Abbott Awaits (14 page)

When the generous children's librarian gives Abbott's daughter a package of animal stickers, the girl wants to open them immediately, right there in the library. Abbott knows that if he opens the stickers, she will use them up within minutes. He kindly tells her no, explaining that she should save her stickers for a special time. Abbott's daughter ignores his answer. “Dad open these?” she says. Abbott again says no. He says, “Let's just wait and open these later, OK?” “Dad open these?” she says again. “Not now,” Abbott says. “You just got them, honey,” he says, which is of course his daughter's point. Why is he taking a stand on this matter? What golden application does he envision for these stickers? “Dad open these?” the girl says. “I said no,” Abbott says. There is no end in sight. The child's universe has contracted to this package of animal stickers, and there is no way Abbott is going to back down now, even if he wants to, his idea being that an unreasonable position held unwaveringly amounts to good parenting. His resoluteness is a value unto itself, regardless of the foolish notion about which he is being resolute. “I want these,” she says. “I know you do,” Abbott says, trying to communicate his empathy. “Dad
open these?” “I said no and meant it,” he says. Fortunately for everyone, Abbott's wife is in the library too. “You two,” she says. She opens the package with her teeth and gives the animal stickers to their daughter. Abbott knows that parents should not undermine each other's authority, but he is grateful for the intervention. The girl sits on a bench and begins to put the stickers on her neck and throat. She peels off one after another and presses them onto her skin. Shouldn't she at least save some of them? Abbott thinks. “Shouldn't she at least save some of them?” he says, but nobody answers. When the girl's neck and throat are covered, she begins putting stickers on her chin and cheeks. She uses every single animal sticker, probably two dozen. She is delighted. She smiles as she touches her face lightly with the tips of her fingers. She drops the sticker backing onto the floor, and Abbott picks it up. Abbott's wife finds a small mirror in the library dollhouse and holds it up so their daughter can see. The girl loves the stickers. The generous children's librarian who gave the stickers to Abbott's daughter walks past, waving and smiling, apparently untroubled by the prodigality. Abbott grudgingly understands that this is what the stickers were for. The stickers were for his daughter's neck and face. And he understands that had she done something different with the stickers, then that different thing would have been what the stickers were for. It is not difficult for Abbott to imagine his daughter bringing home a gentleman friend twenty-five years hence. (Make it a female lover if you want—it does not matter to the story.) Abbott, by then no doubt a full professor or perhaps even an endowed chair, will have four cocktails, and he will win over his daughter's beloved with timely allusions to Oscar Wilde and Joe Montana. Later, in bed—Abbott and his wife will allow them to sleep together—the gentleman (or whoever) will lounge dissolutely on his elbow and say, “Your parents are great. Especially your dad. He's really great.” Abbott's daughter will make that face that can be traced back to infancy. She'll say, “He's mellowed a lot. When I was a kid, he was the kind of dad who wouldn't let me put stickers on my face. And he'd correct my grammar in a way that he thought was fun and loving. And he'd tell me to be careful all the time. God, he'd tell me to be careful when I was making toast.” And then they will lie together in that old bed, most likely naked, and for a long time talk about fathers, the failures of fathers.

Abbott's daughter is having a hard time of it indeed. She is trying to lift the stuffed giraffe from the floor, and she cannot do it. She has been at it for some time—nearly a minute, perhaps—and she cannot lift the giraffe. The toy is not large, nor is it heavy. Abbott watches, refusing, out of some combination of principle and indolence, to facilitate. He admires her focus, her tenacity, her intrinsic dignity. She is a straight arrow of intent. Her faint eyebrows are squeezed in concentration and purpose, but she has not become frustrated or angry. She is leaning over, using both hands, pulling the giraffe's head, and the world is simply not working as it supposed to, as it has up to this point. The reason that Abbott's daughter can't lift the giraffe is that she is standing on it. Once she steps off of the animal, she has a much easier time lifting it, which she does, with neither pride nor humiliation. And then, giraffe clamped in her armpit, she moves forth to the next thing.

As Aristotle probably asked,
Is it not prudent to diagnose the diagnoser
? Briefly, then: Abbott's parents were divorced when he was nine years old. Afterward, his parents had joint custody, so Abbott moved between their residences every two weeks. These transfers occurred on Sundays, in late afternoon or early evening. And there was, as in some convoluted geocentric model of the heavens, motion within motion: His mother, with whom Abbott lived half the time, moved six times in the eight years of the custodial arrangement. One consequence of this Ptolemaic childhood was that Abbott at a young age became preoccupied with luggage. Suitcases, duffels, bags, satchels, backpacks. And not just luggage, but any item within which other smaller items might be tidily placed. Chests, trunks, bins, tubs, baskets, folders, cartons, envelopes, pillowcases, pockets. The sturdy cardboard box. And tonight Abbott is in his garage, searching for something that he forgets immediately when he sees, tucked in the corner like some neglected pet, his rooftop carrier. It's covered in cobwebs, but still modern and sleek. At thirteen cubic feet, it's capacious enough to hold several large suitcases and a pair of nice water skis. (Abbott does
not water-ski.) The carrier is durable and lightweight, surprisingly easy to install upon the car's roof rack. Its latches, one on each side, can be locked and unlocked, locked and unlocked, with a small silver key that glints on Abbott's key ring. He looks for the key there, on his key ring, and eventually finds it. He holds it between his thumb and forefinger. There is an extra key he can keep in a special place. Abbott would like to take a trip. He would like, actually, to have taken a trip. He would like to return from a trip. He would like to ease the carrier manfully off the car's roof and wipe it down like a weary steed. He would like to take a firm but tender grip of its black aerodynamic flanks and then position it carefully on a custom-built pallet in the corner of the garage, which is, after all, yet another pleasing container. Abbott turns in a slow circle. He has no idea what he is in here to find. There are so many things in the garage—scattered tools, furniture, a grass-seed spreader—far more than could ever fit in the carrier. It's a discouraging mess. The space is not used well. The pallet he could probably build if he ever had time. Today is, what, Sunday? On Friday Abbott will have another child.

Abbott's daughter sits on the floor across the room from Abbott. The small black spot he sees on the side of her neck belongs to one of two categories—deer tick or not deer tick. This family room is ninety miles from Lyme, Connecticut. “Come here for a second,” he says to her. “I want to check something.” The girl keeps working on her fire-station puzzle. She does not come to him. Abbott is certain that the black spot is a deer tick. As he crosses the room, though, he reasons that most black spots are not deer ticks. It's fear, he knows, that turns spots into ticks. He expands his categories—mole, mud, magic marker. The black spot is very likely not a deer tick, he realizes. He crouches to his daughter's neck, and so what if the spot is a tick? So what? Some deer ticks do not carry disease, and some do not carry implication. Abbott removes the tick from her skin in the proper manner. He's not even sure it's a deer tick. He can look that up later. At present, his daughter needs help with her puzzle. The Dalmatian is tricky.

Long after the volunteer community search party disbanded, the missing girls have been found at a rest area four states away. They're alive. They were playing shoeless in the picnic area when an alert motorist called authorities. They're skinny, but they have always been skinny. The sheriff's deputy back home wept at the press conference. He said, “Most of us working on this one have kids. The ones with kids are the hardest.” He said, “You just can't—” but he didn't finish. Abbott leans back in his chair and tries to recall which missing girls these are. The summer is full of them. Out his window he can see a maple tree, the top of a weathered wooden fence, his neighbor's roof and chimney. The window is divided into twelve panes, four rows of three. Abbott imagines that each pane is a framed photograph. He studies the composition of each of the twelve panes. He moves along rows, left to right, beginning with the upper left pane. A cloud of leaves and a single red brick. A squirrel on new shingles. Sky with faded contrail. There is not one pane that is not beautiful.

Abbott's office is nearly a nursery. The chair and books he has already moved to the basement. Only the desk remains, crowded on one side by a changing table and crib, now assembled, and on the other side by a rocking chair and a chest of drawers filled with tidy stacks of clothing that seem too small to fit anyone. Alphabet letter-cards span the walls, spaced uniformly. A Kite likes wind. A Lamb is soft. The Moon is full. Abbott stands in front of his desk, awaits connection. The room still has the new-paint smell. Today is the anniversary of tragedy, but which day is not? Abbott's eyesight is not what it used to be, but if he squints and leans down toward the laptop screen he can read, in the archival photographs, the messages handwritten on the signs held aloft by dark-skinned people trapped on rooftops of flooded buildings. One sign says HELP US, one says
WE NEED WATER
, one says
PLEASE HELP
. Darwin was troubled by the eye, its “inimitable contrivances.” How could natural selection, working so gradually upon only the modest, incremental variations produced by random mutation, have created something as complex as an eye? What adaptive benefit is one one-thousandth of an optical organ? Or
even half of one? “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,” he wrote after the publication of
On the Origin of Species
. But the mechanism of the eye is the easy part to believe, as any insurance executive can tell you. “One might have thought of sight,” wrote the vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, “but who could think / Of what it sees …?” Abbott's wife knocks on the open door. Abbott turns, keeps his body in front of the screen so his wife cannot see. “When are you going to move the desk?” she says. “Right this very instant,” he says. Abbott
DISCONNECTS NOW
and crawls beneath the desk with a screwdriver. He begins to take the desk apart, keeping the screws in a sandwich bag he will affix to the inside of a drawer with masking tape. On the tape he will write
DESK SCREWS
in black marker. At some point during the disassembly, a juncture of interest to philosophers, the desk ceases to be a desk, the office an office.

The stars are far behind the clouds tonight as Abbott climbs a borrowed ladder to his roof. He does not have wine or a blanket. He sits on the flat roof above his family room and rests his back against the gentle slope of the garage. He presses his palms against the shingles, still warm from the day. He knows the warmth is from the late-summer sun, but it is easy to believe that it comes from inside the house, from all the bodies and breath and motion. The heat of a family, radiating out. He does not have marijuana or an old acoustic guitar. In two minutes he's self-conscious. In five minutes he's bored. In eight minutes his lower back hurts. He sees a firefly blink below him, and he counts the seconds until it blinks again. He hears his neighbors through their screens: the bright clatter of silverware on plates, spouses and children calling for one another through the houses.
Where are you? Can you come here for a second? Have you seen Matt
? Someone is running a power saw. Someone is dragging a can to the curb, though it is not, Abbott thinks, trash night. The wind pushes small sticks and branches across the roof and off the edge. No moon, no constellations, no meteor showers. Abbott climbs back down the ladder.
In the family room his wife says, “What were you doing?” Abbott fixes a drink in the kitchen. “Just checking,” he says. His wife says, “Come in here.” She is lying on the bad couch. The family room is still a mess from the day. “Let's clean this up later,” she says. Abbott lifts her legs and sits beneath them. The veins in her ankles look terrible. You poor thing, the nurses always say. “Are you scared?” Abbott says. “Sure,” she says. “Do you wish we had done the amnio?” he says. “No,” she says, “I don't think about that.” Abbott sees a bulging garbage bag slumped against the front door. It probably is trash night, then. “Everything is going to be fine,” he says. “Look at this,” she says. “Is that an elbow?” he says. “Either an elbow or a knee.” Abbott tries to kiss it but it's gone. He keeps his lips on his wife's stomach for a while, then he says, “Just a second.” He slips out from beneath his wife's legs and gets off the couch. He leaves the family room and walks the length of the house to the bedroom. From the drawer of his nightstand he takes a wrapped gift and returns to the family room. “This is just something small,” he says. “I got you something too,” his wife says. “Go get it. It's in my nightstand.” Abbott walks back to the bedroom and pulls a small wrapped gift from his wife's nightstand. Then he walks back to the family room. “Did you wrap this?” his wife says, holding up the gift. Abbott shakes his head. “It's nothing big,” he says. Abbott's wife begins to unwrap the gift. “You know,” she says, “when I first heard you up there, I was angry. But then I realized you are not the kind of man who would ever fall off a roof.”