I started to recall all the other little incidents that I had been ignoring. The time she was answering the static on her baby monitor like a conversation only she could hear, in a language only she could speak. The time she said Noni had visited. Noni was my great grandmother who died when I was a child. I'd never even mentioned her name to my child. When one of her first words was Timmy, the name of my dead uncle.
The very last incident I remember happened when my daughter was 5. Old enough to begin losing that veil of secret knowledge babies are born with that keep them connected to that other side. We had been driving back to Colorado when I found out that I no longer had a place to live but that's another blog post. It was 10:30 at night and I was at the Nebraska Colorado border with no money, no where to go, and precious cargo asleep in my back seat.
I called my friend whose father had a cabin at Lake McConaughy. It was Friday night. If the Gods were with me at all, he'd be there, ready to start a big weekend of fishing and drinking til he couldn't stand anymore. I waited on the side of a pitch black empty highway, waiting for a call back, waiting for a miracle.
We got to Bob's cabin just shy of midnight. It was a two bedroom mobile home covered in fish decor, right down to the lightswitch covers. I carried my daughter down the hall to the spare bedroom. Bob had left fresh sheets for us. I tucked her in, hoping that like every other time, she would wake up in a strange place and take it in stride, and be fresh for adventure in the morning. One of us had to be.
I stumbled back down the hall and sank into the matching lazy boy next to Bob. We talked about how the children from my generation all had our heads up our asses, how unfair life was, and what I planned to do now. We talked about the terms of a small loan to get me back on my feet in another city, in another state, and how hard it would be for me to find work as a single parent, how hard it had always been. We talked until 2:30 in the morning, when my daughter opened her door, came out into the hall, and stopped short.
"Mommy" she said, rubbing her eyes. "Can you tell the big man to get out of my way?"
I scooped her up, tucked her back in, and rejoined my friend's father in the living room.
"Know why I got this place so cheap?" he asked me as he lit the cigarette he'd been rolling. I sat back. "No. Why?"
"Because the man who owned it got into a fight with his wife and was on his here when he wrecked his car and died." Bob blew out a cloud of smoke. "Seen a picture of em back there on the wall after his wife sold me the place. He was a big man."
The other day, something made me remember all of this. My daughter, now nine, was in her bedroom building giant Lego cities. "Hey hun," I said to her back. "do you remember when you were little, the townhouse we had when Old Man John lived next door and Donna?"
Without turning around, "I kind of do. Why?"
"Do you remember a girl named Jean?"
My daughter turns around, staring up the ceiling to remember. "Yeah...the girl with the purple eyes."
Who knows a good Priest?
