Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  A dragonfly buzzed above the baby pool, but the duck did not snap at it. He watched it, his head following the insect’s arc and swimming in small circles to follow its course. When the dragonfly landed on the rim of the pool, the duck slowly paddled toward it. As if, the children thought, he meant to sneak up on it. Number Twelve paddled, occasionally casting glances back the children’s way, they were sure, until his beak was an inch from the quivering blue dragonfly.

  Honk! he erupted, and the dragonfly startled upward. Honk honk! he called after the insect, then buzzing, then gone.

  The Paradise Duck honked at the sky another moment, bereft, and almost toppled himself in the pool by looking up at the blue nothingness. Nolan almost reached out for him, concerned. But the duck quickly forgot about his lost friend and started splashing himself, chasing the water droplets that coursed over his back before sinking into his pregnable feathers.

  Elsa got closer and held out her hand. The duck swam over and pressed his cool, blunt beak into the soft place where Elsa’s life-line bisected her palm. Finding it empty, the duck butted her hand with his soft head. A chirruping noise came from low in his throat.

  The children had watched the buffleheads for a week now. They had seen them glide stoically, and hunt efficiently, and mate violently. Their father was right about one thing: this duck was different. He was not like the regal birds on the deck, bearing their dampened underwings nobly. Was not like the buffleheads assembled on fallen trees, arching and posing to dry themselves. In fact, Duck Twelve seemed to not even notice his dampness, though he was very wet.

  He’s retarded, Nolan said.

  Don’t say that, said Elsa. She had been a second-grade teacher long enough to know that no one should ever use that word. And yet, Elsa also knew that Nolan was right.

  She didn’t want to believe it.

  She looked at Esther. Is he tame? Did you tame him, Esther?

  Esther shook her head. Born that way, she said.

  But you’re feeding him, Elsa said.

  Your father started feeding him first.

  Dad would never, Nolan said. Ian Grey, feeding table scraps to a study subject?

  Esther shrugged. Your father loved this duck. She stroked Twelve’s back. He had this trick, she said, where he’d squeeze the insides of a dinner roll into a ball in his hand. The duck would chase it around his palm for ages, nosing it for fun before he finally decided to eat the thing.

  That’s hardly a trick, Elsa said, as she considered everything she’d ever done to try to earn Ian’s attention or delight. She had been ready to go to Mars, for Christ sake. A dough ball.

  So he was training him to do it? Nolan said. It was unprofessional. It was silly. It was the indulgent play of a father, and Nolan found it impossible to imagine Ian doing such a thing.

  You father seemed to think there wasn’t any risk of us influencing his behavior, Esther said. Ian claimed the duck didn’t retain learned behaviors. Didn’t seem to apply things that had happened in the past to his present situations. Like he wakes up wiped clean every day. The bread ball thing was a kind of test, I think. Every time your father offered his hand, that duck lost his tiny head for it like it was the very first time.

  Elsa’s throat caught. What the fuck, she said. The duck quacked at her. He tilted his perfectly round head, as if asking what the problem was.

  Nolan laughed. He sat down on the porch, knees crooked, and held his own head in his hands and laughed.

  Elsa ignored him. I thought the mutations were about bringing the duck back to some purer state or something, she said. Improving quality of life.

  Esther nodded. She was patting Nolan’s shoulder with one hand, and dandling the other in the pool, Twelve chasing her fingers around. Yes, she said. Your father thought this was it. Look at him! Duck wakes up happy. Everything delights him. And he doesn’t seem to be concerned with anything, not even meeting his basic needs.

  But that makes him lousy at survival! Doesn’t it? Elsa was trying not to shout. If the duck left now, she’d be sure she’d hallucinated it. She insisted, If he’s not paying attention to, like, food? The weather?

  Backward, Esther said. Ian said he was proof of things gone backward because he’s less focused on survival. He doesn’t even mate at the right times for his mates’ ovulation.

  What is he mating for? Nolan said, out of breath.

  Seemingly it’s whenever the mood strikes him, Esther said, patting his shoulder once more.

  This is crazy, Elsa said. He’s an aberration. It’s nuts to see significance in one retarded duck.

  Nolan stood up. I love him, he told Elsa. I love this fucking duck.

  Aberration can be another word for bellwether, Esther said.

  Elsa tried to take a deep breath, but felt tight-chested and jumpy.

  Esther, she said, was he right?

  All of us think we’re right, Esther said. Was he any more right than the rest of us? She shrugged.

  The duck swam from one side of the baby pool to the other in a tight serpentine. He pressed his beak to the colorful beach balls printed on the pool’s plastic, investigating, but in such a way that it seemed to Elsa he did not even take his own investigation very seriously. He was, Elsa thought, cavorting.

  And this duck, Elsa said, to no one, to Nolan, to her father, this is supposed to be a good thing?

  Nolan put a hand on her shoulder and pointed at the duck. Paradise! he said.

  Their father had spent months following this duck across the island. Watching it swim and play. Watching it care about and get distracted by the wrong things. Watching it eat and breed for the unproductive joy of it. Watching it fuck and love wrong too. Naturally speaking, the duck was an abomination. It was doomed. It was delightful. It had filled Ian with glee and even hope. It seemed, in his journals, that Ian had loved the Paradise Duck. And if this was possible, the children knew, it was also possible he had not forgotten them, stupid blundering disappointments that they were. They’d amounted to so little.

  They were not scientists or giants or Mars colonists.

  And still.

  Esther came over. She offered Elsa the clippers.

  Do it, she said.

  What? Elsa said.

  Nolan reached into the pool and picked up the Paradise Duck. He did not resist and let Nolan hold him, loaflike, to his chest. Nolan tugged the green ID band away from the duck’s scaly ankle.

  You’re going undercover, Esther said, stroking the duck’s belly.

  Elsa took the clippers and snipped the ID band free.

  Nolan lifted the duck, expecting it to fly away with its newfound freedom, but it only tilted its head backward at him and quacked delightedly.

  Elsa pocketed the green band.

  Nolan returned the still-quacking duck to the pool. Afloat now, the Paradise Duck began investigating the colors of the beach ball pattern all over again, as if it were for the very first time.

  Park Rapids

  THIRTY YEARS BACK

  Before Ian found out Elsa was not his, before he left, before Ingrid had to sell the farmhouse and the animals, before they moved to Potato Lake, before Nolan existed—

  It was summer on the farm and the days melted into one another and the stream of time carried Elsa along so carelessly that it felt as if time was not moving at all.

  Elsa’s only job was to help Ian feed Sweet Jane, a milk goat, and Snyder, a fat pony. In the morning, Ian and Elsa forked hay into the animals’ feeders, and then they mucked the stalls and pen. Elsa had her own pitchfork. She and Ian made the rounds, shoveling manure into a red plastic wagon hitched to a four-wheeler.

  What did the wise man say? Ian said.

  Never shovel manure into the wind, Elsa said.

  When the pen was clean, Ian climbed on the four-wheeler, and Elsa got on behind him, hugging hi
s waist. Ian ripped the engine and drove it down to the manure pile where they’d shovel out the wagon. On the ride back, he drove fast, and Elsa pressed her face against the back of Ian’s shirt, warm from the sun, and felt the diesel-smelling world rip itself to pieces as the four-wheeler shook and they climbed the hill to the barn.

  Ingrid took days off, and they went to the lake to swim, and when Ingrid lifted the hair from Elsa’s neck with one hand and rubbed sunblock onto her shoulders with the other, Elsa sat very still.

  Elsa opened her eyes underwater in the lake and spied on turtles and fish and rocks and reeds, and if she found a white rock, she would bring it to Ian and he would throw it for her, and Elsa would have to dive and search for it glowing in the sand and then carry it back to him.

  In the evening, Elsa gave the animals their hay. Sweet Jane chased her, bleating insanely, trying to nibble the hem of her shirt. Snyder was old for a pony but still glossy and black. He trotted after her slowly, knowing the hay would come in good time.

  (It would have been easy for Elsa to tell herself that this had been her idyll—the last farmhouse summer before Nolan, the summer before the day it all went wrong, but wishing away Nolan wasn’t something she wanted to do anymore. And really, Elsa realized, even this was not far back enough. To undo the hurt that came later, Ingrid would have had to not sleep with the Quaker in the first place, a thing Elsa had not known about but had still been true, even when she was small. Not knowing wasn’t the protection she’d thought it was. Which meant that to spare herself that later pain, Elsa would have had to never be born at all. Would have to unmake herself completely. The very creation of her world was the same day suffering came into it.

  Which was a kind of relief. Because it meant that she could stop staring over her shoulder at everything that had come before, searching for the day that came before the pain. There was no place further back to go. To find any kind of happiness, Elsa would have to turn around.)

  Still, on that summer day, when Elsa slid open the door to the hay room and climbed to the top of the stack, halfway to the ceiling, where she’d spread a blanket, and lay there, drunk on the smell of alfalfa, she was happy.

  Because Snyder whickered over his food. Because the motes of dust that hung in the illuminated air seemed frozen as if by an enchantment of Elsa’s own making. Soon, her parents would call her in for dinner and she would race across the lawn. But not yet. For now, she was warm and still upon the hay. For now, she was weightless, and time did not move at all.

  Leap’s Island

  The children were going home.

  They stood on the dock, hands shielding their eyes, watching the postman approach. Jinx gave him two short barks and reared up.

  Pretty rough out here, didn’t I say? he called, taking them in.

  They were slumped in their packs. Their hair was twisted and slick. Elsa’s pits were furry. Nolan was purplish beneath the eyes. Their legs were scabbed over and dirty. The dog smelled. They were pretty rough.

  As the children loaded their bags onto the boat, the postman went about slipping a few slim envelopes into the cubby slots for the Reversalists. He returned with one envelope left in his hands. The children were already sitting in the boat, ready to leave, the dog panting between them.

  You want this? he said. It’s for your dad.

  Sure, Elsa said. It was junk mail. A glossy brochure for an academic conference it was a miracle Ian was still invited to.

  And we’re off, the postman said. He revved the motor and they drifted away from the dock.

  The motor whined, and they picked up speed, everyone’s hair whipping around. Jinx tossed her snout in the air currents.

  Elsa unzipped a side pouch of her pack to tuck in the brochure and found that there were already envelopes in there. The mail from a week ago. She pulled it out and opened the letters. A report from a lab in Louisiana. Another from Georgia. She held the pages up to get a better look and the wind almost snatched them.

  Nolan, Elsa said. She handed him the letters.

  Nolan skimmed the reports on the Paradise Duck, struggling to understand their meaning. The boat shifted beneath him.

  No one had believed Ian. Nolan hadn’t. His family and his friends and his colleagues, they’d all written him off. Even on Leap’s, Ian’s theories had been unwelcome. But Ian believed in what he was looking for. Had wanted to believe that the world he was leaving for Nolan and for Elsa was worthy of them. That they would be okay. Would be better, even, than their parents.

  It was enough, for Nolan, that Ian had wanted this to be true. The sheer optimism of the enterprise floored him. The totally unscientific hope. If this was Ian’s hypothesis for their outcome, Nolan could live with that.

  Over the roar of the motor, it was too hard to tell his sister everything, so he just handed the envelopes back. She nodded, zipping them into her pouch.

  Elsa watched the wake of the boat. The way it channeled deep, then foamed itself shallow again. Her father, she knew, had been down there somewhere. Soggy, sodden. She imagined an underwater tea party with the fishes. Underwater explanations. Underwater eulogy. Underwater apology, apology, apology. She wished they had not found his body. Ian would have liked to have wound up back in the primordial soup of the sea.

  The postman shouted over the motor, You get a sense of the folks out there?

  We did, Nolan said.

  That place gives me the creepers, he said.

  It was just a week, Elsa shouted. But she and Nolan both knew this was not true. A week had almost been long enough for them to make the same mistakes all over again. A week had almost not been long enough for them to find what they were looking for.

  They were just fifteen minutes off the shore, and Leap’s spell had been broken.

  From this distance, the children could see the whole of the island.

  It looked small.

  Up close, you can’t tell that an island is finite. Up close, an island seems like everything, because you are on it. It can feel as if it will go on forever. But the drag of a boat across the space of waves and time can help you see. With time, most things grow smaller. Trees and rocks become less articulated and significant. You draw away and the island narrows to become just one thing, among many. The farther you go, the more an island blurs, until it looks less like a place you lived and more like a muddied landscape. Just someone’s landscape. Maybe not even yours.

  * * *

  ——————·

  As they approached Watch Landing, Nolan felt anxious at the noise and bustle coming upon him. Music from the bars. Boat engines. A popcorn machine. People happily shouting at each other over the noise of their own drunkenness. Mitchell, he remembered, had spent his whole life on the island before going to the mainland as a teenager. How frightening this must have seemed to him. How too-much.

  They thanked the postman and gave him a forwarding address for Ian’s mail.

  When they disembarked, Jinx hesitated, nervous to jump out of the boat.

  You’re a wolf, Elsa told her. You’re a ferocious wolf. Jinx leapt and made the dock.

  As the children walked along the boardwalk, several young girls stopped to coo over Jinx, petting her despite the smell.

  As they reached the end of the pier, Nolan turned to Elsa. We could find someone to show them to. The reports.

  They could lose the island.

  I know. But I mean, that’s not our problem.

  But can you imagine?

  If Mitchell was forced to sell the island and send the Reversalists away, where would they go?

  The children saw Esther in a cheap condo, installing twelve birdfeeders on the patio and ignoring complaints from her neighbors when the spilled seed drew rats.

  Mick and Jim would work at some urban food co-op, or buy back their farm, but they would get trapped in a feedback loop of their
brotherhood and brilliance until it drove them to loneliness.

  Gates they imagined living in some college town where she’d teach a required intro bio class to apathetic undergrads for the rest of her life, drinking instant soup from a thermos and writing cruel things on their papers.

  St. Gilles could write the final book of the Asterias series and receive ungodly amounts of money, but he wouldn’t. They imagined him in a small London apartment, writing and rewriting, trying impossibly to solve for the future of Earth.

  Mitchell would take the money from the sale and build an enormous house somewhere remote. Somewhere he could wall off and live in, as if it were an island.

  This was what the children imagined for the Reversalists if they were trying to be hopeful.

  Hopeful and honest didn’t always go together.

  If they were trying to be honest, what the children really imagined was that, if the Reversalists were kicked off the island, very few of them would survive the next five years. The children would google the Reversalists late at night (they would not be able to resist googling) and they would find news of their deaths, that they had killed themselves, one by one, or maybe all at once in a kind of Jonestown Kool-Aid debacle.

  The children imagined this for all of them except Gwen.

  Because the children imagined Gwen maybe pregnant. Gwen, if pregnant, maybe happy. Gwen, maybe a vet again, traveling late at night with her baby strapped to her chest, to barns where she’d catch cows warm from the womb. Snipping the cords between them and their enormous lumbering mothers. Setting them loose on the world.

  When does the bus get here? Nolan asked.

  Elsa looked at her watch, the black rubber crusted with salt. Four, she said.

  I think we should stay, Nolan said.