A few years later, Nina was born. My father loved parenthood right away; my mother was more ambivalent. Her maternity leave made her feel claustrophobic, and when she finally returned to work, she found that her position had been downsized and her path to promotion all but blocked. Outraged, she left the firm and resolved to find a new job, but doing so with an infant proved harder than she thought. A year passed, then another. She promised herself she would return to work when the time was right, and in the meantime, she tried to embrace her role as a stay-at-home mother.
In the following years, my father sold a few more patents, and mymother was heartened by their expanding financial horizon. Six years after Nina was born, I came along, and a few years after that, my father secured a licensing deal for his latest invention: the nanofiltration membrane. At this point, my mother suggested moving into a bigger home—a townhouse, at last. But my father thought our original apartment was adequate, and he preferred to put any extra capital into the maintenance of the camp. He hoped to retire early from his job with the city, explaining that they could live off his patents, as long as they lived within their means.
“What more do we need?” was my father’s outlook.
“Where do I begin?” was my mother’s.
When it came to material wealth, my father had already achieved what he thought necessary; my mother was just getting started. But more importantly, my mother was perpetually frustrated by her own unrealized earning power. My father was happy to provide for her, but she had never wanted to be reliant on him financially. She still clung to the idea that she would restart her career; she resented that my father seemed to have forgotten she ever had one.
When I was seven, my father retired early in order to spend more time at the camp and more time with us. That same year, my mother finally landed a job that would put her squarely back on the corporate path she had abandoned a decade earlier. As my father’s career wound down, my mother’s ramped up. He wanted to spend more time in the Adirondacks; she wanted to spend less. He wanted to give his daughters large swaths of unstructured time in the woods; my mother wanted to give us the resources she believed would lead to conventional success (good schools, high-paying jobs). It wasn’t long before my mother’s income far exceeded what my father’s had ever been. As the financial power balance shifted, their divergent values came to the fore, and cracks began to form. At first, they were determined to make it work, despite their conflicting priorities. Summer remained my father’s domain. We spent the whole season at Catwood Pond, with my mother visiting for just one week each August before returning to work in the city. Conversely, during the schoolyear, my mother called the shots and set the schedule. This divide-and-conquer approach workedwell enough, but eventually, it was clear that it wasn’t just a parenting strategy. My parents were leading separate lives. The unraveling of their marriage happened over time, as it often does, until the winter I was sixteen, when the tenuous thread binding them together finally snapped.
Chapter 8
On the morning Nina is to leave for Stockholm, I wake in my creaky twin bed from a confounding dream: I coughed up my own heart. One quick retch and there it was in my hand, continuing its steady, purple thud.
Bewildered, I thrusted it toward hazy passersby, asking, “Can I live without this?”
They all shrugged—not knowing, not caring, or both.
Can I live without this?Perhaps I don’t need my heart after all, my dream-self decided, so I threw it toward the frozen pond, where it fell through a hole in the ice and sank.
Over breakfast, Nina attributes my dream to nerves. She never has dreams herself (no time), and she has little patience for the details of my nighttime phantasms.
“Do you think it means I’m heartless?” I press. “Or emotionally arrested?”
“Something like that,” she says, distracted as she rinses her plate and verifies something on her phone. It’s easy to see that she wants to get moving toward her new life.
“Goodrich is going to mail you a physical copy of Dad’s will,” she reminds me. “And they’ll keep a copy at their office as well.”
I nod. Last week, we updated my father’s will and switched the power of attorney designations from Nina to me, putting me legally in charge of my father’s finances and medical decisions. “It’s just a precaution in case something happens unexpectedly,” Nina had assured me. “But it should be you, since you’re local.”
Now, as she prepares to leave, I feel the heaviness of the responsibility begin to descend. She takes a final walk through the house, where she has left a profusion of lists and labels meant to guide me from here on out, and that’s in addition to the digital files she has shared with me: spreadsheets, documents, and a calendar that she will be able to monitor from abroad.
I help Nina load the last of her things into the Subaru—which will now be my car, with the Raisin being demoted to backup. Nina closes the trunk, checks her watch, and looks around. “Where’s Dad?”
“He was just here.” I turn and go back into the house, where I find my father in his room, changing back into his nightshirt.
“Dad, what are you doing?” I ask.
“I think I’ll have a rest,” he says.
“That’s fine, but can you rest in the car? We have to drive Nina to the airport.”
“The airport? Where is she going?”
“Stockholm.”
“Stockholm!” He looks both excited and concerned.
“Yes, she’s leaving today,” I say. “And I’ll be staying here with you.”
He looks me up and down, skeptically.
“Can you change so we can go?” I say, holding up the beige turtleneck I had helped him put on less than thirty minutes ago. “We don’t want to make her late for the plane.”
“I don’t see why I can’t wear this,” he says of his knee-length linen nightshirt.
We negotiate for a moment, and when we finally make it out to the driveway, he is wearing his nightshirt over a pair of jeans. For footwear, he has chosen lime-green Crocs.
