Eclipse

There was a steady creaking of wood as the water slapped the side of their dinghy. Cal curled up in the bottom of the boat and looked up at the sky while her father steered them steadily toward the middle of the lake for the best viewing position.

On summer weekends, the two of them would often go out onto the lake to fish, and spend some quiet time together. When Cal spends time with her mother they often go places, and are always talking and chatting, exchanging stories and jokes. When she was alive, her grandmother used to say that Cal’s mother was blessed with the Gift of Gab, a natural storyteller. In contrast, her father was a quiet, solid man, quick with a smile or laugh, but happy to let anyone else carry the conversation. The two of them complemented one another.

While Cal loved her mother, spending long stretches of time with her was extraordinarily draining. Cal lacked her father’s ability to calmly absorb without pushing or engaging, and she also was not nearly as proficient a storyteller as her mother, which caused most of their outings to devolve into something of a tug-of-war. Cal wanted her mother to appreciate the way that she told stories about her day or about the way a stranger looked walking by. And she did—appreciate, that is—but in a way that wasn’t quite satisfying for Cal.

During her weekends with her grandmother, Cal would sometimes find herself slipping into a conversation about her mother and father. “She just always has to have her way, it’s always about what Mom wants to say, and I know that Dad’s on my side but he’ll never speak up around her, he just lets her talk.” Whenever Cal had one of these moments, her grandmother would smile at her, click her tongue and say, “Your dad would never let your mother steamroll him if there was something he really wanted to say.” And that was true. That was part of the problem. Her dad was just as opinionated as her mother, he just had less to say about it, which was in some ways even worse. Her mother could at least be tempted into a conversation about most things, but her father was just unreasonable; once his mind was made up there was no point in fighting, not that her mother didn’t try.

Those weekends with her grandmother gave Cal a layer of separation from her parents. She told her about the squirrels that ran chittering outside her window. “Try moving the birdseed to the back yard, kiddo, then they won’t wake you up in the morning.” The two of them would walk together, and her grandmother would listen as Cal talked about her friends and how they were all doing over the summer. “You should call Louisa if you miss her this much, you don’t have to wait for someone else to make the first move.” Her grandmother advised her on going to soccer camp “get that energy out, jitterbug,” and gave her books that she thought Cal might like. “Has your dad given you any Heinlein yet?” Her Grandmother was Cal’s advisor about life and her safe haven—those visits became an escape from the day-to-day tension that existed in Cal’s house.

For Cal, being at home meant listening to her mother and her father scream at each other downstairs while Cal lay in bed staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars spread across the ceiling. Her parents could find a fight in everything. More often than not, though, they fought about money. Cal knew all of the arguments’ beats. Her mother cared too much and worked too hard for not enough personal gain. Her father spent too much time thinking about his books and not enough time writing them. She was a shrew who only cared about money. He was an artist who cared more about his own self-importance than his family. Cal could have the arguments in her sleep, and sometimes did, the screaming playing out in her dreams. It was hard to reconcile her parents in those nighttime hours with the parents that woke her up each morning and made her breakfast. In the early morning hours, all things were healed. As Cal came down the stairs in socks she would be greeted by the sight of her mom chattering away, moving rapidly from task to task with a smile, until her dad put a single solid arm around her shoulders, settling her.

The summer made the separation between her daytime and nighttime parents even starker. Cal could see the tension between the two of them setting in as the day went on. Before her mother left for work everything would seem fine, but by the time she got back, Dad may or may not have written anything, work had stressed out Mom, and the seeds of the fight were planted. The only reprieve from the endless cycle were the days spent with her grandmother. When she was younger those days meant endless activities and fun for Cal. It meant running in parks and walking with her grandmother in the wooded areas that surrounded her home. This summer, however, her grandmother had been more frail than usual, and in the fading days of summer everything fell apart.

Her grandmother had a stroke.

There was nothing to be done for it, really. Cal hadn’t been with her grandmother when it happened, and her parents kept the news from her for as long as they could. While her mother fielded calls from the hospital, Cal had spent her time playing in the park down the street, unaware that anything was wrong, much less that her beloved grandmother was dying. It was only when Cal got back to the house that her parents told her that they were going to the hospital to see her grandmother. Because of the short notice, Cal would have to come along.

Cal didn’t like the hospital at all. Everything there seemed quieter and smelled strange. Cal sat in the corner of the waiting room with a pair of large blue headphones, playing songs from her father’s iPod. As she sat there and pulled her knees up to her chest, she watched her parents sitting a couple of seats away.

It was the early evening at this point but all traces of their normal argumentation were gone. Her father didn’t have an arm wrapped around her mother, and her mother wasn’t smiling. The only places that the two were touching were where her dad had laid his hand on the back of her mom’s neck, and her fingers splayed out on his knee, white knuckled and digging in. Her mother wasn’t talking or telling stories, and while some part of Cal wanted to go over there and fill the silence she knew her father wouldn’t, Cal couldn’t help but feel that the best thing to do in the moment was to sit in the corner with her knees pulled up and listen to the Beatles croon about a girl named Michelle.

About an hour had gone by before a nurse finally came out: “The Myers family?” Her father and mother stood up almost in unison. The two of them, in that moment, seemed to share a mind and a knowledge of what to do. With a press of fingers against his arm, her mom walked toward the nurse. Dad turned to Cal who had leapt up a moment after her parents.

“Sweetie, we need you to stay here okay. You’ve been great so far, we just need you to sit tight for a couple more minutes,” her dad started. “Wait, I want to go in with you, I want to see Grandma,” Cal said. Her voice was shaky as she said it, and though it was declarative, it lacked the power of her father’s in that moment. “No. I’m sorry Cal. She wouldn’t want you to see her like this, and I don’t think you should see her like this either.”

With that, her father turned away, moving toward where her mom stood at the door. Cal couldn’t quite think of what to say. You aren’t the boss of me seemed too childish, probably futile too. I’ll never forgive you for this wasn’t quite right either. She sat in the waiting room and cried into her hands with her blue headphones over her ears while her grandmother died holding her mom’s hand two doors down.

Then life went on. It was strange how everything changed with her death. The nights were still starry but they lacked the yelling accompaniment she had learned to expect. It seemed as though the cost for peace in the house was Cal’s confidant. Her last days of summer were spent holed up in her room while her parents were busy trying to take care of all of those last minute objects and details, until finally it was the last Monday before school started once again. This Monday, her mother had finally gone back to work after a period of grief. She had no more time off. Cal’s father didn’t want to leave the ten-year-old at home alone after everything that had happened over those final weeks. When he realized that Cal’s mom was out of vacation days and at the end of her emotional rope, he decided to spend that last day of summer with Cal, renewing their early morning fishing tradition. This morning was made even more special by the fact that there was due to be an eclipse.

That Sunday night as her mom sprawled on the couch, Cal wandered into the kitchen where her dad was drinking coffee. It was the first time they’d spoken since he banned her from the hospital room. “How do you feel about going to the lake tomorrow to watch the eclipse, maybe fish—we haven’t done that in a while? We’ll be able to see the eclipse from there, I checked online.” Her dad smiled in response. “Yeah, if we go early in the morning we’ll have a whole bucket full of trout before the eclipse even starts.” Cal gave a small grin at that, her first in a little while. It felt as though she was doing something completely new, as though a smile was foreign on her face.

They left the house at five. Cal’s dad made himself a coffee, and her a hot chocolate; the two of them walked the ten minutes down to the lake sipping the steaming drinks in the slight chill of the early morning.

The two spent the morning in a companionable silence, the kind that no one struggles to fill. It was easy to pass the time before the eclipse as the father and daughter moved around the boat in synchrony. They caught two fish and eventually decided to take a break as ten rolled nearer and nearer. As the moon shifted over the sun, Cal lay in the bottom of the boat. Her dad abandoned the back motor in favor of sitting next to her. The two were silent.

A moment passed and everything went dark, Cal felt her eyes well up for the first time since that evening in the hospital, where there was no light for anyone to see. Cal shifted so she was leaning on her dad’s shoulder, both of them looking up at the sky. There were stars out and Cal thought she could see the whole universe open up in front of her. The world had gone silent, all noise swallowed up by the majesty of the stars. The silence lasted for one beat, two. Then her Dad’s voice rang out, seemingly louder in the face of the cosmic spectacle in front of them: “Now that’s not something you see every day.”

Lena Foellmer is a 20-year-old junior at USC, where she is majoring in English Literature. She enjoys sports and is a member of the USC Fencing Club. In her spare time, she likes to read and make as much art as she wants that no one will see. You can follow her on Instagram.