I never should have had a daughter (said Mac).
I never did have much of a nurturing streak. Not because I didn't care about other people, I like to think, but because I just didn't have the patience. I was always heading somewhere else, to see something new, or do something different. When I was young, my friends and family found it charming – at the same time as clucking about how eventually, I would want to settle down, of course.
As I got older, they began to find it less charming, and instead of clucking, they began to mutter about how immature I was, and how I apparently wanted to stay a child forever. I never understood that, you know. As a child, you have to stay where you are and do what people tell you to, and as an adult, you're supposed to develop a desire to root yourself to the spot and fill your days with obligations. Almost like you are only considered grown up when you start wanting to go back to being a child, wouldn't you say?
Either way, my supposed childishness didn't stop me from falling in love… or from being faithful to my wife for fifty years of marriage. Sandra, that was my wife's name. A lovely woman. She deserved better than me, but then, don't most husbands say that about their wives? And I was her choice, regardless of the wisdom of it. She didn't rebuke me for spending so much time away from home. She knew I needed to be on the move to be happy.
But she wanted a child. As company, perhaps. Or, yes, perhaps you're right, Doctor Faller. Perhaps she wanted one because that is what everyone assures us we should want, and she had no reason to object to it.
The thought appalled me. It sounds terrible when I say it like that, but they are both of them dead, my wife and my daughter, and it's rather too late in the game for self-deception. To bind my fate to another strong, capable adult was one thing. Sandra's needs, such as they were, were easy to fulfil, and it gave me joy to do so. A child was something quite different. I knew that it would need everything that I could give and everything that I was. I also knew that I was entirely unable to give that much of myself; my own desires were too costly.
I never should have consented. Sandra would not have forced any ultimatum on me – that was not her way. But for that very reason, refusing seemed impossible. What right did I have to deny my wife the one thing she wanted, when she asked so little of me and gave me so much?
Our daughter, Rose, was born one lovely June evening. I think I had hoped that when I at last saw the child of my body, I would be overcome with all the right feelings of fatherhood. You scoff? These things do happen, Doctor Faller. Just because something is a sentimental cliché it doesn't mean it never happens.
Alas, it did not happen this time. All I felt when I held Rose for the first time was confusion and fear. What was this tiny, wrinkled little creature? What did it want with me? I had a vague idea that everything had changed, but at the same time, I felt no different.
In a way, my fears were groundless; my life didn't change very much. I still travelled to far-off nations to see what was there and to write about it. I still lived my life as best I knew how. When I was at home, Sandra was still my loving wife… and if the house now also held an infant, a toddler, a little girl of six, a young woman of fourteen… well, it made no more of an impact on me than having a roommate did in college. She was there, and that was all.
From time to time, Sandra would try to cultivate a relationship between me and our daughter. And I like to think that I tried to cooperate with her efforts… after a fashion. But the girl had little enough to say that interested me, and I had little enough to say that she understood. It is difficult, at least for me, to find common ground with anyone whose intellect and knowledge is so far beneath my own…
You know exactly how I feel? Ah, why do I have a feeling that I was just insulted?
Anyway, I failed. Quite miserably so, I'm afraid. It would have been nice to believe I did the best I could, but that would be another deception. My attempts were half-hearted, born of shame and half-understood obligation. Between that and the frequent absences brought on by my line of work, is it a wonder that by the time Rose was fifteen, she and I were little more than strangers?
By that time, she had started seeking other ways to fill the hole in her life were her father should have been. Every time I got home, Sandra regaled me with new stories of Rose acting out, and of whatever disagreeable boyfriend she had last taken up with. She asked me to talk to the girl sometimes, perhaps feeling that a father's touch was needed – but who was I to provide such an arcane thing? Rose responded to my lectures with nothing but disgust. I must admit I can't blame her for that.
The final result was what it usually is, when a girl goes out of her way not to be sensible. At sixteen, Rose found herself pregnant, and unable to name the father with any degree of certainty. She named her own daughter Daisy. The similarity in names just strengthened my helpless, fatalistic conviction that my granddaughter would share my daughter's fate.
That did not entirely happen, though, or so it seemed. Daisy did not have the easiest time growing up, I think – a number of potential fathers entered and left her life, some of them merely useless, some of them openly abusive, and the money that was present during her childhood consisted of what Rose could scrape together, wheedle out of her current boyfriend, or resentfully bring herself to accept from me and my wife. When she was nine, Daisy already shared at least one trait with her mother; a sullen, resentful look in her eyes, a gleam that judged the world and promised retribution. Even so, where Rose had taken her vengeance on the world by abandoning self-preservation, Daisy took hers by resolving to survive.
She was a remarkable child, Doctor Faller – and I say this though, as you must understand, I have little love for children. She was wild, but there was a focus to her wildness. She would wrap it around her like a coat whenever life treated her badly, and spread it like great, black wings when she pursued something she wanted.
And perhaps with her, I redeemed myself – only slightly, I'm aware, only very slightly – because with her, I managed to have a relationship of sorts. Grandchildren are easier, of course. You are not expected to always be there for them, and you are not expected to raise them to be productive citizens – that's all the parents' work. But it was more than that. I recognised something of myself in Daisy, in that restless spirit of hers. She wanted to know everything I had seen and learned in my life, and I, for my part, found some pleasure in telling her.
When she was eighteen, she walked out of her mother's home and disappeared.
Rose was frantic and Sandra was inconsolable, but I secretly hoped that Daisy would find some adventure in life – and an escape from the legacy of my failures.
The next time I saw her was in a magazine – at the dentist's office, of all places. I was flipping through a collection of dull celebrity stories, waiting for the nurse to call me in so that I could be deprived of one of my few surviving natural teeth, when all of a sudden, there was Daisy, grinning at me from an advertisement page. She was wearing not very much of anything, and looked thin – though no more thin than any other woman who appeared in an ad, I admit – but her eyes gleamed with that same wildness, and with something that resembled triumph. I laughed, then, and was glad that the girl was making her way in the world… but still, that triumph bothered me. I told myself it shouldn't, that Daisy deserved whatever happiness she could wrest out of life, but there was something slightly insane, slightly gloating about the curve of her smile and the lines around her eyes.
She stayed missing for years after that. She didn't turn up at her mother's funeral, when Rose's last bad choice of boyfriend pushed her down the stair and she broke her neck. She did turn up at her grandmother's funeral, two years ago, after my dear wife had suffered a fatal heart attack.
I was standing in the rain after the service had ended, thinking of fifty years with a wife I still didn't think I had ever deserved, and she just appeared next to me, like the rain and the autumn gloom had given birth to her. She wasn't thin anymore, she had developed the pleasant roundness of a mature woman, and she wore a black fur coat that must have cost a fortune.
"I kept meaning to come back," she said conversationally. "To say, you know, thank you for being nice to me when I was a kid. Things kept coming up, though. And I always figured I'd get more chances."
I just stared.
"Sucks, doesn't it, when you run out of chances?" she said.
"Yes," I said. "Hello, Daisy." Then I smiled. "Or should I call you Demetria, these days?" That had been the name she had modelled under. I had been a reporter then, and it had been easy enough to find out.
"Demetria? Oh, that takes me back." She laughed weakly. "I was young. I needed a new name and I figured, the longer and more pretentious, the better."
"So it's Daisy again?"
"Ugh. Never." She grinned. "Everyone needs a little more pretension than that in their life. But I don't mind you calling me that, if you want to."
We went back to my house, and talked for a very long time. She had done a great number of things, it seemed; earned her living in a dozen different ways, studied a number of different fields, met people and lost them. She had been married ("no great-grandbrats for you, though, sorry") and been in love, though never, apparently, both with the same man.
My journalist skills hadn't entirely gone to seed. I could hear all the things she didn't tell me; her stories had gaping holes in them. I considered, idly, what she might have edited out. Drugs, probably – I could not imagined that she had tried everything else life had to offer, and never touched any illegal substances. Crime, fraud, smuggling? Almost certainly something along those lines – she had clearly experienced both wealth and poverty, and she was very silent on how she had gone from one to the other and back again. In fact, I wasn't even willing to rule out terrorism. The few times the topic strayed to the government, or indeed any form of authority, she always seemed to have to force down anger.
Even if I had not noticed the holes in her stories, I would still have known there was something more to her life than the happy-go-lucky vagabond she claimed to be. There was still that gloating triumph written on her face, that smirking lust for ever greater victory over the world. Time had no erased it, merely made it sink deeper into the lines around the eyes and the mouth, infusing it into her very nature. In my granddaughter, my blood and my failures had created something dark and hungry.
What did I do about it? Oh, Doctor Faller, have you heard nothing I have said?
I did nothing about it, of course. I saw, and seeing was enough. Did you think I would change at this point in my life?
And for that matter, I was not entirely discontent. Daisy had darkness in her, yes, but she also had enough love to make herself part of my life again, and to be kind to me. She was not a monster, and she could so easily have become one. The good in her had not been entirely undone, and that in itself was more than I could have hoped for.
Furthermore, she was childless, without any desire to ever become otherwise. And that made me feel relieved, because it meant it would end with her. The river that had flowed from the wellspring of my failures would reach the ocean, and no more pain would come of my legacy.
Sadly, things would turn out not to be as simple as that.