IN THE SHORTENING DAYS, I worked to keep Robin at his lessons. He liked me to sit and do them with him. But the moment I turned to my own work, he lapsed into a trance.
He and I made it through the equinox, and harder still, the holidays. I lied to Aly’s family, telling them that we were celebrating somewhere else. By mutual agreement, the two of us spent the week alone. We snowshoed through the blanketed cornfields just outside of town. Robbie made ornaments for the tree from sketches cut out of his field notes. On New Year’s, all he wanted was to play endless games of Concentration with the Songbirds of the Eastern U.S. playing cards that he’d gotten me for a Christmas present. He was asleep by eight.
Throughout January, he slipped in small steps from color back to black-and-white. In early February, I gave him a one-week break from classes, apropos of nothing. He needed it. He began playing his farm game again on the computer, after months away. He was touchy when I told him to give it a break. Before the week was over, he wanted to get back to his school assignments. He didn’t have the focus to sit more than half an hour at a shot, but he was desperate to learn something. I knew I would have to bring him to a doctor if this went on much longer.
Give me a treasure hunt, Dad. Anything.
“How much of that butcher paper roll do you have left from Washington?”
He made a face. Don’t remind me about Washington. I got you in trouble.
“Robin! Stop.”
I got Dr. Currier’s whole experiment shut down. And now you see what’s happening!
“That’s not true. I talked to Dr. Currier two days ago. There’s a chance the lab will be up and running soon.”
How soon?
“I don’t know. Maybe by summer.” In that moment, it didn’t feel like a lie. And it made him sit up like an alerted prairie dog. I’d tell it again.
The thought of a reprieve seemed to give him strength. Just imagining doing the training again was almost as good as doing it. Somewhere in the universe, there are creatures for whom that’s always so. He picked at his shoelaces, stilled by contrition. He told his shoes, There’s a bunch of that roll left.
In fact, he had about ten feet. We trimmed a foot off one end. “Nine feet. Perfect. Roll it out in the living room.”
For real? He took some persuading. He rolled out a paper path through the middle of the room.
“All right. Nine feet, for four and a half billion years. That’s half a billion years per foot. Let’s make a timeline.”
He rallied a little and held up a finger. He went to his room and returned with a basket of pens and brushes. Then we both got down on the floor and went to work. I penciled in the major waypoints: the end of the Hadean, one foot into our scroll. Immediately after that, the start of life. Robbie penned in those first microbes, hundreds of colored specks you almost needed a magnifying glass to see. He filled the next four feet with a rainbow of cells.
Five feet in, I marked the moment when competition gave way to networking and complex cells swarmed the Earth. Robbie’s cells swelled a bit and gained a little texture. For two more feet, his forms unfolded into worms and jellyfish, seaweed and sponges. When I finally stopped him that night, he was himself again.
That’s a good day, he declared, as I tucked him in.
“Agreed.”
And we haven’t even gotten to the big stuff yet.
He was out in the living room when I woke the next morning, adding, refining, touching up, and waiting for me to mark the start of the main event. I penciled it in—the Cambrian explosion, just over a foot from the end of the scroll.
Dad, there’s no room left. And everything’s just starting. We need wider paper.
His arms flung outward, then dropped to his side. Enthusiasm and distress had become the same thing. I left him to it and took up my own delinquent modeling. All morning long he stayed at it. A parade of giant creatures fanned out across the width of the paper. He ate lunch on the floor, perched over his growing masterpiece. He stood and stepped back, mouth wide with pride and ire. A moment of study from above, and he dropped back down into the thick of things.
All that afternoon, we worked alongside each other. I checked in once or twice, but his immense journey was flowing along at full tilt, and the last thing Robbie wanted was help from anyone. At five, cross-eyed from too much coding, I quit to make dinner. The day had been so fine that I wanted to reward him, and that meant mushroom burgers and fries.
I put in my earbuds to listen to the news while prepping the meal. The stem rust that had killed a quarter of the wheat harvest in China and Ukraine had been found in Nebraska. Fresh water from a dissolving Arctic was flooding into the Atlantic, swirling the protective currents like a hand passed through a smoke plume. And a hideous infection was hitting cattle feedlots in Texas.