Nina raises her eyebrows but says nothing, and we pile into the car. The nearest international airport is in Burlington, and on the three-hour drive, we have plenty of time to review every last detail of my father’s care. By the time we cross into Vermont, Nina’s task-mastering has given way to a jittery optimism.
We park and walk to the terminal, where Nina checks in and requests an upgrade. Persuasive but not pushy, she succeeds. Businessclass it will be. We watch her neatly packed suitcases float away on the conveyor belt, bound for New York and then Stockholm. With all her to-dos done, she finally relaxes enough to become tearful, hugging my father as if this is their final goodbye. I suppose the version of him she meets next will be changed, but that’s true of all of us, to some extent.
“There, there,” my father pats her back, seeking to ease her distress, though he doesn’t understand its source.
Nina sniffs assertively and squeezes her eyes closed as if to halt the flow of tears. When she opens them again, she looks purposeful.
“You’ve got this, Cricket,” she says to me, grabbing my shoulders and giving me a little shake. I nod, which seems to satisfy her. With that, she turns. We watch as she breezes through the short security line, moving buoyantly in the direction of her future.
Back in the short-term parking lot, I find myself scanning the rows for the Raisin before I remember: I’m a Subaru woman now. I open the passenger door and stay close as my father effortfully climbs into his seat, clinging to the roof of the car for balance, or for dear life, or both. By the time I get into the driver’s seat, he is grumbling in frustration.
“This damn thing…” He wrestles with the seat belt, pulling it at the wrong angle and in the wrong direction.
I lean over and slide the belt across his torso, but just before I latch it, he grabs it from me and pushes it into the buckle as if delivering the final blow in a battle. Once it clicks, he relaxes and his annoyance quickly dissipates.
“So, where to?” he asks.
I let him know we are heading home, but the drive will take a few hours. We pull away from the airport, and only now does the weight of my new role finally hit me. I wonder if this is how first-time parents feel when they bring their newborns home. It’s not that my father is as fragile as an infant, but he is dependent on me. It’s terrifying to finally be in charge.
“Have you ever been to Sweden?” I ask, knowing that he has, several times.
“Not yet.” My father shakes his head. “Someday, perhaps. Although I’m quite busy. And why would I go all the way to Sweden when I could go to… Saratoga?”
I laugh. “Or Scranton?”
“Or Scarsdale.”
“Or Saskatoon?”
My father smiles, his watery gray eyes bright in the midday sun. He says, “This is where I belong. There’s really no place better.”
This far north, there is a voraciousness to early summer, brief though it is. The season snaps into action, flashing its brazen greens, knowing it must exist to the hilt. It’s not like the lazy, wilted summer of the South, nor is it like the long, abundant, sun-soaked California version. In the Adirondacks, summer is an ecstatic, too-bold season that, even when in full swing, already seems to long for itself.
“Will you miss Nina?” I ask.
“Certainly,” he says. “But she deserves a nice trip.”
Though we have tried to prepare him, he doesn’t seem to grasp that Nina has moved away and that I am her replacement. I could tell him for the hundredth time, but instead, I just agree, “She does.”
He begins poking at the control panel in search of a radio station, then grows frustrated with the touchscreen he can’t decipher. “This damn thing…”
I help him scan the channels, pausing so he can react to each and finally settling on a station playing Roy Orbison. We pick up speed as Roy warbles about heartbreak, and within minutes, my father is asleep.
Chapter 9
Over the next few days, we settle into something of a rhythm. When my father asks about Nina, I try out an array of responses. “She moved to Stockholm” proves too jarring for him, so I experiment with “She’s on a trip” and “She’s out for a bit.” Those explanations land better, and I see that my job is to find answers that will satisfy him without telling outright lies. I am the filter through which his reality now flows.
In addition to getting reacquainted with my father, I am also reacquainting myself with the home and the land I once knew so well. Everything is smaller than I remember: the house itself, the lawn, the pond, the sky. I remember it all stretching on forever, huge and wild and a little bit treacherous. But now, everything feels scaled down and approachable, like I’m living in a miniature of the past.
Our days are long and slow. I have plenty to do, but nothing is urgent, and I have time to revisit my old haunts. There is the lean-to, where we often slept as kids—sometimes six or eight of us in a row of sleeping bags, crammed together like cigars in a box, our giggles echoing over the water until the last of us fell asleep. There is the guest cabin, which I always avoided, believing it haunted. There is a patch of blueberry bushes where I once “ran away” at the age of seven. Using a dishcloth and stick to fashion a bindle, I took off up the driveway until I reached the bushes, which were still within earshot of the house (I wanted to observe the eruption of concern once my family realized I was gone). Waiting in the warm soil, I could hear my parents talking about the car needing work; hear them say something about “that jackass Rod Seavey”; hear them go silent as they turned back to theirpreoccupations; but I did not hear them mention me. Not only were they not frantic with worry, but they hadn’t even noticed my absence. After an hour (which felt like three days, by my count), I grew bored. I grabbed a handful of damp dirt and smeared it across my cheeks. I mussed my hair so I would look like a proper runaway. I gripped my bindle and limped back toward the house, throwing the door open so they could not possibly miss my dramatic return. I remember my mother saying something like, “Cricket, I need you to clean up your art supplies. They’re all over the porch.” She didn’t notice my dirt-smeared face, my knotted hair, or the fact that I had been away foryears. In that moment, I realized that my mother never noticed me when I was good, or even when I was gone. She only noticed me when I made a mess that somehow inconvenienced her. But my father caught on and indulged me: “What do we have here, a little orphan in from the cold?” Validated, I dropped my bindle and ran into his arms.
Then there is the narrow boathouse where our aluminum boat still bobs, knocking lightly against the dock. Mostly unused these days, its eight-horsepower engine is small but capable. My father taught me to drive it when I was only eight, which horrified my mother, but she did not intervene. On more than one occasion, I went for a spin by myself when I was barely old enough to see over the bow. Only once did I run out of gas in the middle of the pond and need to be rescued by Nina, who towed me back with the canoe. That summer, my mother only stayed at camp for six days, and I missed her. To combat that feeling, I took a jar of her fancy face cream and smeared it on the door of the boathouse. I still remember the sensation of my fingers digging into the thick cream and then dragging four long streaks, like oil paint, across the chipped paint. The streaks are still there on the door nearly two decades later—waxy, hardened, but unmistakable.
When I was nine or ten, some trees were cleared in the wooded area behind the house to afford a better view of the pond. A series of dry stumps remained, and from them, I created a world. I transformed the clearing into a fast-paced animal hospital, where stumps became operating tables and recovery rooms. Someone was always in crisis, and as head surgeon, it was up to me to save them. Though Ispecialized in treating exotic mammals (ocelots, lemurs, reindeer), I would take any patient who came through the door: ponies, stoats, dragons.
The hospital was well-equipped. In the hollow of a tree, I had hidden the receiver of an old rotary phone, whose curly wire hung loose, not connected to anything. A large rock functioned as the front desk, where frantic patients explained their plights. I had somehow acquired a vintage doctor’s bag that I stuffed with supplies (bandages, string, kitchen tongs, knitting needles). A crumbling rock wall was my office, where I wasnotto be disturbed, except in the case of emergency—and there was always an emergency. A skunk might need stitches, an alligator might need a C-section, or a zebra might need a tail amputation. There were quieter days, too: routine checkups for dogs and cats, the braiding of horses’ manes, the clipping of lions’ claws. I did it all while managing a sizeable imaginary staff, who were all incredibly deferential. All but Alex, my promising but unruly protégé who happened to be a squirrel.
“For Christ’s sake, Alex,” I would bark into the tree phone. “This is the third time you’ve been late this month. I see so much potential in you, but I can’t work with potential alone.”
