Neil, of course, agreed. But path dependence was the only way to explain how things had happened with Becca Gallegos. If Neil’s mother hadn’t insisted on having NPR on in the car in the mornings as she drove him to school, then he never would have heard about an effort to require House of Commons–style elections for Britain’s House of Lords. If he’d never heard the story, he wouldn’t have known the answer to the question “The British parliament includes which two bodies of legislators?” which allowed Neil’s team to win the district-wide Knowledge Bowl competition and go on to the state finals. If they hadn’t qualified for state, Neil wouldn’t have had to get parental permission to go on an overnight trip to Colorado Springs. And if he hadn’t had to get that permission form signed, he wouldn’t have gone to his father’s classroom after school one afternoon. He wouldn’t have found the door shut, and when he opened it a crack to see if his father was in there, he wouldn’t have seen his dad and Becca Gallegos, Becca sitting at one of the classroom desks and his father with his back to the door, bending over her like he was correcting her paper. Neil had been about to ask if he could interrupt for just a second to get his form signed when he heard his father say something like “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” and he smoothed his hand over Becca’s hair, then squatted down next to her and rolled down the cuff of her shorts to cover an inch more of her thigh, as if he were personally enforcing the school dress code. Just as he did, the door handle that Neil was holding onto made a noise. Becca looked up, and for what could only have been a fraction of a second but felt much longer she stared straight at Neil in the doorway. Until the girl behind the door in Swindon, Neil had only seen a look like that one other time, when he was a kid and he found a deer with its leg caught in a fence. Eyes frantic, calculating the chance of escape but coming up short, flicking away. Neil closed the classroom door as quietly as possible, and he almost missed going to the Knowledge Bowl finals because he had to wait until his mom got back from a conference she was attending to get his permission form signed. Because he did not want his father to ever, ever know what he’d seen.
None of it was necessarily all that bad in its own right, but it was a whole lot more than what Neil’s father said had happened. There had been no physical contact between them, absolutely none, Neil’s father said. And as for the things Becca said, about how he’d told her she was a beautiful young girl with talents he was going to help her realize, it was all a big misunderstanding. He’d meant to be encouraging, to give her a bit of self-esteem, and she’d taken it the wrong way.
Neil never told his father that he didn’t believe him. He didn’t want to admit to knowing anything more than what people were saying in the halls at school, but the look on Becca’s face had made it obvious that things had been happening that shouldn’t be, and his dad had had no good reason to be messing with her shorts.
Things ended even worse for Becca than for his father, with the very same people who wrote letters to the editor calling Neil’s dad a letch and a predator saying that she was an opportunist and her father was using the whole thing as an excuse to get money out of the school district. It might have been true, because pretty soon after the school board hearing, social services got involved and put Becca and her sisters in foster care. “Couldn’t have happened too soon,” Neil’s mother said. Neil’s mom wasn’t inclined to take his father’s side on anything, but she worked as a domestic violence counselor, and though she was pretty strict about patient confidentiality, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the Gallegos kids had it rough.
Only Neil knew that Becca wasn’t lying, at least not entirely, and he kept waiting for Becca to tell the school board that Neil had seen her and his father together in the classroom that afternoon. Neil spent whole days not hearing a word of what was said in class, waiting for an announcement to summon him to the principal’s office. But even though Becca could have used a witness on her side, she never told. That made the whole thing even worse, thinking of Becca protecting him, as if they were kids again and she was answering Neil’s mom’s questions about where all the boxes of cherry Jell-O had gone so Neil wouldn’t have to open his bright red mouth. Neil stood outside the principal’s office one afternoon after it had become a big scandal, trying to convince himself to go in and tell what he’d seen. But in the end he couldn’t do it—not out of loyalty to his father so much as out of eighth-grade embarrassment at the thought of having to tell Ms. Schisler that he’d seen his father’s hand on Becca’s leg.
It was all really stressful, Neil’s stomach was in knots for weeks, and when she noticed he wasn’t eating, Neil’s mom tried to get him to go see one of her therapist friends. She even offered to let him change schools mid-year, which would have meant driving him to Pueblo each day, because she figured that being Mr. Beart’s son was making things tough. But Neil said no. He wasn’t about to talk to some hippie therapist, and changing schools wouldn’t make his dad any less of a liar or Neil any less of a coward. Plus, Becca Gallegos had transferred to Pueblo after someone wrote a big S-L-U-T all over her locker. The last thing Neil wanted was to have to avoid making eye contact with a reminder of his lack of personal heroism each time he passed her in the hall.
Looking back, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise to hear his father deny something that had so clearly happened. His dad did that kind of thing. He selected from a range of plausible realities the version of events he preferred to believe in. He did it with Neil’s mother when he said she left him because she fell in love with Carl, her Jazzercise instructor, as if he’d forgotten that they’d been fighting like crazy since before the town even had a gym. He did it when he had a fight with the Bureau of Land Management people over whose land the trees at the end of Pop’s back pasture were on, and he did it in a big way when it came to certain facts about Neil’s grandmother. Neil’s dad made such a habit of choosing what to believe, of course he’d found just the right story for himself when it came to Becca Gallegos.
So Neil knew exactly what Professor Piot was talking about when he warned Neil and the other research assistants against getting personally attached to a particular version of history. Too much emotional involvement could lead even a conscientious historian to bias, or worse. It was something they ran into a lot with the documents about Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. The official histories were often written by people overly invested in the church, and they included all kinds of inaccuracies: The church was said to have been originally founded as the first in the name of Saint Anne long before her cult even appeared in France, for example. It was perfectly understandable that a priest or a monk who had devoted his whole life to serving in that particular church might embellish its importance, but it did not make good history. “Fall too much in love with your subject, and you’ll find only the answers you already know,” Professor Piot said.
It sounded better in French, but it fit Neil’s father perfectly. The last time he and his father had talked, back in January, Neil had tried to point this out, and the conversation had not gone well. They hadn’t been talking about Becca Gallegos or anything like that—at least, not directly. The subject had been Neil’s grandmother, and though that particular topic always made Neil uncomfortable, it might have been anything.
It had been Neil’s birthday, and he was honestly surprised to get a call from his father. Neil’s mom had sent him a package of brownies and an e-card to see first thing when he woke up, but his dad wasn’t the type to remember birthdays, and he usually sent Neil a check a week or two late. It wasn’t that his father didn’t care, he just wasn’t very good with dates.
But as it turned out, his father hadn’t remembered Neil’s birthday. His dad said hello and started right in on small talk in a way that made Neil sure there was something else he was waiting to bring up. He asked Neil about the weather there in London—which was cold, it was January, it had just stopped raining and Neil was trying to avoid the half-frozen puddles as he walked to class. It was cold back home too, his fat
her said. The pipes in the old well-house had frozen, the forecast called for more snow. His father asked about school; Neil said it was fine. His father wondered whether Neil had had a chance to pick up the Christmas presents from his friend’s daughter in Swindon; Neil said not yet, but definitely next weekend.
Neil kept waiting for his dad to ask him if he had any plans for his birthday, which in fact he did—Veejay had bought a bottle of something green that was supposed to be absinthe and the girls across the hall were coming over to watch the match against Chelsea. But instead his father said, “So. There’s a new book out about Grandma,” and Neil realized that this was the real reason for his father’s call. Grandma was not Nan, but Neil’s biological grandmother, Inga. As in Inga Beart, that Inga Beart, whose books were an unavoidable obstacle to passing tenth grade English. Though his father had never met her, he insisted on calling her Grandma when he talked to Neil, as if she had been somebody he and Neil actually knew.
“Oh yeah?” Neil said. The book had gotten a good review in the Guardian, but Neil decided not to mention it.
“By a fellow named Bristol,” his father said. “A real hack job. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they write these days.”
“Uh-huh,” Neil said. He knew what part of the book his father didn’t like. It said what all the others said: Inga Beart had a baby, left it, and never gave Neil’s dad a second thought.
Neil’s father cleared his throat. “And, well, I was thinking. If I could finally find some proof—”
Since they were talking on the phone, Neil was free to roll his eyes. Having a famous grandmother was embarrassing, and Neil had started lying on the first day of each new class when the professor called his name and then said, “Don’t suppose you’re related to . . .?” But he hadn’t meant to start an argument when he pointed out that his father sounded a little obsessive, that the guy who’d written the book was actually a well-regarded professor at Oxford, and that maybe now was the time for his father to deal with his abandonment issues in ways that didn’t involve trying to poke holes in the research of real scholars, who ought to have a pretty good idea of what had and had not happened in the life of a woman his father had never even met.
In retrospect, it was kind of a shitty thing to say. Neil had never challenged his father on his Inga Beart theories before. But it was his birthday, and his father was too caught up in rewriting the details of fifty years ago to remember that today Neil was twenty years old.
So maybe that was why, when his father started talking about how as a baby he’d somehow seen and remembered a certain pair of shoes Inga Beart wore—the same story Neil had heard a thousand times before—Neil pointed out how it obviously couldn’t be true. Neil’s dad was silent for a little while and then said, “Well. I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up,” sounding like he’d had his feelings hurt.
“Be reasonable, Dad,” Neil said. He felt bad, but his father was trying to twist the facts of his mother’s life in a way that would make him feel better, and that was exactly the kind of thing Professor Piot warned against.
“I am being reasonable. She came to see us out at the ranch. I was under the table, all I could see was her feet. How could I have seen her feet if she wasn’t there?”
“Maybe you didn’t really see them,” Neil said. “Memories are wrong all the time. People believe what they want to believe. I mean, it can happen.” He was pretty sure neither of them wanted to get into the issue of truths and untruths and which ones his father chose to tell.
“I was there, wasn’t I? For Christ’s sake. I remember.” Neil could tell by his voice that his father was getting worked up, and he wished he’d just let him leave a message. He had some reading he needed to get done before class.
But today was his birthday. He was twenty years old, a grown-up, and, as Professor Piot said, sometimes one has to stick up for the facts.
“The dates don’t work, Dad,” Neil said. “You were, like, two when she left the States, right? Even if you had seen her, you couldn’t have remembered it.” He’d never said anything quite like that to his father before, and he was a little impressed with himself.
“That’s not true—at two or three years old, kids remember. There are studies—”
“But you’re the only one who thinks it could have happened,” Neil said. “Everyone else says she never came back.”
“Well, son, sometimes everyone gets it wrong,” his father said, and the way he said it made Neil pretty sure that they weren’t just talking about Inga Beart and whether she’d made a secret and totally unrecorded visit to Nan and Pop’s ranch that Nan and Pop and everyone else had managed to forget.
There was another long silence on the phone. Neil stepped ankle-deep into a puddle hidden under dead leaves and almost forgot to look right instead of left as he crossed Oxford Street, accidentally letting himself remember how his father had said believe me that day back in eighth grade when Neil had come right out and asked him about Becca Gallegos. He had called Neil son then too, as in Son, you’ve just got to believe me.
“Okay, well, whatever, Dad,” Neil said, which came out sounding less nice than he’d intended. His phone beeped to say he was getting another call. He said, “Oops, just a second,” and when he tried to put his father on hold he accidentally hung up on him. It turned out it wasn’t another call, just a text telling him his credit was low. Neil would have called his father back, except that he didn’t have enough for an international number. He could have stopped on the way to class to buy more minutes, but he didn’t feel like it; one shoe was soaked through and now his foot was freezing. Neil kept expecting his father to call back and say he was sorry he hadn’t said happy birthday, but he never did, and a week or so later Neil got a birthday card and a check in the mail.
But that was back in January. Now it was June, and after Magdute’s call, Neil spent the rest of Professor Piot’s lecture feeling seriously bad about not having sent his dad her mother’s Christmas package. So much time had passed, his father had probably forgotten all about their last conversation. When he got the package he might not even think to ask about Neil’s trip to Swindon, and if he did, Neil could always lie and say that Magdute was living with friends. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. The shopping bag Magdute had given him was in his suitcase, along with the jacket and dress pants he’d brought to Paris but hadn’t had any reason to unpack. When he got home from class he put the presents in his backpack, planning to mail them on his way home from the archives that afternoon. He figured that if he left a little early, he could get to the post office at Hôtel de Ville before it closed, and next to it was a kiosk with flowers. If he could find some that hadn’t quite bloomed and if he remembered to put them in a vase, they would still be fresh enough to give to Magdute the next morning at the station.
But that afternoon Neil didn’t end up leaving the archives until quarter to six, which meant that the post office and the flower kiosk would be closed. He’d requested some documents from the abbey of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, where medieval pilgrims on their way to Spain had stopped to see the head of John the Baptist. A choir of a hundred monks was said to have surrounded the relic, singing to it day and night. Neil thought it said something useful about the medieval worldview that so many sleepless voices had been raised perpetually in praise of a decapitated head, and he was trying to figure out if it had been the actual head with flesh still attached or just the skull—the relic itself went missing during the wars of religion in 1500s—when he found a thin bundle of vellum that contained what seemed to be an account written in the thirteenth century by a monk from Rouen who was making the Saint Jacques pilgrimage to Spain.
Neil was interested to see if the monk mentioned stopping at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie on his way through Paris. At the end of the document was what Professor Piot called a colophon, a description of the manuscript that had been added centuries later by an abbey historian, and Neil started his translation
there. If what the colophon said was true and it really was a first-person account of the pilgrimage, it could be a real discovery. A famous guide to the Saint Jacques pilgrimage had been written in the twelfth century, and in the fourteenth century a number of wealthy or important pilgrims had recorded their impressions, but there was a gap in information from the thirteenth century, when the roads were particularly dangerous and church authorities began to be concerned about so many penitents and adventurers roaming the continent. Neil thought, with a quick silvery shiver, that just possibly he had come across something new in the dusty carton of records from Saint-Jean-d’Angély.
But before he’d had a chance to look past the spidery Latin of the abbey historian to the monk’s own words, it was far past the time he should have been leaving if he was going to make it to the post office, and the archives staff were beginning to turn out the lights. He was the last in line to return the documents to the stern men in gray smocks at the requests counter. He tried to explain that they could just set the Saint-Jean-d’Angély papers aside somewhere, that he would be back first thing in the morning and there was no need to send them back down into the recesses of the National Archives, which Neil of course had never seen, but which he imagined to be the very innards of Paris itself, filled not only with crumbling cartons bound with strings, but with abandoned metro cars and extra guillotines, statues of various Napoleons, flying buttresses, and spare dauphins.
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