Chapter 79 2030
“The trick is to flick your wrist,” Dylan . . . my dad . . . says.
I still can’t get used to that—both that I have a dad and that he is here, with me at the pond.
He casts the rock sideways, and it hops an astonishing six times before sinking into the water. He searches the shore for another so I can try.
He told me that he was the one who had taught my mom to skip rocks. She was an amazing rock skipper. It’s one of the things I remember about her. We used to come to this very spot, Bunny Beach as Pappy calls it, and she would skip rocks while I fed the rabbits.
Dylan hands me a smooth, flat stone, and I step to the edge, set my feet the way he did, and fling it.
Kerplunk.
“Good try,” he says with a smile that is bizarrely familiar. It’s the smile I see when I look in the mirror, higher on the left than the right and with a thin upper lip that nearly disappears when I grin extra wide. “Would it be all right if I show you how to hold it in your hand?”
I can tell he’s nervous. So am I. Which is very unlike me. Normally, I have no trouble talking. Most people would probably say I talk too much.
“Sure,” I say.
He steps behind me and reaches over my shoulders to place a new rock between my thumb and forefinger, then he cocks my hand back and forth a few times to demonstrate the wrist-flicking motion.
“Got it,” I say, hoping that I do, eager to impress him.
“Flick,” he says encouragingly as I step to the water.
I cock my arm and sling the stone sideways.
Kerplunk.
“Things that ain’t easy are the ones you feel best about once you figure them out,” he says.
His Georgia accent is funny. He says ain’t a lot and pop instead of soda and uses words like doohickey.
He and I walk farther down the shore to find another skipping stone. He picks something up and holds it toward me, but it isn’t a rock. Between his fingers is a feather, black at the tip, gray in the middle, and white at the bottom.
“For your collection,” he says.
“How’d you know I have a collection?”
“You’re your mother’s daughter, ain’t you?”
“It’s a golden eagle feather,” I say as I take it, excited to add it to the box I keep on my dresser filled with pine cones and rocks and other treasures.
He looks up toward the trees. “Are those eagles still here?”
“They are,” I say excitedly. “And they had two eaglets this year, and both of them made it to fledglings.”
Every summer, when Nonna, Pappy, and I come back to Minnesota, one of our favorite things is to check on the eagles.
Nonna says the male eagle has nested in the same tree for more than thirty years, and his mate for close to twenty.
It’s a big deal when they have babies, and an even bigger deal if the babies live until it’s time for them to migrate.
“Did you name them?” he asks.
“Laverne and Shirley,” I say with a giggle. It’s a show Nonna and I have been binge-watching all year.
“I love that show,” he says, then to my great delight, he starts to sing the theme song.
I join in on, “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! . . .” And by the time we finish, we are cracking up.
“Found one,” he says. He snatches up a stone—oval, smooth, and perfect, so nice a skipping stone I don’t want to ruin it with another failed attempt.
“You throw it,” I say.
He looks at the stone then back at me. “How about we hold on to it?”
We walk back to the clover patch and sit together on the flat rock. I pull the last of the lettuce and radishes from my backpack and toss pieces to the rabbits.
“You’re a lot like her,” he says.
I look at him cockeyed. I’m nothing like my mom. She was tiny and solid as a stump, and I’m skinny and tall as a beanpole. She was an amazing athlete. I can’t walk without tripping over my feet. She was quiet, and I’m a jibber jabberer. She was an icon. I’m not anything.
“She loved animals,” he goes on. “And nature.” He grins. “I bet you carry spiders out of the house rather than smoosh them.”
I laugh because I do. It drives Heinrich crazy since he’s usually the one I call to catch the spider and free it.
“And you laugh the way she did,” he says. “Quietly to yourself, like it’s a secret.”
I never thought about it that way, though people have sometimes told me that it seems like I’m cracking myself up.
“Everything was funny to her. It might have been what I loved most about her.”
I start at the word. Loved. He’s said a few things like that, making me believe my parents’ love story wasn’t as one-sided as my mom believed. In the first email Dylan sent me, he explained it like this:
If I’d have let her your mom would have tried to save me and I wasn’t in a place to be saved.
So I left and stayed away. I had no idea about you and your mom was right to protect you from the man I was when you were little.
Though it hurts knowing you’ve been around all this time and that I wasn’t there to be a part of it.
I’d like to meet you if that would be alright with you.
I can’t believe she named you Ivy. It’s so typical of her to do something like that—to make my heart ache even when she’s not around.
I wrote back that I would very much like to meet him and asked him to send me photos of his mom so I would know who I was named after. He did, and I couldn’t believe how much we looked alike, like suddenly it all made sense how I could be who I was.
Two weeks later, I flew back to Minnesota with Nonna and Pappy. And this morning, he showed up with flowers in one hand, a box of chocolates in the other, and a stuffed pink rabbit under his arm.
We spent some time with Nonna and Pappy talking, then he asked if I wanted to go to the pond to feed the rabbits.
That’s when I knew it was real and that he was the man my mom had written about.
My dad. It’s strange how important that feels, this missing piece I had no idea was missing.
He still has all the letters my mom wrote him, and someday, when we know each other better, I’m going to ask if we can read them together.
For now, I’m happy to just hang out with him and get used to the idea of him being in my life.
“And the way you tell stories,” he goes on.
“The way you talk with your eyebrows and your hands.” He flings his hands around, showing me what he means, and I laugh because it’s a good imitation.
“It was one of the best things about her, the way she liked to talk about things, to study and figure them out. She was curious and interested in everything.”
I wonder if he could be right, and if I might be more like my mom than I remember.
Most of what I recall about her is vague, fleeting images of a woman with dark curly hair who took care of me, who fed me, bathed me, and made sure I brushed my teeth and wore a coat when it was cold outside.
But Dylan talks about her as a person, describing her so clearly I see her, and it makes me remember more, like how we would laugh and how she’d say, “Every day is the opportunity for an adventure,” and then how she’d do her best to make it one.
I remember dancing in the kitchen when we cooked, and how, each night, she’d read to me, always stories about adventure.
“Did you know that there’s a serpent that lives in the pond?” Dylan says with a nod to the water.
“There is?” I say as if I have no idea what he’s talking about, though I know all about Holly. A lot of people still believe she was responsible for the murder my mom was convicted of before she died.
Only I know it wasn’t either of them.
Dylan recounts the legend, and I half listen as I think back to that fateful morning and the secret I’ve kept since.
I know my mom didn’t kill the man from the grocery store because I was with her when he was shot.
I was watching TV when I heard my mom cry out in the kitchen.
I went in to see what caused it and found her sitting at the counter, looking at her phone. On the screen, I saw the man fall.
“Mom?” I said.
She startled and slammed the phone down on the counter.
I knew the video had been from the eagle camera at the pond and that the man was the one from the store because of the zigzag pattern of his coat. I couldn’t see the other person clearly. The image was hazy because of the snow, and the eagles’ nest blocked the person’s face.
In my six-year-old mind, what I saw didn’t register as important. It looked pretend, like a television show or as if they’d been playacting. I only thought about it again when Uncle Kai brought my mom home after she’d been arrested.
My mom needed to lie down to rest, so I asked Uncle Kai to tell me what happened. He explained, and that’s when I told him what I’d seen.
“Well, hit me over the head with a shovel,” he said when I finished. He was smirking like he was proud of my mom, which I didn’t understand. She was lying and letting the sheriff think she’d killed someone. “She had me fooled. I really thought it was her.”
“But it wasn’t,” I said. “So why’s she not telling the truth?”
“Heck if I know,” he said, still grinning.
“I’ve known your mom most of my life and still have no idea how her mind works.
All I’ll say, kiddo, is she’s got her reasons, and we need to respect that.
Lips sealed, private.” He pretended to lock his lips and throw away the key.
I did the same. Then he saluted me, and I saluted back.
A salute was a serious thing, which was why I never told anyone else what I saw.
“Ready to give it another try?” Dylan asks, standing and holding out the stone. “What do you say we wake up the old serpent?”
“Let’s do it,” I say and leap to my feet.
With great deliberateness, I position the rock between my thumb and forefinger, then practice flicking my wrist several times to get the feel. I step to the edge of the water, set my feet, cock my arm and . . .
Kerplunk.
I laugh, and my dad laughs, a beautiful sound that echoes off the water. And standing beside the pond where he and my mom played as children, on a stunning summer day, my dad takes my hand, and we watch as the ripples fade.