Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

Dad:Okay. Let’s see… How about, hmmmm. How about: Some day my prints will come ?

Gen (crestfallen):Someone told you. Someone told you the answer, didn’t they? Someone told you.

Dad:It’s just an old joke, honey. That’s all. It’s just a really old joke.

Some things, in any case, you cannot control, it occurs to you.

Your sinuses are related in intricate-if-difficult-to-articulate ways to your chest muscles, the anatomy of your lungs, the snow picking up speed and density around you, what a small circle of friends these sorts of events come down to in the end.

Kysha and Thom look over at you sympathetically.

Just seven people, you think.

Karla looks over at you and her dark eyes go oily with sorrow.

Seven people.

That is it.

That is all.

This is to certify that your name has been placed at the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Flowers to share in the prayers and masses offered there each day , the condolence card another relative sends you reads.

You try smiling at them all reassuringly, which only makes your nose run harder, harder and faster, which only makes you for some reason see Gen tumescent in her pink down coat and pink down pants and pink down hood and pink down booties.

Not so much an angel as the scale-model replica of an astronaut.

She is playing in the yard just off the back deck early one morning, first sunlight flaring through fog between dense lodgepole pines, collecting small smooth stones in her mittened scale-model astronaut palm.

You see yourself pulling the blinds closed and continuing to wash dishes, wash dishes or prepare breakfast, wash dishes or prepare breakfast or read the want ads, and then from an omniscient perspective you see your daughter beginning to wander away, onto the foggy gravel driveway, lifting this stone, that stone, testing its heft, evaluating its beauty, letting it drop, lifting another.

You see her squatting.

Squatting and then standing.

Waddle-walking toward the road at the bottom of the driveway.

Never aware, of course, of that flat-green pickup plunging up behind her.

The driver saying later he never saw her, as drivers often do say in such situations, apparently.

He seemed like the kind of man you could trust.

Visibly shaken, he would always carry this conversation with him.

He simply never had any idea she was there.

He took the curve, which your daughter happened to be occupying, and the day’s first foggy sunflash turned his windshield into a white mirror.

That was it.

That was all.

The two hunters riding in the bed saying it sounded like what they imagined hitting a three-foot-tall water bladder would sound like.

They actually used the words water bladder .

They actually used them right in front of you.

In the flair players who move chips with panache while betting signal they are in reality insecure about their hand.

Four hours later you called Karla. It was well past noon in New Jersey. Your voice shivering so badly it must have given the impression you were standing outside in falling snow in your jockey shorts.

Interpreting this as evidence of emotional exhaustion, Karla volunteered to phone your family and friends on your behalf.

Your behalf and Andi’s behalf.

You thanked her and told her you would never be able to repay her.

You were right.

Your family and friends and Andi’s father, who failed to call you back.

There was, you imagine, no real reason.

There was no real reason excluding compassion, of course.

Excluding compassion and excluding tenderness.

Concern.

Things like that.

Unless his not calling had more to do with the opposite of indifference.

This is not that.

This presumably is not that.

Your parents pronounced your sister’s name one last time at the police station, at what passed for a police station, and then they never pronounced it again.

Kysha is speaking now.

She is talking about how this moment is what friends are for.

People believe friends are for the good moments, she says — the vacations, the dinner parties, the weddings, the sharing in happiness and success.

But friends are really for these moments, these awful moments, these moments you cannot begin to believe you are actually experiencing.

Seven people.

One for every day of the week.

That is what it finally comes down to.

Did you just see what I just saw? is what tourists ask their partners over and over, traveling.

The shitting fields, or how the machine-gun-toting guard pulled you out of line at customs in the Belize airport and made you stand off to the side for nearly an hour before it dawned on you he was waiting for a bribe.

Made dangerous by his own poverty.

How that night you were awakened by a noise in your hotel bathroom, what passed for a hotel room, and when you investigated you discovered a rat chewing on one of Andi’s used tampons in the spilled trash can.

You spent a small portion of the money in the special account you set up for Gen to stage this scene.

Did you just live what I just lived?

On the phone calls, the gravestone, the pick ax you purchased in Deary.

On the drives to and from the airport and on the food.

The food and the hotel rooms.

You will give the rest to charity.

A children’s charity, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying.

Look at us, Thom is saying, his own voice shaking like yours shook when you phoned Karla. What a bunch of basket cases. I mean, seriously. Come on, guys. We can do this thing.

The December light cold and gray.

How tourists are always condescending toward other tourists, as if they are not aware of their own tourist status.

Cold and gray and twinkling with mica chips which are catching on your shaved scalp, on the shoulders of your ski jacket, on your cheeks and the back of your neck.

Thom coaching us toward less hurt, as if coaching people toward less hurt somehow involved the notion of volition.

In the stare down players who draw bad cards glare at their opponents, implying they possess a better hand than they in truth do possess.

Andi drops her mitten from her jaw and reaches for yours.

When she squeezes, your nose runs harder.

Harder and faster.

You hear Jack Pederson’s ATV slow down on the road at the end of your driveway, creeping along, figuring.

You have never felt so sorry for yourself in your whole life.

And now it is over.

It is done.

Almost over and done.

You usher your friends and family into your house. Andi serves them chili and beer. You sit in your living room, listening to full mouths moving food around inside them, paper napkins crinkling.

Then you drive everyone two by three to the hotel in Moscow where they will spend the night to catch flights out early the next morning.

Standing in what has become the first storm of the season, you hug each friend or relative goodbye.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Sensing the weight leaving you.

Sensing the weight leaving you all.

These events happen.

These events are falling into the past.

No matter what you do, they slide down the tracks until you can barely make out their luminous white nightgowns fluttering in the blackness.

Then you are in your car, reaching for the door.

Air compacts in your ears, and there you are again, gripping the wheel, striking precisely the same pose you found your father striking after your mother had gone inside and gone to bed, what passed for going inside and going to bed, and you are watching the snow revolve in your headlights.