“Where’s your father?” he said.
“Behind me,” she said, and he looked over her shoulder at the volcano’s horizon, but then realized that wasn’t what she meant. He went on inside the hut. She believed the opportunity was at hand: “I can barely remember you,” she said, directing her words straight at the past. “That’s good,” he answered, and ripped the bag ferociously to liberate some bread at the bottom, taking a bottle of wine from the cupboard above the sink and storming into the back room. For several minutes she stood staring at the closed door, trying to talk her anger into bursting through it and confronting him.
She had a dream that night in which a dead woman who looked much like her lay on the mattress in the corner of the hut where Polly herself was now sleeping. How the woman had died wasn’t clear, and for a moment, when she seemed to turn her head, Polly thought perhaps the woman was alive after all; then the woman disappeared, and Polly’s relief gave way to the certainty that the disappearance and not the death was the delusion. At the end of the dream Polly had the strangest impression she was dead herself, even though her life didn’t yet understand this: the circumstances of her life had gone so awry that ending it seemed the only viable option. Everything in the dream simply seemed so hopeless and involved such futility that suicide wasn’t an emotional decision but a practical one; she didn’t want to do it but was overwhelmed by the feeling that it was the only out.
When she woke, it was as though a noise had awakened her. But the hut was still and she felt entirely alienated from her dream, until she realized it wasn’t hers: rather this dream had smuggled itself from the other room, slipping through the doorway and across the floor to the mattress, where it invaded her ear and ate its way voraciously into her mind. She could see its form in the dark of the hut, like a crustacean from the lava sea outside, skittering across the room. The dogs on the porch whimpered and sniffed at the door. Then there was the abrupt crash of glass in the back room, which gave way to a strange commotion, and she jumped from the mattress and pushed opened the back door, where she half expected to find a battle taking place between Etcher and some beast lurking in the shadows.
Wine ran down the large map on the opposite wall where he’d thrown first the glass, then the bottle. The glass had broken and the bottle lay at the base of the wall gurgling out the remains of its contents. He sat hunched over the desk with his face in his hands and, as though gripped by a seizure, suddenly flailed at the desk so recklessly that the candle was about to tip over and set everything on fire. Polly grabbed the candle. Light darted over the room. In the darting light Etcher didn’t look up, he didn’t move his hands; his glasses lay on the papers in front of him. In the privacy of his hands he said, “Do you know what it does to me to see you?” She had to clutch the candle hard to keep from dropping it; he still wouldn’t show himself, he still wouldn’t look at her. “To see her face looking at me over your shoulder …”
“I’m sorry,” Polly said.
“You’re sorry?” and that released him. His hands fell to the desk and his cheeks were streaked and flushed. “You’re sorry for your face?” The force of his fury seemed to raise him up from where he sat, though in fact he didn’t move at all; in his blind eyes, their glasses still lying on the desk, flashed the last freak moment left of a vision’s halflife from years before, when he loved Polly’s mother and saw everything. “She must have been sorry every day of her life,” he said in a furious whisper. “I must have heard her say she was sorry more times than I could count. She was sorry for her face and she was sorry for her heart, she was sorry for the way everyone told her she had something to be sorry for. She was sorry for the right choices and sorry for the wrong ones and sorry for not knowing which was which, which was almost all of the time. She was sorry for me and she was sorry for the others, but she was never sorry enough for herself except when it was time not to be sorry anymore. Are you here for revenge?”
“Wh-what?”
“It’s a waste of time, if you’ve come for revenge. It’s a waste of time, if you’ve come to hate me. Because there’s no hate you can muster half as good as mine. No revenge you can take half as final as me getting up from this chair and walking out that door and off the edge of the precipice into the fire, a course of action I consider daily, or perhaps it’s hourly. Do you want to be the one who pushes me?”
“I …”
“Come on then,” he said, rising from the chair. He leapt around the desk and grabbed her by the wrist; she screamed, nearly dropping the candle. He pulled her through the front room and out of the house across the porch, past the dogs out onto the ledge, the red mist hanging in the night around them.
“Please,” she begged.
“Do you remember the train ride back, after she died?” A thousand times over the years he must have told himself he was over her. A thousand times in response he must have called himself a liar. Like a wild animal that returns to a habitat it’s never known, but which is its natural one nonetheless, Etcher had come to the mouth of the volcano, and now overlooking the lava he staggered as though to slip over. She screamed again, pulling him back. “It went on forever, all the way back to the city, and you wouldn’t talk to me except to say, like you had a hundred times before, ‘I’m not your friend.’ And then on the station platform you ran to your father and he picked you up in his arms and took you away, and I waited for you to look back at me just once, and you never did. And I knew I’d lost both of you.”
“I was just a little girl.”
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” he cried. In the sheen of the fire his eyes grew wide with the sound of it, as though he could see the admission floating in front of him over the crater, and he wanted to reach out from the void of his life and pull it back.
“You didn’t kill anyone,” she pleaded. “Please come away from the edge.”
“I meant to save her, like I did before.”
“You couldn’t save her either. You didn’t kill her and you couldn’t save her.”
“I was supposed to take care of you. She said, Take care of Polly, and I let him take you.”
“He was my father, Etcher. And I was just a little girl. And I don’t remember much of what happened except that you loved my mother, even then I knew that, and that’s why I’ve come back. And if you hate yourself now then you let me down when I need you most, when I need you to tell me all the things about her that my father won’t or can’t because he never really knew her, when I need to know there was someone in our lives who loved us more than his own life, and that was you. So you have to come away from the fire now, and tell me. Please.”
In the glow of the crater, his face in his hands, he wept. The tears ran through his fingers and down to the ragged sleeves of his shirt. When he finished and came away from the fire he seemed very old to the girl, as though his legs would buckle beneath him, and there was enough of the father in her to find selflessness a revelation, to find the human burden of carrying an old man away from the fire a frightening thing to accept. She sat against the wall as he slept, not at his desk but on the mattress at her feet, spent of his nightmares that plopped one after another from his brain to the floor, scattering helplessly for shelter.