“Hey, Dad, we’re here,” I said, pulling the Buick onto the drivewaythat led to the little house. What was once smooth cement was now bursting at the seams with weeds. I grimaced as our car—already overburdened by the U-Haul container attached to the roof—hit a pothole.
But neither my words nor the jolt shook my dad out of his thoughts. Or stupor. Or wherever he’d gone—deeper into the intricate, twisting tunnels of his own mind. The entire drive up from Maryland, he’d stared out the passenger window, muttering to himself. Figures, mostly, for an equation that had no end.
He’s not getting better.
I faced forward, observing the house through the grimy, insect-splattered windshield. It looked smaller and more run-down than it had seven years ago. The area was pretty, at least.
Our house was tucked into a corner of forest along the bend in the land that created the Bend. The Bend was an entire neighborhood, but you wouldn’t know it. The forest, the road, the silence…it felt as if no one were around for miles. Which was good. There was no oneto see how the house was falling apart.
Our only house now. The last stop.
I glanced over at Dad, who had yet to realize the car was no longer moving and sighed.
Mom’s leaving wasn’t a Big Bang that created a brand-new reality. Instead, it had opened a wormhole to an altered version of the same universe. The same reality on the surface, saturated with all the same painful memories. But if you dug just a little deeper, you’d find an alien landscape.
Dad and I’d become reluctant explorers, discovering little artifacts of Mom’s absence every day. Here is the first breakfast she’s not here to make. Here is my first day at Langdon School with no one to kiss my cheek in the morning. Here is an empty house after the bus drops me off in the afternoon. Here is Dad, alone in his bedroom, alone in his study, alone at the dinner table while I cleaned up remnants of TV dinners or takeout. Alone, alone, alone.
Mom said it wouldn’t be forever, but it’d been seven years. My childhood was all but finished. So was Dad’s career. She wasn’t going to come back, and if she did, it’d be too late.
Dad was still waiting.
He talked frequently about himself and Mom in their early days. “We were in grad school when I first laid eyes on her,” he’d tell me, his eyes distant. “I fell helplessly in love with her in that first moment, but she left me anyway.”
I knew exactly how he felt.
Seven years after Mom left, things fell apart. Without her salary, Dad had to work full time with no breaks. We were no longer able to spend summers in Rhode Island, and all that sadness had taken its toll. I’d witnessed the slow erosion of his mind long before a pair of his supervisors from the NIST paid a visit a few weeks ago.
“He’s had a breakdown, son,” one of the suits had told me in our house in Gaithersburg. “He’s increasingly forgetful. Long stretches of blankness…” He cleared his throat. “It’s necessary that he retire andbegin collecting his pension.”
The other suit had been more direct. “We think he might benefit from a therapeutic setting.”
I read between the lines.
“Don’t let them put me away,” Dad had pleaded that night. “I’m onto something. Something big, and they’re jealous. They’ve always been jealous.”
“They want to help, Dad.”
“I don’t need help.” He offered a small, heartbreaking chuckle. “Don’t put your old man out to pasture just yet. I’m not that far gone. Quite the contrary. My mind has never been sharper. Never have I felt this clarity.” He clutched my shoulders. “I’m close, Xander. I’m so close.”
Dad insisted he was on the brink of accomplishing what every physicist on the planet was striving to accomplish: to reconcile quantum theory with general relativity and arrive at a unified Theory of Everything.
“I just need to work alone, without all the noise and interference. We could go back to Rhode Island!” Dad cried, hope flaring in his eyes. “You can go to school in Castle Hill and be a regular kid for a change. Go to a normal high school and do all the things normal kids do. Trust me, Xander, you want that. Stay safe a little while longer, because once you get into the field, they’ll try to tear you apart.”
Iwantedto be in the field, to keep my brain occupied with practical facts instead of impractical feelings. But Dad needed to be in the Rhode Island house more.
It was decided I’d do a senior year of high school at Castle Hill Academy. A gap year, in which my father would either recover or fall into the cracks of his own mind. He’d spend his days working on his equations and I’d play pretend at the high school. CHA had a robust program of academics, STEM classes, arts, and “elite” sports: gymnastics, lacrosse, water polo, and row. They were even magnanimousenough to allow poor Bend kids to attend.
I already had three degrees from the University of Maryland; the last thing I needed—or wanted—was more high school, but the rowing team was a selling point. I’d been on the Langdon crew, and the physical exertion saved me from drowning in my mother’s abandonment and all those empty mailboxes.
The downside to this grand plan was the high probability that Emery Wallace would also be attending the Academy. Unless she’d moved away. That might explain her silence, but I doubted it.
For years, I’d written to Emery. A humiliating and pathetic number of letters, considering that every single one went unanswered. Like my mother, it seemed Emery had changed her mind about wanting to know me. Two years ago, I’d sent the final letter. A confession straight from the heart that left no mystery as to how I felt about her.
No answer.
I’d given up on whatever we might have been. But even so…
Even so, sitting in the drive of our ramshackle house seven years later, my heart thudded at the idea of seeing Emery again. How beautiful she must be now that she’d grown up…
