But he had set his return to work for December 2, right after Thanksgiving. He wanted to be back in the office by the anniversary of my disappearance. Functioning and catching up on work – in as public and distracting a place as he could think of. And away from my mother, if he was honest with himself.
How to swim back to her, how to reach her again. She was pulling and pulling away – all her energy was against the house, and all his energy was inside it. He settled on building back his strength and finding a strategy to pursue Mr. Harvey. Placing blame was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he’d lost.
Grandma Lynn was due for Thanksgiving, and Lindsey had kept to a beautifying regime Grandma had set up for her through letters. She’d felt silly when she first put cucumbers on her eyes (to diminish puffiness), or oatmeal on her face (to cleanse the pores and absorb excess oils), or eggs yolks in her hair (to make it shine). Her use of groceries had even made my mother laugh, then wonder if she too should start to beautify. But that was only for a second, because she was thinking of Len, not because she was in love with him but because being with him was the fastest way she knew to forget.
Two weeks before Grandma Lynn’s arrival, Buckley and my father were out in the yard with Holiday. Buckley and Holiday were romping from one large pile of burnished oak leaves to another in an increasingly hyper game of tag. “Watch out, Buck,” my father said. “You’ll make Holiday nip.” And sure enough.
My father said he wanted to try something out.
“We have to see if your old dad can carry you piggyback style again. Soon you’ll be too big.”
So, awkwardly, in the beautiful isolation of the yard, where if my father fell only a boy and a dog who loved him would see, the two of them worked together to make what they both wanted – this return to father/son normalcy – happen. When Buckley stood on the iron chair – “Now scoot up my back,” my father said, stooping forward, “and grab on to my shoulders,” not knowing if he’d have the strength to lift him up from there – I crossed my fingers hard in heaven and held my breath. In the cornfield, yes, but, in this moment, repairing the most basic fabric of their previous day-to-day lives, challenging his injury to take a moment like this back, my father became my hero.
“Duck, now duck again,” he said as they galumphed through the downstairs doorways and up the stairs, each step a balance my father negotiated, a wincing pain. And with Holiday rushing past them on the stairs, and Buckley joyous on his mount, he knew that in this challenge to his strength he had done the right thing.
When the two of them – with dog – discovered Lindsey in the upstairs bathroom, she whined a loud complaint.
“Daaaaddd!”
My father stood up straight. Buckley reached up and touched the light fixture with his hand.
“What are you doing?” my father said.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
She sat on the toilet lid wrapped in a large white towel (the towels my mother bleached, the towels my mother hung on the line to dry, the towels she folded, and placed in a basket and brought up to the linen closet…). Her left leg was propped up on the edge of the tub, covered with shaving cream. In her hand she held my father’s razor.
“Don’t be petulant,” my father said.
“I’m sorry,” my sister said, looking down. “I just want a little privacy is all.”
My father lifted Buckley up and over his head. “The counter, the counter, son,” he said, and Buckley thrilled at the illegal halfway point of the bathroom counter and how his muddy feet soiled the tile.
“Now hop down.” And he did. Holiday tackled him.
“You’re too young to shave your legs, sweetie,” my father said.
“Grandma Lynn started shaving at eleven.”
“Buckley, will you go in your room and take the dog? I’ll be in in a while.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Buckley was still a little boy who my father could, with patience and a bit of maneuvering, get up on his shoulders so they could be a typical father and son. But he now saw in Lindsey what brought a double pain. I was a little girl in the tub, a toddler being held up to the sink, a girl who had forever stopped just short of sitting as my sister did now.
