Daud spent his days with my mother, observing lemurs in the rainforest and trapping and tagging specimens, so they could analyze how deforestation had changed their patterns of eating and mating and nesting. Afterwards, we would have dinner together on the concrete terrace that extended out the back of the hotel. At these dinners, I became a kind of pet for my mother and Daud. During the day, they had lemurs in common and at night, they had me.
“Celia has the most astonishing memory,” my mother said one evening, after we’d finished our bowls of lichee and mango. She asked me to recite one of the lists she’d taught me since my father left, like European cities with the highest crime rates or the most polluted places on earth.
“Come on,” my mother urged. “Don’t be modest. How about pollution this time?”
I would have preferred to list the names of everyone who’d swum the English Channel, like Lynne Cox, who’d done it when she was only fifteen, or talk about Lewis Gordon Pugh, who broke the record for the coldest long-distance swim in Antarctica.
“Ranipe, India,” I began. “Then La Oroya, Peru, and Linfen, China.” From there, I moved to Dzerzhinsk in Russia and Haina in the Dominican Republic and Kabwe in Zambia.
“And of course,” I finished. “There’s Chernobyl.” My mother had always been fascinated by the ruined landscape of Chernobyl. Anyone who keeps a nuclear power plant in business, she liked to say, should have to eat their own plutonium.
“Peru?” Daud said in response to my list. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“It’s because of the metal processing plant in La Oroya,” I replied. “And the toxic emissions of lead.”
“What else have you got?” he asked, ladling lichee juice into his spoon.
“A list of all the famous scientists who’ve committed suicide,” I said. “And how they did it.”
“I didn’t know that many had,” he replied, then sat back in his chair and waved his hand, as if to say but prove me wrong.
I cited Adolphe d’Archiac, who threw himself into the Seine River, and Percy Williams Bridgman, who shot himself, and James Leonard Brierley Smith, who took cyanide, and Viktor Meyer, who also took cyanide. When my mother taught me this list, she said I needed to understand the toll answering important scientific questions could take on a person. After Viktor Meyer, I noticed Daud was staring at me, holding his spoon in midair, and I grew shy from his attention.
“Seems cyanide was the way to go,” he said after I’d stopped talking.
“It does kill you pretty quickly,” I said.
“June.” He turned to my mother. “You certainly have given your daughter quite the education.”
“Most parents shield their children from reality,” she said. “But I wanted Celia to learn about hardship early on.”
My mother started going on about pain being the root of knowledge, a Simone Weil quote she never attributed, but I had stopped listening. Instead, I looked at Daud, who was gazing at my mother, entranced, no doubt, by the way she spoke. The lilt in her voice still got my attention, even though I’d been hearing it all my life.
I kept in touch with my father after he settled in Alaska. He wrote me long letters about the endless dark of winter and the way the ice glowed silver during twilight and Lana, the woman who had been his ice-fishing guide. He was living in her cabin outside Fairbanks. I never told my mother how much I looked forward to his letters. Sometimes, if we’d been traveling for a few months, I’d find two or three waiting for me in New York. I was careful to not let her know when I started writing back.
My father was concerned that I wasn’t going to school. I assured him that while I wasn’t in the classroom, I was still getting an education of sorts. I had, for example, become fluent in Spanish and French and, in a letter sent from Hotel Le Dauphin, I wrote him some words in Malagasy—Tsy azoko for I don’t understand, veloma for goodbye. I knew rainforests once covered fourteen percent of the earth, but now it was down to six. I could identify the medicinal sedges used to treat dysentery and fevers, explain how carnivorous plants digested insects. As soon as she finishes her lemur research, I’ ll be studying right angles and Beowulf in New York again, I kept promising my father in my letters, adding on more than one occasion that my mother had worked something out with my head master, which was a lie. I didn’t know where my mother and I were headed after Madagascar, although I had a feeling it wasn’t upstate New York. She’d always been a light traveler, but when she finished packing for this trip, her closet was nearly empty. Something had changed. I just didn’t know what.
There were several times when I considered asking my father if I could live with him, but I never did — somehow sensing, without him ever saying as much, that Alaska wasn’t an option for me. I did visit him once at Lana’s cabin, three months before my mother and I left for Madagascar. Lana turned out to be a lanky, dark-haired woman, elegant in a quiet, vaguely sad sort of way. She had lived in Alaska all her life and had no desire to travel elsewhere. My father and I never talked about his leaving: we seemed to have a mutual understanding that what was in the past should stay there. He took me bird-watching every morning, and we observed great gray owls and American dippers through binoculars. In the afternoons, we went to a lake near Lana’s cabin — a pond really, small and sunken and rimmed with brown grass — and listened to the arctic loons howl in the distance.
At night, Lana would fry fish and after dinner, we sat on the porch and drank beer until the stars pulsed. Our time together was pleasant, but cautious, like a trio of acquaintances leery of attempting more than small talk. One night, Lana told us the Inuits believed death dwelled in the sky and pointed out the aurora borealis, where you were supposed to see images of loved ones dancing in the next life. I searched for my mother, but didn’t see anything that reminded me of her and was relieved. At the time, she was finishing a river expedition in the Amazon and if something had happened, I probably wouldn’t have known about it yet. I stayed in Alaska for eight nights and during every one, I dreamt of Amazonian snakes: silvery blindsnakes and banded pipesakes, giant vipers and anacondas. I would wake in the early morning, kicking away the sheets in a panic, to make sure nothing was coiled at the bottom of the bed.
One evening, while my father and Lana were out on a walk, I searched a chest drawer for matches to light the kindling I’d arranged in the fireplace and found a bundle of letters. They were the letters I’d sent my father during my travels. As I unfolded them one by one, I was struck, despite less than a year having passed, by how young the handwriting looked: loopy letters that couldn’t hold a straight line on the page. A child’s handwriting, I’d thought when I finished reading them, the house dark and the fireplace still cold. A child’s promises.
Every morning, my mother and Daud went into the field and didn’t return until dusk. Once my mother, wanting me to do some exploring of my own, arranged for a villager to take me down the river in a pirogue, a canoe made from a hollowed log. At first, I thought the stretch of water that divided the rainforest might be a good place for practicing my butterfly, but every time I saw a crocodile basking on the banks, something in my chest clutched.
I tried passing the time by reading. It was cooler in my hotel room and I’d snuck some fashion magazines into my suitcase (my mother disapproved of magazines unless they had to do with science). After reading each one twice, I grew bored and moved onto the books my mother had packed for me, books about women having adventures: Out of Africa, Jane Eyre, Delta of Venus. But I couldn’t concentrate with the Indris and the stories didn’t really appeal to me, the mess of love and longing, women adrift. I would have preferred to read about swimming techniques, breathing control and resistance training. Some afternoons, I spent the whole day counting and re-counting the money I’d been hoarding since I began traveling with my mother: the pesos leftover from what she’d handed me to buy chajá cakes for her and Alfonso in Uruguay, the fifty-peso note she’d given me for a camera in Argentina, the stack of ariarys she’d allotted me when we arrived in Madagascar. Eventually I began leaving the hotel, but without the excitement I had earlier in the year, when life with my mother was still enticing. Instead there was a heaviness, a feeling of premature exhaustion and age.