The room began to darken. I could hear the clock ticking, a gutter creaking, the refrigerator humming. A loon called out twice, slicing at the evening, cutting all excess away. This is this, it said. That is that. A breeze shook the blinds. I didn’t notice when the trapezoid of light disappeared. I didn’t notice it was night until I heard a gravelly throat clear from the doorway.
I sat up. In the red glow of Paul’s night-light I saw a man’s silhouette. My first thought was that it was Leo, come back. I thought it was Leo, and a feeling of dread or relief—or both—went through me.
It wasn’t Leo, though.
It was my dad. “Your mom sent me,” he said. “I knocked?”
He must have come through the unlocked door, come hunting through the empty house while I’d been sleeping. Had I been sleeping? He looked at me sitting in Paul’s bed, sitting guiltily mussed, like some teenage Goldilocks in droopy socks and a sweaty T-shirt.
“Madeline?” he asked.
I saw the room the way it must have looked to him. Red night-light in the corner, pinecones circling the dresser, bunnies and bears on the shelves overhead—and me, all by myself in bed, as if I’d made an elaborate fort in the woods, or something, as if I’d made everything up and he’d walked in on me playing dolls or pretend. For a second I felt like the littlest of little kids. I scooted to the edge of the bed, hooked my heels on the baseboard.
“Wouldn’t’ve come in,” he apologized. “But, I saw your tennis shoes by the door—”
He was wearing a shirt I’d worn myself, a soft gray flannel that was tight across his chest, but that had hung from my shoulders when I’d worn it to school last spring. His gray ponytail was threaded through the back of his Twins cap, as usual. He was blinking his eyes to adjust to the light.
“Everything okay?”
Maybe I was wrong to think that there was only one answer to that question that would keep me from walking straight over and setting my face against his chest.
“Yep.”
“Your friend’s family? They—?”
I could see how much it cost him to say even that much. Hadn’t he always made it seem a great kindness—the greatest kindness of all—not to ask too many questions? Wasn’t that something I’d always known? Hadn’t he taught me that much?
“They just left. I’m on my way home now.”
If that was overtly false, he didn’t challenge me. “Okay” was all he said, setting his big palm over his mouth again, rubbing away whatever remains of an expression might have been there. Then he turned and headed out, me behind him.
He passed on about a decade after that. Two strokes in his last months made his face look softer, fatter. He became almost a fat man in the end, overnight it seemed, though he must have been gaining weight for years, slowly—as he walked less and drove his ATV more, as he stopped canoeing any farther than across the lake. I came home once that last year to help my mom winterize the place, and I saw that someone had hung a bird feeder from one of the front pines. All day long Dad watched birds come and go. I remember sitting with him one violet evening as the sun went down, watching birds congregate in the snow outside. At some point I lifted my hand and said, “Look, a nuthatch.” I knew immediately I was wrong—the house finch hopped to a branch and shat. I knew he knew as well, and even so, he nodded.
That’s the kind of person my dad was.
Here’s what my mom was like. That same winter, as I stood on a stool tacking quilts over the window, as the birds fought for seed outside—and my dad slept in his chair—she went on and on about my father as a young man. “He would have followed me anywhere,” she said, not bothering to whisper. “He didn’t know if he wanted to start school or go to work for his daddy or go fishing. He just didn’t know. He was turning circles, going nowhere! I knew what he should do.”