Chapter 4
Ivy slowed, her eyes locked on the field of Queen Anne’s lace to her right. It stretched for miles. This time of year, the thousands of white flowers that form the lacy, flat clusters were thick and heavy. The thigh-high stems sagged under their weight.
The lacy canopy also provided exceptional cover, if someone was so inclined to sit or lie in the field.
Ivy put on her hazards and pulled over. Turned off her car and got out.
The high-pitched whine of cicadas filled her ears and she felt a trickle of sweat make its way down the hollow of her lower back. It was hot for this time of year and at this early hour.
Using her hands, Ivy carefully parted the flowers as she stepped into the field. After just a few paces, she gave up trying not to snap any stems.
She pressed forward, her eyes scanning in all directions.
A honeybee buzzed close to her face and she gently swatted it away. Her movements stirred up dozens of tiny hoverflies.
Come on, where are you?
The bugs, the heat, the noise. Any one of them could have unsettled her. Yet calm washed over Ivy. The field held some of her best memories.
She kept moving.
“Hello?” she said softly.
A grasshopper replied with a raspy rattle.
“Hello?”
Her movements left a trail of bent flowers in her wake. She spotted another such trail to her right.
Ivy moved into this one, trying to limit the damage the way one might step into existing footsteps in freshly fallen snow.
Someone else was here—someone else had made this path.
She found this someone less than five minutes later.
This was Eugene Reeves’s happy place—everyone knew that. When taking a break from his work, he would often come here or a place like it, sit in a field of Queen Anne’s lace, hold one of the flowers in his mangled hand.
Stare at it while he spun it ever so slightly.
A perfect radiating fractal. The florets start from a central stalk, then spread outward.
Here, hold it close to your face, Ivy. Now pull it away a little.
A little more. More. See? It’s the same pattern, repeated at every magnification.
Queen Anne’s lace grows following a Lindenmayer systems pattern—predictive, recursive geometry at its finest.
How old had Ivy been when Gene first explained fractals to her?
Nine? Ten?
It didn’t matter. She might have been as young as four.
Gene never used age as an excuse or a limiting factor. He was the one who had explained to her that learning anything was a process from A (not known) to B (known). The path between these two points was different for everyone, for every subject—loops, backtracking, precipitous drops.
Peaks and valleys.
But no matter the route, this process had one singular name: frustration. And the only thing holding you back from learning something new, at any age, was your inability to remain in a frustrated state for a prolonged period of time.
Ivy didn’t want to break the serenity of the scene that opened up before her.
Was remiss to do so.
But she had no other choice.
She took one step, then another, before dropping down to his level.
“Hey.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
He didn’t answer. Just spun that fractal in his perfectly smooth and pink hands. His fingers were shorter than normal, the tips having been too badly burnt to save.
Ivy reached out, gently caressed his cheek. Didn’t flinch at the roughness of his mottled skin.
The entirety of the man’s face was covered in patchwork sections. Most of his left ear was missing.
The doctors had done their best trying to graft skin to his ruined face, make him look as normal as possible.
They’d failed.
Ivy had learned that autografts from the postauricular region—the area behind the ear—were best for facial reconstruction.
The extent of the damage made this impossible in his case.
They’d gone over the options—allografts from donors, even xenografts from pigs—but these all seemed too garish. The plastic surgeons had settled on removing the top few layers of skin from his lower throat and collarbone region.
These had helped seal the surface, prevent infection, but they had done next to nothing to improve the man’s appearance.
He was unrecognizable and, to most, resembled something out of a cheap horror film.
Not to Ivy. To Ivy, it was the idea of her father that mattered most. How he looked was irrelevant.
“You okay?” A silly question, but Ivy didn’t know what else to say. Never did.
He didn’t look at her, but he did extend the flower in her direction.
Ivy took it.
Queen Anne’s lace wasn’t highly allergenic, but squatting as she was, and after having disturbed the flowers on her trek, the pollen was getting to her.
As her eyes began to water, Ivy reached into her pocket and produced a thin, cream-colored, stocking-like piece of material.
A transparent facial orthosis, Ivy had learned—a TFO. She now knew as much about facial burns and reconstruction as she did polynomial equations.
After the grafts, he had been required to wear the TFO for almost a year to help him heal. Now, nearly three years in, he still sported the mask nearly around the clock. His appearance frightened the other long-term residents in the adult assisted living facility.
Ivy gently slipped the mask over the man’s head, adjusted it so that the eye, nose, and mouth holes lined up.
Then she wiped wetness from her own cheeks.
Damn pollen.
This was the second time in the past month that he had snuck away from the assisted living facility.
No surprise; it was coming up on the third anniversary of the accident. Ivy was amazed that the man still recognized the timing of the traumatic incident that had taken everything from him—from them.
Even though he couldn’t speak.
Could no longer add two and two together.
The timing couldn’t be worse. His primary nurse—no, not nurse; they were called resident care aides—had already warned Ivy that the home was frustrated with her father, and thought his little outings had the potential to be problematic with their insurance policy.
More like problematic with their bottom line.
And with Ivy’s lack of progress at work and her failings in getting through to her students, the idea of looking after him full-time was something she couldn’t even fathom.
Ivy straightened and wrapped an arm around his waist.
“Come on then, let’s get you back.”
She helped him to his feet, only later noticing that the flower he’d been holding had fallen to the ground.
The stalk was broken.