My Abandonment(2)

Inside the ceiling is tall enough that I can stand on my knees but Father has to sit down or crawl. He pulls the branch back across the door and looks at me.

"We're lucky," he says. "We're the lucky ones."

"We are," I say.

"We have to be so careful these days," he says.

"Why?"

"People."

"No one knows where we are," I say.

"If you think that way," Father says, "that's when you get caught. Overconfident."

"No one's ever caught us," I say. "No one could."

"That doesn't mean anything," he says. "You know better than to look to the past, Caroline."

I set Randy on his wooden base with the one metal post the size of a pencil that fits in the hole in his stomach. I turn his white side out so I can look up and check on him in the darkness and he'll be easy to see from the mattress.

The dinner dishes are all dry now and I stack them on their shelves. Father takes off his dark forest pants and mends a rip with a piece of dental floss and a needle. Then he writes down things from the books he's reading in his tiny handwriting in his little book and I do some homework he's given me and I also write on the scrap paper some of this journal and things I've seen and thought. Father, his hand spread out is wider than this sheet of paper, wider than the plates we eat off, his fingertips hanging over. It makes a book look tiny when he holds it.

We brush our teeth and spit in the chamber pot and change out of our clothes and lie down on the mattress. Father stretches his hands over his head so they almost reach the flat stone and the green Coleman stove. Sometimes in his sleep his hands cross and his wrists come together and his bracelets ring softly. They're supposed to help him be stronger. When I tell him I need help to be stronger, he says that I haven't seen all the things or had the problems he's had. He says I'm too young to wear jewelry. He turns over to kiss me, his scratchy cheek.





If a paragraph is a thought, a complete thought, then a sentence is one piece of a thought. Like in addition where one number plus another number equals a bigger number. If you wrote down subtraction you would start with a thought and take enough away that it was no longer complete. You might write backward, or nothing at all, or less than nothing. You wouldn't even think or breathe. A comma, that is a place you breathe, or think, which is how breathing and thinking are the same. They collect, or are places to collect. A semicolon is a strange kind of thinking that I don't understand. It is more than one sentence inside one sentence. It makes more sense to me just to let each sentence be a sentence. Father says both the pieces on either side of a colon should add up to the same thing, even if one side is just a list. Some of the things I need to write about: Randy, the lookouts, bodies, names, Nameless, people when they think they're alone, snow, trampolines, helicopters.





"Wake up," I say. "You were having a dream. Was it the helicopters?"

"Whoa," Father says. "I guess it was a dream."

"I can't see the moon," I say. "It's dark outside tonight."

"Clouds," he says. "Maybe it'll rain tomorrow."

"Was it the helicopters?"

"Oh Caroline," he says. "They swarmed all down over the trees, rattling and tearing at everything. They had loudspeakers and from above they cast the sound of a baby crying, so loud, crying, the edges breaking up."

"Why? This was in your dream?"

"No, this was before. I don't know."

"Why would they do that?" I say.

"Exactly. I don't know. Sleep, Caroline."

In the summer like now we sleep on top of the sleeping bags with only a sheet over us and in the winter we zip the bags together since it's warmer that way. When my body was smaller there was lots of room but now even when it's too warm I cannot get away, our legs touch, our arms. I can't fall asleep and I can't tell if Father is asleep or not. I keep thinking of the deer, dead, lying half a mile away, listening while different animals drag parts of her away. Father does not grow but he is the largest man in the forest park that I have seen, bigger than anyone in the city except very fat men who cannot move like he moves. I am also quick but much more slender and five feet tall, my dark hair long and snarled and my skin white so it can flash in a darkness if I'm not careful.

All at once there's a whining, a snarling and then a snuffling as a snout pushes through the branch across our door. It's the dogs, some of them, racing through our camp, and Father shouts once and bangs a pan with a spoon and they're gone that fast but I know that he's awake.

"I named the head dog Lala," I say.

"If she's such a good friend of yours," he says, "you could tell her that we try to sleep around here at night."