Chapter 17 #3
I set the safety and let the pistol drop to my side. “Who’s Darrel McKnight?”
“Action holo star. Kills a hundred bad guys before breakfast, then has waffles. Never mind. You’re doing great.”
I took a deep breath and let it out, trying not to feel like I was being talked down to by my own son—my son who was now older than me. I pulled off the helmet, then held up the pistol. “Where do I carry this? In the backpack?”
“No. There’s a holster on the vest, under the coat. See? Here.”
I fiddled and got the pistol into the holster. “Okay. So, now I’m a trained killer ready for anything. What’s next?”
Lyle smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I wish we had more time.”
“I do, too.”
“I meant to train you, get you up to speed on everything you need to know—”
“I know. I know what you mean. But…” I hesitated, looking at the log, then at the clear blue sky overhead. “Can we call it good? I really appreciate all of this, the thought you’ve put in, but I just want…”
“What?”
“Can we spend the rest of the day together? Nothing else, not training, not talking about the future or the state of the world. Just, like, father and son?”
Lyle blinked. It was so much like how he looked when he’d been seven. “Okay, Dad. We can do that.”
“Good.”
Lyle led me back into the cabin. I took off the tactical gear and got back into my old clothes. Then we had a few beers and lunch. Eventually we had dinner, and some more beers, then some Scotch that Lyle pulled from a cellar below the cabin.
I told him about his great-grandmother. For some reason, I never had before, despite the outsized role she had in my memories.
“Miriam,” I said, slurring only a little from the alcohol.
It was night by this point, and we sat on the porch, sipping the powerful cask-strength Scotch that, were it not for the earlier beers, I probably wouldn’t have stomached at all.
Normally I’d be asleep on the couch after this much alcohol, but being there, with Lyle, kept me up.
“She was your grandfather’s mother. It was—I always wanted to be more like her.
She meant more to me. I could never figure out how my dad turned out the way he did with her as a mother.
She was so calm, so … wise. Like a, like a prototype of what a grandmother should be. ”
Lyle nodded, serious, holding his glass of Scotch and as drunk as I was. “Maybe she was not as prototypical as a mother. Or maybe your grandfather had more influence on your father.”
“Or there’s a lot more influence from nature than nurture in our family.” I said it without thinking through the implications, or even understanding what I meant.
Lyle didn’t seem to notice. “I kept in touch with Grandpa and Grandma Treder.” He spoke with care, piecing out each word. “Just like you asked when I was in college. Remember?”
For me it was a few days ago. For him, decades. “I remember.”
“I could never figure out how you came from them. You were so different. Maybe a little like your mom, but not really.”
“Grandma Miriam,” I said. “I’m my grandmother’s grandson.
” I wasn’t entirely sure that made sense, but Lyle nodded again.
“I also—I was—my life was, the way I am…” I stopped, gathered my thoughts, and took another sip of the burning Scotch.
“I was more influenced by my friends.” It came out a declaration, like I’d decided then and there of the truth.
“You never talked about your friends.”
“They would’ve come up when you were older. I mean. Younger than you are now, but older … Anyway. My best friends in school. Elementary straight through high school. Severine and Sophie. We were inseparable. They—a math teacher called us ‘S-cubed.’”
“Ha. Nice.”
“They meant more to me than anyone except Grandma Miriam.” The alcohol buzzing through my system let out more truth than I usually allowed myself to think, much less say.
“We—I think we raised each other in a way. We made each other better. Encouraged each other. We were—like Amy, like your mother. We all came from homes that were, if not broken, at least a little bit cracked. Sophie especially, even with all her family’s money.
In a way I think—Amy and I held on to each other the way Severine and Sophie and I did, because of that shared history.
Parents who weren’t there. So, we found others…
” I trailed off, suddenly aware of what I was saying, and to whom.
Lyle stared into the forest, watching the outline of the evergreen trees sway in the nighttime wind.
“Lyle,” I said.
“We should look them up.” He stood. “We should see what happened to your friends.”
“I’m not sure I want to, Lyle.”
But he was, as always, persistent. He led me downstairs to his neatly arranged office.
He sat in front of a wall-sized holographic imaging system and took me on a whirlwind tour of what was now the Internet.
It was more like a VR game from my time than the Internet as I remembered it.
In my drunken state it was a confusing, jumbled mass of glowing electronic highways and loud, screaming ads, and I had to stand back and focus on other things while Lyle navigated.
I looked at the books on his shelves, and, while Lyle was intent on his search, I found an electronic frame showing a series of still images.
Images of Lyle standing next to a woman I didn’t know, and, often, Lyle with a boy.
A boy with intense eyes, a boy who aged as the images progressed, turning into a sullen-looking teenager with eyes no less intense.
I turned away from the frame before Lyle could catch me looking at it. It was obvious he hadn’t intended to bring me down here before the beers and the Scotch. He hadn’t meant for me to see those photos.
“I think this is Severine,” Lyle said. He brought up an image. “This is a photo on her profile dated thirty-eight years ago. Does that look like her?”
“That’s her.”
“She’s still alive. She’s living in rural New York. Has five grandchildren. She’s been married to the same man for sixty-something years. Do you want to see a more recent photo of her?”
“No. No. Sorry, Lyle. I want to keep her in my mind like she was to me. Her and Sophie.”
“Okay, Dad,” Lyle said, giving me a look taking me back weeks—decades—to when he was seven years old, when I could still gift him with pearls of wisdom he dutifully absorbed. “My query for Sophie hasn’t turned up anything. Too many matches on her name.”
“That’s okay. Thanks, bud. Let’s go back upstairs.”
As I followed him back up the steps, I took one last look at the images on the frame, of the intense young man standing next to Lyle.