six other assorted times throughout the year.
Hero and I stepped out through the sliding door into the backyard. This had become an increasingly hazardous endeavor. Nails and screws and splinters of shaved metal and wood littered the patio slab as the wraparound porch began to rise up at the edges. If I wanted to be perfectly authentic, the cement slab, too, would need to go, but I was waffling. It was something I wanted to discuss with the contractor if he returned tomorrow. I made a mental note to call him again, even if he refused to answer. Just so he’d know I knew he wasn’t there.
Barefoot, Hero defiantly walked straight across the patio and out into the yard. The back line of my property was overgrown, dropping quickly into a steep ravine, an undeveloped and presumably undevelopable swath cutting straight through Magnolia Grove—each year creeping a bit closer. The sky above was threatening with heavy clouds, and the afternoon was turning dark.
Hero flopped down onto the unmolested long grass and gazed back up at me with a gray face.
“I hear you’re going to be killing someone.”
“Is that what this is about?”
“I think that’s kind of a big deal.”
“Janice told you, I suppose.”
“About the killing,” she said. “Yes.”
“I’m not killing anyone,” I said, bending down beside her. “I’m just arranging the execution. It’s entirely different.”
“Not for the guy dying,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exactly matter to him who does it.”
The thick overgrowth loomed in the twilight, and through the buzz and creak of the insects, we could make out sounds of small, slow movement—a neighborhood cat, most likely, or squirrels, raccoons, armadillo, the only roaming animals left to the city in this century. And us, teetering on the fringe of the wild.
“You’re leaving in a week,” I pointed out.
“I know.”
“We don’t have much time to sort all this out.”
“Sort what out?” Her eyes were closed, her lips drawn into a soft smile that might have been satisfaction.
“Us. As in, how do we proceed from here?”
“Maybe we just wait and see.”
“Wait and see what? What is there to see?”
She opened her eyes and stretched her arms out over her head into the grass with a large sigh. The pose struck me with a sense of my own vulnerability, facing the danger of a looming pounce.
“Does it bother you,” she asked, “what you do?”
“What do I do?” I asked, crouching beside her.
“Your job. Locking people up.”
“Someone has to do it,” I said. “Imagine if we didn’t.”
“I’m still collecting data on you.”
“You make me sound like an experiment.”
To this, she just shrugged, as if to say that this seemed fairly obvious. I eased the rest of the way down onto the grass beside her. A bright flash of lightning and a swift low rumble told us we didn’t have long before the storm.
“Maybe I should have given those missionaries money. God seems displeased.”
“Do you believe in God?” she asked.
“That was a joke.”
“But I’m being serious.”
“Then, yes. Of course, I believe.”
“But which god?”
“Now, that’s the kind of question I’d expect from a teenager.”
“Don’t try to change the subject.”
I sighed. “You’re overwhelming, you know.”
“You’re still changing the subject.”
“I just want to know how we’re going to do this, the father/daughter thing.”
Her eyes darkened. “I thought we were doing it.”
“You know what I mean. Visits. Holidays. That kind of stuff.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“You’re leaving.”
“And you’re rushing.” Hero sat up and stared out into the thicket, cross-legged, tearing at the grass. She didn’t sound upset, but the playfulness was lost into the silence. “Maybe coming here was a mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe we aren’t ready for this. Me. Maybe I’m not ready.”
I didn’t want to ask if this was about Geoffrey, but I felt fairly certain it had to be. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be rejected by your father, the man who’d believed he was your father for your entire life. Val had insisted that the two of them had been very close and very similar. Two peas.
“We don’t have to do this all at once,” I conceded. “Maybe we’re just trying too hard. We have time.”
“Matthew,” she said suddenly, the use of my name sounding so odd coming out of the blue. I may never have heard the word from her mouth before. It carried a desperate and ominous urgency, a plea to stop before we went too far. “I think we should consider the possibility that this may be all there is. And maybe it’s fine to just leave it at that.”
She laid bare the artifice of our relationship. Two people, bound together by a faith in something we couldn’t begin to understand, who perhaps had no business being together at all. I was trying to be a father to her, but I could never fill that role as I imagined it. Twelve years had passed, and that time belonged to another person. There was no reclaiming it. But I was her father still. Somehow, we had to make this work.
“Maybe,” I said, just as we saw the dark sheet of rain fold across the dense forest. “Don’t give up on me yet, though.”
“I didn’t say I had.”
With the arrival of August, the storms had begun to roll through, swift and overwhelming and threatening. You could set your watch by them; they never varied, punching through the thick afternoon at four, rumbling deep to the core and shading out the sun. The intermittent flashes, the occasional strike of lightning. As the winds kicked up and the horizon began to darken, everyone started taking cover, setting up in their usual seats. We settled by the large front window. The evangelists sprinted about with uncharacteristic and unbecoming panic beneath nature’s wrath. Down the block at the senior center, the elderly wheeled indoors onto glass-enclosed porches and lined up by the sill in rows as always to watch
