She’s three. It’s a Saturday, late morning, in early December. They’re making the walk to the neighborhood playground, eight blocks from their home in the college town that doubles as an up-and-coming city.
This walk always makes him nervous. She moves so quickly, sometimes darts suddenly. She’s always honored their rule about how if she gets to the end of a block without him, she has to wait for him before crossing the street. They always hold hands when they cross. But he worries that one time she’ll forget, and a person driving a car onto the path won’t see her in time. He also frets about her tripping and falling onto the hard pavement, like the time when she was walking a neighbor’s dog and something alarmed the dog and it took off in a sprint, causing her to trip over the leash and land, head-first, on the stony sidewalk.
He wishes he could push her to the playground in a stroller. But she’s never been able to tolerate riding in one of those. The last time he tried to walk her to the park in a stroller, she screamed and wept from the buggy to the point where passersby stopped and stared. When he pulled her out, she said, “My do it!” her funny way of saying, “I can do it,” and she pushed the empty stroller the rest of the way. She’d always been especially active, and willful. As she explained to him when he asked why she never wanted to ride in a stroller, “I’m a moving girl, Daddy.”
He knows the time at the playground will be good. Ever sociable, she’ll likely hang with another toddler they happen across there. They’ll run around and play on the swings and slides and climbing structures. He always likes watching her have a nice time. Then, she’ll be tired by the time they get back home a few hours later. After lunch, she’ll surely take a nap for an hour or 45 minutes or so. He thinks about how peaceful that’ll be, to have that little window of time where she’s not moving, and he doesn’t have to worry about her falling or getting hit by a car or choking on something she grabbed and stuck in her mouth while roaming about.
They’re halfway there. As he watches her, yet again, suddenly pick up her pace and get several steps ahead of him, he indulges himself in a fantasy that’s become a recurring daydream for him. He pictures a vast open area, somewhere out in the country. Like a huge spread of farmland. Acres and acres of ground and no cars will ever pass over it. There are also no objects of any kind that she could run into or trip over. Best of all, the surface is made of foamy material, so even if she does trip and fall, she’ll have a harmless landing. He watches as she gets to the end of a block before him and just barely stops herself before stepping into the street. He thinks about that farmland with the foam ground. If only.
They’re at the park. He sighs in relief. And he thinks about that safe time they’ll have after, when she naps. If she just survives the walk back home.
She’s 17. It’s a Thursday evening in early December. She’s in her room, in bed, with the lights off and her AirPods on. She’s been in there, like that, since 3:30, when he brought her home from the mental health facility 20 miles away. She’s in a partial hospitalization program there, being treated for severe depressive disorder, among other afflictions. She goes from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon each weekday.
He knows she should be doing schoolwork, which she does independently, and remotely, now. An education liaison at the facility has been working with her and her high school teachers, to try and keep her on track with her studies, so she can graduate in June. It’s an uphill struggle. He knows she hasn’t done anything for school since she got home, probably hasn’t even logged in to see what assignments she needs to do to catch up. He starts to go in there to say something to her about it. But then he remembers the email he got from the main facility counselor, that he saw when he looked at his iPhone after he got her home from there. “She had an especially tough day here today. I can provide details later but just wanted to mention it for now.” Probably not the best day to nag her about homework.
He thinks about calling his ex-wife, her mom. They’re supposed to tell each other if something especially concerning happens with their daughter on their respective days with her. His ex would want to know that the counselor said their daughter had a bad day at the clinic. He starts to call her, but then puts his phone down, promising himself he’ll do that later. He feels guilty about putting the call off, because they’re supposed to be cooperatively co-parenting post-divorce. At the weekly family counseling sessions they have at the clinic, he’s promised to be a good team player in that way (a better team player than he was during the marriage). But those calls are always such a strain on him.
Earlier, a little after 6:00, he knocked on his daughter’s door to ask her if she’d be having dinner with him. She listlessly said, “Yes, ok.” But when he went back and told her the pasta with pesto sauce and salad was ready, she said she wasn’t hungry yet.
“Just leave everything out and I’ll come get some later.”
He knew she probably wouldn’t, so wrapped up what was left and put it in the fridge, after eating by himself. He didn’t put any Newman’s Own balsamic vinaigrette dressing directly on the salad, though, only squeezed some into his own bowl, not wanting to let the lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes get soggy from the liquid, in case she did come out and eat later.
By 7:00 he’s ready for his evening drink of Jim Beam and water. He figures he’ll sit in the living room and sip that while catching up on the news via Erin Burnett Out Front on CNN. He fishes his keys out of his pocket and heads to his bedroom. To get to the bottle of bourbon, he has to unlock it from the little safe in his room. Per the instructions on the safety plan that was made for her at the mental health facility, the written agreement which he, his ex and she all signed, both parents have to keep all alcohol locked up in their respective houses. Along with all medications and “sharps,” or sharp objects. He’d had to go into the locked box earlier to get the serrated steak knife he used to chop the cucumbers and tomatoes for the salad. Part of him thinks this strategy is silly. He sometimes shakes his head and sighs when looking at the scissors, knives, his shaver and spare razor blades, the bottles of Advil and Hydrogen Peroxide, etc. in addition to her daily medications she takes for depression and anxiety and attention deficit disorder, in the box. He knows that if she gets determined to kill herself, she could just shatter a drinking glass and use the sharp edges to cut herself open. He keeps thinking he should recycle those glasses and replace them with plastic cups but hasn’t gotten around to that yet. Anyway, she could also hang herself in her room. Or flee from the house and commit suicide somewhere else. But he understands about removing objects that could become means. And he definitely sees the need to lock up his whiskey, after the alarming things the counselor at the facility drew out of her, about how much she’d been drinking in private in recent months. So, he adheres to the safety plan. He pours his Jim Beam and water on the rocks in the kitchen, then returns the bottle of liquor to the safe and locks it up.
He’s not paying much attention to the news. Burnett and her guests are saying all the same old things about COVID, the partisan gridlock in congress, and what Christmas will feel like this year. He goes to his desktop computer in the room that serves as a study, fires up the machine and looks at old pictures from when he still had a digital camera separate from his smartphone. He finds one of her playing with another kid at the local park, from when she was three. He takes a sip of bourbon and water and simultaneously smiles and produces a tear. He remembers how willful she was then, how she refused to ride to the park in a stroller. And how he always worried that she’d step out into the street at an intersection and get hit by an oncoming car. He reflects on that and wonders if all his anxiety about her getting hurt afflicted her and is part of why she’s pathologically anxious now. We fuck up our kids no matter how hard we try to do right for them, he thinks, and walks away from the computer after logging out.
Heading back to the living room, he thinks, how did my “moving girl” 3-year-old turn into a 17-year-old who sometimes never leaves her bed for whole days? He partly thinks there’s a thousand different reasons for that, partly thinks there’s no reason at all, it’s just something that happened in her organically and can’t be explained.
Erin Burnett’s show is still on when he gets back to the living room. But he still doesn’t focus on it. Instead, he indulges in a daydream he has a lot lately. In the vision, his daughter’s in her late 20s. She’s a professional psychologist who works with troubled teenagers. She helps kids work through the same problems she had when she was their age: severe depression, acute anxiety, substance abuse, estrangement from their families, an inability to cope with the demands of high school due to all of the above. He loves that vision. She was always so empathetic, before her own problems got so big that she didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to help anybody else. But when he’s asked her if she thinks she’ll want to become a counselor later in life, she’s just shrugged. She’s talked of trying to get into modeling – people have always stopped her in the street and in stores and restaurants to admire her striking blue eyes – and has also said she wants to buy a van and just roam around in it. Later, he’ll lull himself to sleep by cozily imagining her driving around in that van, content and safe from harm.
