My Abandonment(38)

I wonder about my bedroom that I never slept in, in our house at the farm. I think about all my clothes I never wore and if they're still in my wooden dresser, washed once and folded and waiting. I would wear those to school and by now I would be in school. Kids would maybe have called me names but there also would have been good parts. All the books and games and maybe someone would like me after they got used to me and I was used to everything. I would have had the same clothes as everyone but now they are far away.

Now my clothes are dirty and it's even hard to keep my skin and hair clean. Waiting for Father to come back I take out the buttons and thimbles and green plastic army men and I have a square sheet of cardboard I've lined into a chessboard. I have pennies for pawns and silver batteries for queens, sparkplugs for bishops. Kings and rooks and knights I haven't figured out yet for sure so I use quarters and dimes and nickels. I play against Randy, with him on his side on the mattress and I play both sides really against myself which doesn't work. I try two openings and then stop. I write some of this out and curl up on the mattress.





I wake up when Father comes home since he knocks his knock and I have to unlock the locks.

"Tired," he says, sitting on the mattress, kicking off his boots.

"Your checks are still coming," I say. "We don't need money so much you have to work for Vincent, do we?"

"I'm planning ahead," Father says. "Caroline, you know that. The checks, I'm not certain they'll follow us where we're going."

"Where are we going?"

"Trust me," he says.

"Still," I say. "What are you doing?"

"We can only do our best," Father says. "We can't do better than our best." He falls back and groans.

"That wire with Vincent," I say, "that wasn't stolen?"

"His name is Victor," Father says. "I don't know that I'll work with him again."

"This is not the way we used to be," I say. "This is not a way we were ever supposed to be."

Father sits up and begins to scrabble his hands along the floor until he finds the headlamp. Then he digs through his pack until he finds his notebook. He pages through it.

"The other terror," he says, "the other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall."

I listen. The shadows on our wall are only the crossed lines of the window frame and the square edge of another building.

"It would be better," I say, "if you talked to me instead of reading at me."

"They're the same thing, really," Father says. With the headlamp his face is so bright I can't see his expression.

"No," I say. "One comes out of you and the other comes out of someone else."

"Think about that, Caroline," he says. "Whether or not that's actually true."

He switches off the headlamp and turns over, then over again pulling the blanket away from me.

"Do you ever think about all our things?" I say. "Back at the farm? Like our bicycles?"

"Those were not really our things," Father says. "You know that."

I don't say anything else. I know we have to sleep so we'll get up in time since during the day all the workmen come with their yellow hardhats. Some night we'll come home and this room where I'm sleeping will be gone. There will only be air here in the sky and the bricks and walls and mattresses and everything will have collapsed into a pile to be taken away. If we're not too far away in the city on the day it happens we might hear it fall.





To sojourn is to reside temporarily, so a sojourner is temporarily residing. To reside is to live in a place permanently or for an extended period. To extend is to open or straighten or unbend.





Today on the esplanade a girl in a hooded sweatshirt and duct-taped shoes skateboards past. Pushing hard and suddenly leaping to scrape the bottom of her board along the next bench and then rolling backward past me, near where my feet are pointed.

"Nice," I say but she doesn't hear me and keeps going and I'm thinking that girl could be my friend. Already she's out of reach out across the walkway under the Steel Bridge and past her, way up the river I can see the pale green towers of the St. Johns Bridge and I look away since I don't want to think of all that back then.

It's stopped raining and the sun is out and there's a couple boats out on the river. I sit on the esplanade closer to the Steel Bridge, between it and the Hawthorne. Down there they're setting up tents for some kind of festival or fair. The fountain over there is on but it's too cold out for the kids to play in it. There's homeless guys drinking, passed out, and a group of street kids with their BMX bikes on the grass. Everyone's smoking cigarettes.