My daughter’s sharp gasp made me wheel in place, looking for the source of her cry. My little girl, Laura, had tripped over a root that looped up through the frozen earth. A light dusting of frost highlighted the gnarled ridges. Many of these roots broke the surface of the path we were walking on. It ran straight like an old rail road bed through the trees and small hills on either side. It wasn’t wide enough to walk side by side on and my daughter had been behind me when she fell.
Laura was already up and brushing the dirt off her jeans. Her narrow face smiled at me to let me know it was ok, she was just surprised. Her straight black hair was hidden under a gray stocking cap that I had once worn when I was in college. It dwarfed her small head, but she liked wearing it. Her brown eyes, sparkling—like her mothers, almost shone out from under the hat.
“You don’t have to look so worried, dad,” I was, and always had been, thrown by the grown up sound to her speech. I suppose spending half of your life in and out of a hospital bed will make you grow up faster.
“I know sweetheart,” I tried to smile, “are you ok?”
She raised her small chin, frowning slightly. She hated when I fussed over her. As a parent, especially when she had been first born, I had been so afraid of screwing up somehow. My wife and I hadn’t been able to stop her crying one night and at our wits end had called my parents who lived in town. My father had come over and laid my daughter down in her crib. He placed his hand on her chest and almost instantly she stopped crying. I didn’t know whether to thank him or kill him.
We kept on walking through the chilly winter day. I’d loved this park as a kid. I used to go walking through the creeks when they weren’t frozen over, like they were now. We, my parents and I, would put on our boots and go stomping—well, I was the stomper—through the water. Those are some of my best memories as a kid. I wanted my daughter to have something happy like that to think about. Especially since tomorrow she goes back to the hospital.
I let her walk in front of me this time. She was so thin, legs like sticks, arms so skinny I was afraid they would break in half. If she didn’t have her mother’s attitude and self confidence I would be afraid the wind would blow her away. But like her mother, she would talk the wind down and stay firmly rooted in place.
It wasn’t a cold day—well yes it was cold, but not cold in the bone chilling Indiana way, that lancing ice feeling that went straight through the clothes and to the heart. The creek beds were still frozen, but most of the snow was receding, giving way to green grass below.
“Why does snow melt?” Laura suddenly asked.
“Oh,” I thought for a second, “when it gets warm enough the snow can’t stay frozen anymore, so it melts.”
“I know that,” she sounded half exasperated,”but why?”
“Oh,” how do you explain to a seven year old that heat gives energy to the water molecules so that the magnetic dipoles no longer align in a crystal lattice? So I just said that, hoping I at least sounded, as a father should, smart and knowledgeable.
“Do you know a lot, daddy?” she asked.
“I know a lot about some things, but not a lot about others.”
“Like women?”
“What!?”
“Mommy says you’re really smart, but dumb at figuring out women.”
I laughed, it was true. My wife had to pull the date request out of me, drop hints like atom bombs, and shake her head as I muddled through the appropriate steps. Laura is so much like her mother, assertive in spite of her size, sharp too.
We came to a foot bridge that spanned one of the frozen creeks. The ice was caught in motion, as if at any moment it would come back to life and flow over the rocks and down to the little waterfall further off. The brown bridge was made of wood with rails that came up to my waist and just under Laura’s chin. The sun was bright today and the tree branches caught the light and cast shadows in a crisscross pattern over the ground and creek bed.
Looking at Laura I saw her tracing something with her finger on the railing. She was standing on her toes and gazing intently, not at the woods or the creek bed, but at three characters, two letters and a rose.
“What are these for?” she never looked up from the letters, just traced with her finger.
“Oh, well, they are probably initials. They stand for names of two people. So your initial would be L.”
“Who were they?” she asked.
“I don’t know. They were probably boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Like you and mom?”
“Well, that comes before marriage, usually. But yes, your mother and I were boyfriend and girlfriend once.”
“Did you write your initials anywhere?”
I thought about it for awhile. My wife and used to take long walks in the woods, though I never carved anything, “no, we hadn’t.”
“Why would people do that dad?” she stopped tracing the letters and looked out into the woods. Again, I waited a little before answering.
“I suppose, maybe, they wanted to have something to remember being together. By marking this bridge like this their initials won’t get erased. People will see this, like you did, and know that two people who were once together stood on this bridge. I guess it’s a way to make their mark on the world, a way to be remembered.”
“So why didn’t you do that?”
I laughed, “there was no way your mother would let either of us forget. We didn’t need to carve anything anywhere. We would remember.”
“Would people remember me if I did that?” her question cut into me like a knife blade. I kneeled down next to my daughter, looking at her face from the side. Her eyes never wavered from whatever she saw in the woods.
“Why do you say that?” I tried to keep my voice from cracking.
“I heard you and mom talking. I know I go back to the hospital tomorrow. Mom was crying, she said I wouldn’t be home for a long time. You were crying too, I think, but it sounded different. Mom sounds like me when I cry. You sound like you’re breathing heavy, like when you come back from running,” she still wouldn’t look at me, “you don’t know if I’ll get better. I want to know if I people will remember me.”
“Sweetheart,” a ten year old shouldn’t sound like that, like she’s been reading existential philosophy and is worried about leaving some indelible mark and being remembered. I barely remember what it was like to be ten, I think I was in fifth grade, maybe. Then again, at ten I hadn’t spent much of my life in a hospital bed between operations, reading voraciously—worse than me as a kid, which is saying something. She reads—and has read—most of my old books, the Dostoyevsky, the Faulkner, the Huxley, Eco. She must have gotten into the Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Tillich when I wasn’t looking.
“Sweetheart,” I tried again, “when did you hear us? We had that conversation late one night, you should have been in bed.”
“I know, but I couldn’t sleep. I heard you in the kitchen. I got scared.” She suddenly turned and hugged me, my beautiful baby girl, old before she should have been. I’d just gotten used to the idea of her being ten and no longer able to fit in the crook of my arm. I’d read her Whitman before she was born, lying next to her mother under the light of the reading lamp, marveling at the thought that there would be something of me, but separate from me, soon to enter the world. I had once thought that Whitman was praising himself overmuch, saying that he ‘contained multitudes’, though at your birth I think I understood. My baby girl, how can a father tell his daughter how beautiful the world can be, though let her experience it? It hurts, too. I joked with your mother once that you couldn’t date till you had your blackbelt. I was only half kidding.
“You will be ok,” I said, holding her tight, “the doctors will make it better. It’s their job to make you better.”
“They haven’t before,” how could my ten year old’s voice be so steady when mine wasn’t?
“I know, I know,” what could I say?
“Will you and mom remember me?” she pulled her head off my shoulder and looked into my eyes.
“Forever, I promise,” I said, “we love you, we could never forget you. We won’t have to remember you though because you will be here with us. It will be ok.”
[To Be Continued}
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