by Jeff Giles
“We’re chill,” he said. “How about you?”
The woman laughed.
“I’m chill, too,” she said.
“Sweet,” said X.
Zoe stifled a laugh. The woman handed back her identification.
“Have a very chill day!” she said.
Zoe pulled away, and they crossed over a glittering creek. X’s nervousness gave way to excitement. The immensity of the trees and mountains—the permanence of them—had never struck him so hard before, probably because he’d always been bent on some awful task for the lords. He stared at them in amazement now.
This was where his parents had met.
Zoe clicked off the radio—out of respect for what was about to happen, it seemed like. For the next few minutes, the only sound was a disembodied woman’s voice from her phone.
“In two miles, turn right toward Lake Lillian.”
“In one mile, turn right …”
“In two hundred feet …”
It struck X that not long ago they had been in another forest, heading toward a lake and another father.
Zoe’s.
It was an awful memory—Zoe had screamed herself hoarse at her father when they found him—but it snuck into X’s head before he realized what it was. It was like he’d clenched his fist around barbed wire.
“You okay?” said Zoe.
“In truth, I am thinking about your father,” said X.
Zoe took a hand off the wheel, and stroked the back of his neck.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Arrive at destination.”
X was startled by his father’s house—it wasn’t what he had expected, though he couldn’t have said what he’d expected.
It was a tree house. It had a wraparound balcony and such giant windows that it seemed more glass than wood. It was set among fir trees but not exactly in one. X actually couldn’t tell, from a distance, what was holding the house up. It seemed to hover above the ground, as if it had just taken off.
X and Zoe got out of the car, transfixed. Instead of steps or a ladder, there was a curving, wood-planked walkway that rose slowly from the forest floor to the front door. The path was bordered by carved handrails, and hung with old iron lanterns. X and Zoe were halfway up it when X’s father opened the front door, waved without speaking, then retreated nervously back into the house.
The interior was a single enormous room. What little wall space wasn’t dominated by windows was occupied by shelves, so that the only thing you saw—besides trees, mountains, and sunlight—was books. There were only two decorations in the entire house. One was a frame with pale fuzzy flowers pressed under glass. The other was Rufus’s sculpture. X had thought that Rufus only made happy, cartoonish bears that waved and held signs, but he’d carved this one as if it were sleeping. It lay near the fireplace, emanating peace.
Timothy brought out a platter overburdened with food—three kinds of crackers, three cheeses, green and red grapes, and various sliced meats, as well as dark chocolate in a gold wrapper. The minute he set it on the low wooden table he seemed to realize it was too much.
“We don’t get a whole lot of guests, the bear and me, so I’m not clear on the whole portions thing,” he said. “Don’t feel like you have to eat it all.”
X wasn’t sure what to say.
Zoe said, “Oh, we’re gonna eat it all. I’m like a seagull.”
Timothy looked different than he had in the photograph, though it was only a few years old. X wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him before: His father, unlike his mother, was a mortal. He was aging. Sylvie, trapped in the amber of the Lowlands, had remained 35. Timothy had edged into his 50s. His curly hair was graying at the temples, and he had a slight belly, which X found comforting. It reminded him of Plum.
X didn’t think he looked like his father—his hands, maybe—but then he looked so much like Sylvie that he probably should have foreseen this, too. X remembered his mother saying that Timothy had been full of life when she met him, that he’d put a flower in his teeth and danced. That Timothy seemed to be gone. He seemed shy now, as if he wasn’t sure how to proceed, as if he was more comfortable with wild animals than people. The uncertainty in him resonated with X.
X had spent his whole life wanting to say more than he knew how to.
“I’ve never seen a house like this before,” he said, remembering to speak with “a twenty-first-century vibe.”
“Seriously,” said Zoe. “Are you an Elven lord?”
“I wish,” said Timothy quietly. “And thank you. I put a lot of thought into this house. Maybe too much. The truth is, I—”
X and Zoe leaned forward, but Timothy decided not to finish the sentence. He looked at the platter. The silence expanded awkwardly, like a cloud that would eventually fill the room.
X needed to know what Timothy had been about to say. Zoe must have been curious, too, or she would have blurted something random to jolt the conversation forward. Fifteen seconds went by. The silence grazed the walls and ceiling. X was about to give up and ask something pointless about the sculpture, when Timothy looked up, and said suddenly, “The truth is, I built it for a woman.”
X had never considered the possibility that Timothy had fallen in love with someone else after Sylvie disappeared—that he’d married, maybe more than once, had children, adventures, a life. He steeled himself to hear another woman’s name. Then, as Timothy told his story, X felt a wave of relief, of gratitude. Maybe it was selfish, but it was what he felt. His father had never loved anyone but his mother.
“I was thirty-two,” said Timothy. “Happy as hell. Already obsessed with bears, wolverines, mountain lions—all the carnivores. I just loved being outdoors. Wouldn’t go indoors to save my life. Any kind of building at all felt like a—like a cell, I guess.”
At the word “cell,” X could feel Zoe forcing herself not to look at him.
“I’d been working for the park for two or three years,” Timothy went on. “I had just come up with—you’ve got to be kind of a bear nerd to care about this stuff—but I’d just come up with a new way to collect DNA samples from grizzlies so we could track the population better. I got a heap of praise for it. Mail from wildlife biologists all over the place. By the way, you can skip the cheese and go right for the chocolate, if you want. There aren’t a whole ton of house rules around here.”
“Thank you,” said X.
The idea that you ate food in a particular order made no sense to him anyway.
“The grizzly thing felt like the highlight of my life,” said Timothy. “I bought myself a suit to celebrate—not a suit-suit but a kind of sleeping bag that you wear. Almost like a space suit? I always found sleeping bags constricting. Like I was a larva or something. Anyway, then I had a day off. It was September second. I remember because of what happened. I hiked up to Avalanche Lake, and met this woman, Sylvie. And all of a sudden the grizzly thing was no longer the highlight of my life. Not even close.”
Timothy fell quiet.
“I just realized I don’t even know your names,” he said.
Zoe told him hers.
When it was X’s turn, he said Xavier.
“And how old are you guys?” said Timothy. “Is that a rude question?”
“Not at all,” said Zoe. “I’m seventeen.”
“Twenty,” said X.
The second the answer was out of his mouth, he wondered if he should have lied. Was it crazy to worry that Timothy had noticed how much he resembled Sylvie, and that simple math would lead him to the truth?
“You’re not finished with your story, I hope?” X said quickly.
“Oh, I think I’ve probably subjected you to enough,” said Timothy.
“No, no,” said X. He smiled. “Please subject us to some more.”
Zoe turned to him, and lifted her eyebrows, impressed by his little joke. Honestly, it was like something she herself might have said.
“People your age don’t even believe in love at first sight, do they?” sai
d Timothy.
Now Zoe came to X’s aid.
She raised her hand.
“We do,” she said.
“I didn’t hear Sylvie come up behind me on the trail—and I’m generally pretty alert,” said Timothy. “She just kind of appeared. She had a blue-and-white dress on, which I thought … I mean, who hikes in a dress? But she blew right past me. We were down by the gorge. You know it? I waited to see if she’d look back at me. And she did. She gave me a look like, ‘Think you can keep up?’ That was all I needed. I was pretty cocky in those days.
“We kept passing each other on the trail, trying to impress each other. Eventually, I realized she was just toying with me. She was ten times the hiker I was. Crazy strong. In my defense, she was so pretty that I was tripping over tree roots and stuff. I was just so taken with her. It blotted everything else out. If you had stopped me right there in the middle of the trail, and you had said, ‘Do you know what day it is, Tim? Do you know where you are?,’ I might have been able to come up with ‘North America?’ ”
Timothy paused. X feared he would stop altogether, but the story had a momentum of its own now.
“She came back four times that month,” Timothy said. “Always wearing the same dress. Just seeing her walk toward me through the trees was thrilling. When she smiled … I mean, it was like her body was made of light. Sounds dumb, probably.”
“It doesn’t,” X said gently.
“Later, I figured out we spent about sixty-five hours together,” said Timothy. He looked at them sheepishly. “I like counting stuff,” he said. “Anyway, I bet we spent sixty-two of those hours just hiking the trails and talking. I said things that I’d never said before. To anyone. Not even to myself. Painful stuff. Joyful stuff. I feel foolish saying this because I’m a scientist—I mean, you’re looking at a guy with a doctorate in biology—but the way she listened to me, the things she said, her whole kind of aura … I felt like she healed me in a lot of ways. Fixed some of the messed-up wiring in my head, you know? I don’t know if that makes sense. She never told me a whole lot about herself, in terms of specifics, which was frustrating but also just completely tantalizing. For instance, ask me what her last name was.”
“What was her last name?” said X.
“No idea,” said Timothy.
X realized then that he didn’t know either.
“She was from Montana, but where exactly?” said Timothy. “No idea. Later, I realized that some of what she did tell me about herself didn’t totally compute in terms of a timeline. But being with her—I’d never felt anything like it. I didn’t even know that a feeling like that was on the menu. She picked some plants for me at one point, and I did this goofy Spanish dance for her. You’ve got to understand: I was not the kind of guy who danced. That’s how far she’d pulled me outside myself.” Timothy paused. “Look, I have to stop. The rest of the story is no fun. It’s upsetting even to me, and it’s been a couple decades.”
“She picked plants for you?” said X. “Not flowers?”
Sylvie had told them it was flowers. He needed to know which it was. He needed to know everything he possibly could.
“Yeah, bear grass,” said Timothy. “Technically, it’s a plant. You want to hear two interesting facts about bear grass? It’s not a grass, and bears don’t eat it. Not sure what the botanists were thinking. That’s, uh, that’s the bear grass she picked right there.”
The frame with the white flowers.
Now X understood why it was one of the only decorations in the house.
“Those are the very—sorry, the actual—plants she gave you?” he said. “You kept them all this time?”
“I did, yeah,” said Timothy. “If she had spit out a watermelon seed I would have kept it. You’re thinking I’m nuts. It’s fine.”
“No,” said X. “I’m not thinking that at all.” He worried that he shouldn’t say what he was about to say. “I’m thinking that what Sylvie did for you—pulled you out of yourself?—is exactly what Zoe has done for me. In truth, she’s saved me many times.”
Timothy seemed moved by this.
“You only get one person like that in your lifetime, I think,” he said. “Keep her close.”
X assumed Zoe would be uncomfortable with the praise, that she’d already be formulating a joke.
Instead, Zoe said something kind to Timothy: “I’m sure you took Sylvie out of herself, too. I’m sure you fixed her wiring. Actually, I’m positive that you did. It works both ways or not at all.”
“I want to believe that,” said Timothy. He stood, as if to underline his skepticism. “But I don’t. I can’t.”
“Trust me?” said Zoe.
X knew how much more she wanted to tell Timothy. He longed to say it all, too.
Timothy, just to busy himself in the awkward moment, leaned down to pick up a paper napkin that had fallen to the floor.
“Then why didn’t she stay?” he said. “Why have I been alone twenty years?”
When X and Zoe left, Timothy asked them—awkwardly, which made it seem all the more genuine—to come back sometime and help him finish the food. They promised they would. But the truth was that X didn’t know if he could be that close to his father again without announcing, “I’m your son.” Just hugging Timothy good-bye had been hard—two like objects recognizing each other right when they had to pull apart.
They’d all forgotten to talk about Rufus’s sculpture.
Outside, the sun had sunk low enough to shine straight through the windows and make the house glow. X turned when he and Zoe were halfway down the curving walk. The house looked different to him now. Timothy had told them that he’d begun building it right after Sylvie disappeared, thinking that she’d come back, thinking that they’d live in it together. He had held onto the fantasy even after a year went by, two years, three. Half the books in the house, he said, were things he bought because he thought Sylvie would like them: a book about how mountains are formed; a book about a woman, known only as Agent 355, who spied for George Washington; a book about explorers on a hellish expedition to Antarctica to study penguin eggs.
Of course, Sylvie never saw the books—or the tree house.
Timothy said he thought about selling the place every few years but didn’t think the house would make sense to anyone other than the woman it’d been built for. The image X took away of his father was of an enormously kind, enormously sad man. X pictured him standing on a dock and watching the whole world pull away.
X and Zoe passed the old iron lanterns, not yet lit, as they made their way down to the car. Zoe told X that it’d been brave of him to seek his father out.
“Brave?” said X. “You leaped into a glowing portal to hell. I only ate grapes.”
Zoe laughed.
“I ain’t scared of no portal,” she said.
She drove them toward home, following the river out of the park. X watched the current—the way it crashed against the rocks, then seemed to reassemble and keep going.
“Is wholer a word?” he asked Zoe.
“Holer?” she said. “How would you use it?”
“ ‘Every day, I felt a little bit wholer,’ ” said X.
“I’ll allow it,” said Zoe. She kissed her palm as she drove, then reached out to press it to X’s cheek. “I really, really liked your father.”
“As did I,” said X. “Yet he is so much like me that perhaps I do not see him clearly.”
“Like you?” said Zoe. “You think so?”
“I think he is so much like me that he could be me,” said X.
“I mean, you’ve got his hands,” said Zoe. “And you’re both shy. But he just seems so, I don’t know, decimated? Devastated?”
“That is it precisely,” said X. “That is what struck me hardest as well. I think I haven’t been clear. He is me—if I had lost you.”
THIRTY
For Zoe, happiness was harder to get used to than anything else—harder to trust. When she couldn’t sleep, she stared out the w
indow at the shed X was living in. She liked seeing the glow of the space heaters under the door. It was one of the only things that soothed her. X was in there. He was safe. They were all safe. No one was coming. No one was going away. Sometimes, just seeing the shed wasn’t enough, so Zoe would pad through Rufus’s soggy backyard in unlaced sneakers. She’d pull open the door of the shed, and look at X as he slept. She had bought him one of the wearable sleeping bags that Timothy had mentioned—so he wouldn’t feel constricted. It made him look like an astronaut, which cracked her up. Zoe would stand in the dark, gazing at him. It was an embarrassing thing to do. Zoe knew it, and didn’t care. One night, she went out there three times.
As for X, he seemed to crave sleep. He hoarded it almost, the way a dragon hoards gold. Even the groaning of the shed door as Zoe came and went didn’t wake him up. Sleep—and food and sunshine—were already healing him. His cheeks were pink. The bruises under his eyes had faded, as if his body knew he’d never hunt another soul.
When Zoe went to school, X and Rufus worked on some secret project of Rufus’s. Zoe couldn’t get any details out of either of them, or even out of Jonah, who helped sometimes. When Zoe and Jonah got home from school, Zoe could always hear X and Rufus laughing in the shed. Jonah would run out to join them, and he’d be in hysterics even before he knew what was funny. Hearing them all laugh: that soothed her, too.
Zoe’s dream, which she didn’t speak aloud, was that Rufus would let X stay after the rest of them moved to Bert and Betty’s house on the lake. That X and Rufus would be roommates. Rufus would only go for it if Zoe’s mom approved, and her mother hadn’t adjusted to X being in their lives. More than once, as Zoe snuck back inside after checking on X, she saw her mom standing sleeplessly at her window, as if the shed were a spaceship that had just landed. To Zoe, X was an astronaut. To her mom, he was an alien.
Everybody else seemed happier with X around—wholer, to use his word. Zoe prayed her mother would see that. X was polite, gracious, kind. He asked what he could do to help so often that her mom and Rufus had started inventing chores, like tightening the lightbulbs and cleaning the inside of the dishwasher.
