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.
Robin clutched his list. He was finding new flowers left and right. But he’d lost his ability to name things. Are these rue anemones, Dad?
He’d found a clump identical to the picture in his field guide. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
Well, the petals don’t quite match up. And the little thingies in the middle are a lot longer.
I looked at the picture and then at him. He’d lost his confidence. Four months ago, he would have been correcting the book. “Trust yourself, Robbie.”
He fretted and waved his hands in the air. Dad. Just tell me.
I confirmed his guess. He drew a clumsy little clump of rue anemone. He went on to find, then worry over, both true and false Solomon’s seal. Then he drew those, too.
Only drawing gave him a little peace. With a sharp pencil in his hand and a log to sit on, he was still okay. But it took him forever to re-create the ghostly purple streaks lining the inside of a spring beauty. He raged against the shakiness of his trout lilies. And, honestly, his draftsmanship had shriveled a little, from the airy, open boldness of a month before.
The checklist filled in. He found ten, then a dozen species of ephemerals in full flower, faster than any stranger to this place would have imagined. Each new find filled him with dogged satisfaction. Before we were half a mile up the ridge, he found every kind of plant that I’d put on my challenge. He looked back down along the wall of sun-covered, wet rock so packed with cooperating experiments. Spring will keep coming back, whatever happens. Right, Dad?
There were strong arguments either way. The Earth had been everything from hell to snowball. Mars had lost its atmosphere and fizzled away to a frigid desert, while Venus descended into hammering winds and a surface hotter than a smelter. Life could crash and spin out, pretty much overnight. My models said as much, and so did the rocks of this planet. Here we were, in a place fast becoming something new. Predictions were shaky from a sample size of one.
“Yes,” I told him. “You can count on spring.”
He nodded to himself and headed up the ridge. We came around a switchback onto a level stretch. The forest cleared from one step to the next. Lush laurel undergrowth surrendered to open stands of oak and pine. My phone pinged. It shocked me to be in coverage, even up here. But it was the job of coverage to cover every uncovered spot on Earth.
I checked. I couldn’t help it. I flicked past the lock screen—Aly and Robbie on his seventh birthday, their faces painted like tigers. Seventeen messages in six different text chains waited for me. I looked up to see Robbie heading down the trail, his gait almost easy again. I sneaked a look at the texts, fearing the worst. But I failed to imagine what that might be.
The NextGen Telescope was dead. Thirty years of planning and ingenuity, twelve billion dollars, the work of thousands of brilliant people from twenty-two countries, the hope of all astronomy, and our first good chance to see the contours of other planets. The newly reelected President had killed it with glee:
My colleagues were scrambling in the ruins, pouring out their fury, grief, and disbelief. I typed in something, five words of uncomprehending solidarity. The message queued but wouldn’t send.
Down the trail, Robbie knelt at the foot of a hemlock, fixed on something. I put my phone away and headed toward him. He stood as I approached. Did Mom ever hike this trail?