A case of dolls, some talking, some mute. Then, I acquired a bed to place them on, as much as a place for her to sleep, a pink and white floral canopy with matching comforter, dresser, chifforobe, hope chest and vanity. And flowers, flowers everywhere. Hand-painted, glow-in-the-dark stars and smiling planets decorated her ceiling.
But with her first look at her room, my daughter just laughed.
“You’re joking.”
“No joke,” I said
“What’d you do? Call in a cheerleading squad?”
“I thought it was nice,” I said.
“It is,” she said. “So very nice.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
She paused, fixing me with her stare, as if still trying to sum me up. She put a hand on my forearm.
“I can see this is going to take some work,” she said with a heavy sigh, pushing me back out of the room and closing the door between us.
g
My daughter’s name is Hero.
There is no part of that sentence I feel any responsibility for, but some things simply cannot be helped. The subtle events of life, those small, unnoticed moments that at the time seem so remote, come back to you in the most unexpected and frightening ways. Past overtakes present. It returns in the form of twelve-year-old girls who look upon you with pursed lips and oh-so-skeptical frowns; who avoid your eyes when you walk into a room; who stand noticeably apart from you reading grocery store tabloid banners, laughing quietly to themselves without sharing the joke, while you hunt frozen dinners and avoid the prying disapproval of other shopping parents.
I navigated the food aisles with an overladen grocery cart, the left front wheel whirling and spinning without ever seeming to touch the floor. The cart stubbornly veered to the side, and I nearly took out a display of cereal boxes, then a tattooed stock boy pricing cottage cheese, before ramming into an open freezer resting in the middle of the aisle, scattering its stacks of fish sticks out across the linoleum. Mothers shook their heads and turned away while a pair of college students, drunk or stoned, burst into giddy fits. My daughter, circling in an orbit that kept her far from me, focused her attention elsewhere, leisurely brushing her fingertips along a row of soup cans before sashaying around the corner and down another aisle.
If you live in a place long enough, it begins to occupy two spaces in time at once, or sometimes even more. A row of neat, multicolored condos now, but formerly a high vacancy office plaza. A multiplex movie house that once had been a mini-golf arcade, which had been built over an old mom and pop grocery. Once, a field of tall thin pines, where impatient teens would throw caution and clothes and themselves to the knobby ground—now, a deluxe supermarket with pharmacy, sushi bar and three-level parking. They’re all here. Pasts encroaching upon the present, reasserting themselves in a swell of memories.
Once an independent, childless thirty-something. Now—
They tell me I am Hero’s father, confirmed by tests that go all the way down to our shared DNA. Less than a year ago, I’d received the subpoena, lawyers requesting that I donate “material” for a paternity test in a divorce proceeding—for a woman I could only vaguely remember. Oddly, I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, hadn’t seen a reason to refuse or protest. I’d believed the whole thing impossible, absurd. A mere lark, a simple mistake from which the wonders of modern science would surely absolve me. Then the results had come back positive.
I was apprehensive about parenthood, my relationship with my own parents consisting mostly of a rocky and unsettled series of misunderstandings and doused hopes. I’d moved in with my grandfather when I’d turned 18, into the very house where I now lived. We had resolved most of our disagreements, though, by the time my parents died in an accident several years ago, on their first cross-country trip in the new RV after retirement, never knowing they had a granddaughter upon whom to dote.
Watching now as Hero lifted grocery bags into the truck with me, always reaching first for the heaviest, I found myself still wary, doubtful, perplexed by her stout form, muscular through her neck and shoulders, her dark freckled complexion, her flowing brown hair, her bruising wit. These traits came from somewhere, but likely not from me. Perhaps from Hero’s mother, Val, though she was only an obscure, possibly invented, memory to me, an impression of a gloriously drunken evening of debauchery thirteen years before. When I asked if she had a picture of her mother, Hero had noted that if I couldn’t remember the mother of my child, she certainly wasn’t going to help. Still, whomever it comes from, you could see that strength everywhere in Hero herself, her arms, her calves, her face. Sweat ran in streams across her forehead. She’d wrapped her long hair atop her head in a whirl and secured it with a pencil. She’d tied her long-sleeve cover-up around her waist. A rolled-up new copy of The New Yorker was stuffed into her back pocket. I could not bring myself to ask her if she’d paid for it.
I must be in there. Somewhere.
We drove along the Augustus Parkway, the capital’s main artery connecting east and west, grown rough now with age and randomly patched with black gravel squares and ovals. Cracks and potholes littered the highway. People were jerked along in their cars beside us, bouncing awkwardly in their seats. Inside the cab of my deluxe 4x4, we could barely feel a ripple.
“If you could be any person from the 19th century, who would it be?” she asked.
“Another study, is it?”
“And it can’t be a political figure.”
I unwrapped a piece of gum while we sat at the light, offering a piece to Hero. She turned it down. A blue Chevette came up close behind and nearly rammed our bumper.
“Which century is that?” I asked through my chewing.
“Eighteen-hundreds.”
“Nonpolitical?”
“Politicians are too easy,” she said.
“You’re telling me.”
Ever since her arrival, she’d deluged me with what she called her “studies”: short exercises in empathy, guessing games, tests of logic—the works. You never knew what was coming. She flew through them rapidly, never staying with one for more than a day or so, and never revealing their results. I don’t know where she found them all. Mined, I suppose, from the depths of her imagination.
“Eighteenth century, huh?”
“Eighteen-hundreds,” she corrected. “Nineteenth century.”
“Right.”
She liked to keep the purpose behind these projects a mystery, but that didn’t keep me from pressing. Somehow, I felt she wanted me to ask.
“What’s this one for?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you that. It would spoil the surprise.”
“Just a hint. I’m very slow.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“At least tell me why it has to be the eighteenth century.”
“Eighteen-hundreds. Nineteenth century.”
“I’m
