“But he might come back.”
“He might.”
“I wouldn’t want him to stay if he didn’t want to.”
“I suppose not,” says Wallace. Then with some venom: “Heaven forbid he should do something he doesn’t want to do.”
“So things will stay the same?”
“I suppose they will.”
“That’s all right.”
“You can be sad. You won’t offend me.”
She looks out the window, says, “Where do you think he went?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I would be more sad if I knew where he went.”
Wallace nods. Better only to wonder what he’d chosen instead of them. “I know what you mean.”
For some time, some weeks, it seems possible Addison will return. But the leaves turn orange and the nights cold, and he doesn’t come back.
“Why do you think he didn’t stay?” Jamie is sitting on a footstool in Wallace’s studio up in the house’s turret. With charcoal on scrap paper the boy is drawing minnows hovering over a rocky river bottom. “Why did he come here at all?”
“I don’t know.” Wallace is at his easel, oils pungent on a palette, sketches pinned up around him. “I don’t know him very well. We were never close like you and Marian. I think he meant to stay, but he got spooked.” He leans to look at Jamie’s drawing. “That’s very good. I have a sense of water moving around the fish—it’s clever how you did that.”
“Spooked by what?”
Wallace’s brush nibbles at the canvas. By you. By the fact of you. “It’s only a guess, but I think he might not have liked the idea of owing us anything.”
“Why would he think he owed us?”
Wallace puts down his brush. “You are a very dear boy.”
“Why?”
“It’s a forgiving question, that’s all.”
Quietly, to the charcoal fish, Jamie says, “I don’t think I do forgive him, though.”
Life proceeds as before. Berit struggles to keep order. She tries and fails to get Marian to wear dresses. There is never quite enough money. Wallace is paid well by the university but likes to bet on cards. Sleeping dogs lie strewn through the house.
In their bedrooms where they seldom sleep, preferring the porch, the twins hoard clattery jumbles of antlers and moose paddles and foraged troves of bones and teeth. Crumbling birds’ nests line their windowsills in the company of pinecones and interesting rocks. Feathers are pinned to the walls. The twins pick up human artifacts, too: arrowheads, bits of broken crockery, bullets, nails. Jamie makes drawings of what he finds, arranges still lifes and draws them, adding color with pastels or watercolors Wallace filches for him from the university. “Here come the naturalists,” Wallace says when they return to the house in the evenings, extravagantly dirty and with full pockets. “Here come the archaeologists back from the dig.”
They do not always go to school. If it is a splendidly sunny day or an enticingly snowy one, they might wander away somewhere else. They have a friend who cuts with them, Caleb, wilder even than they are, a couple of years older, the son of a whore who lives in a sagging old cabin just down the Rattlesnake. （Gilda, Caleb’s mother, had chosen as a surname for herself and her son the name of the river that flows up from the south and joins the Clark Fork on the far side of town: Bitterroot.）
Caleb is a graceful, feline child with long black hair loose down his back, so straight and glossy that people say his father must have been either an Indian or a Chinese. He picks pockets. He steals moonshine from his mother and sweets and fishhooks from the shops downtown. He hates the men who come to his cabin, hates what his mother does with them, but will brook no insult to her. He’ll sock Marian in the gut or arm as soon as he will Jamie, and in summer all three swim naked in creeks and rivers.
Though Marian and Jamie have both gone at different times to watch through a gap in the curtains when Gilda is at work, they have not discussed what they saw. Jamie was troubled by how much bigger the man was than Gilda, the way he threw his body at hers with the mindless force of a pile driver. Gilda’s small feet in their dirty stockings bobbled. Helplessness upsets Jamie. He rescues drowning bees from the creek, brings home stray dogs, feeds abandoned baby birds with an eyedropper, then with worms he gets Marian to chop up. The birds look like angry old men with their wrinkled necks and open mouths. Some live, some die. Wallace offers little resistance to the dogs, the other creatures. “Poor soul,” he says, looking over a raven chick too weak to lift its head.