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.”
“Sure,” I called. “That makes sense.”
“All righty, then,” she said, and clapped her hands. The dogs ran off, glancing back at us. The woman turned and labored back toward her porch. I once again surveyed the view — the splintery farmhouse, the lake, my daughter, dew netted in her hair.
“Excuse me!” I called, scything my way toward the old woman, until I managed to rip myself free of the field. I swatted the grass from my pant legs. She blinked back at me with opaque blue eyes. “Pardon me for being so slow to respond. My daughter and I—” The field spat forth Meadow, looking impish with thistles in her hair. “My daughter and I are taking a little road trip together and we do, actually do need a place to stay. For a day or two before we head on.”
The woman’s eyes shifted vaguely in Meadow’s direction. “How did you hear about me? Someone in town?”