Chapter Five #2
Wesley had pulled up the pertinent information on his school laptop and was beginning to walk Miles through it when there was a knock on his bedroom door.
It was Kate. Time to take Augusta and Harper home, she said.
There had been some ganging up, and though she was always a fan of working out one’s differences, and she knew there were multiple sides to every story, in this case they were going to need to talk about whether Harper was really a good friend for Olive.
But they could deal with that later. If Miles didn’t mind pulling together dinner, she would drop off Olive’s friends. She had to swing by her office anyway.
“And, just to warn you,” said Kate, “she’s mad at you.”
“At me? What did I do?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me.”
So Miles left his son and went to find his daughter, no longer hidden under a blanket, but defiantly turning the pages of her sketchbook. Giuseppe was in her lap, a sad streak of snot across his ear; he appeared to be in heaven. Miles sat down next to her, and she turned away.
In the sketchbook: the drive from California, the rust duff of Sierran foothills, aspen yellows, Iowa’s green horizontal, house as imagined, house as it was.
“Mom says I’m in trouble.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Was it because I sold Wesley?”
“That’s not funny.”
“I know. But we needed the money. Now I can get you another sketchbook.”
“I said that’s not funny.”
“You’re right.” He leaned against her a little, and she turned, but didn’t scoot away. “But I still don’t know the crime I am accused of.”
“Lying.”
“Lying?”
It came out. They had been talking about, of all topics, bears, and Harper, whose father hunted, told Olive he had once shot a little cub that was messing with their chickens.
Olive said that she didn’t believe this, that it was illegal, and Harper said it wasn’t, and even if it was, it was okay in self-defense.
Her dad shot coyotes all the time, and had trapped a bobcat.
She’d seen it, with its broken leg. The coyotes, which he left dead in the woods.
Pups, too, because they’d grow up to be adults.
Olive’s story had come out haltingly, her lip trembling, her face disfigured, her grief palpable. She looked down into her sketchbook, at her portrait of her family, her dog.
Miles could feel, physically feel, the heat of her outrage; the collar of her shirt was wet with tears and sweat, tented from the constant wiping of her nose.
Gently, because she still wouldn’t let him hug her, he rested a hand upon the dog.
It was all too easy to imagine how the conversation had unfolded.
Months ago, he had come to the sudden realization that Olive, before Vermont, didn’t know that people hunted bears, in fact was only vaguely aware that people hunted animals outside of fairy tales.
She’d adjusted to the truth with unexpected equanimity, filing it somewhere with all other outrages that the adult world somehow tolerated, carried on despite.
But there were moments when such essential horrors broke through her composure.
A year ago, out of the blue, she had become, suddenly, convulsively, aware of death, beset by fits of tears, which seemed not so much directed at the dizzying consideration of Nothingness as at her parents, for just going on with life, unanguished.
But this was different. These tears were less about the bears or cubs, and more about the other little girl, whose approval and opinion were so central to Olive’s world.
A little girl who—Miles knew, but didn’t quite know how to say this to Olive without her repeating it to Harper—lived in a mobile home barely larger than Rumphius’s living room, among a rank of mobile homes arrayed along a rutted court, strewn with abandoned appliances and uncollected trash.
Who lived there with only her father, her mother never mentioned.
Who stared with palpable envy, each time that she came over, at Olive’s stuffed-animal collection, the wolf, the fox, the bear.
What he could not say: some kind of revenge had been enacted that afternoon, and this revenge was part of a larger revenge unfolding in the adult world, which the adult world was also trying to understand.
But even had he known how to explain this, he didn’t think that it would help now. Nor, for that matter, was it clear what this had to do with him, save for the vague charge of all children against all parents, that they have been inadequately protected against the world’s cruelty.
But Olive wasn’t finished yet. Harper, apparently, seeing her friend close to tears, had taken the chance to tell her that everybody knew that she was lying when she told their friends about the dog who disappeared inside the cave.
“Ah,” said her father.
Perhaps, he thought later, the right thing to do in that moment would have just been to listen, to apologize, to say something about how maybe Harper’s life was a lot harder than Olive’s life, and that sometimes people pick fights about one thing because they can’t pick fights about another.
But perhaps because he had been accused of lying, and perhaps because it was just last night that he had told the story, and because, aware of the dangers of the Humbaba, he’d thought that he’d been very clear about what was possible and what was Jeremiah’s fancy—because of this, he started to explain how some of it was real, some probably imagined.
But then he had the sense that Olive wasn’t really listening, that she didn’t want a complicated justification, only comfort.
So he abandoned his explanation, and just remained there for a while, with his daughter and his dog.
—
And then it was bedtime. Kate was home; Wesley reluctantly agreed to do nothing about his anonymous informant until Miles had some time to think about it; ice cream had mended Olive’s mood a little, though, to punish him as only she knew how, she asked for a story from Afanasyev (Traditional Russian Tales, 1859) instead of one of his creations.
Kate sang to them, then settled in the kitchen to finish her lecture for the following morning.
Miles wanted to talk to her about Wesley, about Olive, but something was bothering her, too, and it was late, and he’d had enough of long discussions.
As Afanasyev had written, “The morning is wiser than the evening.”
Indeed, when he woke the next morning, the world seemed wiser.
It was snowing lightly, and beautiful beyond imagining.
Kate slept deeply; how lovely he found her when she slept!
In the kitchen, on the table, a still-life bore witness to a very late night: a forgotten phone, a wineglass, a finished bar of chocolate, her copy of Blake’s Complete Illuminated Books.
Miles leaned forward and drew the volume toward him.
He’d always liked the idea of Blake a bit more than he liked Blake’s actual poetry, but now an image caught his eye, a cross-section of a scene that showed both world above and world below, a chasm through which tree roots descended.
It was the cover of the pamphlet The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which Miles once had been assigned but never read.
Now he turned the pages slowly, his eyes skimming the poet’s scrawl, the strange theology, until the word “cave” caught his eye, and “cavern,” and he stopped and read:
So he took me thro’ a stable down the winding cavern we groped our tedi-
-ous way, till a void boundless as a nether sky ap-
-pear’d beneath us, it would be easy to see what else this person had texted. But he couldn’t bear the thought of what he’d find there. Not now, with the children waking, the day ahead.
But he couldn’t ignore it, either. A name was all he wanted, just a name.
Perhaps he’d find that it was innocent, even a mistake.
The area code 802 covered all Vermont. On a hunch, he went and picked up his phone, pulled down the search bar, and typed in the number.
Names appeared—Andrei, the school, the library—only to disappear as he typed further.
There were no matches in his contacts. There was, however, an email, and he opened it. Innocence took another step toward Experience. It was from the Southern Vermont Ski League, and the phone number belonged to Bjorn.