Bewilderment

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ROBBIE EVEN ENJOYED INFLATING THE BOAT. Usually he gave the foot pump two minutes of half-hearted kicks before giving up. That day, he didn’t even ask for help. The watercraft rose from a puddle of floppy PVC without a complaint from my son.

We put in near a sign that gave the fishing limits in Spanish, Chinese, and Hmong. Robin slipped off the dock while getting into the boat. He wailed as his shoes sank into the mud and the lake soaked up to his knees. But the instant he scrambled back into the boat, he looked at his legs, puzzled. Well. That’s weird. Getting so worked up about water.

We paddled out in the flat-bottomed dinghy, taking forever to go a hundred yards. He scoured the shore as he rowed. I should have known what he was looking for. Birds: the creatures that had kept all his mother’s demons at bay. He’d always been interested in them. But interest had turned to love, deep in his spine, as he trained on the print of her brain.

A sleek, gray form shot across our bow. He waved me to stop paddling. The first notes of distress in days tinged my son’s voice. Who is he, Dad? Who is he? I couldn’t see!

A resident so common even I knew its name. “Junco, I think.”

Dark-eyed or slate? He turned to me, sure I could tell him. I couldn’t. His mother spoke, up close to my ear. The robin is my favorite bird.

We rowed some more, the slowest form of transportation known to humankind. In deeper water, he lifted his paddle. Could you take over, Dad? I’m kind of preoccupied.

I worked from the stern, passing my paddle from side to side to keep us from spinning. A butterfly more staggering than any stained-glass window landed on Robin’s downy forearm where he rested it on the boat. Robin held his breath, letting the visitor stumble, fly, and land again on his face. It walked across his closed eyes before flying away.

Robbie lay back against the gunwales and appraised the sky. His eyes sought out all the thousands of points of light from our night in the Smokies, every one of them still up there but erased by the light of day. The two of us glided underneath invisible stars, crossing the placid lake in an inflatable boat.

I’d imagined we were alone. But the more I watched Robin, the more I joined the party. Flying things, swimming things, things skating across the lake’s surface. Things that branched over the shore and fed the water with rains of living tissue. Chatter from every compass point, like some avant-garde piece for a chorus of random radios. And one enormous life in the boat’s bow, a thing that was me but wasn’t. When he spoke, I startled so hard I almost capsized us.

Do you remember that day?

He’d left me far behind. “What day, Robbie?”

The day you two recorded your feelings?

I remembered it with weird precision. How Aly and I craved each other afterward. How we locked ourselves in our room. How she wouldn’t tell me the source of her ecstasy. How she’d called through the closed door to reassure our son that everything and everyone were so okay.

There was something funny about the two of you. You were both acting strange.

He couldn’t have remembered that. He’d been so young, and nothing about that afternoon would have been remarkable enough to impress itself on him.

Like you both had a big secret.

Then my wife was whispering. You remember the secret, don’t you, Theo?

I paddled against our spin and slowed my breathing. “Robbie. What made you think of that?”

He didn’t answer. Alyssa kept teasing. Of course he remembers. His parents were acting weird.

“Did Dr. Currier mention something about that day? Was he asking you things?”

Robin rolled over onto his belly, rocking the boat. He squinted at the far shore, trying to see into the past. Did Mom have a tattoo or something?

He could not have known about that. I didn’t dare ask him how he did. She’d gotten the thing before we met. She needed a psychic boost to power her through a disastrous first year of law school. To push back against the demoralizing crush of L1, she hit upon the idea of sowing the world’s tamest wild oat. Four scalloped petals around a tiny center of stamens and anthers, inked into her skin.

“It was supposed to be a little flower. Her namesake plant.”

Sweet alyssum.

“That’s right.”

But something happened to it?

“She didn’t like the way it turned out. Someone told her it looked like a deformed smiley face. So she asked the tattooist to turn it into a bee.”

And the bee ended up looking funny, too.

He was rattling me. “That’s right. But she stuck with the bee. She didn’t want to end up with a funny-looking horse tattooed all over her.”

His face was turned toward the water. He didn’t smile.

“Robbie? Why are you asking?”

His shoulder blades stuck out through his polo shirt like amputated wings. Dad. What do you think she was thinking, that day? It’s so weird. It’s… like walking into a forest a million years old.

I wanted to beg. Send me word—just one small thing that survived what happened to her. I’d lost the gist of her, the feel. And Robbie couldn’t tell me. Or he wouldn’t.

He rested his chin on the side of the boat and gazed into the lake. The bobbing surface of the water was the ocean of another world, one in a story I’d read when not much older than he was. He was looking for the thousands of fish that the dark green water hid from the eyes of air-breathers.

What’s the ocean like, Dad?

What was the ocean like? I couldn’t tell him. The sea was too big, and my bucket was so small. Also, it had a hole. I put my hand on the back of his calf. It seemed like my best available answer.

Did you know that the world’s corals will be dead in six more years?

His voice was soft and his mouth was sad. The world’s most spectacular partnership was coming to an end, and he’d never see it. He looked up at me, with Aly’s ghost planted right into his brain. So what are we supposed to do about that?