Anything Is Possible (Amgash #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

But she thought that when she was old enough for this awful thing to happen to her own body she would bury the things outside in the woods.

“Don’t come back. Don’t get married. Don’t have children. All those things will bring you heartache.”

He saw how his father increasingly did not speak with her. His father began to eat sloppily, which he had never done. The sound of his chewing was notable; bits of food fell down onto his shirt. “Elgin, my goodness,” Sylvia said, rising to get a napkin, and he shook her off. “For Christ’s sake, woman!”

father’s querulousness, his sudden asking repeatedly where Annie was, “Where is that child? Is she in the woods again?” All this fell into Jamie’s stomach with the silence of a stone falling into the darkness of a well. Within a year they could not care for the man; he ran away, he started a fire in the barn, he drove them insane with his questions, “Where’s Annie? Is she in the woods?” And so they found him a home, and Elgin was furious to be there. Sylvia stopped visiting because he was so angry when she came, one time calling her a cow.

Their father was being asked to leave the home he was in; he was abusive to the orderlies, Jamie said, making sexual passes at all the men, grabbing at their crotches, and was altogether disruptive.

though how a man with dementia could give permission Jamie did not understand,

Sylvia had learned that for years Elgin had had a relationship with Seth Potter, they were lovers, Sylvia said she had often suspected this, and Elgin was, demented as he might be, referring to himself as a raging homosexual, and he was very graphic in things he said; they would most likely have to put him in a far less pleasant place, the...

“If you want my opinion, your father went mad because of his behavior. Being a pervert. I always knew he was a homo, and that can drive you insane, and now he’s insane, that’s my opinion, if you want it.”

took care of its own even while it hurt you.

Her father must have worried she would come across him in the woods.

“Soon as that father died, she started it. Ran an article in the newspaper, said one out of five children are sexually abused. Honestly, Annie. What a world.”

“No,” Jamie had said to her. “Whatever he did, he hid.”

“I heard about Charlene,” Annie said. “It’s unbelievably sad.” “If it’s true,” answered Sylvia.

Jamie shrugged, and Annie saw—or felt she saw—that Charlene’s burdens were nothing to them;

Their once silent father in his state of dementia seemed unable to keep himself from spilling forth all he had held on to secretly for years, and Jamie, who had been silent himself, now had to tumble all he heard before them. “One time they saw you in the woods, Annie, and he was always afraid after that that you’d find them.”

“But one of the strangest things he said,” Jamie reported, sitting back, “was that he drove us to school so he could, just for those moments, be near Seth Potter. He didn’t even see him, dropping us off. But he liked knowing he was close to him each morning. That Seth was only a few feet away, inside the school.”

“It puzzles me, is all.”

They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.

His concern—his love—for her was genuine, yet the responsibility he felt toward her revolted him in a way he’d admit to no one.

His wife could not abide her.

“Mom, stop. This is how people get trampled to death. Dad, hold Sophia, I’ve got Jake.”

“I want us out of here, Abel,” his wife said. “And if you—”

“We’ll wait. Just as you say.”

“Another mizzap,” said Sophia, bashfully. “Right, Grandpa?” “You go to sleep.” He bent to kiss her. “And when you wake up in the morning, all will be well.”

“They’re little, they move quickly, they’re very judgmental. You look surprised.”

“You’re stuck in a room with a lunatic and you apologize?”

After a long pause, Scrooge said, “It’s the oddest thing. But that just makes me hurt with jealousy. You probably want to say, ‘If you had a grandchild yourself, Mr. Oddball Theater Queer, you might understand that love.’

Well, then you’ve never been hungry, Elaine. He did not say it. But he did become ashamed, once his wife asked him that question. Then he surely became ashamed. She requested that he never tell their children how their father had been so poor as to eat from garbage cans.