My Abandonment

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
Boston · New York · 2009

A
LSO BY
P
ETER
R
OCK

The Unsettling: Stories

The Bewildered

The Ambidextrist

Carnival Wolves

This Is the Place

First edition
Copyright © 2009, 2008 by Peter Rock

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

www.hmhbooks.com

Portions of this work were previously published
in
Tin House,
volume 9, number 3, 2008.

Photograph on title page courtesy of Stephanie Margaret Hinshaw.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rock, Peter, date.
My abandonment / Peter Rock.
p. cm.

1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.
3. Homeless families—Fiction. 4. Survival skills—Fiction.
5. Forest Park (Portland, Or.)—Fiction. 6. Wilderness areas—Northwest,
Pacific—Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS
3568.0327
M
9 2008
813'.54—dc22 2007044412
ISBN
978-0-15-101414-9

Text set in Fournier
Designed by Lydia D'moch

Printed in the United States of America

DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on 100 percent postconsumer waste recycled stock.

While the author was inspired by real events as the starting place for his story,
this is a work of fiction. Caroline and her father, and all other characters,
places, organizations, and events are the products of the author's imagination
or are used fictitiously for verisimilitude, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Ida Akiko Rock

Sometimes you're walking through the woods when a stick leaps into the air and strikes you across the back and shoulders several times, then flies away lost in the underbrush. There's nothing to do but keep walking, you have to be ready for everything and I am as I follow behind Father down out of the trees, around a puddle, to the fence of the salvage yard. It's night.

"Caroline," Father says, holding open a tear in the fence. "You come through here."

He begins to sort and scavenge. He wants rebar, metal to support our roof. I watch the road, the gate and also behind us where we came through. Cars and big trucks rush and rattle past on the highway, the people inside staring straight ahead and thinking about where they are going and what will happen next and probably things they've done before but they're not thinking of or looking at us. There are no houses near the salvage yard. An electrical station humming inside its own fences and then on the other side Fat Cobra Video, which Father says is a snake store but I don't think it is. In the window are pictures of ladies with their shirts off, holding their breasts in their hands.

Now he is pulling out the long thin metal bars, setting the scraps of sheet metal aside. I hold Randy, my toy horse, in one hand. If I set him down it's never for long. Randy and my blue piece of ribbon are always with me.

"You see, Caroline," Father says, "all the work I'm doing here for these people, organizing all these different things. This is how we are paying them back for what we're taking."

"Yes," I say, squinting across the highway to the dark trains in the railyard, the tiny lights of the cars on the bridge over the river.

The rebar and wire are happy to be with us since we will put them to better use and not forget them to rust in a pile. Father bends back the fence so you'd never know we were here. In one hand I carry a roll of wire that will help hold up the roof or which we can bend to a hanging shelf or another secret thing he might make and in my other hand is Randy softly rattling with the things I put inside his hollow body. My finger is over the round hole in his stomach.

"Caroline, don't lag."

"I'm right here," I say.

Father keeps backtracking since it's hard to carry the long pieces of rebar through the trees in the dark. They keep snagging on things, turning him sideways.

"If you look up at the sky," I say, "you can see the spaces between the trees that way and see where to walk."

"Thanks," he says. "Who do you think taught you that?"

At night the air smells less dry, the coolness in the trees. A branch clatters down, becoming a stick. Squirrels up there? An owl? Everything in the darkness reaches out, in its way and at night we wear shoes so it's harder to feel how things are. We go deeper into the forest park, further from the edge where the city leans in. I know where we are. I know the way home and where I would end up if I walked thirty minutes in any direction through the forest. If I hold my breath and let Father walk away I can't even hear his footsteps, even in his shoes. That's how good he is.

Then the air is thick and rotten. Father's hand is on my arm. I hear the click and then his headlamp is bright and round on his forehead. He holds back a tangle of blackberry and I step through and on the ground is a deer with its neck bent back and its eyes missing and blood on its black nose. The light is a five inch white circle sliding across the deer. Its head, its hooves, its tail. The deer is about the size of me, its tan fur smooth, flies bouncing and buzzing. Its stomach is open and some parts are missing.

"That's her liver," Father says, pointing with a stick, sharp black against the light. "Lungs. Heart."

"The dogs did this?" I say. "The smell."

"Hold your breath," Father says. "I doubt it was dogs, or coyotes. Someone might have shot her, or disease, or she could have even fallen down here and broken her neck. Even animals can fall down sometimes."

"I know that," I say.

"Look carefully, Caroline. There's a lesson here. It's better homework than being in school, that's for certain."

Father turns his neck to look at me before I can shut my eyes against the brightness and it blinds me. I hear the switch so I know it's off but still the light is in my eyes and they take a moment to clear and we can walk again.

A little further on Father stops at a good place where it is finally not so steep and sets everything down. He pulls up the ivy around and over it even though almost no one would come here or find or want or be able to carry it.

"There," he says. "We've done it again, Caroline."

We step only on the stones, closer to home. I on every one, Father on every second one. To not beat down the grass. We come around the side and carefully he takes away the branch across the front door and then we sit on the edge of the mattress for a moment before he strikes a match and lights the lamp. The lamp is made out of a glass bottle with fuel in it and a string stuck through into it. Its light shines and deeper back in the cave the gold letters on my encyclopedias shine back. I only have up to L but I haven't read past E. I go into F or G or the future ones when something's mentioned that starts with that letter. My dictionary is there, too. It is a paperback book and smaller.

Inside the ceiling is tall enough that I can stand on my knees but Father has to sit down or crawl. He pulls the branch back across the door and looks at me.

"We're lucky," he says. "We're the lucky ones."

"We are," I say.

"We have to be so careful these days," he says.

"Why?"

"People."

"No one knows where we are," I say.

"If you think that way," Father says, "that's when you get caught. Overconfident."

"No one's ever caught us," I say. "No one could."

"That doesn't mean anything," he says. "You know better than to look to the past, Caroline."

I set Randy on his wooden base with the one metal post the size of a pencil that fits in the hole in his stomach. I turn his white side out so I can look up and check on him in the darkness and he'll be easy to see from the mattress.

The dinner dishes are all dry now and I stack them on their shelves. Father takes off his dark forest pants and mends a rip with a piece of dental floss and a needle. Then he writes down things from the books he's reading in his tiny handwriting in his little book and I do some homework he's given me and I also write on the scrap paper some of this journal and things I've seen and thought. Father, his hand spread out is wider than this sheet of paper, wider than the plates we eat off, his fingertips hanging over. It makes a book look tiny when he holds it.

We brush our teeth and spit in the chamber pot and change out of our clothes and lie down on the mattress. Father stretches his hands over his head so they almost reach the flat stone and the green Coleman stove. Sometimes in his sleep his hands cross and his wrists come together and his bracelets ring softly. They're supposed to help him be stronger. When I tell him I need help to be stronger, he says that I haven't seen all the things or had the problems he's had. He says I'm too young to wear jewelry. He turns over to kiss me, his scratchy cheek.

If a paragraph is a thought, a complete thought, then a sentence is one piece of a thought. Like in addition where one number plus another number equals a bigger number. If you wrote down subtraction you would start with a thought and take enough away that it was no longer complete. You might write backward, or nothing at all, or less than nothing. You wouldn't even think or breathe. A comma, that is a place you breathe, or think, which is how breathing and thinking are the same. They collect, or are places to collect. A semicolon is a strange kind of thinking that I don't understand. It is more than one sentence inside one sentence. It makes more sense to me just to let each sentence be a sentence. Father says both the pieces on either side of a colon should add up to the same thing, even if one side is just a list. Some of the things I need to write about: Randy, the lookouts, bodies, names, Nameless, people when they think they're alone, snow, trampolines, helicopters.

"Wake up," I say. "You were having a dream. Was it the helicopters?"

"Whoa," Father says. "I guess it was a dream."

"I can't see the moon," I say. "It's dark outside tonight."

"Clouds," he says. "Maybe it'll rain tomorrow."

"Was it the helicopters?"

"Oh Caroline," he says. "They swarmed all down over the trees, rattling and tearing at everything. They had loudspeakers and from above they cast the sound of a baby crying, so loud, crying, the edges breaking up."

"Why? This was in your dream?"

"No, this was before. I don't know."

"Why would they do that?" I say.

"Exactly. I don't know. Sleep, Caroline."

In the summer like now we sleep on top of the sleeping bags with only a sheet over us and in the winter we zip the bags together since it's warmer that way. When my body was smaller there was lots of room but now even when it's too warm I cannot get away, our legs touch, our arms. I can't fall asleep and I can't tell if Father is asleep or not. I keep thinking of the deer, dead, lying half a mile away, listening while different animals drag parts of her away. Father does not grow but he is the largest man in the forest park that I have seen, bigger than anyone in the city except very fat men who cannot move like he moves. I am also quick but much more slender and five feet tall, my dark hair long and snarled and my skin white so it can flash in a darkness if I'm not careful.

All at once there's a whining, a snarling and then a snuffling as a snout pushes through the branch across our door. It's the dogs, some of them, racing through our camp, and Father shouts once and bangs a pan with a spoon and they're gone that fast but I know that he's awake.

"I named the head dog Lala," I say.

"If she's such a good friend of yours," he says, "you could tell her that we try to sleep around here at night."

"I was thinking about the deer," I say. "The dead one."

"What about her?"

"Nothing," I say, the bottoms of my feet on his leg. "What is your favorite color?"

"What's yours?"

"Yellow," I say.

"Why?"

"The way it makes me feel. It's bright and not still."

"Exactly. It draws attention. I like green."

"You would," I say, and he laughs and holds me close.

"And what was my mother's favorite color?"

"Yellow. Just like yours."

"So she taught me that, for it to be my favorite."

"Probably," he says. "Kind of, some way. You're very much like her."

"And we have the same name."

"Had," he says. "Yes. Caroline."

"Why did you give me the same name?"

"Because I loved her so much. Now go to sleep; it's the middle of the night, Caroline. I always tell you that."

"I wish I could have met her."

"She wishes that, too," he says. "Good night, yellow."

"Good night, green."

Since I am thirteen I am allowed to get out of bed whenever I wake up. Even before the sun, like now. Father sleeps on his stomach with his face in the pillow and his arms stretched out underneath it, his big hands on the ground. If he sleeps on his back he snores and I have to wake and tell him so he'll turn over in the night since snoring is a sound.

The zipper is cold but the morning is not too cold. I pull on my black jeans and my dark green sweatshirt over my nightshirt and I get Randy off his stand and leave him with his horse's head on my pillow, safe in the bed with Father. I take the chamber pot I used once last night and the water bucket and I slip out not knocking the branch over, the branch that goes across the door when we're not here and sometimes when we're sleeping. In the winter we hang a wool blanket across, inside, to hold in the heat of our bodies.

The bugs are already up in the warm air and I only need my two shirts. Father says now I have to wear an undershirt under my other shirt even if my breasts are almost flat. In the winter I wear sweaters and a dark raincoat. At the men's camp people wear garbage bags with arm and head holes torn out but Father says that is not right. I also in the winter wear tights beneath my jeans. Father wears waffled long underwear all year around. The legs are gray and the top is red. He wears a dark plaid shirt that smells like wool and him, his hair and everything.