“Why is sixteen grown-up?”
“’Cause then I can drive.”
“Is that grown-up—being allowed to drive?”
“It’s one big thing, yeah. Maybe the best.”
“Control of the machine.”
“Huh? What machine?”
“The car.”
“Oh, yeah, right. The car, the pickup, whatever.”
“What will you do when you control the machine?”
“Go wherever I want.”
“Where will you want to go?”
“As far away as I want.”
“I’ll miss you, Jojo. I had no one before you. Nothing.”
“You won’t miss me. We’ll go everywhere together.”
“Why do you want to go far away?”
“Don’t you?”
“I’ve already been far away.”
She was silent, and he asked again why she wanted to go far away. She said, “You and me, we’ll go somewhere everyone is nice and everything they say to each other is nice, and no one is mean.”
“It hurts you when they say mean things about me.”
Once more she fell silent. Then: “Mostly they’re stupid. They don’t know you like I do.” She sighed. “Eight years is a long time.”
“Not so long,” he said.
“Well, you’re eleven. You’re three years closer to sixteen.”
“I’m a lot older than that, Jojo.”
“Don’t tell me you’re twelve. I know you’re not.”
“I’m more than four thousand years old.”
“Now you’re being silly.”
“Maybe.”
“You’re being a totally silly goose.”
“Maybe what’s silly is to think we’ll go everywhere and far away together.”
“Don’t say that. We’re best friends forever.”
Standing on the veranda of the house, about fifty yards upslope from the lake, her mother called to them. They weren’t allowed to be out after dark, just two children, because coyotes might come upon them. Mother didn’t know that coyotes were no threat to Jojo when Jimmy was with her.
Abruptly the jet was shaken by turbulence, and Joanna slumped in the seat, the bracing effect of the memory undone as the aircraft dropped hundreds of feet. From other passengers came small cries and gasps of alarm, but throughout the sudden sinking and subsequent undulant ascent to their assigned altitude, Joanna was not alarmed.
She stared out the window, not with concern that she might meet the earth below in a free fall of horrific violence, but instead with an awareness of fault, of failure, of something uncomfortably close to guilt. The pledge of eternal friendship had been made when she was a child with little understanding of the sacredness of pledges, and she had failed to keep her word more because of circumstances and the death of two parents than because she made the conscious choice to turn away from him. Yet she couldn’t escape from the truth that she’d forgotten him entirely, as though he never existed. She didn’t know what suffering he had endured during the past twenty-four years or what she might have been able to do to alleviate his pain if only she had kept him in her mind and heart.
She didn’t even know if Jimmy Two Eyes was still alive.
Although she understood that guilting herself over this would risk letting true sentiment slide into sentimentality, she wondered if her loneliness was a consequence of karma, an echo of the greater loneliness to which Jimmy had been condemned when she left Rustling Willows Ranch.
But why had he never spoken to anyone but her, and then always in secret? Why had he chosen isolation and allowed everyone else to believe that he lacked the capacity to understand language?
The suburbs of the mile-high city materialized under her, and ahead was Denver International Airport, another flight to Montana, and a truth she might wish she had not pursued.
PART 2
HOMECOMING
On the quantum level, reality is spookily fragile and can be manipulated. By whom? By us.
—Ganesh Patel
25
Where the river slides past Zipporah, its course is nearly flat, with no sudden steps in the bed to churn its current into rapids, and the grassy banks fold down to it as smoothly as draped velvet. The water flows almost as silently as time.
Naked, Asher Optime bathes in the river this morning, as he does every morning, as he will until the cold of winter forces a change in his routine. He ventures from shore only until he stands waist-deep in the flow. He uses a soap made from the essential oils of certain plants, careful not to pollute the pristine water, which is so clear that he can see the bottom. His feet remain in soft silt, and he never missteps on one of the large round stones that look like a parade of turtles making their way downstream.