Three blocks from our house, we reached the tiny neighborhood park. He pointed to a slender fountain of a tree trunk in the corner of the playground near the swings.
That’s my favorite. I call it my redhead tree.
“Your what? Why?”
Because it has red hair. Serious! You’ve never seen it?
He steered me toward the low-hanging branches. When we reached the tree, he twisted a leaf. There, on the underside, in the junction of the side veins and the midrib, were tiny patches of red hair.
Scarlet oak. Cool, right?
“I had no idea!”
He patted me on the back. That’s okay, Dad. You’re not the only one.
Shouts came from down the street. Three boys a little older than Robbie were trying to dislodge a stop sign. Concern clouded Robin’s face. People are so strange.
He let the leaf go, and the branch sprang back into place. I looked up at the column of tree, where every leaf was now red-haired. “Robbie. When did you learn all this stuff?”
He reared back and gawked at me, the only creature out here that baffled him. What do you mean, “when?” All along!
“But have you been teaching yourself?”
His whole body demurred. Everybody out here wants me to know them. In another moment, he’d entirely forgotten I’d ever asked him anything. He showed me an ant mound and a burrow dug under the wall of a small pavilion. I don’t know whose that is, yet. He got down on his haunches and watched the opening for long enough to make me restless. Whoever’s in there is fantastic.
He walked under the tunnel of maples and doomed ash trees as if he were in a submersible at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. I tagged along in the wake of his rotating gaze. But still, I wasn’t looking. I couldn’t clear my head of a question that had nagged at me for weeks. It came out of me even as I was thinking of some new way to suppress it. “Robbie? When you do the training? Is it like Mom’s there?”
He stopped and grabbed at a section of chain-link fence. Mom’s all over.
“Yes. But—”
Remember what Dr. Currier told us? Whenever I train myself to match the pattern, then what I’m feeling…
Was what she was feeling. The lemon-colored wedge, that grand prize on Plutchik’s wheel of fortune. He had Ecstasy, while I was stuck on Apprehension, Envy, or worse.
He started up again, and I followed. His hand swept along the length of suburban street. Dad? It’s like that planet we went to. The one where all the separate creatures share a single memory.
-
HE POINTED DOWN THE BLOCK toward the sign-vandalizing boys. Let’s see what they’re doing.
This wasn’t Robbie. Real Robbie was back in the house, playing his solo farming game, watching videos of his two favorite women, and cowering from the rest of humanity. But this boy took me by the arm and pulled.
We’ll just say hi, okay?
Words that Aly cajoled me with a thousand and one times in this life. I questioned the wisdom of heading into that cloud of testosterone. Then it hit me: A large part of this experiment consisted of training my son to unlearn the worst of the traits he’d gotten from me. In this lawless little boondock of Sol 3 that had me so cowed, my son had somehow grabbed the crown of confidence.
The three preteens glanced up from their destruction to sneer as we got close. Two of them wore ads for running shoes. The third wore camo pants and a shirt reading THESE COLORS DON’T RUN, THEY RELOAD. They stopped kicking at the sign, but in a way to suggest that they’d finish the task the moment we were gone. I’d seen a pre-election poll the week before. Twenty-one percent of Americans thought society needed to be burned to the ground. A stop sign probably seemed an easy place to start.
Before I could fake authority and tell them to go home, Robbie called out. Hey! What are you guys doing?
The one in the reload shirt snorted. “Burying our goldfish.”
Robin’s eyes widened. Really? All three boys snickered. I watched my son recoil a little, before snickering back. We had to bury our dog once. Do you know about the owl?
The boys just stared, trying to decide if he was mentally challenged. At last the smallest of the three, the one in the baseball cap reading I’M NOT REALLY THIS UGLY, said, “What are you talking about?”
The great horned owl. In the white pine by the Catholic church. The thing is huge! He spread his hands to half his height. Come on! I’ll show you.
The two small guys checked with the big one, who wavered on the corner of Disgust and Interest. Robin turned and motioned for them to follow. Amazingly, they did.
Robin led us around the block to a mat of accumulated brown needles under the branches of a big white pine. He pointed, and we four looked up. Shh. There he is.
“Where?” one of my companion thugs bellowed.
Robin shushed again, exasperated. He whispered through clenched teeth, Arggh! Right. Up. There!
I searched for half a minute before realizing I was looking into the eyes of the magnificent bird. It must have been two feet tall, but the crazed camouflage of its feathers disappeared into the pine’s fissured bark. Only the whitewash on the trunk beneath and the golden rings of its pitiless stare betrayed it. The whole neighborhood would have been out under the tree, if they’d known.
RELOAD boy whipped out his phone to take pictures. The tiny kid in the NOT THIS UGLY cap pulled out his phone, too, and began texting. The third kid shouted, “Shit!” and the great creature stooped, bobbed twice, and straightened into the air. Its huge, tapered wings opened as wide as I was tall. They pressed on the heavy air and the bird disappeared over the roof of the house across the street.
Robin looked ready to lay into them for scaring the creature off. But he merely sighed at giving away such a valuable secret. He caught my eye and tipped his head, down the street toward our escape route. He didn’t talk again until we were out of earshot.
The great horned owl’s conservation rating is “Least Concern.” How stupid is that? Like: unless they’re all dead, we shouldn’t be concerned.
Even his anger seemed bountiful. I draped my arm across his shoulders. “How did you happen to find him?”
Easy. I just looked.
-
THE DAYS GREW SHORTER and summer ran its course. One night in mid-August, he asked for a planet before bed. I gave him the planet Chromat. It had nine moons and two suns, one small and red, the other large and blue. That made for three kinds of day of different lengths, four kinds of sunset and sunrise, scores of different eclipses, and countless flavors of dusk and night. Dust in the atmosphere turned the two kinds of sunlight into swirling watercolors. The languages of that world had as many as two hundred words for sadness and three hundred for joy, depending on the latitude and hemisphere.
He was thoughtful, at the story’s end. He lay back on his pillow, hands clasped behind his head, looking up at the idea of Chromat on his bedroom ceiling.