For a long time he was still and alone. Again he felt like lifting the television and smashing it to the concrete. But instead he turned woozily toward the empty house and opened the door and stepped into the dull flat light of the drifting entryway.
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She was atop the slide, smiling, the other children swarming the playground equipment around her, periodically peeling away to charge across the grass and asphalt to their waiting parents. Keith stood amongst them but he did not call out her name, not yet, instead standing and watching her as she shot down the polished metal slide and turned, trailed by two or three other children, apparently her friends, and clambered to the top once again, sliding down, then giving up on the slide altogether to begin running around the playground equipment. The children were playing tag or something like it, and he could hear the high-pitched screeches and laughter even from across the grass and asphalt, all the way to the edge of the parking lot. His daughter’s laughter. The laughter of her second-grade friends. And yet each time she moved too far away from them or they from her he could feel his heart seize in his chest, the moment in which she was alone there on the playground stretching out before him, time no arrow but a wobbling series of loops like yarn sprung loose of its bundle. But the children she was playing with returned to her again and again, and even as one and then two of them were called away by their parents, they would be replaced by others and he came to realize that she was not joining their game, that they were joining hers, that she was the center of their play, an idea that he found so surprising and which he embraced with a sense of relief that very nearly brought him to tears.
She did not see him until there were no longer enough children remaining for the game to keep going. It was only then that she glanced toward the parking lot and saw him there, the other parents mostly gone now, a few continuing to arrive.
She waved toward the playground, one or two children returning the gesture, and then sprinted up the hill toward him, her face a bright smile and her tiny backpack flapping behind her like a weird single wing.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said when she had arrived at his side.
“Quinny Quinn Quinn,” he said.
“Where’s Mom?”
“She had to go out so I told her I’d pick you up.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Grandpa’s sick so she went to see him.”
“Sick how?”
“He has cancer.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means he’s really sick,” he said. He was looking at her, at her tiny self, her tiny being. “Do you have all your stuff?”
“Yeah, let’s go,” she said.
“OK, bossy pants,” he said.
In the car, she asked him again how sick her grandfather was and he told her, bluntly and without preamble, that it was likely he would die. He had not even speculated what her response would be because he had not thought his way through the conversation they would have. Barb’s father had already gone through a full cycle of chemotherapy treatments the previous year, but two months ago it had been revealed that the cancer had returned and had spread throughout his body. He had deteriorated rapidly, and when Barb’s mother had called to tell her daughter that her father was in hospice she had booked the first available flight and called Keith at work to tell him that it was time. He bundled a thick sheaf of papers into his bookbag and returned home in time to drive her to the airport. She had not spoken in the car, clutching his hand and staring forward out the windshield, and when they arrived at the airport she did not release her grip for some minutes, continuing to stare straight ahead as various travelers crossed and recrossed the walkway before them. He did not say anything to her then, turning from her face to the windshield and there they remained until at last she broke the silence by telling him that she had left a list with Quinn’s schedule and that there were some things in the freezer he could reheat for dinners. He told her he would be fine. She would call him from Atlanta when she knew more. He told her he loved her and she did the same.
“So Mommy’s with Grandma and Grandpa?” Quinn asked him.
“Yes,” he said. He looked at her in the backseat. He could not read any emotional response there at all.
“Is Grandma OK?” she said.
“Yeah, Grandma’s fine.”
“OK,” Quinn said. “When’s Mommy coming home?”
“I don’t know. It might be a couple of days. Might be longer than that. She’s making sure Grandpa’s OK.”
“But Grandpa’s going to die?”
“Yes, he’s going to die.”
“Then how is she going to make him OK?”
“She just wants to be there with him. To make him feel better.”
“But he’s still going to die,” Quinn said. It was not a question.
“Yes,” he said. “He’s still going to die.”
She did not speak for a few moments. Then she said, “Could you turn the radio on?”
“Sure can,” he said.
He did so. When he looked at her again, at that part of her he could see in the rearview mirror, she displayed no emotion whatsoever. He knew already that Barb would likely be irritated with him for telling Quinn the truth of what was happening or at least for telling her on his own without Barb at his side, but Quinn had asked him and he had answered and as far as he could tell she was handling it well enough.
“When’s Mommy coming home?” she said again.
“I don’t know exactly,” he said, turning the radio down. “Maybe a couple of days. Maybe a little longer than that.”
“I want her to come home.”
“She will.”
“I want her to come home now,” she said.
He looked at her in the rearview mirror. She continued to stare out the window. “We can call her tonight,” he said.
“OK,” she said. She did not look at him.
Her face held in profile within the rectangle of the mirror. Around that reflection unscrolled the world: an endless flow of cars on the southbound interstate, full neighborhoods lined with trees, distant farm fields just rolling into spring.
The night went better than he thought it would. He knew Barb had been called in to the elementary school on several occasions over the previous year for what Quinn’s teachers had come to call their daughter’s “strong will,” a behavior that amounted to an ongoing problem according to the school but which Keith had seen little of during his time at home. Nonetheless, he knew it was not something Barb or Quinn’s teachers had invented. His daughter was, if nothing else, a little girl who expected to be treated like an adult, a facet of her personality that Keith was actually quite proud of but which Barb found annoying. And indeed he had to admit that, when Quinn asserted herself, her personality — her strong will — was more than either of them knew what to do with. If she decided she did not want to do what she had been told to do, she simply would not do it. She would throw no tantrums; she would simply refuse to do what was asked unless it was her will to comply.
So he had been concerned that Quinn might be difficult that first evening but in actual fact she gave him no trouble, perhaps because he did not ask her to do anything she did not want to do. He was aware that he was not really parenting her but he simply did not see the need to adhere to the house rules Barb had set down for their daughter. Not now. He bathed her later than she was usually bathed and dressed her in pajamas and they sat on the couch for half an hour — this already an hour past her bedtime — and watched a cartoon about an animal Keith could not identify.