In the morning, Stephen James gets up, pulls on a clean shirt from the basket by his bed, gets himself a bowl of cereal, and sits down at his desk. He looks across the rough wood at his bookshelf, illuminated by the morning light from his window. Most of the books on it are dusty, classics that he read in high school and barely remembers, or bestsellers from the bookstore about which he’s heard much talk but which he has never so much as opened. Scattered among these volumes are his favorites, the only books he reads nowadays: a group of the cheapest and trashiest crime thrillers his town’s yard sales have ever had to offer. Most of them, thick and brightly colored, have ripped covers and concave spines from years and years of rereading.
He doesn’t have to be at the bookstore until two, so he pulls one of his thrillers off the shelf, a favorite novel about a serial killer who imitates the murders of fairy tale characters, and idly begins to reread it. After a while, he gets up, washes his cereal bowl, and goes into the bathroom to shave. As he’s staring at himself in the mirror, examining the gray hairs at his temple and wondering how his eyes got so bloodshot, the phone rings.
“Hi, Stephen.” It’s Amanda. She sounds sick, or tired, and Stephen readjusts the phone pressed close to his ear, switches his razor to his other hand, and doesn’t say anything. “Look, I know this is short notice, and probably inconvenient…” she trails off. “Stephen?”
He clears his throat. “Hi.”
“Hi. Listen, can you take Ida this weekend? I have… a business trip, I’m busy, I can’t have her in the house. It’s the nanny’s weekend off, and I thought, well. You haven’t see her in a month-” Four weeks, actually, he doesn’t say. “and I really need you to do this favor for me.”
He thinks about it. It’s Friday morning. Besides work, he doesn’t have plans.
“Stephen, are you listening to me?” she says, louder. He notices that her voice is rough and gravelly, even more so than it was a minute ago, and he wonders if she’s begun to smoke again.
“Amanda, yeah, I’m listening. I can take her.”
“Thanks, Stephen. She’ll get to Boston tomorrow morning. You’ll have to pick her up. Listen, I have to go now, work, but thank you again.” Amanda pauses. “She wants to see you.” Stephen starts to say something, laugh maybe, but Amanda hangs up. He drops his phone on the counter with a sigh and finishes shaving.
. . .
When he gets there, the bookstore is warm and silent. The only sounds in the place are those of the cashier, putzing among the shelves, and two teenage girls, the only customers, extolling the virtues of their favorite YA novels in hushed tones. He greets them politely and, getting the scratched X-Acto knife from the cupboard behind the counter, descends the whitewashed stairs into the basement, which is cold and dry and full of cardboard boxes of books. Every couple seconds the white lightbulb hanging from the concrete ceiling flickers. Stephen sits on the floor, dirt and gravel digging into his thighs through his jeans, and pulls one of the boxes onto his lap. He cuts the tape with the knife, methodically, listening to the squeak and slide of the blade as it slices through the plastic.
Distracted, Stephen watches a spider crawl from wall to wall in the room’s corner, and in his hands, the knife slips, digging into the pad of his left index finger. He sucks in a breath. The blood begins to well up from his skin, making a dark spot on the box. With a sigh, he stands, shoving the box off his lap and onto the floor with a thump. He crosses to the sink set into the windowless basement wall and washes his hands, shaking them dry. When he’s finished unpacking all the books and set them, identical and shiny, on the metal shelves with last week’s orders, he brushes the dirt off his jeans and climbs the stairs, back into the body of the bookstore. He says a soft goodbye to the cashier, who is still invisible among the shelves, and, his work finished for the day, Stephen walks home.
His hometown is small, easily navigable and familiar if not cozy, and his apartment, which is just the same, is only fifteen minutes from the shop. He still has his old car, the one he drove back when they all lived together and he brought Ida to preschool every day, but he barely needs it anymore. His hands are cold, the skin across his knuckles dry in the winter wind. He rubs them together, feeling a scab forming on his index finger, on the spot where he cut himself in the basement. He tucks his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, which is old and soft and brown and something he wore fifteen years ago in college, when he first met Amanda.
When he gets home, his apartment is cold and dark, but he doesn’t bother with the heat or the hallway light, instead pulling on a sweater and flicking on the desk lamp in his office, tapping the bulb twice to make sure it doesn’t flicker. In the harsh fluorescent glow, he looks again at his bookshelf, a scratched old wooden thing from the thrift store, something he’d liked and Amanda had abhorred. In front of his novels are a jumble of photographs, some in frames but most simply propped up against books, as dusty as everything else around them. Pictures of his parents, his grandparents, and one of him and his siblings, the three of them small, tanned children with bruised knees at the beach in California. Someone Stephen does not remember had taken the picture, and in the background his parents are sitting together on the sand, tiny in the distance with their arms around each other and youthful smiles on their faces. There is a similar picture beside it, of him and Amanda and Ida, at Rye Beach their last summer together, the summer that Ida turned three. Stephen bought a shiny black frame for this picture back when it was first taken, but he misjudged its dimensions, and so his shoulder and half of Ida’s arm stick out beyond the edge of the plastic, faded nearly gray in the light from the window.
Stephen opens his laptop. On the screen glares his novel: a block of ugly text, a blank, white expanse of page, and a constantly blinking cursor. He looks at the last word he wrote, three months ago: “and.” He rereads his first sentence out loud: “It was a cold fall morning when the girl disappeared.” He checks the time: it’s early yet. He pictures his two main characters, detectives Fogel and Grusser, the morning the girl was kidnapped, working on some other case, long before the girl’s file ever appeared on their desks. The blank page glares at him still, the blink of the cursor angry with impatience now. He checks his word count, flat black number unchanged now for weeks: 27831. Respectable.
He remembers the day he began to write his novel, three years ago almost exactly, with Amanda in the other room and Ida, sick with a cold, laid down for her afternoon nap. It was a sunny Saturday in their living room, in an apartment on the other side of town that he can no longer afford to rent on his own. Amanda was working, reviewing files for the upcoming week, and he was doing something for the store. It was a calm, still day, and as he heard Ida wake up and begin to cry in her room, he felt that it was time to begin the mythical novel he’d spent much of his adult life looking forward to writing. The story came to him, as he sat there, listening to his wife calm his daughter back to sleep: a girl, kidnapped without a trace, a mother, mysteriously gone, the both of them leaving behind a grieving father, a gentle man, an academic, now alone for life. The two detectives assigned to the girl’s case he created later, carbon copied them from formulaic late night television and the trashiest of the crime novels on his shelf: a man and a woman, young, independent, perpetually at odds with each other but also incapable of escaping their mutual attraction. Detectives Fogel and Grusser, revolving so intently around each other that sometimes they forget their jobs, forget whose child they’re supposed to be looking for.
He hasn’t been able to write in three months. Work at the store is slow, his social circle has diminished to practical nothingness since the separation, and he hasn’t seen Ida in at least four weeks, since her birthday. He’d flown to Chicago for it, not because Amanda had asked but because he’d been struck by some unfamiliar guilt as he realized that his daughter was six years old and barely knew who he was. At the party, though, he hadn’t known what to say to her. He’d never really known what to do with her, how to entertain her. As a gift he brought her a plastic toy, something one of his coworkers from the bookstore had recommended, but she was too old for it, he realized, as soon as he saw her. He noticed that her hair was getting long, brown like his, eyes like his too, but warmer. He tried to give her a hug, but she backed away and then began to cry, running to her mother and protesting that Daddy’s jacket smelled of cigarettes.
He looks at the document open on his laptop, rereads the final scene. Detectives Fogel and Grusser have identified their primary suspect, a woman, who Fogel believes is the girl’s absent mother. Grusser, who is possessed of a preternaturally good heart and solid belief in the inherent goodness of humankind, refuses to agree with Fogel, but since the girl’s father is too wracked with grief to speak to them, they have come to no conclusions. The two of them are about to enter their primary suspect’s house. They are on the porch, Fogel with her gun out and back pressed to the outside wall, Grusser with his hand raised to knock on the front door. Stephen’s hands are frozen on the keyboard, because he doesn’t know any more than Fogel and Grusser what they will find inside the house. At first, he entertained the possibility that the kidnapped girl might be dead, the detectives’ search in vain, but he discarded it, feeling another sort of unfamiliar guilt steal over him at the idea. On the other hand, if the girl were there, alive, and the detectives rescued her, the novel would be a flop, the case a too-easy fix, and nobody would remember his story. Stephen is at an impasse. He closes his laptop.
With a tug and a squeak, he slides open the right-hand drawer of his desk, and from within it produces a pad of sticky notes. Taking a second glance at his word count, he writes “27831” on the top note, punctuates the number with a solid black period and a single, sharp, underline, peels the note off the pad, and sticks it on the back of his computer. With a sigh, he turns off his desk lamp and wanders into his darkened bedroom. He checks his calendar: tomorrow is his day off and at the beginning of the year, in a fit of optimistic productivity, he scheduled it as a “Writing day!!” With a sigh, he drops his brown leather jacket to his bedroom floor, kicks off his shoes, and climbs into bed. At 9:30 pm, listening to the sounds of the river and rain outside his window, he falls asleep.
The next morning, Stephen picks Ida up at the airport. She’s tired and sullen, carrying a backpack full of clothes and homework and bags under her eyes darker than any six-year-old’s should be. Stephen takes her to his apartment, and makes her a sandwich, which is just about all he can do because he hasn’t cooked a meal for himself, or anyone else, for three years, and then takes her to the coast. In the car, she does a math worksheet, head bent low over her paper, and when he asks her if she wants his help she shakes her head and doesn’t say anything.
The beach is cold and damp. Ida doesn’t take off her shoes to walk in the surf, and so neither does Stephen, although sand gets into his boots and his socks and rubs uncomfortably between his toes. A puppy comes bounding up to Ida along the beach, and she drops cautiously to kneel in the sand, touching the dog’s ears and, tentatively, stroking its back. After a moment, the dog bounces back to its owner, and, standing back up and brushing sand from her knees, Ida cracks a smile for the first time all day. As they walk back to the car, Ida notices that there are worms in the sand right where the waves hit. Clutching her backpack to her chest, she asks Stephen why they live there, where the ground isn’t stable and they’re always being pummeled by water. He doesn’t know, so he doesn’t answer, and the conversation dies.
Later, he stops at the grocery store to buy something for dinner. In the backseat, Ida’s doing French now, trying to pronounce words like “demain” and “papillon.” He doesn’t remember enough French to correct her when she asks if she’s saying “feuille” right, even though he and Amanda both studied the language all through college. When they get back to his apartment, he makes spaghetti and they eat together at his kitchen table, which is mostly covered in books but has a clear space at the end where he usually puts takeout containers and pizza boxes. After dinner, he doesn’t know what to do. It’s begun to rain again outside, and Ida informs him dutifully that she has finished her homework. Stephen doesn’t feel like writing, and so he flicks on the television and they watch cartoons together.
After an episode and a half, she falls asleep on the arm of the couch. Stephen takes his winter quilt out of the closet and drapes it over her, glad that she is already asleep because he doesn’t have a guest room and has not, since agreeing to take Ida for the weekend, given a single thought as to where she could sleep. He stands there by the couch for a minute, feeling that perhaps there was something else a good father should do, before shutting off the light and going to bed himself.
In the morning, when Stephen wakes up, it’s raining again. Ida is sitting on the couch, neatly dressed with her shoes on, reading from one of Stephen’s books, the one about the fairy-tale murderer. “Ida, what’s that?” he says, coming quietly into the living room.
“Nothing,” she says, quickly shutting the book and hiding it behind a pillow.
“Ida, is that one of my books?” he asks. “Did you get that from my shelves?”
“It was on your desk,” she says. Then, timidly: “Are you angry?” Stephen doesn’t feel angry. He knows Ida shouldn’t be reading his books, which are full of murder and gore and rape, but he knows it isn’t her fault that she came across such a book, unhidden, in his apartment.
“No, it’s all right,” he decides as he says, “Just don’t keep reading it.” After a moment, he adds, “And don’t tell your mother.” It’s tiny, the barest curve of the mouth, but at that, Ida smiles.
They have leftover pasta for breakfast. Quietly, Stephen panics. It’s Sunday, it’s still raining, they’re in a tiny town with nothing to do, and Ida doesn’t have to be at the airport until three. He doesn’t know what Ida’s hobbies are, about her friends, her favorite subject at school. Is she bookish, like him, or is she ambitious and independent, like Amanda? “Ida, do you have any more homework?” he asks, washing their plates from breakfast.
“I told you. I finished it.” She sits back down primly on the couch, tiny arms crossed.
“What do you want to do today?” Stephen asks, remembering that the cartoons last night were his idea, and that they put her to sleep.
“I don’t care.” She sits there, back straight, more decorous than he had ever seen such a young child. Was he like this when he was six years old?
He scans the room. “Ida, would you like to play cards? I can teach you the games I used to play when I was a kid.”
She uncrosses her arms. “Okay.”
“Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah.” After a moment of silence in which she fidgets with the edge of her gray skirt, she looks up at him and says, “But only if we play old maid.”
. . .
In the car on the way back to the airport, they sit in silence. He gave Ida the pack of cards, which are creased and soft from near-constant use in college, because she confided, nearly in a whisper, that she didn’t have any at home. In the backseat, she’s organizing them by suit and by number. Halfway to the airport, she says “Dad, can we listen to the radio?” Stephen blinks and turns the radio on wordlessly, feeling an odd difficulty controlling the breath in his chest. He hasn’t been called Dad in three years.
At the airport, father and daughter wait together on a bench, Ida wearing a pass around her neck to signify that she’s a child flying alone. Ida she pulls a notebook out of her backpack and begins to write in it, scribbling at full tilt, almost feverishly. Stephen opens his laptop, and, listening to the scratch of Ida’s pencil, he stares at his novel for a while, tinkering. Nervously, he begins to write, turning detectives Fogel and Grusser away from the suspect’s house, away from discovering whatever’s inside. They’re investigating something in the woods now, tramping about among the trees with their badges in hand.
Ida looks over his shoulder. “What’s that?” she asks. “Are you writing something?”
“Yeah,” Stephen says, closing the window before she can read too much. “It’s a novel.”
“I’m writing a novel too! What’s it about?”
Stephen wants to explain, hasn’t heard Ida this excited since she was a baby, but his throat closes up when he thinks about the little girl in his book. “Nothing. It doesn’t really have a plot yet,” he lies, shutting his laptop completely. “Ida, you’re writing a story? What’s it about?”
She begins to tell him, completely animated, gesturing as she speaks. “It’s about mermaids! They live under this island in the ocean, and they have seals as pets, like dogs…”
Ida stops talking as a woman comes up to them, dressed in a flight attendant’s uniform. “Hi, honey! Are you flying alone?” she says, bending double to face Ida. She turns to Stephen, her 100-watt smile faltering slightly. “Are you her father? She is flying alone, correct?”
“Yes, I am, and she is. This is Ida. She’s flying back to her mother, in Chicago.” He doesn’t look at Ida as he says it, but from the corner of his eye he can see her sitting up a little straighter, zipping her backpack closed, and folding her hands demurely in her lap.
“I see.” says the woman, her penciled eyebrows rising slightly on her smooth, white forehead. “I work for the airline. I’ll be accompanying Ida through security.”
“Of course.” says Stephen. “Are you taking her now?”
“Yes, sir, if you don’t mind.” The woman turns to Ida, her voice rising once more to a sickly sweet pitch. “Say bye now to Daddy, Ida.”
Ida stands up silently, swinging her backpack onto her shoulders. The pack of cards is left sitting on her side of the bench. “Ida, your cards.” Stephen says, feeling something unpleasant in his chest. “You left them.” He holds the blue and white box out to her, carefully.
For a moment, Ida is still, looking at the cards. Then, lightning-fast, she reaches out her tiny hand and grabs the box, slipping it into the pocket of her coat and zipping it up securely. “Thanks.” she says, staring down at her shoes. “Bye, Dad.” And the woman sweeps her away in a clatter of heels and a cloud of disturbed air that smells like plastic and perfume. Stephen gathers his things and turns to walk away, when he hears the squeak of small sneakers on linoleum and feels something warm grab onto his hand.
He looks down in time to see Ida’s fist, tiny and soft, wrapped around his index finger, the way she used to hold his hand when she was a baby. Then, she’s gone again, quickly disappearing into the rushing crowd.
Stephen drives home with the radio on, not really listening. When he gets to his apartment, he climbs the stairs, takes his laptop out of his bag, and, not even bothering to take off his jacket, sits with it on the couch. He deletes what he wrote at the airport, and then deletes the whole last chapter. He deletes the scene where the detectives discover the girl’s mother has abandoned her. He deletes the scene where detectives Fogel and Grusser first receive the little girl’s case, and he deletes the scene where they identify their primary suspect, and he deletes the scene where the father, a good man, first discovers that his brown-haired daughter has disappeared from her bed. Piece by piece, he deletes the whole thing, and then he closes his computer. The green sticky note, 27831, sits there, adhesive half peeled off already, somehow mocking. He removes it and tears it in half, throwing it away on his way out of his apartment.
He walks along the river, watching the seagulls circle overhead and the ducks, feathers already growing in thick for winter, paddling around each other on the water. He throws a stone and watches the ripples, smaller and smaller until they disappear, just as they reach him at the shore. There’s a bench nearby and he sits on it until, as night falls, the birds settle into the trees and the cold air begins to crawl inside his jacket. As he walks home, he imagines that he can still feel the warmth of Ida’s grip on his finger, her hand over the place where he cut himself in the bookshop basement. He focuses on it all the way back to his apartment and up the stairs. He thinks about it as he pulls out a sheet of printer paper from his desk, and sharpens an old pencil, and he keeps thinking about it as he begins to write, telling this time the story of a not-so-good man, maybe a better storyteller than he is a father, who nevertheless doesn’t let his daughter disappear.