a father and a baby brother, all of them gone one day, leaving him behind. He gets mad, too, when he remembers they didn’t even leave him a note, just left him to try and do his best by himself. On his sixth birthday, he woke up wondering how to make the day special, when he wouldn’t have any presents or balloons. He scrambled out of his hole, his bushy tail waving, and he looked all around the park. In the pond in the middle, he saw a baby duck swimming around, and he ran straight there. The duck was so little with feathers that looked like snow. ‘Hi, Duck,’ Henry said. ‘It’s my birthday and I want to know if you want to play with me.’ Duck said, ‘Okay. Come swimming with me.’ Henry said, ‘I don’t know how to swim. But wait. I’ve got a great tail, and my feet are sort of like flippers, and maybe they’ll keep me from sinking. So here I go.’ And then Henry was in the pond with the duck and they splashed and played together for hours.
“The End,” Daniel said, and it was silent in the nursery for two or three seconds, and then Eric began to laugh his baby laugh, a gurgle more than anything else, but the sound he was making, the emotion he was conveying, was obvious, and Daniel said, “I don’t see what’s so funny. It’s a good story.”
Joan and Fancy smiled at each other and tiptoed down the hall into the kitchen. It was a Saturday, Martin was at the hospital making rounds, and Fancy pulled out a bowl and cans of tuna fish, then opened the fridge for the mayonnaise. “Daniel’s five years and seven months old and he’s writing. How about you?” Fancy said.
“How about me, what?” said Joan.
“You know,” Fancy said, and Joan did know.
The month Eric was due, Joan had done what she intended, told Martin she was taking a break from writing. “You know me,” she had said to him, “I need a room with a door to work and my study is the baby’s nursery now.” Martin had nodded. “Whatever you want to do. Whatever makes you happy.” It was so easy to get the lie past him, that would permit her to write without his knowledge, to keep him and their family far away from the precious part of herself. Still, she had been surprised he did not question her ability to cut herself off from her work, for whatever period of time, and disappointed to know he wouldn’t think of scaling the stone walls of her imaginary castle. Where did he store all the knowledge he had gleaned about her during their eight years together, or had he cleared his mind entirely, simplified his life, patients and research coming first, good and loving fathering in the off hours. Regardless, the lie was not supposed to come true, and more than a year had passed since Joan had written a word, those rare babies still figuring into her dreams. She had no satisfactory answer to Fancy’s unstated question, and it caused the usual sharp pain in her heart. For the past year, she had kept small notebooks and pens in her nightstand, in the nursery dresser, in her bag, but the pages remained blank, all that hostile white space, and she wondered if it was her fault, that the small notebooks made her think of journals, of diaries, repositories of dated lies and half-truths.
“I’ve seen Daniel so intent at his desk, but I didn’t know he was writing a story,” Joan said to Fancy instead. To celebrate his coming advancement into first grade, Joan and Martin had bought him a small white desk. Daniel had known what he wanted. “Something,” he said, “that makes everything I do look good.”
“First one I’ve heard,” Fancy said. “But that cherub’s got a first-rate imagination, just like yours. See how well the yellow walls worked out.”
Joan wanted to tell Daniel she heard him reading his story to Eric, praise and encourage him, express her thrill that he was her miraculous son, a writer just like she was. She nearly said something, until she thought back to the Joan in the story she was actually living, and knew that Joan would not interfere prematurely in the creative life of her firstborn.
“Daniel wrote a story,” Joan told Martin in bed that night. She felt the mattress depressing as his long body rolled over, felt his breath on her cheek. She stared up at the white ceiling. Why hadn’t they painted their bedroom a color specially chosen to increase or decrease the particular characteristics of its inhabitants, as they had done with the rooms their children lived in? Fancy had never presumed to suggest they paint their room, but what did she make of their white box? What did white signify, aside from purity, cleanliness, simplicity? Hostility, Joan thought, considering the pages of those notebooks stashed and unmarked. But why not white, and why bother now, when no paint color in their bedroom could alter their own long-formed personalities.
“I know,” Martin said. “He’s been showing them to me.”
“Them?” Joan said, and sat up. “He’s written more than the one Fancy and I overheard today?”
“Maybe three or four,” Martin said. “He finds me and hands me a story and waits until I read it, then wants to talk about it with me, asks me what I think. I’ve told him he’s inherited your talent.”
Joan twisted her hair up in a bun, found a pin on the nightstand, and stabbed it in. “Why wouldn’t he bring me his stories instead of you?”
Martin pulled Joan back down. “Maybe it’s a father-son thing, who knows.” She let him stroke her face, her neck, but when he reached to kiss her, she said, “I’m wiped. I’ve got to sleep.”
But he was asleep before her, and in the dark, the moon through the open drapes highlighted the whiteness of their room. Joan thought of Daniel writing away and debated how long the duration could be, without writing, before a writer was no longer considered a writer.
It took Daniel several months before he told Joan he was writing stories. She didn’t ask why he had chosen his father first, kept all that to herself, just said, “I think that’s absolutely wonderful, I can’t wait to read them,” and Daniel dashed away into his room and came back with three one-pagers. Then the stories grew longer, to two pages, then three, then more, and Daniel brought Joan every new one first, and every single one featured Henry the Squirrel.
She marveled how Daniel made him a Cub Scout, an animal tracker, a hiker, a surfer, a sailor, a long-distance swimmer making his way from Miami to Cuba, finding the particulars of the ocean’s currents from the set of encyclopedias kept on the bottom shelf of the living-room bookcase. Daniel put Henry into risky situations, ascribed to him a catalogue of fears, and then forced the squirrel to use his wily imagination to overcome the challenges he faced. What would Henry do now that he was stranded at the Everest base camp; how might he tame the shark following him in the ocean; how could he pull a teenager drowning in a pool to safety?
In the stories Joan wrote when she was Daniel’s age, she had murdered her characters, while Daniel had his one character facing down dangers and searching for answers. The genesis of the stories was clear to her: because Daniel felt loved and safe within his family, he could imagine himself taking risks, venturing out onto figurative limbs. He was lucky, Joan thought. She had only felt loved and safe within the worlds she created.
Joan encouraged his writing, praised him honestly, offered him help when he said a passage wasn’t coming out right. He would return to her again, saying, “I think I got it now,” and Joan would find he had not changed a word, or he had changed words, but not as she suggested. At first she was taken aback, reacting, she realized, as a writer, as her own editor, as the editor she had been for other novelists at Gravida, and not as a mother of a little boy finding his own storytelling path. The way Daniel threw away her suggestions—her editorial advice actually—stung, but she had done the same thing with her own editors. When Malcolm West was assigned to Other Small Spaces, he was just a few years older than Joan, his youth and inexperience turning him dictatorial, forcing her to attend their meetings with a false piety, calling him a few days later to report that her attempts to execute his suggestions had all failed. My fault, not yours, she always said, and her first collection was published as she wanted,
