Bewilderment

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WHAT ABOUT AN ADVENTURE? he asked, and he took me on a walk around the neighborhood. I’d never seen him walk slower or swivel his head more. Ecstasy wasn’t right. Alyssa’s zeal softened in Robin, to something more fluid and improvised. Half the world’s species were dying. But the world, his face said, would stay green or even greener. He was all right now with every coming disaster, so long as he could just get outdoors.

He shocked me by greeting a young couple who came down the sidewalk toward us. How far are you going today?

The question made them laugh. Not far, they said.

We’re not going far, either. Maybe just around the block. Although, who knows?

The young woman regarded me, the muscles around her eyes praising me for a job well done. I denied all responsibility.

Down the sidewalk, he grabbed my elbow. Hear that? Two downy woodpeckers, having a chat.

I worked to hear it. “How do you know?”

Easy. “Downy goes down.” Hear how the song sinks a little, at the end?

“Well, yes. But I mean, how do you know that the downy’s song goes down?”

And there’s a house wren. Per-chick-oree!

I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. “Robbie. Who taught you this?”

Mom knew all the birdsongs.

He must have known that he was spooking me. Maybe he was chiding me for my ignorance. I’d birded with Aly all through courtship. But after we married, I left that task to other people.

“That’s true. She did. But she studied them for years.”

I don’t know them all. I only know the ones I know.

“Are you studying them somewhere? Online?”

Not really studying. I just listen and like them.

Where had I been, during all that listening? On other planets.

We walked, Robbie listening and me fretting. I was running a calculation I didn’t know how to complete. How different was he from who he’d been months ago? He’d always sketched, always been curious, always loved living things. But the boy at my right elbow was a different species from the boy who’d played with his birthday microscope in our rented cabin in the woods less than a year earlier. Fascination had made him invincible.

Two more steps and he froze in place. He waved me forward, pointing down at the sidewalk, pantomiming. On the concrete, the shadows of a nearby ironwood tree played against a field of sandy sunlight. They looked like layers of Japanese ink paintings on coarse paper, floating over one another in ghostly animation. His face broke out in contagious joy. But Robbie’s happiness and mine were as different as a tern on a thermal and a rubber-band prop plane. I got restless long before he did. He might have stayed there all afternoon watching the spectral silhouettes if I hadn’t prodded him away.

Three blocks from our house, we reached the tiny neighborhood park. He pointed to a slender fountain of a tree trunk in the corner of the playground near the swings.

That’s my favorite. I call it my redhead tree.

“Your what? Why?”

Because it has red hair. Serious! You’ve never seen it?

He steered me toward the low-hanging branches. When we reached the tree, he twisted a leaf. There, on the underside, in the junction of the side veins and the midrib, were tiny patches of red hair.

Scarlet oak. Cool, right?

“I had no idea!”

He patted me on the back. That’s okay, Dad. You’re not the only one.

Shouts came from down the street. Three boys a little older than Robbie were trying to dislodge a stop sign. Concern clouded Robin’s face. People are so strange.

He let the leaf go, and the branch sprang back into place. I looked up at the column of tree, where every leaf was now red-haired. “Robbie. When did you learn all this stuff?”

He reared back and gawked at me, the only creature out here that baffled him. What do you mean, “when?” All along!

“But have you been teaching yourself?”

His whole body demurred. Everybody out here wants me to know them. In another moment, he’d entirely forgotten I’d ever asked him anything. He showed me an ant mound and a burrow dug under the wall of a small pavilion. I don’t know whose that is, yet. He got down on his haunches and watched the opening for long enough to make me restless. Whoever’s in there is fantastic.

He walked under the tunnel of maples and doomed ash trees as if he were in a submersible at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. I tagged along in the wake of his rotating gaze. But still, I wasn’t looking. I couldn’t clear my head of a question that had nagged at me for weeks. It came out of me even as I was thinking of some new way to suppress it. “Robbie? When you do the training? Is it like Mom’s there?”

He stopped and grabbed at a section of chain-link fence. Mom’s all over.

“Yes. But—”

Remember what Dr. Currier told us? Whenever I train myself to match the pattern, then what I’m feeling…

Was what she was feeling. The lemon-colored wedge, that grand prize on Plutchik’s wheel of fortune. He had Ecstasy, while I was stuck on Apprehension, Envy, or worse.

He started up again, and I followed. His hand swept along the length of suburban street. Dad? It’s like that planet we went to. The one where all the separate creatures share a single memory.