Bewilderment

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HE WOULDN’T TELL ME what Jayden Astley said to set him off. I called the boy’s parents, half expecting them to sue me over the phone. Instead, they were weirdly sympathetic. Their boy had given them more information than mine had given me, but they weren’t volunteering anything. Everyone involved was protecting me. I couldn’t tell from what.

I surprised Robin by not forcing the issue, and he surprised me by not wetting the bed that night. The next day was Saturday. I still hadn’t finished the edits for Stryker. Robin and I took a long walk down near Olbrich Gardens. For lunch, I scrambled tofu, using the exact ratio of black salt and nutritional yeast that he loved. We played his favorite board game about racing cars across Europe. I pretended to work while he played with his microscope and looked through his files of collectible cards. We read together in peace for half an hour, before he asked for another planet.

I had two thousand paperbacks scattered through our house and thirty years of reading to steal from. When was the golden age of science fiction? For me, it started at nine.

I gave him a planet where the dominant sentient species could merge into a compound creature with all the powers of its separate parts.

His slew of questions stopped the story. Are you for real? How could that even be?

“It’s another planet. That’s how.”

But, I mean, are they still separate when they’re together, or all one single brain?

“One single brain that can have their separate thoughts.”

You mean, like telepathy?

“More than telepathy. A superorganism.”

Can the big one, like, get inside the heads of the little ones? Does he need them all, to make it work? What if some of the little ones don’t want to join? Or are they really just parts to begin with?

He worried the edge between friendly merger and hostile takeover. I tried to tilt his fascinated horror toward horrified fascination. “They do it voluntarily, when times are hard and they need something extra to survive. And later, when things get better, they split up again.”

He leaned forward, suspicious. Wait a minute! Like slime molds?

I’d shown him, in the labs at the university: those independent single cells that merged into a community with its own aggregate behavior and rudimentary intelligence.

You stole that from Earth! He slugged my upper arm several times in slow motion. Then he lay back on the pillow. I risked smoothing his bangs out of his eyes, the way he liked me to do when he was little.

“Robbie? You’re still upset. I can tell.”

He jerked up. How do you know?

I pointed at his fists, holding his thumbs crimson captives again. He stared, amazed that his own parts had betrayed him. He shook his hands and liberated his thumbs. Then his head dropped back onto the pillow.

Dad? What happened to her? This time, he meant it. That night, in the car.

I looked down at my own hands, which were busy tagging me. “Robin? Did Jayden say something about Mom?”

Luckily, no heavy objects were within reach. But the force of his voice alone knocked me backward. Just tell me. Tell me! He slashed back and forth. I’m nine years old. Just… TELL ME!

I grabbed his wrist, and the pain startled him. “You will stop right now.” I spoke with all the calm authority I could fake. “And get control of yourself. Then you will tell me what Jayden said.”

He yanked his wrist free and nursed it. Why did you do that?

I waited out my pounding pulse. He rubbed his wrist, hating me. Then he burst into tears. When I could, I held him. He tried to work his red and worthless mouth. I signaled that he had all the time on Earth.

He bared his palm and caught his breath. I was telling him about Mom’s video. He said his parents said there was more to her crash than people knew. Jayden said they think that Mom was—

I pressed his lips, as if I could push the thought back in. “It was an accident, Robbie. Nobody thinks anything else.”

That’s what I told him! But he kept on saying it. Like he knew the truth. That’s why I went nuts.

“You know? I might have slugged him myself.”

Half a syllable came up out of his throat, lost between sob and laugh. Great. He patted blindly at my upper arm. Then we’d both be toast.

“You’re not toast, Robbie. Get a tissue and wipe.”

His half-formed features smeared under his pressing hands. The squall had blown over, leaving him clear, small, but still winded.

So what did they mean, Jayden’s parents?

What kind of people knew their son was torturing mine with something they themselves had said, and didn’t alert me when I called them? Scared and scrambling, like everyone.

I’m nine, Dad. I can handle it.

I was forty-five, and couldn’t. “Robbie? There were witnesses. Everyone agrees. Something ran in front of her car.”

What do you mean? Like a person?

“An animal.” He frowned, baffled, like some cartoon boy. “You remember it was dark and icy?”

He nodded at a tiny model he was making of that evening, a foot in front of his eyes. January twelfth. Nine p.m.

“It ran in front of her car. She must have jerked the wheel. The car skidded, and that’s how she crossed the center line.”

He kept his eyes on his tiny simulation. Then he asked a question I should have been ready for. Such an obvious thing. What kind of animal?

I panicked. “Nobody knows for sure.”

Maybe a marten, or something really rare? Maybe it was a wolverine.

“I don’t know, buddy. Nobody does.”

Calculations ran through his head. The oncoming car. The nearby pedestrians. The two of us, waiting for her to come home. I lasted ten seconds. The shame of owning up couldn’t be worse than the nausea I felt.

“Robbie? They think it might have been an opossum. It was an opossum.”

But you said…

I needed him to say: The opossum is North America’s only marsupial, Dad. Things Aly taught him: how hard winters were on opossums, how frostbite punished their hairless ears and tails. But he scowled in silence at the thought of the most despised large animal on Earth.

He swung his head toward me, stunned. You lied to me, Dad. You said nobody knew what it was.

“Robbie. It was only for a minute.” But no: it was forever, really.

He tilted his head and shook, as if clearing his ears. His voice was flat and low. Everybody lies. I couldn’t tell if he was forgiving me or condemning all humanity.

It was way past bedtime. But there we were, the two of us on his bed, the last of the crew of a generational spacecraft that had come to the end of its possibilities long before reaching its new home.

So she chose not to hit it, even though…?

“She didn’t choose anything. There wasn’t time. It was a reflex.”

He thought for a while. At last he seemed appeased, although some part of him was still mapping the changing coastline between reflex and choice.

So Jayden’s parents are full of crap? Mom wasn’t trying to hurt herself?

I felt no need to reprimand the language. “Sometimes, the less people know about something, the more they want to talk about it.”

He got his notebook and scribbled in it, holding it away from me. He snapped it shut and squirreled it away in the nightstand drawer. Something brightened in him. Maybe he was happy that he might be friends with his friend again, tomorrow.

I stood and kissed him on the forehead. He let me, preoccupied with his hands, remembering how they’d deceived him.

How about this one, Dad? What does this mean?

He held one cupped hand upward on the stalk of his arm and twisted it back and forth. A tiny planet, spinning on its axis.

“Tell me.”

It means the world is turning and I’m good with everything.

We traded the signal, and he nodded. I told him I was glad he was who he was. I twisted my own hand in the air again by way of saying good night. Then I turned out the light and left him to fall asleep in the comfort of my larger lie. I’ve always been especially good at lying by omission. And I lied wildly to him that night, by failing to tell him about the car’s other passenger, his unborn little sister.