OUR GIRL WAS BORN AFTER LONG LABOR ON THE FIRST DAY OF fall, a girl of the equal night. We had meant to call her Daphne, but when we saw her both Juliet and I knew, independently, that Daphne was not her name. The maternity nurse warned us to name her quickly—even suggested a long, impatient list—but we couldn’t, didn’t know who the girl was. We left Franklin Memorial with Baby Girl Roorbach safely in her car seat, brought her home to the dogs and her own little room where my office had been.
That was the fall of the Supreme Court election. I listened to the radio obsessively as AI Gore went down, held the baby in the darkening kitchen every afternoon while mother Juliet napped, took her out in the yard in her blanket when the alpenglow rose and Jupiter came visible in the eastern sky, followed closely by Saturn and night.
One morning after no sleep, I put the dogs out in my as yet unused (but ready) studio, slunk back to the house, lay myself down on the couch in the living room to work, and promptly fell asleep, an open master’s thesis (some five hundred pages of good prose from a favorite student) dropping straight onto my face and staying there. Upstairs, Juliet and the baby girl slept too. Perhaps we’d sleep all morning and all the way till two in the afternoon, just as we had the day before.
Not fifteen minutes later I leapt to my feet at the sound of heavy footsteps on the porch, and then the front door opening, that familiar creak of old hinges. My head swam. And someone huge was standing by the wood stove bellowing at me: “The new fah-tha!”
“Earl, quiet!”
“I’ve just a-come to see the baby!” Bay-bay, he said it. And at that he stepped toward me, ducking his head under the parlor beam, this behemoth in overalls, homemade shoes rocking the house with each heavy step. He smiled through his layers of beard grown back and proffered a pink-wrapped present in one of his battered hands. “Saw the Franklin Journal!”
“Don’t you knock?”
Fondly, and at volume: “Now, ain’t you ferocious!”
Upstairs I heard the baby’s cry, that tiniest, most wrenching sound, pulled my face into the sternest shape I’m able, hissed, “Get out!”
Earl fell back, shocked, wounded. His face fell too; he was genuinely hurt. He composed his face sober, ducked his way back to the kitchen, board-creaking steps in the otherwise silent house. “I’ll put this right here,” he said, still too loud, and put the pink package (cigars, as it turned out) delicately on our sideboard. “And I’ll be on my way, unwelcome!”
“Earl, I’m sorry,” I said, still angry despite myself. The baby’s wail came again, spiraling louder. I tried to soften, said, “The baby. She’s not sleeping.”
Earl peered over my shoulder back into the parlor and past that into the living room—empty chairs and couches, silent stereo, silent radio. Pityingly, earnestly, he said, “Where are your people?”
I begged: “Earl, please, we’re not getting any sleep. Please call before you come. Okay? Thank you for coming. But please call. And please don’t barge in here. Knock on the door.”
“Where are your people?” he said again, genuinely puzzled. Where are your parents, he meant, where are Juliet’s parents, where are your brothers and sisters, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, your grandparents, and of course your neighbors, and all your many friends and the hundred casseroles and the cheese platter and the bottles of sparkling cider and the rabbis and mullahs and ministers and priests: where are they?
I TOOK TO DOING MY SCHOOLWORK OUTDOORS IN THE HAMMOCK, where I could intercept the UPS man, or the Jehovah’s Witness gang, or Earl. One afternoon, wrapped in my thick old sleeping bag and swaying in the breeze, I opened my eyes to a shout of hello only to spy a bustling young woman bearing down, tall, purple tank top, bra straps falling off strong shoulders, dark long hair, good jeans, good posture.
Meghan Bitterauf, our neighbor, come to babysit. I felt a warm surge of affection, thought of her dad: I was a man with a daughter now too. Meghan had been eleven when we first met, her family generous with the new neighbors. They lived a couple of doors up the hill in the handsome old James Butterfield house. I’d heard she’d dropped out of college, the University of Montana.
There I was, unshaven, sleepy, disheveled.
Meghan, nonjudgmental, gave me a minute to disentangle myself from the hammock’s old sleeping bag, mark my place in the thesis at hand, get my feet on the ground. She said, 11You name the baby yet?”
No, we had not.
And in fact, the baby and Juliet were asleep, golden hour for all of us, no need for a babysitter quite yet, so I suggested a walk. Meghan shrugged, gave me a hand out of the hammock, and we marched down across the fields and to the stream, sat on a nice rock under oak trees over fast water. She had a clean new tattoo needled partway around her wrist, showed it to me first thing: “If it goes all the way around, you know, your soul can’t leave your body when you die, and you’re stuck.” And apropos of that, she said, “Did you hear about the boy who got hit?”
I felt again the lurch in my stomach, saw that twitching form. I’d sent money to the fund I’d read about in the paper—empty response—felt guilty I hadn’t stopped in to visit his parents, not that I knew them, not that I could offer anything useful.
I told Meghan what I’d seen, already two months past.
She said, “They flew him down to Portland in the medevac helicopter. He’s still in a coma.”
I didn’t understand how he had lived at all, so in a way, the coma was good news. We sat and watched the water. My thoughts went back to the unnamed baby. Meghan’s thoughts had paddled on ahead upstream. She said, “Isn’t it good down here? Abby and Carrie and I would just tell people: ‘Party on Temple Stream!’ And we’d go up past where the pavement ends? In the afternoon? And we’d set up tents and by night-time sixty people would be there. We’d have a huge fire in the rocks, put music on someone’s car stereo, and shake. Your daughter will do the same thing!”
We watched the stream some more. I said, “So, what happened to Montana?”
Meghan tried not to grin: “I kinda flunked a couple of courses? But I had fun! I played folf. That’s Frisbee golf. I loved it there. But I couldn’t stay. Don’t worry—I’m enrolled at UMF. What happened to Ohio?”
“I’m ‘Not Teaching, on Duty.’ N-TOD, it’s called. I’m reading theses and doing e-mail and stuff. We go back in January.”
“What? Bizzle! You go back?”
“We go back.”
“You shouldn’t go back.”
“Well, we have to go back.”
“Just quit.”
“Meghan, I’m a tenured professor.”
“But I thought you loved Maine so much.”
“I do.”
“I don’t know, Bill. You’d better think about this.”