The word raccoon comes from the Algonquin aroughcun, meaning he who scratches with his hands. I learn this while fact-checking middle school reports on mammals, highlighting the definition given by the student, little hands, and offering another. The urgency of “scratches” evokes the scored bark of climbed trees, or the pried lid of a shellfish or garbage can. In my dad’s Dutch, the word wasbeer, or wash bear, contains a gentler reference—the raccoon’s habit of immersing food in water before it eats. Because I like raccoons and the student who wrote about them, I’m tempted to give the report a better mark than it deserves.

I’m twenty-nine now, with three sisters, all younger, but all adults. We still eat with our parents on Sundays, so someone will slap our hands when we pick the sugared pecans from the salad. Sometimes Dad is there, and sometimes he’s somewhere south, hauling oranges or lumber or paper cups to places that don’t make their own paper cups. Important work, he says, meaning the opposite, and making it impossible to respond in an affirming way.

I know Mom still tries to protect us when Dad starts talking about not wanting to live, and she takes him off speakerphone. Hearing my father prefer death has become like reading by the window at dusk. It’s always darker and it’s never dark. We all just keep reading. Some chapters are better than others. 

I recently joined an Almost 30 book club. Everyone’s almost thirty, except for Craig who is sixty and wants to read almost thirty books before December. We call him Dad, and we do it fondly, and he likes it. Last month we read Man’s Search for Meaning. According to Viktor Frankl, if you are having trouble falling asleep, you should try to see how long you can stay awake. I’ve thought about trying the inverse while driving tired. Maybe if I try to fall asleep, I’ll stay awake.

It’s because of Viktor Frankl that I purposely imagine hitting animals with my Volvo. As long as I’m imagining the fur stuck in the grille, maybe it will stay out of it. But sometimes I forget to worry. On a Tuesday, I’m driving back from Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and I’m thinking of Beth dying, so I forget to worry about killing a cat or a squirrel or a deer. 

The sound of hitting an animal with your car is only like itself. “If you’re going to hit something,” Dad told me when I learned to drive, “don’t swerve. It’s better to speed up than swerve. Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big.”

Sometimes I worry that because I’ve stopped worrying that my dad will end his own life, he’ll really do it. And doing it means he won’t do anything else.

When I get home from watching Gerwig’s Little Women, I don’t check the grille. It’s raining, and though I’m almost thirty I don’t know if rain, even heavy rain, is heavy enough to clean an animal off the front of a car. I’ve now seen five different versions of Little Women, and Beth dies in all of them. Eliza Scanlen as Beth dies better than Margaret O’Brien and worse than Claire Danes. In the 2018 modern retelling, Allie Jennings swerves: a bad death, protracted and mawkish. In the 2017 mini-series, Annes Elwy hits it dead on.

I can’t find a language in which raccoon means he who wears a mask. And wasbeer, however pleasing, is inaccurate. When I was six, Dad told me it’s a myth that raccoons wash their food before they eat it. Rather, they immerse each item before eating because their hands are highly sensitive in water. The nerves become like taste buds, gathering information, finding out, is this good? Is this safe?

I’m living in a new place again, and all the pictures in my apartment are level. Every time I move, Dad brings his hammer and his drill and re-hangs everything I ask him to re-hang. It’s a decent apartment, except after I shower, I have to plug in the blow-dryer in the living room or else I’ll blow a fuse. Even though it’s no good for my frizz, I like to blow-dry my hair into its Bride of Frankenstein style. The warm halo is worth the pain of brushing it out after. When I emerge from the sweet singe, I’m staring at four staples Dad put in a shelf to make it stick together. It’s one thing to imagine a person gone. It’s another to imagine a person not putting staples in things ever again.

There were two raccoons. The first one I missed, the second one, I hit. There is no word for raccoon that means one who tried to lead the other across the dark road, but failed. What did the first one do, after?

Dad keeps a fan and a dehumidifier in the back of his truck to dry out the flooded basement apartments of his little women. There’s been so much rain this winter and none of us can afford to live above ground. When I discover a swampy patch of carpet in my closet, I pick up the phone.

“The good news—” I say when Dad answers. “I blow-dried my hair without blowing a fuse.”

“Progress,” he says. “And the bad news?”

“My carpet needs you.” I give him the details, the size of the swamp. He tells me he’s on his way.         

“I like to drive around with my fans,” he says. I laugh. I can hear the rattle of his truck through the speakerphone.

“I’ll be here all night,” he says.

I try to keep worrying he won’t be.

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Image: Julie Liger-Belair, A Home in the Wild, 2020, mixed media collage on paper