“When does he come home for dinner?”
“Right after work,” my mother said. The officer tilted the skillet so the hot onion fell in one glop to the floor. They stood over it, huge, menacing. Fergus slinked up, sniffed, and then ate all of the sizzling onion in several giant gulps.
The soldiers confiscated our ration cards and left, leaving the front door open. Fergus followed them outside and retched up the steaming onion.
When their car was gone, I went to the window that looked out on the side yard and saw the wide track of snow my father had belly-crawled over to reach the far woods. There were no footprints—only the indent of his dragged body, a giant slug’s slime trail. I called Fergus inside when he started to eat the snow he’d thrown up on. Once he came in, he wagged his tail and sat next to my mother who dug her fingers into his coat. Her wet, red-wrecked eyes focused on me as if I were the only thing she had left in the world. I didn’t know if I could withstand that weight.
When it was 10 P.M. that night, I slipped out the side door with a backpack of clothing and what limited dry foods we could muster. My mother put a small roll of cash into the pack’s smallest pocket with a note I didn’t read. It felt too private, like a good-bye between them I didn’t want to acknowledge.
Outside, narrow pillars of trees shot up into the surrounding darkness, and the naked branches formed a canopy of thousands of interlocked, arthritic fingers. Beyond that was a fury of stars, each some bright splinter of shrapnel whose purpose was to explode and rain down until everything remained jet.
I waited for two hours at the fort while the wind picked up and my fingertips and toes throbbed with hurt and then went numb. Wherever he had gone in the woods, my father’s footprints were covered by the wind.
Well past midnight, I left the backpack inside the walls of the fort and went back to the house. My mother’s shadow was framed in the kitchen window. Her figure shifted back and forth on her heels, her fingers manically twirling the ends of her hair. The snow crunched under my feet. In the middle of the open side yard, I stopped. Something felt off as I looked into the woods to the front of the house. A quick red dot of ash breathed to life. I froze. The cigarette’s cherry rose up and brightened with fire again. That same deep fear that coursed through me earlier when the soldiers opened the door to our house surged again. I wished myself a shade, a shadow of a tree that could blend in among the natural world.
Still holding my breath, I walked inside the house to where my mother sat by the window with her knees drawn up into her chest. The combination of tenderness and desperation with which she looked at me was jarring. Her face split in three directions. “Did you see him?”
“No.”
“Did you look everywhere?”
“He wasn’t there.”
“Well. Maybe.” She opened her mouth as if to speak but fell silent, close to tears, not trusting herself.
In the morning, before the sun came up, I snuck out the back door of the house and into the woods, approaching the fort from another angle. There, I saw the backpack had been riffled through. The money, my mother’s note, and the food were gone. The clothes were strewn about. Next to the last traces of my footprints from hours before were two other sets. Each print was set deep into the snow, with a heavy heel and toe section divided by the indent from the heel’s lift. There were no signs of my father since he had taken to moving on his stomach, an image that inexplicably made me ashamed.
Fingers of light poked sideways between the tree trunks, the slanting beams each a welcoming arm of ghosts. At that moment the forest was full of ghosts—the ghost of my younger self who built the fort with Edwin. Edwin, whose makeshift gravestone rested on its side not ten meters away. And now, the ghost of my father joining the others, and I was suddenly paralyzed by the tally of these losses.
I returned to the house, slipped past the crater the bomb had left in the backyard and into the kitchen, where my mother sat at the table.
“What’d you find?”
“Those men ripped through the pack.”
“The letter?”
“It’s all gone.”
Her face looked different, her hurt was transparent and it seemed like the real tragedy was having lost whatever those words were she had written him.
I desperately wanted time to reverse. I’d pick my father off the floor, hose the chemical smell from him, and tell him I was proud of Koopman Light Company. I wanted the time I spent mourning to go backward so I could step out and chip all the russet green peels of paint from our house that had gone untended once Edwin was lost. I’d sand it away and coat it fresh with layer after layer of white primer, then change the color of the place altogether. Soft blue trim at the shutters, true the edges. Given the chance I’d go back to when my mother still had the energy of a young woman and gracefully swayed through her day, gesturing freely with her hands as she talked, pressing her clasped hands to her lips when we made her laugh. I’d go back and make a fresh start of it all. I’d nestle Edwin and me as boys into the wedge of the twin-trunked sessile oak and make a fresh start of it all. I wanted time to go back so I could have kissed Hilda, and perhaps more, wanting the experience of exploring her. I would touch upon every embarrassing moment and say no, no, no, this is not the way, and stage-direct every instance back into proper order. Whitewash each with primer. My mother finding me masturbating in the laundry room. More primer. Throwing rocks at spotlit rats. Gone. My brother dropping beneath the water. Dear god. Never happened. My father dropping to his stomach on glass that I knew pierced the flesh. My mother’s slow and painful breaking apart in front of my eyes. Whitewash it all, paint it away, gone from the world and any memory of it.
My mother stood up, walked over, and hugged me. “Okay. We’re going to the factory today then. I’ll work for your father. First, we’ll tell Martin. Martin will be furious.”