Stephen Dixon - Frog

Sits in the snow in the same place he last sat with her. Tries to bring her back. Talks to where she sat. Says “Olivia, please be here. Materialize from wherever you are. Just by some miracle or something, be with me now. Or walk through those woods there, say you’ve been kidnapped and you just broke free or they let you go. Please, my dearest child, come back. Daddy’s heartbroken. He can’t live without you. He’s sad all the time knowing what might have happened and might still be happening to you. If it can only be a miracle that brings you back, you never have to tell me where you were or how you got back to me or anything about it. Never, I swear.”

Later he calls the police chief as he usually does once a week and says “Please bear with me again, I know I’ve become a terrible nuisance to you, but is there anything new regarding my daughter here or in this country or the world?” “Nothing,” Pollard says; “I wish there was.” “But you’re still doing your best to find her, right?” “Whatever there is to be done, and there isn’t anything anymore without new information or leads on her, we’re doing it, sir, you can count on it. If anyone calls the special phone number we set up for her, the news would reach me in minutes. And believe me, if I couldn’t get hold of you by phone right away, I’d come, or send another officer, to wherever I thought you were. As I’ve said I don’t know how many times, I fully understand how you feel, so you call me anytime you like.”

He dies. How does he? He’s running, collapses. Happens that quickly. Doesn’t even know it, or barely. Sharp pain in the chest a few minutes before but he thought it was an upper abdominal stitch, stopped, pressed on it to move the gas bubble down, waited till the pain went, pain went, continued running. Then a sharper pain in the chest a few minutes later, and maybe just when he realizes what’s happening or might be, he’s unconscious, never recovers. He’s in his car. He’s thought for a long time he might die in a car accident. Not a heart attack in one, making him lose control of the wheel, but because of some wrong move or bad decision on his part or the driver’s in another car. It’s been close several times. Several times he’s thought if he’d been a second slower in reacting to this or that, or if he hadn’t looked to the right just then, or if the car behind him or to his side had been a foot closer, a few inches closer…. He just hoped neither of his children nor his wife would be with him when this accident happened. This time he pulls off the highway into a one-way street and a truck speeding his way. He tries to avert it by making a sharp right but the truck tries to avert him by making a sharp left. Three young man come up to him at a bus stop, say it’s a holdup, give them everything he has, he gives them everything he has, they shoot him in the head. Stomach pains, been feeling them late at night for weeks, thinks they’re because of the wine and liquor he drinks too close to bedtime while he reads, tells himself to stop drinking at least two hours before he goes to sleep, can’t, one hour, never does it, treats himself with antacids, pain increases, turns out to be pancreatic cancer, he has one to two months, three to four weeks, barely has time to prepare for it, his wife and children barely have time. Then he gets so sick and weak that just about all he can do in his few waking hours a day is think about his nausea and pain. He also cries a lot, that he’ll be dying and losing his children and wife, the growing up of his children, his children as adults. He’s in a restaurant, fishbone gets caught in his throat, tries coughing it up, someone runs up behind him, clears a table with a sweep of his arm, throws him on the table facedown and uses a method on him to dislodge the bone, it doesn’t come out, he continues to choke, can’t breathe, just as another diner is about to cut into his windpipe with a steakknife, he dies. He’s crossing the street, hat flies off his head, he chases it, looks both ways, no cars are coming, picks it up, gets clipped by a car. A plank is blown off a building going up and hits him on the head. A hammer falls from a building going up, a flowerbox in an apartment windowsill, part of a cornice of an old building.

His oldest daughter can’t believe it at first. No, she believes it. “Daddy isn’t coming home anymore,” Denise tells her. “Why?” “Daddy passed away.” “What’s that?” “Oh Jesus, how should I explain it? It means Daddy’s not coming home again ever.” “But why not?” “You still don’t know what I’m saying?” “No.” “All right, plain and simply: he died.” “I know what ‘to died’ is. You don’t have to explain to me. I know I won’t see him anymore. I feel bad, but it’s OK.” She can hardly sleep, is morose most of the day. When she can sleep, she twists around fitfully, has nightmares she says she’d tell what they’re about if she could remember them. “All remember is big teeth in every one of them, some with no faces, and scary dancing deer.” Eats little, won’t play, never laughs, avoids her baby sister, talks mostly in whispers, doesn’t want to go out or to school, sits by herself all day at school looking at books or staring out the window or keeping her eyes shut. Starts to play by herself with a bear she’s renamed Daddy. Dresses it in cloth napkins, toilet tissue and doll socks, feeds it her snacks, takes it for strolls around her room in her doll carriage, puts it to bed at night and covers it up to its neck and hums or tells stories to it, but she won’t sleep in her bed. She sleeps with Denise for weeks, clutching a soft shark. The youngest child asks for Dada several times a day. Phone or doorbell rings: “Dada.” Comes into the kitchen while Denise is cooking or cleaning and says “Dada, where?” and looks around for him there. Other times: goes into the coat closet, shuts the door and when Denise looks for her and finds her sitting in the dark there, says “Dada, looking.” Says “Dada out,” and turns with little quick steps in a circle, meaning she wants him to take her out. Sometimes puts her hat on, carries her coat or snowsuit around the house saying to Denise or to no one “Dada work.” That could mean she wants to be in the back- or front yard where she thinks he’s working or in the cold basement where he did his schoolwork and typed. But she doesn’t seem sad, sleeps the same, hasn’t lost her appetite, wants to play with Olivia, cries or screams when Olivia ignores her or shuts her door on her or pushes her away, goes to her toddler group once a week with no fuss. Years later when they talk about him, she gets sad. “I wish I’d known him. First I wish he were here. He wouldn’t be that old. Even if he were, he’d be a big vigorous sixty-five. I’ve so little to almost no memory of him. Sometimes I think I’ve more than that, but then I suddenly know I’ve been leading myself on.” When they’re adults they sometimes look at photographs of themselves with him, with Daddy alone, of Daddy alone, Daddy as a baby and a boy, with Mother, holding both of them, cheeks against his, week after Eva was born. “This was the first time we took you out after you came home from the hospital,” Olivia says. “I can’t say I remember the event, but I do recall the photo.” Daddy and Olivia hamming it up for the camera, Eva crying behind them. “I’m sure he didn’t hear you — I wouldn’t say the same for me — or he would have stopped clowning immediately to take care of you. Mother probably just didn’t see you through the viewfinder.” Daddy carrying them in a garbage can, standing beside them seated on a camel, squeezed inside an igloo with them he made in the street after the city’s biggest snowstorm in a decade, holding them in one arm on a beach. “He was always so lean and muscular,” Eva says. “Look at that neck. No wonder Mom fell for him at his age.” “He was still doing a thousand pushups a day when he turned fifty,” Olivia says, “then as a birthday gift to himself dropped to nine hundred. And running three miles every morning except on the first day of a bad flu or when the streets were coated with ice. He was a little bit too musclebound and showoffy for my tastes.” “Daddy a showoff? According to Mom he was self-deprecating and overly self-critical, hid himself in dark clothing, was taciturn at gatherings, wouldn’t be interviewed, was invited to but never wrote articles or reviews, even in class, was unduly apologetic to his students and scarcely expressed his views.” “Musclebound and vain, then. He used to flex his chest and arm muscles in front of my bedroom mirror some mornings after he thought he got me back to sleep. And I once walked in on him pulling himself off in front of the full-length bathroom mirror, though their sex life, Mother’s said, except when she was just being generous with her body, was nothing but ripe and raw.” Eva holds up several photos. “What beach is it?” Olivia doesn’t know, calls Denise. “Chincoteague,” she says, “home of wild ponies and soggy oysters. We went there for a weekend every spring and fall, before and after the tourist season. This was going to be a family tradition, your father said, even after you both got married and had children and if the oyster beds survived, but it only lasted four to five years. I remember that day well. You can always tell a great day when we have so many photographs of it, though there were some great days when we overexposed the film or quickly ran out of it. It was so windy on the beach that your father, with the emergency shovel he always kept in the car next to the emergency rope, flares, books, pads and pens, dug a hole in the sand deep enough for all of us to sit belowground and have lunch, even if Eva was still only nursing. I wouldn’t go down. It just seemed too silly. I knew people would pass, hear us and take pictures of us down there. I also didn’t trust the walls. I felt if they collapsed he’d only be able to get you two out and I’d be buried alive with Eva’s breasts.”