After the family dinner, with her brother’s wife Ella making it five, Mirabelle goes to her room and sits on the bed amid the relics of her childhood. Her mother’s discarded sewing machine has been stowed in the room, and there are a few stray cardboard storage boxes stuffed into her closet, but otherwise everything is the same. A clock radio from the seventies, predigital, sits on her bedside table, in exactly the same spot it occupied when Jimmy Carter was president. The books that Mirabelle dove into when she wanted to vanish from the family are still in perfect order on her painted wicker bookshelf. The yellow glow from the incandescent overhead light washes over everything, and it, too, is familiar. Although she feels she is a stranger in the house, she is not a stranger in this room. This room is her own, and it is the only place where she knows exactly who she is, and whom she is fighting against, and she would like to remain in it forever.
She opens one of the storage boxes – cardboard drawers in cardboard chests – and sees piles of old tax forms, long past any purpose of being saved, a few ledgers, and some rolled-up Christmas wrapping. She kneels down, brushing dust off the floor, and slides open the lower drawer. A folded sweater and more financial flotsam. She sees an array of photos tucked inside another antique ledger. She picks it up and the photos spill onto the bottom of the box. She sifts through them and sees Christmas pictures of herself at five years old, riding on her father’s neck. He is all smiles and clowning, her brother is nearby with a space weapon, and Mom is probably taking the picture. But the mystery for Mirabelle is, what happened? Why did her father stop loving her?
Mirabelle lies back on her bed holding the photos like a gin hand. Each one is a ticket to the past; each reveals a moment, not only in the faces but in the furniture and other objects in the background. She remembers that rocker, she remembers that magazine, she remembers that porcelain souvenir from Monticello. She stares into these photos, enters them. She knows that even though the same people and the same furniture are outside her door, the photo cannot be re-created, reposed, and snapped again, not without reaching through time. Everything is present but untouchable. This melancholy stays with her until sleep, and she loves being held by it, but she cannot figure out why these photos are so powerful beyond their obvious nostalgic tug.
The next day, she and her dad take a walk in the woods. In Vermont, no matter in which direction you go, you end up in the woods, so they go straight out their own backyard. The snow is crunchy and manageable. Mirabelle wears her mom’s parka, which makes her look like someone has inflated her. Dad is all man in a furry vest and plaid shirt and lambskin jacket. After the “how’s Mom” discussion in which little is said and nothing is answered, Mirabelle produces from her pocket the photographs, and hands them to him.
“I found these last night. Remember these?” She laughs as she presents them, to indicate their harmlessness.
After reaching clumsily for his glasses, which are inconveniently stashed under layers of insulation, Dan looks at the photos.
“Uh-huh.” This is not the response Mirabelle is looking for. She had hoped for a smile or chuckle or flicker of some memory of pleasure.
“We were giggly,” probes Mirabelle.
“Yeah, it looks like we are having a lot of fun.”
He hands the photos back to her. She cringes at his disconnection from the events in the pictures.
Mirabelle suddenly knows why the photos have such a powerful effect on her. She wants to be there again. She wants to be in the photographs, before Easter, before the shift in his personality. She wants to be hoisted onto her dad’s shoulders the way she was as a child; she wants to trust him and be trusted by him, enough that he would share his secrets with her.
“These were taken right when you came back from Vietnam, weren’t they?”
Mirabelle has tried to open this door before. Today his response is the same as always.
“Not sure. Yeah, I guess.”
The air bites them as Mirabelle and her father continue to walk. Then, coming to a clearing in the snowy forest, they grind to an uncomfortable halt. Mirabelle pushes a hand deeper in her pocket and fingers the card given to her by Carter Dobbs. The distance from the house gives her courage and she thinks now is the time. “There’s a man trying to reach you,” says Mirabelle. “He says he knows you.”
She offers him the card. Taking it, he pauses in the chilling snow and looks at it, saying nothing.
“Do you know him?” Mirabelle asks.
He hands the card back to her. “I know him.” And the conversation is over. But she had noticed something. When he was holding the card, he took his thumb and traced it over the name, and when he did so, he was powerfully distant from where he is now, in this snow with his daughter, in the woods in his backyard, in Vermont.
Her mother leaves the house to go babysit for her three-year-old grandchild. Mirabelle goes to her room after watching several hours of television with her now monosyllabic dad. The house is quiet, and she angles the shade on her bedside lamp and browses some of the books of her youth: Little Women, Jo’s Boys, Little Men, Jane Eyre, The Little Princess, Secret Garden, The Happy Hollisters. Nancy Drew. Agatha Christie. Judy Blume: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Deenie. Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. But something catches her ear. Something…the sound of a cat? Or an injured animal in the far distance. But her mind keeps recalculating the data, inching the source of the sound closer than the outdoors. This wail, these moans, are coming from inside the house. Wearing her bunny slippers – a gift last Christmas from an aunt who underestimated Mirabelle’s age by fifteen years – she opens the door to her room and steps out into the hall. She does not need to walk far to know that the sounds, which she has now identified as sobbing, are coming from her father, who is behind the closed door of his bedroom. She stands frozen like a deer with bunny feet, then guides the slippers backward into her room, noiselessly. She shuts her door without making a sound, as she had done one night twenty-one years ago after hearing the same cries coming from the same room.
The moaning has stopped, and now the house is quiet. Mirabelle sits in her armchair and sees her parka, which has tumbled off the foot of her bed and onto the floor. She retrieves Carter Dobbs’s business card. She approaches her parents’ bedroom and lays the tiny business card up against the doorway. Then she quietly slides her way back to her own room.
Six months pass unnoticed as Ray and Mirabelle live in a temporary and poorly constructed heaven, with him flying in and out, visiting her, taking her to fine restaurants, then back to his place, sometimes sleeping with her, sometimes not. Sometimes he takes her home and says good night. She does not like sex when she has her period. When she feels depressed, sex can sometimes leave her sullen, so during these times there is an awkward domesticity while they wait it out. He takes note of her use of expressions that linger from her adolescence – lazy bones, sleepyhead, early bird and is alternately amused and annoyed by them. A toothbrush is set aside for her. Since his house is closer to Neiman’s, she often stays the night with him, bringing an overlarge purse stuffed with a change of clothes so she can go directly to work from his house. When he fantasizes about sex, he thinks of her and no one else.