Chapter Nine #3
He found her at the end of practice, in the field with the Brueghelic children. I need some tips, he told her, and she nodded sagely. She had noticed.
“Follow me,” she said.
—
Dusk had fallen, the trail was getting dark, but the sky was clear and the moon was full, and the stars were so bright, and everywhere. She skied ahead of him, up the hill that rose above the lake, to where the trail entered the forest.
He followed. It was just a matter of transferring weight from ski to ski, he told himself, trying to remember the online lectures.
Of pushing off with skating leg and gliding with the other.
Of returning arms and body to an upward stance, and planting poles; of compressing, extending, compressing, hips aligned with shoulders, ankles with knees.
But still he struggled, and, ahead, Olive halted on a little rise and stood there waiting.
“Not like that!” she shouted, and again she set off on the trail.
He followed. “Copy me!” she shouted. In the dusk, her pink jacket fluttered.
“Copy me!” And he lifted his arms to match hers, and set them down to match hers, and pushed forward with his right leg when she pushed forward, and his left.
She turned to look, surprised he was still there, and something changed, her arms shot up again, her poles pushed off the snow—he followed—two, then four, and then he felt it, he couldn’t understand, could not have told a soul what he was doing, the angle of his knees, or when and where his poles touched, but there was ease and grace and he knew that it was happening, enkeldans, dobbeldans, and now as they rose up a little hill, the padling—hours of video, of struggling, and all he had to do was follow his daughter as she sped forward through the dark.
She looked back. In her laughter, and the flashing of her eyes, he understood.
“Race you,” she said.
The trail dropped off to the right; she stepped into the turn with little chopping steps he’d seen the older children take to keep momentum.
Then, again, she dropped into her glide; again he followed.
They skied in synchrony, Olive just in front of him, arms rising together, skis sliding forward on the trail.
Past tin-barked birches, maples with their empty hollows, the frozen creeks.
The trail turned gently down; by virtue of inertia, he was able to keep close to her.
The spruce and firs drew closer. Dark now.
They should return, he knew, but such a joy it was, he didn’t want it to end, he wished that he could ski with her forever.
She disappeared. A hill; he paddled to the top, expecting to find her waiting there, triumphant, but she was gone.
—
Two roads diverged in a wood.
He called her name, then louder.
No reason to be worried, he told himself. Less than a minute had passed.
But a rift had opened, he could feel it widening, the darkness pouring in. An image, the child fallen somewhere, struggling, sucked down deep into the bank.
But she was fine, a strong skier, just a little enthusiastic.
But she was nine. He had the sudden sense that his heart had stopped.
He looked at his phone, but he didn’t have reception.
A choice now. Three choices, really, left or right or back, to call for help from the remaining parents.
For what if he took the wrong path? How far would he follow it?
And when would Olive realize she had lost him?
How long would the enchantment of the woods last, before she looked back to find she was alone?
How many stories had he read of children lost in forests, and the crooked and cackling beings who waited with their mortars and their pestles and their bubbling pots?
—
Four times before. A crowded park, a carnival, a city pool frenzied with the play of other children.
Once, in a mall in San Jose, he’d lost Wesley, age four, and spotted him only after the two longest minutes of his life.
He’d been running, pushing through the crowds, and had seen the moment that his son looked up and saw that his father was no longer with him.
Seen the fear in his son’s expression, as he fought to keep from crying.
Felt it himself. For weeks afterward, he’d relived the moment.
What if he hadn’t found him? What if the unthinkable had come to pass?
And each time, a moment when the panic came crashing into him, a terror he had never known existed before parenthood, the world pulled out beneath his heart.
There should be a word, he thought, to place among the taxonomy of parental fears, a missing-child terror.
Subspecies, nighttime forest; sub-subspecies, winter, snow.
—
In his mind: the map of the place, the long trail leading out, and the branching, and the branches branching again.
—
The sound of his voice, her name, the sifting silence of the snow.
—
And then, in the darkness, a form, a man, skiing home through the dark.
But he had not seen a child.
—
Dark now, and the cold of the night, and from this stepped a forest sprite in pink.
Teeth white in the light remaining. “Daddy, boo.”