Page 19 - WTP Vol. VIII #4

bird on the high shelves or beams. She needs to check the heights in the living room. The rug odor now seems heavy and evil. The only sound is her father pounding his cane, shouting unintelligible words
that toggle between fear and rage. Worried that he’ll have a stroke, she races back to him, grateful to see that he’s still standing there in the hall, too small for the nightclothes he has been wearing all day, now rumpled and, she suspects, wet.
“Where’s Beryl?” he demands. His eyes are furious, poking at her, but she can see that he is in tears and his pajama bottoms are twisted. He is leaning on his cane with both hands.
“I’m Jo,” says Joanna suddenly. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? “Dad, look at me. I’m Jo.” As be- fore, his eyes glance off of her, searching for someone, and she realizes that person is not herself.
“I want to go home.” Her father is weeping now, lean- ing on his cane, jabbing at his chest with a fist, his mouth a thin quaver of flesh. “Right now. Take me home.” He allows her to straighten his pajama bot- toms and smooth down his flyaway hair. Trembling, Joanna dresses her father in his jacket and cap, then shoves her arms into her woolen coat and finds her handbag. Her feet are too swollen for her shoes,
so she leaves the condo without them. She grasps her father’s elbow, helping him over the threshold, glancing over her shoulder for signs of her bird. She consoles herself with the notion that Lyra is more likely to find her way back in the silence.
Beneath Joanna’s stocking feet, the accelerator and brake pedals feel wrong, somehow not connected to anything mechanical but to something deeper, more fundamental, a frozen root or a cave. Despite the rocky, hazardous walk from the condo, despite no longer being able to pivot his legs from the street to the car without help, her father sits next to her, se- cured by his seatbelt, safe, whatever that means now.
Where are they going? To the highest point in town, Joanna has decided, which is the parking lot of the university, where a view of the night sky is still possi- ble. The streetlamps and the misty glare of the town blot out most of the constellations, including the one for whom she’d named her bird. But she can at least find the Big Dipper, which hangs from its square bowl this time of year. She can point to it and perhaps he’ll remember.
She would like to drive him back in time to the shore- line stretch where they had walked during a difficult
summer in her past. From there, they could see the whole black sky and he would teach her to pick out the elusive patterns. He would tell her that whenever life or work got the better of him, he would look for them. “Hard evidence,” he had called the stars, though he never said of what. Of God? Joanna was a believer, but her father was neither religious nor spiritual. Mystery, perhaps, or beauty. Or love. Large and hot and luminous enough to dissolve the rejections and failings, the disappointment and loss.
It hadn’t been much, just walks, but that summer had been their time. Joanna’s mother had left him for good. Joanna’s husband, her love, had left her to live with a much younger woman. Scott was only two at the time, spending the summer with his father, and Joanna had lost so much weight that it hurt to sit down.
He would drive her to the beach every night and buy her a triple-scoop maple walnut ice cream cone
from a shanty with a hand-painted menu on a stand. They’d eat their cones inside his gritty Ford truck with its pockets of loose change and road maps,
with that smell, consecrated in her memory, of salt and rust. “Feel up to a walk?” he’d ask and they’d take their shoes off first. Then plod along the lip of the shore, still wet from the tide, where treasures had been dragged in, kelp with long amber ribbons, with hairy tangles and mussel clusters and blister packs. He would show her what he knew about the sky and quiz her afterwards. The constellation Lyra, even there and then, was often too faint to be seen. But there were Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco, Cyg- nus, Pegasus, Hercules. It was just a preoccupation, a loner’s way past the pain. But that summer she had learned what he had taught her.
“Nice work, Jo,” he would say afterwards. Jo, he had always called her.
She supposes, now, that the whole point had been the ice cream; the constellations had been a pretext to help her put on weight. To bring her back to life. It had been evidence enough.
Wildes spent most of her professional career as a copywriter in agencies and on her own as a freelancer before she began writing fiction. Her stories and novels are set in small New England towns where her characters, many of them gifted, struggle under the weight of their choices and circumstances. While she does not write genre fiction, elements of faith, crime, mystery, and conspiracy often feature in her work. Wildes is a graduate of the Brown University Writing Program and currently lives in Middletown, CT.
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