Chapter 37
Eleven Days After the End of the Summer Excavation Season
Ripley comes in from the garden hot and bored.
She wanted to spend the day out there, but she’s already weeded, edged, staked, mowed, and tidied everything, and her dad won’t let her start any new projects so late in the year.
Steve Adams is sitting at the kitchen table, reading the mail.
She’s not used to seeing him without oxygen tubing snaking down the front of his shirt, but these days he can go without it when he’s resting.
He’s fit enough to walk to the entrance of the trailer park and back, stopping at the cluster mailbox along the way.
Afterward, he allows himself another cup of coffee and the latest L.L.
Bean catalog, which seems to arrive two or three times a day.
“Mail for you, Pip.” He indicates a padded envelope.
Ripley soaps her hands at the kitchen sink. “Why didn’t you give it to me on your way in?”
“You were elbow-deep in dirt.”
“I could’ve washed my hands.”
“You mean rinsed them with the hose and dried them on your pants.”
“Same thing.”
“This came all the way from England. I thought it deserved a proper scrub.”
He’s here, she thinks nonsensically, bracing herself against the sink until the tsunami of wanting and fear and unkillable hope recedes.
“We’re conserving water, Pip.”
“Right. Sorry.” Ripley turns off the tap, grabs the worn tea towel from the oven handle, and dries between her fingers as she walks to the table.
Across each side of the oversize mailer is a red stamp: Do Not Bend. Underneath the printed label, she can see the faint outline of her address in proper, upright handwriting.
“You don’t have to open it in front of me. You can take it to your room, and I can stay here with Mr. Bean,” her dad says, tapping a two-page spread of deeply discounted madras shorts. “No hard feelings.”
“Here is fine.” She sits down opposite him. She’ll get this over with, then eat something to settle her stomach. After that, she’ll go back out to the garden. There must be something she can do out there.
The pull tab tears through the paper padding, scattering soft brown fibers over the table.
She shakes out eight pieces of thick, stiff paper, each one sealed in clear cellophane.
A cream-colored envelope hits the table with a substantial sound, like there’s more than a few sheets of heavy stationery inside.
She turns over the first piece of paper, and her dad lets out a low whistle.
It’s Beauty poised over her eggs, her baleful eye staring out from a long-lost world.
James has added a sheer tint of watercolor: dark gold for her back, pale cream for her belly, inky black for her eyes.
The eggs are a luminous blue against the brown of her nest. Ripley runs her fingers along the cellophane over Beauty’s wing.
The vestigial claw is so lifelike, she almost expects it to draw blood.
One by one, she reveals the rest of the original sketches of Beauty and their matching watercolor versions.
Steve picks up the drawing of Beauty in flight. “That’s…” He pauses.
“Incredible? Amazing? Beautiful?” Ripley suggests, not sure how to feel.
He shakes his head. “That’s a man dying for forgiveness if I ever saw one.”
Her heart never stops hurting, but there are times, like now, when it hurts more. “Dad. You’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I am. But have you looked at these, Pip? Not the drawings. Well, yes, those, but less his talent and more how they’re done, if you know what I mean.”
She has, in fact, looked at his drawings.
All of them. They say a lot about the artist. How much he cares about everything he does.
How he gives himself so generously to everyone, even complete strangers.
How he truly sees his subjects—people, animals, creatures long extinct—in a world where a lot of people don’t bother to look, much less see.
Still.
“I don’t know if I can forgive him, Dad. Even if I could, I don’t know if I can change anything that would make a difference.”
James needs to be in England; she needs to be here. They both love their families. Neither of them is in a position to give up their work.
“Hmm,” Steve says, considering. “You don’t have to forgive anyone, Pip. I just say that because it sounds like you want to, and if there’s anything I know about my girl, it’s that she can do whatever she puts her mind to.” He reaches across the table and lays his hand on hers.
She shakes her head, eyes burning. “I haven’t achieved a single thing I’ve put my mind to or that you wanted for me. You gave up your dreams of being a paleontologist, and I got kicked out of school. I let you down, Daddy. I can’t even help you when you’re sick. I can’t give you a better life—”
She can’t stop her voice from breaking, because what comes after a better life is a better death.
She drops her head onto her folded arms and keens out a long, high, hurt sound, the kind of sound wounded mammals have made for hundreds of millions of years.
She cries harder than she can remember crying since she fell down Mr. Selassie’s front steps while selling Girl Scout cookies and knew from how much it hurt that her arm was broken and the fun was over.
She cries until she feels the firm, steady pressure of her dad’s hand on her shoulder.
“Ripley,” he says, shocking her into halting sniffles.
He only uses her full name when she’s done something truly terrible.
Like the time he caught her coming home from the corner store in the Charger a year after he taught her to drive stick but a year before she was old enough to get her license.
Or when, at age six, she sneaked so much icing off her birthday cake that it ended up reading lappy Birthdau Riple and he had to pay for a rush replacement on the day of her party.
“Yes?” she says, waiting for the dressing-down.
“I was never going to be a paleontologist.”
“Don’t say that,” she whimpers into the cave she’s made with her arms.
“It’s true,” he says, rubbing between her shoulder blades in the way that’s always slowed down her sobs.
“By the time you came along, I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a scientist. I loved finding fossils, but the math, the picky-picky technical writing…
” He makes a disgusted sound. “The professors were always stressed out. Hustling for grants. The whole business seemed awful. But, you know. A good parent tries not to crush their child’s irrational fantasies. ”
A crack of wet laughter escapes Ripley’s chest. She sits up, wiping her eyes. “It is kind of awful. Sometimes. But there are good parts too. Maybe you would have figured that out if you’d kept going.”
He shakes his head. “It wasn’t for me. And even if it was, it’s not the kid’s job to catch the grown-ups’ dreams for them. It’s the other way around, sweetheart. Makes me feel like I made a mistake in there somewhere, that you’d think you had to do that for me.”
“I did it because I wanted to,” she whispers.
“But would you do it if you didn’t have to?” He tugs her to her feet and into a hug.
Instead of an answer, what comes out of Ripley’s mouth is a childlike “I don’t want to lose you, Daddy.”
“I know, baby.” He’s stronger than he was even two months ago, his posture straighter, his arms pressing more firmly across her back. “Do you remember asking me about death when you were little?”
“No.”
“You might’ve been five. I explained that dinosaurs died a long time ago. A day or two later, you nailed me with a million questions right at bedtime: ‘Are you going to die, Daddy? When will you die? Will you be a fossil?’ ”
“Oh, wow. I do not remember this at all.”
“I do,” her dad says dryly. “Back then, I told you I’d be around for a long, long time, until you were an old lady. Now that you’re…” He pauses.
“Twenty-eight.”
“It’s hard to remember,” he complains. “When you have kids, you’ll understand. Anyway, I don’t have to tell you there are no guarantees. The cancer could come back next year or I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
“What I want for my life, and for my little girl’s life, is meaning.
Purpose. Joy, Pip. I want you to have some control over how you spend your time and who you spend it with, because those are the most important things in a good life.
If you want to be a paleontologist, that’s great, but don’t do it for me. ”
“I do want it. But I don’t know if I’ll ever have it. Once Will gets through with me, and once James Smithson’s name is on my fossils…”
He makes a thoughtful humph. “I hate to see you put those two men in the same bucket, Pip. One of them tried to add his name to your work. The other tried to help you, but he couldn’t change who he was.”
James Alfred Smithson, she hears in that low, rasping tone.
One does wish to get out from under the legacy of it all.
From time to time. Ripley presses her face against her dad’s chest, her forehead touching the long, raised scar under his shirt.
His heart beats directly underneath his breastbone now.
The surgeon said this would happen, that his organs would shift to fill the empty space where his right lung used to be.
Steve Adams’s heart is at the center of his body now, the way it’s always been at the center of his life.
Her dad strokes her hair the way he used to do when she was small and couldn’t sleep.
Maybe the way he did that night when she asked him when he would die.
“I hope you don’t think I’m going to let you stay stuck here for too long, Pip.
I may not be perfectly healthy, but I’m getting better.
If the cancer comes back, we can figure out what to do.
For now, you need your own life, and I do too. ”
Her own life. This is a great idea in theory, but Ripley’s already screwed up two chances at her own life. It’s not as if lives are like fossils in Hell Creek, so numerous you have to be careful not to trip over them, all waiting to be picked up.
The sound of tires on gravel draws her dad’s attention. “Were you expecting someone?”
“No,” Ripley says, swiping at her eyes before going to the window. She peeks outside and sees a wiry, older, slightly bowlegged man climbing down from the cab of his battered truck.
“Oh! This is super-weird, but I think I know this guy. I mean, I don’t know-know him, but I sort of ran into him in the hardware store one time…I’ll see what he wants.”
Ripley steps out the front door. “Hi,” she calls. “Can I help you with—” She blinks in confusion at the figure exiting the other side of the truck. “Matteo?”
“Hi, Ripley,” Matteo says, closing the truck’s door, then absently giving it an extra shove, like he’s known its quirks his whole life. “I hope you don’t mind that we came in person instead of texting, but”—he sends a provoked look at the rancher—“my granddad felt pretty strongly about it, so…”
“This is your grandpa? I mean, uh, this is your grandpa!” Ripley corrects herself, holding out her hand. They don’t look much alike—the rancher’s eyes are a faded blue, not Matteo’s liquid brown, his skin pale and ruddy instead of warm tan. But there might be a certain resemblance around the eyes.
“John Foster,” the older man says, clasping Ripley’s hand in a firm shake. “My daughter Susie is Matteo’s mom. Thank you for everything you’ve done for Matteo.”
“Granddad,” Matteo says, agonized.
“All right, all right, I’m embarrassing my grandson again, I guess. But I do appreciate it. Anyhow, we have something for you.”
Ripley waves her hands in front of her chest. “Oh, that’s so sweet, but gifts are really not necessary. Matteo did good work. You should be proud of him.”
Matteo shakes his head, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “It’s not that kind of something, Ripley. Do you think we could come in?”