hero who simply didn't know how he'd ever become one.
She stared at the students packing the rows in the utterly silent lecture hall. “Don't move,” she instructed. “Not even a twitch.” Beside her, on the podium, an egg timer ticked away one full minute. She hid a smile as she watched the undergrads, all of whom suddenly had gotten the urge to sneeze or scratch their heads or wriggle.
Of the three parts of Dante's masterpiece, the Inferno was Laura's favorite to teach - who better to think about the nature of actions and their consequences than teenagers? The story was simple: Over the course of three days - Good Friday to Easter Sunday - Dante trekked through the nine levels of hell, each filled with sinners worse than the next, until finally he came through the other side. The poem was full of ranting and weeping and demons, of fighting lovers and traitors eating the brains of their victims - in other words, graphic enough to hold the interest of today's college students ... and to provide a distraction from her real life.
The egg timer buzzed, and the entire class exhaled in unison.
“Well?” Laura asked. “How did that feel?”
“Endless,” a student called out.
“Anyone want to guess how long I timed you for?” There was speculation: Two minutes. Five.
“Try sixty seconds,” Laura said. “Now imagine being frozen from the waist down in a lake of ice for eternity. Imagine that the slightest movement would freeze the tears on your face and the water surrounding you. God, according to Dante, was all about motion and energy, so the ultimate punishment for Lucifer is to not be able to move at all. At the very bottom of hell, there's no fire, no brimstone, just the utter inability to take action.” She cast her gaze across the sea of faces. “Is Dante right? After all, this is the very bottom of the barrel of hell, and the devil's the worst of the lot. Is taking away your ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want, the very worst punishment you can imagine?”
And that, in a nutshell, was why Laura loved Dante's Inferno. Sure, it could be seen as a study of religion or politics. Certainly it was a narrative of redemption. But when you stripped it down, it was also the story of a guy in the throes of a midlife crisis, a guy who was reevaluating the choices he'd made along the way.
Not unlike Laura herself.
* * *
As Daniel Stone waited in the long queue of cars pulling up to the high school, he glanced at the stranger in the seat beside him and tried to remember when she used to be his daughter.
“Traffics bad today,” he said to Trixie, just to fill up the space between them.
Trixie didn't respond. She fiddled with the radio, running through a symphony of static and song bites before punching it off entirely. Her red hair fell like a gash over her shoulder; her hands were burrowed in the sleeves of her North Face jacket. She turned to stare out the window, lost in a thousand thoughts, not a single one of which Daniel could guess.
These days it seemed like the words between them were there only to outline the silences. Daniel understood better than anyone else that, in the blink of an eye, you might reinvent yourself. He understood that the person you were yesterday might not be the person you are tomorrow. But this time, he was the one who wanted to hold on to what he had, instead of letting go.
“Dad,” she said, and she flicked her eyes ahead, where the car in front of them was moving forward.
It was a complete cliche, but Daniel had assumed that the traditional distance that came between teenagers and their parents would pass by him and Trixie. They had a different relationship, after all, closer than most daughters and their fathers, simply because he was the one she came home to every day. He had done his due diligence in her bathroom medicine cabinet and her desk drawers and underneath her mattress - there were no drugs, no accordion-pleated condoms. Trixie was just growing away from him, and somehow that was even worse.
For years she had floated into the house on the wings of her own stories: how the butterfly they were hatching in class had one of its antennae torn off by a boy who wasn't gentle; how the school lunch that day had been pizza when the notice said it was going to be chicken chow mein and how if she'd known that, she would have
bought instead of bringing her own; how the letter / in cursive is nothing like you'd think. There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn't known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of his winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.
This September - and here was another cliche - Trixie had gotten a boyfriend. Daniel had had his share of fantasies: how he'd be casually cleaning a pistol when she was picked up for her first date; how he'd buy a chastity belt on the Internet. In none of those scenarios, though, had he ever really considered how the sight of a boy with his proprietary hand around his daughter's waist might make him want to run until his lungs burst. And in none of these scenarios had he seen Trixie's face fill with light when the boy came to the door, the same way she'd once looked at Daniel. Overnight, the little girl who vamped for his home videos now moved like a vixen when she wasn't even trying. Overnight, his daughter's actions and habits stopped being cute and started being something terrifying.
His wife reminded him that the tighter he kept Trixie on a leash, the more she'd fight the choke hold. After all, Laura pointed out, rebelling against the system was what made her start dating Daniel. So when Trixie and Jason went out to a movie, Daniel forced himself to wish her a good time. When she escaped to her room to talk to her boyfriend privately on the phone, he did not hover at the door. He gave her breathing space, and somehow, that had become an immeasurable distance.
“Hello?!” Trixie said, snapping Daniel out of his reverie. The cars in front of them had pulled away, and the crossing guard was furiously miming to get Daniel to drive up.
“Well,” he said. “Finally.”
Trixie pulled at the door handle. “Can you let me out?” Daniel fumbled with the power locks. “I'll see you at three.”
“I don't need to be picked up.”
Daniel tried to paste a wide smile on his face. “Jason driving you home?”
Trixie gathered together her backpack and jacket. “Yeah,” she said. “Jason.” She slammed the truck door and
