“I feel like your dad might have played a role in that.”
“Yes. But.” He starts back along the path toward the lobby.
Ripley knows thisbutall too well.Buthe was their father.Butit’s easier to blame an interloper.Butchildren never stop hoping that a complicated parent will find a way to apologize so they can find a way to forgive.
“It sounds like a lonely childhood.”
“I didn’t know anything else. My mum planned to go back toher PhD at Oxford when I reached school age. Later, I realized Dad must have nixed that so he could continue getting hit by thunderbolts, as he preferred. He divorced my mum and married Kathryn when I was thirteen. Cavendish was born that same year. Daisy three years later.” He tears off his suit jacket with three quick yanks.
“Oh, shit. I know how that feels.”
“Yes. Your half brothers,” he says.
“But your mum loved you. And you loved her.” Ripley knows she didn’t mistake the way he spoke about her.
“I don’t doubt her love, but after the divorce, she wasn’t the same. Linus and Marie were doing graduate studies in chemistry, yet her child didn’t care for chemistry, or for science, even. The day she…that day, my mum said we would go to Lyme Regis for fun.”
“Oh, James,” she says, realization dawning. “Oh, no.” She reaches for his hand, and he squeezes back convulsively.
“It was a sales pitch. ‘How do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it, Jamie? Your dad and I would be so proud.’ ” His impression of his mother’s voice is full of love—and, underneath that, frustration and fear.
“On the motorway going home, I begged her to help me go to art school. I threatened to run away. I told her she was still my father’s pawn and I hated her.” He’s so quiet, Ripley can hear the canned birdsong from several exhibits away.
I was distracting you,he’d said in the Charger. Oh God, she’d let him come along. Put him in the car.
“As it turns out, my father was right. All I had to do was ‘stop drawing maudlin scenes with dragons and lightning, for God’s sake.’ ” She hears his father’s voice, stern and dismissive. “All I hadto do waswantto succeed in science, and I did. I never felt better than when I achieved milestones my mother would have celebrated. There was always another rung to reach for.”
“ ‘The youngest-ever full professor of paleontology at Oxford,’ ” Ripley murmurs, quoting her long-ago search result. “And then what happened?”
“Nothing,” James says with a faint shrug. He acts like he’s been waiting for her to touch this particular sore point—like he might deserve a hard knuckle in every tender spot.
“The moment I had nothing to work toward, I couldn’t work at all. I couldn’t stop thinking,Is this all there is?Gathering data, applying for grants, engaging in bad-faith panel debates at conferences because people love controversy? This, for the rest of my life? I’m going to livesucha long time, Ripley,” he says despairingly.
“But you’re working again. Your taxonomy.” The paper in his cabin, each page a feather on the wing of his single bed.
He shakes his head, hooking his jacket over one finger and tearing at his tie. He’s in his head, his eyes unfocused, and he doesn’t seem aware he’s still gripping her hand, more or less towing her in his wake. They’re in the extinctions exhibit now, moving backward in time from K-Pg through the Triassic-Jurassic.
“I was only doodling on the framework I already had. Being here with you, being on the dig with you—you love paleontology somuch,and you want it so much, and I…” His voice falters. “And Irespectyou so much, it feels like I could love it and want it too. I need something to reach for. If I could justhelpyou, Ripley. Undo the wrong that was—”
“James, watch out for the—”
His shin collides with an array of soft square divans in themiddle of the Cambrian Period. He seems startled to find himself among primitive fish, trilobites, and signage shoutingAn Explosion of Life.
He pivots wildly. “How do you fucking escape this place? It’s like a bloody IKEA in here.”
For a second, Ripley doesn’t know what to do. James spends so much time helping everyone else find their direction that it’s hard to understand this rudderless, uncertain version of him. She can feel the lonely boy he used to be, not so much younger or older than his siblings that he couldn’t see how different he was or understand how the thing he loved most was also the thing that made him the loneliest.
Ripley hadn’t had much of a mother, but she’d had Steve Adams. Even if their love for dinosaurs hadn’t united them, her dad had read and joked and cooked and played hockey with his daughter. Her family had been smaller than James’s, but her life had been so much bigger.
“Sit with me.” Ripley tugs him down on a divan, strokes his hands, tames his fluttering fingers. “Please tell me no one suggested you caused your mom’s accident. It wasn’t your fault.”
“You don’t know that,” he says with an evenness born of years of the most severe self-control. “No one does. The only one who could have seen where she was looking when the load came off that lorry was me, and in the last moments of her life, I was staring out the window, giving her the silent treatment. My father might have been the first one to take her work away from her, but I took it from her when I was born and again when she died. She wanted me to become a scientist, Ripley. What the bloody hell else was I supposed to do?”
“I don’t think it would bring your mother any happiness to see you this way.”
“You’re forgetting my father,” James mutters.
“So he’s proud of you?”
