The Nobody People

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When Emmeline was a baby and Avi had her with him at the park or the food co-op, people remarked on how she never cried. Avi assured them that when he got her home, all hell broke loose. It was a thing to say to other parents that said yes, I am in the parenting trenches like you, fighting to survive. But it wasn’t true. Even at home she was preternaturally calm.
She used to follow Avi from room to room. She climbed the big red chair in the attic as he read through editor’s notes. She played on the kitchen floor while he made dinner. One day, when she was three, Avi put water on to boil and turned away from the stove to wash dishes. Emmeline snuck behind him and pulled the pot of boiling water off the stovetop, spilling it down her arm. Avi ran around the kitchen like a cartoon character with his ass on fire. Emmeline sat in a puff of steam as if she were floating on a cloud. Avi snatched her up off the floor and plunged her arm into the cold water in the sink, casting the scalded flesh of her forearm into the whorls and dunes it’s been set in since. Emmeline looked at the scarred arm quizzically, observant.
Days later, when Kay could register anything other than fury at Avi for letting it happen, she worried that Emmeline might be one of those kids who didn’t feel pain, who had to be trained to understand the dangers of heat and sharp edges in the abstract. Avi countered with a list of Emmeline’s childhood injuries and their appropriate squeals and crying jags. While they argued, Emmeline sat on the couch, gazing through the cling wrap the doctors had put over the burn at the new alien landscape of her skin.
Avi often thinks about Emmeline, sitting with the steam dissipating around her. He imagines the control and the strength it took to remain calm. It was the kind of thing he’d read about in mystics and fakirs. People whose faith let them stick their hands into fire, walk across coals. And there it was, possessed by a three-year-old child. Avi wonders what his daughter is.
Kay calls to say she’ll be late. She’s calling to remind him to pick up Emmeline, but she doesn’t say it out loud. Emmeline is quiet in the car, staring out the window at the bare trees that line the streets of Rogers Park. She mumbles something about homework and goes straight to her room. Avi stands in the foyer with his jacket in his hand.
The minute he goes upstairs, something will end. He thinks about his life in terms of turning points. Rubicons. Marrying Kay. Emmeline’s birth. The burn. Mosul. They took on their importance afterward. Even with marriage and Emmeline’s birth, things he knew were coming, he hadn’t conceptualized their impact on his life. He hadn’t understood the extent to which his old life would become a country to which he could no longer return. This is bigger. The whole world pivots on a point. The point happens to be his daughter.
He stands outside Emmeline’s door. There’s no sound from inside. He knocks gently, and Emmeline tells him to come in. Emmeline’s walls are bare, and her room is cluttered without being messy. There are books in piles and drawings everywhere. A blue car, the circular heads of two girls sticking out of the windows. One is obviously Emmeline from the spiraling curls. A city block with a towering black building at the center. Emmeline is lying on the floor, drawing concentric circles. She’s started with a dot, and now they tangent the edges of the page. She has changed into a tee shirt, which she wears only when she’s gotten to her room at the end of the day with no intention of leaving. She never comes downstairs in short sleeves.
“How was your day, Daddy?”
“It was a tough day,” he says. “Strange.”
“Oh,” she says. She sits up and crosses her legs underneath her. She looks down at her hands. With her index finger, she traces a path through the maze of her scar. It winds and loops from her elbow to her wrist.
“Leener,” Avi says. “Are you—” He can’t locate the words. If he says them aloud, he’ll make them true. Emmeline looks at him, then back down at her arm.
“Today’s the day you find out,” she says. Her voice trembles.
“Find out what, honey?”
“I’m like the people you met today,” Emmeline says. “I can do things.”
Avi is scared. This is the dark room full of snakes. This is the bridge in the movie, made of ropes with slats missing, suspended over a river of crocodiles. He was less afraid as the IED went off, the moment he knew what was happening and knew he couldn’t stop it. He felt less afraid stepping across the threshold of the door in the attic into what should have been open air.
Avi looks at his daughter. When she was a toddler, he understood that she would always be small to him. He would see the baby she’d been even when she was an adult. Her past would echo off her present.
Resonate, he thinks. The word becomes capitalized, scared out of its former meaning.
“What can you do, Leener?”
No answer will make it all right. No strange ability his daughter can possess that can be ignored and forgotten. Avi braces himself for what comes next.
“I don’t know yet,” Emmeline says. “I’m sorry, Daddy.” She tosses herself at him, crashes like a wave. She’s crying, little hitched breaths. “Do you still—am I still yours?”
Avi’s arms come up from his sides slowly, in shock. He wraps them around Emmeline. Downstairs, the front door bangs against the wall. “Hey, guys, I’m home,” Kay calls. Emmeline inhales deeply, a snuffling sound against Avi’s shirt. She wipes her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Hey, Momma,” she calls, leaving Avi alone in