by Ashley Ream
“I like you more than I should,” Tip had written.
She stared at the screen. She should say something but hesitated to say too much. Emoticons were out of the question.
“I like you, too,” she replied, a response she immediately felt was both sophomoric and awkward. So much about dating, including the word dating, felt sophomoric and awkward, and she suspected other people did it better.
She shoved the phone into her pocket and adjusted her bags. This package of Oreos she would keep in her room. Kicking off her shoes at the door, she stopped in the kitchen for a glass of milk and carried it and her things deeper into the house, following the sound of a television playing sports. Harry hated sports.
Opposite the library was the family room. A large flat-screen television took up one wall, and a cluster of leather sofas and chairs were gathered around it, making only enough room for a large traveling trunk that served as a coffee table. On top was a bottle of beer and a glass of red wine, the latter closer to Harry, who shouldn’t have been drinking it—not that Tilda didn’t understand the impulse.
“Juno,” Tilda said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
Their son was stretched out across the entire sofa with his arms crossed over his chest and Shooby, who shouldn’t have been on the furniture, lying across his knees. The game she’d heard earlier was a snippet from a highlight reel playing as part of a cable sports news show, which she knew Harry would hate even more than an actual game.
Juno took his eyes off the screen, which was large enough to create a sort of black hole, increased gravity–type effect, and pushed himself up to greet his mother, dislodging the dog, who hopped down and took a secondary position at Harry’s feet. Juno was taller than both her and Harry. He gave her a not-overly long hug, and when he did, she wondered how such a large man could have come from her body. He kissed the top of her head and wrinkled his nose.
“You smell like chlorine,” he said.
“They only have cheap shampoo at the community center. I’ll shower again in a minute.”
“Whenever I smell pool chemicals,” Juno said, “I think of you.”
Tilda supposed most mothers would like their grown children to say they smelled of flowers or maybe homemade cookies. Tilda had managed to swim out most of her earlier aggression, so she found the space in her brain to honor his truth—or whatever bull hockey she was supposed to think.
She smiled at him and said, “Modeling a healthy lifestyle for my son two decades and counting.” And then in the next breath, “Where’s your car?”
“I didn’t bring it. The ferries were too packed. I called last night to say I was coming,” Juno said, “but no one answered the phone.”
“I didn’t hear it ring,” Tilda said.
“You weren’t home yet,” Harry said. Despite the subject matter, Harry was not immune to the super gravitational field generated by the television set. It kept his eyes from following his son and ex-wife, and instead he scowled at the screen like it was doing something very rude. “She spends the night with her boyfriend now.”
In her imagination, Tilda walked the three steps over to Harry’s chair and smacked him upside the back of his head. As much as her private life was none of Harry’s business, it was even less Juno’s.
“What boyfriend?” Juno demanded.
“Your father is just being rude.”
“But you do have a boyfriend?”
“I went out to dinner,” Tilda said, moving around her son and the couch to put a coaster down under the bottle of beer. “That hardly makes him my boyfriend.”
She had found and purchased that antique trunk at a flea market in Seattle twenty years before. She preferred it not be ruined in twenty minutes. Also it was a distraction from this conversation.
“Where did you meet him?” Juno asked.
Tilda stood up and turned to face her son. “He lives next door.”
“In the Abrams’s old place?”
Harry answered. “Other side.”
“The Feingolds moved?”
“No,” Harry said, “it’s the Feingolds’ kid. The parents didn’t move. They died.”
“God, Mom.” Juno said it like someone had punched him in the gut, and the words were the last rush of air he had left. Tilda expected him to put the back of his hand to his forehead and slump down into a chair like Scarlett O’Hara. “I played with him when we were kids.”
Tilda snatched the pillow he’d been lying on off the couch and fluffed it with enough force to release the feathers in one big poof if she wasn’t careful. “Oh, you did not. He’s much older than you are. You didn’t give each other the time of day.”
“He’s not that much older than I am,” Juno said, which did not refute the lie he’d just told.
“Where’s Anna Beth?” Tilda asked with all the patience she could muster.
“At home.”
“You didn’t bring her?”
“We had a fight.”
Juno sat back down.
“A fight about what?” Tilda asked. She glanced at her ex-husband, who seemed as surprised as anyone to hear this. Of course he hadn’t asked, she thought. Why would he?
“She wants to get married,” Juno said.
The obvious and unsaid ending of that sentence was “and I don’t.”
Tilda looked to Harry. “Would you turn that damn thing off?”
He reached for the remote.
“Did she ask you to marry her?” Tilda asked.
“She said I should have already asked.”
There were a hundred things Tilda might have said, and all of them were trying to push their way out of her mouth. Anna Beth would be good for Juno; although Tilda wasn’t sure the reverse was true. But the one thing Tilda did not want and would never do was to insert herself between Juno and a girlfriend. Not even now. She said this last bit to herself firmly. Anna Beth was, after all, eight months pregnant with his baby, not to mention as good a young woman as Juno was likely to attract. A stable home life would—Tilda stopped herself.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Not really.” Juno had drained the bottle of beer and was peeling off the blue-and-silver label in little strips.
Tilda walked over beside him and put her hand on his head, smoothing his hair like she used to do. “What do you need right now?” she asked.
“A place to stay.”
“I’ll put some fresh sheets on your bed and lay out the towels,” Tilda said.
“Thanks, Mom.”
Tilda didn’t think twice about acting as though this were her home to share, and Harry didn’t say anything at all. Perhaps, Tilda thought, he would offer his own kind of support and comfort, something only he could do that Juno had come to appreciate. Tilda hoped so, as much because of how sad it would be for Harry as for Juno if he couldn’t manage anything at all.
“What’s your next step?” she asked Juno.
He shrugged and kept peeling the label.
“She’s less than a month away from delivering your baby,” Tilda said. “You’ll have to do something.”
He didn’t answer, so she kissed the top of his head and went to get a set of sheets before she took that shower.
“Oh.” She had almost forgotten. “We have another houseguest.”
Juno’s eyes shot up, and his voice was defensive. “Who?”
“Rachel,” Harry answered. “Dr. Rachel Bell.”
Juno’s head swiveled to his dad. “Is she one of your doctors?”
“No,” Tilda said, cutting off any answer Harry had planned. “She’s one of the researchers working out on the beach.”
“The 100-Year Miracle,” Juno said.
“Yes, apparently her lodgings were less than five-star, so your father invited her in.”
“You invited a total stranger to come live in your house?” Juno asked his dad.
Tilda couldn’t help feeling just a little self-satisfied. Harry wasn’t the only one who could turn thei
r son like a heat-seeking missile. She left Harry to answer that question and headed for the door.
“Mom?”
Tilda stopped.
“The Feingold kid?”
She couldn’t suppress the sigh as she walked away.
Tilda climbed the stairs. She was thinking about the logistics. There were the sheets and towels, and she’d need to go to the grocery store for more than just Oreos with Juno in the house. When she came to the top of the landing, it was almost a surprise to find herself just where she had stood that morning. It seemed longer ago than that. She reached out and put a hand to the doorknob. Tilda wasn’t sure what she hoped to feel. Hot? Cold? Something that would tell her what was going on in there? It was the hiding that made her so frustrated and angry. Wasn’t that always true? Tilda let the doorknob go and went to the linen closet to make her son a fresh bed.
* * *
John stood outside Hooper’s cabin. He had knocked and was wondering if he should knock again when the door opened. Hooper was wearing a gray university sweatshirt with the plaid collar of a button-up poking half out around the neck. The two shirts did not match, not each other and not the green, multi-pocketed field pants he also wore along with black socks and strappy sandals secured with Velcro.
“I need to talk to you about Dr. Bell,” John said.
Hooper had not stepped out of the doorway or invited him in, and John’s opening line did nothing to change that.
“I don’t want to be the one to rat,” he went on.
“But you’re going to rat?”
It was the first thing Hooper had said, and his tone took the younger man by surprise.
“I think Rachel is conducting unauthorized research,” he said, trying to plant himself on firmer ground. “In fact, I know she is.”
“I know it, too.”
John blinked. He had not imagined that Hooper would’ve allowed competing work on his site. The younger man assumed that all he needed to do was inform him, and action would ensue. But Hooper just stood there, as if waiting for John to get to the point.
“The breeding colony is sensitive,” John said, shocked at having to state what was so obvious. It didn’t take an ecologist to see what was happening. Any scientist at all should have been up in arms. “We must ensure that none of us takes more than absolutely necessary.”
“I’m aware of the risk,” Hooper said. “Any work we do is a risk, just as doing nothing is a risk.”
John didn’t think that was true at all, and his blood pressure was rising along with his indignation. He needed Hooper’s support and had expected to get it. Now it seemed he was siding with the enemy.
John switched tactics.
“I’m concerned that it’s impacting Dr. Bell’s work and also her health.” The last part, while true, came out sounding slightly less sincere than he’d hoped.
“Do you know what she’s doing precisely?”
John hesitated. The fewer people who knew about the Artemia lucis’s effects the better, but Hooper was the only authority Dr. Bell recognized. Short of running her over with the research van, John didn’t know what else to do.
“She’s making a narcotic.”
Hooper said nothing. John said nothing. There was a sudden high-pitched screech, and John jerked to look over his shoulder.
Hooper didn’t flinch. “Two squirrels fighting over a tree. They’ve been at it all morning.”
John looked back at Hooper.
“So you think Rachel is building a narcotics lab in her spare time?” he asked.
Hooper was twisting his words, putting him on the defensive. “She’s a chemist,” John said.
“A biochemist.”
“In this case, that only makes her more effective.”
“Do you have evidence?”
“Look at her!” John was losing his temper.
Hooper held up a hand. “Let’s see how things develop,” he said.
“I don’t think—” But Hooper shut the door before he’d finished the sentence.
John knocked again. He stood on the cracked concrete pad that served as Hooper’s front porch for two more minutes, but Hooper never opened the door, and then the sound of the shower running came faintly through the walls.
John was truly angry now.
It would not be, he thought, such a terrible thing if the damn woman destroyed herself, as long as it happened quickly enough. She did not respect what she was dealing with. She did not respect John or the Olloo’et, not their history, their knowledge, or their right to protect the breeding colony. Hubris had killed scientists before, and human nature being what it was, John saw no reason why it couldn’t now.
27.
Olloo’et Island is shaped like a boomerang with Olloo’et Bay cradled in the center. Dr. Woo’s office was on the far tip of the island not far from the ferry terminal. All the roads on the island were two lanes, and it should have taken Tilda twenty minutes from door to door to drive Harry to his appointment. With the off-season tourists clogging things up, it took twice that long, which was even more frustrating than it would have been on the mainland. There was not supposed to be traffic on Olloo’et. There was never traffic.
She had rolled down her window a crack when they’d left the house. The world smelled like rain, not just the clean, fresh smell they always had in this damp, drizzly place, but real rain. Tilda couldn’t say she was looking forward to it.
The inside of the car was quiet. Harry had turned off her country radio, and she had let him. It was a sort of reward. He’d made it out of the house and to the car and then into the car without her assistance at all. He seemed to hardly need the cane. Perhaps he’d been doing the therapy exercises Juno told her he’d been refusing for six months. Perhaps he was finally taking his medications on the precise schedule Dr. Woo had written out. Whatever it was, it was working. She’d tried asking, but he’d only grunted and said something about the hills and valleys leading to his eventual and imminent demise. That was when she’d rolled down the window.
“So,” she said, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel to hurry along the other drivers. “What are we going to do about Juno?”
Harry had been looking out his side of the car and turned just enough to see her out of the corner of his eye. “What do you mean ‘do about him?’”
“I’m not suggesting we get involved in a lover’s quarrel,” Tilda said.
“We shouldn’t get involved in anything at all.”
“Your plan is to have him live in his childhood bedroom for the rest of his life?”
“He got here two hours ago. How about we give it another hour before declaring a state of emergency?”
Tilda knew two things. One was that she was, in fact, getting ahead of herself. The other was that Harry was in no position to question anyone’s parenting. Rather than dwell on it, she turned her radio back on. Patsy Cline saves the day.
One verse in, Tilda had relaxed enough to mouth the words as they crawled around a snake-curve stretch of road. There were at least three cars ahead of her, maybe more she couldn’t see, and they had reduced the functional speed limit to twenty-five miles an hour.
“There are too many people here,” Harry said when Patsy faded away and a commercial took her place.
“Yes, but they’ll leave at the end of the week,” Tilda said over the announcer’s push for over-the-counter antacids.
“I thought we might get away for a few hours.”
Tilda had not been paying that much attention to Harry since he’d called her a hysterical harpy—or words that could be translated by her to that effect. But this made her ears twitch and turn toward his voice like a cat.
“We?”
“I got two tickets to the symphony. You can come if you want.”
“You sure know how to sweet-talk a girl.”
Harry was back to looking out his window. Their wagon train had reached a four-way stop up ahead, and other wagon trains of tourists had reached the stop from other
directions, and the “is it you/no me/no you/no ME” cha-cha was playing out. Still, Harry kept his face turned away from her, and he wasn’t responding.
“How did you get the tickets?” Tilda asked.
“I bought them.”
“You bought two tickets?”
“Yes, is that important? I bought them. I bought two tickets.”
“When you were buying the tickets, who did you think would use the other ticket?”
Harry sighed like a teenager. “You, obviously.”
“So why not just ask me to go with you?”
“I did.”
“You said you had an extra I could use if I wanted, sort of like ‘Hey, there’s some leftover pizza. You can have it. Otherwise I’m giving it to the dog.’”
“It’s not enough that I bought you a ticket to the symphony?” Harry asked. “Now I have to tell you I bought you a ticket in just the right way, or I’m implying that you’re leftover pizza?”
“I’m just saying you could flat-out ask me to go to the symphony with you.”
“Yes, let me do that because the whole evening sounds so great now.”
“You know, I totally let you off the hook for that bullshit you pulled in front of Juno, and now you’re going to give me crap about this?”
“What bullshit in front of Juno?”
“Telling him about Tip was unnecessary.”
“It was not unnecessary. It was the answer to the question why no one picked up the phone. I was collapsed on the floor, and you were off with your new boy toy.”
“So now I’m supposed to feel guilty for dating? I didn’t know you were hurt, Harry. I didn’t leave you there on purpose. You’re the one that doesn’t want people pecking around you all the time.”
“I never told you to feel guilty. If there’s anything I learned from that damn couple’s counselor, it is that I am not responsible for whatever the hell you feel. I’m just saying that what I said was the truth, and if you don’t want people to know it, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.”
Tilda waited her turn at the four-way stop sign and considered it personal growth when she didn’t T-bone the crossing monstrous black SUV just for the stress release of it.