MY SISTER AND HER KIDS overtake the house, absorbing my six-year-old Kate into their stampede, exhorting her to find her shoes, hurry. They hustle her toward the door in a comical cacophony, as if to pile into a clown car.
“’Bye, Mom!” Kate pauses for just a moment. “You’ll be here when I get back, right?”
“Right.”
My sister reaches over her head to close the door, calling, “Happy Anniversary!” Chris and I have been married ten years.
He is waiting for me in the backyard. We have abandoned our customary shorts and t-shirts in preparation for a candlelit dinner on a white tablecloth. But instead of going to the restaurant, we go to war.
We have always stood on opposite sides of one canyon. We have always heaved thick, heavy ropes back and forth, back and forth, painstakingly constructing bridges that sway beneath us as we wobble toward each other. Tonight, we pitch the ropes into the chasm and shout across it.
We remain in the yard, and I appreciate the darkness pressing in around us. It hides the ugly twist of my face as I level my charges, the childlike crumple of it as he details his disappointment in me. Our voices rise and rise.
Kate will be back soon. As I move toward the house, Chris fires a final shot. “Happy fucking Anniversary.”
A couple days later, a handwritten letter addressed to me arrives in the mail. The sender says she is a Jehovah’s Witness who lives in the neighborhood. The paper shakes in my hands as I read.
She says she takes lots of walks in the evening. She cites a number of Scriptures she thinks might help me cope with family life. She says Christ is the answer. I show Chris the letter before dropping it in the trash.
One thing we agree on: we won’t fight outside anymore.
***
Instead of finishing our fight, we switch to silence. We are too tired to fight anymore. The silence spreads itself over days, weeks, thick with terrible things we’ve said to each other and cannot unsay.
We speak directly to Kate. When she is elsewhere or asleep, we exist on separate floors of the house, careful not to overlap in shared spaces. Chance encounters send us scurrying back to safety.
Kate becomes watchful and weepy. At bedtime, I blot her cheeks and whisper, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers back. She knows, just not the word.
Alone on the first floor, I bounce the word like a ball. I Google “loneliest place on Earth,” Point Nemo, an ocean desert. I circle the living room, lingering at the bookshelves to run a finger over the spines of books. Here are Dante, Calvino, Levi, Bassani – my introduction to Italian literature, relics from a former life as an interesting person.
Here is D’Annunzio’s L’Innocente – The Innocent, The Victim. The pages still smell like the decaying Florentine villa where I first read it. I’m holding the book to my face, breathing it in, when Chris appears and makes me jump. He addresses me for the first time in a month.
“Just so you know, I’m not – not taking Kate to camp.”
I say, “I’m going, too.”
He retreats to the basement.
Mute, we face each other from opposite sides of one canyon. Ropes pile our arms, slack. We are forgetting why we ever threw them in the first place.
***
Instead of saying the word, we drive Kate deep into the forest for sleepaway camp, where she will meet her cousins. When they pitched it to her two months ago, the fun they would have, Kate readily, eagerly consented.
Much discussion animates the processes of packing the duffel bag, selecting a single stuffed animal to sustain her for three days, procuring a pink sleeping bag. Kate’s anticipation peaks as we load the car and endures for most of the drive. But as we get closer, the road narrowing and turning to dirt, the dense pines crowding it and casting it in shadow, she quiets. What seemed like a great idea two months ago now bends into a question mark.
We join the other parents and kids shuffling through a line of cheerful counselors in matching t-shirts. Clipboards in hand, they verify emergency contacts, collect medications, field questions, and allay concerns. Trembling beside me, Kate motions for me to bend down.
“Where are my cousins?”
“Almost here,” I assure her. My sister has texted that they are running a little late, and we will wait with Kate until they arrive. But we won’t, because once we have steered her to her cabin, which swarms with little girls, once she has chosen a bunk and cubby, a counselor named Annette takes matters in hand.
“I’ve got it from here. Thank you, parents!” Her bright, brisk tone conveys the importance of swift exits.
We face Kate, who looks suddenly, impossibly, desperately small. This was a terrible mistake, bringing her here, I think, and what kind of parent sends their six-year-old to sleepaway camp, and it’s too late now, because Annette, sensing the potential for a scene, is prodding us toward the screen door.
Chris and I each pull Kate into a hug. He finishes his with a sturdy shake of her shoulders. I flash my sunniest “everything’s fine” smile.
“Are you sure my cousins are coming?”
“I promise,” I say. “They’ll be here any minute.”
“And you’ll be here when camp’s done, right?”
“Right.”
She swallows hard. She will not cry in front of strangers if she can help it. “Both of you?”
The innocent, the victim, locked in a silence she cannot articulate.
“Both of us. We’ll be right here.” I can hardly bear to look at her. “We promise.”
Bolstered, she turns to Annette. Relieved, Annette ushers her into the swarm. Chris and I slip out. We walk slowly back to the car, nothing left to do now but face ourselves.
— MEGAN CATANA
Megan Catana (formerly Schikora) is a novelist and a 2023 Page Turner Awards longlister. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction can be found in F(r)iction, Fictive Dream, New South, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Rumpus, The Literary Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Flyway, and BlazeVOX, and is forthcoming in Midway Journal and Exacting Clam. She lives in Michigan.