Unseen Children
Penny pats the trail marker on the other side of the stream. “Only a mile to the cave,” she calls to the kids. “No laggards!”
Tom doesn’t turn around, the turbid water threshed by the rain, the stepping stones slick. Through his earbuds he can hear the kids behind him: their shoes sloshing through the lochs of muck, the quick wince of a twig against a rain jacket, a water bottle gasping after parting from lips. All generated by the service.
The service allows children of any age. Tom and Penny picked a boy of seventeen and a girl of fifteen. Zach and Cadence. With them for six months, though it feels like they had them back in their thirties, when they were trying.
Cadence doesn’t enjoy hiking and thinks the outdoors reeks; she’s complaining now about the scent of mud. Zach is jabbering about the video game he’s shepherding, something about collision detection. The kids are ten feet back or so. Tom doesn’t turn around. He prefers not to see the empty trail.
“Is this a loop hike?” Cadence asks.
“No,” Tom says.
Penny turns to face the kids. She’s all-in. “You’ve done this hike before.”
“Not in the rain,” Cadence says. “My shoes are soaked.”
“Didn’t I say to wear your hiking boots?”
Having children has given Tom retroactive empathy for other parents, but he also regrets the experiences he’s missed. Zach’s brilliant mind has been a wonder to observe. Cadence writes songs and sings so beautifully from behind her closed bedroom door. He would have loved to have been there when those talents first took root. But he isn’t thinking these things now. He is bristling at their negativity.
“My water bottle is empty,” Zach says.
“The water in mine tastes like soap,” Cadence says.
“Stop!” Penny stretches the word to three syllables, her patience exhausted after an hour of endless complaints.
“Look! An owl!” Tom says, not bothering to point.
Cadence makes a noise he hopes is astonishment, the natural world finally making a positive impression on her. Zach rattles off a fact about the hunting prowess of owls. Penny gives Tom the same scowl he received the last time he lied to the children. Despite the distraction, fresh complaints return.
“C’mon, guys,” Tom says, almost turning around. “Stop acting like you’re five. You’re being no fun.”
“If you don’t want us around, you shouldn’t have had us,” Cadence says. “We had nothing to do with being born.” She means this literally; the children are ignorant of the electronic birds and bees behind their existence.
“Fine,” Tom says. “Complain all you want. Be miserable in nature. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not going to stress about it.”
“Hmm. Character development,” Cadence says. She and Zach—and Penny, especially—laugh.
“How about Twenty Questions? I Spy?” Penny says.
“The Dad Test,” Zach says. “Math, geography, or English?”
“English,” Tom says.
Cadence imitates the sound of a buzzer. “Just warming up.”
“Pellucid,” Zach says.
“Clear,” Tom says.
“Translucently clear. Saccade.”
“Something about the way your eyes move when you read.”
“We’ll let you have it,” Cadence says.
“Scurf.”
“No clue.”
“Snaffle.”
“Pass.”
“Snuffle.”
“Real words.”
“These are real words,” Zach says.
“And you call yourself a teacher,” Cadence says, which is only half as annoying as her buzzer imitation.
Zach continues to lob words. “Bugbear. Recherché. Passel.”
“Done playing,” Tom says.
“Leave your dad alone,” Penny tells the kids.
After another quarter mile, they cross the stream again on a foot bridge and enter the sandstone cave in the canyon wall. The cave isn’t large, but it holds a generous history as a hideout for stagecoach robbers and horse thieves. Tom’s father told him he carved his and his mother’s initials into the stone, but Tom’s never been able to find it, and he doesn’t look now. Sheltered from the rain, they take out their lunches. The kids say they’re not hungry and go exploring down by the stream. Tom gives them a minute before turning around. When he does, he sees Penny taking a bite of her crushed snack bar. Her graying hair is pressed against her forehead below her blue hood, her glasses both wet and fogged. He wishes the weather were better—and a dozen other parameters in his life over which he has no influence. Moments like this, with just the two of them present, replace the illusion of parenthood with a tension that isn’t loss, isn’t yearning, but some uncomfortable combination of both.
A burst of dark wet wind scours the cave. The drip of rain from the top lip of the cave turns into a waterfall, washing clumps of soil and moss to the cave floor. The stream fills in a moment, splashing against the bottom of the bridge as Penny crosses it shouting the children’s names.
Tom goes after her. He hears the stones clunking against one another in the rushing water. Penny stumbles into the stream. He tries to pull her out, but she shakes him off and continues along the rocky bank, yelling for the kids, slipping back into the muddy flood that rises from her knees to her waist in a moment. He goes in after her.
“Daddy!”
Tom freezes. He hears the children, then sees them carried downstream toward where he and Penny stand. Penny captures Cadence. Tom manages to grab Zach by his yellow raincoat, though both kids are so much smaller and younger. And then there’s another child who shouldn’t be there, and Tom manages to grab him or her, too. He gathers the pair in his arms even as he stumbles backwards in the swift flow of water and debris. Zach is coughing hotly against his ear. The other kid is bawling. They flinch in his arms as thunder grumbles. He falls, for a moment, onto his back. He grips them more tightly. He can see Penny clutching Cadence and she sees him holding Zach and whoever else this is, and Penny is smiling with gratitude.
Two men come sliding down the cut bank. Tom doesn’t want to accept that these are fathers who foolishly allowed their children to play in a stream during a rainstorm. Not until the children in his grasp pull away from him and reach for their father can Tom bear to release his hold on their little bodies, their short legs, their soaked shoes that he can’t help but pinch hard as they leave his grasp. It is humiliating to accept one of the father’s hands and allow himself to be helped up from the roiling water to where Penny lies, weeping.
After the countless thank yous, after they’re alone—earbuds long since washed away, his phone cracked, hers lost, his knees sore and exposed through his pants, her wrist possibly sprained—they trudge several miles back to the car, both soaked and shivering. He starts the engine and turns up the heat, but can’t yet leave Zach and Cadence behind.
“A bugbear is a pet hate,” he says to the rearview mirror. “Recherché is something rare, I think. And a passel is a large group of something.”
Penny looks at him, just a glance, then turns back but stops herself. She looks away.
“You didn’t think I’d know, did you?” he says.
Tom doesn’t want to return home, where he won’t hear Zach and Cadence walking around in their rooms, talking with friends, the floorboards creaking. He will no longer hear music leaking from their headphones as he drives them to school. He imagines buying new sets of earbuds, smooth little embryonic Zachs and Cadences sitting in a charging case. Perhaps next time they can make them older, in their late twenties, living out of state with successful careers. But he knows he won’t be able to convince Penny to try this again. She’s done playing, pretending, hallucinating.
At home, the garage door rattles shut behind them.
“Imagine if we hadn’t been there to save those—”
“No,” Penny says. “Don’t ever imagine that.”
She steps from the car, then throws her wet clothes into the dryer on her way into the house, the wrist of her left hand held closely to her body, bruises ripening across her thighs. He stays in the car and imagines the forbidden anyway: the sorrow and the loss, the blame and the guilt. How the lives of those three children might have been abbreviated had he and Penny not been there.
There was one morning in the car, months ago, when, exasperated by Zach and Cadence’s fighting, he’d taken out his earbuds to give himself five minutes of silence. When he put them back in again, the kids were wailing hysterically, asking why he’d abandoned them. It put an almighty dread in him.
He turns. No one has ever sat in the car’s backseat. He moves to the back, his body stiff, his knees aching. He lies down and listens intently for any sound of anguish. He hears the tumble of the dryer and then its buzz, and continues lying there, stroking the plump velveteen fabric of the seats until the machine buzzes again.
Franz Jørgen Neumann’s stories have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and Water~Stone Review. His published work can be read at: www.storiesandnovels.com.