My Abandonment(64)

Father: I'm no longer angry with him for the mistake he made. He was afraid and he lost his sweetness and I could have helped him more to advance confidently in the direction of his dreams and to not confuse a misunderstanding with an understanding so he would not believe people are like us when they are not. I forgive him, I understand him. I learn mostly from how he lived his life and also from how he stopped living it.

Father and I are a family of writers. My sister Della I don't know about or about my mother even if I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they wrote too. I have always, I have sometimes imagined that I have written all this to my mother, just to show her what's happened to me and that I've turned out all right. If she were alive I would track her down and read it to her, but since she's dead maybe she's watched it all or can think what I'm thinking as I write it down. She's watched it happen and then she's seen each letter and word scratched on a page and now this final typing.

When I look back through all these times, all the girls I've been, I just laugh. Only Randy really knows, has seen it all. Randy, he moves from wall to wall, wherever he wants to go. The pebble from the forest park and the scrap of paper with the name I'll never use, they rattle inside his body. He's beat up, dirt ground into him so his organs are all one color. The 114 numbers are worn away, only slight marks where the red dots were. I remember the numbers, where they went, all the counting and mathematics I did on them, all the things I thought they meant. They did mean those things, if I thought so. Still, since then I found a book and learned that what Randy is about is acupuncture, from Chinese medicine, the places to stick needles into a horse to treat an injury or illness. For overexertion or congestion of the lungs, the point is called Hsieh-tang and is number 16, two needles stuck into each side of the nose. Number 114 is named Wei-chien, one needle only at the tip of the tail to fight heatstroke and the common cold.

How nice it would be to stick a needle in your neck or hand or elbow to treat a sadness or to bring back a memory, to be able to run faster, to make people recognize you as a friend and to understand what kind of person you are.

Here's something else Father copied into his notebook: "Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened."

There is no one to report Father missing except me. I miss him but he is not exactly missing. Out walking I search and search and I find caves and go inside them. I ask around even at school if people know about parties in caves and they say, "Caroline, we don't need a cave." Still I am out there in the hot summer and in the cold months when the snakes wait half-numb and stiff in the paths for the sun to thaw them. I range and wander. I find caves and take ropes to them, lanterns and flashlights to walk through the damp lava tubes as wide as a hallway in a shopping mall that then tighten down to where I can hardly squeeze through. Then they open up again, wide and echoing. I hear water. Bats hang leathery, complain as I pass. I don't call his name, I'll know when he's close.

Winds blow underground. They lead you to new openings, they show you the sky, suddenly bluer and brighter than you remembered.

I know my way around this wilderness. I know the landmarks on a map and I know my own landmarks. Still so often I will find the dark slot of a cave one morning and go home for water and rope only to return in the afternoon to find the cave gone, no longer where I left it.

I believe that there is movement always beneath the surface of the ground. The hollow spaces that are caves drift beneath us, carrying with them whatever they hold. A cave will sometimes meet another cave and merge with it for a time and then pass on through. The burrows of snakes and moles are taken in, their walls gone to air, the little animals dropping surprised to the cave floor. Trees' roots grasp at nothing, anxious until the dirt returns.

Caves drift smoothly beneath us without any sound. Father is missing, he is not missing. He is beyond the reach of snow and sunlight. He stays close to me, following where I cannot see but can only sense him in that darkness below. In the soles of my bare feet I can feel him say my name.