The World Is Ahead of You

The baby in his arms was falling asleep. Earlier, the small dark eyes never left him, as if the girl held him more than he held her with only a look that sent a blade of guilt through his chest and made his eyes burn without tears. He closed his eyes and, for a moment, he tried to put himself back in the car on the street. A tipped-over cart on the sidewalk. Puddles in the road. Windows boarded up and dusty. He could’ve stopped himself from getting out, he could’ve driven away from here—but it was too late now.
“She’s asleep,” Scott said when his daughter Samantha came back into the living room and sat beside him on the couch.
“She likes you,” Sam whispered, and then, to her own daughter, said, “You’re comfortable, aren’t ya?”
Scott’s arms locked up and his neck stiffened. Sam was leaning too close to him. He smelled the fruity shampoo of her hair. The dyed part of it, a fiery orange strand, warmed his shoulder like a candle. If he could, he would’ve snuffed it out, snipped the hair right off, and thrown it away. He looked at the baby again and imagined orange strands weeding through the black, thin patch of hair.
“She’s beautiful,” he said, and he meant it until he saw the tattoo of vines and fronds crawling up Sam’s arm. Was it there the last time he saw her? The tree branch across her shoulder had faded so much it seemed to falter like the branches swinging in the wind outside. For the first time in his life, he realized his daughter was aging, she was a woman, a parent, and would she, like him, disown her child one day?
“She does this thing with her eyebrows when she sleeps,” Sam said. “They kinda wiggle.” She laughed and brushed the dyed strand of her hair. “I think she’s dreaming then.”
“Babies don’t dream. They’re too young.”
“How would you know?”
Because I’ve already raised one, he almost replied, but stopped himself. It would only cause a fight. Did you? she’d say, never hesitant to question. He remembered how she used to draw on herself. Her teachers would call home with concerns—her defiance outweighed her intelligence. She’d come home from school with her arms and legs covered in flowers, plants, trees, and birds, refusing to wash off her art.
“You need to a shower before dinner,” he’d warn her.
“Or else what?” she’d say.
He never followed up a threat, never hammered down a nail of fear, a stake of respect. He saw the risk and dare in her early on. Once, he was yelling her name through a dark dank culvert—his voice reverberating, the splashes of her footsteps on the other side of the long tunnel—where she was hiding from him after he had locked her in the bathroom until she would wash off the tree roots drawn around her lips and eyes. It was not in him to be that kind of father, one of hard discipline and strict authority, and he never wanted it in him either, and to pretend to have it only made a hollow space in his chest, a gap she could pass through without his guide, without his help and his love.
“How would you?” he asked back, the question playful, without warning.
She laughed with him, landed a soft punch on his upper arm. He used to do the same to her after a piano recital, when she would shake her head at any compliment and say she could’ve played better, but she was always brilliant, and she would go on to great things, he had believed. He knew this just from her walk across the stage, just from her pure poise, and when the first notes sounded, he would sometimes close his eyes and see her hands on the keys, nearly in tears by the time he opened them and found her on stage again.
His eyes traveled across the living room. Ugly wires hung below the television. The recliner had duct tape over a tear and the coffee table was covered in scratches and water stains. He imagined her and Brody finding the furniture on the street, the two of them angling the couch through the door of the apartment, happy to have someone else’s junk. This was not the kind of life he had envisioned for her whenever she played. He hadn’t seen her in so long that he didn’t even know what they did for money aside from Brody’s work as a mechanic in town. She refused recitals the more and more she saw Brody, and he first blamed the young man for his daughter’s loss of direction.
There was enough space on one side of the room for a piano. He could hear her playing Chopin and Debussy there in the room, her orange hair hidden on the other side, and he had the idea of surprising her one day with a new black piano for her and her daughter.
“Have you talked to Mom at all?” Sam said.
He then saw his ex-wife in their old living room. She might be on the couch, reading a book, looking up at the piano in the corner, or maybe she was preparing for an open house she had to host. He had always feared she was the one closer to Sam because of the piano. When Sam was little, she’d sit beside her mother on the bench and follow along to a tune, and he’d clap and ask them to play another song. It had seemed then he was somehow on the outside of something between Sam and his wife, and the warmth of love that flooded him was soon closed by a deep grip of yearning he could not reopen with his daughter.
“She doesn’t know I’m here,” he said.
“She comes by a lot,” Sam said, and then, whispering to her child again, “Thanks to you.” He looked at her and he found the dark eyes and the high cheeks of his image in hers. “She’s always been around, I guess, but she’s more involved now, you know.”
He said yes, but he didn’t know. How could he? The line between him and his family had been cut ever since he locked Sam out of the house one night. She was seventeen at the time. She’d been gone for almost two days with Brody again, who was older than her and out of school. She hadn’t touched the piano in months, her only sounds in the house were hurried steps out the door, shouts down the hall. He told her if she didn’t want to live in his house she could find another place.
And she would, his wife had warned him. “You’re pushing her out,” Rhonda had said. He remembered her packing a bag of clothes on their bed. He took her arms and held her and promised Sam would be back soon, that there was no need to leave, begging her to wait. They were old when Sam was born, and they had had long talks about what it meant to bring someone into life, if they could still do it at their age, and they agreed their age didn’t matter, that what mattered most was raising someone who could find a good place in the world, and he feared then, as Rhonda was packing her bag, that they were going to lose what world they had together.
“I can’t,” Rhonda had said. “Not like this.”
He had found himself alone. In fact, thinking of it now, he considered it the entrance into a new part of his life, one where his only company was the television or his phone, severed from Rhonda and Sam. It had never occurred to him how his family would go on to separate worlds. He had stepped into his daughter’s world and away from his own the moment he was out of the car and shaking his head at the boarded-up house across the street. She was living here, and he felt the gap in his chest freeze, sharp icicles inching down him, piercing his insides. Was it all because of him? He had pushed her into this world, and he was now alone in his, where he spent nights, sometimes weeks without speaking to anyone outside of the office.
His arms tightened as he pulled his granddaughter closer to him, her tiny face just below his heart. He hoped he could see her eyes one more time. He felt so much possibility, so much future and time was within his arms right now, and he worried if there was enough for him, too.
“The world is ahead of you,” he said to her.
The softness of his voice settled him for only a moment. He let the words drop and drip with a slow, steady rhythm, the same way the rain outside had softened to a sleepy lull. He let the words trickle down the gap in his chest. His eyes were burning again, but with tears now, held back and hidden.
“Sure is,” Sam said.
Then the child made a noise, slightly coughing, her face contorted. He wanted to keep her in his arms—he hadn’t held a baby in so long—but he was soon handing her over and his daughter was shushing her back to sleep. He looked at them together, and he thought it would’ve been a nice picture.
“You got her,” he said.
“I got her.”
“This has been nice,” he said, checking his phone for the time.
“You’re Grandpa now,” she said.
“I’m Grandpa.”
Sam carried the baby to the door and down the hall, following her father out to the porch. It had stopped raining and the winds had died down. He paused on the steps and heard the cars hissing on the wet road in the distance. No other sound came out of the gloom around him. It was as if the baby had silenced everything now that the storm had passed.
“I’ll see you,” he said. His voice sounded uncertain, like he asked a question, and he realized he was afraid of the answer until she nodded.
“See you,” she said, then shut the door.
When he walked to the street, there was such a stillness in the gray afternoon that he paused again before getting into his car. Some sunlight was trying to break through the overcast. It lit up the traveling clouds. He watched the clouds fill with a heavy light and hang there, over the street and the houses, glowing like silver lanterns. The warmth of the light coursed through him, washing the cold gap in his chest, and he knew now he’d be back again to see her.