Across, Beyond, Through

For the first hundred miles, Eden is sound asleep in the back seat. Carl navigates the winding roads with the radio on low, a hiss of guitar chords and static. The sky is dark, the highway a shimmering ribbon of gray, but he is wide awake.

It is four in the morning. The highway fills gradually with fellow travelers, early commuters on their way to work. Carl welcomes the friendly blaze of their headlights. He keeps an eye on his daughter in the rearview mirror. Eden talks in her sleep, though not in any language he can understand. At fourteen, her coltish frame is too long to stretch comfortably across the back of the car. She tosses and turns.

Occasionally Carl catches a look at her face, splashed in the glow of oncoming headlights. It makes him wince each time. He knew that as the hours passed, his daughter’s bruises would darken, all part of the healing process. Still, it is a shock to observe the pulpy mess that used to be Eden’s right eye, her lip scabbed and swollen.

The sun crests the horizon dead ahead, lighting up every bird dropping and crust of ice on the windshield. And then, without warning, Eden hurtles into the passenger seat, her hand on Carl’s shoulder, her bare foot fishing for purchase. She settles cross-legged beside him and yawns, smacking her lips. Her T-shirt is on inside out.

“We’re really on the road,” she says. “I thought maybe I dreamed that.”

She flips down the visor and investigates her wounds in the mirror there. The black eye has taken on a sticky sheen, like mother-of-pearl. Her lip is spongy, split down the middle. She grimaces at her reflection.

“We’ll get you an ice pack at the next oasis,” Carl says.

“I thought I dreamed all of it,” Eden says. “It seems like a nightmare, right?”

Carl nods. “Sure does.”

“Mom punched me twice. Eye, then mouth. And then bam, open hand, right here.” Eden lays a palm over her ear.

“I’ve never known your mother to hit anyone.”

She cocks her head to the side, considering this. Her auburn hair, shoulder-length, swings with each gesture.

“Can you—” Carl pauses, unsure how to proceed. “Would you like to tell me more about what happened yesterday?”

“No,” Eden says, without hesitation. Clearly she was waiting for this question, her answer loaded and ready to fire.

Carl knows better than to push. The highway winds among rolling hills, a wide prairie beaded with farmhouses. The sign for Pennsylvania appears around a curve. As they cross the border from New York, both Carl and Eden lunge forward across the dashboard, one arm outstretched, trying to be the first to enter the new state, if only by the length of a fingernail.

“I won,” she crows.

“I’ll beat you to Ohio,” he says.

The sunlight flares across the windshield, offering light but no warmth. It is December, and the air is tinged with frost. Carl reaches for his thermos of coffee. He has not slept much in the past twenty-four hours.

The call came around 2:00 a.m. yesterday, waking him in his Las Vegas apartment. Eden’s voice, incoherent with sobs. Carl staggered out of bed and switched on the light. It took him a while to understand what was happening. Eden cried in a way he hadn’t heard since her babyhood, the sort of reckless, breathless wheezing that used to accompany a tantrum. He remembers fumbling for the clock and doing math—2:00 a.m. for him in Nevada, 5:00 a.m. for Eden in Utica on the other side of the country.

“Where’s your mother?” he asked. “Can I talk to her?”

“She’s been arrested,” Eden screamed through her tears.

Carl threw on whatever clothes he could grab—a strange arrangement he is still wearing, crisp khaki slacks and an ancient hoodie with paint on the sleeve—and drove to the airport.

○

Dark pines stand out among the bare, skeletal trees. An arctic breeze buffets the car as Carl and Eden play Twenty Questions. He tries not to stare at her injuries, though it’s difficult. Her lip is a chunk of pulped plum. Her eye is in the process of swelling shut. She has a concussion that will require care, and one eardrum is ruptured. They cannot fly across the country; the changes in cabin pressure could cause permanent damage to Eden’s hearing, not to mention excruciating pain. So Carl rented a car and they are road-tripping through ten states over two days.

He has a high-stakes poker game on Tuesday, scheduled months ago. He’s paid the entrance fee. The prize pool is over a million. It cannot be missed.

Lake Erie glimmers between the trees on Eden’s side of the car. The Pennsylvania coast is layered with plateaus and valleys of ice, an otherworldly, uneven terrain caused by the movement of waves and sudden cold snaps and snowfall and the occasional thaw followed by refreezing. The deep water, however, seems unaffected by winter. Along the horizon, waves shift and dance, blue under blue sky.

Eden was not supposed to join Carl in Las Vegas until June. His apartment is not ready for her; it’s still a bachelor pad strewn with empty liquor bottles and dirty dishes. Did he remember to hide his marijuana paraphernalia? He’ll have to check as soon as they walk in the door.

Until now, his relationship with Eden has been one of summers and texting. They are buddies. They chat with their thumbs about TV shows they both watch, comic strips they both enjoy. Sometimes Eden sends him strings of emojis he can’t parse. Sometimes he dreams about her—Technicolor, slow-motion moments of closeness, Eden as an infant clutching his finger, Eden as a toddler in his lap, Eden as a preteen riding on his back. He wakes up haunted, unsure whether these visitations are good dreams or nightmares.

She lives with her mother in Utica during the school year and spends her summers with Carl in Las Vegas. That has been the custody agreement up until now, anyway. For three precious months each year, Eden has hung her art on his fridge, critiqued his decor, woken him with a pillow to the face, challenged him to dance parties, and infused his life with sweetness and purpose. Their erratic closeness—periodic but intense—has allowed him to see her growing up in a different way. She does not age continually for him, but in surges, her shoulders suddenly wider, her face elongated, her vocabulary larger, her movements more assured.

He does not know what happened between her and her mother. He can only assume that his ex-wife suffered a psychotic break of some kind. He and June have a cordial, icy dynamic—cordial on his side, icy on hers. But she has always been a loving mother. She has never raised a hand to Eden before, not even a swat on the behind. Her discipline consists of time-outs and exhausting lectures on ethics. She is the sort of mother who cuts the crusts off the bread and peels the oranges she puts in Eden’s lunch, even though Eden is in eighth grade and most of her friends just buy a hot lunch and a soda. June is doting and overprotective, lauding Eden’s every achievement on social media. Even participation trophies and so-so report cards are touted like Olympic gold medals.

Carl cannot imagine what caused his ex-wife to beat their daughter so badly that Eden ended up in the emergency room and June in jail.

Pennsylvania is the shortest leg of their trip. They cut across the chimney of land that sticks up from the northwest corner of the state. When the sign for Ohio appears, Eden cracks her knuckles and rolls her head side to side like a gymnast preparing for a difficult routine. As they cross the border, both of them lunge forward against their seat belts, one arm extended.

“I won,” Carl says.

“Your arms are longer. Unfair advantage.”

A barbed wire fence separates a field of snow from another field of snow. Probably corn and soybeans grow here in the summer, proud thickets of green, but just now the landscape seems almost apocalyptically bare. Eden tips down the visor again to examine her reflection in the mirror. Beneath the black eye, her cheek has begun to swell, slowly turning mauve.

“It’s gonna get worse before it gets better,” she says.

Carl is in the process of passing a semi when his cell phone jangles to life.

Eden glances at the screen. “It’s Mom.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“I thought she was in jail.”

“Your aunt probably posted bail.”

“Oh no. Oh no.” Eden tugs desperately on a lock of hair, a gesture Carl recognizes from her toddler years.

He pulls onto the shoulder, tires kicking up a wash of gravel that pings against the undercarriage. He waits a moment to steady his nerves before climbing out with the phone in his hand. The chill turns his breath to vapor. He takes a few steps down the road, glancing back at Eden’s white face.

“You’re a monster,” June cries, in lieu of greeting. “Where on earth are you?”

“I’m bringing Eden to Vegas with me.”

“I got home and the house was empty. The CPS people told me you’d taken her. How could you do this to me?”

Carl shivers. He did not think to bring a coat before boarding the plane; he has been a native of Nevada for long enough that he forgot what real winter is like.

“Are you there?” June shouts.

“I’m here. Eden is going to stay with me. It’s all arranged.”

“You’re an asshole.”

Carl gnaws on his thumbnail, baffled. June does not swear. She has forbidden Eden from saying shut up or crap or even the word hate.

“Is Eden . . .” June begins, then trails off. “How does she look? Is she—”

“She says you punched her twice and boxed her ear. Is that what happened?”

“Oh my goodness.” June blows her nose. “Oh heavens. Look, you’ve got to bring her back here. This is all a big mistake.”

“Did you hit her?” Carl repeats. His hands close instinctively into fists. Papa bear.

“It’s complicated. I can’t get into it right now.”

“It doesn’t seem complicated to me.”

June’s voice rises an octave. “I can’t even think while you’re holding my little girl hostage. You’re going to turn around and bring Eden right back home. She belongs with me. I’m her mother. I know what’s best.”

Carl hangs up and glares at the phone for a minute, then turns it off in case June calls back. The little screen goes black between his fingers.

○

Ohio lasts for hours. Snow begins to fall, a powdery dusting, bleaching the air. Clouds cover the sky, the ground moon-pale, the whole world rendered in grayscale. Eden signals at trucks to sound their horns. Drivers in passing cars do double takes at the sight of her face. Her bruises are blossoming spectacularly. Whenever her mouth starts bleeding she dabs it with Kleenex, which is then deposited randomly around the car, along with ponytail holders, tubes of lip balm, socks, and hairpins. An adolescent nest.

And all the while, Carl’s mind orbits the puzzle he cannot solve: What made June turn on her beloved child? He still remembers his ex as she was when he first encountered her—crackling with life, constantly in motion. He remembers her fiery red mane, now darkened to coffee brown and laced with gray. He remembers the way she hummed when she was thinking and chewed her pencils so intensely that she nibbled away every scrap of yellow coating, turning them into whittled, damp twigs.

Even then, he and June made for something of an uneasy alliance. She came from Southern Baptists who raised her on purity rings and father-daughter dances. Carl’s parents, on the other hand, were hippies who urged him not to marry until he was at least thirty so he’d have plenty of time to sow his wild oats and find out what kind of life he wanted for himself. He and June met in an introductory science class at Utica University. They both needed it to fulfill their requirements for graduation and were both lost after the first session. Carl was prelaw, June majoring in philosophy with the goal of becoming a doctor of divinity. They coached each other through Physics 101 and ended up falling in love, each fascinated by the other’s strangeness.

After graduation, they moved in together. In defiance of her upbringing, June was sexually active—a demon in the sack, actually—but she could not shake the guilt. Often she wept in shame after orgasm. Carl privately hypothesized that her fascination with the study of religious scholars arose from a desire to quantify the precise cost to her soul of each sin. He knew to tiptoe around the apartment without speaking whenever June was on the phone with her parents. They believed she lived alone. Fortunately they were proud Mississippians and refused to travel to the scary, unfamiliar North.

Then Eden came along. An accident, a statistical anomaly—June was one of the tiny fraction of women to get pregnant while on birth control. Abortion was out of the question, of course. Carl hadn’t meant to marry so young, but he knew June needed this from him. And he loved her then, he did. They eloped as quickly as possible so her parents wouldn’t be able to count backward from nine months and draw nefarious conclusions.

The real battles began during the pregnancy. Carl had finally come to terms with the fact that he did not enjoy the law. He was finding success as a poker player online. He’d begun driving down to Atlantic City on the weekends and returning with fat pockets. He wanted to try his luck as a professional gambler. He believed, rightly as it turned out, that he could make a good living.

June was horrified by this development. She insisted that he take a nine-to-five job instead, something with a schedule and benefits she could depend on. And so he did. Against his better judgment, he became a paralegal at a soul-crushing corporate firm. He did it for Eden, born a week after her due date, a nine-pound behemoth with a full head of red-blond hair.

The marriage limped along for a couple more years. June was at her best with Eden, changing her diapers with lightning speed, translating her mewls and grunts into plain English, and nursing her in the rocking chair for hours while she teethed. Carl can still see them there, Eden dozing at her mother’s breast, June nudging the chair back and forth with her toes even as she dozed too.

Their split was more his fault than June’s. Some might say it was entirely his fault. He continued gambling on the side, weathering the inevitable storms whenever June found out. Each time, she begged him to quit. Each time, he solemnly agreed, lying through his teeth and privately vowing to cover his tracks better.

Then came the affair. Her name was Marianna, another paralegal at the firm where he never wanted to work in the first place. Carl takes full blame for their tawdry, but satisfying, fling. He has always had difficulty denying himself pleasure. June walked in on them in bed together, and that was the end of the marriage.

His infidelity catalyzed something in June. She’d always been a Sunday churchgoer, but Carl’s betrayal seemed to activate some latent zealotry. She switched from her broadminded Unitarian church to a fire-and-brimstone Baptist one on the other side of town. She started going three times a week. Overnight, it seemed, she became someone Carl did not recognize: born again, smugly saved, quoting scripture in every conversation, even with their divorce attorneys, and frantically organizing Eden’s baptism, something she hadn’t thought necessary until now.

The divorce was acrimonious but rapid. Carl escaped to Vegas and found his way to a kind of hedonistic serenity—sleeping with whomever he liked, avoiding serious entanglements, surfing the shifting waves of poker wins and losses, now broke, now flush, and following his bliss, as his parents used to say.

It was the right thing for him. But he does regret missing so many milestones in his daughter’s life. He wasn’t there when she was born. June had recently caught him gambling again and banned him from the delivery room as punishment. He was in bed with Marianna the evening Eden said her first word. He was settling into his new apartment in Vegas when Eden had her first ballet recital, a chubby three-year-old in a frilly tutu. He was at the casino when she lost her two bottom teeth on the same day; he had to content himself with seeing the gap in her smile over FaceTime. There are more things, surely, that he has missed—inches of growth, childish revelations, tiny heartbreaks, new ideas, moments too inconsequential to be mentioned over the phone but vital nonetheless. Impossible to reclaim.

In recent months, Eden has seemed further away than ever. She’s a teenager, it makes sense, but still, it has turned his heart to water. She has refused to get on the phone, only texting. She has limited her responses to the bare minimum, sometimes just a cold, inscrutable K.

What has Carl missed during this period of near silence? How badly did he fail Eden by moving across the country all those years ago? He thought she was in good hands. He thought he was leaving her with the better parent.

○

At an oasis, Carl watches his daughter dash across an open field, chasing the chipmunks that gather around the picnic area in hope of scraps.

“I’m gonna catch one,” she shouts. “I’m gonna name it Chippie.”

Carl smiles indulgently. It will be good for Eden to work off some extra energy. Fourteen-year-olds are not calibrated to spend hours cooped up in a car. Giggling, Eden darts this way and that, finally disappearing into a grove of snow-covered pines. Carl zips up the coat he bought at the oasis shop, brand-new and stiff.

Right now Eden is refusing to speak about what happened, feigning normalcy. She’s her father’s daughter, with a fine poker face of her own. He will take his cues from her. He will let her come to him.

After a moment’s thought, he pulls his phone from his pocket.

“Hello?” June cries, almost before the first ring has ended. “Yes? Is that Eden? Eden?”

“It’s me,” Carl says, settling at a picnic table. “We’re in Indiana.”

“What do you want?” June says coldly. “You don’t need to rub salt in the wound, Carl. I understand that you’re not bringing Eden back here. You’ve made it perfectly clear, despite my expressed wishes.”

“I was just calling to check up on you, actually.” He keeps his voice gentle, picturing himself as a horse whisperer holding out a handful of oats to a skittish mare. Calm and nonthreatening.

When Carl arrived at the hospital yesterday, Eden’s wounds had already been assessed and treated. He hurried into the recovery room and found his daughter curled in a fetal ball on the white bed, flanked by a representative of CPS on one side and a neighbor on the other. June wasn’t there, of course. She’d been taken away in a squad car, while Eden left home in an ambulance.

The social worker gave Carl the broad outlines of what had happened: assault and arrest, prognosis and procedure. Mrs. Westerman, June’s next-door neighbor, filled in the rest. She was a soft-spoken woman who kept laying her palm on Carl’s forearm as she spoke. She’d insisted on accompanying Eden to the hospital, she told him. The poor child shouldn’t be surrounded by strangers after such a trauma.

“Yesterday was a bad day for everyone,” Carl says now. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“Really?” June says suspiciously.

“I would love to understand what happened between you and Eden.” He infuses his tone with warmth. The effort scalds his throat, but he needs to know what went down, and Eden isn’t talking. Not yet, anyway.

“Well, that’s a nice change, I have to say,” June says. “I thought you were blaming me for everything.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it? I never got to talk to you at all. One of your neighbors mentioned that you were yelling about a murder as you . . . as the car drove you away. Is that what happened?”

He pictures Mrs. Westerman’s wrinkled brown face, her eyebrows raised and pulled together with anxiety. She’d lived next door for years, she said, and always thought June was a nice, God-fearing woman. No, she didn’t know what June could have meant about a murder. Yes, that was definitely the word—June shouted it over and over, pointing at Eden as the squad car pulled away.

“I suppose I did say something like that,” June says. “It’s a little hard to remember all the details. I was in quite a state.”

“Did you . . .” He falters, wondering how to phrase this. “Were you trying to murder Eden? Is that what you meant?”

“Oh my goodness, no,” June wails. “No, of course not. How could you think such a thing? I was trying to protect Eden. I still am.”

Unable to speak, Carl closes his eyes.

“That’s why you need to bring her back to me,” June says. “This is an emergency. A family crisis. We should be on the same side, you and me.”

There is a crunching of feet, and Eden emerges from the shelter of the trees, packing a snowball. She crouches low and begins to form the bottom layer of a snowman.

“What does Eden need to be protected from?” Carl asks, finding his voice. “What did you think you were protecting her from when you ruptured her eardrum and gave her a goddamn concussion?”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” June snaps.

“Sorry,” he says, though his patience is starting to fray. “I’m just trying to understand. I’ve never known you to be violent, June. Are you saying that someone else was trying to murder Eden? That you were protecting Eden from someone other than you?”

“Yes,” she says. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“But Eden said you punched her. Mrs. Westerman said it was just you and Eden in the house. The police arrested you. Are you saying . . . I don’t . . .” He stammers to a halt.

“When you see your child subjected to violence, you respond with violence,” June says. Then she sighs. “But I went too far. I see that now. ‘For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God,’” she adds, and Carl can tell from her tone that it’s a Bible quote.

“You aren’t making sense.” He wants to scream at her, but he keeps his voice low so that Eden, now working on the middle part of the snowman, won’t hear him.

“I’m in my right mind,” June says. “Do you want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Then you can judge me as you please.”

“Fine,” Carl says. “Yes. Tell me.”

“I woke early for morning prayers. I always do. I was surprised to see the light on in Eden’s room as I went downstairs. I usually have to bang pots and pans to get her up these days.”

“Okay.”

“I opened the door just to check on her. I thought she might have fallen asleep studying and left the light on. She has an algebra test coming up. Her grades have been slipping a little. I was going to get her a tutor.”

“Right. Sure.”

“Well!” June takes a shuddering breath. “I was caught off guard. There was Eden, my Eden, standing in front of her mirror in a pair of men’s boxer shorts. I don’t even know where she got a thing like that. And she was winding something around her chest. At first I thought it was a bandage, I thought Eden was injured. But no. She was binding her breasts.”

Carl shoots a glance at his daughter kneeling in the icy field. The snowman is small and crooked but almost complete.

“Eden had the strangest look on her face,” June says. “Kind of—I don’t know, drugged, maybe. I didn’t recognize her. Carl, in that moment, I swear I didn’t recognize her.”

“You’re saying that . . .” He trails off, unsure if he has understood.

“Her breasts just bloomed. I brought home a B-cup bra for her only last month. I thought she’d be so excited. I was, when my time came! And here she was binding them. Forcing them flat against her chest. Crushing her femininity. It’s violence! Where did she even get the idea to do such a thing?” June does not pause for an answer, continuing, “It’s all this nonsense on the internet. It’s like a contagion. Genderqueer this and orientation that. Saying your pronouns whenever you tell someone your name. And what is this business about they? How can one person be they?” Her voice climbs to a higher register. “I should never have let her go to public school. I knew in my bones that I should homeschool her. I blame you for that, Carl, I really do. You were so insistent! And now look what’s happened.”

“What did happen?” he asks unsteadily. “What happened next?”

June makes a tutting sound. “Eden was so preoccupied that she didn’t even hear me come in. I asked her what she was doing. She grabbed her robe. She said it was nothing—just a game.”

Carl shifts his weight on the picnic bench. Eden is gathering sticks, measuring them against one another to make sure the snowman’s arms are even.

“I knew it wasn’t a game,” June says. “I knew that was a lie. It isn’t the first time she’s . . . This topic has come up before.”

“It has?” he shouts, forgetting to keep his voice low. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“Why would I? She’s just a little confused. One time she mentioned something about it in the car. She said she didn’t feel like a girl that day. I told her it was just hormones and adolescence. Their bodies go through so many changes!”

Carl clutches his brow. All those one-word replies from Eden. Strings of emojis, without substance. Never wanting to get on the phone, much less FaceTime. Of course she didn’t feel she could share something so profound with him while they were hundreds of miles apart. The guilt is a body blow, knocking the wind out of him. Was Eden planning to tell him about this six months from now, when she came to stay with him in Nevada for the summer break? Would she ever have told him?

“She’s been dressing more masculine,” June says. “I didn’t really notice it at the time, but now . . . There was a dance at school and I bought her the loveliest dress, new earrings, cute shoes. Then she went in jeans. I just figured it was a fashion thing.” She pauses, humming a little, her thinking noise. “The other day she asked me how I know I’m really a woman. I didn’t even understand the question. ‘I am as God made me,’ I told her. ‘And so are you.’”

Carl wishes he could reach through the phone and throttle June. “So when you say you’re protecting Eden . . .”

“From herself. We have to protect her from herself in this moment. She’s in terrible danger, Carl. ‘Train up a child in the way he should go,’ the Lord says. Somehow the devil got into my home. I’ve always tried to raise her right. Binding her breasts! What’s next? Pills to stop her periods? Disfiguring her body with surgery? I’ve read about what can happen.”

“Oh god, poor kid,” Carl says.

“Lord’s name in vain,” June hisses.

He does not apologize. The blood is roaring in his ears.

“She’s the fruit of my womb,” June says. “I know my own daughter. I knew she was a girl before the doctor even found out, remember? I felt her there. I’m the one who birthed her and held her miraculous body in my arms. I’m the one who wiped poop out of her little vagina every time I changed her diaper.” Her voice increases in volume, crackling with static. “Front to back, always front to back. I taught her that. I brushed out her tangles. Painted her toenails. We pressed flowers together. I took her to Disney World to meet the princesses from the movies. I know her better than anyone. Better than she knows herself.”

Eden has finished the snowman, staring at it proudly with her hands on her hips. Carl pushes off from the picnic table, rising to his feet.

“She’s a mixed-up little girl,” June says. “This is the devil’s work, you understand? We can’t let her destroy her God-given body. That’s what I meant by murder, Carl. The devil is telling my daughter—our daughter—that she’s a boy. The devil is trying to murder my little girl.”

Carl hangs up without saying good-bye. In the distance, Eden waves to him, then points to her snowman and takes a bow.

○

They make it through Illinois without a single bathroom break. Eden wins the race across the border to Iowa, flinging out her arm before Carl even registers the sign. He wasn’t paying attention, too busy watching her surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye. Eden’s clothes give nothing away: jeans, a T-shirt, gender-neutral. He has decided that he will continue to think of her as “her” until Eden tells him otherwise. He can’t take June’s word about anything.

Night comes early, though the clouds are so thick that it’s hard to tell when the sun actually sets. Eden curls in the passenger seat with her thighs against her chest, resting her cheek on her knees. Her eye is swollen completely shut now. The bruise has spread all the way down to her jaw. Iowa is a landscape of graceful, undulating hills. Carl knows it’s time to stop driving when he begins to imagine that he’s sailing a boat over ocean breakers. The fatigue has caught up to him, to both of them. Eden staggers up the steps to their motel room. In the bathroom, she brushes her teeth in drowsy slow motion.

“Get into bed, honey,” Carl says. “Tomorrow will be a better day.”

Eden laughs, then winces as her mouth begins to bleed. “You always say that.”

Twin beds stand side by side. Eden picks the one by the window and climbs beneath the blanket. Carl sits on the edge of her mattress. All day he has been careful not to touch her unless she initiates contact. This is a child who has just experienced extreme brutality at a parent’s hands. June was arrested for aggravated battery and aggravated child abuse. Aggravated—a nonsense word, given the circumstances. Carl can think of better terms. Unforgivable. Indefensible. Deranged.

“Want me to stroke your hair?” he asks. “Or would you rather I didn’t?”

“Fine, if you want to,” Eden says carelessly.

Her red-brown curls flow across the pillow. Carl traces each long ringlet with a gentle motion. It has always soothed her. As a toddler, this rhythmic petting was the only thing that could get her to sleep. At that age she habitually fought bedtime, growing increasingly teary while announcing more and more vehemently that she wasn’t tired, right up until she conked out mid-sentence.

Carl feels a lump in his throat. He has always been the father of a daughter. All of his touchstone memories—teaching Eden to shuffle a deck of cards, applying temporary tattoos on her skinny arms, offering advice while she tried on dozens of pairs of soccer cleats to find the right fit—belong to the father of a daughter. He was the one who taught her the correct terms for her genitalia, something June shied away from. When Eden got her first period, June lectured her about Eve’s sin and the burdens of womanhood, while Carl ordered flowers to the house in Utica with a congratulatory card.

Who is this child beneath the blanket? What has happened to the daughter he raised, the girl he thought he knew? Murder, June said, and Carl wouldn’t go that far, but there is loss here, primal and disorienting. He dances his fingers along Eden’s curls, just as he has always done, giving no sign of the ache in his chest, as powerful as an ebbing tide. It is grief, no more, no less. He swallows thickly. If there was ever a time for a poker face, it is this moment. Somehow he must pretend this child is still his own same Eden, not some stranger, an unknown quantity, a lanky teenage body made of mysteries.

“I wish I’d been there when you were born,” he hears himself saying.

“Yeah?” Eden asks dreamily.

“It’s one of my great regrets in life that I wasn’t there.”

“Why? Goopy baby. Umbilical stuff. Gross.” The last word ends in a yawn.

With each brush of his hand, Carl can see the tension melt from her shoulders. “I wanted to see you come into the world,” he says. “It’s the moment when you became real. When you separated from your mother.”

“I guess.”

“I took the birthing classes and everything. I was ready. But your mom didn’t want me there.”

“Well, she was mad at you, right?” Eden says. “That’s basically all I remember from when you lived with us. Mom being mad at you.”

He nods. “Sounds about right.”

“I bet she just didn’t want you staring at her coochie while she pushed a watermelon out of it. I’ve seen the pictures. I had a big head.”

Carl laughs, still stroking her curls. A silence falls between them, filled with the soft, staccato knocking of the radiator.

“You know you can tell me anything,” he says.

And just like that, the tension is back. Eden’s shoulders hunch together beneath the sheet and she rolls over, facing away from him.

“Mom used to tell me that too,” she says.

○

The motel alarm clock jangles at 3:00 a.m. Carl ushers Eden into a blast of wintry wind laden with snow. He settles her in the back seat with his hoodie balled beneath her head as a pillow and his new coat spread over her like a blanket. In his youth, Carl learned that it wasn’t safe to let a person with a concussion fall asleep, but the ER doctors informed him that since Eden’s pupils weren’t dilated and her speech and motor functions were normal, sleep was fine, even beneficial. She slumbers all the way across the remainder of Iowa. Snow falls so heavily that it erases the world beyond the headlights. Carl has the illusion of traveling at light speed as the flakes whirl in a conical vortex around the car.

He has it all planned out. Sixteen hours in the car yesterday, including stops for meals. Today they’ll drive even farther, but he hopes to be home before midnight, still enough time to collapse into bed and get enough sleep to hit the tables rested and refreshed tomorrow. He’s looking forward to the tournament. For the past two years running, he’s made it to the final table. He expects to this time as well.

After that, the real work will begin. He needs to look into local schools. He has no idea about the educational system in Vegas; he has never needed to consider it. A single father—that’s what he is now. In the past, he has been the other parent, a part-time counterpoint to June. Carl squares his shoulders. He is about to get a crash course in dentist appointments and algebra homework and curfew, all the essential, relentless minutiae that have flown beneath his radar until now. The moment June landed her first punch, everything changed for Eden—and for him.

Last night, Carl spent hours scouring websites for parents of LGBTQ teens rather than getting much-needed sleep. He brushed up on the terminology and read lists of FAQs. Eventually he and Eden will talk, and he is determined to handle it well. His private bewilderment has not diminished; the mournful ache in his chest remains. His child is changing, changed, a changeling—but he knows better than to burden Eden with these thoughts. She has been through enough at the hands of her mother. Carl will box up his confusion and grief and hide them away at the back of his mind, storing them for some other season.

The sun rises as they cross into Nebraska. The car brims with light, triggering a stirring from the back seat. Eden sits up, her hair matted in the rearview mirror. Her bruises are even riper and more shocking. She looks like a boxer after a particularly savage match.

“I stink,” she says, sniffing her armpit. “I don’t have any clothes to change into, do I? We didn’t think to pack anything. We’re morons.”

“My fault,” Carl says. “I decided not to stop by the house on our way out. I just wanted to get you away from there. We’ll buy you a whole new wardrobe in Vegas.”

“And a phone.” She climbs into the passenger seat, stepping on Carl’s thigh.

“What happened to your phone?”

“Mom smashed it,” Eden says in an expressionless voice, settling beside him. “She said it was how the devil got into me. Through my phone. And my friends.”

Carl tightens his grip on the wheel. It is the closest Eden has come to discussing what happened. This is one of those moments, he knows. A milestone. A turning point. He has missed too many; he needs to handle this one right.

But before he can gather his wits, Eden turns on the radio, scrolling through stations with jarring rapidity. She settles on a tinkly pop song Carl has never heard before and begins to dance in her seat. She has always loved to dance, even as a baby.

“I need to pee,” she sings along with the melody. “Please stop soon before I burst.”

Carl takes the exit for Omaha, vowing to seize the opportunity more decisively next time.

Over the years, he has done his best to contravene June’s religious influence. Each summer, he and Eden would watch irreverent movies and discuss evolution and history. He made sure that his daughter was exposed to other viewpoints. Having been raised Taoist-Buddhist-spiritualist-agnostic, he could see with the clear-eyed perspective of an outsider how bizarre Christianity could be. An omnipotent deity impregnating a human woman? A faithful flock eating and drinking the simulated blood and flesh of a demigod? The absolute racket of tithing? Carl believed that the only difference between a cult and organized religion was scale.

Still, he never criticized June to Eden. Her religion, yes, but not June herself. That was the one ironclad rule of a well-behaved divorce—a rule he and June both agreed upon, despite their differences. She never spoke ill of him either. Even now, Eden remains unaware of his adultery and its role in the breakup of their marriage. June withheld the shameful truth, not for Carl’s sake but for Eden’s.

A good woman, a good mother, or so he thought. Until the events of the past few days, he would have trusted June’s moral compass above his own, without question. How long has this hateful thing been coiled inside her? For a moment, navigating across a two-lane road patched with snow, Carl is almost too angry to breathe.

They get breakfast at a fast-food place and eat leaning against the side of the car in the parking lot. Despite the bitter wind, they both need to stretch their legs. The snow has stopped, though the roiling clouds look ready to unleash another torrent at any moment. Omaha appears to be one big strip mall. Eden points to the next parking lot, where an enormous Target stands behind a billboard for a strip club.

“Please?” she says. “Pretty please? Clean clothes? New phone?”

Carl checks his watch. “We can’t stay that long, honey.”

Eden sticks out her arms like a zombie in an old-timey film. “Newwww phone,” she drones, lurching toward the Target.

“Oh Jesus.” He laughs. “Fine, come on.”

Energetic music plays as they enter the monolithic store, the aisles stretching as far as the eye can see. People turn and gape as Eden passes by with her plethora of bruises. Then they look at Carl with suspicion and dislike.

It wasn’t me, it was her asshole mother, he wants to announce, but Eden seems intent on pretending that nothing out of the ordinary is happening, no gasps, no stares, no little kids pointing at her face. Carl does the same.

They visit the electronics section first, where things prove more difficult than anticipated. Eden is still on her mother’s cell phone plan. She’ll need a new number on Carl’s plan, which Target can’t do, according to the bored teenage boy behind the counter, scarcely older than Eden. She takes it fairly well, running her fingers over the locked cabinet where the phones glitter like jewels in a display case at a museum, then turning away.

“My friends probably think I’m dead,” she says. “It’s been a million jillion years since they’ve heard from me.”

On their way back out to the car, they pass the clothing section. Eden pauses to stroke a T-shirt with a picture of a robot on it. Carl notes that they’re in the boys’ area. He clears his throat, thinking quickly.

“It’s always bothered me that they separate the clothes into a binary,” he says, parroting the websites he googled the night before. “Boys on one side, girls on the other. I mean, what’s up with that? People come in all genders, you know?”

Eden freezes in place, as still as the mannequin behind her. She does not appear to be breathing. Nearly a minute passes in agonizing silence.

At last, without looking at him, she says, “Mom told you?”

“She did.”

Eden’s hands begin to shake, still holding the T-shirt. But she maintains that poker face, saying in a casual tone, “You’re the king of subtlety, Dad. I mean, that was a master class in segues.”

“Smart ass,” he says, matching her nonchalant manner. “Do you want to try anything on?”

“No, I don’t need anything.”

“Are you sure? You were just saying—”

“No,” she yells, hurrying toward the front doors with her head down.

○

For the remainder of Nebraska, all six hours of it, Eden sits in the back seat, staring out the window. Carl tries not to glance too often in the rearview mirror, though she seems unaware of him, lost in some inner world. Shocks of wind pulse over the snow-tipped grass. An occasional butte rises lonely from the prairie.

Gradually Carl becomes aware of something moving up ahead. Dark shapes dot the plains at the edge of the horizon. He can’t make out what they are—big as boulders, yet they keep shifting position. After another five miles, he realizes it’s a buffalo herd. They are grazing along the south side of the highway, bulky creatures, larger than the rental car, with fur the color of burnt umber. Their cumbersome heads froth with curls. There are babies in the group, adorable and dangerous at the same time, like child-sized tanks. They skip gaily around the mountainous masses of their parents, all of whom are strolling in the same direction with their mouths in the grass.

Carl pulls over. There’s no one on the road behind him or in front of him; he hasn’t seen another car in twenty minutes. Thank goodness he thought to fill up the tank at the last oasis. Gas stations are few and far between in Nebraska.

Eden glances around curiously as the car comes to a halt. She hasn’t noticed the buffalo. She hasn’t been aware of anything outside herself.

“Look,” Carl says, pointing.

Eden squeals and claps her hands. “Beautiful monsters!” she says. “I’ve never seen them in real life.”

“A transcontinental drive brings many wonders.”

One of the beasts lifts its head, crowned with horns, and stares in the direction of the car. Carl isn’t certain whether it’s male or female, since all the adults seem to have the same curved prongs. The creature snorts—Carl can’t hear it at this distance, but he sees a puff of steam leave its nostrils—and resumes grazing.

“Are they buffalo or bison?” Eden asks. “Is there a difference? Can we get closer to them?”

“No, no,” he says, answering her last question first. “We shouldn’t even leave the car. They could crush you like a bug if they felt like it.”

There is a click as Eden unbuckles her seat belt and climbs, once more, into the passenger seat.

“I like them,” she says. “They’re good buffaloes. Or bison.”

Carl puts the car into drive again. The sign for Colorado appears up ahead, shadowed against the sky. Eden wins easily, lurching forward at the border with her arm outstretched; Carl does not even try to beat her.

“I’m the champion,” she says.

“You’ve got skill, I admit.”

At the next oasis, while Eden is in the bathroom, Carl takes his cell phone from his pocket and blocks June’s number. She hasn’t called since yesterday, but it’s just a matter of time. She can contact his lawyer if she needs to get in touch. He doesn’t want to hear her voice again.

Then, staring at the little screen, he googles the word trans. Last night, he packed his brain with information about gender identity and presentation and coming out and deadnaming. In this moment, however, he feels compelled to know exactly how trans is defined, not as a stand-in for transgender but in and of itself.

His phone informs him that it’s a prefix meaning across, beyond, through. Carl grins, taken with this idea. Across the United States in a rental car. Beyond a simple understanding of who his child might be. Through this traumatic period together, side by side.

○

Back on the road, fortified by snacks and soda, Eden folds her hands in her lap. “When are we going to see mountains?” she asks.

“Soon,” Carl says. “Watch the horizon.”

She nods. Her hands twist, fingers white at the knuckles.

“So what did Mom tell you?” she asks.

He considers how to answer. June said a lot of things, most of them horrifying and unconscionable. Eventually he and Eden will unpack all that nonsense about God-given bodies and the devil, probably with a therapist. June’s assault was as violent as an earthquake, and there will be aftershocks, fallout, and damage, both seen and unseen—marked on Eden’s face and hidden beneath the surface.

For now, Carl decides that a simple answer is the way to go.

“Mom said you’re a boy,” he says. “You might be a boy,” he corrects himself.

“She did?” Eden whispers.

“Not in those words. She said you’ve been using a binder and dressing in a more masculine way. She said you’ve mentioned not feeling like a girl. I didn’t mean to put a label on you. Maybe you’re feeling more nonbinary or agender. It’s okay if you don’t know right now. I know there are a lot of permutations of how a person’s identity—”

“Dad. Stop.” Eden shakes her head, her cheeks flushing pink. “I get it. You did some googling.”

“Well, I might have scanned a few articles last night. What is the internet for if not to educate old fogies like me?”

“Porn,” Eden says. “That’s what the internet is for.”

Carl groans. “Jesus, I’m not ready for that conversation. You’ve never seen porn, right? Not even one time?”

She draws an X on her chest with her forefinger. “Not even at Maddie Riley’s birthday sleepover when I was ten. Definitely not then.”

A few jagged chunks of stone jut up through the prairie, the first suggestion that the Rocky Mountains are approaching. Along the horizon, larger foothills stand in rows, purpling as they fade into the distance.

“Demiboy,” Eden says. “That’s what I am right now, anyway.”

Carl doesn’t know the term. It didn’t come up in his research.

“It means sometimes boy, sometimes nonbinary,” Eden says, correctly interpreting his silence.

“Got it,” he says. “And your pronouns?”

“He/him mostly,” Eden says, all business now. “I’ll let you know if I’m ever feeling more like they/them, but I really like he/him at the moment. That’s what all my friends call me. I really like it.” The words are coming out in a rush, a dam breaking. “Eventually I might be male. Not demiboy, but fully male. I felt like I was agender for most of the fall, but things seem to be changing lately. Like with the binder. And the boxers. My friends have been great about all of it. Really great.”

They are not looking at each other. That seems to be what Eden wants, both of them staring straight at the horizon. Matching poker faces.

“Do you have another name I should know?” Carl asks.

“Eden’s fine. For now. Maybe eventually Ethan. It means ‘strong and safe’ in Hebrew. And it’s close enough to Eden that I’ll respond to it sort of naturally, you know?”

Grief swells inside Carl, but he crushes it back down. There is no room for it here. He remembers flipping through a book of baby names with June, nestled on the couch, their foreheads touching. They argued playfully and vetoed one another’s suggestions until they came upon Eden, which both of them loved—June for its meaning, Carl for its sound.

“Ethan is a great name,” he says softly. “If you end up choosing it.”

The websites all said to celebrate a child’s coming out. Cakes and balloons and congratulations. But Carl isn’t sure how to summon that kind of jubilation. Besides, Eden’s first attempt was met by such savagery that it doesn’t seem right to cheer and clap now, while the bruises and concussion are still fresh.

He/him. Carl will start there. He glances across the passenger seat at this demiboy, his son, his sometimes-son, sometimes-nonbinary child.

Eden wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “Are you mad?” he asks. “It’s okay if you’re disappointed. Mom was so . . .” His voice hitches in his throat, and a strangled sound escapes him as he tries to hold back tears.

“Oh, honey.” Carl begins to reach across the space between them, then thinks better of it and withdraws his hand. He will let Eden decide when they next make physical contact. “I couldn’t be prouder,” he says. It’s a line borrowed from one of the websites, but in this moment, Carl means every word.

Eden begins to shake again, his whole body juddering. Carl worries for a second that his son is having a seizure, but then the sobs come, wrenching and wracking, torn from his throat. Eden leans forward in his seat, arms wrapped around his head, screaming as each sob leaves him. Tears spatter the floor mat and the dashboard. Carl has never seen anyone cry like this. He parks on the shoulder, letting the storm pass through his son’s body. He wants to pull Eden into his lap—he would have done it before without a second thought.

“I’m here,” he repeats instead. “I’m right here.”

Eden throws open the car door and vomits onto the packed earth. Carl hurries around the vehicle to gather his son’s hair off his nape. Eden voids the contents of his stomach and keeps gagging after there’s nothing left to come up. He collapses into a crouch, leaning against the front wheel, his face a mess of snot and tears and blood from his split lip, which has reopened into a raw gash.

Carl sits on the ground beside him. The sun is high, and a cold wind stirs the prairie into silken waves. Eden’s breathing slows to a normal rhythm. Carl fishes in his pocket and finds a handkerchief, passing it over. Eden dabs his eyes and nose and mouth, staining the fabric crimson.

“Wow, I’m hemorrhaging,” he says.

“Head wounds bleed,” Carl says. “Put pressure on it.”

“I know.”

A high, crystalline call shivers the air. A hawk soars overhead, flicking its shadow across their bodies.

“I feel dizzy,” Eden says. “Everything’s kind of spinning.”

Carl leans forward to examine his son’s pupils. No dilation. No slurred speech. None of the dangerous concussion symptoms the doctors mentioned.

“It’s your ear, I bet,” Carl says. “That was a big cry. Your sinuses are inflamed. Come on, let’s get you into the back seat.”

He tucks his son in, hoodie balled under the head, coat over the body. Eden mumbles something as he dozes off, but Carl can’t catch what it is.

○

Eden is asleep when the mountains appear. First they are faint, edgeless shadows, then cloudlike blobs, and finally solid peaks glinting with snow.

Carl has not been looking forward to this part of the trip. The road zigzags up steep slopes. So many narrow switchbacks. The engine whines, complaining about the angle of the incline. Then comes a ridge with a sharp drop-off on one side. There are no barricades to stop the car from careening right into the valley. Carl knows that the lack of a guardrail is an intentional choice by the highway administration to keep drivers from feeling overconfident and pushing their luck. But still, the inky shadows in the chasm below make his extremities tingle.

A pronghorn bounds across the road thirty feet in front of the vehicle, moving with such swiftness and surety that it is gone almost before Carl registers its presence. A flash of auburn fur. A lattice of horns. He grips the steering wheel at ten and two, as he was taught in driving school. A cliff on the left side, then a cliff on the right. For a short stretch the road is bordered by empty space. The mountains are beautiful, but Carl can’t take his eyes off the road long enough to enjoy the view, and Eden is still asleep. The air seems rarified as they ascend into higher altitudes.

He wants to wake Eden when they reach the continental divide, then thinks better of it. Rest is essential to recovery. The body heals only during REM sleep, he once read. Still, Carl stops the car and climbs out to look at the big yellow sign marking the moment of transition. They have been climbing toward this point for hours. Now they will begin to descend on the other side.

Darkness comes earlier here, the sun setting behind the mountains long before it reaches the horizon. In the back seat, Eden has begun to snore like a pack-a-day smoker. A natural aftereffect of such powerful weeping.

They cross into Utah without fanfare. As the miles pass, the peaks shrink back into foothills. Carl drives between arches and towers of stone. The last of the sunlight drains from the air, and stars appear, more stars than he has ever seen. There is no light pollution here. So few people live in Utah. Carl is elated by the wealth of constellations, the splash of the Milky Way across the great bowl of the sky.

A rustle from the back seat. Eden yawns, then groans. “Shit, my mouth hurts,” he says.

“No swearing.”

“Really?”

“Well, only do it when we’re alone.”

There is no moon tonight. The car’s headlights, sweeping across shrubbery and stone, might be the last lights in the whole world.

“Dad?” Eden says.

“Uh-huh.”

A small silence. Carl wishes he could see his son’s face in the rearview mirror, but Eden is still lying down, and anyway the interior of the car is black as pitch.

“Is Mom going to prison?” Eden asks.

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that too. She might. But she’s white and middle-aged and fairly well-off, so I don’t know what’ll happen.” He pauses, then asks, “Do you want her to go to prison?”

“I don’t ever want to see her again.”

“That’s fair.”

“I don’t give a shit what happens to her. She can die for all I care.”

Carl knows this isn’t true, but he only says, “How’s the dizziness?”

“Better.”

For a moment there is only the thrum of the engine and the murmur of wheels on pavement. Then Eden says in a tone of wonder, “Look at the stars.”

○

It’s after midnight when Carl parks in the garage beneath his building. He’ll return the rental car on his way to the tournament later. In the elevator, Eden slumps against the wall. His mouth is no longer bleeding, but the scab is fresh and painful-looking once more. Carl leads the way down the hall to his apartment. He hurries to hide his one-hitter and stash while Eden is in the bathroom. Then he wipes the kitchen counter down with a sponge and frowns into the fridge, empty except for condiments and moldering takeout boxes.

Eden enters the room with a strange look on his face. Carl can’t quite interpret it.

“Straight to bed with you, young man,” he says. “Your room is pretty much the way you left it. Might be a little dusty. I’ll vacuum in the morning.”

Eden sits at the kitchen table. “Actually, can we do something first?”

“Sure, I guess.”

He looks at his lap. “I asked Mom. She said no.”

“Well, your mom is a jerk. Fuck her.” The words are in the open air before Carl has the presence of mind to stop himself. Normally he would never say such a thing.

“Fuck her,” Eden echoes fiercely.

“What do you want to do?”

He cuts his son’s hair right at the table. Eden holds a shaving mirror to watch as Carl lifts each lock, grown to an impressive length over months and years, and snips it away. Red-brown coils fall to the floor like autumn leaves. Eden’s face is aglow with happiness, unmistakable even beneath his mask of wounds.

Nothing around Carl seems entirely real. Too much has happened in the past couple of days. He feels caught between waking and dreaming, unsure which state he currently inhabits, but he keeps cutting. Soon Eden sports a mop top of uneven tufts. He tips his face this way and that, investigating his own reflection with his mouth open.

“Ready?” Carl asks, reaching for his beard trimmer.

“Born ready.”

The oddest things whirl through Carl’s head as he shears his son like a sheep, leaving only a quarter inch of ruddy fur. Murder, June said, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. What is the inverse of death? What is the opposite of grief? Carl’s heartache has burned away like morning mist beneath the rising sun. Nape to crown, he works the trimmer with a confident hand. There is no stranger here, no changeling, only Eden, always Eden, his own same Eden. A concentrated version, stripped of superficialities, distilled to pure essence. More Eden than ever before. His lip has begun to bleed again from too much smiling.

Carl finishes the buzz cut with a flourish, meeting his son’s eyes in the hand mirror. Eden’s jaw seems more pronounced without the frame of his curly mane. His long-lobed ears are visible now. Has he always had those sharp cheekbones? He looks so much like Carl at fourteen that Carl finds himself groping for the back of the chair to keep his balance.

Silence falls. Eden pushes back his chair and rises to his feet. He wears that same new expression, which Carl can now identify as relief. Eden spins in the glow of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling fan, and Carl finds himself laughing, and maybe crying too, for the first time since getting his son’s midnight call.

Across, beyond, through—that was the first definition for trans, but there were others beneath it. The second was a state change, as in liquid to solid, or, Carl thinks now, a literal change of states, New York to Nevada. The final definition was on or to the other side of, as in a transcontinental road trip or, perhaps, the process of healing from a wound. One day Eden will emerge on the other side of this suffering recovered and renewed. That’s the hope, anyway.

Carl was not present when Eden was born, and he has missed any number of moments along the way, but he is here, now, for what may prove to be the most crucial milestone of them all. Eden strikes a proud pose. Carl wipes his eyes with the heel of his palm. Through chance and calamity and wild good fortune, he will bear witness to whatever this transition is: experimentation or affirmation, rebirth or revelation, homecoming or becoming. He will see who this miraculous child turns out to be.