“I know this trip has been hard on you,” Dad said. “It’s not what you wanted it to be.” He let out a big gooey sigh. “I’m sorry you had to read all those documents, Bee. They weren’t meant for you. They weren’t something a fifteen-year-old should have had to read.”
“I’m glad I read them.” I didn’t know Mom had those other babies. It made me feel like there were all these children Mom would rather have had, and loved as much as she loved me, but I was the one who lived and I was broken, because of my heart.
“Paul Jellinek was right,” Dad said. “He’s a great guy, a true friend. I’d like us to go down to L.A. and spend some time with him one day. He knew Bernadette best. He realized that she needed to create.”
“Or she’d become a menace to society,” I said.
“That’s where I really failed your mom,” he said. “She was an artist who had stopped creating. I should have done everything I could to get her back.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know how. Trying to get an artist to create… it’s gigantic. I write code. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. You know, I’d forgotten, until I read that Artforum article, that we used Mom’s MacArthur money to buy Straight Gate. It was like Bernadette’s hopes and dreams were literally crumbling around us.”
“I don’t know why everyone’s so down on our house,” I said.
“Have you ever heard that the brain is a discounting mechanism?”
“No.”
“Let’s say you get a present and open it and it’s a fabulous diamond necklace. Initially, you’re delirious with happiness, jumping up and down, you’re so excited. The next day, the necklace still makes you happy, but less so. After a year, you see the necklace, and you think, Oh, that old thing. It’s the same for negative emotions. Let’s say you get a crack in your windshield and you’re really upset. Oh no, my windshield, it’s ruined, I can hardly see out of it, this is a tragedy! But you don’t have enough money to fix it, so you drive with it. In a month, someone asks you what happened to your windshield, and you say, What do you mean? Because your brain has discounted it.”
“The first time I walked into Kennedy’s house,” I said, “it had that horrible Kennedy-house smell because her mother is always frying fish. I asked Kennedy, What’s that gross smell? And she was, like, What smell?”
“Exactly,” Dad said. “You know why your brain does that?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“It’s for survival. You need to be prepared for novel experiences because often they signal danger. If you live in a jungle full of fragrant flowers, you have to stop being so overwhelmed by the lovely smell because otherwise you couldn’t smell a predator. That’s why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It’s literally a matter of survival.”
“That’s cool.”
“It’s the same with Straight Gate,” he said. “We’ve discounted the holes in the ceilings, the wet patches in the floors, the cordoned-off rooms. I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how people live.”
“It’s how we lived,” I said.
“It is how we lived.” A long time passed, which was nice. It was just us and the seal and Dad whipping out his ChapStick.
“We were like the Beatles, Dad.”
“I know you think that, sweetie.”
“Seriously. Mom is John, you’re Paul, I’m George, and Ice Cream is Ringo.”
“Ice Cream,” Dad said with a laugh.
“Ice Cream,” I said. “Resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”
“What’s that?” He asked, rubbing his lips together.
“Something Mom read in a book about Ringo Starr. They say that nowadays he’s resentful of the past and fearful of the future. You’ve never seen Mom laugh so hard. Every time we saw Ice Cream sitting there with her mouth open, we’d say, Poor Ice Cream, resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”
Dad smiled a big smile.
“Soo-Lin,” I started to say, but even uttering her name made it difficult to keep talking. “She’s nice. But she’s like poop in the stew.”
“Poop in the stew?” he said.
“Let’s say you make some stew,” I explained, “and it’s really yummy and you want to eat it, right?”
“OK,” Dad said.
“And then someone stirs a little bit of poop in it. Even if it’s just a teeny-tiny amount, and even if you mix it in really well, would you want to eat it?”
“No,” Dad said.
“So that’s what Soo-Lin is. Poop in the stew.”
“Well, I think that’s rather unfair,” he said. And we both had to laugh.
It’s the first time during this whole trip that I let myself really look at Dad. He had on a fleece headband over his ears and zinc oxide on his nose. The rest of his face was shiny from sunblock and moisturizer. He wore dark mountain-climbing glasses with the flaps on the side. The one lens that was taped over didn’t show because the other lens was just as dark. There was really nothing to hate him for.
“So you know,” Dad said, “you’re not the only one with wild ideas about what happened to Mom. I thought maybe she’d gotten off the ship, and when she saw me with Soo-Lin she somehow dodged us. So you know what I did?”
“What?”
“I hired a bounty hunter from Seattle to go to Ushuaia and look for her.”
“You did?” I said. “A real-life bounty hunter?”
“They specialize in finding people far from home,” he said. “Someone at work recommended this guy. He spent two weeks in Ushuaia looking for Bernadette, checking the boats coming in and out, the hotels. He couldn’t find anything. And then we got the captain’s report.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Bee,” he said carefully. “I have something to tell you. Have you noticed I haven’t been frantic about not being able to get email?”
“Not really.” I felt bad because only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t thought about Dad at all. It was true, he’s usually all into his email.
“There’s a huge reorg they’re probably announcing as we sit on these rocks.” He checked his watch. “Is today the tenth?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
“As of the tenth, Samantha 2 is canceled.”
“Canceled?” I didn’t even understand how that word could apply.
“It’s over. They’re folding us into games.”
“You mean for, like, the Xbox?”
“Pretty much,” he said. “Walter Reed pulled out because of budget cuts. At Microsoft, you’re nothing if you don’t ship. If Samantha 2 is under games, at least they can ship millions of units.”
“What about all those paraplegics you’ve been working with?”
“I’m in talks with the UW,” he said. “I’m hoping to continue our work over there. It’s complicated because Microsoft owns the patents.”
“I thought you owned the patents,” I said.
“I own the commemorative cubes. Microsoft owns the patents.”
“So, like, you’re going to leave Microsoft?”
“I left Microsoft. I turned in my badge last week.”
I’d never known Dad without his badge. A terrible sadness poured in through my head and filled me to the brim, like I was a honey bear. I thought I might burst of sadness. “That’s so weird,” is all I could say.
“Is now a good time to tell you something even weirder?” he said.
“I guess,” I said.
“Soo-Lin is pregnant.”
“What?”
“You’re too young to understand these things, but it was one night. I’d had too much to drink. It was over the moment it began. I know that probably seems really… what’s a word you would use… gross?”