sections 5-9

V

                        

                On days like this, days when the rain began before dawn and never stopped, days when the sidewalks were rivers interspersed with lakes, Adare would take his rocking chair to the veranda and watch the rain. He had been doing this since he was very young. Now, Bear joined him. They would watch the rain as Adare scratched Bear’s ears.

                A woman wrapped in a poncho approached the house as I sat on the veranda, scratching Bear and talking to Adare.

                She pointed at Bear, “he could jump off that porch, you know that don’t you.”

                I was surprised. I could not quite understand why someone would traverse the soggy ground between the sidewalk and the house. “Probably, but why would he?” I said. Bear raised his head, pointed his nose toward her, poked it out beyond the shelter of the roof, and drew it back. I was sure he wondered who would think he’d get off a perfectly dry veranda and go out in the rain. He was not a fan of getting wet.

                Bear dropped his head. The woman walked away. Katya dashed across the street and hopped quickly up the steps and under the roof.

                I looked at Katya. She did not speak. She sat kneeled down, behind Adare, and scratched Bear. He was a very happy dog.

                She looked at Adare, “I used to watch the rain from the porch in the Ukraine.”

“Why did you stop?”

“The Russians came.” Her smile dropped. Adare dashed into the house for snacks for him and Katya. I asked about her father.

                “Stepfather” she said

                “He doesn’t like you coming here, does he?”

                “He doesn’t want me home when he has friends over, he told me to go to your library, but I saw the dog here.” It was that simple.  And it struck as a seven-year-old’s way of saying she didn’t want to be home when her stepfather’s friends were there.

                “The library is closed on Sunday”

                “I don’t think he knew this news.” Adare returned with crackers and raisins. Adare had always shared food; he even shared his candy. Other children, I noticed, rarely shared their candy with him. He knew that. He even talked about it. Sometimes he said he wouldn’t share anymore food if his friends would share theirs. But he never actually stopped sharing his food, even with the stingiest of children.

                Katya took a few raisins. Adare sighed “well, if it is going to rain all day we will just have to play Star Wars on the veranda.” He picked up a stick from his collection and offered it to Katya, “this can be your light saber.”

                She took the stick, a little unsure what Adare had in mind. Bear got up, circled, laid down again. Normally he’d be much more interested in stick play, but it was raining and I was scratching his ears. And, so far, they weren’t playing; Adare was explaining who was on whose team, who the “good guys” and “bad guys” were, what kind of light sabers they had, and what special powers they had. Adare’s expositions on the game to be played sometimes ran longer than the game itself. Bear simply didn’t care.

                I didn’t keep track of the time. I rarely do. But when a car pulled slowly out of the driveway across the street, then sped off, running the stop sign Katya sighed “I guess their done.” She put down her stick and darted through the rain and into her house.

 

VI

 

                After two days of rain it was suddenly hot.

                Droves of people headed for the beach. The lake was as cold as the air was hot. No one swam. The stood in the lack, maybe up to their ankles, maybe their knees. They absorbed the cold.

                Adare submerged himself in the lake.  He emerged, ran through hot sand, laid on the warm towel and announced he was cold.

                I looked across the beach at the children, the teenagers, the adults. I wondered why no one seemed to be at work, midday of midweek. I laughed to myself; no doubt someone looked at me and wondered why I was not at work midday of midweek.

                Adare ran down the beach screaming a name. I could hear it, but I couldn’t quite understand it. I watched as he joined a small group of children. I wondered in that direction. I greeted his friends’ mothers. It was always a bit awkward for them, and maybe a little for me. Even now, after some three years, I was not one of the mothers. I never could be, since I was Adare’s father. Yet they all knew what I knew: Adare’s mother was never coming back.  If Adare went to the beach, it would be with me. If he went to a birthday party, it would be with me. If he was at the park, it was with me.  But I would never be “one of the mothers.” Conversations would change as soon as I appeared.

                At least they adored Adare.

                Down the beach I saw someone quite familiar. It was really only her long, twisty, black hair that told me it was the woman who owned Tank.  I had only seen her in the cold, and outside. She was entirely different looking in a baseball cap and bathing suit.  

                “How is Tank?” I smiled

                The spark of recognition appeared in her eyes. “He’s great, and Bear?” Then she laughed, “I hardly recognized you without a coat on.”

                I laughed as well. “Yes, it’s amazing we can find anyone in the summer.”

                “Luckily, we only have three or four days of summer a year.” She smiled. It was the common joke, but the last two summers it hadn’t seemed to be a joke.  “Otherwise, we’d all be strangers.”

                It was an odd comment, I thought, because it seemed we were almost strangers. Our dogs were not strangers but were we not so? Adare ran up and grabbed my leg. “Katya’s here” he announced. He ran back to his friends. I was not entirely sure why he wanted me to know that Katya was at the beach. Of course, it wasn’t a surprise, everyone seemed to be at the beach.

                ‘Who’s Katya”

                “His friend who lives across the street from us”

                “In the big brick house?” I nodded in answer. There were not very many brick houses in town. And there were not so many big houses in town.  “Didn’t they just put up the enormous fence?”

                “Yes, it’s really an eyesore, I think.” She agreed. Adare came running back.

                “Papa” he grabbed my leg. “You have to chase us. You are the monster. If you catch us, you will eat us.” And he darted off.

                I laughed, “I’m always the monster.” And I gave chase.

                When I caught them Katya was telling Adare how to hide behind a log. I might not have seen her, but Adare stood up and yelled “the monster’s coming” so they were easy enough to find. Katya just shook her head and told him he had to learn to hide better. She pointed to a cut between the dunes and the beach and looked at Adare “the Russians will look there, for sure.”

                “Are the Russians monsters?” Adare looked confused. “Do they eat people?”

                “Oh, I guess there’s only one Russian monster, but he ate my country.”

                Adare looked confused.

                I don’t know how long I chased Adare and Katya before the settled into making sand castles. I don’t know how long they made sand castles before they tried burying each other in the sand and pretending to escape artists. I watched Hank’s owner walk slowly away, a silhouette against the setting sun.  I felt the temperature slowly dropping. I knew Adare, and maybe Katya too, would only notice once they got cold. I knew that the promise of pizza would get Adare to leave the beach.

                “Pizza?!” it was both a question and a declaration

                “Pizza!” it was an exclamation of absolute excitement. Adare turned to Katya “do you like pizza” and the three of began the uphill walk towards home and dinner, “you should eat pizza with us.”

                Katya shook her head, “probably my step-father’s company has gone now, so I should go home. Anyway, we’ll see if there is a strange auto in the driveway still.”

                For a man who lived in the town less than two weeks, who rarely seemed to leave his house and certainly had failed to speak to anyone on the street, her step-father seemed to have quite a few visitors. Perhaps they were friends from Illinois coming to see his new home, maybe even helping him move in. If I were Katya, I probably would not really want to be there either.

                I must have let my thoughts become words. Katya looked at me “I think he meets them on the internet; that’s where he met my mother.” She paused, looked around and said “at least there aren’t any Russians, and no bombs go off in the night.”

 

VII

 

                Like most nights, I sat the large brown chair in front of the oversized desk that had once been my grandfather’s. Where the stain was darker from the blotter that shielded it from light for 60 years now sat a laptop computer.  I checked my email. I checked my automatic payments. I looked for book deals. I registered at a Ukrainian dating cite.

                I had no intention of registering at a Ukrainian dating cite when I sat down at the computer. I had no intention of registering even after I had typed in the search term. I had no intention of typing in the search term in the first place. But I did. And I registered. I imagined it was the one Katya’s mother used, but there were too many to choose from to know for sure. I left myself logged in as I went to the kitchen to pour tea.

                I was back within five minutes. I had twenty-three massages from Ukrainian women in my inbox.   Twenty-three women in five minutes. I shook my head. Suddenly, with no pictures and a bare minimum of words, I had been listed as a favorite for several women, invited to see multiple private galleries and sent a special video labeled “just for you.” The economy was bad. The war was bad. But twenty-three women in five minutes declaring their interest in a man they know nothing about, it was a little sad, a little bewildering.

I clicked on one letter. A woman was telling me she was serious about forming a family, that she was cheerful and a good cook. I closed the letter. I opened another. The second woman told her favorite position for sex and included a photo of herself covered in only a sheet. A pop-up box appeared, and girl beaconed me to join her, promising to lift my mood. As quickly as she appeared, another chat box covered her and a different girl danced in lingerie, promising me the greatest pleasures, despite the fact that she was 7,000 miles away. I clicked accept. The service informed me I did not have enough credits to enter the chat room.

 “So much for free” I muttered.

The invitations came quickly, the letters piled up. I was about to close when an invitation piqued my interest. The woman was reasonably dressed, smiling but sitting, asking if I had had an interesting day or read a good book lately. I didn’t intend to buy credits, but PayPal made it easy enough. And then the chat box opened, a friendly face from the Ukraine appeared in a small screen, and messages in computer-translated English slowly began to scroll across the screen.  At first, it was simple ‘hi” and followed by a simple “I hope you are well tonight.”

I responded the same, assuring her I’d had a good day. I asked and she confirmed it was the very middle of the night, but she was a night owl. If none will chat with her, she will read the book. She held up a novel, the title was in Ukrainian. Or maybe it was in Russian.  She told me it was spy novel, from the Cold War, from the West: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

I typed “I loved that book, I read first nearly 20 years ago but read it many times since.” It was true. But I couldn’t believe I was typing this at all, to a woman whose honest response was “I couldn’t even read that long ago’ as she laughed a little.  I laughed a little. I was nearly 20 years older than her. What could we really have to chat about? But I stayed. And she stayed.

I finally looked at the clock. Midnight. We had been chatting online for almost two hours. I typed “it’s midnight here” and she typed ‘it’s seven here, I should be getting ready for work.” I typed ‘I need to get some sleep.”

She smiled into the computer, “can we chat again, I really like you” I sent a smiley face through the chat system and wrote “you do?” She laughed, “we talked for two hours, I laughed a lot, and you didn’t even ask me to take my clothes off.”

I read the last line again. Half-dressed women had been sending invitations to “hot chats” all night.  Perhaps what little they wore came off easily.

I typed: “do most guys ask you to take your clothes off?”

“Yes” appeared on the screen. Then the next line “it usually only takes five minutes” and a laughing face appeared.

“Oh”

“When I don’t do it, they close the chat. Usually they don’t even say goodbye.” She sighed, then she smiled into the camera again, and typed “will you come back?”

“Yes, about the same time tomorrow, I think.”

She sent a virtual hug, waved into the camera, and closed the chat session. I went to bed. I wondered what she did.

 

VIII

 

Adare came down the stairs. He announced “it is home day” and then looked at me with uncertainty “is it a home day?”

“No.”

“But you did not get me out of bed.”

He presented the fact as evidence that today was a home day. Adare knew he was allowed to sleep as late as he wanted on a home day. On other days, I got him out of bed in time to go to preschool. But he could not yet tell time.

I pated his head, “it is not time yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means that I would have gotten you up in about 10 minutes, but you got up before it was time for me to get you up.”

“I should go back to bed.”

Adare liked routine. He liked ritual. To start a school day as if it were a home day would not bode well. He marched back up the stairs. I heard his door open, then shut. He always slept with his door shut, but demanded that I sleep with my door open. This, it turned out, kept the monsters from coming into his room while allowing me to get into the hallway to scare away the monsters more quickly.

Ten minutes passed. I went upstairs, opened his door and went in. He looked at me and said “I’m tired, I’m too tired to get up.” The school day routine had begun. I lifted him out of bed and put him in the chair. “What color do you think you’ll wear today?”

“Red.”

He dressed. I handed him a pair of socks, “put these on and go get the candle.”

“Oh, yeah!” He dashed into the den and returned with a small hurricane lamp.

I lit the match and handed it to him. He took it, lit the candle, and replaced the glass. “I will sit like a Chinese master” he said as he folded his legs underneath himself and placed his hands together on his lap. My legs no longer folded as his did. I sat. We watched the light radiate from the candle. He lifted himself on his knees and blew toward the candle. “I want to blow it out now” he said.

“It’s not time yet, patience.”

He sat. “Is it time yet.”

“No, patience Adare.”

He wiggled, leaning over the candle.

“Patience Adare.”

He wiggled more, then leaned back on to his feet. I looked at him “What do we say?” And he began his mantra: “I am strong, I am brave, I am caring, I am kind, I am wise.”

The timer dinged. Five minutes had passed. “You may blow out the candle now.”

Adare blew on the candle, then picked it up and took it back to the den. He returned to put on his shoes. I looked at him, “are you going to make wise choices today?”

He sighed. “Yes.”

“And that means?”

“I know.” But he would not say what it meant. I smiled. “I want pancakes.”

“How about waffles, we don’t have time to make pancakes.”

“I want pancakes.”

I would make him waffles. He would demand pancakes. He would pout. He would eat the waffles, with butter, dipped in syrup and say they were delicious. He would remind me he wanted pancakes.  As we walked to the car he took my hand “I like pancakes better than waffles.” Some ideas were difficult to let go. Pancakes were one of them.

I was not surprised to see Katya at the fence petting Bear when I got home. I was never surprised to see someone at the fence petting Bear. And I was no longer surprised to Katya. Her school had ended for the summer. Cashel now would only go for the half-day camp.  Tank trotted up to the fence, reared up on his hind legs and put his front paws on the fence, just as Bear was doing. Katya scratched them both behind the ears. I had seen her smile. Now she seemed to be a happy child. The woman walking Tank smiled at Katya, “you must like big dogs” she said.

Katya smile left. It fled back to the chaos of the Ukraine. “We had him” she said “until the Russian bombs.” She stopped. Tank and Bear sensed a change. Bear put his head on her shoulder as if he were giving hug. Tank nuzzled her. The smile slowly crept its way back across the Atlantic to her face, but it never brightened her quite like they had been. The woman walking Tank was visibly upset. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” It was something we said when we could not possibly have known. Katya turned to her, “Can I walk him with you?” The request was impossible to deny. Tank, the woman, and Katya walked off, and the woman handed Katya the leash. Tank was easy to walk; he was 8 years old.

A car pulled into the driveway across the street and Katya’s step father emerged from the house to meet three men who nearly fell out of the subcompact car. The shook hands and went inside. I petted Bear, went through the house to get a book, and emerged onto the back deck. I sat. Bear sat. I read. Bear slept.

 

IX

 

I logged on.  My inbox was jammed. Mail from women�"late teenagers, really�"claiming to be serious. Mail from women midway through their twenties promising to fulfil my every desire. Mail from women in their thirties promising a life of pleasure and love.  I searched the list of women on line, scrolling down along the list of screennames and ignoring the chat invitations from lingerie-clad girls.  I found the girl who read mystery novels, and sent her a chat invite.

She appeared in a box, smiling.

We chatted about Adare. We chatted about Bear. We chatted about her cat, her grandmother, her upcoming trip to the village. We chatted about my job, about her job. We never told each other our real names.

Screennames only.

I ignored the stream of chat invites that got more and more provocative as the American night wore on and the day dawned in the Ukraine.

“When do you sleep?”

She laughed. It was 6:00 in the morning. She’d been online chatting with me for almost an hour. She might have been online before that, I had no way of knowing.

“After work” she typed. “I just go to bed right after work, then wake up at maybe 4:00 in the morning.”

I wondered. “Is this typical?” I tried to imagine.

She laughed again, and typed “ha-ha” then “no” then “only for girls trying to meet American men” and she laughed more.

Suddenly I wondered what her voice sounded like. I had given her a voice. When I read her typing that voice sounded in my head. It was the voice of a woman I knew in college. The woman I cooked chicken for not knowing she was a vegetarian. A woman who danced with me senior year, who nearly kissed me, who really tried to kiss me. The woman I should have let kiss, the woman I should have kissed back. Twenty-five years later I gave a Ukrainian her voice, the voice of a French Canadian.

Bear jolted me back to the present, to the now. Bear’s life happened now, only now. And now he wanted scratched.

“He is so cute” the words appeared on the screen. Right now I was talking to a woman half my age seven time zones away.  

I stopped scratching Bear to type “he’s bigger than you are, he’s 55kg.” At least according to her profile she was a mere 53Kg. And not much taller than Bear on his hind legs either, at just over five feet. The French Canadian had been short too, not quite making it to five feet.

I looked back at the screen. She smiled. I smiled. I put my hand toward the screen. She put hers up. Seven thousand miles and an ocean make holding hands difficult. I felt her. I thought she felt me. Word appeared: “I can feel you, like you are here.”

I typed: “I have such a crazy life.” She laughed. She typed: “you have Adare, you have Bear, and you wonder when I sleep?” She looked at me and added, “you need someone who will make you go to bed” and she added a wink.

“So do you.” I added a wink, and a kiss.

It seemed oddly safe to suggest going to bed with someone from a distance of 7,000 miles. But she smiled and put her hand back to the screen. I raised my hand to the camera. I looked in her eyes. We stared through the webcams, the internet allowing us to watch each other half-way around the world. I knew she would go if it were possible. I knew I would take her if it were possible. And we blew each other kisses and closed the chat.

I settled into my chair. I picked up my pen, pushed the nib forward, and wrote one word on a card: “Seriously” and added a question mark. I lit a candle, folded my legs, dropped my hands into my lap and stared at the candle until everything surrounding it was shadowy and blurry. I stared at the flickering flame slowly breathing. Yes, I said, seriously.

I blew out the candle.

I stood up, turned out the light, and wondered into the bed. It was a queen-sized bed. It had split box springs and even then they had barely made around the tight corners of the staircase. The head piece of the sleigh bad had barely made it up as well. Adare had slept there with me for over a year before announcing he was going back to his own bedroom to sleep. He still arrived, sometimes. Sometimes he woke me as he got into the bed. Sometimes he did not. Bear occasionally put his nose on the bed, nuzzling me. He preferred the cool, wooden floor even when the wooden floor was more frigid than cool. I laid down. There was space for her, even if Adare came upstairs.