“A crystal for Christina,” he said.
“That is amazing,” Doran said. “You made this?”
“Marcus is an award-winning glassblower,” his mother said. She tilted her head. “He made me these earrings.”
Of course, LT thought. His mother had always loved bowerbirds.
The gift was very pretty, and pretty useless, too heavy for a Christmas ornament, and not a shape that could sit upright on a shelf. They’d have to hang it, but not above her bed.
“Which ear is she supposed to wear it in?” LT asked.
Marcus laughed. “Either one. She’ll have to grow into it.”
When the food arrived, LT needed to eat, and he was forced to surrender Christina to Doran. His body moved automatically as he held her, a kind of sway and jiggle that soothed her. Where did he learn that?
Mom said, “Did you call your father?”
And like that, the spell was broken. LT said, “What do you think?”
“I think you should.”
“Fuck him.”
“Hey,” Doran said.
“Right. I gotta stop swearing. Eff that guy.”
“Your mom’s right. We should give him a chance.”
“He’s had six years of chances. Any time he wants to call, I’ll pick up.” There were a few years, after college, when they talked on the phone and his father would pretend that LT lived alone. He never asked about Doran, or about their lives. Then LT sent his father an invitation to the commitment ceremony. The next time LT called, his father said that he was disgusted, and didn’t want to talk to him until he fixed his life.
His mother said, “This is different. Maybe it’s time.”
Maybe. He got up from the table.
Time itself had become different. He looked at Christina in Doran’s arms and thought, I’m going to know you for the rest of my life. The future had broken open, his week-by-week life suddenly stretching to decades. He could picture her on her first day of school, on prom night, at her wedding. He caught a glimpse of her holding a baby as tiny as she was at that moment.
Had his father felt that way, too, when he was born?
He kissed Doran’s cheek, then bent over their daughter. She was awake, dark-eyed, watching both of them. He thought, There’s no way I can go away for six months into the jungle and leave her. He wouldn’t make the choice his parents had made.
“We’ll give it a shot,” LT said. He moved his cheek across her warm head. Inhaled her scent. “Won’t we, my darlin’?”
He was reading to Christina and Carlos when the call came. Or rather, Christina was reading while LT held the book, because Christina said he was only allowed to do the Hagrid and Dumbledore voices. Carlos, five years old, lolled at the end of the bed, seemingly oblivious but missing nothing.
Doran came to the bedroom holding the cordless. “Some guy wants to talk to you. He says he’s a friend of your father’s.”
The thick Tennessee accent opened a door to his childhood. Vernon Beck, hearty as ever. He apologized for bothering LT “up there in D.C.,” but he was worried about LT’s father. “He stopped coming to work. He didn’t quit, just stopped coming. Same with church. He won’t answer the phone at all.”
“Is he sick? Did he get hurt at the yard?”
“I went over there, and he finally came out to the porch. He said he was fine, just wanted folks to leave him alone. But I don’t know. It ain’t like him.”
They talked a few minutes more. Mr. Beck apologized again for bothering him, explained how he got his number from a cousin. LT reassured him that it was all right. Asked about his son, Hale, who turned out to be doing fine, still in Maryville, working maintenance for the hospital. Had a wife and four children, all boys.
LT thought about that day they ran from the thistles. Funny how you don’t know the last day you’ll see someone. He’d spent the rest of that winter when he was thirteen daydreaming about Hale, his first big crush. He didn’t mention that to Mr. Beck, and Mr. Beck didn’t ask about LT’s husband, or children. Southern Silence.
“One more thing,” Mr. Beck said. “Your dad, he’s let things go. You should be ready for that.”
Doran asked, “What happened to your father?”
“Maybe nothing. But I think I have to go lay eyes on him.”
Christina said, “I want to lay eyes on him!”
“Me too, kiddo,” Doran said. “But not like this.”
“Can we read now?” Carlos asked.
Doran didn’t want LT to travel south. All those famine refugees landing in Florida, and the citizen militias in Texas and New Mexico. LT said his Department of Agriculture credentials would get them through any checkpoint, and besides, Tennessee was nowhere near the trouble. “It’s like going into Wisconsin,” LT said, quoting one of their favorite movies. “In and out.”
“Fine,” Doran said, “but why not just call the local police, let them check it out?” But LT didn’t want to embarrass Dad, or get him fined if he wasn’t taking care of the house.
“I owe him this much,” LT said. And Doran said, “You think so?”
Doran stayed home with Carlos, and LT and Christina left before sunrise the next morning with a cooler full of food so they wouldn’t have to depend on roadside restaurants. Christina fell asleep immediately, slept through all the phone calls he made to the Department, and woke up outside of Roanoke. He put away the phone and they listened to music and he pointed out invasives and native plants alongside the interstate. They were driving through the battlefield of a slow-motion war. Old native species were finding novel ways to fight the aliens—sucking resources from them underground, literally throwing shade above—and new invasives kept popping up into ecological niches. “It’s all happening so incrementally,” he told her, “it’s hard to see.”
“Like global warming,” Christina said. He’d let her read the opening chapter of the book he was working on, and had taken her to see the Al Gore movie, so she understood boiling frogs. This had been his job for the past decade at the Department of Agriculture: explainer-in-chief, interpreter of policy, sometimes influencer of it. He missed the fieldwork, and longed to do original research again, but the government desk job provided stability for his family.
“Remember what I told you about animal speed?” he said. “Plant speed, and planet speed, that’s just a hard timescale for us mammals to keep our attention on.”
“I know. Wheels within wheels.”
“Exactly.”
After a day of driving and a two-hour wait for inspection at the Tennessee border, they entered the foothills. His hands knew the turns. He remembered the long drive home that last day of college—and realized for the first time that his father must have had to leave the hills at one in the morning to get to Illinois State by noon, and then had turned around and driven all the way back the same day. Drove it in silence, with a hungover, secretly heartbroken boy sulking in the passenger seat.
They pulled into the long gravel drive and parked beside the house. Christina said, “You used to live here?”
“Be nice. Your grandfather built this house.”
“No, it’s cool! It looks like a fairy castle.”
His childhood home was being overrun in the same slow, grasping process that had swallowed Christina’s village. The backyard grass, ordinary and native, had grown knee high. But covering the wall of the house was a flat-leafed ivy, brilliant and slick-looking as the heart of a kiwi fruit; definitely an invasive. Was this war, or détente?
Ivy also covered the back door. He tore away a clear space, and knocked. Knocked again. Called out, “Dad! It’s LT!”
He tried the door, and it swung open. “Wait here,” he said to Christina. He didn’t want her to see anything horrible.