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.
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?”