THE GREATEST THREAT TO THE SECURITY OF EVERY AMERICAN!!
Wild weather throughout the Southeast triggered an outbreak of Amblyomma americanum, the Lone Star tick. Robbie loved the story. He asked me to read him anything I saw about it. It might not be a bad thing, Dad. It might even save us.
He said strange things these days. I didn’t always challenge him. This time I did. “Robbie! What a horrible thing to say!”
Seriously. The infection makes people allergic to meat. No more meat eaters could be an amazing thing. Our food would go ten times farther!
The words made me queasy. I wanted Aly to intervene with the boy. But that was the problem: she was intervening already.
He trained a fourth time on the template of his mother’s ecstasy. And then a fifth. Each session left him a little more happily baffled. He spoke less and less, even as he looked and listened more. He drew into his notebook with the speed of a growing plant.
He came into my study after dinner, where I sat writing code. Was I better yesterday than I am today?
“What do you mean?”
Like, yesterday I felt like nothing could touch me. Today? Arrrggh!
He roared the roar of impatient rage his mother always did, when confronted with inane bureaucracy. But even as he sank his claws in me and shook with a frustration he couldn’t name, his aura felt large and loose. He’d grown easy in his new skin.
The days brightened. He sat with his digital microscope for hours at a time. He could stare at simple things and sketch for the better part of an afternoon. The backyard birdhouses, the contents of an owl pellet, even the mold on an orange entranced him. He still fell into old fears and angers. But they leached out of him faster, and low tide left behind all kinds of treasures in the exposed and tranquil pools.
The boy who stood on the steps of the Capitol waving his handmade placard was gone. I ought to have been relieved. But I’d go to bed at night feeling something toward my once-anxious child that seemed an awful lot like mourning.
I did a terrible thing. I sneaked a look in his notebooks. Over the millennia, millions of parents have done worse, though usually for better reasons. I couldn’t pretend he needed policing. I had no reason to eavesdrop on his thoughts. I simply wanted to listen in on his ongoing séance with Aly.
It happened on the first of August, when he asked if he could camp in the yard. I love it out there at night. So much going on. Everything talking to everything else!
You could hear the sounds from the house well enough: the choirs of tree frogs, the massed cicada choruses, and the solos of night birds that hunted them. But he wanted to be inside the sounds. It surprised me, my timid son asking to spend the night outdoors by himself. I was glad to encourage him. The world might be dissolving, but our backyard still felt safe.
I helped him pitch the tent. “Sure you don’t want company?” I wasn’t really offering. My mind was already planning my illicit evening reading.
I waited until his tent light went out. His notebooks were on top of his student desk, propped up between geode bookends. He trusted me. He knew I’d never spy on him. I found his current one, its cover emblazoned with the words PRIVATE OBSERVATIONS OF ROBIN BYRNE. I pored through the pages, feeling no guilt at all until I saw what they contained. Not a single word about his mother, or about me, either, for that matter. Not a line of his own private hopes or fears. The entire book was devoted to drawings, notes, descriptions, questions, speculations, and appreciation—the proof of other life.
Where do finches go when it rains?
How far does a deer walk in one year?
Can a cricket remember how to get out of a maze?
If a frog ate that cricket, would he learn the maze faster?
I warmed a butterfly back to life with my breath.
One mostly blank page declared:
I love grass. It grows from the bottom, not the top. If something eats the tips, it doesn’t kill the plant. Only makes it grow faster. Pure genius!!!
Underneath that manifesto he’d drawn a grass stem with all the parts labeled: blade, sheath, node, collar, tiller, spike, awn, glume… He’d copied the names from somewhere, and yet the seeing was all his. He’d circled a spot on the open blade and put a question mark next to it: What is the fold in the middle called?
My face flushed with two shames. I was spying on my son’s notebooks. And I was getting my first good look at a blade of grass. The oddest feeling came over me: the pages had been dictated from the grave. I put the notebook back in place. When he came back into the house the next morning and went to his room, I was afraid he might smell the prints of my fingers on his pages.
-
WHAT ABOUT AN ADVENTURE? he asked, and he took me on a walk around the neighborhood. I’d never seen him walk slower or swivel his head more. Ecstasy wasn’t right. Alyssa’s zeal softened in Robin, to something more fluid and improvised. Half the world’s species were dying. But the world, his face said, would stay green or even greener. He was all right now with every coming disaster, so long as he could just get outdoors.
He shocked me by greeting a young couple who came down the sidewalk toward us. How far are you going today?
The question made them laugh. Not far, they said.
We’re not going far, either. Maybe just around the block. Although, who knows?
The young woman regarded me, the muscles around her eyes praising me for a job well done. I denied all responsibility.
Down the sidewalk, he grabbed my elbow. Hear that? Two downy woodpeckers, having a chat.
I worked to hear it. “How do you know?”
Easy. “Downy goes down.” Hear how the song sinks a little, at the end?
“Well, yes. But I mean, how do you know that the downy’s song goes down?”
And there’s a house wren. Per-chick-oree!
I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. “Robbie. Who taught you this?”
Mom knew all the birdsongs.
He must have known that he was spooking me. Maybe he was chiding me for my ignorance. I’d birded with Aly all through courtship. But after we married, I left that task to other people.
“That’s true. She did. But she studied them for years.”
I don’t know them all. I only know the ones I know.
“Are you studying them somewhere? Online?”
Not really studying. I just listen and like them.
Where had I been, during all that listening? On other planets.
We walked, Robbie listening and me fretting. I was running a calculation I didn’t know how to complete. How different was he from who he’d been months ago? He’d always sketched, always been curious, always loved living things. But the boy at my right elbow was a different species from the boy who’d played with his birthday microscope in our rented cabin in the woods less than a year earlier. Fascination had made him invincible.
Two more steps and he froze in place. He waved me forward, pointing down at the sidewalk, pantomiming. On the concrete, the shadows of a nearby ironwood tree played against a field of sandy sunlight. They looked like layers of Japanese ink paintings on coarse paper, floating over one another in ghostly animation. His face broke out in contagious joy. But Robbie’s happiness and mine were as different as a tern on a thermal and a rubber-band prop plane. I got restless long before he did. He might have stayed there all afternoon watching the spectral silhouettes if I hadn’t prodded him away.