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It was easy, in the beginning, to hold his daughter in his heart as his own. As if his blood truly mingled with hers. Her skin was smooth and pale, freckles dusting her nose. Her tiny fingers wrapped around his thumb and squeezed. He could lift her with her fingers gripping his, hanging like a monkey from a tree. Her hair, though nothing like his own or his wife’s, was only a minor irritation, and only if remarked upon. For he found the image of her was simply her. Her face as familiar to him as his own, until the lines and shape of her no longer felt distinct from her essence.
She toddled and fell, scraped her nose, bruised her knees, drooled on his shoulder while she gnawed with her gums like a puppy. She threw her small body from chairs, trusting he’d reach out and grab her at the last second. Being a child, he thought, was about doing without consideration, letting your body learn the consequences. Being an adult inverted it, the consequences ever etched in one’s vision, until doing felt impossible.
He had not expected to think about her quite so much. When he’d imagined fatherhood before Claire had gone, he’d pictured waving goodbye to his wife and child in the morning, going about the business of his day, then later, when his work was finished, conjuring them in his mind as he ventured home. But his daughter was not so easily dismissed. She invaded his thoughts throughout his days, appearing in the bit of cereal crusted on his trouser leg, in the tiny orphaned sock he found at the bottom of his briefcase. She must have pulled it off and tossed it in there last night, he’d think. And she appeared in the corners of his mind always, as he watched the students walking with oblivious confidence, imagining her grown and barreling through these halls.
As she grew older, his fantasy of her being merely his faded. It wasn’t so much that she was physically resembling the mysterious man who shared her DNA. It was in her manner, a presence, a confidence that felt entirely different from his own or Claire’s. The tilt of her head and the hum of her thoughts as she contemplated a problem. How could blood be so strong, he wondered.
This change spurred him to pull her closer, to leave his imprint in some way. His suggestion to begin spending a week in the mountains each year might have seemed deliberate in hindsight, but in truth, it was a whim in the beginning.
“The Adirondacks?” Claire looked up from the journal she had folded over on her lap. Her hair had loosened from the pins and had begun to fall across her brow as she read. She pushed it back behind her ear with a sigh of exasperation.
“I thought perhaps you’d like some time away from the city, but if you’re too pressed with work I can go alone with Bree.” Frank pushed his glasses higher on his nose and glanced at her.
“No, I… No, that sounds wonderful! It’s been so long since I’ve gone anywhere.” The strain that normally pulled on her face began to loosen and a smile tugged at her lips.
“Work won’t be an issue?” Frank asked dubiously.
Claire’s brow furrowed, her lips pursing. “How long?”
“A week.”
“Hm. Well, I don’t know if I can do a full week at the moment, but at least a few days. Perhaps I could drive separately so you and Bree can stay a bit longer.”
He’d not expected such an enthusiastic response from her. He knew she adored nature and longed for time away, but still, time with him didn’t seem a good selling point. While he was relieved that she was receptive, he felt a pang of guilt for how pleased he was to hear that she’d not be with them the entire time. He cherished his alone time with Bree and if he were to examine his feelings a bit deeper, he’d find that he worried Claire’s presence would somehow resurrect the other man, the one who seemed intent on haunting them.
“Why would this man let us stay in his cabin, Daddy?” Bree asked as the car rattled over the bumps in the narrow road snaking through thick forest. Claire’s car followed close behind and Frank glanced in the rearview to make sure she didn’t blow a tire on the rocks.
“Why?” he laughed. “Well I daresay he considers me a friend, darling. Is it so hard to believe I might have friends who want to do nice things for me?”
Bree snickered from the seat next to him. “No! It just seems like lending someone a house is a bit more than lending someone your… power saw.”
“Well then, my dear, that is my challenge for you. Become the sort of person who is offered houses rather than… hand mixers.” He smiled widely at her, tightening his grip on the steering wheel at a particularly deep pothole.
“I’d rather be offered a power saw over a hand mixer, if those are my options.” She smirked and winked at him. Or, more accurately, blinked. She had not yet mastered the art of winking just one eye and instead blinked with a slight dip of her head, something he found utterly charming.
“Here we are,” Frank said, leaning forward to see the cabin as he pulled the car to a stop at the top of the drive.
Frank and Claire unloaded the cars and gave up trying to get Bree to help as she ran through the cabin chattering about how perfect it all was, especially the screened sleeping room off the back. She bolted out the door, leaping over a steel wash basin, her voice swallowed by the forest.
The cabin was small, but modern enough that they had running water, a wood stove for heat, and a bathroom. Frank’s shoulders relaxed as he dropped a stack of shirts in the dresser drawer. The place was a bit musty, so he pushed open a few windows and ventured back toward the kitchen where he’d left Claire to organize. He found her standing at a window, looking out through the trees, her eyes seeing something else. He hadn’t seen that distant look in a long time and felt a panic rise in him. He couldn’t let her slip away now. He couldn’t pretend what they had was ideal, but if she let herself drown in her past, she’d be lost not just to him, but to Bree as well. That fear gnawed at him.
“Shall we go for a hike? Stretch our legs and get the lay of the land? Bob said there’s a creek a half mile or so away. Good for fishing.”
“Hm?” She turned to him, eyes slowly refocusing. “Yes, let me find a basket.”
The trail to the creek was well worn, but the summer had been wet and new growth began to crowd the edges, pushing tiny branches and brambles into their path. Frank made a note to bring the hatchet next time to clear some of it away. Once settled in with their fishing rods, feet propped on smooth stones along the edge of the water, Claire began wandering, crouching now and then and dropping herbs into the basket hanging from her arm. Bree lost interest in staring at the water with Frank and joined her mother.
“What are you going to do with these, Mama? Are we eating them? They don’t look very good.”
“Ha! No, I suppose they aren’t all that appetizing. I might use some in our food this week, this thyme for instance. But some I will take back with me to the hospital.”
Bree looked at her mother as if she’d spoken another language. “Why?”
“Well, some herbs have healing properties, settling stomachs, soothing pain, all sorts of things. I like to have options.” She spoke matter-of-factly, but her smile was nervous, having been on the receiving end of suspicious looks from her colleagues when introducing herbs to her treatment plans.
“Did you learn about them in medical school?” Bree asked.
“Hmm, no. No, I had read some books before I went to medical school and… Well, I spent some time using more natural… remedies.” Claire’s voice trailed off, catching her words before they shattered the walls she’d built to keep the past at bay.
“‘Learn by doing.’ My biology teacher says that all the time.” Bree added a handful of yarrow to the basket and brushed her hands on her pant legs.
“Books cannot always prepare you for the reality of things. That is very true.” Claire leaned forward and kissed the top of her daughter’s head, pulling a leaf from her curls.
The days at the cabin were long and peaceful. The fresh air and exercise knocked them all out cold before the sun fell below the horizon. Bree woke on the fourth day and found her mother setting her bag on the front porch.
“Do you really have to go?”
Claire turned back to her daughter, a sad smile on her face. “I do. I’m sorry, dear. But I’ll see you in three days. And you will have a wonderful time with your father. Although you are in charge of extracting any splinters he gets now. Think you can manage?”
“Ugh no! I hate splinters. Daddy will have to live with them. I think I’ll pass out if I have to pull any out,” she said, half-joking.
Claire kissed her daughter goodbye and slipped away before Frank woke.
After breakfast, Brianna washed the dishes and went outside to find Frank. He wasn’t out front chopping wood where she’d expected him, but rather behind the cabin, about twenty yards into the woods. He held a rifle at his side, and Brianna’s eyes went wide.
“Bree. Come here.”
“Really?” she asked, disbelief shadowing her face.
A conspiratorial smile answered her.
“You’re going to teach me how to shoot?” she asked when she reached his side.
“Well, yes. I was thinking, Bree, about what you said in the car. That you are not the kind who will be pleased to borrow a hand mixer. You get that from your mother, I think. But you are bright and meticulous and determined, which are all good qualities for a marksman. Or markswoman, as it were. And based on your glee this week, I suspect you may find yourself living in the woods someday so this skill might come in handy.”
She grinned back at him, bright and eager, and his heart swelled with pride. So much of his life as her father was lost to the mundanity of existence, the unrecognized coming and going, the tiny steps that led to big leaps with little to remark upon if only because it was merely part of life. But in this moment he felt the gentle nudge of time, that he, and she, would look back on this memory, distinct and pivotal. That when she thought of him years from now, after he was long gone, she might think of learning to shoot with him in the woods.
It was not deliberate. He did not know when he taught her to shoot that she truly would find herself living in the woods someday. But he did consider, later when he found proof of his wife’s return to the past, that perhaps there had been some subconscious truth behind it all, that he was meant to take her shooting in the woods. That he was meant to come to America. That Claire had to go through the stones and return to him. That it all was meant to be.