I won’t be back. There’s no returning to this life in the woods, and I need Finch to come to terms with that, to the degree that she can. The thought of her looking out the window, waiting, like she did for Jake, for the sound of my truck rounding the bend—
“Marie will be here in the morning,” I tell her. “Once I’m gone, you’ll pack up your things. Marie will drive you to your grandparents’。 You’ll be all right. Marie will make sure. And sugar, I want you to know that getting to live here in this place, getting to raise you—I wouldn’t trade that for the world. All the things I’ve done in my life.” The words catch in my throat. “Getting to be your dad, that is my greatest accomplishment.”
* * *
I realize: I need to find Finch a poem. Something beautiful. Something she can lean into, once I’m gone. That’s what she would pick: a poem. And so I look. Once she’s tucked in—and tonight, it’s a short process, though I want it to last. I want her to beg me to tell her a story of Cindy, or read a long time, but she’s spent, and she kisses me on the cheek and turns over in her bed, back to me. I sit there awhile and take her in. The curvature of her spine, the small shoulders, the tangled blond hair. Can I really leave her? Is it really the right thing to do? Because at the moment, it sure as heck doesn’t feel right.
I sneak out to the main room, leave the door cracked and secretly hope that she calls me back in for some reason, needs me. I add a fat piece of oak and stoke the fire. I open the cupboards and trace the rims of the plates and then run my hands along the red countertop. I start leafing through the books on the shelf in the main room. Page after page. Nothing is right. Nothing is perfect. And in this case, it has to be. It has to be precisely right. It can’t be depressing. It can’t be about the wrong type of love. It has to offer some kind of advice, even if it’s not overt. It has to be about me, somehow. It has to be about Finch. It has to create a world. “Oh, little girl, my stringbean.” No Anne Sexton. Sylvia Plath, I set to the side as well.
From the top shelf I pull a small book with a simple cover. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver and somehow in my eight years here I’ve never read it. I crack the spine. Jake’s name on the inside cover. I begin leafing through the pages. Then, “The Summer Day.”
Finch tumbling into the grass and stooping and soaking in the world. All her questions, all our days. This wild and precious life. I know it right away: this is the poem I will write in my crooked lettering and leave for my daughter before I get in my truck and drive to the end of myself.
THIRTY-THREE
For a while I lie on my bed, listening to Finch breathe, shuffle through the sheets. I crawl out and kneel next to her, stroke her blond hair, rest my palm on her back. The thought that this will be the last time I see her here in our home. That she will grow and shift. That every muscle and bone will expand and her looks will change and she will become someone I won’t know. Maybe not even recognize. And that I will change, too. Not grow but be different all the same.
I can’t go through with this. Can’t. Won’t.
I sit up. Crying hard now and shaking bad. I sneak out to the main room and slump into the couch and wipe my eyes with Finch’s quilt, finished now: all those squares, all those pieces of things she wore. The blue and white dress from the summer she learned to walk. The yellow sweatshirt she wore all last winter. The pink onesie with an elephant. Cindy had picked that one out before Finch was born.
“It’s not safe here anymore,” I say aloud, to Cindy. The weight of her absence like a stone in my gut.
And even if it were safe, that’s beside the point. Knowing that girl died a terrible death. Knowing her parents are out there, hoping she’ll come home. Waiting. I wipe my face with my sleeve. “I can’t just sit on it, what happened to her. It’s not who I am. Who I want to be. For Finch and also for myself.”
I rise from the couch, grab a box of matches and the flare, from the first time Scotland showed up in the yard, all those years ago. I unlock the front door, move the shovel at the handle, and step out into the night. For some reason the story in the Bible where Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane keeps roiling through my mind: Jesus asking God whether there is some other way. Not that I’m comparing myself to Jesus, mind you. But the wanting there to be an alternative. A different path. Some way to avoid the heartache that looms just ahead. Terrible feeling, to know that though it’s not here yet, something bad is aiming toward you, lumbering its way closer. And to know that you do indeed have a choice: it’s on you. You could decide not to. You could back out. You could run.