The lamp was currently dark. The afternoon sun lit the room more than adequately, throwing its spotlight directly onto the chair Ben occupied. He basked in the halo of warmth as he considered the problem before him. That, of course, being his daughter, and what, exactly, he was going to do with her for the next three months.

It would be far easier, he noted, if she were something slightly less complicated than a human being. A sea star, for instance, or an urchin. Anything, really, that could be opened up and dissected, its internal activities studied and understood without complication. The thoughts of a barnacle were not much of a mystery; those of his own flesh and blood were completely indecipherable. Even if he could open her up, poke around inside her and reveal her smallest secrets beneath the lens of a microscope, he was certain he would fail to grasp the complexity of her.

He had occasionally doubted, never with much sincerity, whether Caddie had, in fact, been partly his doing. Not because he questioned his then wife’s fidelity in any way, or at least not any more than he would ever doubt the ability of a creature whose basic impulses for survival were driven by the need to procreate as often as possible with the most genetically desirable partners to remain monogamous. No, it wasn’t because of any suspicions of adultery (what a peculiar word that was, suggesting the addition of impurity to something believed to be perfect), but simply because he didn’t believe himself capable of such a thing, not in any biological way, but in a larger, less easily defined sense.

When he looked at Caddie, he did not see himself in her. He was, he knew, responsible for one half of her DNA strand and that, even so, she didn’t need to resemble him to be of him. Her difference, though, went deeper even than the genetic blueprint from which she’d arisen. It was something primordial from which he recoiled, as if allergic. When she was a child, he’d held her like he might an atom bomb, fearful of activating her. Carol had laughed at him, made jokes about his clumsiness and worry over causing injury to the baby. He’d been unable to explain that it was his own life for which he feared.

Eventually Carol had discovered the weakness in him. He didn’t know when it had first dawned on her that he viewed their child as something altogether unknowable, but he could pinpoint the moment when she’d revealed her knowledge to him. It was on a summer evening when Caddie, three at the time and seeing him striding up the sidewalk coming home from work, ran out on unsteady legs to greet him. She’d stumbled over a crack, a toy, some obstacle, and fallen. Her knee, scraped, had begun to bleed and she, seeing it, had let out a wail of such indignant hurt that a jay, watching the tragedy unfold from its vantage point on a fence, flew up with a startled shriek and sought safety in an oak tree.