“Abby!”
Abby ignored her father. The last thing she wanted to do was talk to him. It was time for her to act, to keep walking, to move. Time to make her own decisions rather than letting others dictate her life to her. The time for talking was long gone.
“Abby, wait!”
Without looking back, she could see her father: limp, shuffle, stab the cane into the crusty snow; limp, shuffle, stab the cane; limp, shuffle, stab. Abby was absolutely disgusted with the whole limp, shuffle, stab thing. Why couldn’t he be like all her friends’ dads, capable of walking unaided for more than five feet without falling flat on his face? A skiing injury from his college days that broke his hip and gave him a lifelong limp. Whoever heard of such a stupid thing? She kept walking, not turning to look back, focusing on walking forward, one frozen step at a time.
“Abby, please.”
He was now close enough so that she could hear his huffing and puffing. Abby gave in. She stopped and hitched the knapsack farther up her back. She turned, not so much to hear what he had to say, but just to get it over with so she could get going again. He was bent over with one hand on his knee, the other holding his cane above his head with index finger extended, giving her the ‘could you please wait a moment’ signal while he caught his breath. Nonverbal communication. As much as Abby enjoyed communicating with words through poetry, there was something just as poetic in communicating with physical expressions. Another form of nonverbal communication involving an extended finger popped into Abby’s mind, but her father definitely would not think it appropriate if she exercised that adult prerogative. Though, it would have conveyed the exact emotion she felt at that moment.
Her father straightened up. He maneuvered around a patch of ice, wincing as he swiveled his hip. “Where…do you think…you’re going?” he said between breaths.
Abby shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She slipped her gloved thumbs under the canvas straps of the Army knapsack and tugged at them, holding to them for security. She stared at her father.
“Come back to the house.” His chest heaved. “Please.” Another heave, his hand brought to his chest, another gasp for breath. “We’ll talk.”
“Talk?” Abby cocked her head to one side. She hitched the backpack again. “You told me that when I turned sixteen you would take me to see my mother’s grave. That’s what you said. We’ve already talked about this.”
Abby surveyed the neighborhood. Houses on either side of the street, some with smoke rising from the chimneys, others with idling cars in their driveways emitting exhaust out of their tailpipes, stood as silent witnesses to the drama unfolding in the street. Although she could not see it through the trees, she felt the black silhouette of Wachusett Mountain looming in the distance a couple miles to the west. Barren branches held snow in outstretched arms above her. The road was covered in patches of snow and ice and sand. This was her neighborhood. She was connected to this place. What does that have to do with right now? Abby wondered. Connected? To what? What does that mean? She didn’t know, yet she could not shake it. Everything and everyone around her was connected somehow by a unifying thread, not just by being in the same neighborhood or something as superficial as that, but by something deeper. This is crazy, Abby thought. She was losing focus, getting distracted by silly thoughts running through her mind. Focus, Abby. Focus!
She looked directly at her father. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Planning for it.” Abby paused for effect. Then: “I’ve written poems about this very day.” She gripped the stiff straps that held the weight on her back. “Do you have any idea how many times—?”
Abby turned away. She had to. Her emotions had ambushed her. She tried shrugging them off, but they surrounded her, attacking from all sides. Frustration. Sadness. Abandonment. Betrayal. One after the other they assaulted her. The hardest one to shake, the one she had not expected at all, was the sense of loss when she told her father how long she’d been waiting for this day. It had been too long. Years. And now the years were coming back at her, pointing their accusing fingers at her, blaming her for not going to Albany sooner, for not pushing it with her father more often, for not doing everything she could to convince her father to take her to see her mother’s grave.
This was all Abby’s fault. Not her father’s. Not her mother’s. It was no one else’s but hers.
“Abby?”
She focused on the breath vapors that swirled about her head, lasting only a moment, and then vanishing. Like so much of her life—here for an instant, then gone. But not truly gone. Just…invisible—still there, swirling all around her.
“Abby.” Her father stepped toward her. “I want to go with you.”
She looked at him, surprised and confused. He maneuvered around another ice patch, reached out to her, and opened his mouth to tell her he would go back for the car. She hadn’t noticed it, but now she saw it parked down the road behind her father, idling at the curb. He was about to tell her that they would go together, and they could talk about everything in the car on the way to Albany, and they could set off on this journey together, and that she did not have to go through it alone. Abby smiled and reached for her father’s hand.
He smiled too, extended his hand, and shook his head. “I just can’t take you to your mother’s grave today. I have to—”
Abby evicted the smile from her face. She yanked her hand from his, pivoted, and stormed up the sidewalk, her arms two pendulums marking off each step. The tears tried to break through, but she fought against them. What just happened? Did I just lose my grip on reality for a few seconds? Am I losing it?
Her father called after her. “What are you going to—, Abby! How will you get there?”
“Don’t worry about me,” Abby yelled over her shoulder, wiping her eyes. She was on her own. Fine. She was going to Albany to see her dead mother’s grave, and she was alone. That was perfectly fine with her. Josh would be with her, so technically she wouldn’t be alone, but she’d be alone nonetheless.
What the heck am I doing?
The silhouette startled Abby to a stop. In the front yard of one of the houses across the street, sitting atop a snowbank next to a maple tree, was the black silhouette of a gigantic dog. Abby stood still. There was no reason for her not to continue on her way—she wasn’t afraid of dogs—but she didn’t. Instead, she felt compelled to stay put. The dog sat on its haunches, unmoving. It appeared to be staring at Abby, though she couldn’t be sure because its eyes were lost in the blackness of the silhouette and the shadow of the tree. A cold current ran down Abby’s spine. She felt her feet move toward the animal. She should go to it. She should—
Something clamped onto Abby’s arm, jerking her body backward and spinning her around, frightening her. Through strands of red hair dangling in front of her eyes, the sudden movement knocking the hood from her head, she was face-to-face with her father.
“You can’t do this,” he said through clenched teeth and trembling lips.
Abby pried at the fingers squeezing her arm. “You’re hurting me!”
“You can’t do this.”
Abby narrowed her eyes. “Watch me.” She continued prying at his fingers.
His grip tightened. “I can’t let you do this.”
“I don’t care.” Abby scratched at the fingers. “Let go. I’m going and there’s nothing—”
He shook her arm once. “Are you listening to me?” The change in his voice caused Abby’s fingers to stop their scratching and prying. The anger in his voice from a moment ago had given way to pleading. Tears welled up in his eyes. His throat worked as if digging deep inside for the right words, deep inside the pit of his stomach, digging all the way to hell. “I can’t,” was all that came out. He lowered his head and let go of her arm, dropping his hand to his side.
“Can’t?” Abby rubbed her arm through the sleeve of the parka. “Try won’t.” She ignored the change in her father’s demeanor and decided to cross the road. She stepped off the curb, and as she did she slipped on snow-covered ice. Her arms pin-wheeled in time to catch her balance before the weight on her back pulled her over. She started crossing the road.
“Abby, please….”
Abby stopped in the middle of the road. Her father stood on the sidewalk, leaning heavily on his cane, exhaling heavily, the vapors drifting listlessly above his head.
Standing in the road with hands on hips, staring at her father, a question—the one that had started haunting her—resurfaced in her mind. What did he not want her to see in Albany? Her father obviously did not want her going to her mother’s grave. Which had to mean there was something in Albany, possibly even at the grave site, that he did not want her to see. But that was ridiculous. What could possibly be there that he didn’t want her to discover?
Abby hitched up the knapsack, turned, and set off down the path of her own choosing, more determined than ever to get to Albany.
“Abby…please!” The tone in his voice told her he was resigned to letting her go, told her he now realized he had no choice. His daughter had made up her mind and there was no stopping her. She was going, even if it meant being on her own.
But she was not quite on her own. Neither Abby nor her father noticed the two bullet-sized holes of flame-blue light. Blending in with the shadows of the houses and bushes and trees, sliding from one to the other, the shadow with the blue eyes followed Abby as she set out on the course of her own choosing. Its eyes watched her every move while at the same time scanning its surroundings.
It would be proven over the course of the rest of her life that the choice Abby made on this particular February morning would set her on a path that, in accord with the prophetic sentiments of Abby’s favorite poet, Mr. Frost, would take her into a wood that, indeed, would prove to be lovely, dark, and deep.