Lisa DellaPorta
Aperture
Small isn’t enough. I want it tight. Ideally, I’d be able to feel the walls just brushing against my arms, enough space to turn around in a full circle with a little effort, but hemmed in closely so that something is always touching, holding, gently scraping—like fingernails dragged across all my skin at once. “Dad,” Chloe says, not for the first time, slapping me on the wrist to get my attention. “Can you pick me up later at Hannah’s? After swim practice?” The cereal in my milk has gone jagged-edged and soggy. I stand up from the kitchen island and move to spoon it down the garbage disposal.
“I don’t know, can I?” She rolls her eyes, turquoise like her mother’s, like the chlorinated pool she glides through three afternoons a week.
“Would you?”
“Sure.” Water isn’t quite the same. You float on top of it, rather than being confined. After slipping beneath the surface, it requires resolve to stay below; relax your body and you’ll pop back up like a cork. For just a moment, from the bottom of a deep lake looking up at the sun, that far-away ring is a close second. The spot of light above, the bent shadows all around.
***
I walk into the Walmart after dropping Chloe off and take my usual lap. Idly, look at the plaid flannel jacket, a bulk box of Pop-Tarts. Pick up a three-wicked scented candle, sniff and recoil at the artificial stench, place it back on the shelf with lid askew to warn others. The meandering always leads to the same rear corner near the restrooms. Stacked four high in a row along the bottom shelf, behold the trash cans. I look left, then right, then left again, pull one grouping out onto the floor, lift my leg high, climb in, and crouch down inside. Too smooth. Too shallow. Decent diameter, but no resistance. I know from experience that if I release my weight and lean against the side, I’ll fall over and spill out onto the floor, a flounder pulled to dry land.
***
I suppose the first twenty-four hours were terrifying, but I don’t remember those as well. I shouted so much my throat grew hoarse, and I went silent save for the occasional, pitiful cough that bounced off the walls and landed back in my ears. The second night, I noticed the stars. Spattered overhead, the only brightness to my otherwise darkened reality, a patch of navy polka-dotted luminescence. Then, sunrise: the slow, dawning creep that washed the sky to grey, pastel, azure. Like the broad end of a spyglass seen only through a tunneled frame. That focus, that clarity—I would chase it for the rest of my days.
***
I don’t like Hannah. Her parents are divorced and compete over who can spoil her the greatest. The gifts are lavish and carted out for everyone to see, arrows loosed in a cutthroat tournament of affections. She doesn’t come to the door to see Chloe off or wish her goodbye, but I watch her through the front window of her house, painting her nails with careful strokes, a can of Diet Coke on the glass coffee table next to where she’s balancing her foot. My daughter recounts the newest cell phone, something called a Labubu, the most expensive brand of sparkling water. “Can we get it next time? Instead of the generic stuff?”
“It’s an equal amount of bubbles, I promise you.“ She throws herself back against the car seat, defeated, pinning her still-wet hair against the headrest.
“Yeah, but Hannah says it’s made with real bits of pineapple. The stuff we get has chemicals.”
***
When they found me, the triumphant shouts echoed down and off the walls, distorting their message. Areyouohkaiiiiiiaiiiiaiii? Areyouuuuuuuthereereere? The basket they lowered was meant to carry me back to the surface. Cliimbimbimb innn sononon. My hesitation was taken as weakness; they assumed it was the days without food that rendered me unable to bend and slither inside. Not stubborn refusal. Not the wish to stay. They sent down their slimmest, a beanpole of a man, to grasp me for capture. I thrashed, resisted, not from panic, but from a desire to remain.
Only I recognized the reason I wept as I broke through the horizon, seen in the photo they published on the front page of the paper the next day. To the uninformed eye, I look overwhelmed with joy at being rescued. They say that when astronauts return to Earth after experiencing the vastness of space, they endure a prolonged period of depression, a phenomenon coined as the overview effect. Below and not above, I too was shattered by my time in space.
***
My wife used to insist that we all eat dinner together around the dining room table—a bleached, unfinished slab purchased in a post-wedding spree at Pottery Barn, long since pockmarked by younger Chloe’s fork tine stabbing phase—but since she moved out, I tend to sit in front of the TV on the floor with my meal balanced on crisscrossed knees. Chloe isn’t hungry and refuses my offer to share garlic bread and a can of Progresso soup, says she had dinner at Hannah’s. She retreats to her bedroom: the loud squeak as she rotates the handle, the sound of simulated rain from the shower.
I wait until I’m sure Chloe is asleep before I shuffle into the backyard, to the corner behind the garage that’s hidden from the view of the house. Under the tarp, three feet deep by four feet wide, is where I’ve started to dig the hole. It’s slow going with a garden spade and empty cement bucket, but like any labor of love the time it takes to do it right is half the appeal. I shove the blade down, heap, drag the full bucket to the hillside separating our property from the neighbor’s, and watch the clods of dirt roll down to where they aren’t my problem anymore.
From time to time in my adolescence I would go back to the field and try to find the well. After my extraction, the township filled it in with gravel and concrete, citing a safety hazard and pulling rank on the negligent property owner. The grass grown long in a camouflage thicket, I would walk the plot in laps, shuffle my feet until I found the slab, curl up in a ball on top with my face crushed tightly against its roughness. The summer I went away to college, the lot was sold to a developer and soon covered with a parking lot and a Starbucks. Enough, I told myself, sitting inside while draining my third flat white in an excuse to be near it, or where I thought it was. Enough, now.
***
The next few weeks are rainy, and digging is easier than usual, the clay softening and the shovel sinking into the earth with ease. But this reveals a new issue as the hole gains depth: the dirt becomes that much harder to lift in buckets, and the weight of carrying it up the ladder to the top leaves my neck stiff and tilted to one side. Chloe fills a tube sock with rice and microwaves it, nestling the fabric along my hairline.
“Are you sure it’s heat for sore muscles? Not ice?”
“Ice right after the injury, heat to loosen them up after. That’s what coach says. But I don’t know what you’re supposed to use if you’re just getting old.”
“Old?”
“Mmhmm.” She picks through my scalp, grooming me like an ape. “I definitely see some greys.”
***
Even though I work from home I’ve made it a rule not to go out to the hole during the day in a self-defeating exercise of discipline. My wife used to come home at lunch twice a week to take advantage of her office being twelve minutes away. Over the double-decker chicken salad sandwiches that I’d prepare in anticipation of her return—light on the mayo, red-skinned grapes mixed in for her even though I abhorred the mix of meat and fruit, a sacrifice that never seemed to be acknowledged—we’d talk about our day, the garden, the latest school gossip from Chloe’s class. The night that she told me she was moving in with Matt From Sales, it occurred to me that she hadn’t been home to eat my sandwiches in months. Take that statement however you will.
And she took her electric toothbrush with her. I noticed it the third night after, alone in our bed, staring past the nightstand into the black abyss of the ensuite bathroom. The green glow from its charging cradle, slow blinking on then off through the witching hour before the LED held steady—absent. I’d wrapped myself in our comforter that still smelled like her deodorant and night cream, and felt the urge for the first time in a long while. The fabric was too soft, and now there was no light at the end of the tunnel.
***
Hannah is sleeping over because both her parents are going out on dates with other people at the same time. Maybe I’ve been too judgmental toward her.
“How about we order a pizza?” I offer the olive branch. Cool Dad doesn’t make you sit down and eat a home-cooked meal. Cool Dad understands the power of faux-casual food plans and grease-soaked cardboard takeaway boxes. Hannah clicks her tongue against her front teeth, perfectly straight, recently de-braced.
“Pizza is barely nutritional.”
“Yeah, Dad. Carbs. Cheese. Processed meat!” Traitor. They’re ganging up on me now.
“Okay. Chinese, then? Vegetables?” Chloe eyes her friend sideways, not wanting to be the first one to speak.
“They should have a diet menu. Steamed broccoli. Brown rice.” Hannah loops her arm through Chloe’s and smiles at me defiantly. “We can just split it. They give you way too much.”
By the time I’m driving to Beijing Garden to pick up the rabbit food, it occurs to me that maybe I should be worried about Chloe. The skipping of meals, the obsession with nutrition—alone, each might be teenage volatility, but the sum of the parts is a red flag. Her mother would have picked up on it, I think, or she would have told me that all girls try to impress each other and to butt out. I could call her, but I don’t want to. She hasn’t called us.
Some boy singer du jour is crooning as I crack the front door and wrestle the takeaway inside. The girls are crouched in the den side by side, watching TikToks together on their phones, wearing monogrammed swim team sweatpants. If they hear me come in they don’t let on. “He’s hot.”
“Eew, you think?”
“No? No. You’re right, he’s totally cringe.” I leave the bag on the floor next to the sofa and retreat to the kitchen to eat my own kung pao shrimp out of the carton with my fingers, leaning over the sink.
***
Teenage girls can stay up all night, so I break one of my own rules and start digging while the lights in Chloe’s room are still on. The sky is clear and full of stars, the October air is pleasant, alarmingly warm, and her windows are open to let in the breeze. I can hear them singing that same song together while I work by the dim light of an old camping lantern. I knew I loved you from the first time I saw you. Dig. Lift. Empty. Return. I never knew that I could feeeeeeeel like thiiiiiis.
The shout comes loudly, and at first I think it’s part of the performance. Then another, and what sounds like pleading, the slam of a door, the world gone quiet. It doesn’t sound like an accident, or an emergency. Am I supposed to go knock on the door? Respect her privacy, or barge in and make sure she’s not passed out on the floor? I two-step in a narrow circle, considering the correct action while I drag the back of my hand along the side of the hole and feel the scratch of severed tree roots, the gentle rake of cleaved pyrite. Chloe’s head appears over the side unexpectedly, backlit by the constellations with her expression hidden from view.
“What the hell.”
“Heyyyy. Kiddo.” I’m climbing up the ladder now, slowly, like it’s no big deal, like she hasn’t just glimpsed the most embarrassing part of me. “How’d you find me?”
“Saw the lantern. Why are you down there?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Why are you out here?”
“Hannah left.”
“You two fight?”
“Something like that. You couldn’t sleep, so you . . . you dug a hole in the backyard. At midnight.”
“What did you fight about?” We stare at each other, silent. Stalemate. This time she breaks first.
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“Okay. So.”
“Do you want me to leave you alone?” And I don’t want her to, truly. It’s never been about solitude. It’s the clarity, the way you feel embraced by the bits and pieces older than you’ll ever be, the safety of sheltering yourself with a limited view.
“Humor me, okay? Get in here with me.”
“In the hole.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I assure you, I’m not.” I wave my hand invitingly and climb down two rungs before turning to look back at her. “Trust your Dad. Please.”
I snake my arms around her for support when she lands and plants both bare feet on the bottom, sinking slightly into the loam. This must be what she looks like when she jackknifes to the bottom of the pool and makes contact with the concrete. “I can’t see a damn thing.”
“Patience. Now give it a minute for your eyes to adjust.” I’m already in position, head tilted back so far that the top of my skull is brushing the wall behind us and knocking loose little brown crumbs. I can feel her heart beating. We’re snugged-up chest to chest, like when she was a toddler falling asleep as I carried her home from the park: two rhythms, not quite in sync but overlapping. “Look up.”
This child, half mine, her breath catches in her throat and I know it’s gotten her too: that celestial spyglass, that earthen tunnel, the scratchy road between what’s dust and heaven. We stand like that for several seconds or half an age—down here there is no difference.
“She doesn’t like me, Dad. Not the way I like her.” I digest this for a moment, aware of the heaviness in what she’s chosen to share. What is the best thing to say? How do I handle it? How would her mother reply? Instead, not looking down, I give her a squeeze.
“Believe me. I know the feeling.”
Lisa DellaPorta lives in the deep woods of Philadelphia. Previous publications include New Letters, Bookends Review, and Wild Roof Journal.