Upstairs, the bedsprings creaked; the soft pad of Claire’s footsteps, tentative and groggy, gaining purpose as they gathered speed, moving down the hall…
And he…he’s grown hard deaf hard deaf…
“Mama? Maa-ma? Mama!”
“I’m coming!” Claire called. “Good grief, Charlie!”
Dopplering like the whistle of a train, the song gave Ran a final chance to board.
It’s just that loneliness has made his heart ferocious,
And he’s grown deaf to any softer call.
Frowning, he put down his pen. “I’ve got him, Claire,” he called, and went to fetch his son.
It was quarter to eleven when he finally made it back from Powatan, after dropping off the kids at preschool. Centuries had passed, and Ransom was a different, humbler man.
Holding one somber child in either arm, he’d watched Claire drive off down the allée toward her first-day breakfast, and he’d smiled for the rearview mirror.
We gave three heavy-hearted cheers and plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.
The lines from Moby-Dick played back, and Ransom, swallowing a Bluepoint of cold, briny fear, took Hope and Charlie in the house and scrambled eggs.
“Are eggs baby chickens?” Hope asked as she climbed into her blue and purple booster chair.
“Baby chickens come from eggs,” he conceded, spooning some onto her plate.
“Do they die when we eat them?”
“Well, Hope,” he said, searching for a valve for Charlie’s sippy cup, “the baby chickens aren’t alive yet, so I don’t think you can really say they die.”
“Do chickens mind when we eat them?”
“What? Charlie, come eat breakfast!”
“I coming, Doddy!” Carrying his little toy guitar—another street-find Ran had mailed down for the birthday he had missed—he skidded around the corner in his socks.
“Look at me! Look at me!” he said with his sweet serrated smile and such vulnerable, unvarnished need in hazel eyes, which were neither Ran’s nor Claire’s. Whose eyes were they? Holding the guitar left-handed, with the treble E string on top, he hit a jangling stadium chord. “Look, Doddy! Look at me!”
“I see you, bud.” Fighting the impulse to turn the instrument around and tune it on the spot, Ran lifted him into his high chair. “Now eat your eggs, okay?”
“Do they, Daddy?”
“What?”
“Do the chickens mind?” Hope articulated very clearly, as though he were semicretinous.
“Well,” he said, “when we eat a chicken, the chicken becomes part of us, okay? Part of something that can think and laugh and dream and do all sorts of things a chicken can’t…So maybe the chicken doesn’t mind. Maybe there’s something in it for the chicken, too. Does that make sense?”
Hope listened soberly. “Uh-huh,” she said, and pushed her plate away. “Let’s play the Scar game, Daddy.” Her eyes took on the wicked gleam.
He faced her, arms akimbo. “What exactly is the Scar game, Hope?”
“Look at me, Doddy!”
He raised a finger. “Just a minute, bud…”
“You be Scar, and I’m Mufasa climbing up the rock,” she said. “I say, ‘Help me, brother, please,’ and you grab my paws and say, ‘Long live the king!’ and let me fall into the wildebeest stampede.”
He frowned. “What happens then?”
“I get dead.” Hope grinned.
“How about when you say, ‘Help me, brother, please,’ I lift you up onto the rock with me and everyone lives happily ever after?”
“No, Daddy!” She regarded him with shocked disapproval. “No! That isn’t how you play. You have to let me fall.”
“I’m sorry, Hope,” he said, getting softly in her face. “I don’t think I can play that game with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’d rather fall into the wildebeest stampede myself than see you break the toenail on your little toe.”
“I don’t have toenails, I have claws,” she said, and showed him. “Rarrrrrr!”
“Rarrr, yourself,” he said, wondering how it was that Claire always seemed to know the proper move. And not just Claire. It was as if there were some universal primer course on parenting, and everyone had taken it but him. This was an old feeling, though. Catching it, he made a mental note to pick up the scrip he’d dropped off at the pharmacy last night.
“Doddy?” Charlie’s voice was wilting plaintively.
“What, Charlie, what?” When Ransom turned, the smile came back.
“Eat my eggs.”
“Yes, you did. Good job. Now, everybody, listen up! Attention! No more fooling, we have to get to school. Mama’s counting on the team. Now where are everybody’s shoes?”
Charlie shrugged with big, round eyes, and Hope said, “Mama knows.”
They searched the house three times—all fifteen rooms—only to find them in the one place the Team Leader never thought to look: the closet.
“Do we have time to swing before we go?” Hope asked him on their way outside.
“What are we doing here, Hope?”
She frowned at his tone. “Going to school?”
“That’s right. Going to school. Do I look like I have time to push you on the swing?”
“No, but Mommy does.”
“Well, I’m not Mommy. Obviously.” He threw in this ad hominem aside against himself as he strapped them in their seats. At which point, the missing valve in Charlie’s cup—the one that Ransom never got around to putting in—led to a drenching OJ spill; which led to an unbuckling; which led to an about-face to the house; a hosing in the tub; another Huggie; a new set of clothes.
Finally—to the tune of “Five Little Ducks”—they set out. They were down to four, when the opossum or raccoon—the remains had reached the state where it was hard to differentiate—disappeared under the hood. As the tires tump-tumped, Ran caught Hope’s expression in the rearview. Her face had gone grave; her eyes had that scintillant and musing light. She seemed like a tiny mathematician working out a problem, and it struck her father that his little girl had found the deep equation that would occupy her life. She had the artist gene—Ran didn’t know what else to call it, or if he would have wished her spared.
In a guilty need for reciprocity, he looked toward Charlie, and found his son’s eyes waiting for him in the mirror.
“Hi, Doddy.”
“Hi, buddy.”
Ransom smiled, and Charlie’s left eye blinked, then both, and then the left again. Ran had seen this last
