“Ahoy, sailor!” How sweetly she places her hands on her hips, cocks her head, plays the part. “Are we sailing the high seas today?”
“Ahoy!” she says again, her conviction greater than her pirate vocabulary.
“Aha!” Dan says. “Another actress in the family!”
His daughter blushes and beams and darkness wells inside him. Please, God. Not again. It’s too soon to consider, to entertain dreams ofdeparture, of becoming anything other than his sweet child. No more invented worlds where he doesn’t exist, no more sharing, not yet, she’s only seven years old and still his—his only—only his! His hands tingle, begging to offer her something else to belong to. He only has himself.
“I don’t think so.” He smiles benignly enough. “Wealth management, maybe. Buried treasure, it’s a good start.”
Dan chuckles, looks to his scrambling children. “Lunch soon?”
Over Dan’s shoulder, his wife is reaching into a large bag, procuring a tidy plastic pack of Kleenex. She is wiping the snot and rubbing lip balm onto her littlest, while talking to the middle ones about their evening plan. She is watching the oldest, who is shooting a horse with a water gun. She is probably thinking about how to have a conversation about guns and violence and fairground games. She is probably thinking about how to adjust all of their meals to their liking, how to stop them from hitting each other, and making sure all their homework gets done in time for tomorrow. Watching her feels like watching a future he once believed in, as familiar as if he had occupied it.
His pockets are empty except for Viola’s overstretched hair elastic and his own wallet.
“Sure,” he says. “Let’s do lunch.”
As Dan departs, Sebastian bounds over, wielding a large stick like a sword. “Ahoy!”
“Ahoy!” Viola says, picking up her own smaller stick and raising it en garde.
“Enough!” Al snaps. “You’re going to hurt somebody!”
Shocked, Viola drops the branch. Because it is the only thing he can do, Al resumes wandering through the grounds, unsure where he is leading. When he gathers the energy to turn back, his daughter is brooding, beard falling out, eye patch smudged, untouched by the music of the carousel. She looks at him and asks—
“Was Mom in the movies?”
Her father looks at her sternly, as though she has broken a promise.Why does she feel so wrong? Wasn’t her mother an actress? Or maybe she was a fortune teller. Her mother is receding in her mind like the ocean, something so big she can hardly get her head around it. When she picks it up it disappears into droplets.
“No, Vi. She did some acting, but it was only TV. They don’t make recordings of TV.”
“They don’t?”
“Afraid not. Mommy lived with us, remember?”
She is tired of her mother being dead. Nothing ever changes about it. For a while, she expected her to walk back through the door, that death might be somewhere like California. But every day that passes makes it clearer: there will be no coming back.
As far as she can remember, her mother was mostly not there. She was never allowed to look at her, not on the television and not behind the closed door of her room. The strongest imprint is a sense of waiting, cold glass pressed up against her nose and a certain terror. Some facts seem important, and she clutches them like playing cards. Her mother was allergic to stone fruits. She doesn’t know what a stone fruit is, but it doesn’t sound very good. Her mother wore beautiful scarves on her head. Her mother grew up in Salem, which is where witches came from. But the sound of her voice?
“I can’t even remember her.”
When a person dies, can their memories die too? A terrible, tremulous thought.
Her father squats, eye-level. He takes both of her hands firmly between his and says:
“We all came here together, remember?”
The landscape of the fair breathes life into the story. She was there at the petting zoo, in her soft brown sweater, placing animal feed into their tiny hands. And wasn’t she there, swinging Viola by the arms as they waited in line for the tiny train? Didn’t she buy them each a candy apple, Sebastian’s dipped in sprinkles? Didn’t they all learn to square dance? The vision catches like a lit candle, flickers like a dream. Yes, hermother might have been just there, with sparkles in her eyes and color in her cheeks. The thought of it carries her away.
“She was the queen of the fair,” he says. “She got to ride on the pumpkin float. She awarded the prize for best bovine. Everybody loved her.”
“Did she wear a crown?”
“Absolutely. Don’t you remember?”
She doesn’t remember. But he is looking at her like she needs to make it true.
“I think so,” she says.
