Shane Lives in Allouez Now

by Michael J. Vowles

Before he left, my daddy filled my head with images of inferno. Pine trees exploding. Men boiling alive as they hid inside a water tank. High winds whipping up tsunamis of fire 200-feet high, rolling over towns and farms with extreme prejudice. It must have been screaming followed by total silence, I thought. A brutal end to all things.

When I asked why Peshtigo was so bad, Daddy smiled at me. He said that I was a very clever girl because I always wanted to know the why more than the what. I didn’t care that the temperatures reached 2000 degrees, or that over two billion trees were lost. What I wanted to know more than anything was why it happened.

We moved past the plaque, shivering a little and keeping our hands inside our scrunched-up coat sleeves. It was cold but bright. I was wearing an old Packers coat that Daddy wore in the 1980s when he was my age. It was still too big for me but that’s part of why I loved it. I thought that if I kept wearing it, I would grow into the spaces he left for me and become him.

“Slash-and-burn. You know what that means?”

“No.”

What I loved about my trips with Daddy was how he didn’t treat me like a 12-year-old. He spoke of insatiable consumption, how men set fires everywhere to clear the forest for farmland, and the metaphor inside the swirling tornado of flame that came to punish them. It was difficult to keep up, but I felt the images taking root in my brain.

Inside the mill there was a display with a horseshoe that had been warped by the fire. I said it looked like a black snake. Daddy said it was a warning, but he didn’t say for what. Perhaps he was just being silly. But I’ve tried to interpret it in various ways since. That day was the last trip we took together for the year. After that the museums closed for the season. Snow fell with noiseless abandon over the streets. I didn’t know it then, but there wouldn’t be any more trips with Daddy to the forest.

A week before Christmas, I overheard him telling my mom that it was possible to love two people at once. When they realized I was there, they told me to go back to bed. The next morning Daddy was gone. I learned straight away that it was difficult for my parents to be honest with me about what happened. Mom seemed to be constantly wrestling with the temptation to say what she really felt, denying me answers whenever I had questions but blurting out vague remarks laced with bitterness whenever I was silent.

It was a shit Christmas. I didn’t see Daddy again until the new year. He said he hadn’t planned for things to happen this way, which told me that he had, in fact, planned for things to happen.

“I wanted to give you one last Christmas as a family,” he explained, as though expecting praise. I stared at him and he quickly averted his gaze. I knew in that moment that I was a problem Daddy was trying to disentangle himself from.

Before, I had always felt that he belonged wholly to me. This was in spite of the fact that he was rarely available. I assumed he was always off doing something fantastic. But when he came home, and when he took me on our daddy-daughter dates to the forest, I felt like I was in full possession of everything he had to give. It was inconceivable- from the way he spoke, the way he acted, the way he looked at me- that there could possibly be room for anything else in his life but me. Now, all of a sudden, he could barely look me in the eyes.

When I think of that time, I think mostly of silent car journeys. A nauseating, wordless gulf between us that made our trip to Peshtigo feel like a long time ago- even though in reality it had only been a few short months. He dropped me off and didn’t get out. In fact, he didn’t even wait to see whether I made it inside the house or not. By the time I reached the door, his car was out of sight. One time, a friend of mine who lived across the street asked me why he never got out of the car.

“He must be so busy,” she said, brushing clumps of snow from her eyelashes.

“Shane lives in Allouez now,” I said. I’d stopped calling him Daddy to counteract the way he had stopped treating me like an equal. Where before he had engaged my imagination, now he spoke in an unfamiliar, formal tone with contrived questions about school, about what I was eating, about Mom. Mostly he seemed interested in trying to justify why he had left us. No matter what he said, I didn’t say anything back. I knew that he found my silence irritating, because out of nowhere he would snap at me about whatever he could think of. That my hair was too long, that I was slouching, that my grades were slipping. I didn’t care. I remained silent and Shane would sigh, as though it were me that had changed.

When the snow began to melt, Shane told me that I had a little sister. We were parked outside an Applebee’s in De Pere. I didn’t know what to say but he kept staring at me. I looked out the window at a family leaving the restaurant. My eyes followed them all the way to their car and lingered on the parking spot after they had gone.

“Well?”

“What?”

“Don’t you have anything to say?”

“No.”

“Hey, look at me when I’m talking to you,” Shane said. I looked at him. There was something in his frown that felt to me like acting. “You know your attitude stinks,” he said. For some reason I laughed. I don’t think I meant to. Maybe I did.

Shane didn’t seem to know what to say. This didn’t surprise me- I had come to think of him as not very fantastic after all.

“Listen,” he said after a long pause. “I know this isn’t easy for you. But you should know your family, Kelsey.”

At that moment he undid his seatbelt. I felt my chest tighten.

“Where are you going?” I said. But I knew. I could see it in his eyes. “No,” I said.

“Yes.”

“They’re not.”

“Yes, they are, and we’re late.”

I spun my gaze toward the restaurant windows but I couldn’t make out any of the faces inside.

“No.”

“Come on. It’s been three months already…it’s time you met them.”

“I’m not coming.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Get out of the car, Kelsey!” Shane screamed. I really didn’t want to, but I started crying. Shane sighed. “Please?”

“No.”

“So you’re just going to sit here this whole time? Because I’m not driving you home.”

I didn’t say anything. Shane looked completely lost. The man I used to know had always been in control. Or so it had seemed. Now all I could think was how weak and pathetic he looked. He was clearly weighing up what to do. Then, when he committed, it was in a flash; he grumbled something like “Fine,” and got out of the car. He didn’t close the door properly, so he doubled back and slammed it shut. I braced myself, imagining this new, erratic version of my father dragging me kicking and screaming out of the car, but he walked instead to the front door without looking back.

For the next few minutes, I sat there crying. I didn’t even notice when she came out of the restaurant. A tap on the car window snapped me out of my daze, and all of a sudden I was face to face with a woman and a baby. The woman motioned with her free hand for me to roll down the window. I recognized her from my father’s office. Jessica something. I wiped my eyes and rolled down the window. It wasn’t lost on me that the baby was at least a year old. It also wasn’t lost on me how long it took to make them. I started doing the math in my head but gave up when a pudgy hand extended itself towards me.

“This is your little sister; Morgan,” Jessica said, beaming at the child. She didn’t feel the need to introduce herself, or ask why I was out here crying. For a second, I thought she was going to pass Morgan through the car window, but she just shuffled closer so that Morgan could grab a tiny handful of my hair. I guess that interested Morgan for some reason. She turned the blonde locks between her fingers and examined them. I just looked at her, trying and failing to find any resemblance to myself.

After what felt like a long time, Jessica said, “Why don’t you come in?”

I didn’t have any strength to argue. We went inside the Applebee’s and joined Shane at a table, who looked to me like he was sulking. Jessica caressed his shoulders with her free hand before strapping Morgan into a highchair.

“She’s getting so heavy!”

Jessica did most of the talking. Shane didn’t say anything until it was time to order. “Look, Kels, they have wings,” he said. It was clear from his voice that he was expecting this statement to be a big win, as though my mood could be so easily manipulated. Buffalo wings were my favorite food on the planet. When Shane and I used to go on our trips to Door County, to Devil’s Lake, to the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, we would always stop for buffalo wings. But that was then.

“I’m vegan now,” I blurted out.

Shane cocked his head. “No, you’re not.”

“Yes I am.”

“Since when?”

“Since February.”

Shane couldn’t prove that I wasn’t. He hadn’t been around.

“Do you know what a vegan is?” he asked. “Because it’s not the same as a vegetarian.”

“I know that,” I lied.

I ordered fries and picked at them disinterestedly. Shane looked miserable the whole time. Jessica seemed determined to maintain a smile. When Morgan started crying, Jessica tapped my father on the arm and said, “Could you?”

Shane got up and carried my baby sister to the restroom. Jessica turned her fixed smile on me.

“Not hungry?”

“Nope.”

“Your father loves you, you know,” she told me, leaning close. “It’s important you remember that. This is hard for him, too…”

As Shane drove me back home in silence, I thought about what he had told me in Peshtigo. Maybe he had been trying to warn me after all. Maybe, I thought, he had to burn our family down for his new one to grow.

*

I committed to veganism for the next four years just to spite Shane. I hated it, but I couldn’t give him the satisfaction that he was right about me. Plus, I seemed to be going through a phase where I wanted to make myself suffer.

Shane began spoiling me with gifts and doting on me with compliments, but I made sure never to thank him. My feeling was that he didn’t want me back at all. What he really wanted was for me to absolve him for what he did. And as much as I wanted things to go back to the way they were, my instinct was that I had to keep denying him anything that might be construed as forgiveness. That way, he would be tied to me forever. If I forgave him, he would be free to leave me behind and focus on his new family. That’s what he really wanted- to unburden himself of the past. I wouldn’t let him.

For example, when I was fifteen, I got a septum piercing. I knew Shane would hate it, but he couldn’t say anything. I got a piercing in the shape of a horseshoe, to remind him of our last daddy-daughter date when I was twelve, although I’m not sure he picked up on that. He just winced when he looked at it.

I also got myself a boyfriend- Austin- who I liked to emphasize as the main man in my life. He was a sweet, shy boy who had been pursuing me since middle school. When I finally accepted, I let him know straight away that I was broken.

“Don’t hurt me,” I warned him. Austin said he wouldn’t. I made him promise. “You can’t hurt me like Shane did.”

Austin came to understand that whenever I told him he was nothing like my father, this was to be taken as the highest compliment. Because of what happened between Shane and Jessica, sex disgusted me. This was another thing I made Austin understand early on. There would be no sex. I let him kiss me now and then, mostly when he had made me happy. It was like a reward. We always held hands when I dragged him along to Shane and Jessica’s house in Allouez. I played with his hair when I knew Shane was watching. Even though sex repulsed me, I still wanted my father to think that I was having it, to keep him in the dark about my life as much as possible.

For his part, Austin seemed to have little capacity for hatred. Even though I’d told him again and again about how Shane had degraded my mother, how he had kept his family in Allouez hidden from us for as long as he could, how he had hoped to somehow have the best of both worlds, Austin was always polite to him in person. And he loved my kid sister. Every time we went there, he would play with her until she exhausted herself from laughter. It was obvious that he had so much love to give- and that he wanted to give the lion’s share to me. But this realization only made me feel shitty about myself. We would leave Shane’s house in silence, and Austin would ask me what was wrong.

“Nothing,” I would say. That’s when I first started lying to him.

By the time I was sixteen, I started smoking weed to feel better about myself. I had a weekend job at the Dairy Queen in De Pere where I became infamous for my “resting bitch face” at the drive-thru window. A coworker two years older than me, Thomas, could see that I was unhappy. He started offering me lifts home, and then he started offering me other things. We would park down the street and get high in his car, where I could forget about the father who betrayed me, the mother who had grown absent and bitter, the boyfriend who pedestalized me, and the little sister who had stolen everything. Pretty soon getting high was all I wanted to do.

Then one time, I was having a laughing fit in Thomas’ car, when he reached over and grabbed my boob. I was shocked. No one had ever touched me there. He worked up to a rough massage over my polo shirt and asked me if I wanted him to stop.

I got home quite late that night, unsure of how to feel. My mom didn’t even say anything. I wanted her to ask what I had been doing because I was aware of a pain between my legs and blood on my underwear. It was becoming more and more acute, but I was still so high, so I decided to shower.

When I woke up the next day I cried. I told Mom I was sick and she let me take the day off, which I spent wrapped up in bed. I guess it turned out that I was more like Shane after all. It was all I had ever wanted when I was younger. In the afternoon, Austin called me to ask if I was okay. I told him what had happened and he hung up. I cried some more. It was the most I had cried since that day at Applebee’s years ago.

I decided to call Shane when he got home from work.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“Can we go to Wequiock Falls?”

“Uh, sure. You mind if your sister comes? Jess is out.”

“Sure.”

He sounded worried but cautiously happy. I had never once called him before or asked him to hang out.

Twenty minutes later, they were outside.

“You still have this?” Shane said, gesturing at the old hand-me-down Packers coat.

“Of course.”

“I haven’t seen you wear it in years.”

The truth was I had asked Mom to throw it out the day I got back from Applebee’s. But it turns out she had kept a hold of it, even at the height of her anger towards my father. Despite how much I had grown, it was still too big for me.

At the falls, Morgan raced ahead. It felt good to be in the forest again. Shane asked in a low voice if I was okay. I started to cry, even though I had spent the whole day crying in bed. I liked that when this happened, his first instinct was to hug me rather than press me for details.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. Even though it wasn’t him I had hurt, I felt like we were somehow morally even.

“I’m sorry, too,” he said. We stopped for a while, and he held me close. He kissed my forehead and rubbed my back. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

Up ahead, Morgan was transfixed by the falls. From my angle, it looked like a perfect photograph, with her off to the side, balanced on the rocks, looking up at the tumbling waters with her mouth half-open.

“Let’s keep her like this forever,” I said.