by Pamela Morsi
“You have?” I was surprised. “I’ve never caught you looking.”
“A gentleman never gets caught looking,” he told me, laughing. “I’m working on that with Spence.”
“Lost cause,” I told him. “So, if I want to make some person like me,” I said, “I need to figure out what that person is interested in and just let them talk about that.”
“I think that will work,” he said.
“Okay, great,” I said and got up to go.
“Wait!” he said. “Aren’t you going to give me any hints about your mom? Besides the name thing?”
“You really want to be friends with my mom?” I asked him. “You are so not her type.”
He shrugged. “She’s not really my type, either,” he admitted. “Maybe that’s what intrigues me about her.”
“Weird,” I told him.
“The guys she dates, what do they talk about?”
“Themselves mostly,” I said.
“Does she talk about herself?”
“No way, never,” I said. “She doesn’t like the past. She likes to keep moving on.”
Del nodded. He was thinking about her. Speculating about her. I wanted to ask him not to. I remembered what Sierra had said. The crap about the two needing each other. I didn’t think it was true and I didn’t figure that would be good. Mom could get involved with some guy and that would be okay. But a guy like Del, he’d be hard to leave. And leaving was all part of Mom’s thing. I didn’t think I could make him understand that. I didn’t understand it myself. So I did the next best thing. I sabotaged him.
“Ask Mom about growing up in foster care,” I told him as I hurried out of the gate. Lying was not my top skill. I didn’t want any questions and I didn’t want him to read anything on my face.
If Del even mentioned foster care to Mom, it would be the last conversation they’d ever share. Better for both of them that things went sour now, before either of them really cared.
I was grateful for Del’s advice. And I watched Mrs. Leland, trying to figure out her particular stargazing-skateboard interest. I could sit up on Spence’s balcony with the Nature Sounds Receiver and hear everything that went on in her office. But nothing much went on. Just the tapping of computer keys and the occasional one-sided phone conversation.
I decided to talk to Vern about it. He was in his office working at his computer.
“May I interrupt you?” I asked from the doorway.
He glanced up and smiled, motioning me in. “You’re always welcome to come in here,” he said. “That’s one of the many advantages of being retired. I can always break for granddaughters.”
I smiled at him, but I was curious, too. “Do you really think of us as your granddaughters?”
“Of course,” he said. “That’s who you are.”
“I know,” I said. “But we were never around here. You never really knew us.”
Vern nodded, but it didn’t change his opinion. “All the time you were gone, I knew you were out there,” he said. “I knew that you were somewhere and that Dawn would keep you safe.”
“And you missed us?”
“Yes,” he said, very softly. “I missed seeing you grow up. But I’m glad you’re here now.”
I felt sad for him, wanting us, losing us. I knew from the argument that I’d listened in to that he blamed Mrs. Leland. That he believed that his wife had run my mother off. That wasn’t true.
“Mom always runs,” I said.
“What?”
“Mom runs. When things get bad or scary or just complicated, Mom just gets in the car and goes. I know you blame Mrs. Leland for Mom leaving, but she would have left anyway.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “But then again, the slightest change can make all the difference.”
His words tugged at me strangely. That was exactly what I’d thought about my dad. If just one thing had been different that day, he might not have died. I wanted to think that, but it bothered me, too.
“Is that really true?” I asked him. “Can a small change really make a big difference?”
“Well, that’s a very good question,” he said. “Have you ever heard of the chaos theory?”
That coincidence made me sit up straighter.
“Yeah,” I said. “I checked out a book about it, but I never got to read it. Do you know about the chaos theory?”
He nodded and turned to his computer. “Let’s see what I can find here,” he said.
He clicked through a couple of programs and pulled up a really neat picture, sort of a swirling shell in a bright vivid pink.
“Wow, what is that?” I asked him.
“It’s a fractal,” he said.
“It’s really cool looking,” I told him.
Vern agreed. Along with the picture was a long string of numbers in a complicated math problem.
“This picture is the physical representation of this equation,” he said.
“Cool.”
“It seems very stable doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Okay, why don’t you alter just one number,” he said.
“Which one?”
“Your choice,” he said. “Just change one number.”
I looked it over. “This fourteen,” I pointed out. “I’ll change it to thirteen, my age.”
Vern nodded and entered in the change.
“Okay, let’s see the fractal.” He pulled up the display.
I gasped. I expected to see a difference. I thought part of the picture would be changed. Maybe some of the edges would look different. But it was a totally different picture. It was no longer bright pink, it was dark purple. And it didn’t look like a swirling shell, but more like an asteroid floating through a starlit space.
“How does this happen?”
“It’s chaos theory,” he said. “Randomness is very sensitive to even the smallest changes. You’ve heard about how the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in Hong Kong could change tornado patterns in Texas.”
“That’s some kind of urban legend or something,” I said.
“Actually, the butterfly effect is a classic example in the premise of chaos theory,” he said. “No matter how small the change in initial conditions, the outcome can be radically different. Try some on your own.”
I pulled a chair up beside him and began working with the numbers.
The fractals were really fun to do. It was sort of a mixture of math and paint-by-number. The software that Vern had made it easy to display even the simplest equations in a beautiful three-dimensional image.
I tried to get the math formula so similar that the picture would be almost the same. But no matter how slight I made the initial difference, even down to thousandth fractions, the tiny changes would grow at an enormous rate until the sets were unrecognizable as being mathematically similar.
“That’s why we call it chaos,” Vern explained. “Because it takes so very little to transform the outcome so completely. The premise turns Newton’s determinism model totally on its head.”
“So this is like new science?” I asked.
“Relatively new,” Vern answered. “There were some hints about its possibility in the nineteenth century. But it wasn’t recognizable until the last four decades.”
“Why not?” I asked. “In school it sounds like science already knows like all the laws of nature and stuff.”
“We know just enough to reveal how much we don’t know,” he told me.
“Why don’t we know? Couldn’t somebody like Einstein just figure it out?”
“Of course he could have,” Vern answered. “But sometimes even the smartest physicists and mathematicians and biologists have to wait for the breakthrough. Copernicus was the father of astronomy. But even he couldn’t help us really understand space and the solar system until Galileo invented the telescope. That helped human eyes to see the vast distances for the first time.”
“What breakthrough did we have to wait for to understand chaos?”
“Computers are the tool that we needed to help us with that,” he said. “It wasn’t that our eyes were too weak so much as our brains were not powerful enough.”
Vern and I hung out together all afternoon doing fractals, altering them, making them positive or negative, adding and subtracting X factors. We printed some of the coolest ones on the color printer. I thought the space-ish ones would look better in Spence’s room among the Hubble posters.
I learned more than just some cool math stuff. I learned that Del had been right. Taking an interest in someone else’s interest really does bring people together. I felt like I could talk with Vern, joke with him, be straight with him, like he was a friend. I could even ask him serious questions.
“What happened to make my mom leave Knoxville?” I asked him as we sat, sipping sodas among the best of the fractals we’d printed.
He hesitated. Vern was a thoughtful guy. Most of the men I’d known in my life—i.e. the guys my mom dated—were not. I liked that about him.
“When there’s a crisis in the family,” he told me carefully, “sometimes it doesn’t bring out the best in people.”
“Yeah?”
I waited patiently, as he chose his words.
“Dawn and your grandmother had words,” he said.
“It was Mrs. Leland’s fault,” I said quickly, hoping that it was true.
Vern nodded, but he wasn’t completely in agreement.
“They were both to blame,” he said. “They were both harsh and they were both cruel. And it was for the same reason. Sonny, whom they loved so much, was lost to us forever. That hurt a lot. I don’t know if you can understand this, but sometimes when people are hurting, they lash out at other people.”
I nodded. “Yeah, Mom does that sometimes,” I told him. “I just always know she doesn’t mean it.”
“Your grandmother doesn’t mean it, either,” Vern said. “But she and Dawn aren’t close enough to know that about each other.”
I didn’t figure they would ever get to be.
“What did they say to each other?” I asked him.
Vern gave me a long look, like he was trying to decide whether to trust me with the information. I guess he realized that he could.
“They blamed each other for Sonny’s death,” Vern said.
“Each other?” I was puzzled. “It was an accident in the woods. How could Mom or Mrs. Leland be to blame?”
“Because of why he was out there in the woods,” Vern said. His voice sounded really sad. As if maybe he blamed himself a little, too. “Your grandmother believed that if he hadn’t married Dawn and needed to support his family, he would have never taken such a job. And Dawn believed that if your grandmother hadn’t been punishing him for marrying her, we would have supported him and he’d have been in school.”
“Neither of those things are really true, right?”
“Both of them are true,” Vern said. “That’s what’s so hard. Things could have, would have, should have been different. But they weren’t.”
Vern said the words so quietly. I wanted to throw my arms around him and hug him, to tell him how sorry I was and that everything would be all right. But of course, everything was not going to be right. And I was as sorry not to have my dad as he was not to have his son.
“It’s like these fractals,” he said. “One slight change in the equation and the outcome would have been totally different.”
I glanced down at the pictures we had made. They were different, but none of them were awful or ugly. Could the changed outcome turn out to be just as beautiful as the original equation?
REAL LIFE
22
It was great spending time with Vern, but that didn’t get me very far with Mrs. Leland. I quizzed him some about what she liked. He suggested history and genealogy. History was not my best subject. And I didn’t really know how to ask questions about it. “What year did Columbus discover America?” prompted an answer, but not much of a discussion.
Genealogy was just as bad. Who was my great-great-grandfather? sparked her to show me how to read a family tree diagram. But it didn’t go much further.
“What was he like? What kind of man was he?” I asked.
“He died before I was born,” she said. “There are some photos of him in one of the albums.”
Dutifully, I went and looked through the ones she indicated. And politely peered at page after page of black-and-white photos adhered to albums with little glued-on corners.
Mrs. Leland didn’t seem to care if I was interested in the family or not. But I knew there had to be something I could talk to her about. Something that she wouldn’t just brush off.
As I put the album back in its place in the glass-fronted cabinets, I glanced for a moment at all the albums of Dad. There were entire shelves of snapshotted moments of the life and times of Sonny Leland.
Randomly I pulled one out. The photos were of a little guy about nine, I guess. He still had his little-boy face, but big grown-up teeth that looked so supersize, I had to laugh.
I began turning pages, following him through Halloween costumes and Santa Claus photos. There was a photo of him onstage. He was dressed up like a cowboy with a hat and bandanna. His mouth was open like he was singing.
Could my dad sing?
The question provoked me in an unusual way. I had never heard my father’s voice. Never heard one word that he’d ever spoken. Suddenly the idea of him singing, what he sang, how he sounded, seemed really important to know.
I hurried into Mom’s room to ask her.
She was asleep on the chair, her feet propped up on the ottoman. Her face was slightly swollen and rounded from her daily dose of prednisone. The cath-port pump was quietly pushing Adriamycin into her veins. Rocky, lying on the floor beside her, raised his head inquisitively and then seeing me, knowing I wouldn’t disturb Mom, settled back down for a nap.
I could have waited until she woke up to ask her, but I realized she wouldn’t know the answer. She didn’t meet Sonny Leland until he was in college. She’d probably never looked through the photo albums and wouldn’t have any idea what he’d been doing in a cowboy getup in front of a microphone.
I walked back into the dining room. The open album sat staring up at me. I grabbed it up and headed through the kitchen and out the back door to Mrs. Leland’s office behind the garage.
She was sitting at her desk, but she was staring off into space, lost in contemplation. I didn’t give a moment’s thought to having disturbed her.
“What’s this picture?” I asked, plopping the photo album into her lap.
She was surprised, but she covered it well.
She fumbled on the desk for her glasses and once they were perched on her nose, she peered down at the glossy colored image.
“This is a play,” she said. “Sonny was in a school play.”
“He looks like he’s singing,” I said.
She nodded. “He was. Sonny was a wonderful soprano until his voice changed. His baritone was less spectacular, but he always liked to sing.”
“My mom sings sometimes,” I said. “Especially when we’re in the car moving someplace new. She always sings then.”
“Yes, well…I haven’t heard your mother sing, I suppose,” she said.
“I never heard my father sing,” I told her. “I never even heard his voice. I was looking at these pictures and wondering what he might have sounded like.”
She was looking up at me. Then she glanced down at the album in her lap. She ran a finger along the side of the face in the photo.
“His voice was a lot like Vern’s,” she said. “Though not as deep. Maybe it would have gotten so with age. Every once in a while, when he called home from school, I’d think he was his father.”
I nodded to her, making a mental note to try to listen to Vern more closely, to try to memorize the sound of his voice.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to know your father,” Mrs. Leland said. “I’m very sorry about t
hat.”
“Yeah, but I guess I’m lucky that I got to know you and Vern,” I said. “Because you’re the people who always knew him. Being here, seeing you guys and living where he lived. It kind of makes him more real to me.”
She frowned in a strange way, as if for an instant she didn’t quite understand what I meant. Then slowly she nodded.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I suppose your mother never told you much about him.”
“She talks about him sometimes,” I hastily defended. “But I guess it’s like your great-great grandfather. If someone dies before you’re born, it’s really hard to know anything about him.”
Mrs. Leland just stared a me for a long moment. Then it was as if a lightbulb went on.
“You’re right,” she said. “I do wish that I’d listened to more family stories. That I’d learned more about my parents’ parents and grandparents from family members who knew them. But I didn’t think to ask. I didn’t even get interested in family history until most all of them were gone. You’re a very smart girl to ask questions so young.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Anything you want to know,” she said. “Just feel free to ask me about it.”
“Okay,” I said.
Immediately, I decided to test the truth of that statement. I leaned forward and turned back a couple of pages in the album.
“Why are all these guys dressed the same for Halloween?” I asked.
“It’s not Halloween,” she said. “They were all going to a punk rock concert, so they dressed up as members of the band.”
“Eww, that’s weird,” I said.
Mrs. Leland laughed. “I thought exactly the same thing,” she said. “I told them that if they expected to be mistakenly allowed onstage, they should really try to look taller.”
I giggled, too. She was right.
I dragged up a chair beside her and we began leafing through the album. She remembered all the photos, what was happening, who the other kids were, all the circumstances and funny stories attached. She seemed to enjoy looking at them as much as I did learning about them.
It was only after we’d finished and I’d taken the photo album back to the hallway and she was puttering around the kitchen starting dinner, that I realized that I’d finally found out Mrs. Leland’s interest. It was her son.
