I used to think about Susan, at the room we rented then, in Matt Gray’s house. Matt Gray was the chief of the Enon police. My grandfather and grandmother knew him well because they had been friends for many years with his father, Matt Senior, who had been the police chief before Matt. I used to sit on the lawns of the houses I painted, smoking cigarettes, drinking cans of soda, Gus spewing his dreadful jive talk, and try to think about what Susan was doing at that very moment. I imagined her, in the cool, damp summer morning light, maybe doing the couple of dishes we hadn’t got to the night before, maybe folding some clothes and putting them away in the bureau we shared, maybe deciding to take a walk to the library to see if there were any books that interested her. She liked to read mysteries while she was pregnant with Kate. I’d get worried sometimes, thinking about what she was doing, because here she was, living with me, in a single room, in the police chief’s house, in her boyfriend’s hometown, with no job then and no money and me painting houses and her six months pregnant and summer getting hotter and hotter, and it made me half panicked to think of her being unhappy, maybe, and me being the cause of her feeling disappointed that her life wasn’t going as well as she’d always hoped and that I was a big part of the reason that the plans we’d talked about at the kitchen table all those nights weren’t working out, instead of being the reason they all came true.
ONE AUGUST NIGHT WHEN Susan was six months pregnant with Kate, she couldn’t sleep and so we went outside to see what it was like and it was clear and beautiful and there was a cooling wind flowing up in the trees and there were fireflies in the meadows and we took each other’s hand and started to walk together.
“Susan,” I said after a while, “I can’t wait to meet our kid.” I touched her stomach through her maternity blouse. “Who are you in there?” I asked. “I’m your dad,” I said. “Me and your mom can’t wait to meet you and see who you are and find out about what you’re like.” Susan took my hand from her stomach and kissed it.
“Whoever it is, she’s going to make us better people, isn’t she?” Susan said. We never checked the gender of the baby. Susan knew it was a girl from the moment she learned she was pregnant.
“She is, Sue.” I started to try to say something to her about how I was sorry I wasn’t as good a husband as she deserved, or as good a partner, or as successful or ambitious. “Susie, you know, I’m sorry, sorry that—”
“Don’t, Charlie,” she said. “It’s funny and sad, and a little scary. But it’s okay, too.” She stopped walking. We stood where one of Enon’s oldest roads splits in two, one branch turning toward the center of the village, the other leading to the section called Egypt. Four small neat, old houses, each with a small barn, faced the intersection. A single streetlight stood at the divergence and moths and other insects swarmed around it. Susan took both my hands in hers. She leaned toward me and kissed me.
“I know I’m no bargain, either,” she said.
“Tut tut! Not another word yourself, my dear. I understand. Let’s just walk some more and be happy about the little cosmonaut on her way.” It felt like Susan had been just about ready to lie to try to make me feel better, and that seemed awful. She wished better for us and that was like a blessing, in that moment, like love itself, if a little sideways, but that was enough.
“My legs feel restless even when I’m walking.” She pressed the heels of her hands against the small of her back and arched and grunted. “Whew,” she said. “This is some thing, Charlie, having a baby. Let’s head home.”
We walked home and I held the door open for Susan and moths followed us in. I took two bowls from the cabinet and two spoons from the drawer. I grabbed a carton of ice cream from the freezer and scooped some into the bowls and we both sat at the table savoring the cold sweet sugary crystalline ice cream while the moths bounced and plinked against the ceiling lamp above our heads.
The summer grew hotter and Susan grew larger. We could practically see Kate in outline. Whenever Kate moved, her elbows and knees and head and behind projected themselves in relief against Susan’s stomach. Susan had a terrible time at night and could not get comfortable. I spent the last three weeks of the pregnancy sleeping on the couch in the living room. Whenever the box springs creaked more than once or twice or Susan groaned, I’d bring her a glass of ice water and see if she needed me to rearrange her pillows or get her a book or just stay with her for a little and sympathize. Sometimes I’d fall asleep sitting up and rouse to find Susan still awake, frowning and trying to settle into a comfortable position.
When Kate was finally born and Susan saw her for the first time, the faraway look in her eyes vanished. Kate brought Susan wholly and fully into this world. She made the tenuous threads that had held Susan and me together before obsolete. Kate’s birth seemed to stop our drift away from one another, a process I had often contemplated before the news of Kate’s arrival with the kind of melancholy one feels at an upcoming and inevitable sorrow. Kate bound us back together. Or, really, we were each separately fully bound to Kate and thereby to each other through our single, cherished daughter, and that was fine by us. After all, we did have a sort of real love for one another, or I did for Susan and she had a deep affection for me.
WHAT AN AWFUL THING then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other. Susan took her tea up to the bedroom. I went to the foot of the stairs and called to her. I said I thought it was a good idea that she go by herself to be with her family. I raised my broken hand and fit it to the hole I had punched in the wall, as if to insert a casting back into its mold. I withdrew my hand a few inches, imagining the hole filling back in and broken bones mending. Stop pretending, I thought. Face facts.
“Susan,” I said. “How does that seem to you, you going to see your family?” I lowered my hand. I felt like an actor in a play, the house a cutaway set, the first floor the living room and hallway and foot of the stairs, the second floor the bedroom. The husband stands at the foot of the stairs, calling up to his wife. The wife moves around the bedroom, putting piles of clothes away but also selecting pieces that she makes into a separate pile on a small armchair—a hand-me-down, clearly, upholstered in an old-fashioned pattern of faded pink and blue bouquets of hydrangeas and roses and leaves and branches of berries. As the audience watches the husband, the actor playing the husband, the actor playing the husband struggling to figure out what to say, as if he strains to author his own lines, as if he is struggling to compose his own words, it becomes apparent that although the wife does not respond to her husband, the clothes she is setting aside are all hers and are what she is packing, or thinking she’d pack, for going back to her family. The audience already knows she will go and some members already know or suspect she will not come back, but the husband and wife must play the full scene, of course. The audience already knows that she will pack the clothes into a suitcase, something she does not quite yet know; nor does he. They are a young couple who had a single child young and who lost the child in an instant of combustion and are straggling around their home in shock at the child’s death but nonetheless trying to spare each other in at least some slight degree the full blow of the end of their fragile marriage by acting as if it isn’t the end for just a little longer, by spreading the blow over just a little more time so it does not fall on them all at once.
Time is mercy, I thought. Knowing that did me exactly no good and there I was at the foot of those stairs, part of me wishing I could just say out loud, “It’s okay, Susan. You can go and I know it’s done and let’s just get it over with,” but the rest of me struggling with what I should say next, so that the inevitable would play out in the fullness of time. Even in the midst of so much pain, an impatience overtook me, and for the first time I imagined the cemetery, the headstone on the slope, the Norway maples and the granite crypts and the gravedigger’s shack and the spigot and plastic
jug for watering the flowers, and sitting behind and above Kate’s stone and thinking about her, talking with her. I imagined the set of the house, with Susan and me moving around in it, revolving to reveal another set, of the cemetery. The actor playing the husband could go through a trap door in the set of the house, while it rotated, and up a narrow ladder, to a hatchway cut into the top of the cemetery set. He could open the hatch, climb onto the artificial cemetery lawn, close the hatch, and find his mark as the set turned toward the audience’s view.
“Sue?” I asked. “I don’t know. This is all so, so shit-ass crazy. But maybe it’s something you should think about doing.” Listen to the husband, I thought. Listen to the actor, how he takes the line and delivers it with a kind of strangled levity, imparting the truth that, even as he speaks the line, he realizes that the tone of his voice only intensifies the tragedy of what he says, rather than alleviating it, as he intended.
Susan left for Minnesota the next day. I was too groggy from the painkillers to drive her, so one of her coworkers from the school picked her up. Before she left, she went shopping and bought food she thought would be easy for me to prepare for myself, bread and cold cuts and jars of peanut butter and jelly and a dozen cans of soup. I told her to call me when she got there and to say hi to her family and to send my love and regrets, my embarrassment, at not coming along. We hugged each other and I kissed her on the forehead and said I was sorry. I said hi to her friend from work, whose name I didn’t know, and I put her suitcase in the backseat of the car. I kissed her again and she got into the car and the car pulled out of the driveway and drove off and that was the last time I saw her.
2.
KATE LOVED FEEDING THE BIRDS IN THE ENON RIVER SANCTUARY. The first time we went was because my grandfather, George Crosby, had taken me there once, when I was thirteen or fourteen. I had walked to his house from school, probably restless, probably bored, and he’d said that there was a wildlife sanctuary a couple miles away where we might walk around for an hour. We found Enon River, chose a random path, and followed it through a meadow to a boardwalk that crossed a marsh. It was early October, and the sun was low and behind the trees to the west. The cold that had collected itself up in the pines during the day had begun to flow back out into the footpaths. As soon as we stepped on the boardwalk, a small troupe of chickadees began blipping about in the bushes and lower tree branches around us.
“I’ll be damned,” my grandfather said. “Hey,” he whispered. “I think that if you put your hand out, you can get them to come to you here.” We didn’t have any seeds with us, but we stood next to each other, still, hands held out, palms up. The birds circled in tighter and tighter radii, until they nodded and curtsied toward us off the tips of the bushes, no more than an inch from our outstretched hands. When the first chickadee hopped onto the ends of my fingers, I startled at the grip of its scratchy, weightless little claws, and it wheeled off back into the bushes.
My grandfather whispered, “Heh! You’ve got to stay vary steel, so the leedy birdees dond get scared,” in one of his weird, vaguely Slavic, vaguely vaudevillian-sounding accents. We must have been a sight—a short, potbellied old man and his thirteen-year-old grandson, already several inches taller than him, but still a kid, still skinny and thin-voiced and still interested in toy soldiers and plastic tanks and blowing up his model trains with firecrackers, standing side by side on the boardwalk, facing the bushes, each holding a hand out just past the tips of the branches, standing still, squinting into the shadows and light, occasionally whispering back and forth, the old man urging the boy to keep still, but in a funny voice that kept making the boy laugh and say, “Stop it, Gramp.”
Another bird flew onto my fingers. It was above my head, on a branch perhaps twenty feet up. It tipped headfirst off the branch, wings tucked at its sides, and dropped like a bobbin straight toward my palm. It flicked its wings out six inches above my hand, spun itself upright, and dropped onto the tips of my fingers. This time I did not startle. The bird looked at my empty hand, gave me a couple bemused, sideways looks, and sprang off.
I never returned to the sanctuary with my grandfather, and the experience sifted away in my mind for years, until it emerged again one afternoon when Kate was seven years old.
“Hey, Kate. I just thought of something really cool. It’s kind of a mystery, something I remember from way, way back when I was a kid.”
“What is it, Dad?”
“Well, let me just show you, okay?”
We drove to the sanctuary and I walked her down the wide grass track that ran downhill alongside the meadow, high with milkweed, and the grid of swallows’ houses until we reached the edge of the woods and entered them through a leafy archway. The path turned to packed dirt and stone, with steps made out of the trunks of trees spaced every fifteen feet or so. The hill leveled out at the edge of several miles of marsh and interconnected ponds. We crossed a boardwalk hedged by spicebush and willow. Birds began to chirp and call and zipped back and forth in front of us. We stepped off the boardwalk and onto a sandy path exposed to the fumy heat and bright, open buzz of the marsh, swarming with insects. The path led past a low section of stone wall at the edge of the marsh. Clumps of speckled alder grew on either side of the wall.
“So,” I said. “The cool thing is that if you put some seeds in your palm and hold it out, the birds might fly to you and eat right out of your hand.”
“Yeah?” she said. She wore jeans and pink sneakers and a green T-shirt with a cartoon monkey on it. Her hair hadn’t darkened to brown yet and was still bright blond, and long, and not, as I remember, especially well combed. It was snarled and looked a little wild, like vines.
I opened a plastic sandwich bag that I’d filled with black sunflower seeds.
“Take a handful and stand with your hand out, right near those bushes, and be very still, and very quiet.” She scooped some seeds from the bag.
Kate whispered, “Dad!” A trio of chickadees had come to the alder near where she stood. They hopscotched around in the branches at the back of the tree and made their way to the front in a series of formations that looked choreographed.
“Stay still!” I whispered.
“Dad!”
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “It’s okay; they’re more nervous than you.” That wasn’t true. The birds were tame and used to being fed by people. Kate turned sideways toward the branches. She hunched up and covered the side of her head nearest the birds with her shoulder, as if to protect her cheek and ear. Her fingers started to curl shut over the seeds.
“Open your hand, Kates. It’s okay; I promise.” The lead chickadee perched on the tip of the nearest branch and leaned out. It feinted toward her and she yelped and snatched her hand away. The bird wheeled back up into the branches and chirped twice, indignant.
“It’s okay, my love. It’s a little startlish. You don’t have to do it if you don’t like.”
Kate kept her eyes on the springing birds. There were now five of them in the tree. She held her hand up. The lead bird made its way to the end of the near branch again, and this time when it launched toward Kate, she didn’t move and it dropped down, clinging to the tips of her fingers, beaked around at the seeds until it found one it liked, and whirred off into the tree.
“Dad, Dad! Did you see?”
“I saw, I saw. Keep still and you’ll get a ton of them.” And so Kate stood there, almost like statuary, as a flock of chickadees took turns going back and forth between the alders and Kate’s hand. A screechy, manic quartet of titmice arrived. They managed one or two seeds each from Kate—which she didn’t like; she said they were scratchy and hurt a little—but they mostly just fluttered around in a tizzy behind the chickadees. Two nuthatches scrambled up and down the trunk of a nearby dead pine tree, nyucking and waiting patiently for the chickadees, who were bossy and would not allow any other birds near while they were still feeding. Wilder birds that would not be hand-fed were attracted by the activity and orbited around us—c
ardinals and blue jays in the trees, sparrows and wrens in the underbrush. When the chickadees finally had eaten all they wanted, the nuthatches dropped down and took some seeds.
Just before Kate’s arm gave out, a tiny yellow bird emerged from the reeds in the marsh. It perched on top of a cattail that ticked back and forth like the pendulum of a metronome. Kate looked back at me and whispered, “Is it okay if I’m done, Dad?” Just as she spoke, the little yellow bird looped up onto the tip of Kate’s forefinger.
I pointed and jabbed. “Tsssst, tssst.”
Kate looked back at her hand. The bird did not seem to notice the seeds. It was smaller than any I’d seen before, save for hummingbirds. But it was not a hummingbird. It was not a finch or a warbler or a wren. I’d never seen a bird like it, in the woods or meadows or in a book. Kate looked at the bird and smiled. The bird sang a liquid, silvery little phrase that was so clear and so limpid it seemed without source, trilling in the air for an instant and evaporating without a trace. (Afterward, whenever Kate and I talked about her first time feeding the birds, we ended our recollections by talking about the little yellow bird and the little silver phrase it sang that neither of us could have said quite for certain we had actually heard, but for the fact that the other seemed to have heard it as well.) The bird remained on the tip of Kate’s finger for another moment and whirred back into the reeds. I tried to sight it with my binoculars but could not find it again.