The days are yours.
You read your paperbacks. You know them by heart now, almost entirely. You challenge yourself to recite the first chapter of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from memory. You try to remember meditation sequences from your previous life, how your mind could compress the time or let it stretch.
The house is so silent without them that you sometimes hum just to make sure your ears still work.
Your life as a runner taught you skills. The key to a marathon: You do not think about the end. You do not picture the finish line. You keep moving. You exist in the present. The only way to do it: one stride at a time. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It certainly doesn’t have to be enjoyable. All that matters is that you are still alive at the end of it.
YOU LOOK AROUND for the cameras. Alone in the bedroom, and from the kitchen at mealtimes. You can’t know for sure whether he was telling the truth or making them up. You can’t see anything, but how easy would it be to hide them between two books, in the corner of a dropped ceiling, behind a kitchen cabinet? You believe he can see everything.
On weekend mornings, they depart, packed lunches in stuffed backpacks. You hear nothing but birdsong until the evening. Cecilia returns exhausted but willing to share tales of an afternoon spent hiking, exploring, wandering around a library, a museum. You mine each of her sentences for information. Cold hikes: you must be near mountains, maybe still upstate. Impossible to know for sure. Some days, she mentions the names of nearby towns. Nothing rings a bell. You could be anywhere.
She quizzes you. Cecilia. Wants to know what you’re up to when she’s not around. You recite the lie her father cooked up: you work remotely, doing customer service for a tech company. Around it, you make up a life for Rachel, for the person Cecilia believes you to be. Afternoons spent reading—not exactly a lie. Vague excursions to stores, the same ones you’ve heard her father mention. You stop short of giving Rachel friends or a family. You do not trust your brain to hold a cast of made-up characters, to keep up with the full stories of their lives. She’s smart. If you make a mistake, she’ll notice.
YOU ARE NOT allowed to touch anything, but your eyes have powers. They can travel anywhere. Like when you were a kid and your mom took you shopping: Touch with your eyes only. You let your gaze bounce around the kitchen, peer into the living room. On the bookshelf, a row of medical thrillers. You sit on the couch, head tilted, trying to decipher the titles. What are you looking for? A pattern? A theme? An explanation for who he is and what he does, tucked between Postmortem and The Andromeda Strain?
It is right here, pulsing through the walls, like a quiet roar underneath the hardwood floors. The truth of him, encased in the very heart of this house.
Every item tells a story that may or may not be true. The medical thrillers: a dead wife’s paperback collection, left over from a string of summer vacations, or a warning sign of a dark obsession with the human body? Childhood photos of Cecilia learning to swim in a motel’s pool, “graduating” third grade, lost under a witch hat for Halloween: the usual tokens of family life, or props in the theater of his existence, placed here to keep up appearances?
This house—does it know him? Or is it a movie set, an alternative world, built piece by piece, to hide his true self?
There are the things you see, and there are the things you notice for their absence: No landline. No desktop computer. You assume there is a laptop somewhere, locked in a drawer and password-protected, taken out only for administrative tasks and homework. Their cell phones live tucked away in their respective pockets. Cecilia doesn’t even get to keep hers: she has it for school and for art class, whenever she’s away from him. As soon as she gets home, he holds out his hand and she gives it to him. She is thirteen. On the rare occasions she complains about his phone rules, he says he doesn’t want her to waste her time on social media, swears that she’ll thank him later. She sighs but doesn’t challenge him.
Your eyes return to the paperbacks, to the photos, to the neatly stacked nature magazines on the coffee table. Looking for answers. For a man, for a sign of life. Searching for his story.
At night, you dream. Visions that have followed you from the shed: You, running hard on a country road lined with trees. Behind you, the sound of his breath, the menace of his stride catching up with yours.
You startle awake. Even in your dreams, he chases you. But you run, and for a few moments it feels real to you. You hold on to those sensations as long as you can in the dark, the momentum of your body, the whipping of your arms at your sides, the delicious burn of the air up and down your throat.
YOU MAKE YOUR most startling discovery one night, over a plate of veggie pot pie. Cecilia’s eyes are on the TV. Nick from Arkansas has picked “Mottos” for four hundred.
“These two Latin words symbolize the ethos of the U.S. Marines,” Alex Trebek says.
“Semper fidelis.”
You speak at the same time. You and the perfect father. He turns his head slowly. For the first time in his daughter’s presence, he looks straight into your eyes.
“How did you know?”
His tone is purposeful, focused. Something here means a lot to him.
You do not want to tell him the real reason. You want to keep your memories of the 2012 Marine Corps Marathon to yourself. An evening train from Penn Station to Union Station, one night at a hotel, and a wake-up call at four in the morning. A bus packed with nylon silhouettes, a hazy walk to the Pentagon before sunrise. Men in uniform searching your running belt, browsing through pouches of caffeinated gel, single packs of Advil, nutrition bars. The national anthem, then a gun start. Thirty thousand runners. Four hours and twenty minutes. The Virginia woods on each side of the course, an unending stretch of highway in the suffocating heat, and finally the finish line. More uniforms. Their hands presenting medals. Your tired legs, your sweaty body, a lanyard around your neck. The runner next to you uttering two words to the marine in front of him. Semper fi.
You do not want him to have any of this. You do not want him to know that one day, should the occasion present itself, you could run.
Not now, though. Your body couldn’t do it now. Rule number two of staying alive outside the shed: You will get ready. Until then, you will sit. You will eat. You will watch Jeopardy! You will field questions at the dinner table.
With a father and a daughter waiting for your answer, you search your brain for the most plausible lie.
“I had a fitness instructor who used to be a marine,” you say. “He taught it to us.”
A perplexed father raises an eyebrow. Plays with his pot pie. This is unlike him. He’s not a man who hesitates. He eats or he doesn’t.
Cecilia leans forward conspiratorially. “He was a marine, too.” She points at her dad with her chin. He tries to interject, “Cecilia—” but she continues. “He dropped out of college to serve.”
Your fork clinks against your plate.
A marine.
“Wow.”
You can’t think of anything else to say.
“Hospital corpsman,” he mumbles, his voice low. Forced to give you a part of himself. Something he was hoping to keep, like you with the marathon.
You don’t know what a hospital corpsman is. You don’t know what a hospital corpsman does. He dropped out of college to be one, so presumably being a hospital corpsman doesn’t require a medical degree.
A story outlines itself: A man who wanted to be a doctor but couldn’t do it. Distracted from his coursework by the thoughts swirling inside his brain, one obsessive circle, a deepening riff inside of him. He didn’t drop out to serve, like his daughter just said. Rather, he dropped out and served. He became a hospital corpsman. He was discharged, honorably or dishonorably—you have no way to know. Something brought him here, wherever you are. He found a job. He found a wife. He became a man with a family and a house. He became the man you know.
You set your fork down, rest your hand flat on the place mat. He dropped out to serve.
Memories: A friend’s grandfather, a funeral at Arlington Cemetery. Fourth of July barbecues, your father behind the grill, your mother in a red dress. A country song about the flag, about freedom and revenge. In your class at NYU, a veteran with a service dog who became the class mascot. Words. Five of them. What people said when the time came, in conversation, to acknowledge certain things.
Five words that Cecilia, who grew up hearing the story of how her dad dropped out of college to serve his country, is expecting to hear.
You pick your fork back up. You can’t look at him, so you stare above his shoulder as you say it.
“Thank you for your service.”
He nods. Your mouth fills with acid.