Center of the Universe

“Woof!” Sarah said, approaching the snarling mastiffs, the huge dogs dwarfing the baby girl.

“Doggie…Woof!” Sarah bent hard at the waist as she pushed out the words.

She knew doggies when she saw them, and these were the biggest she had ever seen. Their bared fangs glinted menacingly in the sunlight. She was only a few feet from the bronze beasts guarding the house. They were motionless, but poised to attack. The twin statues glared ferociously at the diminutive intruder.

Holding onto a metal leg and pushing herself up with her knees, Sarah climbed onto one of the pedestals and began brutally petting the animal mounted on it.

“Doggie…Woof,” she crooned to the uncomplaining creature.

“Time to see the rest of the park, Sweetheart.” Harry slipped his hands under both her arms and drew her to his chest before she had a chance to lose her balance.

“Byeee!” Sarah waved to her new animal friends as Harry set her down in the grass.

Twisting her entire torso in the effort, hands curled into tiny dimpled fists, elbows kicking out to her sides, Sarah met the challenge of the hill and its slick sloping grass. Bottom heavy from the bulky diaper inside her baggy blue overalls, she teetered unsteadily, a bowling pin threatening to fall.

Above, clouds raced across the sky. The sun moved perceptibly, and Harry felt the earth shift beneath his feet.

“Shoe!” she named the statue of a winged being at the top of the hill, one of the few words she knew.

“Why not? ‘Shoe’ is as good a name as any, even if he isn’t wearing any.”

“Shoe!” she repeated.

“Yeah, Shoe,” he knew from experience that this exchange would last as long as he played along.

At sixteen months of age, Sarah often became as enthralled by the leaves and sticks on the ground as she did by the events and attractions they attended, but she always clapped in appreciation, if not necessarily at the appropriate times.

Sarah was busy wiping the leaves cluttering the mortared pebble surface around the statue, but when she saw the bottle he set on the ground she flashed a smile that only in the last few months looked less like a model for a jack-o-lantern. Bending at the knees and waist, she lifted the bottle of juice with both hands and pushed the nipple into her mouth. With the bottle secured between her teeth, she brushed the weather-hardened dirt on the steps. Her ministrations had very little effect, but satisfied with her results she turned around and backed up to the prepared spot. When her heels made contact with the step, she sat down. Spine erect and feet together, she surveyed the rest of the park, prepared to sit as long as Harry did.

“Let’s go,” he said, eventually. His daughter wrapped the fingers of her free hand around one of his as they walked slowly down the stone path away from the statue. Harry helped Sarah keep her balance as she stepped off the shallow steps, but suddenly, releasing her grip on his finger and her bottle, she twirled gracefully and headed at full speed back toward the statue.

“Shoe!” she shouted to her impassive friend.

Harry caught her before she was out of reach and hefted her into his arms. She wrapped one arm around his neck and rested her head comfortably on his shoulder as they left the park and Harry realized that he had underestimated her cleverness, or at least her ability to manipulate him. When her arms had been only half as long, they had tried to reach around him for that first hug. It was a feeling that would be forever present in her embrace, a feeling her mother would never know.

Before Sarah, he would have been headed to a smoke filled bar that reeked of stale beer and urine to spend his free time with people he didn’t know and never would, but determined to do better as a father than he had as a husband, they headed to a large toy store in an uptown mall. He planned to just wind her up and let her go.

No winding was necessary.

Greedy little hands outstretched, she roamed each aisle in its turn, moving from one side to the next. Harry followed her, picking up and replacing everything rejected, everything abandoned. After only a cursory inspection, a pop-up book of dogs was the clear winner.

The drive home was celebrated with a fresh bottle of apple juice. Inside the car time was frozen; outside the car, the world passed in confusing blurs.

Once they were home, Harry pulled a beer from the refrigerator and watched the shadows lengthen outside the kitchen window while, behind him, Sarah sat on the kitchen floor leafing through her new book, her stubby little fingers careful to turn each thick page individually.

“Doggie!” she appointed everything with fur. “Doggie! Doggie…woof!”

* * *

As the voice fades behind him, he can hear the sound of the wind keening through the arthritic branches of the old cherry tree in the front yard planted as a sapling when Sarah was his five year old “hepper”; the bottoms, knees and cuffs of her pants caked with fertilizer and mud, her hair bleached to a shimmering gold in the sun. Powerful and radiant with life, it had produced shade every summer and blooms that spring, years later, when they read the letter confirming the scholarship that had, for so long, been their goal.

Squinting in the dying light, his decrepit eyes struggle to read the feminine handwriting on the letter in his hand, It has become illegible. Time has faded the ink and the paper has yellowed with age, but he knows it by heart. Sarah has a different last name now, but he can never seem to remember it.

The final shreds of day have dissolved into night, painting the window with a dreary brush. Harry has forgotten to turn on the lights and as the dark outside merges with the shadows inside, he listens for faint echoes of Sarah’s world.