At first she thought they were here on vacation… the moving trucks were late, and didn’t get here until last week. By then they’d already been living out of their suitcases for a few days, supplemented by whatever else they’d been able to pack in the car for the two-state traverse.
We’ve gone fishing a couple of times since then, and today she says she recognizes the hills and water and sky as we pull into the dirt parking lot at the head of the trail. Maybe the door to the unpredictable dark tower elevator has opened onto a familiar floor, and this will be a better day.
We carry our fly fishing rods down to the spring creek and I wade off the near bank, while she follows my dad a couple hundred yards upstream. Her encouraging platitudes as he casts his line drift watery relief around my bare calves. Finally, he’s able to do something fun, something he’s earned, without her demanding to be anywhere other than wherever they are.
After fewer caught fish than strikes I see her walking the trail back up to the truck. I yell and wave. She strains to shout that she’s just going to sit down, and she’ll see me soon.
She sounds happy.
But the last couple of weeks since they arrived have shown me what this may become, so I bring in my line, trudge out of the creek, and hustle up the trail after her. My dad is already ahead of me, trying to catch her before she gets to the truck. As I approach the open passenger door, she sputters in anger that she’s hot and doesn’t want to talk to me anymore.
My dad hits the brakes on a bridge linking the dirt road to the two-lane highway, and asks her if she wants to see the bigger fish congregating in the shadows below. She whispers “I don’t want to” in between sobs, the toddler intonation reminding me of the year before when we were caught in a rainstorm in the Scottish countryside and all she could say was “I’m so cold.”
I watch her in the side mirror as the truck cuts home through the prairie. She fights and loses to waves of tears, her mouth turned downward in sadness, or anger, or something else entirely. Maybe she’s thinking about what’s happening to her now, or what happened to her as a kid in foster care.
I don’t really know. I never do. She doesn’t talk when she’s crying, but when they drop me off on their way to a doctor’s appointment, I open the passenger door, ask what’s wrong, and brush away the lone tear running down her cheek.
She shakes her head.
“Nothing to do with you.”
Which isn’t true, of course. Everything about this has something to do with me.
I shut her door, step back on the gravel driveway, and watch the truck disappear into the dust.
The truck, and another piece of her.