“‘All good things may be expressed in a single word,’” I said. “‘Freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy. And hope.’ Churchill.”
“‘As thou urgest justice, be assured / Thou shalt have justice more than thou desirest.’ Merchant of Venice.”
“‘Justice wields an erratic sword / grants mercy to fortunate few / Yet if man doesn’t fight for her / ’Tis chaos he’s left to.’”
Dad opened his mouth to speak, but stopped, frowning. “Mackay?”
“Gareth van Meer. ‘The Revolution Betrayed.’ Civic Journal of Foreign Affairs. Volume six, issue nineteen.”
Dad smiled, tilted his head back and gave a very loud “Ha!”
I’d forgotten about his “Ha!” Usually he reserved it for faculty meetings with a Dean, when a fellow colleague said something humorous or stirring and Dad was slightly perturbed he hadn’t thought to say it, so he said a very loud Ha! partly an expression of annoyance and partly to suck the room’s attention back to him. Now, however, when he looked at me, unlike those faculty meetings with a Dean (Dad allowed me to sit in the corner whenever I was out sick with a mild head cold and, without stirring, swallowing all potential sneezes, I listened to the assembled Ph.D.s with chalky complexions and thinning hair, speaking in weighty voices of Knights at the Round Table), Dad had big, bare tears shivering there, ones that threatened to slide shyly from his eyes like modest girls in bathing suits removing their towels, making a slow, embarrassed move toward the pool.
He stood, put a hand on my shoulder and moved past me to the door.
“So be it, my Justice-seeker.”
I sat in front of the empty chair for another moment or two, surrounded by the books. They all had a silent, haughty perseverance about them. They weren’t going to be destroyed by any launch at a human, oh no. With the exception of The Heart of the Matter, which had belched up a clump of pages, the others were intact, gleefully open and showing off their pages. Their tiny black words of wisdom remained in perfect order, sitting in pristine rows, unmoving, attentive like schoolchildren impervious to the influence of a naughty child. Common Sense was open next to me, peacocking its pages.
“Stop moping and get in here,” called Dad from the kitchen. “You must eat something if you’re going to wage war on flabby-armed, potbellied radicals. I don’t think they age all that well, so you’ll probably be able to outrun them.”
Paradise Lost
For the first time since Hannah died, I slept through the night. Dad called such sleeps “The Sleep of Trees,” which was not to be confused with “The Sleep of Hibernation” or “The Sleep of Dead-Tired Dogs.” The Sleep of Trees was the most absolute and rejuvenating of sleeps. It was only darkness, no dreams, a leap forward in time.
I didn’t stir when the alarm went off, nor did I wake up to hear Dad shouting from downstairs the Van Meer Vocabulary Wake-up Call.
“Wake up, sweet! Your word of the day is pneumococcus!”
I opened my eyes. The phone was ringing. The clock by my bed read 10:36 A.M. The answering machine clicked on downstairs.
“Mr. Van Meer, I wanted to notify you that Blue is not in school today. Please call us and give a reason for her absence.” Eva Brewster curtly recited the number to the main office and hung up. I waited for Dad’s footsteps to come through the hall to find out who’d called, but I heard nothing but the clinking of silverware in the kitchen.
I climbed out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom, splashed water on my face. In the mirror, my eyes looked unusually large, my face thin. I was cold, so I pulled the comforter off my bed, wrapped it around me and walked with it down the stairs.
“Dad! Did you call the school?”
I entered the kitchen. It was empty. The clinking I’d heard was the breeze through the open window hitting the silverware wind chime over the sink. I switched on the downstairs light and called into the stairwell.
“Dad!”
I used to dread a house without Dad in it. It could feel empty as a can, a shell, a blind desert skull of a Georgia O’Keefe painting. Growing up, I had a variety of techniques to avoid the truth of the house without Dad. There was the Watch General Hospital with Very Loud Volume (surprisingly comforting, more than one would imagine) and the Put On It Happened One Night (Clark Gable without an undershirt could distract anyone).
Late morning light poured through the windows, bright and vicious. I opened the refrigerator and saw with some surprise he’d made a fruit salad. I reached in, picked out a grape, ate it. Also in the refrigerator was lasagna, which he’d attempted to cover with too small a piece of tinfoil; it left two corners and a side exposed like a winter coat leaving entire shins bare, half the person’s arms and neck. (Dad was always unable to correctly eyeball the required length for tinfoil.) I ate another grape and called his office.
The Political Science Department assistant answered the phone.
“Hey, is my dad there? It’s Blue.”
“Hmm?”
I glanced at the clock. He didn’t have a class until 11:30 A.M. “My dad. Dr. Van Meer. Can I talk to him please? It’s an emergency.”
“He’s not coming in today,” she said. “There’s that conference in Atlanta, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“I thought he went to Atlanta, replacing the man who was in the car accident—?”
“What?”
“He requested permission for a substitute this morning. He won’t be in for the—”
I hung up.
“Dad!”
I left the comforter in the kitchen, raced down the stairs to his study, switching on the overhead light. I stood in front of his desk, staring at it.
It was bare.
I yanked open a drawer. It was empty. I yanked open another. It was empty. There was no laptop, no legal pads, no desk calendar. The ceramic mug was empty too, where he usually kept his five blue ink pens and five black ink pens next to the green desk lamp from the agreeable Dean at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville, which also was gone. The tiny bookshelf next to the desk was completely empty too, apart from five copies of Marx’s Das Kapital (1867).
I sprinted up the stairs, through the kitchen, down the hall, yanking open the front door. The blue Volvo station wagon was parked where it always was, in front of the garage door. I stared at it, at the egg-blue surface, the rust around the wheels.
I turned back inside and ran to his bedroom. The curtains were open. The bed was made. Yet his old sheepskin loafers purchased at Bet-R-Shoes in Enola, New Hampshire, were not capsized beneath the television, nor were they beneath the upholstered chair in the corner. I moved toward the closet and slid open the door.
There were no clothes.
There was nothing — nothing but hangers jittering along the pole like birds, frightened when people stepped too close to the bars to stare at them.
I ran into his bathroom, swung open the medicine cabinet. It was bare. So was the shower. I touched the side of the tub, feeling its stickiness, the few remaining drops of water. I looked at the sink, a trace of Colgate toothpaste, a tiny drop of shaving cream dried on the mirror.
He must have decided we’re moving again, I told myself. He went to fill out a Change-of-Address card at the Post Office. He went to the supermarket for moving boxes. But the station wagon wouldn’t start, so he called a taxi.