At first I actually could speak to her. I could speak to her quite often, actually quite naturally. She just couldn’t speak back, and that really helped. I repeatedly told her I was in love with her, every time I saw her rolling on the carpet, ogling the ceiling, anytime I could catch her conscious. “My god,” I could say to her then. “I love you so much, my little beautiful sussypants.”
And my wife would roll her eyes. “Must be nice,” she would say.
But then my daughter started speaking and it was enormous and awesome in its own way. She was twelve, thirteen months old. She manufactured verbal things like “ad” and “non.” It was awesome, and the awesome totally silenced me, utterly shut me down again. I went solid stone with her—and sulky. It was as if I was trying to date again, back on the scene some twenty years later.
I had major problems with dating, as everyone knows, because it’s very hard to date when you can’t speak naturally to the intended objects of your interest. You have to rely on your body. I have a really good body, really fit, thank god, and everyone knows that if my wife hadn’t been into my body and therefore determined to break me socially, back when we were in college, I might have tumbled, silent and abstinent, into my lonely, filthy little grave.
But my wife did break me, thank god.
Or so I thought. For all these years I’ve been pretty much broken, talking to men and to women with relative comfort, relative niceness. But then we had this daughter of ours, and she wanted to speak to me pretty much as soon as she could begin speaking, and I could not say a thing back to her. At first I could talk to her, yes, but this lasted—in the framework of a lifetime—about twenty seconds. My wife absorbed my silence to my daughter as she would a personal injury to herself. She couldn’t summon the same determination to break me as she had when we’d been courting. She was wounded by it, hurt, suffering. She cried a lot. She whimpered. She got frustrated and loudly banged things on the counters in bursts of anxiety. And yet she tried to help me. She sat me down across from our daughter and said things like, “Go ahead. Just say, ‘Hi.’ Just say, ‘Hey.’ Just start with one word.”
I would have to shake my head. I had a rock in my throat. “No.”
“Just say the first thing that pops out of your heart,” she tried.
“I want to tell her I’m in love with her.”
My wife took a breath and looked off to a distant country. “Maybe try something less dramatic.”
She was very patient. She is an extraordinary woman. She stood there and watched me staring at my daughter. “Dad,” my daughter would later say to me, “play with me.” And I would play with her. But I would do so in silence. I maneuvered fancy-smelling purple and pink horses into and out of fairylands. I combed her long honey hair. I took her to the swing set, pushed her. I just did it all without voicing a single word to her. I just looked at her. And my wife just looked at me, often agape.
“Either this indicates you’re a misogynist,” my therapist offered, “a hater of all women, or else you’re homosexual and closeted. Perhaps you’ve transferred your wanton cravings for men into an abject contempt for the natural interest your daughter might have in speaking with you.”
My wife offered, “I worry the only thing we talk about anymore is our daughter.”
“I sometimes talk about me.”
“Yes,” she answered quietly. “Let’s not do that anymore.” So in time I didn’t talk to my wife about our daughter, or about anything, and I stopped talking to everyone and entered a phase of comprehensive silence where I was only writing notes down on a piece of paper at grocery stores, to pester a shelving clerk about the new location for the organic produce or something, and I answered the telephone only to hear someone speak to me before hanging up on them. At work, I wrote to my boss and director that I had my tongue severed for religious reasons, and I handed them a copy of my protected rights. I fell into studying my domestic life as a qualitative scientist might study a troubling case: I took extensive notes on my wife’s patterns of toiletry usage and tended nightly a three-dimensional scatter chart depicting the angles at which my daughter would prop her cell phone against her face while speaking to different interlocutors—males, females, adults (10–13, 14–16, 17+).
Then one afternoon while my wife was out of the house, my daughter came to me in the kitchen. I was scouring pans. She was unusually fidgety, very pretty. She said to me, “I am a total fuckwaste.”
I shut off the water and turned to her. “That is a lie,” I said.
“Holy—” she said. She put her hands over her mouth. Then she put them on top of her head. She was smiling. I hadn’t seen her smile in more than a decade.
The power of sight is often smothered by its sister senses, especially sound and smell, but I have found sight to be my greatest and closest friend over the years, particularly in my silence. It was our first direct exchange in her cerebral life, and I found the visual dimension of that moment its most gratifying aspect. She had amazing teeth, it turns out, and her cheeks formed dimples that ran clear to her ears. I had never seen that. It wasn’t the way her mother had ever smiled with me. Perhaps, indeed, her mother had never smiled with me, a gutting thought.
“I need to get out of here,” my daughter repeated.
I nodded.
“My life is about to end,” she said. “And I have to get the hell out of here. Let’s just go. You don’t need to talk. I want to go to the mountain. I’ll drive. You don’t have to talk or do anything. I just need to go. I just want you to come with me. We can pan for gold, or something, I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to talk?”
She thought about this for a moment. “No.”
She must have seen me sink.
“That’s why I asked you and not Mom. I just need someone to be with who won’t tell me what to do.”
I nodded and rubbed my face. I had a lot I wanted to say that she was making me swallow.
I had never been to the mountain. I had no idea what people did on the mountain. It is the only mountain in Wisconsin. Indeed, it is the only mountain within a one- or two-thousand-mile radius. Indeed, it’s not a mountain at all. It’s a bluff, and because we see it as a bluff, a total fraud, we call it a mountain. Miners liked it years ago. But that didn’t last, and I can see why. It has always seemed a particularly depressing mountain to me. It has always seemed like some ecological flaw, a misstep of creation, an eyesore that suppressed our property values and our perspectives—a painfully slow rising from the earth matched only by its salient and rather unpleasing drop back down again—a metaphor to kill the pleasure of all metaphors in and around and about this countryside.
I probably should have discouraged her from driving. She was fourteen. She passed cars on the right edge of the highway. She played extraordinarily loud music. The music seemed unbelievably unrelatable. I wondered at the calibration of their anger and what a world looked like in which people wore their anger so openly, or a world in which people paid money to hear people so fluent with their anger. I nearly bit my hand off as we rounded the tight switchbacks. I have never been more grateful to see a parking lot.
We left the car and crossed a wooden bridge leading to a prefabricated cabin built off the face of the mountain. I wanted to know how she’d known this place was here, but she would not read my note. She said, “Let’s go” like we were actors in some television crime drama. But I kept pace with her, and I remained silent. We paid fifteen dollars each (she paid for herself on a credit card I had not, to my knowledge, cosigned for her) for a flimsy tin lid. The broken-toothed and partially bearded man at the counter said, “He know what he doing?”
“No one knows what they’re doing, Billy,” my daughter said.
He laughed. His mouth was a gothic cage. “You go like this,” he said to me. “Not like this. Got it?”
I nodded. I did not have it. I had no idea what he was talking about. I smelled whiskey, and I wanted a long drink. He pointed us out the back door, which he had propped open, and I could see through the back door another long bridge and a set of stairs that went down to the creek near the base of the mountain. He winked at me.
I followed my daughter. She didn’t speak. I didn’t speak. It was, by then, late afternoon. The light fell against the face of the mountain rock in a pleasant way, so that I could see the black flies swarming against the pollen and motes. At the bottom of the stairs we went straight for the creek bed. I knelt down.
“Not here,” she said.
I stood back up.
She was looking around me, around us, and back up to the prefabricated cabin. Sensing, I suppose, that we were not being watched, she moved quickly up the creek, and I followed. We walked for another twenty minutes until we arrived at the entrance to a mine portal. The entrance was boarded over. The creek was spilling from beneath the boards. She stomped into the water, across the slick rocks, and went directly to the entrance to begin yanking boards away.
I am not great at transgressions, which makes me both a great and horrible father. She seemed to expect that I would not be able to assist her in her violation of mine property, as she did not turn around to ask for help. She grunted; noises I had never heard her make came up from her belly and her heart, and she pulled against a final plank with a yell I had actually heard her use before, somewhat frequently, with her mother. But she could not get that last plank away. She turned to me. “Someone used screws.”
Indeed, someone had screwed the planks to the wooden framing of the mine. The screws were new, shiny silver. I put my foot along the side and really yanked. It came off, and I fell heavily onto the rocks and creek behind me.
She ducked down and went in. I scrambled up out of the water and went with her. “Watch your” became the opening of her every sentence inside that mountain. “Watch your head” and “Watch your step” and “Watch your right.” I just stayed close to her, following her deeper into the dark. I tried to keep my hand on her back. I tried to thread my finger through the hole of her shorts belt loop, but she was so fast. It’s a good thing I have such a nice body, I thought to myself, though I was hunched over and shuffling forward like a witch.
“Tell me your thoughts on dark, damp holes,” my therapist said. “You’re clearly drawn to holes. You love to talk about them. You have some sort of obsession with them. I’m interested in the type of holes that most fascinate you, call to you, sometimes maybe come to you in your dreams. Because we all have holes, don’t we, that we want others to explore? And we know that, as we have holes, so too do others. And we like to look and explore holes to make sure theirs are like our own.”
Indeed the mine was dark, and it was wet. But it was cool bordering on cold. It became very dark very rapidly, swallowing any of the late-day’s light that had earlier been chasing us. I turned around a few times and saw nothing—literally the portrait of nothing. My daughter used a small keychain flashlight to guide us through the passageways. Its power against this darkness was astonishing. I said nothing.
Then she stopped and shone her flashlight into a stretch of water that appeared clouded by lime and alluvial tailings where the mine had been flooded and simply pooled. She turned to me and put a hand on my chest. “This is where things get a little weird,” she said.
I nodded.
“Be ready. I just met her a few weeks ago. She’s in some trouble, O.K.? So am I. I’m going to show her to you now. You’ll get it when you see her.”
I expected a dead child. I don’t know why. It might have made more sense, in retrospect, to have imagined an animal or underworld science-fiction creature. But that’s what I pictured. I thought of a dead child. “Are you going to kill me?” I said.
She shushed me. “Just think about what we’re going to do with this information. Don’t worry about what it means. O.K.? And don’t talk.”
She then turned the flashlight farther up the pool of water, deeper into the mine. I had to squint, but I could see, in the dim and pasty light, a woman looking back at me.
“Hi, Hannah,” my daughter said. “It’s me.”
The woman I could see in the pool, in a bikini, was at once familiar and yet very, very strange to me. She was smoking a cigarette, though I could not smell the smoke. She was sitting on the far edge of the pool of water, her legs submerged to her knees. Her bikini looked to be red and floral. She wore her blond hair long and back, in a bun, and she looked ruddy, with high rosy cheeks, but there was no mistaking that this woman was my daughter, older. I was seeing the specter of my daughter as an adult. She was waving. “Hannah doesn’t speak to me either,” my daughter said to me, loud enough that it seemed she wanted the woman to hear her.
“How do you know her name is Hannah?”
“It’s you,” I said.
She shushed me again, this time with some force. “I know who it is, Dad.”
Then we stood there in silence. I really didn’t know what to say. The woman remained on the other side of the water. We would have to get into the water to go toward her. I presumed that was where this was headed. Or I imagined this woman, this specter of my daughter, would lower herself into the water and swim over to us. But nothing occurred; no person of the three of us moved. My daughter kept the flashlight on this woman and the woman continued smoking.
She had stopped waving, but she looked back at us as though we were in meaningful conversation. She nodded nicely. She shifted every now and then, and I could hear the harsh scratch of the loose mine surface beneath her when she did. Except when she would wince while moving her weight, she remained largely placid in her expression, entirely matter-of-fact.
“Just wait,” my daughter whispered to me. “You O.K., Hannah?” she called. “Can I get you anything?”
The woman shook her head and shifted once more. She pulled a leg from the water and the light from my daughter’s flashlight caught a surprising angle in her profile. I had not been able to see it before, but it was clear in an instant that this woman was pregnant. Her belly was enormous! She plopped her near hand on her womb. She tipped her head back and looked up to the roof of the mine. She opened her mouth and groaned.
And then the light went out and I stood there stone silent in the dark.
I didn’t move. I could see nothing. My eyes failed to adjust to the new light, because the new light was an utter absence of light, something I had never seen before, and something I have never seen since. The image of my pregnant daughter burned and glowed in my head, but if there are degrees of darkness there are surely degrees of silence, and I tell you I left a lifetime of relevant verbal matter stuffed inside that hole no one knows how to mine any longer.