My Abandonment(3)

"I was thinking about the deer," I say. "The dead one."

"What about her?"

"Nothing," I say, the bottoms of my feet on his leg. "What is your favorite color?"

"What's yours?"

"Yellow," I say.

"Why?"

"The way it makes me feel. It's bright and not still."

"Exactly. It draws attention. I like green."

"You would," I say, and he laughs and holds me close.

"And what was my mother's favorite color?"

"Yellow. Just like yours."

"So she taught me that, for it to be my favorite."

"Probably," he says. "Kind of, some way. You're very much like her."

"And we have the same name."

"Had," he says. "Yes. Caroline."

"Why did you give me the same name?"

"Because I loved her so much. Now go to sleep; it's the middle of the night, Caroline. I always tell you that."

"I wish I could have met her."

"She wishes that, too," he says. "Good night, yellow."

"Good night, green."





Since I am thirteen I am allowed to get out of bed whenever I wake up. Even before the sun, like now. Father sleeps on his stomach with his face in the pillow and his arms stretched out underneath it, his big hands on the ground. If he sleeps on his back he snores and I have to wake and tell him so he'll turn over in the night since snoring is a sound.

The zipper is cold but the morning is not too cold. I pull on my black jeans and my dark green sweatshirt over my nightshirt and I get Randy off his stand and leave him with his horse's head on my pillow, safe in the bed with Father. I take the chamber pot I used once last night and the water bucket and I slip out not knocking the branch over, the branch that goes across the door when we're not here and sometimes when we're sleeping. In the winter we hang a wool blanket across, inside, to hold in the heat of our bodies.

The bugs are already up in the warm air and I only need my two shirts. Father says now I have to wear an undershirt under my other shirt even if my breasts are almost flat. In the winter I wear sweaters and a dark raincoat. At the men's camp people wear garbage bags with arm and head holes torn out but Father says that is not right. I also in the winter wear tights beneath my jeans. Father wears waffled long underwear all year around. The legs are gray and the top is red. He wears a dark plaid shirt that smells like wool and him, his hair and everything.

I hop across the stones and walk out under the trees, past my hidden garden. The lettuce is easy, even if it's hard to clean. The beans want more sun than they get and I am impatient and dig up the radishes before they're ready.

A chipmunk darts quicker than a squirrel but a squirrel's more aware, his head jerking around from side to side, perched on a branch. Squirrels fall sometimes even if watching them it seems impossible.

Little maples try to grow up through the ivy that Father hates. The ground is all steep and rough and sometimes I'm hardly thinking as I go and then sometimes inside I'm saying Quiet, Caroline. Look at this. Caroline, careful, you lucky girl.

Our stream is narrow, especially in the summer. Here is the pool we dug to get drinking water and down below there's another for washing on hot days. We have tubs and barrels that collect rainwater in other places. The latrine, a trench with a bag of lime hidden in the bushes, is further away and we dig a new one every two weeks. There are right ways to do everything in the forest park so you won't draw attention. If you sharpen a pencil you pick up the shavings. If you burn paper there's still ashes.

Back toward home I switch the full water bucket from one hand to the other, the empty chamber pot in the tired hand. I look all around as I get close. We have moved three times since we came to live in the forest park and I don't want to move again. There's not even anyone in the trees except the birds and they're singing now that the sky is getting brighter.

Father is sleeping, exactly the same. He twitches all of a sudden like maybe the start of a helicopter dream and then he settles. Sometimes right when he's falling asleep he'll jerk his arms and legs too and he might wake himself up or kick me a little.

Silent I set down the pot and bucket. The flat stones are still cold so I stand on one foot then the other. I could climb in bed and read but my feet might touch him and wake him so instead I turn and climb the tall tree where the lookout is.

Ferns grow up high in the trees too, in the branches though not so high as where I am in the lookout. Squirrels chitter and chatter, now circling up and down tree trunks after each other. It's an easy climb for me especially barefoot, the branches mostly like a ladder. The platform is almost one hundred feet high, Father says and the bottom, the boards are covered over with branches attached on so you cannot see it from the ground. On the platform I can see all around us. I can see the pale flat stones that don't look like a path unless you know it's a path, which we step on so we don't make a trail. I see the place where my hidden garden is hidden and the branch across the front of our house which you could never see since the roof can be walked on and ferns are growing there like the rest of the ground and even the tiny maples with their five-pointed leaves. Our house is like a cave dug out with the roof made of branches and wire and metal with tarps and plastic on top of that and then the earth where everything is growing. Only Father and I see it's a house.