And then there is the curious thing that happened the morning that we lost Candy and early the very next day.
We were sitting around the living room, listening to Candy report road conditions. Adam was at the radio; I was on the couch. Lisa was in a chair in the corner, Terry on his stand. Things happened very quickly after Candy’s distress call, and neither Adam nor I had time to pay attention to Lisa and Terry, consciously anyway. Since then, however, I’ve had time to assemble a composite of what they were doing by retrieving memories of peripheral glimpses of things I saw but which didn’t register.
Lisa sat, staring glassy-eyed into space, holding both arms of her chair with white-knuckled hands, smiling enigmatically. Terry was crouched, his body level, tail extended. His expression was even more gleefully vacant than usual. His head bobbed, his wings were half-open, and both he and Lisa swayed unevenly in unison. A short while after we lost the signal, Terry suddenly flapped violently. Both he and Lisa weaved and bobbed back and forth, squealing, “Wheee-e-e-e…!” until either Adam or I snarled at them to shut up. They did; but I heard Lisa whisper to Terry, “That was neat!”
Then early the next morning, as Adam guided the rig swiftly but smoothly along the fire trails toward the search area, they did it again! The silence echoing from the rear of the van attracted my suspicions — that’s something mothers learn early.
Terry again wore that silly, delighted, not-here expression; crouched on his stand, tail slightly elevated, wings half-spread. Lisa, too, was staring vacantly into space again, holding the arms of her chair tightly with both hands, and smiling. Both leaned and shifted their weight in unison; Terry’s movements especially were reminiscent of an aircraft banking for turns.
I watched surreptitiously in the sun-visor mirror until it was over. As before, both returned to an awareness of their surroundings simultaneously but apparently independently. Lisa blinked a couple times and then sighed happily. Terry resumed his normal upright posture and shook himself briefly to settle his feathers. Lisa glanced at him and grinned. The bird bobbed his head in reply.
Now, I’m an engineer. My training deals with concepts capable of mathematical proof, and their relationships to tangible objects or provable intangibles. I have an imagination, but it’s under control. Thus far I’ve never had trouble differentiating between fantasy and reality. Nor have I had difficulty keeping what I want to be separate from what is.
But now I’m not sure. Events of the past few days hint at things beyond my training and experience. Sometimes I wonder if I’m letting my imagination run, fed by Adam’s previous speculations, and seeing more than is there. At other times I wonder if even his suspicions fall short of the truth; if perhaps we’re seeing surface indications of a phenomenon operating on a level we’re not equipped to perceive.
However, I’ve always prided myself on an open mind. I’ve never ruled out something without hard evidence and/or math to justify my opinion. I’ve always believed in, and tried to practice, the scientific method: When faced with an enigma, I’ve always deferred judgment until completing a proper study of the available data. Mere absence of positive data does not prove the negative. In fact, several times I have refused to venture a professional opinion when I judged that the data, while unanimously pointing to a certain conclusion, was insufficient to support it.
Nor have I ever allowed my own involvement to influence my observations and/or conclusions. So far, that is. I wonder if I have this time. I’m very uncomfortable about this. Lisa is my baby, my first born, all that remains of the love I shared with Jason. I may, in fact, be guilty of resisting the conclusion that a growing body of evidence increasingly suggests:
Lisa or Terry, or both, may, through some unknown mechanism, be in touch with Candy. I can’t imagine how they could be, but neither can I prove that they aren’t. If they are, they’re not any clearer about how it works than I am — and whatever it is, if anything, it’s not directional; Lisa has no more idea where Candy is than I do.
I’ve tried to question her about how she knows whatever it is she thinks she knows, but I haven’t had much luck with it. I don’t think she’s being deliberately evasive, but somehow every conversation ends up back where it started, with no identifiable information changing. hands. When I tried to find out what she and Terry were doing right after we lost Candy’s signal, for instance, it went like this:
“Lisa, what were you and Terry doing? Were you playing a game?”
“We were going fast.”
“But you were sitting in a chair. How could you be going fast?”
“Candy was going fast.”
“But Candy wasn’t here.”
“No; she was going fast.”
“But if she wasn’t here, how do you know she was going fast?”
“I felt fast.”
“What felt fast?”
“Candy.”
“But she wasn’t here?”
“No; how could she be here and go fast?”
“Well, where did the feeling come from?”
“From Candy.”
“Oh. What did it feel like?”
“Fast, it felt fast!”
“What felt fast?”
“Candy did.”
“How did you know she went fast?”
“By feeling it.”
“But how could you know that, sitting in a chair?”
“By feeling it.”
“Feeling what?”
“We were going fast.”
An alternate ending to this conversation is a blank look and “I don’t know.”
I’m beginning to suspect that part of the problem is that Lisa and I don’t share common referents to describe what she’s trying to tell me. This could give the term “generation gap” a new lease on life.
A week now, and still no sign of Candy.
We’re not a happy group: Adam’s determination has taken on overtones of desperation. Lisa has been uneasy this past couple of days as well. She still insists that Candy is fine, but admits that she’s “awful busy, and kind of scared.” Which describes my own feelings in a nutshell.
Even Terry is no longer his usual carefree self. He’s still eating enthusiastically, so I’m not worried that he’s working on the Ellery Green syndrome, but he’s growing more subdued day by day.
Apart from that, he’s just plain driving us mad! His vocabulary has shifted back into high gear. He’s talking absolutely nonstop again, employing words in combinations that none of us have ever used in front of him, forming sentences that he simply can’t have heard before anywhere.
His behavior defies rational explanation. When Candy was here, we could speculate that he was taking it from her thoughts somehow. But she’s not here; and even if she were, her presence would hardly explain this, delivered in fits and snatches over the course of several days:
“…yellow stripe on green first, then black stripe on green, then solid red. Right? Stupid cam-latch…!”
“…if the total is larger than sigma, colon; go to sub-YBVD. If larger than lambda, colon; go to sub-YBVE. If less than sigma, go to sub-YBVF…”
“…twist right and pull. I mean left! — I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
Lisa says she knows where he’s getting it, but her explanations haven’t shed any more light on this than they have anything else.
Lord, I wish we knew something. The only thing worse than uncertainty is — probably the truth…