Schroder: A Novel (11 page)

“Don’t you know the way back home?”

“I know the way back home. Do as I say. OK?”

Pulling away from the roadside, I made a screeching U-turn. I could feel Meadow watching me. I didn’t know what to say about my tears. There is nothing to say about them, even now.

“You know what would cheer me up?” I said.

“What?”

“I’d like to see a very tall mountain. With you.”

“All right. Is there one close by?”

“Sure. There are mountains everywhere.”

“Good. Because I have school Monday.”

“Right, school.” Again, in the distance, I could see the orange glow of Plattsburgh. “When are they going to let you out of that place? Don’t Catholics believe in summertime? It’s hot already, for Pete’s sake. The blackberries are out. Outside is life.”

“I don’t know. June, I think.”

“It
is
June, hon. Put on your pajamas, would you?”

In the backseat, Meadow unclasped her belt buckle and placed her glasses to the side. After a series of contortions and arm torques, her head popped out of the head hole and she smoothed down the fabric and replaced her glasses on her face. In the headlights behind us, the crown of her head was a star of static. It’s ridiculous, I wanted to say, how many steps there are to everything, how endlessly procedural this life is. I wanted to apologize for it.

“Here’s an idea,” I said. “Now, you can say yes, or you can say no. Got it?”

“OK.”

“Consider this”—I swept my hand toward the windshield—“Mount Washington. Highest peak in the northeastern United States. Home of the highest surface winds ever recorded. And what’s great about Mount Washington is you can drive all the way up to the top. Right to the tippy-top, where you can buy fried chicken and a bumper sticker.”

Meadow held her position of frozen listening.

“But it might take us a couple days,” I said. “If you were willing, we could make a
real
road trip out of it. We could stop here and there. Cause some trouble, you know. It’s been a long time since we’ve—we haven’t had much time together. With all the razzle-dazzle between me and your mother.”

Meadow was pensive. Her nightgown bore the magnified image of a blond girl singing into a microphone. The girl’s pupils were filled in with glitter. Meadow drew her seat belt across her chest and studied me in the rearview mirror.

I smiled gamely. “I am happy to write a note to the nuns.”

“I don’t get taught by the nuns,” she said. “That’s just music and religion.”

“Then I’ll write a note to the Christless laypersons who teach you other subjects.”

Meadow gave me a bitter smile. I loved her bitter smiles, signs of a frustrated intelligence. I didn’t want her to be frustrated, but if she was intelligent, there wasn’t any getting around it. I even had the thought that she was going to refuse me. I suppose, in a way, I trusted her to rescue us.

“All right,” she said, shrugging.

“Really? Are you sure? You’d miss a little school.”

“It’s all right.”

“Really? Great.
Great
.”

“Of course,” she added, “I’ll have to ask Mommy.”

My heart sank. She had dutifully found the compromise solution that would keep all of us from getting what we wanted. We were once again prisoners of our own making.

“Absolutely,” I said, swallowing bile. “We’ll find a pay phone and call Mommy first thing in the morning. See what she says.”

“Well, maybe not first thing,” she said. “Just sometime along the way.”

“OK, sweetheart. It’s nice of you to think of Mommy.”

“How many days will it take?”

“How many days do you feel like giving it?”

She screwed her eyes. “Six?”

“Six whole days? That’s great. That’s almost a week.”

“It’s how old I am.”

“Your lucky number. We haven’t spent six days together in—in forever.”

“And I
don’t
learn that much in school. I already know the stuff they’re teaching me. Reading and stuff. I already learned when I was a baby.”

“I’m sorry, Meadow. That kills me.”

“So I
would
like to go to the top of Mount Washington. But I’m hungry. Actually, could I have a donut?”

“Sure. Sure. I’m sure we can find you a donut somewhere around here…” We both looked out at the landscape, a thick wall of first-growth forest on either side of the road. “Or maybe in Plattsburgh. I bet there are zillions of donuts in Plattsburgh. You can have them all.”

But she was asleep again by the time we reached Plattsburgh. I can only imagine the dreams with which her unconscious mind explained the sensations: the thrum of the trucks as they lined up beside the passenger cars, the huge clanging of the ferry’s deck as it lowered the ramp, and the way it must have felt to have the car’s wheels detach from earth and slide away upon some other substance…

It was 1:05 a.m.

The Plattsburgh–Grand Isle ferry was surprisingly trafficked. I pulled onto the deck when I was signaled and shut off the engine and sat with one arm hanging out the open window, the lake breeze sweeping the deck. Meadow slept on in the backseat. Her sleep had already developed a deep, denying quality.

I opened the door and stepped from the car, nodding at the trucker who idled behind us, high in his cab. Then I crossed
the deck and climbed up the metal stairs to the passenger deck. I hid myself in the very corner, from which I could not see the Mini Cooper. I leaned over the railing, looking deep into the lake. It was odd. Suddenly I wanted to get away from her. That is, I wanted to get away from my love for her. I had forgotten about the vortex that gets created when you love a kid. Because I wanted to be with my daughter more than anything, and yet I also wanted to be free of that desire. I wanted to be free of that desire because I knew being with her had an end. You, me, death, her teenage years—what would end it? Whatever it was wouldn’t be up to me.

There is no such thing as forgetting.

You just have to stand it.

Lake Champlain was as dark as oil. A necklace of distant lights flickered along its edge. Up on the observation deck, I watched the most curious scarves of spider silk float inches above the black water. There are silent people, and there are also very silent things.
⁷
The strange silence of this windless lake was broken by the uneven reception of a radio playing pop music somewhere. The music roused me, shook me awake, back from the railing over which I was leaning recklessly. I thought of the truck driver high in his cab and wondered what the hell I was thinking leaving her there even for a second. I ran back down the metal stairs. In the backseat of the Mini Cooper, my daughter was safe and fast asleep. Within sight of the hinterland, the ferry’s engine powered down. Now we would simply skid the rest of the way. New York State was behind me. We had entered Vermont.

RETICENCE

As I’ve said elsewhere, my dad was a fairly quiet man. I associate him with silence, since that was the soundtrack of our lives together, whenever I wasn’t unspooling for him the tales of my schooldays in English he could only half understand. He wore a wool overcoat, and had iron-colored hair on his chest and back, and his beard was the same dark crimson color of the cherry juice he drank each day to ward off gout, and every once in a while, I threw back a glass of the same, wondering if it would thicken my own hair and make me hearty like him, capable of labor. Me, I was always getting sick.
⁸

Dad was not cruel. He rarely scolded me. He never forced me to do anything, except for once. After that one time, he never directed or guided me at all, and in fact, he seemed to forget the conventions of fatherhood altogether. I missed the pedantic advice he used to give me when I was very little, when we were all together, in East Germany, the cautions, the slaps to the back of the leg, all of it. For all the grimness of our life in Dorchester, his outrage might have reassured me. But the anger in him disappeared as I grew up, and as it did, our history made less and less sense to me. Why had we gone to so much trouble to get here? And so when I say that silence makes me think of my father, maybe I mean silence in the sense of censored speech, censored memory, the static of erased tape.

ZWEITER TAG
OR
DAY TWO

We awoke the next morning in Grand Isle, Vermont, our backs stiff, our car surrounded by chickens. I had parked the car there the previous night in the darkness, and I was glad to see in the daylight that I had hidden us well. The car sat in a patch of sandy ground behind a billboard advertising the Great Vermont Corn Maze. Except for the chickens and the road, there was no sign of civilization.

Now, in any other context, I would have set out trying to secure Meadow a decent breakfast, trying to find a safe and sanitary place for us to wash up and change. But a strange thing happens to people once they start to sleep in a car. A sense of permission seemed to have settled over us both. We had not fled to Canada, but neither had we returned to Albany. We were on a road trip. It suddenly felt as pointless for Meadow to change out of her nightgown and brush her hair as it did for me to start being honest. We set off through the woods behind the billboard. I think we felt—we both felt—excited for the adventure—I think so.

And yes, I planned to call you.

Have you ever seen Vermont hayfields just after they’ve
been mown, the large sage-colored bales casting their shadows westward at daybreak? Have you seen red barns with their doors open, exhuming a cool, night-fed shade you can feel from far away? We came out of the woods into a sea of tall buttercups, whose sheltered birdsong we could hear over the silence. Lake Champlain glittered through white birch trees at the far edge of the field. Along the puckered furrow of cleared land sat an old white farmhouse in need of fresh paint, and on the slope above this house, a groomed geometry of green and brown farmland gave a shapeliness to the innumerable hillocks. Everything hummed with morning.

“Here,” I said to Meadow. “Come up on my shoulders.”

I hoisted her skyward. She was heavy, but I found myself glad to labor across the field carrying her like that, because I still could. Everything we did was starting to feel touched with lastness: the last summer I could carry her on my shoulders, the last—or at least finite—days of our togetherness before I would return her to Albany and to our occasional, supervised visitations. Crickets, butterflies, and orange-banded birds burst out of the grasses. Up on my shoulders, my daughter twirled her hair with one hand and surreptitiously sucked her thumb with the other. Her eyes had that loose, satisfied look of her early years, when she gorged on love.

We were halfway across the field when the door to the farmhouse opened and a woman with a low-hanging bosom stood watching us, her face half in shadow. I nodded and pressed on, but two small dogs had been released from the house and were now darting around my ankles amongst the knotted stems.

“Doggies!” cried Meadow. “Daddy! Can I pet them, please can I pet them?”

“No, sweetheart.” I glanced over at the woman. “We really should forge ahead.”

“Please, Daddy, please! Look how cute and
tiny
.”

I stood there while Meadow sank into the grasses petting the dogs, and I tried not to acknowledge their owner watching us. We were trespassers, and I was determined to avoid all imbroglios or anyone who might demand to know who we were and what the hell we were doing. Besides, she looked like the shotgun type. I heard her garbled shouting.

I feigned deafness. “Excuse me?”

“You looking for me?” the woman shouted again.

“No. At least I don’t think I am. No.”

“Because we got cabins.” The woman had stepped off the porch with some effort and down the single stair to the edge of the meadow. “I thought you were looking for our cabins. I rent them. I rent the cabins.”

I nodded. I gave Meadow’s back a little push.

“Sometimes people just kind of come wandering through. Because they’ve heard about me in town. That’s why I ask.” The woman put her hands on the small of her back. She was, I could see now, a rather old woman, her gray hair cut short like a man’s. “Because I only want the kind of people who hear about me in town. People who come recommended.”