Jess fumbled in her jacket pocket for her wallet and her keys. She felt like a child as she followed Daisy out the back gate. Did Leon think she was a child?
Chafing at the errand, Daisy didn’t speak as they walked to the car, nor did she move the stacks of leaflets from the passenger seat. Jess heaved the bundles into the backseat. “Does this happen a lot?” she ventured.
Daisy glanced at her for a moment, and for a moment she looked amused. “Yes,” she said, “this happens all the time.”
8
Jess did not tell Emily that she spent the next day playing with Leon instead of packing, wandering in Muir Woods instead of catching up on laundry. Nor could she say exactly why she almost missed the early-morning flight to Boston. That she had stayed up all night talking to Leon at the Tree House, that they had sat on the window seat, looking out at the garden and talking trees and politics, redwoods at risk and those protected, and some in secret groves, unknown to all but a few climbers and scientists. Trees like living castles in the mist. Leon told Jess, “When you see them you …”
“You what?” Jess asked him.
“You feel blessed.”
They talked about actions against Pacific Lumber Company. Tree sitting, roadblocking, human chains, using webcams and blogs and Listservs for publicity. “Old technology destroyed the environment,” said Leon. “Wouldn’t it be cool if new technology restored it?”
And Jess leaned against him, imagining a wireless world, a place without telephone poles, those poor denuded trees turned into sticks, a world where you could see the loggers make their kills online, and click to donate and do something about it. A world of webs and nets instead of boxes, logs, and … no, she couldn’t quite give up on books.
“I don’t think I could stop using paper,” she told Leon.
He rubbed her shoulders and his hands slipped underneath her shirt. “People gave up on clay tablets,” he pointed out. “They gave up typesetting, and eventually, they’ll give up paper too.”
“I like to turn the pages,” she said.
He laughed softly. “It’s all I can do not to turn you.”
“All you can do? Really?” She turned to face him, and all at once she saw his delight and his surprise and the sun rising through the window. “Oh, God, I have to get to the airport!”
Leon rushed her home to the apartment for her suitcase, and they sped to the airport in his imported hybrid car, so that she dashed to the gate with just minutes to spare.
“I was worried about you!” Emily exclaimed as they boarded their plane. “I couldn’t reach you! I thought something had happened to you! You’re getting a cell phone.”
“Okay, okay.” Jess sank into her window seat. “You could have boarded without me.”
Her sister had been struggling with just this possibility, torn between concern for Jess and her longing to see Jonathan. “What kept you so long? Do you really hate seeing Dad that much?” Emily stowed shopping bags of gifts in the overhead compartment and pushed her briefcase neatly under the seat in front of her. “Is that what this is about?”
“No! No, of course not.”
“I think it is.”
“I promise you,” said Jess, “Dad could not have been farther from my mind.” She took Hume from her backpack to read in self-defense. The plane began taxiing to the runway, and Jess read the same sentences again and again.
Emily offered her a granola bar.
“No, thanks,” said Jess.
“Did you eat any breakfast?”
Jess returned to Hume, without answering. She didn’t want to talk. She was afraid Emily would notice something different about her. When it came to confidences, Jess would rather hear Emily’s secrets than tell her own. This seemed fair, and this seemed right. Jess was the more forgiving of the two.
“You catch colds a lot, don’t you?”
Jess started. She’d heard her sister say, “You fall in love a lot, don’t you?”
Not so often, not so much for someone my age, Jess protested silently to the page in front of her. How would Hume put it?
Jess slept and woke, and tried to sleep again, tucking her knees to her chest, straining to rest her head, turning in her seat like a cork in a bottle. The day was over by the time they landed with a thump at Logan, and as the sisters stumbled out, loaded with gifts for Lily and Maya, they saw that they had traded a sunny California afternoon for a misty, messy Boston night. Their father had been circling in his Volvo station wagon, “for twenty minutes,” he said, even as he embraced them.
“So good to see you,” he murmured to Jess, but after kissing Emily, he stood back and shook his head in amazement at his spectacularly successful daughter—a stance Jess recognized as “My, how you’ve grown.”
Emily sat in front, and Jess struggled to unstrap and move two child-safety seats, so she could squeeze in back. The car was overheated, and the windows were locked. She rested her forehead on the glass and stared out at the crumbling brick buildings advertising steakhouses and bars in chipped paint. Growing up, she hadn’t noticed how old and dirty everything looked, but she saw it now. The decrepitude back east!
“Why is there so much traffic?” Jess asked. “Is it the Big Dig?”
“The traffic is entirely random,” Richard replied. Tall, gray-haired, clean-shaven, he had a quiet face, a recessive chin, eyes the color of a cloudy sky. He had attended MIT for college and for graduate school, and stayed to teach. On his right hand he wore an MIT insignia ring engraved with a beaver symbolizing industry. “Dad!” Jess burst out once when she was in high school and Richard had told her the drama club was a total waste of time, “of course you think that. You wear a brass rat.”
But Richard wore his ring with pride. He considered MIT one of the great places on earth, and he was immensely proud that Emily had attended. As for Jess—what fights they’d had. Richard insisting Jess apply, even though she had no chance, and no interest. Bad enough that he’d forced her to take AP Calculus. That had been humiliating, but her MIT interview had been a joke.
“So,” said the kindly Institute alumnus who had volunteered to meet with Jess. “When you were a kid, did you ever blow up chemistry experiments in the basement?”
“No,” Jess answered truthfully.
“Chart clouds in the skies?”
“No.”
“Take apart the family computer?”
“Never once,” said Jess.
Her father used to storm at her, “You have a perfectly good aptitude for math, but you won’t apply yourself.”
“I’m not good at it!” she’d insisted.
“You’re not interested,” he’d shot back.
“That too!”
This was after Emily left home, and before Heidi. Sweet-natured and playful when Jess was younger, Richard became a fretful, controlling single parent. Outgoing and confident as a little girl, Jess took to her room to read
