I recognized the squat brown dig site trailer in the background. I used to sit inside and watch over my grad students while I finished my morning paperwork and coffee. The day this photo was taken, Miki and I looked on as Clara fit Yumi into a pair of oversized waders. Whenever Yumi saw her mother, on average every three or four months, for a week or two at most, it was as if Clara could do no wrong. “We only have the week,” Miki told me that morning, when it seemed like I was about to go lecture our daughter. “Don’t cause trouble.”
I walked from the excavation office to the edge of what my assistants called the mosh pit and watched as my daughter and granddaughter sifted through the sludge. Clara was telling Yumi a story about seal hunts.
“I think I’m going to start a painting of Clara and Yumi together like this, knee-deep in the mud,” my wife said from behind me. “For my next gallery show. Maybe it’ll remind Clara that the two of them need each other.”
“It’s almost too perfect,” I said.
“Look, Grandpa. I’m a big poop!” Yumi yelled.
Afterward, Miki took Yumi back to the motel to get cleaned up and I urged Clara to stay behind so we could talk.
“Your mother says you’re coming home for a while once we finish here,” I said.
“A week at most. I told you about the opportunity in Siberia,” she said.
“You see how much Yumi misses you, though.”
Clara stood next to one of the folding tables that overlooked the lip of the mosh pit. It was strewn with artifacts. She was focused on a wooden doll we’d found at the site, no larger than a soda can.
“I’m doing this for her,” she said.
“Sure, I get that,” I said. I’ve always been proud of how much my daughter cared about the world. After school she’d study the news, comb the internet for disasters, wars and hate and injustice, write it all down in these color-coded journals. Once, I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was just trying to keep track of it all because it didn’t seem like anybody else noticed or cared that we kept making the same mistakes, that hate in a neighborhood or injustice in a state ran like poison through veins, until another ice shelf collapsed or another animal went extinct. Everything is connected, she’d say. And I’d tell her, You’re only one person and you only have one life.
“You’d rather I come home, wouldn’t you, and maybe teach in your department? Pick up Yumi every day after school and pretend like everything is going to be fine.” She waved the wooden doll in the air, studied its simplistic carved smile. “Whoever played with this had a hard life, you know. Probably a really short one.”
“I just want Yumi to have a childhood with her mother,” I said.
“You and Mom are in no position to talk about being there for your child.”
“That’s not entirely fair,” I said. Every time Clara made this accusation, I felt like a pill bug curling in on itself. Once she had her own money, she’d wasted no time escaping to the farthest corners of the planet with only postcards and photos to let us know she was alive. Clara turned and left me standing there, grabbed her messenger bag, walked toward the ocean, still holding the wooden doll. By the time I caught up to her, she’d pulled out another one of her journals.
“Have you seen the new sea rise projections?” she said, reading off a list of cities that might be submerged within Yumi’s lifetime—most of southern Florida, nearly all the major cities in Japan, New York City turned into Venice. “Are you watching the news of Appalachia burning? Brain-eating amoeba population explosions at summer camp lakes?”
“Things are bad in every generation.” I looked at the opened pages of her notebook, each one covered in disaster. “But we still have to live our life.”
“Your research here wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for climate change,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“Tell Yumi I’ll take her out for breakfast tomorrow. We can talk later if you want.” She turned and walked toward the research tent, flagged down one of my assistants, asked for a ride into town. While she was waiting for her lift, she came back to the dig site and found me in the mosh pit, half sucked into the earth.
“By the way, don’t think I don’t want to be with my daughter,” she said. “You’re dead wrong if you think that.”
But the next day, when Miki and I went to meet Clara and Yumi for breakfast, we found Yumi in tears. Clara had changed her plans, said something about travel being too difficult to the site in Siberia, things were out of her control. She hugged Yumi, who was sniffling over her banana split, and then her mother, who told her to be safe. But I didn’t say anything. I drank my coffee and ordered chocolate chip pancakes.