The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [116]
It is problematic to father alone. By this I do not mean without a wife. That can actually be simpler, finer. A single authority, a clear chain of command. None of the agonies of partnered power, although I’m confident that Claire will soon join me here at the hut. Instead I mean it is difficult to father without an actual child. How exactly does one father when no child is to be found, and yet the father has not finished his work, has fatherish urges he wishes still to discharge, since he did not do so enough when he had the child on hand? It is a central question.
Now that Esther has returned to me, my fatherhood will be evident to her in even the small touches, and not a word will have to escape my mouth. Esther will come to enjoy the woods behind her old house, find the resources she needs, perhaps one day consider this hut her home. She’d never been allowed at our hut before, couldn’t even know about it. Now it is hers. She will appreciate the steps I have taken to ensure her comfort.
We need to get her well first, that’s all. This is what I do not, cannot tell her. I know what words do, and I won’t subject her to our fatal language. We need to fix her up and get her back on her feet.
Newcomers to muteness are not always pleased. I know this firsthand.
On the cot I have forced open Esther’s eyes, stared into them. Her forehead is not just cold to the touch. Cold is not the word. The skin of her arms is slack. Her lips vanish into her face. They are paler than her cheeks.
I will admit that there were days when I first had Esther back in the hut, only a few weeks ago, leaving mugs of soup on the stone post for her, putting bread, dusted with salt, near her sleeping face, when I could look at her for the wrong number of minutes, an extended scrutiny that wore down my joy and left me unsure of who it was I had brought home.
It was marginally possible I’d rescued, instead of Esther, a stranger with a different name.
The hair was not really the hair of Esther. It was flat, brown, indoor hair, the kind more often found hidden beneath a person’s clothing. Under this girl’s tongue I felt the tough, dead skin. LeBov’s Mark. We all had it. A tongue fallen too long into stillness, hardening now in the mouth like a bone.
And Esther’s body? I did not have pictures to compare this girl to, but I shouldn’t have needed them. A picture in the wallet is for others, for boasting, not for the goddamn father himself, who has a picture of his children burned eternally into his mind, correct? Was she shorter than I remembered? Something was wrong. When I recalled Esther, it was now with a smeared face. Where was the smell I could not even describe to you? Life among the worded children had rubbed my daughter in the scent of too many strangers. It gave offense. It did not reach deep enough inside me to trigger my good side. I wanted a sharper dose of recognition. I worried that my paternal instincts would not ignite as long as I suffered this doubt.
While waiting in the blind beneath the ledge for Esther to be released, I recalled the four-year-old perfectionist who flew into rages, the eight-year-old who’d taken modesty to such extremes that she wore a robe over her clothes, the Esther new to her teens who was so disturbingly pretty that her mother and I fell silent when we saw her.
How could a girl so striking tolerate the wretched people her parents had become?
Oh, of course. She couldn’t.
While waiting in the blind for Esther’s release, what I failed to picture was a gray-faced Esther, as if prepped for entombment, an Esther who was recumbent and dry-lipped with iced-over eyes. I had not planned for such a helpless body, erased of the Esther I knew, much like her own mother when the quarantine was announced. The illness had rendered Esther anonymous, and I found it better not to look too closely.
Still I tended to her. I boiled