“My colleagues will keep an eye. Your daughter isn’t going anywhere.”
Nathan doesn’t stop talking for the next thirty minutes, and when it’s over, he can’t recall what he said. He can’t remember the questions the detective asked either. He can’t remember why he agreed to let the detective talk to Ginny again, on her own, without him. He has no memory.
Nathan waits for his daughter back on the bench. He holds his coat folded over his arm and scrolls through his phone. He texts Denise that he is at the police station and looks at the screen, expecting her reply. None comes. He reads articles. The articles are about lifestyles, social constructs, deconstructing social constructs, politics, motherhood, decorating. He consumes. A few sound-bites of his interview resurface. Was his wife unhappy? How was she unhappy? Was it work? Was it the kids? Was it him? All three, Nathan told the detective. Both Nathan and the school undervalued her. Both expected her to respond to emotion robotically, expected her to calm others’ anxieties, whims, and manias, and this meant she could never have any of her own. Of course, that’s what’s so funny about Marion, Nathan told the detective. She sees herself as a calm person, and she’s not. Although she is rational.
“How was she unhappy with her children?” the detective asked.
“Ginny’s a teenager, and Jane’s a little weird. But it’s not that she was unhappy with them. Is unhappy. She’s unhappy with who she becomes when she’s around them. She deals with a lot of parents in her position, in her job, and many of the parents seem unsatisfactory to her. She said it was as if they were performing an idea of parenthood.”
“Did Marion parent or perform?”
“She parented. She couldn’t let herself perform. She’s very hard on herself.”
“But she didn’t like how she parented.”
“No. She didn’t like being a parent.”
The detective’s questions seem odd to Nathan now, on the bench, but at the time it felt like he was with a doctor or a priest. Nathan had to answer for his health or his soul. He reads articles. He tells himself, I didn’t say anything about the woman in Dumbo. I didn’t mention the phone Marion drowned. I did what I was supposed to do.
Meanwhile, the detective questions Ginny in a benign manner. He asks questions to make her feel more comfortable, and then he asks why she keeps running away from school. She doesn’t tell him that she feels like she’s being watched. She doesn’t tell him about her strong belief that she shouldn’t be there anymore. The way the teachers peer at her—it’s not that they are concerned. They want her somewhere else.
Then the detective asks the same questions about her mother that he asked in their first interview. Ginny gives answers as if they are different, but they are the same answers as before. The detective never asks her where she thinks her mother has gone, and she appreciates that. He does ask her about her father, how he is doing. She shrugs her shoulders to say fine. The detective waits for her to elaborate, to fill in the quiet with chatter, as her father has done, but Ginny likes the quiet. It doesn’t make her feel like she’s done something wrong. The detective sighs and releases Ginny back to her father. He shakes the father’s hand and he shakes Ginny’s hand. Nathan Palm repeats that he is grateful for the detective’s time and attention. The detective says, “This is my job.”
Ginny wants to walk home from the police station, and Nathan agrees. A long walk, but he could use the exercise. He offers to carry Ginny’s backpack, and she lets him. He makes a noise when he shifts it onto his back, and she remembers her mother with her backpack. She looks at Nathan and thinks about telling him about the check at the diner, but he’s preoccupied with her backpack because it’s hurting his shoulders. They’re nearing the Gowanus Canal when he tells her to hang on. “This is unacceptable,” he says. “You are a child.”
Nathan opens the backpack, violates a boundary, and pulls out a health textbook. “What is this? You don’t need this.” He walks to the fetid canal, smelling of chemicals, shit, smog, and oil, and throws The Mystery of the Human Body into the water. It makes a splash in the crud. “What do they want from you? What do they want from us? Are we supposed to carry whatever weight they give us? Are we at their mercy?”
Her father is gripping the railing and swearing loudly and repeatedly. Ginny looks up and down Union Street to see if anyone has noticed. Nathan swears a final time, leans back from the railing, and hangs his head down.
“I have homework to do,” Ginny says.
This gets her father going again, and he reaches into the backpack once more. He pitches into the canal a copy of Frankenstein and a folder of Xeroxes. “This is unacceptable.”
“This is not a book burning,” Ginny says.
“This is a book sinking,” Nathan says.
“A book disintegration.”
“A book melting.” As father and daughter name this strange event, Nathan launches the entire contents of the backpack into the dark water. Ginny counts the gloopy splashes.
“Doesn’t this canal catch fire sometimes?”
Nathan laughs and resumes his journey back to the brownstone with the limp backpack on his shoulder. Ginny trails behind. The walk from Gowanus to the house is charmed for Nathan after the release at the canal.
When he unlocks the front door of his house, Nathan finds himself regretting his behavior. Should a writer throw books into a Superfund site? The dog-eared copy of Frankenstein is particularly troubling. How would this be received by the literary community? How will his daughter remember it? Still, he felt gleeful and empty afterward. Now he recognizes the emptiness as hunger. He should make lunch. He looks at his daughter.
At this time of day, they aren’t usually around each other. She seems to realize this as well, and looks up at him as if he’s a species other than human. Nathan asks if she is hungry, and she guesses she is.
Nathan will heat up tomato soup and make grilled cheese sandwiches. He asks Ginny to start constructing the sandwiches and she agrees easily, so he is allowed to be human again. Fuck the literary community. Fuck Mary Shelley. Fuck the school. He’s furious on behalf of his daughter, who is being punished because or instead of her mother. He pictures the shoebox of cash in the basement but replaces this image with the new memory of slinging the textbooks into the canal. He has unburdened his daughter. She should feel free from the school and its rigidity. And so Nathan is congratulating himself on his accidentally good antiestablishment-dad move when he notices that Ginny’s hands are shaking as she holds the knife. He should say, “Let me,” but instead he says, “What’s wrong?”
“All my books are in the Gowanus.”
“So?”
“So I have homework I need to do. I’m not allowed to fall behind.”
“That fucking school. I’ll buy you new books.”
“They had notes in them.”