Schroder: A Novel (18 page)

FÜNFTER TAG
OR
DAY FIVE

The beautiful weather could not last forever. While April and I slept, clouds slid into the sky above Lake Champlain, and with them, the mood had darkened. Back in Cabin Two, Meadow rattled the bottles in the half fridge, looking for something not there. She was tired of cheese sandwiches. Why hadn’t I bought any cereal? she wanted to know. Normal people eat cereal for breakfast. And fruit. Fresh fruit. Three to five servings a day. Everybody knows that. I watched her move about the cabin, still trying to get used to the color of her hair. Unfortunately, it wasn’t goldenish like Rapunzel’s. It was a parched color, like dried corn stalks. She must have done it wrong. I followed her around, holding the dry rope of it in my hands. Glancing in the bathroom, the smeared towels and sink basin made me feel sick.

After she’d walked in on me and April, I’d dressed quickly, and run after her. And now she would barely look at me, and I could understand why. I was in need of a shower. And a Laundromat. No. I was in need of a bonfire. I needed to burn my clothes and start over. I smelled of cigars and April and rain and vokka and my face was bloated as it is sometimes in
the mornings after drinking. Meadow sat at the tiny cocktail table that functioned as the cabin’s dining area, resting her big white head against the heel of her palm as she bit off the corner of the last piece of Roman Meal, staring down at the plastic tablecloth. Jesus, I thought, what would her mother think? I was almost more afraid of that than of legal ramifications.

And our getaway car! I looked out the window to where the thing sat in the mist. What sort of rube steals a car with a white racing stripe? The car was useless. We had driven it all over North Hero, and earlier, to Swanton. It was a moving trap, a fucking advertisement. The only place in which I knew we were invisible was right where we were, but we couldn’t stay here. I could see that Meadow had lost the fragile enthusiasm she’d first had for our trip. Hell, she’d been doing me a favor the whole time. I could see that.

But what did
I
want? Just a little more time. But for what? What spectacular thing was I going to do with it? I didn’t want to be exposed—how much I was about to lose—but I knew I was going to lose it, now or later. I grabbed a nearby chair back, squeezing until it hurt. There was something more to do. I wasn’t
done
.

“Meadow,” I said. “Look at me, please.”

Not changing her position, she looked at me.

“Why are you sad? Don’t you like your hair?”

Her hand flew to her head and brought a swath of it to her face. “Actually. I like it lots.”

“Well, maybe we should change it back. I hate to say it, but I kind of miss your real hair—”

“No. No, thank you.” She shook her head firmly. Her eyes moistened, but she refused tears. She seemed shy of me, as if
she’d realized that her association with me was far less beneficial to her than she’d previously thought.

“So. What is it? What’s wrong?”

She shrugged. “I just don’t understand why we have to be friends with April.”

“Oh,” I said, relieved. “Well, we
don’t
have to be friends with April. April and I are ships in the night. April and I are—two articles of clothing that got accidentally tangled up in the dryer. April and I just had some comfort to give each other. I had some comfort to give her, and she had some comfort to give me. Do you know what I mean?”

“No. Why go to all the trouble? Why not just keep it and comfort yourself?”

“I
do
comfort myself,” I said, my voice thick with my own double meaning. “I comfort myself all too often. It’s not the same. Everyone wants to be comforted by someone else.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Frustrated, I grabbed the air with both hands. “Why? What’s
wrong
with you? Don’t you like to be held and kissed? Don’t you like to be babied sometimes by me or your mom, or by Mom-Mom or Pop-Pop or Stinky Blanket?”

I saw her memory snag on the words, and her eyes filled up instantaneously with tears.

“Oh, no,” I said, grabbing her hands. “Oh boy. I didn’t mean to—”

“I miss my mommy,” she said, tears falling onto the table-top. “I miss Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop. I don’t like this vacation anymore. I don’t
care
about Mount Washington. I don’t want to go there anymore. I don’t want to go there with you. You’re not good.” She looked at me with an expression of
disapproval I’d never seen on her face before. “You’re not good! You told me you were going to be right back! That I wouldn’t be alone!”

“Oh, Meadow. Please—”

“And you were nowhere! You were
away
.”

She snapped her hands back from mine and swiped at her eyes. She stood up and walked out. The slam of the cabin door resounded through the cove.

I grabbed my wallet and keys and followed. She was already indistinct in the morning haze, marching toward the road. She was carrying, with some difficulty, the bucket with the frog in it.

“Hey,” I said, catching up to her. “Let me help you. Tell me the plan. Talk to me. What are we doing?”

She kept walking, her eyes red but dry. I peered into the bucket. The frog was floating spread-eagled in two inches of water. Meadow had covered the top of the pail with salvaged chicken wire to prevent his escape, but it looked to me like he was pretty much dead. I took hold of the handle, careful not to touch her hand. We entered the field we’d crossed with her on my shoulders days before. This time, we skirted the edge, passing the frugally darkened windows of our hostess’s farmhouse. We were soon on the main dirt road, walking uphill. Cows observed us from behind electrified wire. I was surprised at how fast Meadow could walk without stopping, and how far. After some outbuildings on the crest of the hill, the road began to dip again, and we could see, in a field below us, a small pond.

“Good,” said Meadow, as if she’d known it would be there. “That’s where we’ll put him. Then he can have the place to himself and he can start his own family.”

“Or maybe he’ll become a poet and write a book called
Frogs Come and Gone
.”

“No,” she said, eyes narrowing. “He hates poetry. All frogs do. Amphibians are allergic to poetry.” She took a couple of steps forward and then looked up at me, hard. “You can come. But only if you don’t touch him with dry hands. That’ll kill him.”

I fell to one knee. “Sweetheart,” I said. “If you want, when we get back to the cabin, we can pack up, and I’ll take you straight home. I’ll take you straight home to Mommy. I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to be angry at me. Say the word.”

She said nothing, but the expression in her eyes softened, and she finally wiped her brow with the arm of her oversized sweatshirt. She gave the bucket a yank.

“Come on,” she said, and we continued to the pond, over which the sun was now wearing through cloud cover.

THE TANGERINE AND THE FOX

Listen. I don’t see myself as some kind of Socrates, but from my point of view, it doesn’t seem fair to hold a child back from her natural curiosities. Some kids—kids like Meadow—like to ask the hard questions whether or not you’ve brushed up for them. Take the example of the tangerine. She saw a forgotten tangerine that had pruned and hardened in the fruit bowl back in Pine Hills, and she wanted to know what would happen to it next. Would the tangerine keep shrinking and finally disappear? We observed it. We noticed that approximately seven days after we first observed the process of hardening, a process of softening began.

“Decomposition,” I said. “The reverse of growing. But first the dead thing has to dry out. Like with rigor mortis.”

“Rigamordis?”

“Yeah. When a body dies, the body first becomes stiff, like”—and here I did a vampy imitation of a dead body, which made her laugh—“and eventually the same thing happens to the body that happened to the tangerine.”

“It gets stiff; then it gets mushy.”

“Yes,” I said. “Everything that dies eventually gets mushy.”

Her eyes grew wide. “Even we will?”

“Yes,” I said. “Even we will get mushy someday. Everything dies that is alive. It’s important to accept that up front. You do less running.”

Soon after, when we found the dead fox in the backyard, I tried to use the fox as an advanced example of the tangerine. We put it in an old milk crate and put it respectfully behind the lawn-mower shed. And we watched it, day to day, as the sun burned away its flesh and flies took it away in infinitesimal pieces and the wind blew away its form, until it was almost a carpet of copper fur, sinking back toward the earth. We spent hours watching the fox decompose. I know it sounds weird, but it didn’t feel weird at the time. In fact, I thought of the fox as something of a pedagogical success. Which is ironic, as vis-à-vis you, her mother, made tense by advanced stages of marital conflict, the fox was The Final Straw.

“I need to talk to you,” you said one morning, your eyes hard.

We were at the breakfast table. It was a Saturday, early summer. You were almost done with your first year of teaching, and while we should have been looking forward to the summertime together, the time seemed, to me, touched with a danger I couldn’t fully admit. Weekends had become a strain. You’d let me sleep in. Then when I awoke, you’d suit up for a run. This morning that I remember, Meadow must have filled you in on some of our recent experiments while I was still in bed. You gave me a significant stare across the table.

“Meadow,” you said, tapping her leg. “It’s almost time for
Dora
. You can go and watch
Dora
while me and Daddy have some sharing time.”

I smirked.
Sharing time
had such a punitive ring to it, I could hardly hear it without laughing. Your speech had become rife with institutionalisms. I watched Meadow wipe her mouth and push off from the table, her cane-juice-sweetened Os distended in their inch of milk. After she was gone, you leaned in.

“What are you doing?”

“Eating breakfast.”

“What are you doing collecting dead animals? What the hell makes you think that’s a good idea? Who are you trying to turn her into, Wednesday Addams?”

“That’s funny, Laura.”

“This is
not
funny. I have
had
it.”

“Had it with what? It’s nature. Death is natural. She’s not scared of it. She’s wiser for it.”

“She’s not supposed to be wise. She’s supposed to be three and silly and to laugh a lot and not worry.”

“Well, she asked.”

“I don’t believe you,” you said. “That’s the problem.
I don’t believe you anymore
.” You pressed both hands to your brow. “I don’t believe you. I don’t trust you.
Help me
, Eric.”

I sat there wishing for something to do, a satisfying punishment of the sort we used to get in grade school in Dorchester when we were bad or rude, and we were instructed to endlessly rewrite our error until we had filled pages and pages with the chant

I pushed in line

I pushed in line

I pushed in line

I pushed in line

I pushed in line

I pushed in line

We’d write until our hands ached, and we were totally purged, ready to begin again, ready to be better.

I looked up to see tears dripping from your jaw, untouched. You toyed with the handle of your coffee mug.

“Please don’t cry, Laura. It was just a dead animal.”

“No,” you said. “No, it was not.”

“I’m not sure what you want,” I said. “Something that I can actually give you.”

“I want to know how this happened. How we became so different. So opposite. How this huge space grew between us.” You looked at me pleadingly. “Were we always like this? I don’t think so. I miss who I thought you were.”

And then you just let go, you just let yourself sob.

It’s not totally relevant for me to sit here and describe what it feels like to watch your wife cry in despair about something you did—no—some way that you
are
that doesn’t even seem strange or remarkable to you. Despite the fact that I have clearly lost the PR battle here—I mean, I
broke the law
, in countless ways—I’m still curious to know whether or not I did the wrong thing with the fox. Because in the end I really don’t know what I should have said, and I spend a fair amount of time sitting here wondering how I could have been more like who you thought I was, which sometimes feels productive, and sometimes feels like a rare form of self-battery. And so I have devised a multiple-choice questionnaire, for the reader of this document, whomever she may be if she is not
you, Laura, in an effort to conduct, as it were, a sort of study. Here it is: