He let the leaf go, and the branch sprang back into place. I looked up at the column of tree, where every leaf was now red-haired. “Robbie. When did you learn all this stuff?”
He reared back and gawked at me, the only creature out here that baffled him. What do you mean, “when?” All along!
“But have you been teaching yourself?”
His whole body demurred. Everybody out here wants me to know them. In another moment, he’d entirely forgotten I’d ever asked him anything. He showed me an ant mound and a burrow dug under the wall of a small pavilion. I don’t know whose that is, yet. He got down on his haunches and watched the opening for long enough to make me restless. Whoever’s in there is fantastic.
He walked under the tunnel of maples and doomed ash trees as if he were in a submersible at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. I tagged along in the wake of his rotating gaze. But still, I wasn’t looking. I couldn’t clear my head of a question that had nagged at me for weeks. It came out of me even as I was thinking of some new way to suppress it. “Robbie? When you do the training? Is it like Mom’s there?”
He stopped and grabbed at a section of chain-link fence. Mom’s all over.
“Yes. But—”
Remember what Dr. Currier told us? Whenever I train myself to match the pattern, then what I’m feeling . . .
Was what she was feeling. The lemon-colored wedge, that grand prize on Plutchik’s wheel of fortune. He had Ecstasy, while I was stuck on Apprehension, Envy, or worse.
He started up again, and I followed. His hand swept along the length of suburban street. Dad? It’s like that planet we went to. The one where all the separate creatures share a single memory.
HE POINTED DOWN THE BLOCK toward the sign-vandalizing boys. Let’s see what they’re doing.
This wasn’t Robbie. Real Robbie was back in the house, playing his solo farming game, watching videos of his two favorite women, and cowering from the rest of humanity. But this boy took me by the arm and pulled.
We’ll just say hi, okay?
Words that Aly cajoled me with a thousand and one times in this life. I questioned the wisdom of heading into that cloud of testosterone. Then it hit me: A large part of this experiment consisted of training my son to unlearn the worst of the traits he’d gotten from me. In this lawless little boondock of Sol 3 that had me so cowed, my son had somehow grabbed the crown of confidence.
The three preteens glanced up from their destruction to sneer as we got close. Two of them wore ads for running shoes. The third wore camo pants and a shirt reading THESE COLORS DON’T RUN, THEY RELOAD. They stopped kicking at the sign, but in a way to suggest that they’d finish the task the moment we were gone. I’d seen a pre-election poll the week before. Twenty-one percent of Americans thought society needed to be burned to the ground. A stop sign probably seemed an easy place to start.
Before I could fake authority and tell them to go home, Robbie called out. Hey! What are you guys doing?
The one in the reload shirt snorted. “Burying our goldfish.”
Robin’s eyes widened. Really? All three boys snickered. I watched my son recoil a little, before snickering back. We had to bury our dog once. Do you know about the owl?
The boys just stared, trying to decide if he was mentally challenged. At last the smallest of the three, the one in the baseball cap reading I’M NOT REALLY THIS UGLY, said, “What are you talking about?”
The great horned owl. In the white pine by the Catholic church. The thing is huge! He spread his hands to half his height. Come on! I’ll show you.
The two small guys checked with the big one, who wavered on the corner of Disgust and Interest. Robin turned and motioned for them to follow. Amazingly, they did.
Robin led us around the block to a mat of accumulated brown needles under the branches of a big white pine. He pointed, and we four looked up. Shh. There he is.
“Where?” one of my companion thugs bellowed.
Robin shushed again, exasperated. He whispered through clenched teeth, Arggh! Right. Up. There!
I searched for half a minute before realizing I was looking into the eyes of the magnificent bird. It must have been two feet tall, but the crazed camouflage of its feathers disappeared into the pine’s fissured bark. Only the whitewash on the trunk beneath and the golden rings of its pitiless stare betrayed it. The whole neighborhood would have been out under the tree, if they’d known.
RELOAD boy whipped out his phone to take pictures. The tiny kid in the NOT THIS UGLY cap pulled out his phone, too, and began texting. The third kid shouted, “Shit!” and the great creature stooped, bobbed twice, and straightened into the air. Its huge, tapered wings opened as wide as I was tall. They pressed on the heavy air and the bird disappeared over the roof of the house across the street.