Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“So Mommy’s with Grandma and Grandpa?” Quinn asked him.

“Yes,” he said. He looked at her in the backseat. He could not read any emotional response there at all.

“Is Grandma OK?” she said.

“Yeah, Grandma’s fine.”

“OK,” Quinn said. “When’s Mommy coming home?”

“I don’t know. It might be a couple of days. Might be longer than that. She’s making sure Grandpa’s OK.”

“But Grandpa’s going to die?”

“Yes, he’s going to die.”

“Then how is she going to make him OK?”

“She just wants to be there with him. To make him feel better.”

“But he’s still going to die,” Quinn said. It was not a question.

“Yes,” he said. “He’s still going to die.”

She did not speak for a few moments. Then she said, “Could you turn the radio on?”

“Sure can,” he said.

He did so. When he looked at her again, at that part of her he could see in the rearview mirror, she displayed no emotion whatsoever. He knew already that Barb would likely be irritated with him for telling Quinn the truth of what was happening or at least for telling her on his own without Barb at his side, but Quinn had asked him and he had answered and as far as he could tell she was handling it well enough.

“When’s Mommy coming home?” she said again.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said, turning the radio down. “Maybe a couple of days. Maybe a little longer than that.”

“I want her to come home.”

“She will.”

“I want her to come home now,” she said.

He looked at her in the rearview mirror. She continued to stare out the window. “We can call her tonight,” he said.

“OK,” she said. She did not look at him.

Her face held in profile within the rectangle of the mirror. Around that reflection unscrolled the world: an endless flow of cars on the southbound interstate, full neighborhoods lined with trees, distant farm fields just rolling into spring.

The night went better than he thought it would. He knew Barb had been called in to the elementary school on several occasions over the previous year for what Quinn’s teachers had come to call their daughter’s “strong will,” a behavior that amounted to an ongoing problem according to the school but which Keith had seen little of during his time at home. Nonetheless, he knew it was not something Barb or Quinn’s teachers had invented. His daughter was, if nothing else, a little girl who expected to be treated like an adult, a facet of her personality that Keith was actually quite proud of but which Barb found annoying. And indeed he had to admit that, when Quinn asserted herself, her personality — her strong will — was more than either of them knew what to do with. If she decided she did not want to do what she had been told to do, she simply would not do it. She would throw no tantrums; she would simply refuse to do what was asked unless it was her will to comply.

So he had been concerned that Quinn might be difficult that first evening but in actual fact she gave him no trouble, perhaps because he did not ask her to do anything she did not want to do. He was aware that he was not really parenting her but he simply did not see the need to adhere to the house rules Barb had set down for their daughter. Not now. He bathed her later than she was usually bathed and dressed her in pajamas and they sat on the couch for half an hour — this already an hour past her bedtime — and watched a cartoon about an animal Keith could not identify.

“That’s dumb,” Quinn said at some point during the program.

“What is?” he asked. He was not even really looking at the screen at all, instead was thinking of the project he had been working on the day before in his office, wondering how much of it he could complete tonight given the materials he had returned home with. Had he remembered the last set of drawings from drafting? He was not sure.

“Four isn’t even that color really. It’s kinda more like red.”

He felt his chest tighten. He had not been paying attention to the screen but he certainly was now. Had there been a number? He thought so. The number four. An orange number four. “What do you mean?” he said.

“They didn’t do the colors right,” she said. “Four is red. Everybody knows that. Now it’s gonna be mad.”

“Because it’s the wrong color?”

“Yeah,” she said.

He might have scolded her for her tone but he was not attentive to such things now. Instead he felt a turning inside of him, a kind of excitement.

“The four was orange but it’s not really orange. It’s supposed to be red. It would be really mad if it was orange.”

“It’s irritated because it’s the wrong color?”

“Yeah, because it’s supposed to be more like red.”

He paused and then said, “Red or more like brownish red?”

“Yeah, a little like brownish red.”

“But not orange.”

“No way José, not orange.”

The television continued its sounds. He was staring at the screen now, not looking at her, the sense of what she had said flooding through him all at once.

“What about nine?” he asked.

“Yellow.”

“Two?”

“Blue two. It rhymes.”

“Three?”

“Kind like blue and green together. Like water.”

“Four?”

“Jeez, are you gonna ask me all of them?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Probably.” But he already knew all the answers she could possibly give. The colors all the same. The colors exactly the same as his own.

This was how it would start. He knew that now, in the house in the cul-de-sac, his hands ever-flecked with paint. He knew that this had been the moment to dictate everything to come after. But he also knew — had already known — that Quinn was similar to him in some essential way, Barb even making that a household joke, laughing when their daughter’s responses were so blunt and direct, without preamble or thought or concern. “She’s just like you,” Barb would say to him. “Exactly.” He would merely shrug in response and Quinn would peer back at them both, exasperated, as if she knew there was some kind of joke between her parents but she would not deign to acknowledge it. But he knew it was true. Even as a very young child she had displayed a sense of logic and analytic skill. It was the same language Keith spoke, not the language of numbers — that would come later — but rather a language of simplicity and directness. Perhaps it would have been the same with any child, that his own tendency to speak with blunt efficiency, to cut right to the point, mirrored the way children communicated. But then this was not any child; this was his own and she was so much like him that it sometimes felt as if, finally, he had found someone he could communicate with who gave no quarter to pretense or confusion.

She shared, as well, his ability to focus on whatever task was at hand, silently and efficiently. When she had been four or five it had been building elaborate structures with Lego blocks. Much later, it would be her homework. Sometimes, in the years to follow, he would stand in the doorway to her room and watch her at work, her back to the door, and if he was quiet enough he could watch her there for a long time, her silence, the intensity of her progress. It reminded him of being alone in his office with his pencil and calculator and his numbers and with no one to disturb him. He could think of no place on Earth, no situation he enjoyed more. The only questions that existed in that room were ones he directed himself and all such questions, no matter how complicated, could be answered and in this too, he imagined, she was like him.

In the weeks following Barb’s father’s death, he had already decided that the numbers would provide a trajectory for her, a way for her to move forward, not just ahead of her peers but away from them because she had the gift. She shared the same secret and inviolable sense of numbers that he did, their personalities and their colors immutable. At first he had been too surprised — shocked, even — to think of anything beyond the moment they were in because what she had said in passing, casually, in front of the television, was something he had thought private: that the numbers themselves held within them a sense of relationship. He had known this as early as the second grade, when he had told the class that three did not like seven and that seven and eight only got along when they were seventy-eight and otherwise did not want to be neighbors at all, that this was clear from their colors alone. The other students had laughed at him and the teacher praised him faintly for his overactive imagination and Keith stared back at them, dumbfounded, his eyes not tearing up but rather only opening wide to mark his sense of incredulous confusion. What he had told them was fact, something he understood as intimately as he knew his own mother and father, perhaps even more so. He did not understand the reaction the other students had toward him. He did not understand it at all.