Parental absence and abandonment

Parental absence and abandonment in the novel are not a single event but a pattern passed between generations: a father vanishes without explanation, children lose parents to death, and a family’s supernatural bargain turns children into offerings. Against these ruptures, the story sets acts of care that endure across time and, finally, a rescue that refuses to accept a child’s disappearance as final.

Apollo’s Father and the Unanswered Departure

By Apollo Kagwa’s fourth birthday, Brian West was gone. His absence was not explained as an ordinary separation: he had not run off with another woman or returned to Syracuse, and he left no discernible trail. For Apollo and Lillian Kagwa, he seemed to have vanished from existence. The lack of an explanation makes the disappearance more than a missing person’s case in the family’s life; it leaves a young child to make sense of a loss without knowing whether his father chose to leave, was prevented from returning, or was still alive.

Soon after Brian West disappeared, Apollo began having a recurring nightmare. A man knocked at the apartment door, pushed his way inside, and removed one face to reveal another beneath it: the face of Apollo’s father. Fog poured from Brian West’s mouth, then filled the apartment as the sound of rushing water rose around them. His father carried him through it. The dream ended with the words, “You’re coming with me.” Yet when Lillian asked why the words frightened him, Apollo explained that the feeling was not fear but longing. His question, “Why didn’t he take me with him?”, exposes the child’s interpretation of abandonment: the anguish lies in being left behind, not simply in the frightening dream of being carried away.

The nightmare returned night after night for weeks. Apollo stopped wanting to sleep, while Lillian dreaded the moment her four-year-old would wake in terror. Eventually the dream passed, or Apollo stopped speaking about it. Life settled into a difficult new arrangement: Lillian worked full time, studied on Saturdays to become a legal secretary, and raised Apollo alone. He grew into a bookish, self-contained, watchful child. The end of the dream did not restore the missing father; it marked the beginning of a family life organized around his absence.

Erasure, Return, and Inherited Fatherhood

Eight years passed with Brian West unmentioned. By the time Apollo turned twelve, neither he nor Lillian expected to speak of him again. In the fall of 1989, however, Apollo received a gift from his father: a box of objects tied to Brian West and Lillian’s earlier life. By then Lillian had returned to her maiden name, and Apollo had legally become a Kagwa. The change of surname made their separation from Brian West official, but the box reopened a connection they had tried to erase.

As an adult, Apollo recounts the disappearance to his infant son, Brian Kagwa. During tummy time in the basement of their Riverdale home, he tells the baby that his grandfather disappeared when Apollo was four, that he used to dream about him leaving, and that Brian Kagwa was named after him. Apollo also explains that the gift box arrived when he was twelve and wonders aloud why his father sent it before disappearing again. This time, Apollo interprets the gesture through his own experience of loving a child: he thinks Brian West wanted him to know that he had mattered, and not to spend his life believing otherwise. He admits that he does not know what circumstances his father faced, or whether he is still alive. The interpretation offers Apollo a way to understand the gift, not proof of Brian West’s motives.

Apollo’s promise to his son is shaped by the very uncertainty he cannot resolve. He says that even if he were trapped on Saturn, he would find a way to send a message and let Brian Kagwa know he was loved. The contrast is pointed: Apollo cannot recover his father or establish why he left, but he can make communication and reassurance part of his own fatherhood. Naming his son after Brian West carries the absent man forward, while Apollo’s promise attempts to keep the name from carrying only abandonment.

Emma’s Loss and the Fear of Losing Brian

Emma Valentine’s fear of separation has its own family history. On April 14, 1988, a fire trapped her and her sister, Kim Valentine, with their parents. Kim remembers their father bringing the girls into the kitchen, where their mother pulled Emma into her lap and held her tightly. Their mother said she did not want to leave her daughters orphaned and believed it might be better for them to die with her than face the world alone. Their father had already taken Kim outside, but then returned to the burning house and went back in with their mother. His final look at Kim remained part of her memory, though she could not know what he meant to communicate.

The sisters survived, were treated in hospital for smoke inhalation for five days, and then entered foster care. They lived with Nathan and Pauleen, whom Emma remembers for Pauleen’s oatmeal cookies. Their parents’ deaths did not leave them without care altogether, but the passage from family home to hospital and foster placement permanently shaped the sisters’ understanding of safety, attachment, and loss.

Years later, Emma’s concern for her own infant son, Brian Kagwa, becomes entangled with that earlier trauma. While exhausted and back at work too soon, she admits to Kim that sometimes she looks at the baby and does not think he is her son. His eyes or the way he puckers his lips can make him seem like the child she gave birth to and, at the same time, like someone else. She says that when she holds him with her eyes closed, she can almost feel a difference. The fear does not establish that Brian has changed; it shows how intensely Emma experiences the possibility of losing the person she loves most.

Emma’s protective response takes a concrete form: she has obtained chains and wants to wrap them around the security gate on the fire escape outside Brian’s room. She worries Apollo will object, and asks Kim to help her present the chains as a doctor’s orders. Kim connects the sight of Emma’s fear to their mother on the day of the fire, while also reminding her that exhaustion and the early loss of their parents help explain her terror. Her response combines practical assistance with recognition of the past. The chains may make Emma feel safer, but the scene locates their meaning in a history that cannot be made safe simply by locking a door.

Abandonment as a Repeating Pattern

The novel enlarges the theme beyond human bereavement through the history of the troll and the Knudsen family. Jorgen Knudsen recounts that Nils Knudsen became the creature’s caretaker under a bargain requiring a child. When the obligation could no longer be postponed, Nils took his daughter, Agnes Knudsdatter, into the woods and delivered her to the cave. Apollo then sees a wall of images arranged like a timeline: drawings, charcoal renderings, daguerreotypes, photographs, and early color pictures, all of infants and none of children older than a year. The sequence makes the bargain’s repeated cost visible. What a family could describe as caretaking or appeasement appears in the accumulated images as the repeated removal of children from their lives.

The uncertainty around who counts as a parent or protector continues in the account of the troll’s efforts to raise the children it receives. Jorgen objects when Apollo describes the children as fed to the creature, insisting that it tries to raise them. That claim does not undo the fact of their delivery to the cave; instead, it sharpens the novel’s distinction between claiming a parental role and protecting a child from harm. Kinder Garten’s computer displays photos of the same small child at different moments in her first six months, another intimate record set against the plot’s history of sacrifice. The images preserve a child’s early life even as the adults’ choices threaten the child’s safety.

The rescue of Brian Kagwa gives the pattern a reversal. Swallowed whole by the troll, he is still alive when Apollo and Emma find him. They tear open the creature’s belly sack by hand and pull their son back into the world. The narration calls him “the only child ever born twice.” His return does not erase Apollo’s childhood loss or Emma’s fear, but it turns the story’s recurring disappearance into a moment in which both parents act together to bring their child back.

Narrative Significance

The theme joins private family pain to the novel’s fairy-tale structure. Apollo’s childhood dream gives emotional form to an absence for which he has no explanation; his later account to Brian Kagwa shows how that wound informs the promises he makes as a father. Emma’s dread likewise becomes legible through the remembered fire and the orphaning that followed it, rather than as a free-floating fear. In both families, what adults do—or fail to do—determines what children must carry forward.

The troll’s cave makes abandonment grotesquely literal, while the infant photographs and Brian Kagwa’s rescue complicate any simple division between birth, possession, and care. The novel places a father who disappeared, parents lost in a fire, a daughter delivered to a monster, and a child recovered from its body within the same larger inquiry: whether love can be trusted when a child is vulnerable to being left behind. Its answer is not that the past can be repaired. It is that care becomes meaningful through action—sending a message, staying with a child, or reaching into danger to bring one home.