George was smoking in the garage and feeling relieved that he could at last allow himself to let go of an impossible dream. Had Joyce been around, she would have asked him why he didn’t smoke on the porch. The garage was cool and its litter of objects suited him: assorted tools, a tricycle, a child sized rocking chair with a broken runner.
He eyed a stack of three ring binders, each stuffed with lined pages that he’d filled on both sides with tiny print. George snuffed his cigarette in a metal cat dish, picked up the binders, and dropped them in a garbage bin.
He was startled to find that a photo of his daughter in a ballerina costume had been underneath the binders. She was only two in the picture. George saw his pant leg in the corner, meaning Joyce must have taken it. George had deposited the binders here a few days ago and there had been no pictures.
“Guess you’re haunting me.”
He dragged the bin to the curb and a girl of about seven skipped down the front steps. She trotted up to George with a worn doll.
“Can I take my daughter with us?” the girl said.
“Sweetheart, I’d rather you bring something small that you can fit in a pocket.”
Otherwise, he’d end up carrying it himself or she would lose it. The baby was a favorite of hers. Olivia had started calling it her daughter a week or two after Joyce passed. Maybe it was cruel to force Olivia to leave the doll, but the results of losing it would be far more dire.
Olivia did not look as crestfallen as her father had expected. Her face turned up and she scampered back in the house. A few minutes later, George called her to the car. They were headed to York to see the beach and the zoo. He had some family up there. They strapped in and drove off.
“What did you bring?” said George. In the mirror he saw her waving a pink toy calculator in the air. “Really?”
“It’s my phone, remember?”
He did remember. Joyce’s phone had been that same bubblegum pink.
The weather was nice, the windows were down, and the music was on. George felt better than he had in weeks, maybe years. Then a low slow cry crept up from the back seat. It was the muffled whimper of a child trying her best to keep it together and failing.
“What’s the matter, baby?” he asked.
Olivia’s sobs sounded hurt enough to solicit a growing panic in his throat and he was about to pull over when at last she responded.
“I dropped my phone out the window!”
The panic turned to annoyance. “How many times have I told you not to wave your arms out there?”
“You have to go back! Will a car crush it?”
“I’m sorry, bear, but you have to understand I have no idea where to look for it and I could get hurt. But really, you’re seven years old. Don’t you know what to expect?”
“I had to hold it up, Daddy.” she sniffled. “I was taking pictures for my daughter because she couldn’t come.”
George jumped right into Olivia’s mind, where he saw a girl who had planned out her own adventure, an adventure she intended to share with her doll in pictures and videos. The whole fantasy was very real to her, and with little effort she’d made it more real to him then anything he’d felt in some time.
He had shut out as much feeling as he could to defend himself against a sorrow he was afraid might cripple his function as a father. The quarantine had left him unable to fight off the slightest wave of loss, even the loss of a toy.
He promised to replace it, but he knew it was a small comfort. It wasn’t really the one dollar calculator she was crying about. He couldn’t replace broken stories.
“We’ll come again.” he said. “And you can bring her.”
They arrived at the beach and met up with George’s cousin and her son. Olivia had met them only once before, but unlike her father she never had a problem engaging new people. That sociability was her mother’s trait. A least it had been, before Joyce could do nothing but curl up and cry, as though she’d lost all that had given her meaning on an anonymous roadside.
George and his cousin watched the kids dash into the ocean and race the waves back to the sand. He told her about the calculator.
“I don’t want to be mean.” she said. “But I should be honest. I think Olivia misses having a mother more than she misses Joyce herself. That’s why she’s pretending to be a mom. Her mother was never really… present after Olivia was born. It’s almost as if Joyce lost interest. Does Olivia even remember her that well?”
Olivia remembered the pink phone. Maybe that was all. Did it matter? George pulled the photo out.
“Yeah.” said his cousin. “Joyce kept trying to get Olivia interested in dance because that was her thing, but your kid is your kid. She likes to tell stories, not fulfill her mother’s stage dreams.”
George couldn’t bring himself to reveal how he’d tossed all his stories. He hadn’t been able to write for five years and he’d grown tired of the effort to recover his voice.
Then he saw Olivia laughing and instructing the boy in a game she’d created. She drew a picture in the wet sand. He had to memorize it before the water washed it away and then draw it again. Once more, George found himself borrowing his feelings from his child.
“Joyce was doing what any parent does.” said George.
“Can I tell you a secret you might not want to hear? When I was at Olivia’s second birthday party, Joyce locked herself in a bathroom with her phone. I overheard her saying she sometimes felt she was aping motherhood and hoping it would come naturally someday. She spent two years wondering if it would ever click.”
Shortly after Joyce died, George had written dialogue in one of those discarded binders. It was an interview between himself and one of his characters, a technique he’d often used to get to the heart of what a character meant to him.
“People tell me my feelings make their own reality, as if I could live some other reality. I don’t think there’s any other meaning out there, George. You know as well as I do that depressed people haven’t lost their happiness so much as they’ve lost their ability to feel at all. Sadness is fine and even good if there’s still a story we can tell ourselves. Being depressed means losing faith in the lies we all have to tell ourselves about who we are and what the hell we’re doing here.”
He hadn’t expected a fictional person to talk to him like that about his own life. It just came out. So maybe he’d put the photo in the garage and didn’t remember, or maybe he was haunted in more ways than he could count. It hardly mattered, not any more than it mattered that Olivia’s phone wasn’t real. He needed to go on playing pretend as if his life depended on it.
George stood and walked down the beach to join his daughter in her tireless game with and unrelenting ocean.
