Sixty Days and Counting

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FRANK AND CAROLINE FLEW TOGETHER out to San Diego.

There was an awkwardness between them now that Frank didn’t understand. It was as if, now that they were free to do what they wanted, they didn’t know what it was. It reminded Frank in a rather frightening way of his old inability to decide—of how that had felt. They had no habits. They sat side by side, and long silences grew.

Before they had left, Frank had dropped by the office. He had walked into Edgardo’s office and given the Argentinian a big hug, his cheek crushed against the tall man’s skinny chest. “Thanks Edgardo.”

Edgardo had smiled his wry smile. “You are welcome, my friend. It was my pleasure, believe me.”

They had then discussed the situation as conveyed by Umberto; it sounded like things would be okay. Phil was untangling the intelligence community, though that would take some doing. Frank then explained his plan, and Edgardo had raised a finger. She might not want to talk about this last year, he had warned. She may never want to. A lot of us are like that. I don’t know if she is, but if so, be ready for it. It may always be a case of limited discussion.

Frank had nodded, thinking it over.

Besides, Edgardo had continued—even if she did fix the election single-handedly, and frame her ex to make it look like he framed her, what’s anyone to do about that now?

Frank’s uneasy shrug had sparked Edgardo’s most delighted and cynical laugh. It echoed in his mind all the way across the country.

In San Diego, Frank drove their rental car up to La Jolla. First to the top of Mount Soledad, to show her the area from on high; then down to UCSD, where he found parking and walked her through the eucalyptus groves in their ranks and files and diagonals. Then up the great promenade between the big pretty buildings, the ocean often visible out to the west. Up the curving path on the east side of the library, an inlaid piece of sculpture made to resemble a snake’s back. An inscription from Milton carved into the snake’s head made it clear just which snake it was. Central Library as the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: very apt.

Caroline smiled when she saw it, and kissed Frank on the cheek. “Want an apple?” That was the best sign he had gotten from her all day, and his spirits expanded a bit.

Then out across the street, onto the bluff overlooking the Pacific. He pointed out his bedroom nook, and watched her look out at the view. You could see San Clemente Island on the horizon, seventy miles out to sea. He could see that she liked it. Then they returned to the streets, and up Torrey Pines to the new institute.

Into Leo’s lab. Leo regarded Caroline with interest as Frank introduced them.

“Leo, this is my friend—”

“Carrie Barr,” Caroline said, and put out her hand.

“Hi,” Leo said, taking it. “Leo Mulhouse. Good to meet you.”

After a bit of chat about their trip out:

“Are the insertions still going well?” Frank asked.

“They’re good,” Leo said. “Results are really good right now.”

Frank explained to Caroline some of what they were doing, and tried to answer her questions with the right amount of technical detail, never an easy thing to judge. She looked different to Frank now, as if she had instantly become a Californian now that she was here. Maybe it was that he had seldom seen her in the sun. It was hard to believe how little time they had actually spent together. He didn’t know how much biology she knew, or whether she was interested in it.

After that, Frank had a meeting on campus. “Do you want to join me for it, or do you want to have a look around while I talk to him?”

“I’ll have a look around.”

“Okay. Let’s meet back at Leo’s lab in an hour, okay?”

“Fine.” Off she went.

Frank walked over to the coffee kiosk in the eucalyptus grove at the center of campus, where he had arranged to meet with Henry Bannet of Biocal. They shook hands, and in short order were looking at Frank’s laptop and the PowerPoint show that Frank had cobbled together for him. As Frank spoke, he added stuff Leo had just told him a few minutes before. Bannet proved to be much as Leo had said: pleasant, professionally friendly, all in the usual way—but he had a quickness of eye that seemed to indicate some kind of impatience. Once or twice he interrupted Frank’s explanations with questions about Yann and Eleanor’s methods. He knew a lot. This guy, Frank thought, wanted gene therapy to work.

“Have you talked to your tech transfer office about this?” Bannet asked.

“It’s Eleanor Dufours who is the P.I.,” Frank said. “She’ll be the one leading the way with any start-up.”

“Okay,” Bannet said, looking a bit surprised. “We can discuss that later.”

By the time Frank got back to Leo’s lab, Caroline was already there, and so were Marta and Eleanor, with Marta looking most intrigued.

“Frank!” Marta said. “I didn’t know you were going to be out here again so soon.”

“Yes, I am. Hi, Eleanor. Have you guys met my friend—”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “Leo introduced us,” and for a second everyone was saying something at once.

After a brief laugh, they fell silent. “Well!” Marta said. She had a gleam in her eye that Frank had seen before. “What a lucky coincidence! We were just going to grab Leo for dinner in Del Mar, to celebrate the latest results—did he tell you about those? Why don’t you two join us?”

Frank said, “Oh, well—”

“Sure,” Caroline said, “that sounds great.”

So there they were at one of the beach restaurants in Del Mar, talking away cheerfully. Given the results in the lab, they had a lot to be cheerful about. Caroline was seated on one side of Frank, Marta on the other. It made him uneasy, but there was nothing he could do. And besides he too had cheerful news, in the form of his meeting with Henry Bannet.

“So does that mean you’re moving back?” Marta said to Frank when the others were all talking among themselves.

“Yes, I think so.”

“You’ve been out there a long time—what has it been, three years?”

“Almost,” Frank said. “It feels like more.”

After dinner, Marta invited them to come along with them to the Belly-Up, and again Caroline agreed before Frank could beg off. So there they were, in the crush of dancers on the floor of the Belly-Up, Frank dancing with three women, watching Marta and Caroline shouting over the music into each other’s ears and then laughing heartily, before excusing themselves and going off to the ladies’ room together. Frank watched this appalled. He had never even imagined Marta and Caroline meeting, much less becoming friendly. Now he was surprised to see that they looked somewhat alike, or were in some other way similar. And really, now that he thought of it, it was gratifying that Marta liked Caroline—a kind of approval of his judgment, or his D.C. life. Part of a more general amnesty. But it also felt like trouble, in some obscure way Frank could not pin down. At the very least it probably meant he was going to get laughed at a lot. Well, whatever. Nothing to be done about that. There were worse fates.

Frank had made reservations for the night at a motel in Encinitas, but for some reason he was nervous about that; and besides, he wanted to take Caroline up to Leucadia. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep until he did.

So he explained as they left the Belly-Up, and she nodded, and he drove north on the coast highway.

“So?” Frank said. “How are you liking it?”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “And I like your friends. But, you know—I’m not sure what I would do out here.”

“Well—anything you want, right? I mean, you’re going to have to do something different anyway. You aren’t going to be going back into intelligence….”

But maybe she thought she was. Maybe that was it.

She didn’t say anything, so he dropped the matter, feeling more uncertain than ever.

He turned left off the coast highway in Leucadia, onto the street that led to Neptune.

He parked a little down from Leo’s house. As they walked up the street, gaps to their left again revealed the enormous expanse of the Pacific, vast and gray under the marine layer, which was patterned by moonlight. Like something out of a dream. He had her here at last. Breaking waves cracked and grumbled underfoot, and the usual faint haze of mist salted the air.

He stopped in the street in front of one of the cliffside houses. The cliff here had given way in the big storms, and even the streetside wall of this particular house was cracked. It appeared that one corner of its outer foundation overhung the new face of the cliff. There was a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign stuck in the Bermuda grass of a narrow front lawn.

Frank said, “I followed up on something Leo said, and checked the USGS study of this part of the coast, and he’s right—this is a little buttress here, a little bit of a point, see? We’re a touch higher, and the iceplant doesn’t grow as well on the cliff, and there was this erosion, but the point itself is strong. I think this will be the last erosion you see here for a while. And there are things you can do to shore things up. And, you know, if worse came to worst, we could tear down this house entirely and build nearer the street. Something small and neat.”

“Like in this tree?” Caroline said, gesturing at the big eucalyptus tilting over them.

Frank grinned. “Well, incorporating it maybe. We’d have to save it somehow.”

She smiled briefly, nodded. “My treehouse man.”

She walked out to the edge of the cliff, looked down curiously. Anywhere else on Earth this would be a major sea cliff; here it was a little lower than average for North County, at about seventy feet. Everywhere sea cliffs were eroding at one rate or another.

“There’s a staircase down to the beach, just past Leo and Roxanne’s,” Frank told her, pointing to the south. “There’s a bike lane on the coast highway that runs from here all the way down to UCSD. I think it’s about twelve miles. You could get a job down there on campus, or nearby, and we could bike down there to work. Take the coast cruiser when we need to. We could make it work.”

“Well good,” Caroline said, staring at him in the moonlight. “Because I’m pregnant.”

-

FRANK DREAMED THAT CHARLIE CAME to him at the end of a day’s work and said, “Phil wants to see Rock Creek,” and off they went in a parade of black Priuses. In the park it was as snowy as in the depths of the long winter, and they crunched on snowshoes through air like dry ice. At Site 21 the bros had a bonfire going, and Frank introduced the bundled-up Phil as an old friend and the bros did not notice him, they were focused on the bonfire and their talk—all except Fedpage, who looked up from the Post he was feeding to the fire. He studied Phil for a second and his eyebrows shot up. “Whoah!” he said, and knocked his glasses up his nose to have a better look. “What’s this, some kind of Prince Hal thing going on here?” He jerked his head to the side to redirect Zeno’s attention to the visitor. “Oh, hey,” Zeno said as he saw who it was. Frank was afraid he would go all blustery and false like he often did with Frank himself, but Phil slipped through all that and soon they were adding fuel to the fire, and talking about Vietnam, and Zeno was fine. Frank felt a glow of pleasure at that. But otherwise it was cold, unless you sat too close to the fire, and the hour grew late, and yet on the Viet vets reminisced; Frank shared a glance with the Secret Service man sitting beside him, a black man he had never seen (and on waking he would remember this man’s face so clearly, it was utterly distinct, a face he had never seen before—where did the faces like that come from, who were they?) and their shared glance told them that they both had realized that the president liked this kind of scene, that he was a bullshitter at heart, like Clinton, like—how far did it go back? Washington? And so they were going to be there all night, talking about Vietnam.

But then Spencer and Robin and Robert came roaring through and Frank leaped up to join their night golf. They were going long, they said. It was too beautiful not to. They were shooting new holes all the way down Rock Creek and past the Watergate, curving one shot into the Lincoln Memorial to smack Abe’s left knee, then across to the Korean vets, where one of the doomed statues had his hand out as if to make a catch; then on to the Tidal Basin, threading the cherry trees lining the west bank, so that it took finesse as well as brute distance to do well; and then out to the FDR Memorial, where the final hole was declared to be the gold forefinger of Roosevelt’s second statue. Frank threw his frisbee and realized as it curved away that its flight was so perfect that it would hit the finger right on the tip, and so he woke up.

-

THEY GOT BACK TO D.C. JUST IN TIME for the Saturday of another party at the Khembali farm. It was a day on which Frank had a zoo morning scheduled with Nick, so he showed up at the Quiblers’ house at around ten.

“How was San Diego?” they asked him. They knew that he was planning to move back there.

“It was good.” He smiled what Anna called his real smile. “I found out that my girlfriend is pregnant.”

“Pregnant?” Anna cried—

“Girlfriend?” Charlie exclaimed.

The two of them looked at each other and laughed at their nicely timed response, also their mutual ignorance.

Then Anna snapped her fingers and pointed at Frank. “It’s that woman you met in the elevator, I bet.”

“Well yes, that’s right.”

“Ha! I knew it! Well!” She gave him a hug. “I guess you’re glad now that you went to that brown bag talk at NSF!”

“And came to your party afterward. Yes, that was quite a day. You did a good thing to set that up.” Frank shook his head as he remembered it. “Everything changed on that day.”

Anna clapped her hands a little. “Frank that is good news, so when do we get to meet her?”

“She’s coming to the party this afternoon, so you’ll meet her out there. She couldn’t make it to the zoo, though, she had to do some stuff.”

“Okay, good then. Off we go.”

They walked up to the Bethesda Metro, trained down to the zoo. In through the front gates—an entry Frank and Nick rarely used—past the pandas, then down toward the tigers, Joe racing ahead in perpetual danger of catching a toe and launching himself into a horrible face-plant. “Joe, slow down!” Charlie cried uselessly as he took off in pursuit.

Frank walked between Nick and Anna, all three looking for the golden tamarind monkeys and other little ferals squirreling around freely in the trees. By the time they had dropped in to see which gibbons were out, and continued down to the tiger enclosure, Joe was up on Charlie’s shoulders, and dangerously canted over the moat.

Their swimming tigers were basking in the sun. The male was draped against the tree like a tiger rug, his mouth hanging open. The female lay en couchant, long and sleek, staring sphinxlike into emptiness.

For a long time no one moved. Other people drifted by, passed on to other things.

“I saw the jaguar,” Frank told them. “It was casual at the time, or, I don’t mean casual—I was totally scared and ran away as soon as I could—but I didn’t fully get it, how great it was to see it, until a few days later.”

“Wow,” Nick said. “Did you get a GPS?”

“It was at the overlook.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Wow.”

After a while longer they went to get snowcones, even though it was just before lunch. Frank got lime; Nick got a mix of root beer, cherry, and banana.

Then Frank took off to go pick up his girlfriend, and the Quiblers went back to the house before continuing out to the farm.

The Khembalis’ party was a big one, combining as it did several celebrations, not just the Shambhala arrival, but also the Buddhist plum-blossom festival, which now would always mark the auspicious day when the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government had agreed on his return to Tibet. The treaty had been signed there in Washington, at the White House, just the day before. And now also it was Frank’s going-away party as well, and even a sort of shower; and last but not least, Phil and Diane were going to drop by for a bit. Their presence added to the crowd, as well as making the party into a kind of wedding reception, because the first couple had made their actual nuptials a completely private affair some days before. Parts of the punditocracy were squawking that this fait accompli was an unholy alliance of science and politics, but Phil had only laughed at this and agreed, adding “What are you gonna do?”

So when they arrived, there was the usual stir. But as soon as they had accepted a toast from all they insisted that the party refocus on the Khembalis, and the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet, and to what that meant, which was the return to the Tibetan people of some kind of autonomy or, as Phil reminded them briefly, semi-autonomy. “No one person or institution or nation is more than semi-autonomous anyway,” Phil said in his remarks, “so it’s very good, a welcome development that truly dwarfs any personal cause for celebration we might have. Although the personal causes in this case are all quite glorious.”

To which everyone said, “Hear hear.”

Frank and Caroline wandered the compound together, running into people Frank knew and chatting with them over cups of champagne and unidentifiable hors-d’oeuvres. Padma led them through every room in the much-articulated treehouse, and Caroline laughed to see Frank’s face as he contemplated the new upper reaches of the system. He took her out on the old limb to show her where he and Rudra had lived, and then he was given a tour of the farm’s current crops, and the orchard of apple saplings, just recently planted, while Caroline was taken in hand by Qang to meet some of the other Khembali women.

When Frank rejoined her, she was still deep in conversation with Qang, who was answering her questions with a smile.

“Yes,” Qang was saying, “that is probably what they have always stood for. We call them demons, but of course one could also say that they are simply bad ideas.”

“So sometimes, when you do those ceremonies to drive out demons, you could say that in a sense you’re holding a ceremony to drive out bad ideas?”

“Yes, of course. That is just what an exorcism of demons is, to us.”

“I like that,” Caroline said, looking over at Frank. “It makes it kind of explicit, and yet—religious. And it—you say it works?”

“Yes, very often it does. Of course, sometimes you need to do it more than once. We had to exorcise Frank’s friend Charlie twice, for instance, to drive out some bad ideas that had taken root in him. But I believe it worked in the end.”

She turned to Frank to include him in the conversation.

“It sounds like something I could use,” Frank said.

“Oh, no. I think you have never been infected by any bad ideas!”

Qang’s merry look reminded him of Rudra, and he laughed. “I’m not so sure of that!”

Qang said, “You are only infected by good ideas, and you wrestle with them very capably. That’s what Padma says.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“It sounds right to me,” Caroline said, slipping an arm under Frank’s. “I, on the other hand, could use a thoroughgoing exorcism. In fact I’d like to order up a full-on reincarnation, or not exactly, but you know. A new life.”

“You can do that,” Qang said, smiling at her. “We all do that. And especially when you have a child.”

“I suppose so.”

Sucandra joined them. “So, Frank,” he said, “now you go back to your old home.”

“Yes, that’s right. Although it will be different now.”

“Of course. The two of you together—very nice. And you will work for the institute you helped to start out there?”

“I’ll work with them, but my job will be back at the university. I’ve been on a leave of absence, so I have to go back.”

“But your research will connect to that of the institute?”

“Exactly. Some of my colleagues there are exploring some new possibilities. There’s an old student of mine who is doing remarkable things. First there was genomics, and now he’s starting what you could call proteomics. It looks like they’ll be starting up a small company of their own. In fact, I’ve been talking to Drepung about the idea of you guys investing in this company. If Khembalung has any kind of investment portfolio, you might want to talk with them. Because if things pan out for them the way I think they might, there’ll be some very important medical treatments to come out of it.”

“Good, good,” Sucandra said, and Qang nodded too. “Qang here heads that committee.”

“Yes,” Qang said, “I will talk to them. If we can make investments that help health, it’s a good thing. But Sucandra is our doctor, so he will have to take a look too.”

Sucandra nodded. “What about you, will you be investing in this new company?”

Frank laughed. “I might if I had anything to invest. Right now all I have is my salary. Which is fine. But we’re buying a house, so there won’t be much extra. But that’s okay. If it works there’ll be enough for everybody.”

“A nice thought.”

Then Drepung joined them. He was wearing his Wizards basketball shirt and his enormous Reeboks, and the cord to his iPod was entangled in his turquoise and coral necklaces.

“What about you, Drepung?” Frank asked. “Will you be moving back to Tibet?”

“Oh no, I don’t think so!” Drepung grinned. “Only room for one lama in Lhasa! Besides, I like it here. And I am obliged to stay in any case. It’s part of the deal with the Chinese, more or less. And besides, this is Khembalung now! And not just the farm, but really the whole D.C. area. So I have work to do here as an ambassador.”

“Good,” Frank said. “They can use you.”

“Thank you, I will give it a good try. What about you, Frank? Won’t you miss this place when you go back to San Diego?”

“Yes, I will. But I need to get back. And people always visit D.C. All kinds of reasons bring you back.”

“So true.”

“Maybe I’ll see you out there too.”

“I hope so. I’ll try to visit.”

Neither man was under any illusion as to how frequently this was likely to happen.

Frank looked around at the crowd. He knew a lot of the people there. If he had stuck to his plan and stayed just a year, and lived that year like a ghost, he would have passed through and gone home without regrets. No one would even have been aware of his passing. But it had not happened that way. It all came down to the people you ran into.

This was accentuated when the Quiblers arrived. Charlie pretended to be cheery about Frank’s departure, but he also shook his head painfully—“I don’t know who’ll get us out on the river now.”

Anna was simply sad. “We’ll miss you,” she said, and gave him a hug. “The boys will miss you.”

Nick was noncommittal. He looked off to the side. He spoke of the latest developments in their feral research program, steadfastly focused on the details of a new spreadsheet Anna had helped him set up, on which he could record all their sightings by species, and not only keep an inventory, but enter range parameters, to gauge which species might be able to go truly feral. There was also a GIS program that let you identify or design habitat corridors. It was very interesting.

Frank nodded and made some suggestions. “We’ll keep in touch by e-mail,” he said at one point when he saw Nick looking away. “Then hey—maybe when you go off to college, you can come to UCSD. It’s a really fun school.”

“Oh yeah,” Nick said, brightening. “Good idea.”

Anna was startled at this suggestion, and Charlie actually winced. Neither were used to the idea of Nick growing up. But there he stood, almost as tall as Anna, and four or five inches taller than when Frank had met him. He was changing by the day, almost by the hour.

The Quiblers wandered the party. Nick and Anna talked about the swimming tigers with Sucandra as they all stood under the treehouse, looking up to watch Charlie chase Joe around the various catwalks.

“It’s gotten so big.”

“Yes, people like to live up there. People like to work on it too.”

“It would be cool,” Nick said.

Sucandra nodded. “You all should consider moving out here with us,” he said to them. “We would be so happy to have you here with us. You are already Khembalis, as far as we are concerned. And I think you would like it. A community like this is a kind of extended family. And of course group living is very thrifty,” he added with a smile at Anna. “Energy consumption would be only a fraction of that used by an ordinary suburban house.”

“That’s true,” Anna said.

“Hey MOMMA!” Joe shouted down at her from the highest catwalk.

“Hi monkey,” she called up. “Did you lose Dad?”

“Yeah, I did!”

“Oh my,” Anna muttered.

Actually Charlie was not far below Joe, although on a different catwalk; he had gotten lost at an intersection. He retraced his last steps, and turned a corner—and there was Roy Anastophoulus.

“Roy!”

“Charlie!”

They gave each other a hug.

Over Roy’s shoulder, Charlie saw Andrea Blackwell. Charlie had not been aware that they were on again, but by her smile it appeared to be so.

“It’s good to see you!” Charlie said. “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“No, well, when we heard about Phil and Diane coming out to get a marriage blessing from the Dalai Lama, we asked if we could tag along and join in.”

“So—you mean—”

Roy nodded. “Yes. We got married yesterday at the courthouse.” They showed him their shiny new wedding bands. “Now we’re here for the blessing.”

“Wonderful!” Charlie said. “Wait till Anna hears!”

He yelled down to the ground: “Hey Anna!” Then: “Just a second, I have to catch up to Joe. In fact, if you could take this catwalk across to over there, and wait? Maybe you can help me cut him off.”

“Sure.”

Back on the ground Anna was indeed delighted with their news. They gathered with the rest of the guests on the lawn in front of the main house, and cheered the appearance of the Dalai Lama, entering the big tent with Drepung, and followed by Phil and Diane, then Roy and Andrea. A troop of Khembalis in their best Tibetan finery performed a brief dance, accompanied by the drums, horns, and swirls of incense that reminded Anna all of a sudden of the first time she had seen the Khembalis, performing a similar ceremony before their little office in the NSF building.

The Dalai Lama, cheerfully sublime as always, led Phil and Diane through a brief set of Buddhist wedding vows; then did the same for Roy and Andrea. While they were still up there, Drepung gestured to Frank and Caroline to come up to the front, and they came out of the crowd to applause. Diane gave Frank a quick high five.

Drepung was the one who led Frank and Caroline through their vows, ending with a blessing on them:

Then he and the Dalai Lama stood side by side, and reached out together to join the hands of the three couples. For a moment everything was still; then with a blast on the long Tibetan horns, the party began in earnest.

“Here,” Nick said as the Quiblers prepared to leave, and he shoved an envelope into Frank’s hand. “FOG made a going-away card out of your phone log. Almost everybody signed it. Jason was out of town.”

“Thanks,” Frank said. Most of those people he had never met in person; they had been voices over the phone, or names on the sighting board. “Tell them I’ll miss them. Tell them I’ll try to get something like this started out in San Diego.”

“Will there be any animals to see out there?”

“No, not really. You’re lucky with what you have here. Out there it’s down to birds and rabbits, I’m afraid. Maybe I’ll have to arrange a breakout at the San Diego Zoo.”

Joe, nearly asleep on Charlie’s shoulder, heard the word “zoo” and rolled his head to the side.

“Tiger,” he murmured, and pounded Charlie’s chest with a single solid tap.

Charlie put his chin on the round blond head. “You’re my tiger,” he said. Joe drifted back off.

-

WHEN THE QUIBLERS GOT HOME they changed out of their party clothes and went out in the yard to work on the garden. At five their doorbell rang, and Frank’s friend Cutter appeared at their door, a burly black man with big scarred hands and a friendly smile. Behind him his crew were already unloading gear from their truck. The PV panels had arrived at last. Joe ran around the house to investigate, and he and Charlie watched fascinated as the ladders were assembled and scaled. The nimble climbers disappeared onto the roof and then dropped ropes beside the ladder, to help stabilize their climb and also to haul things up. The struts and wiring had been installed weeks ago, but there was a waiting list for the solar panels themselves. Now they were hooking them to a hoist line. Soon what Charlie and Joe could see of the south side of the roof was covered with gear. It was going to be a grid of sixteen photovoltaic panels, capable of generating all the house’s electricity when the sun was shining. Whenever more electricity was generated by the panels than they used in the house, the excess would be fed back into the grid, and they would be paid for it by the utility district that had recently replaced the private company as their power provider. This was going to give them a big drop in their carbon-burn numbers, and Charlie was sure Anna and Nick would be very pleased.

With a wave to Joe, Cutter and his team took off.

The photovoltaics were indeed very good for their carbon-burn score, and their garden helped a little; but still they were scoring pretty high, and Anna was getting frustrated. “You just can’t do it in a suburban home, when you own a car and a phone and all the stuff.”

“We’re doing better,” Charlie reminded her.

“Yeah, but we’re hitting limits.” Anna stared at her spreadsheet. “I don’t see what else we can do here, either, given the infrastructure and all. I wonder if we should take up the Khembalis’ offer and move in with them.”

Charlie rolled his eyes. “It seems to me they’re crowded enough out there.”

“Well, they’ve sent some of their group back to India. They say there’s room.”

“I don’t know. Would you want to do that?”

“I don’t know. In a way I think it would be nice.”

Charlie did not reply. He knew that Anna was concerned about the carbon burn of their house. The numbers there had hooked her in their usual way. For the sake of an elegant result she would contemplate almost anything. And to be fair, Charlie recalled now how involved she had been with the Khembalis from the very start—inviting them over, becoming friends with Sucandra and Qang, helping their Institute of Higher Studies—learning more Tibetan than any of the rest of them.

“Let’s talk to the boys about it,” he temporized.

“Sure. And maybe check it out the next time we’re out there for dinner. See what it might really entail.”

“If we can. We might not be able to tell in a visit.”

“Well, of course.”

“And, you know,” he reminded her, “we’re doing better here than most people who live in a single family house.”

“True. But maybe that isn’t good enough anymore.”

After that Charlie wandered around the house, feeling strange. It was almost sunset outside, and inside the house it was getting dark. The others were out in the kitchen, clattering about as they got dinner started.

Charlie stood in the living room looking around. Something about it caught his eye. A quality of the evening light. It looked like a place that had been lived in long ago. There was a tangle of trucks on the carpet, but otherwise things were cleaned up. It looked spare. Perhaps Frank’s comment about Nick going to UCSD had put him in an odd frame of mind. Of course all these things would happen. But the years after Nick’s birth had been so intense; and since Joe’s arrival, even more so. It had filled his mind. It had crowded everything else out; it had seemed the only reality. He could have said, Once there was an island in time, just off Wisconsin Avenue: a mother, a father, two boys, two cats; and it seemed like it would last forever. But then…

That was all it took, just then and then and then another then. Enough thens and then the island was gone. Someday other people would live in this house. It was an odd thought to have. Charlie sat down, looked around at the room as if it might vanish. One day he would break the couch under him into splinters so it would fit in the trash cans to be hauled away. Island after island went under, and the little Khembalung moved somewhere else.

The phone rang.

“Charlie, can you get that please? I’ve gotta—Joe! No Joe, we’ll get that—oh—oh, okay. Okay! Charlie, never mind! Joe’s got it!”

-

FRANK WENT DOWN TO THE POTOMAC for one last trip out before they left.

It was a hot spring day, the world green and steaming. Charlie couldn’t make it; Drepung couldn’t make it. Caroline was driving down from the farm later with a picnic lunch; she too was busy, and said she would get to Great Falls before he was finished. She planned to sit on the bluff overlooking the downstream end of Mather Gorge, near the put-in, while he paddled up the Fish Ladder.

An hour later, while taking a rest from his salmon leaps up the Ladder, he looked up at the bluff but did not see her.

When he looked back at the falls, the woman kayaker he had seen twice before was already three steps up the Ladder and ascending like a kingfisher or a water ouzel. As before, the sight of her leaped in his vision, it was like being nudged by the side of the world: broad shoulders, big lats, a thick braid of black hair bouncing on her neck—for an instant, a profile—maybe that was it—or the way she moved. Beautiful. He took off after her, he didn’t know why; he intended nothing by it, he knew his Caroline would soon be there; it was just a curiosity that put him in pursuit, some itch to see.

Hard paddle into the first white drop, punching into the flow to get enough acceleration to slide up onto the flat spot above. Do it again. Do it again. Each flat spot had a slightly different length, leading to a different speed of water at the infall. The drops got harder, though in truth they were almost as even as stairs—but not quite—and near the top, the ones that were just a bit taller took a terrific effort to ascend.

But he made it to the top. His lungs were burning and his arms were on fire. He had never managed it before and here he was, on the big sweep of the upper Potomac.

But there she was, rounding a bend upstream, still paddling hard. Frank set off in pursuit, confident now he had ascended the ladder that there were no impediments to catching her. He took off at a racing pace.

But so had she. When he rounded the first bend she was already at the next one; and when he rounded that, his arms in a hot lactic scream, she was even farther ahead, in the long straight section that came there. And yet it wouldn’t be that long before she made it to the next bend; and she was still paddling hard. Frank pushed one last time, breathing hard now, sweating until his eyes stung, trying to ignore the lactic acid in the pulling muscles of his arms and chest, until the time came that they felt like blocks of wood. His kayak was slowing down.

When he rounded the bend at the end of the straight, she was disappearing ahead. Gone. He had to give up.

He stopped and sucked down air, sweating, wiping sweat off his eyebrows with the backs of his hands. Cramps flickered through his muscles. He let the kayak drift downstream on the current. He had given it his all. Chasing beauty upstream until he couldn’t anymore. A very fast goddess. Oh well.

Now there was the Great Falls of the Potomac to attend to. Very few took the biggest drops in a kayak; they could be fatal. Only the best professionals would even think of it. Everyone else ran the various alternatives, not just the Fish Ladder but other parts of the complex of falls on the Maryland side, more or less difficult.

He took the drop called The Ping Pong, struggling with the big bounces in the midsection, his arms burning again, almost too tired to perform the absolutely necessary course corrections—but too tired to risk an overturn either. He had to stay upright, he was panting as he worked, and would not be able to hold his breath for long. He had to stay upright!

He got through the drops. In the hissing white flow of re-collecting water at the bottom of the falls he floated thankfully, spent. He had just enough strength left to paddle to the Virginia shore. On the bluff overhead, Caroline was watching him.

He grabbed the put-in boulder on the shore, wearily hauled himself in. Undid his apron and struggled to follow his paddle up onto the rocky jumble at the bottom of the bluff. Stiff and sore. Sweat poured out from his head. He stumbled back into the shallows and sat down in the river, then lay back and let the water pour over him. Ahhh, cool water. Just what he needed. Up again, spluttering and gasping. Cooler already.

He hiked up the steep little cleft in the bluff. Sat beside Caroline with a squish. Dripped river water. He was still sweating.

Caroline regarded him. “So,” she said. “You came back.”

“What do you mean?” Frank said. “I never left.”

“I guess that’s true.”

They sat there, looking down at the river. Below them a pair of kayakers were putting in; one paddled backwards upstream. A wind threw a quick cat’s paw across the surface of the river, and on the opposite shore the wall of green trees bobbed and flailed. In the sky to the north a cloud was rearing high into the sky, its white lobes aquiver with the promise of storms to come.

“I love you.”