he knew your father. They were friends. Colleagues. She asked me to leave. So I left.”
“Maxon, they were kissing?”
“Probably.”
“My mother, kissing some witch doctor from Burma, I hardly think so,” Sunny said to herself. “Unless.”
She didn’t say to Maxon that she thought she knew the reason. She thought, she had always thought, she had always known, that Dr. Chandrasekhar was her father in hiding. Now she was almost certain of it. The baldness cure, now the visit to her mother in Pennsylvania, it was all too strange. What chance was there that this man was really a colleague? Why get interested in the baldness then, when it had been her father’s obsession? She put the mailer away in the drawer and turned out the light. She would not ask her mother about this, pursue this lead. She would not go straight to Dr. Chandrasekhar and confront him. Shake his hand. Stare into his face and say, “Daddy? Daddy? Is it really you? Why did you leave us?” She would just keep thinking about it forever, processing it in her own head. Her father visiting her mother. The cure for baldness sent out on a mailer, like a love letter straight to her. She would keep it safe, not disturb it. It would be added to the narrative, one of the offshoots. Her diagram was not a labyrinth. There were many alternatives and they were all real. She felt energized by this new discovery, as if an unknown branch had sprung out from the tree, ripped into the sky, burst out with leaves, and stood there shaking and new.
“Maybe I won’t get that orchid stuff after all,” she said to Maxon as she flicked off the light. She came over to the bed, and said, “You want to take a crack at curing what ails me, baby?” As she got between the covers, in the shadow from the streetlight outside, she could see he was holding up one finger for “good.”
13
There were only a few significant incidents in Maxon’s mind in the time between when he was born and the time he married Sunny and became Sunny’s husband. They ranged in his mind from the excruciatingly significant to largely significant. In his life, they were like beads on a chain. They were the only things he could truly remember that involved talking.
THE FIRST BEGAN AT 3:45 in the afternoon on July 4, 1987. The temperature in the cow barn was 68. Fog lay over the mountains, coagulating over this valley. The boy was eighty miles north of Pittsburgh, eighty miles south of Erie, between one Appalachian foothill and another. A weak summer sun broke through the clouds but did not warm him. A light rain had come down at 1:35. The boy put one hard foot on the lower layer of the barbed-wire fence and pushed down, pinched the upper layer with his hand. Pulling them apart, he slid through expertly and left his father’s property. As soon as he was through he went off running. Down through the valley he ran, fifty steps down, hands out to steady himself down a short descent, fifty more steps running, feet slipping shoeless through the leaf mold and pine needles. The ferns whipped his bare legs.
At the creek in the bottom of the valley he paused, bones in his chest expanding and contracting around his panting lungs and racing heart. Ankle-deep in the stream, he put his hand down to drink, lifted the water up to his face like a hunter, his eyes on the sandy bank. Raccoon tracks, deer tracks, and then he saw human tracks. Adult human feet in boots, all over the place, and one delicate footprint, pressed into the edge of the creek where the sand gave way to mud. It was small, the footprint of a child. The boy let the water fall from between his fingers. He climbed up the bank from whence he’d come, and approached a nearby stump. He reached in and lifted out a flat rock that covered up an opening inside. Up to his armpit now in the stump, he pushed aside a chipmunk skeleton, fully formed, a few rocks and odd-shaped gnarls of wood, a wad of cash, and pulled out a wax paper bag. Inside it was candy, very old. He took out a piece of the sticky peppermint and put it in the pocket of his shorts.
The boy went back to the footprint, puzzled over it, studied it closely, his sharp nose barely a breath away from the pea-shaped indentations of the toes. He put his own filthy foot over it, as if to match the shapes, but he did not disturb one grain of sand on this precious impression. Instead, he pressed his hands down over his long hair, flattening it, ordering it. He rubbed the back of his hand over his face, then applied some water to the effort, and used the hem of his torn white T-shirt to scrub at his cheeks. He gave himself a winning smile in his reflection in the creek. Then suddenly he looked fierce, angry, wild, growling at the water. His face went blank. Then he lifted his eyebrows, widened his eyes, showed all his teeth. His face went blank again. Finally he frowned, stood up, and began to climb the opposite hill.
Across the road from the old farm, the boy stopped in the high weeds. Among the milkweed clumps, he waited and watched, crouched over, hunched down. The old farm was no longer empty. He knew, looking at the place, that he would no longer be able to climb through a window and sleep there when he needed to. There was new gravel on the driveway. There were new windows with bright white frames. He had heard the sound of a car, the sound of a hammer yesterday. He had envisioned a thief, tearing apart the decrepit porch, seeing the wormy chestnut paneling, using a crowbar. He knew that paneling was worth some money, because he had heard his father and brothers discussing it.
He felt angry at the interlopers. He had deciphered every book inside the old farmhouse, saying each word out loud, one after the other. He deciphered by the light of a store of yellowed candles from under the kitchen counter. There was a book entirely composed of letters, arrows, and numbers. There was a set of leather volumes that had the word “Dickens” on the spine, fifteen volumes, ranging between two inches and three and a half inches thick, wide as his mother’s butcher block. He could recall the length of each paragraph, and the width. How dare some other vagrant dismantle this house? There was a station wagon in the driveway, and in the front yard, a human hung from a rope, swinging back and forth, back and forth, sixty degrees across the yard and back.
He parted the weeds to get a clearer look. His face framed in weeds, his hands pulling them apart on each side of his face, he looked across the dirt road and saw the human that had made the footprint in the creek. It was a child. The child sat in a tire all cut apart. The cut-up tire hung from the tree and was swinging back and forth, back and forth. As it swung across the arc it also was revolving, so that it turned and swung, both, the child’s face coming around to face him, seeing him, and then turning away, around, across the whole sweep of the yard, the farmhouse, and then back around to see him again. By the time the child had rotated back around, the boy had sprinted across the road and was standing on the mounting block at the bottom of the driveway. The child in the swing put out its foot and stopped the swing from rotating and swinging. It regarded the boy with large eyes. It stared at him.
“Who are you, a boy?” said this child.
“Maxon,” said the boy. He stood fully erect, one knee touching the other, heels planted firmly together on that mossy and rectangular stone block.
“I’m Sunny,” said the child. “I’m a girl. Do you want a turn on this?”
The farmhouse had been empty ever since Maxon could remember. He had found it very early in his life, when he was exploring the woods. Now he had been all over the county. It was one of the places where he slept. There were others, an A-frame cabin 168 trees down the electric line past the old farm, a hunting blind in a tree next to the railroad. There were people who fed him, including his family, but also others. There was one woman in a trailer who thought he was a mute. He never talked to her. The houses with white paint and ninety-degree angles he stayed away from. During the school year, he went to school as much as he could, on the bus. He was seven years, four months, and eighteen days old. Or, he was 2,693 rotations of the Earth old.
At this time, Maxon climbed into the tire swing and Sunny pushed him on it, and he played with her. When they were laughing, another person came out of the front door. Maxon had never seen any of the doors of the house open; he thought of the old farmhouse as impenetrable except by squirrels and him. The woman was tall, wearing a long skirt. She had long blond hair in pigtails as if she were a child.
“Sunny, what’s this?” said the woman.
“It’s Maxon,” said Sunny. She talked around the piece of peppermint that was in her mouth. “He’s staying for dinner. Maxon, this is my mother.”
Another woman came out behind the mother, and this one was brown. Maxon had never seen a person this brown color. She was short, and she had a hammer in her hand. Her arms were covered in dust.
“Nu, please set another place at the table,” said the mother. “Sunny has a friend.”
At the dinner table, Maxon sat diagonal to the mother and the brown woman, and across from Sunny. Sunny
