Chapter 70
— Chapter 70 —
Mr. Gioletti lent Aubrey a hanging dial scale so we could weigh our gear. Step’s notebook is fourteen ounces, which is too much to carry for too little benefit. Dr. Singh gave Aubrey a space pen and a pack of Field Notes, which all together only weigh five ounces. Aubrey copied the useful information from Step’s notebook on the first three pages of one, but she keeps insisting I read the original before we go “for the nuance.”
“Step didn’t take the trip,” I say. “He didn’t know if anything he wrote was true.” I want to tell her that I would never make her read anything Charlie wrote, but I don’t want to equate Step and Charlie in her mind. Step was important to her. His notebook is important to her.
So I sit at Step’s workbench and thumb through his pages. His handwriting has always been squared and strange, with wide spacing between each letter, so sometimes it’s hard to tell where a word starts and ends.
I bought a backpack today. And a pair ofb oots I will bre akin doing yard work, so they’re ready in ti me. Underneath his words are line drawings of a backpack and boots, shaded with smudgy pencil. His perspective is skewed. The shadows are in the wrong place. But as much as I don’t want to be, I’m moved by his desire to draw and the earnestness of his renderings.
On a page titled Plants to See, there’s a sketch of a spotted flower with long stamens and six curled petals. Underneath he wrote: Turks Cap Lily, North Carolina . There’s an arrow pointing to the shaded center and a note that reads: Turks Cap center = star. Circle center = Carolina Lily.
There are drawings of red-spotted newts he hoped to see in Tennessee and notes on how to tell the difference between a cerulean warbler and a black-throated blue warbler. Another page has a camp stove recipe for Minute Rice with dried apricots, peanuts, and trail blueberries.
Toward the middle, he’s drawn a picture of himself in a lake, floating on his back. It is flat and cartoonish—his mouth a simple upturned line that takes up most of his face.
Above the drawing he wrote: The light from NewYork City pollutes the sky, and I have never seenstars the way a man wasmeantto. Soon enough, I will. I mayhave mis sed Halley’s comet thisyear, but next year, if my calculationsarecorrect, I will be at Lonesome Lake in time to wa tch the Perseid meteors shower the sky.
My vision blurs while I try to read the words again.
Halley’s Comet.
This year.
I was nine years old when Halley’s Comet came around. I remember because at school, we made comets from paper plates and glitter, and calculated how old we’d be when Halley’s Comet returned. I will be eighty-four. Step was going to leave right after my tenth birthday. He wasn’t just planning to leave my mother. He was planning to leave me.
Pages later he wrote, Not going this year givesme more ti me toplan.
At the end of his notebook is a list of gear and food supplies. There are eraser marks and cross-outs, indentations in the paper showing that he had an MSR cookstove before he replaced it with a Jetboil. He had at least four different backpacks before he got the green Gregory that Aubrey will use. At some point he swapped GORP for PowerBars.
On the inside of the back cover there are words scribbled in varied inks and widths of pencil, like a scavenger hunt list: Poplar, WeepingWillo w, Ma ple, Birchthru Be ech, Oak, Cobbles tone, Granite, Slate, Lim estone, Acorn, Hazelnut, Pine co ne, Blackberry, Chestnut, Primrose, Chicory, Trillium, Goldenrod, Sun flower, Chickade etoWoodPe cker, Her on, Eagle, BlueJa y, KingFisher, Cardinal
But there are no words in his book about how he couldn’t bear to leave his child, or how he wished he could take me with him. I can’t even find solace in the fact that he didn’t go, because he was continually planning to, and I think I might have been better off if he had. At the very least, if Step disappeared, our family would have looked like a problem to the outside world. Maybe someone would have helped me.
“My father was going to leave me,” I tell Bee. We’re lying on the giant hammock that takes up most of her tiny fenced-in patio. I’ve spent the whole day spiraling through my anger, trying to find a way out, and I’m so desperate for relief that I’m not pretending to smoke up; I’m all-out smoking.
“Shit,” Bee says, resting her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Maybe I expected too much from him,” I say, looking up at the orange night sky. “My mother never really loved him, so, like, he had to walk around knowing that.”
Bee reaches up and grabs my chin, making me shake my head. “No! Frey-ya! That is water flowing in the wrong direction.” She takes another puff of the joint, then holds it to my mouth.
“Parents,” Bee says, pausing to make a moment out of saying something very wise, “are not supposed to make their children swim upstream. You weren’t there to care about their problems, you were supposed to be cared for. ” She flicks her lighter at the joint to get it going again. “Try to understand them all you want, but it’s not going to mean you got what you needed.”
I imagine myself as a salmon in very cold water, jumping against the current, suddenly caught by claws. I gasp for air, clap my hand over my mouth. “They let the bear get me,” I say, as if I’ve solved an unsolvable mystery. My voice reverberates against the damp air surrounding us.
“What bear? Wait!” Bee sits up and looks behind us, swatting at her shoulder. “Is there a bear?”
“No!” I try to tell her the bear is a metaphor, but I say meatball instead.
“The bear is a meatball!” Bee repeats and laughs so hard she barely makes a sound.
“No.” I can see the right word in my head, but I say, “A meatball. No! The bear is…” The only word in my brain is meatball .
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bee squeals, her face crumpled with laughter. “Why is there a bear meatball?”
“Because of the fish!”
“What fish?”
“You said the thing about fish!”
“Did I?”
We both laugh until tears roll down our faces and Bee has to run to the bathroom so she won’t wet her pants.
I get turned around leaving Bee’s condo the next morning and end up stuck in the endless loop of roads in her development. None of the streets that seem like they should connect to the main road actually do, so I have to pay attention to street names and retrace my steps.
I follow Trillium Court to Goldenrod Circle, and make a left on Sunflower Lane, and it starts to add up in my mind. I turn my car around in the cul-de-sac on Primrose and retrace my route to Bee’s condo on Chicory Drive.
The words in the back of Step’s notebook were not a nature checklist.
“Can I look in your crawl space?” I say when Bee opens the door.
She snort-laughs like we’re nine and I just told a dirty joke.
“They’re not flowers. They’re streets!” I tell her. “What year was your condo built?”
Bee shakes her head. “Two thousand two. I think. Maybe three? But I bought it last year.”
I stare at her.
“Are you still high?” she asks.
There’s a theory forming in my brain, like a bunch of tiny memories pieced together in a film reel. I don’t know where to start, how to turn those pictures into words that will make sense. I am also probably still a little high.
Bee registers my desperation, steps aside to let me in. She opens the slanted half-door under the stairs. I drop to my knees and dig through the cubby, handing her beach chairs, a light-up snowman, a plastic bowl shaped like a pumpkin. I push boxes out of the way until I can see the back wall. It’s unfinished, but the only mark on the drywall is a patent number printed in black.
“I’m sorry,” I say, pushing the boxes back, standing up. “I thought I knew something.”
“No worries.” Bee laughs nervously, as if she’s watching me unravel in front of her.
I picture Lee Skagway brushing rust off his shirt and try to remember what he told me. “Where’s your breaker box?” I ask, running to the kitchen, throwing open the door to the garage. I see it on the wall next to the door, but when I open the cover, the switches are gray, not bright green. The backside of the drywall is also visible in the garage. Same numbers stamped in black.
Bee follows me out there. “Are you alright?” she asks.
I run through the film reel again in my mind: My mother on the phone with Charlie when she looked at me and said, “God, you’re such a lurker.” Step, sunburned and beer-buzzed after his afternoon at the golf club with Charlie and his buddies. The lists in the back of the trail notebook.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I heard about faulty breaker boxes and this bad kind of drywall, and I thought maybe—I’m sorry. I’m so stupid. You had an inspection when you bought this place, right? They would have looked here and the crawl space and—Oh my god! Wait! Bee!” I feel a rush of goose bumps traveling down my arms and legs. “If a developer had a bunch of banned drywall to get rid of, he wouldn’t use it in the visible places. Oh my god!” My whole body is vibrating. I run into the kitchen and kick the wall hard as I can. It only dents.
“What are you doing?” Bee shouts, but she seems more amused than upset.
“I’m sorry! I’ll fix it!” I kick the wall again, and my boot goes through.