37.

San Francisco, California, 2011

It is a clear November day, and Walker is having trouble staying put for the remaining time left of his office hours. More students than usual have come to see him because today is the filing deadline for the senior thesis proposals. Alice will arrive soon. They are going to see a rerun of what she claims is one of the great films of the twenty-first century: Wet Hot American Summer.

She has been living with him since the beginning of the school year. She hates her mother, she says. She hates Harry. She hates Walker, too, only a little less than everyone and everything else. Lisette is unhappy about the new state of affairs, but she is also worn down by Alice and is relieved to have a break. Walker is grateful that in her fury, Alice has chosen him. He has enrolled her in a city school where she is repeating the eleventh grade. She goes to rehab. He tests her urine once a week, and she is not allowed to hang out with her friends at night. She and Walker eat takeout and listen to music. She shows him funny videos on YouTube.

He continues to read through his students’ proposals. The work is serious and eager. The seniors have taken his introductory class and followed up with courses in narrative nonfiction and methodology. Their undertakings are all versions, in one way or another, of his work, and he is flattered by how much they believe in him and his endeavors.

Over the last few months, he has pursued a project of his own, constructing an imagined narrative of intersecting lives—his and Mary Coin’s. He wonders if he is really looking to find the truth, or if he is only trying to find a way to confront his unexpected sorrow at his father’s passing, and his guilt about his children, and the essential loneliness he feels each day. In each case he has failed. He can no more prove that Mary Coin was his grandmother than he can repair himself. He hears his father’s voice in his head: What good is history?

He turns to his computer and pulls up the photographs he took the previous year of the kids on the fishing trip—Isaac recoiling from a flapping trout, Alice caught in a private moment thinking about Walker knows not what. He resisted digital photography for a long time, knowing that once there were no paper photographs, there would be no dusty albums hidden in attics for someone like him to discover. But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.

He scrolls back to the beginning of the file and studies the pictures of Alice when she was five and Isaac when he was two. He has an urge to see them younger, and so he finds the box of old photos he brought to the office intending to scan them. They have sat under his desk untouched for two years. He sorts through the disorganized clutter of images, looking at newborn Alice and Isaac held up for the camera, his or Lisette’s hands clutching their tiny torsos. At six months old, Alice’s sharp worry is already etched into her expression. And there is sweet Isaac, his gaze limpid and trusting, open to the world. Walker imagines that he can see his children’s characters in their earliest photographs, and this alleviates the guilt he bears knowing that the divorce was a terrible blow to them and that his absences were small, repeated wounds. But he knows he could be deceiving himself. What if their faces are those of any children vulnerable to parental whim? If Alice and Isaac had been raised by another, happier couple, would they be better off now or just differently harmed?

Emily Muller, an ambitious senior, taps on his open door.

“Hi, Professor Dodge?” she says. He hears the upswing at the end of the sentence, the strange combination of parent-inflicted overconfidence and global uncertainty he notices in his students.

“Hello, Emily,” he says.

“Just wondering if you’d gotten to mine yet.”

He shuffles through the proposals, finds hers, hands it across the desk. She looks at it, bouncing on her toes a few times as if she cannot contain her anticipation.

“So you liked it?”

“It will be fine.”

“I think I can uncover something really interesting. Something truthful.”

“Something truthful?” he says. He looks at the pile of student papers on his desk. He wonders if he has led them all astray.

“I’m not going to predetermine anything. I’m going to let the evidence lead me,” she says hesitantly. “Like you said.”

Alice blasts into the office with her typical disregard for what she might be interrupting. She has dreadlocked her hair and dyed some of the knotty hanks purple. She wears combat boots and shorts. He is so happy to see her. She drops a package on his desk.

“The lady at the front said to give this to you.”

“The ‘lady’ is Mrs. Elliot,” he says of the secretary who is a whiff of old-world San Francisco propriety in a department filled with sloppy, self-aggrandizing academics.

“I guess I’ll go?” Emily says.

He looks from his brazen daughter to the fearful Emily. He knows he has done her a disservice. “I’m very interested in your project, Emily,” he says. “I look forward to seeing what you come up with.” She backs out the door, looking pained.

“What’s her problem?” Alice says.

“A surfeit of faith in her teacher,” he says.

Alice looks at him quizzically. “Are you high?”

“I have never gotten high in my life.”

“Bullshit,” she says, smiling.

“Well, it’s the bullshit I’m supposed to dish out. You’ll see when you’re a parent.”

“Now you sound like Mom.”

“Your mom is right about a lot of things.”

“Is she right about you?”

Now they are in dangerous territory. “I don’t know what she says about me.”

“That you are searching for something and you haven’t found it yet.”

He looks at Alice. What could these words possibly mean to her? He wonders if he is as inscrutable to his daughter as his father was to him.

“Are you going to open your package, or what?” she says.

He studies the box for a moment, then finds scissors in the clutter on his desk.

“What is it?” Alice says impatiently.

He lifts out crushed newspaper that protects the contents of the package. Before he can go further, Alice reaches into the box and takes out a hat. It is made of red felt and has plastic fruit affixed to its brim.

“Who sent you this?” she says. Her distaste is evident, but she puts it on her head anyway. The disjunction between her purple hair and the prim hat makes him laugh. “What else is in there?” she says.

He takes a legal-sized envelope from the box. His name is written on it. Inside is a letter that informs him that James Coin has died and that his instructions were that these items be sent to Walker.

“Oh, no,” Walker says.

“What?”

“Someone died.”

“Who?”

Something else is in the envelope, and he pulls it out. It is a framed newsprint photograph. The glass is cracked down the center. The picture shows a man sitting in a chair with his eyes closed. He holds a shotgun in his arms.

“Who died?” Alice repeats.

Walker does and does not understand why James has sent him this box. Or, rather, he understands something, but it feels far off, like weather in another county, or history, which becomes more present as it recedes, a paradox of time.

“Dad? Hello?”

“His name was James Coin.”

“How come I never heard of him?” she says.

There is another letter in the box. This one is addressed to Mary Coin. He opens it. Alice looks over his shoulder.

“Who is Vera Dare?” she asks softly.