It was in my power to help him. The time for fear and principle was past. All I had to do was accept a few future risks, and I could ease his present pain. He needed medication.
One night, after a bath, he lingered in the bathroom for so long that I had to check on him. He was standing with a towel wrapped around his boy’s slight body, staring at the mirror. It’s gone, Dad. I can’t even remember what I can’t remember.
This is what I miss most about him. Even when his light went out, he was still looking.
My spring break was days away. I’d been preparing in secret. I sprang the idea on him. “How about a gigantic treasure hunt?” His shoulders fell. He was done with discovery. “No, Robbie. A real one.”
He eyed me, suspicious. What do you mean?
“Put your pajamas on and meet me in my office.”
He obeyed, too curious to refuse. When he appeared at the side of my desk, I handed him a sheet of paper filled with names, two dozen in all. Spring beauties. Sharp-lobed hepatica. Trailing arbutus. Bishop’s cap. Fire pink. Six kinds of trilliums.
“Know what these are?” If he didn’t when he started to nod, he’d figured it out by the time the nod was done. “How many can you find and draw?”
His limbs began to jitter. He snarled in distress. Dad! I held his arm to calm him.
“I mean for real. From life.”
Puzzlement kept him from melting down. His hand paddled the air, begging me to be reasonable. How? Where? As if flowers would never happen again, for someone so fallen.
“How about the Smokies?”
He shook his head, refusing to believe. Serious? Serious?
“Totally, Robbie.”
When?
“How about next week?”
He searched my face to see if I was lying. For the first time in weeks, hope trickled out of him. Can we stay in the same cabin again? Can we sleep outdoors? Can we go to that river with the rapids where you and Mom went? Then the full awfulness of life washed over him again. He raised the list of wildflower names up to eye level and groaned. How am I supposed to learn all of these in one week?
I vowed that when we came back from the woods, I’d make an appointment with his physician and start him on a new treatment.
THE RIDE DOWN MADE HIM RESTLESS. His smallest thoughts now required endless reassurance. He couldn’t stop asking about the past. Through most of Illinois and all through Indiana and Kentucky, he talked about Aly. He wanted to know where she grew up and what she studied in school. He asked how we met and how long it took us to get married and about all the places we visited before he came along. He wanted to know everything we’d done together on our honeymoon in the Smokies, and what Alyssa had liked best about those mountains.
When he wasn’t grilling me, he was studying an Appalachian wildflowers book I’d gotten him, indexed by color and organized by the time of blooming. What’s a “spring ephemeral”？
I corrected his pronunciation and told him.
Why do they go so fast?
“Because they’re down in the shade on the forest floor. They have to germinate and bud and bloom and fruit and set their seed before the trees leaf out and it’s game over.”
What was Mom’s favorite spring wildflower?
I must have known once. “I can’t remember.”
What was her favorite tree? You can’t remember her favorite tree?
I willed him to stop asking, before I forgot the little I’d ever known.
“I can tell you her favorite bird.”
He started shouting at me. It was a long trip.
I MANAGED TO RENT the same cabin we stayed in so long ago, the one with its wraparound deck open to the woods and stars. We crunched down the steep gravel drive, chasing the shadows of trees. Robin bolted from the car and took the front steps two at a time. I followed, with the bags. Inside, all the light switches still bore their labels—Hallway, Porch, Kitchen, Overhead—and the cabinets were still covered in the same color-coded instructions.
Robbie tore into the living room and flung himself onto that couch emblazoned with its procession of bears, elk, and canoes. Three minutes later he fell asleep. His breathing was so peaceful I left him there to sleep through the night. He woke only when dawn poured in.
That morning we hit the trails. I found a climb not far inside the boundary of the park that faced the southern sun while backing onto a damp ledge. Every twenty yards we came across another wet outcrop packed with more species than a manic terrarium. You could have cut out a chunk, loaded it into the cargo bay of an interstellar spacecraft, and used it to terraform a distant Super Earth.