Robert turned back to his family. Only Kim met his eyes. He picked up the French press, poured a mug of coffee, and opened the cabin’s back door. “You guys do want you want,” he said as he went through it. “I’ll take on Katahdin alone.”
***
Robert stomped around the cabin for ten minutes before taking off, and though Aida thanked me for my invitation to fish, Aaron was the only one to accept it. It took longer for us to get going. I came back from getting my fishing gear to find Aaron still in his chair. The few hours on Doubletop had cost him, and he moved slowly as I coaxed him to get the few things he needed for our hike.
It was mid-morning by the time we parked the truck at the Daicey Pond trailhead. I let the boy lead. He started out like the day before, hiking in short bursts until his foot found a root or rock that made him stumble and stop, then starting again. I stayed well back and kept quiet. Finally, he found the pace his heavy body could handle. It was slow going, but the stumbling stopped.
We made the turn past Little Niagara. I was tempted to lead him to the short side trail that would show him the falls, but I let him march past without a word. Aaron was humming softly. After a few more minutes of plodding along, he began to talk.
“We’re on the AT now, right?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Where’s it go?”
“It ends on Katahdin, starts on Springer Mountain.”
“Where’s that?”
“Georgia.”
We walked in silence for a moment, following the trail as it descended gently with the river.
“And people do the whole thing?”
“I did.”
He turned around and stared at me, his eyes even wider behind the magnification of his glasses, his mouth a perfect “O." I laughed. “You’d be surprised what you can do if you take things one step at a time.”
He turned back and started walking again.
“How far should we go?”
“Like I said at the cabin, it’s your call. But if we make it three miles, we’ll hit bigger water where the stream empties into the Penobscot. Our chances of catching dinner go way up down there.”
He stayed quiet. Aaron was sharp enough to know that meant a six-mile round trip. But I wasn’t going to push it. He was humming along the trail, accompanied by the music of rushing water and late morning birdsong. That was more than enough of an achievement for me. Him too, I hoped.
As it turned out, we never did make it to the Penobscot. After another mile, the trail rose slightly where it neared the river. The water was shadowed by walls of granite that formed the ravine it twisted through. Aaron stopped walking, sucked in a breath, and pointed downstream.
“Look,” he said, his voice hushed in awe. “It looks—it’s snowing on the river, but it’s snowing up.”
I broke into a grin and stared at the golden flurry rising from the dark water. A brilliant sea of softly glowing, slightly oblong shapes drifted slowly skyward through the angled beams of the late morning sun.
“That’s not snow,” I told the boy, tightening the straps of my backpack, “and our plans just changed. It’s a hatch, Aaron. Get ready for something really wild.”
I had to stop myself from sprinting ahead down the trail. It was late in the season for a caddis fly hatch. Most species tapered off in September. A hatch on the first day of fall was a true gift from the fish gods.
I asked Aaron to let me take point as we broke from the trail. It was going to be tricky to find a spot to cast from. We weren’t packing waders. My hope had been to reach the Penobscot and fish from its wide, open bank. But the action was here, in the boulder-studded ravine through which the stream below churned. I stopped and scanned the bank for a moment, finally spotting a sliver of open ground that stood at the end of the rocky chasm. I led Aaron to edge of the bank and stopped.
“You up for this?” I asked. His eyes traveled past me to the roiling white water below.
“I’m—uh, I don’t know.”
“Let’s try it, Aaron. You give the word, and we’ll turn right around. You’re making all of the decisions today. Okay?” I could see the fear flare behind the frames of his glasses as he struggled to answer. After a few seconds, he forced a smile.
“Okay.”
***
My heart was in my mouth for the next twenty minutes as we crept down the steep slope, looking for every foothold and handhold we could find along the way. We had to wade along the bank a bit at the bottom. If I’d been alone, I probably would have taken my boots off, but I wasn’t going to risk Aaron’s footing on the slippery rocks.
I watched the water as I took out my pack rod. The hatch had picked up. It wasn’t hard to find where the fish were rising amid the choppy swirls of the Nesowadnehunk; they were jumping right out of the water to feed. I had no trouble snagging one of the caddis flies from the cloud of bugs around us. I pinched it between my fingers, then asked Aaron to hold it in his palm as I opened my fly wallet.
“Okay,” I told him. “You pick. Which one of these do you think is the best match for that bug in your hand?”
It only took him a moment before his finger landed on the #16 tan elk hair caddis, the same fly I would have picked.
I tied the fly to the end of my line and gave Aaron a quick lesson in side casting. That technique was the only way to shoot line within the narrow confines of the ravine, but he wouldn’t have to throw it far. I only meant to demonstrate the cast, but as soon as my fly hit the water, it disappeared with a jerk.
“Grab the net,” I said, then showed him how to strip in the line to land the twelve-inch prize on its end. His face lit up when he saw the fish, the brook trout’s golden spots glistening as it wriggled in my hand. I showed him how to work the hook out gently from the mouth and revive the creature by moving it back and forth underwater before returning it to the fray before us.
“Your turn,” I said.
For the next few hours, Aaron found everything but water with his fly. He hooked the bushes behind us, the trees overhead, the roots underneath them, and finally, me. Each time, I retrieved the fly when I could and snipped the line when I couldn’t. I praised every attempt the boy made, taking the rod back again and again to show him the short, quick move that would get the line in the water. But for all the control Aaron had over his sharp mind, he simply couldn’t seem to get his body to do what he wanted. I could see that he understood the mechanics of the motions I showed him; he just couldn’t transfer them to his fingertips.
When we ran out of all the flies resembling the hatch, I sensed Aaron’s patience running thin. I led him back downstream to a flat boulder wide enough for a very late lunch.
As I put my gear away, Aaron asked for my fly wallet. I handed it over, and he put down his PBJ it to inspect its contents.
“How come some have wings and others don’t?” he asked.
“Some are nymphs; some are flies. One of the secrets of fly-fishing is knowing where the bugs are in their lifecycle. This hatch is the pivotal point in their journey.
“But how do the eggs hatch on top of the water?”
“They don’t. The eggs are under it. They mature into nymphs or larvae. Our caddis today were larvae, which means they pupate, or form a cocoon. They undergo metamorphosis and swim to the surface as imagoes—the final stage of transformation from nymph to fly.”
We’d spent a good portion of the day on the water. Noon had come and gone, and the ravine was falling into shadow again. The hatch was nearly over, but I could still pick out a few fuzzy pinpoints of light against the dark rocks in the distance. I pointed upriver to them as I continued.
“Every one of those little insects is at the end, and also at the beginning. The end of its long sleep in its cocoon, the beginning of its new life. Today was their big day, Aaron—and you and I were here to see it,” I told him with a smile. “The day when they left their cold, dark world behind, spread their wings, and flew free.”
20
Little Niagara
It was a lot harder climbing up the bank than it had been climbing down. I shadowed Aaron closely, and when he missed a handhold, he almost took us both off the rocky slope. By the time we got to the top, he was panting hard, and his T-shirt was soaked. I had him take it off and change into the extra one I’d packed. He sat down to do it, so I took a seat on a log and made myself wait until he suggested we start moving again. It was a long time before he stood up to step back on the trail.
We walked through the deep shadows of the afternoon’s end, matching our silence to the quiet of the woods. Despite the break we’d taken, Aaron’s pace slowed until he finally stopped. “Can we take another rest, Uncle Paul?” he asked.
My throat went tight. It was the first time he’d called me that. When I thought about it for a moment, I realized it was the first time he’d called me anything at all. I’d been a blank spot in his life for so long—the story of a man that his mother told him, not the real one who walked behind him on the trail today. “Sure,” I said with a swallow, “I know the perfect place.”
The sky was a deep purple when we came out of the woods at Little Niagara. I led Aaron across the huge slab of flat granite at the top of the falls. He stopped in the middle of the broad expanse, looking down the long drop where the Nesowadnehunk arced over water-washed boulders to crash in white froth in the pool below. We sat down and turned to face upriver. Aaron hugged his knees as he looked north, and I followed his gaze to the distant view of Barren Mountain. The peak was almost the same color as the deepening blue above it, but the granite scars on its flanks blazed pink with the last of the day’s sun. I watched the water for a long time, following the dance of waves over the boulders before us, tracing the jump and spray of each leap as they got smaller and smaller upriver to the spot where the thin blue thread disappeared into the twilit sky. Then I lost myself in that indigo distance—a dark window to another evening, another time, in this very same place.
“—cle Paul?”
I turned to see Aaron looking at me, his brow creased with worry.
“Yes?”
“Are you okay? I said your name three times.”
I reached up to wipe my eyes and dried my fingers on my shirt. I didn’t answer right away, letting the soft roar of white water fill the space between us for a while.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about another evening, just like this, at these falls. This was my sister’s favorite place in the park. We hiked down here late one afternoon. Your mom and Gram were swimming at Daicey with my dad and brother. Jordan and I sat right here. I kept telling her we’d be late for dinner, but she made me stay here till the stars came out.” I laughed. “She could always make me do whatever she wanted. We got into a bit of trouble with our folks when we finally crawled out of the woods in the dark.” I turned and looked up the river again. The mountain had completely disappeared into the night sky. Only the fading pink slashes of granite remained, floating over the point where the river disappeared. “But it was worth it. I guess sitting here, in this place, makes me feel connected to that day. And in a way, I guess, connected to Jordan again.”
We let the water talk for a while before Aaron took a turn.
“Maybe it’s more than a feeling.”
I turned to look at him. There was still enough light in the sky to illuminate his face, but his eyes had disappeared behind the screens of his glasses, reflecting back twin shimmers of the white water that played at our side.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He thought for a moment.
“Mr. Gordonski says that the many worlds interpretation solves the problem of superposition.”
I stared. “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to break that one down for me, Aaron,” I said. “And who’s Mr. Gordonski?”
“My physics teacher . . .” he answered, his voice trailing off before starting again. “I guess it starts with Schrödinger’s cat. Have you heard of him?”
“Sure. He has to do with probability, right?”
“Quantum superpositon, specifically—the idea that a subatomic particle exists in all possible states until it’s observed or acted upon in the real world. Then it collapses into a definite outcome. Schrödinger’s cat was the thought experiment that illustrated the concept.”
“Okay . . .”
“You’ve got a cat in a sealed box with some radioactive material connected to a hammer over a vial of poisonous gas. If the material decays, the hammer falls to break the vial and the gas escapes to kill the cat. If it doesn’t decay, the hammer stays up and the cat lives.”
“I’m with you.”
“So if you don’t look in the box, if the state of the cat remains unobserved, is it alive or dead?”
I shrugged.
“Superposition says it’s both. That’s the weird part.”
I rubbed my chin while I thought about that. “Okay. How do you get from there to the many worlds thing?”
“The many worlds interpretation says that at the moment you open the box, at the moment of any observation or any event, all possibilities for its outcome split off into an infinite number of worlds where they happen. What we observe or experience is only one of those realities. All the rest happen in those other worlds.”
“But what does that have to do with me saying that I remembered my time here with Jordan?”
“That’s not what you said,” Aaron answered quickly. “You said you felt connected to her.”
“So?” I waited, but he didn’t answer. “Aaron?”
“I don’t want to make you sad,” he said softly.
I touched his arm. “It’s okay, Aaron. Just tell me where all of this took you.”
“Well, maybe,” he began slowly, “when your sister died—when she drowned in the pond, it was just one way that story happened. You’re stuck here in the world where it did. But maybe there’s another world, or many worlds, where it didn’t happen, where she swam to shore, or where the canoe didn’t tip over, or where Jordan never even got into the boat at all. Maybe she grew up there and is living in that world now as the woman she would have become here. And maybe whenever you get that feeling you had—of being connected to her—you really are. Maybe at that same exact moment, in that other world somewhere, Jordan is having the very same feeling about you.”
I couldn’t speak. We sat there and listened to the white noise of the water together for a long time after that. When I looked up, the sky was shining with stars. I stood and handed Aaron the headlamp from my pack. Then I let him lead me though the dark woods to find our way home.
21
An Open Window
I pulled in next to Robert’s Porsche at Kidney Pond and said goodnight to Aaron. After a long day on the river, I was starving, but when I thought of eating another meal with Robert, I decided a cold beer and hank of jerky in Loon’s Nest would do me just fine. I was so tired I barely remember that dinner. My head hit the pillow the moment I set my empty beer can down.
***
I was in the wrong place. I always took the stern, but now I was in the bow. I wanted to turn around to see who was behind me, but the wind was too strong. I knew I needed to paddle hard to keep up with my parents. My father was in the canoe to starboard, my mother in the one to port. They were each in the stern, digging furiously at the water while their passengers did the same. I couldn’t see their faces but I knew who they were: Kim traveled with my mother, Tommy with my father.
When I started to turn around to see my own passenger, the wind roared even louder. Our three boats were drifting apart, and I couldn’t afford to miss a single stroke. I looked over, and though my mother was far away, I could see her face clearly. Her soft brown eyes burned bright with fear. Her lips were moving, but the distance between us was too great for me to hear.
I paddled harder and turned to starboard. My father’s eyes were hidden under the brim of his ball cap, but I could see the dark hole of his mouth framed by his short, rust-brown beard. He
was yelling—giving me direction of some kind—but his words too were lost in the wind.
I bent low and stabbed at the water. The wind whipped across the surface of the pond, throwing sheets of spray that blocked the view to either side. I chopped and slashed, furious that my position in the bow wouldn’t allow me to steer the craft closer to my parents. I thought I’d try anyway, pick a side to overcome the navigation of my stern mate. But I couldn’t choose. I was caught between the desire to rescue my mother and the wish to obey my father’s commands. I stopped. The wind blew through me and I was pulled in three directions, desperate to turn to the parents at each side and to the one who sat behind me—to see if the person I hoped was there could help me find my way.
***
I sat up in my bunk shaking and looked around the cabin. There was no need for my headlamp. The waning moon cast a glow bright enough to chase the shadows away. I got up and went outside to the outhouse. When I came out, I stopped on the dirt path, listening. The sound of my father’s voice, which I’d searched for in my dream, seemed to come to me now, and for a moment I stood disoriented, lost in that gray borderland between sleep and the waking world. Finally, I realized the noise wasn’t in my head. I walked down the path toward the other cabins, following it.
I lost the sound, then heard it again. It was coming from the library. As I grew closer, I caught enough to recognize the voice as Robert’s. Then, fainter, came Kim’s response. They were arguing softly, trying to keep their voices low, but an open window let snatches of words drift through to me.
“—the way up here to finally spend some time with us and you go hiking alone—”
“—them to come with me. You too, if you’d left your goddamned running shoes at home—”
“—doubt it. Seems like you’d rather do anything these days than spend time—”
I heard a chair scrape and stepped backward on the dirt path, retreating to the shadows of the woods behind me. I felt ashamed, standing there in the dark, but the weight of Aida’s secret anchored me to the spot. After a moment, I realized I was really listening for words that would let me know my sister knew it too—hoping for the knowledge that would release me from the burden Aida had shared.
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