The kitchen lights were off. There were dishes in the sink, a pair of pots on the stove.
He called for his father again. His toe snagged on something. A vine, snaking across the floor. No, many vines.
He stepped into the living room—and froze. Ivy covered everything. A carpet of green clung to the walls. The fireplace burst with green foliage, and the tall stone altar of the chimney had become a trellis. Vines curled through doorways, snaked along the stair rails. Greenish sunlight filtering through the leaf-covered windows made the room into an aquarium. The air was jungle thick and smelled of fruiting bodies.
He stepped closer toward the fireplace, spied dots of white and red nestled into the leaves. Was the ivy blooming?
“What are you doing here?”
LT startled. The voice had come from behind him.
“Dad?”
His father sat in his armchair, nestled into the vines. Leaves draped his shoulders like a shawl. He wore a once-white UT Vols sweatshirt that seemed too big for him. His hair was shaggy, a steel gray that matched the stubble on his face. He looked too thin, much older than he should. LT felt as if he’d been catapulted through time. He hadn’t seen or spoken to this man for almost twenty years, and now he wasn’t even the same person.
His father said, “Who’s this?”
LT thought, Oh God, not Alzheimer’s, and then realized that Christina had come into the room.
She was looking up at the walls, the high ceiling, slowly turning to take it all in. “Dad…” Her voice was strange.
“It’s okay, honey, there’s nothing to be—”
“This is awesome.”
She lifted her hands to her head as if to contain the shock. A sound like applause erupted around the room. The leaves were shaking.
She looked at the corner, then up. “Dad, do you see it?”
He could, a green shape against the green. Enmeshed in leaves, an oak-thick stalk rose up in the corner. At the top, a bulbous head a yard wide was bent against a cross-timber, so that it seemed to be looking down at them. Its right arm stretched across the room, where broad leaves splayed against the wall as if holding it up. Its other arm hung down. Finger leaves brushed the floor.
“Holy fucking––”
“Dad,” Christina chided. She walked toward the plant. Lifted her hands above her head. The leaves of its arms rattled like a hundred castanets.
She laughed, and bent at the waist. Slow Mo’s huge head eased left, then right.
LT’s father said, “Isn’t he a lovely boy?”
Geological time, plant time, animal time… and inside that, yet another, smaller wheel, spinning fast. His father’s body had become a container for cells that lived and replicated and mutated at frightening speed.
On the second morning at Blount Memorial Hospital, Christina sat at the edge of her grandfather’s bed, curled her fingers around his (carefully not disturbing the IV tubes taped to the top of his hand), and said, “I read a pamphlet about colon cancer. Would you like me to tell you about it?”
His father laughed. “Are you going to be a scientist like your father?” He was remarkably cheery, now that equipment had rehydrated him and delivered a few choice opioids.
She shook her head. “I want to be a real doctor.”
LT, listening to on-hold music on his cell, said, “Hey!”
Doran came back on the line. “Okay, I got him an appointment with Lynn’s oncologist. Bring him here. I’ll move Carlos into Christina’s room.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“I would only do this for my favorite person. Besides, I don’t think anybody else is stepping up. You’re an only child, right?”
“Uh, kind of.” He’d have to explain later.
He gave Christina a five and told her to sneak some ice cream into the room. “He likes rocky road, but chocolate will do.”
His father watched her go. “She reminds me of your mother.”
LT thought, Sure, this tiny, dark-haired, brown-skinned girl is so much like your blonde, dancer-legged wife.
“I mean it,” his father said. “When she looks at me—it was like that with Belinda. That light.”
“Dad—”
“All the boys in that school, and she chose me.”
“Dad, I need to tell you some things.”
“I’m not leaving the house.”
“You can’t go back there. I had Mr. Beck check it out. There are roots running through the floorboards, wrapped around the pipes. The wiring’s been shorted out. You’re lucky the place didn’t burn down.”
“It’s my house. You can’t tell me—”
“No, it’s Mo’s house now. It’s been his for years.”
On that last Thanksgiving he hosted in the Virginia house, the topic of conversation was, appropriately enough, food.
“We haven’t published yet, but the data’s solid,” Christina said. “We’ve got an eater.”
Cheers went up around the table. “Were you using the cyanobacteria?” LT asked. Just a few months ago, her gene-hacking team at McGill was making zero progress. “Or one of the Rhodophyta?”
“Let the woman speak!” LT’s mother said. Christina, sitting beside her, squeezed her arm and said, “Thanks, Mimi.”
“She needs no encouragement,” Christina’s husband said, and Carlos laughed.
“Here’s the amazing thing—we didn’t engineer it. We found the bacteria in the wild. Evolving on its own.”
“You’re kidding me,” LT said.
Christina shrugged. “It turns out we should have been paying more attention to the oceans.”
LT tried not to hear this as a rebuke. As the USDA’s deputy secretary, he orchestrated the research grants, helped set the agenda for managing the ongoing crisis. It was a political job more than a scientific one, and much of the time the money had to go into putting out fires. So even though everyone knew that most of the seeds had gone down in water, the difficulty in retrieving them meant that almost all the research on water-based invasives focused on ones near the surface: the white pods like bloated worms floating in Lake Superior, the fibrous beach balls bobbing in the Indian Ocean, the blue fans that attached themselves to Japanese tuna like superhero capes.
Christina said that the bacteria were found feeding on rainbow mats. The scientific community had missed the explosion of translucent invasives hovering in the ocean’s photic zone, until they linked and rose to the surface in a coruscating, multi-colored mass. The satellite pictures of it were lovely and terrifying. The alien plants were so efficient at sucking up carbon dioxide, in a few decades of unrestricted growth they could put a serious dent in global warming—while maybe killing everything else in the ocean.
But somehow, fast-evolving Earth organisms were trying to eat them first. Or at least, one species of them. But if one Earth organism had figured it out, maybe others had, too.
“You have to tell us how they’re breaking down those peptides,” LT said.
“Or not,” Carlos said.
“I have a story,” said Bella, Christina’s four-year-old daughter. “During craft time, this girl Neva? It was a disaster.”
“Wait your turn, darling,” Aaron said. Christina’s husband was a white man from Portland. He ran cool to Christina’s hot, which was good for Bella.
Through some quasi-Lamarckian process, LT’s children, and his children’s children, had inherited his most annoying conversational tendency. On Thanksgiving they didn’t go around the table saying what they were thankful for, but rather took turns explaining things to each other. Nothing made LT happier. All he wanted in the world was this: to be surrounded by his family, talking and talking. Much of the world was in dire shape, but they were rich enough to afford the traditional dry turkey breast, the cranberry sauce with the ridges from the can, sweet potato casserole piled with a layer of marshmallow.