittled, and I force myself to be heard above the truck’s rumble. “We need to leave. Today. Tonight. Uncle Bill’s hunting cabin or grandma’s place.” Tears now, ones that owe nothing to the gas. “Nothing good will happen if we stay here.”
My father works the gearshift. “We’ll be OK. And if it comes to it, we’ll go if we have to.” He wrangles the gear shift. “Don’t worry, OK?”
The cab quiet for the rest of the ride. Looking down, I realize one of the pots inside my box has broken. A spilling of soil and exposed roots.
I babysit as my parents help Dr. Klein load her minivan. The crib broken down, diaper boxes and packed suitcases, clothes on hangers. I play with the baby in the backyard. The little boy charges on chubby legs, and I’m close behind, my hands near, ready to catch him. He’s always bringing me gifts—blooms and stones, the delicate shells of cicadas. The boy sits, a plop onto his cushioned behind. He rips handfuls of grass, and holds them out to me, the blades lifted and released, a tumbling into my outstretched palm.
My father opens the backdoor. “She’s ready.”
I pick up the baby. A sniff of his head, the scent of lotion, and I think of a boy not much older than him and the rocks he threw at a burning house, and I wonder about this life’s paths, the ones we choose and the ones we’re shown. I carry him around the house’s side, past the flowerbeds with their last blooms and wilted stalks. The child wiggles until he faces forward. His hands outstretched as we near his mother. Dr. Klein straps him into the car seat and shuts the van’s door.
A pause on the sidewalk. My parents and Dr. Klein have already discussed her leaving, a conversation kept among adults but which I understood without overhearing the specifics. The campus shut down until further notice. Windshield fliers decrying godless liberals. The neighbors who no longer talk to us and a brick through Dr. Klein’s window, as well. The fear for her child’s safety.
Dr. Klein hugs me then my mother. Her embrace for my father longer, her eyes closed as she speaks. “Don’t think me a coward.”
“I don’t.”
“If it weren’t for the baby—”
He steps back, her hands held in his. “We’ll all be back together when this settles down.”
The baby cries as the van pulls from the curb. We cross the street. Slater on his porch, a closing of his golden mailbox’s lid, and I wonder how long he’s been watching. His stare open and cold, my father’s wave unreturned.
Three days pass. The college remains closed, and in my school, rumors it won’t reopen anytime soon. The news is spread with a kind of glee, a victory proclaimed by the diehard locals who’ve latched onto McNally’s hatred of intellectuals, and in the hallways, a new power structure emerges. The boys who roam in packs and prop their boots up on desks, who openly curse and mock their teachers’ attempts at discipline. They’re small-town boys, and they have no better representatives of McNally’s hated elites than their teachers, men in ties who gush over books, women keen on decorum and following rules. I’m not their target, yet when we pass in the hall, their gazes slip my way. Missy Blough and her boyfriend, a senior louder and more brazen than most, the two of them slowing as I pass. The math freak. The daughter of a poet and professor. The hidden forces that have always fascinated me ooze from their stares, tides fetid and ugly and anxious to settle a score they believe long overdue.
A reprieve comes at dinner where the laughter of my father’s visiting grad students brings a welcome light. We share simple meals, the post Shut-In reality of shortages and rations. Discussions of politics give way to academics, the love of science and life overcoming the world’s upheaval, their visits usually ending with a garden tour. Another batch of students is due later for a Sunday lunch, but for now, my father takes me out in his truck. What we discuss on the ride—field hockey and the nuances of graphing discrete functions. What we don’t discuss—the argument he and mom had earlier about his opinion piece in the morning paper. His condemnation of violence, his appeal to unity. The Movement unmentioned but its ideals extolled. My mother’s voice lowered, but still I heard. “Things are different now. Don’t you see that?”
Oaks and sycamores line the river road, patches of sun and shade. On the shoulder, a dead groundhog, and the flies stir as our truck rattles by. The caterpillars’ nests high in the branches, sunshine captured in the spun tangles. Chestnut on my lap. His snout twitches, his front paws on the door’s armrest. The window down and his ears matted by the wind.
We near our destination. Further up river, the shuttered steel mill, a miles-long stretch of crumbling brick and broken windows. A few more miles to the capital. The legislature suspended and sent home, their chambers empty, guarded checkpoints on every major road into town.
My father flips the blinker, and I smile—the road to ourselves and how like him. A believer in the common good, the user of turn signals on deserted roads. He veers onto a dirt spur and stops. “Ready?”
“Yep.”
He climbs out, and I slide over. The engine’s shudder cuts even deeper when I grip the wheel. I lean forward, my back lifted from the seat. My father settles beside me. Chestnut sniffs me then him.
“Remember how it all works?”
My first lesson a year ago. This very spot, the trees gold and red, a world so different, my father’s encouragement and three stalls in a row. “Uh-huh.”
“Imagine your footwork. Nice and easy.”
I let out the clutch, a lurch harder than expected. The finches gathered in the lane’s ruts scatter. My father’s tone gentle. “You’re good.”
I stop at the rail bed. A veil of dirt, golden in the sun, swirls around us. I look north then south. The rails narrow and twist with the river’s slow turns. I cross, bucking over the rails, and rejoin the dirt road. The trees closer here, and the lowest branches scrape the roof. An opossum slides into the shadows. I stop when we reach the clearing.
The river opens before us, a wide stretch to the opposite shore. Sunlight slivers on the flow. My father wades into the brush, trowel in hand. The search for a rare autumn bloom, a name in Latin that crumbles on my tongue.
I walk a shoreline of silt and rock. I look for carp in the shallows but see none. Upstream, the steel mill’s smokestacks, the city’s south-side bridge. Before me, a small island halfway across the river. I’ve been coming to this spot with my parents for years. Picnics. Explorations. June’s mayflies. February’s ice. I once daydreamed about the island, a tangle of vines and scrub no larger than our house’s lot. On the island, I pictured a house and life all my own. A refuge. A kingdom. My fantasy snuffed with the view from the south-side bridge after a week-long rain. The island lost, its tallest trees barely visible above the flow.
My grid appears, and the vista dissolves into its components. The water’s reach. The current’s purr. The fog’s slow burn. I crouch and cup a cool handful and let the water trickle between my fingers. These drops unique but the flow no different than last year. Ten years ago. A hundred. A thousand. The river a
witness to it all. I’ll return next spring. Older. A better driver. My father will look for a new plant. My mother will sit on a boulder, her notebook on her lap. Time, so often the blurred axis of my grid, for once in focus. Time will heal us. I pick up a stick and hurl it into the water. The stick visible for a moment, then gone.
A rustle behind me. The sway of lanky reeds. Chestnut bolts from my side. I find my father kneeling in the brush. A small leaf on his shoulder and his glasses crooked. “This is it?” I ask.
“It is.” His trowel bites into the earth and claims a small circle. He lifts, two hands cupping the dirt. Chestnut sniffs the dangling roots. The plant a tangle of green and a single, dime-sized, red flower. He closes his eyes and sniffs the bloom. He looks at me. “Its seed can travel for miles before it takes root, and there might not be another one like it for as far as we can see. It survives the cold and snow then flowers in autumn. A year goes by, maybe two, before it blooms again.”
“For our backyard?”
He stands. “Sound like a good plan?”
“Yes.” I reach out, a hand to help him over a rotting log. “One must always have a plan.”
I’m dreaming. Or perhaps I’m lost in the white expanse between consciousness and sleep. My limbs distant yet in my thoughts, I run, a deer’s strides, only I’m beneath the river. Around me, stones and fish and sunken boats. The miracle of air in my lungs.
Chestnut barks and the river evaporates. Voices mesh with the air conditioner’s drone. My bed shakes. Earthquake—my first stab at lucid thought, but that’s impossible, isn’t it? The rumble focused, the front door, and I picture my uncles’ hammers. I picture elephants, Fourth of July explosions. Chestnut with hackles raised, his alarmed bark. A disconnect in my head, what’s real and what isn’t. The stairwell just outside my door, a throat that rises from downstairs’ gut and in it, the horrible pulse. Kicks and screams. My mother’s voice pierces the din. “Run, damn it! Run!”