Sylvie
Knox says, “Depends. I’m not sure how much I trust the Twin Sisters of Doom, but they for sure have me thinking about my mamaw, and if she’s doing okay. If she needs me.”
“I mean, I can take us straight there. To her house in North Carolina. There is literally no need for me to keep pulling over for every roadside attraction.”
He gets quiet. “I don’t know,” he says, finally. “Because the other side of it is, con artists only have power over you if you let yourself believe them. Like, am I so desperate for a purpose that I’ll buy whatever bull this pair of feuding fortune tellers is selling me?”
“But her phone was disconnected.”
“I know,” he says. “But it’s been disconnected before. She didn’t ever have a lot of money.”
“You’re worried about someone you love. There’s nothing shameful in that.”
“I appreciate it. But I’m tired of having my life being dictated by charlatans. I don’t know. I have to think about it.”
And I let him have his thoughts, but they’re taking him a while to process.
Eventually I pull into a rest stop so that I can reroute us through the little lake towns clustered on Michigan’s western shore.
Saugatuck, South Haven, St. Joseph. Whether we’re headed toward Wisconsin or eclipses or points unknown, it’s still on our way.
Knox smiles a little, watching me. “We gonna go swimming?”
“I love swimming,” I tell him, “but no one loves it more than Winslow. The second he sees the water, he—”
“Bolts?”
“Probably not a surprise, is it.”
“I’d be more surprised if he approached it at a slow, dignified walk.”
“For a while I kept a running list of the things that Winslow’s made a break for. Once he decided to befriend a traffic cone. Across a busy four-lane road. Once I was walking him downtown and he just flattened me trying to get into a shoe store.”
“He’s trying to communicate his needs.”
“His shoe needs?”
“He wants new sandals for summer.”
“Don’t we all?”
Winslow, having heard his name, sticks his big, sweet head between our seats. Knox goes quiet. He scratches Winslow between the eyes.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t snap at me for asking.
Cal always snapped at me for asking. “I was just all excited, I guess, about all the possibility—chasing meteorological phenomenons, weird things in Wisconsin—and then I kept thinking about possibility. And how there’s nothing but possibility in front of me.
Nothing sure. I guess it’s always been like that for me, but I didn’t really feel it until now. ”
“Do you know what you want?”
“Today? Next week? Next year? I have lots of different answers. Do you know what you want?”
“I’m bad at it. Ten years from now feels easier than tomorrow.
I always sort of thought I’d be a lawyer, maybe.
I like reading. I like coming up with arguments.
There’s a path to something like that, and decisions I can make that’ll lead me there.
But like . . .” I think about it. “If you weren’t here, I’d be kind of paralyzed about where I’d go next.
Like it would feel arbitrary. That I was just counting the weeks down until college. ”
“You’re going to college in the fall?”
“Northwestern.”
“Is that up near Seattle?”
“No,” I say, “actually, it’s in Chicago. Wow. Now I wonder why they call it Northwestern.”
“Are you excited to go?”
“I think so. Yeah, maybe. It’s a fresh start. And it’s what I’m supposed to do.”
“Is it what you want to do?”
I tick off the reasons. “Well, I like school. I don’t want to be in central Illinois anymore.
I was top of my class, and because of that everyone expected me to go on and do something fancy and far away.
Enough that I started wanting it too, I guess.
But . . . wow, I’m starting to feel like a mutant. ”
“Noted. Continue.”
I laugh a little. “It’s a lot easier to figure out what someone else wants and give it to them than it is to figure out what I want.
Sometimes I’d only know it through, like, resistance.
Like when Cal—when my friend wanted to go to Home Depot, and I’d be getting in the car to go with him and feel this big wave of frustration and only then realize that what I wanted was to .
. .” I trail off. “Nothing I was proud of. Lie in bed. Play Candy Crush. Go—”
“Go swimming?” Knox supplies.
“Oh my God, I haven’t been swimming yet this summer.”
“Really?”
“Okay, now we have to go.”
Out the window, the sign says Saugatuck: 5 Miles, and I start looking for an exit. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I know.”
“That’s not the first time you haven’t.”
“I know.”
“Like maybe it’s the third time in the last hour.”
“Sylvie,” he says, laughing.
“I’m serious!”
He looks at his tanned hands. “When I was a kid, I read this book called My Side of the Mountain. It’s about a boy who runs away—sort of with his mom’s permission—to go live in the woods.
He burns out a giant tree and makes a house there.
He hunts a deer and uses every part of it.
I still remember him curing the hide to make a door for his little tree hut.
And he only goes back into town to read stuff at the library. ”
“That sounds magical. Authentic.”
“Maybe? I mean, I guess I’m saying that all my answers would disappoint you.
I’ve been living on my side of the mountain.
I can tie forty different kinds of knots, but I’ve never lived somewhere long enough to have a mailbox.
I could use every part of the deer. I could fix up your van pretty much short of it being on fire—well, I’ve never worked on a German car so that could be false confidence—but I’ve never played on a sports team, or even been to a sports game.
I didn’t run for, like, high school president—”
I try not to laugh. Unsuccessfully. “High school president?”
“Come on. You know what I mean.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not making fun of you! It was just an amazing visual. The Springfield High School Oval Office. Little freshman aides running papers in and out. Cabinet meetings full of crop tops and snapbacks.”
“How was I supposed to say it?” He still looks uncomfortable, and I feel bad now.
“Student council president, maybe? Or class president. You’re not missing anything with that one. It’s just a popularity contest, basically, with a side of promising your classmates stuff you can’t deliver, like getting them to put soda machines in the cafeteria.”
“Or like promising everyone A’s?”
“That would be less exciting than a Dr Pepper fountain drink option, I promise you.”
“I want to have done it,” he says in a rush. “I want to know, I want to have made the choice for myself. I had to teach myself trigonometry out of a textbook from 1972. I want to have had a math teacher! I want to . . .”
While he’s thinking, I signal and take the exit to Saugatuck.
“I wanted to say all that out loud,” he finishes. “I never have before.”
“That’s one thing to cross off your list, then.”
“So maybe let’s talk about what is possible. What I can want now. I want to see an eclipse. I want to go to Wisconsin. I want to take a girl on a date on a Friday night.”
The air between us shimmers.
“Well,” I say, “it’s almost Thursday. We better start looking for that girl.”