Bewilderment

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IN THE MORNING I PRETENDED I’d forgotten what day it was. My new nine-year-old saw through me. While I made super-deluxe oatmeal with half a dozen mix-ins, Robin bobbed in place, pushing off the counter and pogo-sticking with excitement. We set a land speed record eating.

Let’s open the presents.

“The what? You’re making a pretty big assumption, aren’t you?”

Not assumption. Hypothesis.

He knew what he was getting. He’d been bargaining with me for months: a digital microscope that attached to my tablet and let him display magnified images on the screen. He spent all morning trying out pond scum, cells from inside his cheek, and the underside of a maple leaf. He would have been happy looking at samples and sketching notes into his notebook for the remainder of our vacation.

Afraid of pushing him over the top, I wheeled out the cake I’d bought on the sly at the little 1950s grocery store at the bottom of the mountain. His face shone before he caught himself.

Cake, Dad?

He made a beeline for the box, which I’d failed to hide. He studied the ingredients, shaking his head.

Not vegan, Dad.

“Robbie. It’s your birthday. That only happens, what…? Barely once a year?”

He refused to smile. Butter. Dairy products. Egg. Mom would not have gone for it.

“Oh, I watched your mother eat cake, on more than one occasion!”

I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. He looked like a timid squirrel, not sure whether to take the outstretched goodness that he craved or to flee back into the woods.

When?

“She made exceptions now and then.”

Robin stared at the cake, a carroty, sinless thing whose virtue would have disgusted any other child. His brief little birthday Eden had just been overrun with snakes.

“It’s okay, champ. We can feed it to the birds.”

Well. We could try a little, first?

We did. Every time the taste of cake made him happy, he caught himself and grew thoughtful again.

How tall was she?

He knew her height. But today he needed a number.

“Five-foot-two. You’ll pass her, before long. She was a runner, remember?”

He nodded, more to himself than to me. Small but mighty.

She called herself that, when gearing up to go do battle at the Capitol. I liked to call her “compact, but planetary.” Stolen from a Neruda sonnet I once recited to her on an autumn night that ended in a winter. I had to resort to some other man’s words to ask her to marry me.

What did you call her?

It always rattled me when he read my mind. “Oh, all kinds of things. You remember.”

But like what?

“Like Aly for Alyssa. And Ally, because she was my ally.”

Miss Lissy.

“She never liked that one.”

Mom. You called her Mom!

“Sometimes. Yes.”

That is so flipping weird. I reached out to rough his hair. He jerked away but gave me a pass. How did I get my name again?

He knew how he got his name. He’d heard the story more often than was healthy. But he hadn’t asked for months, and I didn’t mind repeating it.

“On our first date, your mother and I went birding.”

Before Madison. Before everything.

“Before everything. Your mother was brilliant! She kept spotting them left and right. Warblers and thrushes and flycatchers—every one of those birds was an old friend. She didn’t even have to see them. She knew them by ear. Meanwhile, there I was, poking around, stumbling over these confusing little brown jobs that I couldn’t tell apart…”

Wishing you’d asked her to the movies?

“Ah. So you have heard this one before.”

Maybe.

“At last I saw an amazing patch of bright orange-red. I was saved. I started shouting, Ooh, ooh, ooh!”

And Mom said, “What do you see? What do you see?”

“She was very excited for me.”

Then you swore.

“I may have sworn, yes. I was so humiliated. ‘Gee. Sorry. It’s only a robin.’ I figured I’d never see this woman again.”

He waited for the punch line that, for some reason, he needed to hear out loud once more.

“But your mother was looking through her binoculars like my find was the single most exotic life-form she’d ever seen. Without taking her eyes off it, she said, ‘The robin is my favorite bird.’”

That’s when you fell in love with her.

“That’s when I knew I wanted to spend as much time around her as I could. I told her so, later, when I knew her better. We started saying it all the time. Whenever we were doing anything together—reading the paper or brushing our teeth or doing the taxes or taking out the trash. Whatever blah or boring thing we were taking for granted. We’d trade a look, read each other’s minds, and one of us would blurt out, ‘The robin is my favorite bird!’”

He stood and stacked his dish onto mine, brought them to the sink, and turned on the faucet.

“Hey! It’s your birthday. My turn to wash dishes.”

He sat back down across from me with his Look me in the eye look.

Can I ask you something? No lies. Honesty is important to me, Dad. Was the robin actually her favorite bird?

I didn’t know how to be a parent. Most of what I did, I remembered from what she used to do. I made enough mistakes on any one day to scar him for life. My only hope was that all the errors somehow canceled each other out.

“Actually? Your mother’s favorite bird was the one in front of her.”

The answer agitated him. Our curious boy, as strange as anyone. Weighed down by the world’s history, before he even learned to talk. Six going on sixty, Aly said, a few months before she died.

“But the robin was the national bird, for her and me. It kept things special. We just had to say the word, and life got better. We never thought of naming you anything else.”

He bared his teeth. Did you have any idea what being a Robin is like?

“What do you mean?”

I mean, at school? At the park? Everywhere? I have to deal with it, every day.

“Robbie? Listen to me. Are kids bullying you again?”

He closed one eye and pulled away. Does the entire third grade being a total jerk-face count?

I held out my hands, asking forgiveness. Alyssa used to say, The world is going to take this child apart.

“It’s a dignified name. For men and women. You could do good things with it.”

On some other planet, maybe. A thousand years ago. Thanks again, guys.

He gazed into his microscope’s eyepiece, avoiding me. The note-taking grew diligent. Someone looking in from outside might have thought his research was real. In a confidential report, his second-grade teacher had called him slow but not always accurate. She was right about the slow, wrong about the accurate. Given time, he’d converge on more accuracy than his teacher could imagine.

I went out on the deck to breathe in the trees. A tract of forest ran in all directions. Five minutes later—it must have felt an eternity to him—Robin came out and slipped underneath my arm.

Sorry, Dad. It’s a good name. And I’m okay with being… you know. Confusing.

“Everyone’s confusing. And everyone’s confused.”

He put a sheet of paper into my hand. Check it out. What do you think?

From the upper left, a colored-pencil bird, in profile, looked toward the center of the page. He’d drawn it well, down to the streaked throat and white splotches around the eye.

“Well, look at that. Your mother’s favorite bird.”

How about this one?

A second bird in profile looked back from the top right. This one, too, was unmistakable: a raven with its wings tucked in, like a tuxedoed man pacing with his hands behind his back. My family name derived from Bran—raven in Irish. “Nice. From the Mind of Robin Byrne?”

He took the sheet back and appraised it, already planning slight corrections. Can we print up some stationery from this when we get back? I really, really need some stationery.

“This could happen, Birthday Boy.”