Circus (4 page)

For their meeting, she chose a local coffee shop furnished with artfully mismatched tables, creaky chairs, and a collection of novelty candy dispensers arranged in colour-coordinated rows along the windowsill. The coffee came in cups that were more like bowls: smooth and round and thick. He ordered a black coffee, and she just had tap water.

Her baby bump looked strange on her thin body, as though it belonged to someone else.

“Is that a new shirt?” she asked, sipping her water, delicate as a hummingbird. They sat opposite one another in a booth by the window.

“I went to the mall the other day,” he answered, though he was never entirely sure when she was making fun of him, because she had perpetually ironic eyebrows. “How are you?” he asked, feeling his heart floating up by his ears.

“It’s a girl,” she said, as if he were a stranger who had asked a different question. “It doesn’t matter, though, does it?” Annie’s mother glanced up and turned her head to stare either out the window or at the Daffy Duck PEZ dispenser on the sill, he couldn’t be sure. “But, yeah. A girl.” She was avoiding his gaze. “I just thought you should know that this happened,” she said, gesturing at her own tummy. “Just, yeah. You know. It happened. But I’ve made the decision, so that part’s done.” She paused and sipped her water. “Anyway. They seem like they’ll be good parents. They have a backyard. You don’t need to do anything.”

Jake wanted to turn his head so that he could see what she was looking at out the window, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the bump. The only tenderness between them had always come from him, and there it was still, radiating out in bright beams, newly focused on her belly. As he sat there in the booth, watching her, he knew what he needed to do.

“I’ll take her.”

And that had been that.

Annie was skeptical about the camping gear at first. She hadn’t been planning an outdoor adventure. Camping was something her friends sometimes did, it was true, but Annie avoided the Outdoor Education trips at school – which involved hiking, orienteering, and kayaking – and always opted instead for Mathletes. She had never even been much of a sleepover person because it freaked her out to be in unfamiliar houses at night. The first time she went to a slumber party, at age nine, she called her dad as soon as all the other girls fell asleep. As he drove them home that night, he told her he would come to get her whenever and wherever she needed, now and always. It was a promise she took so seriously that eventually he stopped going to bed at all when she was away, and sat by the phone instead, waiting for her inevitable call.

Although it had never really occurred to Annie that outdoor gear would be something she would ever need or want, it was better than the T-shirt with the photorealistic image of a hippo from the previous year. It was much better than the dangly earrings made out of miniature fish skeletons that he
bought her for her eleventh birthday, and no one wants to bring up the extra-large puke-green fleece pajamas with the disconcerting flap over the backside that opened and closed with snaps. Her dad insists to this day that he hadn’t noticed that part when he’d bought them, that he just thought they looked “cozy.” Yes, compared to her dad’s spectacularly poor selections over the years, the tent and camping gear seemed, well, inoffensive, and potentially even useful.

“Thank you,” Annie said, and she meant it.

They hadn’t always managed so perfectly, the two of them. Jake had never cooked vegetables “from scratch” before Annie started eating solid food, and when she was a toddler he had to pay a housekeeper to come over and teach him how to keep his own home clean enough for a little girl who put everything in her mouth. Fashion was not his strong suit: Annie showed up at her first day of preschool without underwear, which wouldn’t have been as obvious if she had been wearing pants instead of a Snow White costume with a voluminous yellow skirt that flipped up when she went on the swings. And until one of the mothers pointed it out, he hadn’t realized that skirts, unlike pants, usually zip up in the back rather than the front. He was secretly relieved when, at the age of five, Annie took charge of her own wardrobe, among other responsibilities. She was the one who, at ten, planted herbs in the window boxes and added throw cushions to the couch. At twelve, she took him to the department store to help him choose new small appliances for the kitchen when their blender grew so rickety it required a
screwdriver to turn on. Annie and her father both figured, now, that they did okay, and that neither of them would want to change much about their little house on Alder Street.

It hadn’t escaped Jake’s attention that, like her mother, Annie had shown no real interest in camping up to this point. He didn’t often compare her to her mother, since he hadn’t, truthfully, known her mother all that well in the first place. He could identify only a few traits that might be genetically inherited – the way she walked, for example, making a shape like the letter
A
, with her arms held slightly further out from her body than was usual, and the particular auburn colour of her hair. Otherwise, Annie’s self belonged just to Annie. This being the case, he hoped that camping could be given a fresh start for him, free of associations. Plus, with a tent so easy to work with and so light to carry, how could a person
not
want to go out and explore the big wide world?

“Will you look at that!” he kept saying. He circumnavigated the tent once more, careful not to knock over the neighbouring side table and magazine rack, and examined the parts until he began to worry that he had said it too many times, had got too into the details, and that his daughter’s interest in her present was rapidly dwindling the more enthusiastic he became.

“Let’s try it out,” he said, trying not to sound overly eager. “Just to be sure it’s good.”

“Didn’t we just do that?”

“To be sure it’s good on the inside.”

“Shouldn’t we put the rain protector onto the outside first, like the instructions say?” Annie held up the single sheet and pointed to step number 3 of 3.

“Forecast for our living room says mostly sunny, but I suppose there’s always the chance of rain.”

“Dad.” Annie raised one ironic eyebrow and tilted her head.

They slipped the rain cover over the tent and fastened it to each of the corners. When they finally crawled into the tent, they were surprised by how spacious it was inside. It was a three-man tent, and they were only two men, but it still seemed unexpectedly vast.

“We could get everyone we know in here, practically!”

“Yep. Come one, come all! Well, maybe everyone except Mrs. Mooney next door. She’s put on a bit of weight lately.”

“Dad! You’re awful!”

“No, just being realistic about the capacity of our dwelling,” Jake said, as he crawled out to grab the other wilderness supplies. They spread the sleeping bag out on the floor and opened the packet of freeze-dried ice cream, crunching the tiny shards of spumoni while they examined their surroundings.

“Will you look at that!” Jake said again, under his breath.

Annie was relieved that his present might actually work out. This time, she wouldn’t be obliged to pretend to like her birthday gift, although her dad always knew immediately when she was faking. In past years, she had always waited at least twenty-four hours (a suitably polite amount of time) before asking for permission to mangle her present in some way for use in the “found objects” sculpture project with which Miss Bee, her art teacher, begins every year. Annie gets an A+ for found objects each time because Miss Bee has decided that these annual installments are, collectively, Annie’s “conceptual autobiography.” Apparently, they “comment on father-daughter relations
in a postmodern consumer-driven world in which the gulf between self and other can never be bridged by material objects.” Maybe this year, Annie thought, I won’t get my A+.

“This is cool, Dad.”

“Really?”

“Really. It feels like being inside a cathedral, almost, the way the ceiling is shaped.”

“A waterproof worship-centre, assembled in less than five minutes,” Jake said, adopting an infomercial voice as he held up his fist to his mouth like a microphone.

Annie lay down on the sleeping bag and looked up at the blue for the first time. As she tried to get space-worthy strawberry seeds out from between her teeth with her tongue, she felt, for a moment, as if the tent had become the whole world.

They hadn’t meant for the tent to stay there. Jake was so excited that he had finally hit the mark, present-wise, that he hardly wanted to say anything when its continued presence in front of the pine bookcases and beside the living room set started to seem a bit odd. He knew he should probably exercise his parental authority at some point and insist that they tear down the camp; in truth, he didn’t want to take it down any more than she did. Before the tent, Annie spent most of her time alone in her room. He never asked what she was doing, because he has not forgotten how much he hated his mother’s constant nagging while he smoked pot in his bedroom when he was Annie’s age. He was always curious, though, and wished that she would
come down and watch TV with him. Back when her pajamas still had feet, she would beg to do just that, to stay up that extra half hour and fall asleep in his lap while he watched the news. Now she was the one who stayed up late, and he found himself wishing that he could curl up and fall asleep in the chair in the corner of her room while she talked to her friends on Gchat. If she’d wanted to come downstairs, he would have watched whatever she wanted to watch, even if it involved style makeovers or reality shows about spectacular desserts. Sometimes he walks up to the top of the stairs and stands outside her closed door, willing himself to knock, but he always goes back downstairs without asking her to join him. The idea of her saying no, however gently, is somehow worse than not asking at all. Besides, she was diligent about her homework, and although he worried about the fact that she didn’t go out all that often or talk to him about her classmates, he knew she had friends at school. She went for a long run every other day and played field hockey, so really, how could he complain? She was basically the perfect kid, wasn’t she?

In the weeks that followed the construction of the indoor campsite, two unexpected things happened: they began to spend their evenings together in the tent, and, to Jake’s surprise, Annie began to open up to him. Like a seedling at first, offering gossip about the new music teacher at school, or her friend Miranda’s constant battle with her sister over the use of their parents’ car. Then, over the course of the first month of tent evenings, Annie burst into chatter as bright and full as a garden of prize-winning chrysanthemums. Her voice took on a new, sweet pitch when she told him about Todd, the shy
math genius who sometimes stayed with her after class to work on bonus questions. “He’s attentive, like he notices when I wear my hair up and stuff. And he’s so smart, like he was explaining projective space to me, which is basically when …” Jake relished the warble of excitement when she explained hyperbolic geometry problems he wasn’t sure he understood fully, even though he had learned the same things once himself. This was the first time she’d ever mentioned a boy, but Jake knew better than to say he was more interested in hearing about the boy than the math. He didn’t want to slow the bloom of her banter. Instead, he watched Annie’s face, relaxed and pointed up at the ceiling, bathed in the blue light. Then he closed his eyes and listened.

Six weeks after they put up the tent, Annie brought friends over after school to see it. As they walked to the house, the girls were suspicious.

“So, it’s just a tent,” said Miranda, checking her phone.

“Yep.”

“Like, in your yard?” asked Juliana, who had wanted to go to the boys’ soccer game.

“Nope,” Annie replied.

“Where is it then?” asked Abi.

“You’ll see,” said Annie, fidgeting with her hair.

When the girls arrived in the living room, they remained unmoved.

“I don’t get it,” said Selisha, crossing her arms and looking at Juliana for support.

Juliana shifted her weight to one foot and stuck out her hip. “So, seriously,” she said, “Kevin is playing goal today.”

“Patience, grasshoppers,” said Annie, opening the flap and sweeping her hand across the interior as though she were presenting the Taj Mahal. In the girls went, and for the first time since they left school, they stopped checking their phones. Miranda even brought her chewing to a standstill and let her gum harden between her teeth. At first, none of the girls said anything at all. They didn’t quite know how to explain how it felt to be in the blue together. Annie sat in the middle, cross-legged, and closed her eyes. Her friends had never been so quiet. After a few minutes, they started giggling. Leslie snuggled into the corner and gave Krista a cuddle.

Miranda relaxed and blew a bubble. “It’s awesome!”

“Thanks for having us, Annie,” said Selisha.

Her father came home to find that there were eight girls inside the tent, and they didn’t even seem squished, just happy and giggly and tinted a luminous blue.