Robin saved me the effort. His voice was still low, still robotic. But I saw his eyes spark as he studied the fire. Mom used to read poetry at night, to Chester?
Who knows how he leapt from one thought to another? I’d stopped trying to trace him a long time ago.
“She did.” It had been Alyssa’s favorite ritual, long before I showed up on the scene. Two glasses of red wine, and she’d submit the homeliest beagle–border collie rescue that ever walked the Earth to her favorite stanzas.
Poetry. To Chester!
“I’d listen, too.”
I know, he said. But clearly, I didn’t count.
The embers spat, then settled again into reddish gray ingots. For a moment I worried that he’d ask me to name her favorite poems. Instead, he said, We should get another Chester.
Chester’s death had almost killed him. All the grief over Alyssa that he’d suppressed in order to protect me tore out of him when the crippled old beast gave up. The rages took over, and I let the doctors medicate him for a while. All he could think about was getting another dog. For a long time, I’d fought him off. Somehow, the idea traumatized me.
“I don’t know, Robbie.” I poked the cinders with a stick. “I don’t think there is another Chester.”
There are good dogs, Dad. Everywhere.
“It’s a lot of responsibility. Feeding, walking, cleaning up after it. Reading it poetry every night. Most dogs don’t even like poetry, you know.”
I’m very responsible, Dad. More responsible than I ever am.
“Let’s sleep on it, okay?”
He doused the fire in several gallons of water, to show how responsible he could be. We crawled into the two-man tent and lay faceup, side by side, no fly, just the lightest netting between us and the universe. The tops of trees waved in the Hunter’s Moon. A thought formed on his face as he studied their moving tips.
What if we hung a huge Ouija board upside down, above them? Then they could send us messages, and we could read them!
A bird started up in the woods behind our heads, another cryptic message no human would ever decode. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. I started to name it, but there was no need. The bird would not quit. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will.
Robin grabbed my arm. It’s going nuts!
The bird looped its name into the cooling dark. We started to count together, under our breaths, but gave up when we reached one hundred and the bird showed no sign of flagging. That bird was still perseverating when Robin’s eyes started to close. I nudged him.
“Hey, mister! We forgot. ‘May all sentient beings . . .’ ”
“。 . . be free from needless suffering.” Where does that come from, anyway? I mean, before Mom.
I told him. It came from Buddhism, the Four Immeasurables. “There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”
Was Mom a Buddhist?
I laughed, and he slugged my arm through two sleeping bags. “Your mother was her own religion. When she said something, it was worth saying. When she spoke, everybody listened. Even me.”
Half a vowel trickled out of him, and he hugged himself. Some large forager snapped twigs on the slope above our tent. Smaller creatures rooted through the leaf layer. Bats mapped the canopy in frequencies beyond our ears. But nothing troubled my son. When Robin was happy, he had all the Four Immeasurables covered.
“She once told me that no matter how much bad stuff she had to deal with during the day, if she said those words before bed, she’d be ready for anything the next morning.”
ONE MORE QUESTION, he said. What exactly do you do, again?
“Oh, Robbie. It’s late.”
I’m serious. When somebody at school asks me, what am I supposed to say?
It had been the cause of his suspension, a month before. The son of some banker had asked Robin what I did. Robin had answered, He looks for life in outer space. That made the son of a brand executive ask, How is Redbreast’s Dad like a piece of toilet paper? He circles Uranus, looking for Klingons. Robin went nuts, apparently threatening to kill both boys. These days, that was grounds for expulsion and immediate psychiatric treatment. We got off easy.
“It’s complicated.”
He waved toward the woods above us. We’re not going anywhere.
“I write programs that try to take everything we know about all the systems of any kind of planet—the rocks and volcanoes and oceans, all the physics and chemistry—and put them together to predict what kind of gases might be present in their atmospheres.”