The Marsh King's Daughter(11)
Stephen’s eyes narrow. I can’t tell if he knows I’m not being entirely honest. I’m not sure it would make a difference if he did.
At last he shrugs. “Call me,” he says wearily. The window goes up.
The yard light kicks on as Stephen backs into the turnaround and starts down the driveway. Iris cranes her neck to watch out the back window. I lift my hand. Iris returns my wave. Stephen does not.
I stand in the yard until the Cherokee’s taillights fade into the distance, then walk back to the house and sit down on the porch steps. The night feels empty, cold, and suddenly I realize that in the six years since I got married, I’ve never spent the night at my house by myself. A lump forms in my throat. I swallow it down. I have no right to self-pity. I did this to myself. I just lost my family, and it’s my fault.
I know how this works. I’ve been down this road before, after my mother sank into a depression so deep that she wouldn’t come out of her room for days and sometimes weeks at a time and my grandparents sued her for custody of me. If Stephen doesn’t come back, if he decides my sin of omission is too big to forgive and he wants a divorce, I’ll never see my girls again. Stand me and my dysfunctional childhood and idiosyncrasies and quirks alongside Stephen’s one-hundred-percent normal middle-class upbringing and conventional family values and there’s no way I’ll measure up. I have so many strikes against me, I may as well not go to bat. There’s not a judge on Earth who’d decide in my favor. Even I wouldn’t award myself custody.
Rambo plops down beside me and puts his head in my lap. I gather him in my arms and bury my face in his fur. I think about all of the years and all of the chances I had to come clean about who I am. In hindsight, I think I’d convinced myself that if I didn’t say my father’s name, I could pretend he didn’t exist. But he does. And now, in my heart, I realize I always knew that one day, there’d be an accounting.
Rambo whines and pulls away. I let him go off into the night and stand up and go inside the house to get ready. There’s only one way to fix this. One way to get my family back. I have to capture my father. It’s the only way to prove to Stephen that nothing and no one is more important to me than my family.
5
THE CABIN
A long time passed after the Marsh King dragged the terrified princess beneath the slime. At last the stork saw a green stalk shooting up out of the deep, marshy ground. As it reached the surface of the marsh, a leaf spread out, and unfolded itself broader and broader, and close to it came forth a bud.
One morning when the stork was flying over, he saw that the power of the sun’s rays had caused the bud to open, and in the cup of the flower lay a charming child—a little maiden, looking as if she had just come out of a bath.
“The wife of the Viking has no children, and how often she has wished for a little one,” the stork thought. “People always say the stork brings the babies; I will do so in earnest this time.”
The stork lifted the little girl out of the flower-cup and flew to the castle. He picked a hole with his beak in the bladder skin covering the window, and laid the beautiful child in the bosom of the Viking’s wife.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
I had no idea when I was growing up that there was anything wrong with my family. Children usually don’t. Whatever their situation, that’s what’s normal to them. Daughters of abusers fall in with abusive men as adults because that’s what they’re used to. It feels familiar. Natural. Even if they don’t like the circumstances in which they were brought up.
But I loved my life in the marsh, and I was devastated when it all fell apart. I was the reason everything fell apart, of course, but I didn’t fully understand the role I played in that until much later. And if I had known then what I do now, things would have been very different. I wouldn’t have adored my father. I would have been much more understanding of my mother. I suspect, though, that I still would have loved hunting and fishing.
The papers called my father The Marsh King after the ogre in the fairy tale. I understand why they gave him that name, as anyone who’s familiar with the fairy tale will as well. But my father was no monster. I want to make that absolutely clear. I realize that much of what he said and did was wrong. But at the end of the day, he was only doing the best he could with what he had, same as any other parent. And he never abused me, at least not in a sexual way, which is what a lot of people assume.
I also understand why the papers called our place a farmhouse. It looks like an old farmhouse in the pictures: two stories, weathered clapboard siding, double-hung casement windows so crusted with dirt that it was impossible to see in or out, wood-shingled roof. The outbuildings contribute to the illusion—a three-sided slab-wood utility shed, a woodshed, an outhouse.
We called our place the cabin. I can’t tell you who built our cabin, or when, or why, but I can guarantee it wasn’t farmers. The cabin sits on a narrow, densely forested ridge of maple and beech and alder that juts out of the marsh like an overweight woman lying on her side: one small hump for her head, a slightly bigger hump for her shoulders, a third for her massive hips and thighs. Our ridge was part of the Tahquamenon River basin, 129 square miles of wetland that drain into the Tahquamenon River, though I didn’t learn that until later. The Ojibwa call the river Adikamegong-ziibi, “river where the whitefish are found,” but all we caught were muskies, walleye, perch, and pike.