Except Mary was sixteen.
To anyone looking at her, she was a typical teenager. She had a curly mop of blond hair and eyes that Clark thought of as Caribbean blue. Her face was round and bright. She was almost six feet tall, with a stocky frame. A big girl. She could have been a runner or a wrestler. It seemed so wrong and unfair that she kept growing into a pretty young woman while remaining trapped in the mind of a child. Clark lay awake nights blaming himself and God for the accident in the water. He consoled himself with the belief that Mary would be perpetually happy, perpetually innocent, without the awkwardness, pain, doubt, and self-consciousness of becoming a real teenager. It was little comfort.
“It’s bedtime, Mary,” he murmured.
She pretended not to hear him. She kept playing with her blocks and humming a tune to herself. Clark realized it was the theme song to a television show they had watched earlier in the evening. He was always amazed at the things that made it inside her brain, when so many other things did not.
“Bedtime, Mary,” he repeated without enthusiasm.
Mary stopped and frowned. Her lips turned downward like a clown’s. He laughed, and she laughed, too.
“Five more minutes,” he said.
Clark hated Sunday nights. At ten o’clock, Mary would go to bed, and he would be alone in the small house for another hour while he watched TV and poured himself a last beer. In the morning, his ex-wife, Donna, would come by the house, and they would silently make the exchange. Mary would cry and go with her, and Clark would cry and watch her go. Then he would pour coffee into a Thermos, silently wrap up a turkey sandwich for his lunch, and head off to his construction site on the Duluth harbor, knowing that the house would be empty when he returned home. Five long, lonely days awaited him. During the week, it was as if he were in a trance, waiting for that moment on Friday evening when Donna’s SUV pulled up in front of his door, and Mary ran up the sidewalk to get folded up in his arms. His beautiful girl. His baby. He lived for the weekends with her, but they were over almost as soon as they began, leaving him right back here, dreading her bedtime, feeling his soul grow cloudy at the thought of a week alone.
“Come on, honey,” he told her, his voice cracking.
Clark got off the sofa. Mary got her big bones from him. He was burly and strong. He had worked construction since he was eighteen, and after twenty years laboring outside through bitter cold and ninety-degree summers, he woke up every morning with his muscled body stiffened into knots. In his twenties, he could take a hot shower and come out refreshed and limber. Not now. Pain dogged him through his days.
Mary bounded up and held out her hand. He took it to lead her to her room. Her skin was pink and soft, and his own skin was like leather. She knew he was sad on these nights, and she tried to cheer him up by making faces. He smiled and let her think it was working, when the truth was that nothing could lift him out of depression at these moments.
“Blocks, Daddy,” she said.
“Yes, honey, I’ll take good care of your blocks. They’ll be here for you next week.”
Her bedroom was at the rear of the small house, with two windows looking out toward the woods at the back of the lot. Mary danced into the bathroom behind him to brush her teeth. It was dark, and Clark went up close to the windows and studied his reflection in the glass. Puffed-up brown pouches sagged under his eyes. His sandy hair was too long; he needed to cut it, which he usually did himself to save money. His jeans were fraying. He could poke a finger through his left pocket to his skin. He wore a NASCAR T-shirt and a camouflage baseball cap.
“Meeeeeeee!” Mary shouted, flouncing back into the room and jumping onto the squeaky frame of her bed. She slept in a twin bed that was too small for her, but she didn’t mind that her feet dangled off the end. There was barely room for Mary among the beanbag animals she collected. She wore a frilly nightgown that came to her knees. That was one thing that worried Clark whenever Mary was out in the world without him. She had no concept of sexuality, but her body said otherwise. She looked like a normal, healthy, attractive girl. She had no embarrassment, and she often stripped off her clothes and wandered around the house naked and couldn’t understand why Clark insisted she stay dressed.
“That was quick,” Clark said. “Did you really brush your teeth?”
Mary nodded seriously.
“Really?” he repeated.
She folded her arms tightly and nodded again, her whole body quivering like gelatin.
“Okay,” he said.
Clark turned off the overhead light but left the lamp lit by her bed. Mary liked the room bright throughout the night. He checked her windows and locked them, because otherwise, Mary had been known to climb outside and run through the backyards of the neighborhood. She didn’t sleep well. She might close her eyes for an hour, and then she would get up, and Clark would hear her bouncing an inflated ball against the bedroom wall. If he wasn’t too tired himself, he would get up and play with her, until finally she grew drowsy again. Sometimes she simply curled up on the floor, and he would pull the blankets off the bed and cover her.
He tucked her into bed. Her eyes were bright. “Good night, Mary.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you, too, honey.”
The ache in his stomach at the thought of her leaving in the morning was so great that he couldn’t say anything more. He kissed her forehead, and as he closed the door, he saw her waving her hands at the ceiling in bed, as if she could see the stars and conduct them like an orchestra.
Clark returned to the sofa and finished his beer and opened another one. He thought about seeing Donna in the morning when she came to collect Mary. Donna lived across the bridge in Superior and worked as a legal secretary. Clark was in Gary, living in the white concrete block house that had once belonged to his parents. For five years, he had shared Mary with Donna from a distance, and for five years, he had hated the arrangement so much that it felt like a disease inside him.
It wasn’t Donna’s fault. The bitterness between them had long ago died into loneliness. They had married young and tried to make a go of it, but the pressure of raising Mary together had destroyed them. They each loved their daughter, but Mary demanded so much that they had run out of energy to love each other. Donna thought they should try again. She had made noises about making a fresh start. Two weeks earlier, when she had come to his house to drop Mary off, she had stayed there all evening, the three of them together like in the old days. After Mary went to bed, they had drunk wine, and laughed, and wound up sleeping together. They were kids again, the way it was before Mary, before the divorce. The sex felt warm and familiar. But when he awoke, he was alone. Donna couldn’t face him. That told him all he needed to know.