flew away in the winter and then came back to live in a ground nest Christopher built for him beside the house. Christopher forming letters on the white brick of the backyard patio from twigs collected in the yard and broken to size. Even his own words, unremembered but resonant:
“Do you know what, Dad? It takes a long time trying to grow up. It goes age to age, and I want to skip some ages.”
That was the one that drove him away to regroup, that threatened to upset his precarious balance. The dirty little secret of growing up, Meyfarth had said. And Christopher had been in such a hurry to learn it.
Presently, he returned to the comsole and read through the last of the letter. It ended without explanation or closure in the middle of Christopher’s sixth year, its last anecdotes—of his trials with an older and more aggressive neighbor child—offering no clue as to why the project was abandoned. The next item Lila presented was date- stamped a full three years later.
“Wait—what’s going on here?” Christopher said in surprise. “Isn’t there anything between this and the last?”
“No, Christopher. I’m proceeding in strict chronological order, as Mr. McCutcheon directed.”
“Show me a file directory.”
“I’m sorry, Christopher. I don’t have a directory available.”
Lila’s mechanical politeness was becoming an annoyance. “I can take these somewhere else, you know.”
“Yes, Christopher. But you would not be able to read the files without my assistance.”
“Then I’ll take a can opener to you first and see how you do it,” Christopher said irritably, coming up out of the chair and then kicking it out of his way.
He walked to the window and stood looking out through his own reflection, his hands tucked into his back pockets. House rules, he thought. Still his father’s house, still his father’s rules.
“All right,” he said finally. “He wants you holding my hand, I guess that’s the way it has to be. Tell me this. Is there more like what I was reading coming up? More addressed to me? If so, I want to skip ahead to it.”
“Christopher, there are very specific restrictions on how I may access this material. I may not look ahead, skip ahead, or redisplay already viewed sections. I may not store, mail, or copy any part of it, or allow it to be filmed off the display.”
He sighed and made a reluctant pilgrimage back to the chair. “Do you have any idea why there’s such a gap?”
“I’m sorry, Christopher. I don’t. Is it important?”
“You tell me,” he said. “Continue, please.”
Before long, Christopher was convinced that it was important. For, in everything that followed, he found himself discussed in the third person, rather than addressed in the first. It seemed that—for some reason—any thought of him ever seeing his father’s words had vanished in the interim.
But, curiously, Christopher discovered his father spoke most clearly when he was not speaking to Christopher directly. His father’s voice became a more familiar one, his language liberated from the prison of childspeak. And though there were as many gaps and mysteries as before, the thoughts he did record seemed less guarded, closer to the heart.
Infuriatingly, that brief entry was the only allusion to Deryn’s departure. It was, in fact, one of the few times either woman was named, and—to that point at least—the only time they were spoken of together. For all their presence in the archives, it was almost as if Christopher’s mothers had never existed.
He had waited in vain for the kind of reminiscence of Sharron that he had sought from Lynn-Anne, for the kind of reassurance that would erase his sister’s bitterness—and his own ambivalence—from his mind. Through the long hours leading up to midnight, he had kept wondering when something would touch his still-untapped pain and break loose the logjam of anger and grief he could sense but not reach.
But before that happened, he was ambushed by a simple, self-knowing confession:
The cat was Dorian, the big gray who had owned the B Street house until the day he simply failed to return from a winter walk. The woman could only be Sharron, for Christopher could give damning witness to the way his father had kept Deryn at arms length.
And though he tried desperately to find a reason to believe otherwise, Christopher knew in the first moment the words fell under his gaze that the child his father spoke of was Lynn-Anne.
In that moment, hurt and alone, he hated both his father and his sister more than he had known possible.
This time, the kitchen was not far enough away. Christopher retreated outside, to the wooden deck which squared off the curves of the twin domes at the back of the house. Overhead, thin high clouds were making a ghost of the gibbous moon.
It was not that Lynn-Anne was first in her father’s heart which cut so deeply He granted her that as right of precedence. It was the thought that she had won from their father something that Christopher never could, that she had stood in the way of his having any standing at all. It was the realization that his father had knowingly imprisoned him in a losing game.
There was no comfort in knowing that Lynn-Anne’s jealousy had blinded her to her real status, costing her exactly what she blamed Christopher for stealing. There was no joy in the contemplation of how much her defection had cost William McCutcheon. That they, too, had been cheated only made the whole muddle more tragically foolish.
His father had changed after Lynn-Anne left, though at the time Christopher had not seen it. There was proof of the change even in the spotty record of his father’s notebooks. It explained the end of the long letter. It explained the three-year silence, coinciding with the trips east, now seen as attempts to win his aaugnter back. It explained the emotional distance when the entries resumed.
The picture was clear. For his first five or six years, Christopher had been an intimate part of his father’s life. But after that time he was never more than an important part. And he had spent the succeeding years trying to earn back something he had once had, without ever grasping exactly what was missing—or why it had been taken away.
So much of Christopher’s history with his father finally made sense. His own eternal sense of inadequacy. The paradox of his father’s studied indifference and his obsession for control—the endless auditions for an approval he would never give. Even his father’s curious relationship with Deryn, by his choice alone less than it could have been, an arrangement rather than a marriage.
Numbly, he wondered—was this the whole point of the exercise, for him to learn that his father did not love him? If so, then it was a cowardly act, and a cruel legacy. And there was no reason to mourn such a man.
The high clouds were blowing off, and scattered windows of star-dotted sky were starting to open. Christopher sat on the railing, back resting against the wall, his arms crossed tightly across his chest, looking up into the fragmented sky for pieces of a pattern he could recognize.
It struck him then that his father had left him neither a gift nor a message, but a final test.
