on this lonely road. The girls were stricken with as much grief as I was, but they had help in recovering. They were young and had friends and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. To me, all of their words just felt hollow and pointless. Tiffany was gone. There was nothing left to talk about.
Someone then told me that I might try getting out more, displacing myself from the physical world of my suffering. I can’t to this day recall who had kindled that fire within me, but if all I was to have left was survival, then I needed to learn how to survive. I looked up the best campsites in Michigan and visited each of them over the course of the year with my girls. My sorrow sought me out. I was never free of it, but when I was alone with the kids in the wilderness, I felt closer to Tiffany or God or whatever it was that roamed the unseen world. It ignited a hunger inside of me—a long dormant instinct. I read books on survivalists and tracking. I started experimenting with how to survive on my own with nothing but my bare hands. Eventually I found myself going to sporting goods shops and knowing more than the proprietors. One man even wanted to hire me. I would talk to park rangers and even went to expos for outdoorsmen. I even once flirted with the notion of going up to Alaska, moving there and starting fresh. They say that Alaska is nothing but wilderness and bears, that outlaws and criminals fled there to live in the frontier. But every time I thought about that, I thought of how miserable the girls would be if I took them away from all they knew.
Every time I learned something new, the girls were the ones I shared it with. They were all I had. I showed them how to trap, gut, and skin an animal, how to make an oven out of a can, or what to do if they were lost. I taught them everything I had come to know. We would go to the rock climbing facilities, master their walls. We’d go camping and fishing together. Three times Lexi and I would go bow hunting. We would go rafting and share in a multitude of outdoor adventures. It was what we had, what we shared with one another.
As the girls left me behind, learning eventually became my drug. I would take free classes at the YMCA or the local library on all sorts of things. I took classes on home maintenance, auto mechanics, and even one on interior decorating. My unhealthy craving for knowledge kept my mind preoccupied with materials other than wallowing in my own loneliness and confronting my own sense of abandonment. I taught them everything I learned when they came home.
I could only pray now that everything I had taught them was coming into use. They knew how to forage, how to board up and fortify a house, they knew how to ration, and they knew how to keep safe. I had trained them all of that. They knew self-defense and how to work a gun properly. I picture them on the coast, on a beach house in Florida, alone with their group of friends, holed up and waiting for me. Alone, I try to recall anything I might have heard of Florida on the news before heading for my father’s cabin. A tidbit. Something. “We’ll be safe, Daddy,” Val had said. “Don’t worry about us. Get somewhere safe.” It was so laughable that she was the one telling me to be safe. Sometimes, it was hard to tell who was in charge with those two.
I try to remind myself how strong they are, how independent they’d grown up after Tiffany had died. They knew that I was hurting just as much as I knew they were. We understood each other and we were there to help one another. I don’t think we were as much of a family as we were a team. There was no living after Tiffany died. There was only survival. So all this desolation was familiar to us. I had to remember they weren’t helpless and as such I couldn’t be careless in my trek to them.
When I don’t think of them, my mind wanders to the Girl in the road. My hand trembles every time I think about the fact that I had killed her. From all the
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