The other girl said, “We know right where Kate is, right down there. We talk about her sometimes.”
“Talk to her sometimes.”
“Yeah, to her.”
“We saw her once.”
“Right down there, by her stone.”
“She was, like, made of the shadows.”
“Yeah, or like inside the shadows, but we knew it was her.”
“We could tell from her hair.”
“Yeah. Her hair was really pretty. Really, really black.”
“But black because of the lights moving around in it, kind of.”
“Yeah, it was really weird. But she was so beautiful. I mean, really, really beautiful.”
“Yeah, we really kind of fell in love with her.”
Just like Kate fell in love with the idea of Sarah Good, I thought. The taller girl took a drag of her cigarette. She took a half-step forward and offered it to me.
She said, “Dude, you look like you need a smoke.” But then she stepped back and dropped her face a little, as if suddenly remembering her manners in front of an adult.
I said to her, “Your name’s not Sarah by any chance, is it?”
“No, I’m Lilly,” she said.
“And I’m Caroline,” the other girl said.
“How many times did you say you’ve seen my daughter?”
“A bunch—”
“A couple—”
“Once for sure.”
I thought: Jesus, these kids know about me? I thought: Jesus, Lilly and Caroline, in the cemetery, drinking some white wine you pinched from your moms, playing with tarot cards, probably getting okay grades, probably going to decent colleges in a year or two, trying to work things out, trying to be good kids, really.
“Lilly and Caroline,” I said. “What a couple of lovely”—I wasn’t sure what to call them: girls, women?—“souls you are.” I felt mortified, too, though, soaking wet and strung out, talking and sharing a cigarette with teenage girls in the cemetery late at night, with evidently half the kids in the village aware of what I’d been doing for the past year, and these two not as frightened by me as they rightly should have been. But it felt like a spell had been broken, too.
I stammered a vague thank-you, suddenly not wanting to explain the facts of the night, charmed by these kids but suddenly wanting nothing more than to be home. So I told them that they didn’t know how much they had helped me and I didn’t know what else more to say but thank you.
“No problem, my man,” Caroline said.
“That’s what we’re here for,” Lilly said.
“Well, your secret’s good with me, you guys. Just—ah—be careful, okay? Take it easy with the booze and those smokes, all right?”
“Okay, Mr. Charlie.”
“Okay, Dad.”
I laughed out loud at that. As ridiculous and reduced and outrageous as the whole situation was, it was nice to be called dad, and in that funny, smart, sarcastic girl’s voice.
“Bye, guys,” I said. I turned away and limped down the hill toward the road.
Lilly called out in a loud whisper, “Hey, Mr. Charlie?”
I stopped and turned around and whispered back, “Yeah?”
“We’re really sorry Kate died.”
Caroline whispered, “Yeah. We bet she was a really good kid.”
14.
KATE AND I SHARED A LAST MEAL IN THE TWILIT REALM I HAD invented for her. The meal was the same meager supper I had provided when she first arrived in that other world, but reversed. I had imagined the world, colonized it, and come ahead of her in order to build a stone-ringed fire pit and a wigwam of lashed saplings covered over with bark and insulated with straw, and to make a sooty fire and to toast some meal cakes. She sat on a bench made from a planed log, wrapped in a shawl, pale, gray even, ill from the rise and drop of the ocean. The wigwam was smoky and dark and cramped. The floor was covered with dirty straw. Kate nibbled at her empty fingertips until a pinch of crumbs appeared kneaded up between them. A corner of tasteless cake grew in her hand. Once it formed into a square, Kate removed it from in front of her mouth and handed it to me. I placed it back into a pan resting next to the coals and traced its outline with a knife and it joined back into the rest of the cake behind the blade. Kate stood up and stepped backward toward the doorway. I shuffled back from the hearth and stepped behind her and we both left the house, watching it recede into the trees. We struggled for a mile and a half, through trees and meadows, scrub and dune grass, our backs to our destination, Kate’s seasickness getting worse along the way, until we arrived at the shore. When we reached the smooth stones and clotting seaweed and the first waves soaked our feet and curled back up into themselves, I turned around to face Kate and the ocean. We embraced and I turned her over to a lean, half-starved, sunburned sailor, who stood in the water up to his knees in front of a dinghy. A small, battered, and dark caravel with tattered lateen sails lay a hundred yards offshore. The sailor took Kate’s hand and she, watching me, backed up over the side of the dinghy and onto one of its two benches. The sailor pushed the boat into the water by the bow, leapt into it, took up a pair of oars, inserted them into the tholes, and began to row the boat backward toward the ship. When the dinghy reached the ship, I could see Kate stand and be raised up to its deck by two men on board. The sailor who rowed her to the ship climbed up a rope ladder. The dinghy was pulled up with a windlass and stowed. The ship raised anchor and began to draw back across the ocean, stern first. I backed up across the sand slowly until I stood on slightly higher ground, near the edge of the dune grass. I watched the ship for hours, as it receded and diminished, until its small sails sank and disappeared beneath the horizon. I watched the empty ocean for hours afterward. The sun dropped through the sky and followed the ship off the eastern ledge of the world. The sunlight spread across the far line of the flat earth and dimmed into full night.
IF THE DAUGHTER OF the son of a daughter of a son of a mad tinker who was the son of a mad minister perish beneath the wheels of a passenger car conducted by a distracted mother of three, her father shall be liable to death by slow poison from his own hand, during the long administration of which he shall wander bare and wooded hills, open and choked meadows, thickets and swamps, day and night, befreckled with ticks and beknotted with burrs, burned by the sun and frostbitten by the snow, making acquaintance with all the dead of Enon, be they recent or remote, and luring himself toward their society with flimsy, elaborately constructed decoys of his daughter.
I returned to the walk-in health clinic and told Dr. Winters I was afraid maybe I’d developed a little dependency on the pills. She took mercy and humored my euphemism and wrote me a prescription and gave me a list of vitamins to take and food to eat and phone numbers to call. I did everything she told me and sweated and ached and wept and shit myself and bid my farewells to all the exhausted effigies, the poor hapless understudies, with turnips for brains and empty birds’ nests for hearts. Once, during withdrawal from the drugs, which was hardly terrible in terms of real withdrawal but grisly and horrific nevertheless, I had a vision of all the versions of Kate I’d invented since her death lined up along a shelf on a wall, like old dolls in a dark, dust-choked room in the back reaches of the oldest basement in the village. They were made of rags and hay and grain sewn into little sacks, disemboweled by mice and rats. They had mismatched eyes of marbles or buttons. Their heads were scavenged gourds or cracked porcelain skulls that whistled in the drafty night.
Poor manikins; poor mandrakes; poor, innocent potatoes. What grass-stuffed rag dolls of my daughter I made. They were grotesques. Any flicker of beauty to be found in them had to be discovered only during the most merciful moments, by the kindest eyes, in order to perceive the source of human grief from which they had been conjured. They were fetishes, cobbled together by a mind clumsy with drugs and sorrow, and shaken in terror like rattles at the immense and exact unfolding of my daughter’s true absence elaborating itself in the world.
THE NIGHT BEFORE KATE died, I woke up from a dream about an immense house, filled with relatives from a dozen generations. It was the beginning of September and there was a heat wave and we didn’t have any air conditioners. Susan’s and my bedroom was located at the front of the house. There were two windows in the room, one facing the side yard, which looked out into the foliage of a large beech tree, and one facing the front lawn. I had opened both windows, hoping for a cross breeze, although the air was completely still, and I had angled an oscillating fan between the stool and sash of the side window, so that it would draw in air that had been cooled by the tree and push it through the room, over our bed. I think I knew that the tree did not cool the air, but the idea was appealing. When I awoke, the fan had tipped back against the screen in the window and was making a sound like an animal trying to claw through the screen as it tried to rotate back and forth. I sat up and gulped at the glass of water on my bedstand. Susan did not stir. She flourished in the heat and slept deeply. My T-shirt and my hair were damp with sweat. My pillowcase was sticky from sweat on both sides. More like a sponge than a pillow, I remember thinking, groggy, grumpy. It struck me at that moment that the room in which I’d last been in the house in my dream was a vast conservatory, with high, vaulted ceilings made of glass and aluminum, built-in bookcases full of old leather-bound books, and lots of red leather chairs and couches, like in the lobby of a grand hotel, all of which seemed to have immense potted ferns looming up behind them, shading them with green canopies of fronds. I crawled forward to the end of our bed and propped the fan back up on the windowsill and stuck my face in front of it. The currents of air broke against my damp skin and made the hair on my neck and arms prickle. Torpid, I crawled off the bed and knelt at the back window and looked out into the night. The air was perfectly still. Not so much as a leaf on a tree rustled. The yard seemed timeless, and it struck me that the wind moving the trees and the grass and the clouds was what usually gave the sense that time was still moving, that the world was still moving, that the wind was a mechanism something like a clock. Or the trees and the clouds were the clock and the wind the power released from some immense solar springs uncoiling in space. I thought my grandfather might have liked the idea of a clock made of clouds and wind. The display on the alarm clock flashed, so the power must have gone out at some point while I’d slept. I had no sense of what time it was. I knew that I would not be able to fall back asleep again anytime soon, so I tiptoed down the dark hall, past Kate’s room. She mumbled something when I passed the open door. I have noticed that sleepers will stir when the air in a still house is disturbed by a moving body. I scooted to the stairs and braced myself on the railings running down both sides of the stairway and eased my weight onto each step slowly, so that I would not wake Kate. She could be a tense, light sleeper, easily startled and easily frightened. It took her a few minutes after being jolted awake by thunder or a tree branch breaking in the yard or the wind toppling a garbage barrel into the street to realize where she was and that she was not in any danger. Being startled was something she especially hated; it was one of the very few things I ever saw her become really angry about whenever it happened, even if by accident.
I reached the bottom of the stairs. I remembered that the Red Sox were on a West Coast trip, so that their games did not begin until ten o’clock at night, and if the games were slow or went into extra innings they lasted deep into the night. I loved the Red Sox series on the West Coast. I loved baseball during late summer nights. The clock on the cable television box read 3:30. I clicked the TV on to see if I could get a score from the game. The sound came on first and I heard the monotone hum of a sparse crowd and the voice of the Red Sox play-by-play announcer. The screen kindled, and instead of reruns of the sports highlights show, the game between the Red Sox and the Seattle Mariners that had begun five and a half hours prior was still being played. The score was tied at one run to one, and the game was in the fifteenth inning. This seemed like a small treasure, something to help me deep in a mildly strange, half-asleep night. I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice and returned to the living room and sat on the couch to watch the game.
At some point I became aware that Kate was up and looking at me from the darkness of the hallway beyond the dining room. I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to turn and call her name, for fear of frightening her, even though it might seem as if she were the one who was liable to frighten me. So I watched the game for ten more minutes, self-conscious when I clinked out a little march on my juice glass with my wedding band, or cursed, Shit, shit, shit, at a diving catch the Mariners’ right fielder made to end the inning, aware of Kate watching me and thinking that she was looking in on a person who thought he was all alone, unobserved, when she was in fact watching a performance. It was that idea, that I was in some sense defrauding her, that caused me to finally sit myself up straight at the end of the inning, stretch my arms over my head, say Ay yi yi, shake my head, reach for my cigarettes and lighter on the end table next to the couch, and rise, as if I were innocently getting up to go have a smoke on the back porch before the game resumed.
I heard Kate skitter back to the staircase and pad up to the third or fourth stair and turn around and thump back down, as if she were just coming down from the second floor. She came out of the dark hall into the doorway of the living room.
“You okay, Late Kate?”
“Fine, Dad. Just peeing. It’s roasting. The game’s still on?”
“Seventeenth inning,” I said.
“Did the power go out? My clock’s blinking. What time is it?”
“After four.”
Kate went to the bathroom and I stepped out to the back porch and lit a cigarette. I took a drag or two, but when I saw Kate coming out I tapped the ash off the end and palmed it.
“Perfect way to ruin a beautiful summer night,” I said as Kate stepped outside.
“It’s okay, Dad. I don’t care if you smoke.” She’d told me once that my smoking made her worry about me getting cancer or having a heart attack, but that there was also something comforting about it to her as well. She was used to the smell, she said.
I said, “But I care if you smoke.”
Kate looked up and said, “Wow—look at all the stars.”
The night sky was saturated with oceans of stars, with the maples and beeches in the yard making inky black continents among them. The clouds of the Milky Way were visible behind the stars.
“Weird to be lying on a couch watching a game called baseball on a thing called a television set, of all things, with all that out there,” I said.
“Hey,” Kate said. “There’re no crickets.”
I cocked my head and listened and, after a few seconds said, “That is strange. Really strange.”
“Too hot, maybe?”
“I really haven’t got the slightest idea. But it makes the night extra spooky.”
We stood for a moment, watching, then Kate said, “Dad, when you came downstairs, did you stop and look at me sleeping?” I turned to her and arched my eyebrows.
“I plead the Fifth,” I said.
“I don’t care—just wondering.” She stared at her feet and raised one off the ground and pointed her toes and made a little figure eight with them in the air, like a dance exercise.
“Well, I don’t need this stinky thing,” I said, and stubbed out the cigarette on the driveway and flicked the butt into the planting pot I kept tucked against the corner of the house for spent smokes. “Let’s go see about them Sox.”
We returned to the living room. I dropped myself down on the middle of the couch, rested the orange juice on my stomach, and flung an arm behind my head. Kate sat on the edge of the end of the couch nearest the doorway to the dining room. I waggled my fingers and Kate leaned over and took my hand in hers and kissed it.
“My dad, the vampire,” she said.
“Some vampire, lying on the couch watching baseball,” I said back.
“How lo
ng’s this thing going to go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe forever at this point. The game that never ended,” I said, in a silly, sinister voice.
“They could make a special channel for it on TV.”
“Nah, well, this guy who’s pitching is a bench player. Someone’s going to knock a cream puff down the right field line and end it any second.”
“A cream puff right down Pastry Alley.”
“Exactly.”
Kate gave me a last, hammy smooch on the back of my hand, like in the cartoons, where the rabbit gives the hunter who’s stalking him a long, wet Mmmmmwah! before he yanks the hunter’s cap over his eyes and dives back down the rabbit hole.
“Night, Dad.”
“Night, Kates.”
Kate hiked back up to her room. I watched the game for another quarter hour and fell back asleep and again took up my dream, which had switched location from the house to a vast, curved aluminum frame, like a zeppelin’s, suspended in the clouds, along which I crawled, terrified. As I slept, the Red Sox finally beat the Mariners, and an hour later the sun rose over the last day of my daughter’s life.
15.
I PLACED A SMALL BOUQUET OF BLUETS AND BUTTERCUPS ON Kate’s stone on the first anniversary of her death. I placed a spray of chicory and hawkweed that I saved from the summer on her stone, on what would have been her fourteenth birthday. The stone is a dark gray, flecked with chips of what look like quartz or mica. It is next to my mother’s and my grandparents’ stones. I sometimes imagine a quiet, clean, hidden bower for Kate, with little ornaments made from twigs and leaves and elaborate mobiles made of branches and cordgrass and even handmade bird feeders tucked into hollows, which I’d keep filled with black oil sunflower seeds, and evenly balanced and weighted by pebbles wound in twine and suspended from the corners, and slim glass flutes wound into the twine, in which I’d put droppers full of sugar water, so that there would be a watchful aviary above my girl, attended by birds whose ancestors were the ones Kate and I used to feed from our hands in the sanctuary.