But then she lassoed him with seaweed rope and tripped ahead, hooting and skinny legged, her tattered sneakers squeaking on the rocks. Those sneakers still looked too big for her, and she’d toss them off wherever she pleased, in the bathroom or under the dining room table. The sneakers smelled funky, even out of the dryer, like kids’ sneakers do. She wore his fleeces to the supermarket still, without embarrassment, the extra length of sleeve bunched at her elbows. Later, he’d pull one on and find gum wrappers in the pockets and that soapy sweet smell she left behind, the same way the crown of her head smelled when she was a baby.
In the morning he drives the bends at fifteen, for the power walkers pumping five-pound weights and the kids weaving lazily on bikes, but the road is deserted. Three police cruisers block the entrance to the town dock. The flag flutters at half-mast. Over breakfast he told Jenny the outline: a strange man attacked a summer girl but she escaped. He knows this talk is not sufficient, but he is waiting for her questions.
“I’m scared,” says Jenny, fiddling with her seatbelt.
Her face hides behind the loose, honey-colored tangle of her hair. She’s still wearing her Barrel of Monkeys pajamas.
“Me, too,” he says. “But don’t be. You won’t feel a thing through all that Novocain and laughing gas. Lucky duck.”
“I don’t want braces anymore.”
“Sure you do,” he says. “You’ll be the belle of the ball.”
Somewhere along this stretch of road, Adelaide was forced into the white van. He scans the street as though there should be a sign — the shadow of the van, the shadow of the girl, seared into the pavement.
* * *
Now he waits in the lobby while dental hygienists whisper from behind the receptionist’s desk. “Poor girl,” they say, and “in broad daylight,” and “not here, never in a million years.” Gestures stand for the details of the crime — heads shaken, hands held to their mouths.
“Dad,” calls one of the hygienists, “she’s asking for you.” Jenny is reclined in the dental chair, her lips pulled back from her teeth with wads of cotton. There is little room for him. He sits in a chair in the corner. Jenny’s hand appears from under her paper bib and she waves at him. He waves back.
“I’m going to give you some nitrous oxide now,” says the dentist, whose hairy hand loops a tube over her ears and tucks it into her nostrils. “Tell me when you feel it.”
“I don’t feel anything,” says Jenny.
Harold watches as her clenched hands relax.
“Maybe now. I feel something.” Her words are full of tongue and spit. They’ve tucked an apparatus into her mouth to stretch it wider.
“I feel something,” she says, a few minutes later. “I feel it.”
“Doing good, dear,” says the dental hygienist.
“OK there, just a little pressure,” says the dentist. His big blue-gloved fingers strain against a pair of pliers. Jenny is breathing hard, and then there is blood on his gloves and on her bib. The tooth is small, with a long root. The dentist drops the tooth into a metal tin.
“Dad,” Jenny says.
He can just make it out. There is no way to stop what is happening: the dentist readying his pliers, the hygienist with her sucking tool inside Jenny’s mouth. The sucker changes pitch when it catches on the inside of her cheek. The dentist holds up a finger toward Harold when he tries to go to her.
“Please,” says the dentist.
“Almost done,” says the hygienist. “You’re doing great.”
“Dad,” Jenny says, again. She is wild eyed, and her stretched mouth makes him think of a warhorse flipped onto its back.
“It’s like I’m in a well.” The word “well” is nearly lost. He has to strain to find it.
Another tooth plinks into the tin.
“Please keep quiet,” says the dentist.
“Doing just fine,” says the hygienist.
“Keep your tongue still,” the dentist says, “quiet, that’s it.”
“Down in a well,” Jenny gargles. “Looking at you.”
“I’m right here, sugar.”
He moves to the foot of her chair, and squeezes her sneaker.
“But you’re way up there.”
“I’m going to have to give her the midazolam,” the dentist says, his voice soft with anger. “She’ll be awake, but no fear at all with this stuff. Just a nice twilight sleep.”
The hygienist is swabbing Jenny’s arm, preparing an IV. “Just a tiny pinch,” she says.
Jenny’s eyes close and her feet splay.
“There she goes,” says the dentist. “Good girl. Now if you don’t mind waiting over there please.”
Harold lets go of Jenny’s sneaker, returns to his chair, sits on his hands. The room is quiet. He tries to clench his jaw against the click of his chattering teeth. “Air conditioning too chilly, hon?” the hygienist asks him. “Why don’t you grab a cup of coffee in the waiting room. She won’t notice.”
He wants to stay but there’s a twitching around his mouth.
“You sure?”
“Dead to the world.”
His skin is pricking, electric. He tries not to rush through the lobby to the parking lot. Outside it’s Jenny that surrounds him, some kind of sweet distillate. The feeling has been accelerating since last night, his daughter growing into detailed relief like a print left to etch too long in acid. The smell of her ChapStick as she kisses his cheek before bed, how she hums brushing her teeth, the puff of her almost snore through his bedroom wall.
The feeling withdraws. It is only gathering strength for the next wave. He goes back inside, through the lobby, into the operating room. The hygienist is cleaning the blood crusted at the corners of Jenny’s mouth, which is still gaping, and the blood and the gaping mouth root themselves into his chest. He feels the way he expected to feel in the weeks Jenny’s mother was dying. That all of it, even the most vulgar details, would come home to his heart. Before they were married, before Jenny, he was certain that he’d love her face in old age, that their job as lovers was to love each other’s faces in all their forms. But the beginning wasn’t too far before she got sick, which was the end. Her face grew old when she was still young, and her breath turned sour from too much sleep. Her head resting on his shoulder radiated heat, leaving a crescent of sweat behind on his sleeve. The details were not precious, but terrifying. The coated tongue, the mushroomy smell before he got her in the bath. Her nostrils were flared and animal as he held her hand at the end of it, Jenny wailing from her crib. Only after she died did grace shake loose, the twisted sheet stripped from her bed, the fresh one filling like a sail before settling smooth.
They prop Jenny up, and tears drain out of her ears. She’s awake again, but she can’t keep her eyes open. They tell him to keep the cotton wads in her cheeks, to stanch any bleeding. She shuffles against him, her face pressed to his shirt pocket. He carries her to the car, her long legs knocking against his knees. In the car she huffs and pulls the cotton from her mouth, pink spit stranding from her chin to her hand. He finds the soggy tuft inside her fist and tucks it back into her cheek.
“Dad,” she says as Harold’s tugging off her sneakers. She is propped up in bed, head lolling. Her hair hangs in her face. She blows it away. He can picture her as a woman, whiskey drunk in college.
“Hey, sugar.”
“Questions,” she says. “Can you answer them?” The cotton blurs her words.