FEAR

My father had a good trip. A good day. We don’t mention the soldier. But that night we let our guard down, exhausted, sitting by the woodstove in dim light. I’m on the couch, my father’s in his wide-armed chair, the seat sunken to his weight, our long legs stretched forward, feet crossed at the ankles toward the stove, leaning back, our heads against our clasped hands. Pilot, asleep on my boot.

This is us. But we’re also different. There’s something butting in. I want to give it a shove into the open; I want to talk about it. I say to my dad, “What scares you?” I wonder if the Motel 6 in Chincoteague is creepy; I wonder if the expanse of ocean off Virginia has more ghosts than the Gulf of Maine. He thinks about my question.

“Well,” he says. “Sometimes thinking about you scares the life out of me. When you were younger, you’d fall asleep, your hair would fall over your cheek. Just looking at your cheekbone scared me with how much I wished I could protect you.”

We are silent. I think about begging him to take me to Chincoteague. Me, Rosa, and Mr. Murray. But I don’t. I say my fear. “My fear is—trying to figure out how to say this. It’s about your first wife.”

“Who am I marrying next?” His exhausted eyes twinkle at me, and I love him.

“Don’t know yet.” The fire pops. “But the first one, she’s a wild card, isn’t she? We’re doing good, you and me, and then here comes Lydia, and everybody starts to fight. Who needs this?”

My father doesn’t answer that. I wonder if he knows about Bong Proh, the man too old for my mother, but someone from that war so they must be tight. The baby’s father. The baby who comes walking into our lives curled inside my mother’s belly.

In this deep scaredness inside me, there’s Luke. I don’t understand. I see his eyes bleary with no sleep, but they also warm me and hold me. So I make a fear up for Luke, one I don’t tell my father.

What would Luke’s fear be? Not the 95 bridge. Not the cars screaming. Not the speed of the current if a guy jumps. All these can ease a body. His fear is behind the eyes. It wedges his eyelids open. I imagine the clock ticking, the waves against the rocks, nothing he wouldn’t do for sleep. His fear is that he can’t go there. What do you do if you can’t sleep? He needs to keep sorting the net as it flies through the winch and shave the snow from his nostrils and mouth the way I’ve seen my father do on the boat. And now he doesn’t have a boat and that adds to his sleeplessness.

Pilot wakes and paces by the door, as if she feels tension in the house and she’s worried we might leave.