Timothy looked different than he had in the photograph, though it was only a few years old. X wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him before: His father, unlike his mother, was a mortal. He was aging. Sylvie, trapped in the amber of the Lowlands, had remained 35. Timothy had edged into his 50s. His curly hair was graying at the temples, and he had a slight belly, which X found comforting. It reminded him of Plum.
X didn’t think he looked like his father—his hands, maybe—but then he looked so much like Sylvie that he probably should have foreseen this, too. X remembered his mother saying that Timothy had been full of life when she met him, that he’d put a flower in his teeth and danced. That Timothy seemed to be gone. He seemed shy now, as if he wasn’t sure how to proceed, as if he was more comfortable with wild animals than people. The uncertainty in him resonated with X.
X had spent his whole life wanting to say more than he knew how to.
“I’ve never seen a house like this before,” he said, remembering to speak with “a twenty-first-century vibe.”
“Seriously,” said Zoe. “Are you an Elven lord?”
“I wish,” said Timothy quietly. “And thank you. I put a lot of thought into this house. Maybe too much. The truth is, I—”
X and Zoe leaned forward, but Timothy decided not to finish the sentence. He looked at the platter. The silence expanded awkwardly, like a cloud that would eventually fill the room.
X needed to know what Timothy had been about to say. Zoe must have been curious, too, or she would have blurted something random to jolt the conversation forward. Fifteen seconds went by. The silence grazed the walls and ceiling. X was about to give up and ask something pointless about the sculpture, when Timothy looked up, and said suddenly, “The truth is, I built it for a woman.”
X had never considered the possibility that Timothy had fallen in love with someone else after Sylvie disappeared—that he’d married, maybe more than once, had children, adventures, a life. He steeled himself to hear another woman’s name. Then, as Timothy told his story, X felt a wave of relief, of gratitude. Maybe it was selfish, but it was what he felt. His father had never loved anyone but his mother.
“I was thirty-two,” said Timothy. “Happy as hell. Already obsessed with bears, wolverines, mountain lions—all the carnivores. I just loved being outdoors. Wouldn’t go indoors to save my life. Any kind of building at all felt like a—like a cell, I guess.”
At the word “cell,” X could feel Zoe forcing herself not to look at him.
“I’d been working for the park for two or three years,” Timothy went on. “I had just come up with—you’ve got to be kind of a bear nerd to care about this stuff—but I’d just come up with a new way to collect DNA samples from grizzlies so we could track the population better. I got a heap of praise for it. Mail from wildlife biologists all over the place. By the way, you can skip the cheese and go right for the chocolate, if you want. There aren’t a whole ton of house rules around here.”
“Thank you,” said X.
The idea that you ate food in a particular order made no sense to him anyway.
“The grizzly thing felt like the highlight of my life,” said Timothy. “I bought myself a suit to celebrate—not a suit-suit but a kind of sleeping bag that you wear. Almost like a space suit? I always found sleeping bags constricting. Like I was a larva or something. Anyway, then I had a day off. It was September second. I remember because of what happened. I hiked up to Avalanche Lake, and met this woman, Sylvie. And all of a sudden the grizzly thing was no longer the highlight of my life. Not even close.”
Timothy fell quiet.
“I just realized I don’t even know your names,” he said.
Zoe told him hers.
When it was X’s turn, he said Xavier.
“And how old are you guys?” said Timothy. “Is that a rude question?”
“Not at all,” said Zoe. “I’m seventeen.”
“Twenty,” said X.
The second the answer was out of his mouth, he wondered if he should have lied. Was it crazy to worry that Timothy had noticed how much he resembled Sylvie, and that simple math would lead him to the truth?
“You’re not finished with your story, I hope?” X said quickly.
“Oh, I think I’ve probably subjected you to enough,” said Timothy.
“No, no,” said X. He smiled. “Please subject us to some more.”
Zoe turned to him, and lifted her eyebrows, impressed by his little joke. Honestly, it was like something she herself might have said.
“People your age don’t even believe in love at first sight, do they?” said Timothy.
Now Zoe came to X’s aid.
She raised her hand.
“We do,” she said.
“I didn’t hear Sylvie come up behind me on the trail—and I’m generally pretty alert,” said Timothy. “She just kind of appeared. She had a blue-and-white dress on, which I thought … I mean, who hikes in a dress? But she blew right past me. We were down by the gorge. You know it? I waited to see if she’d look back at me. And she did. She gave me a look like, ‘Think you can keep up?’ That was all I needed. I was pretty cocky in those days.
“We kept passing each other on the trail, trying to impress each other. Eventually, I realized she was just toying with me. She was ten times the hiker I was. Crazy strong. In my defense, she was so pretty that I was tripping over tree roots and stuff. I was just so taken with her. It blotted everything else out. If you had stopped me right there in the middle of the trail, and you had said, ‘Do you know what day it is, Tim? Do you know where you are?,’ I might have been able to come up with ‘North America?’ ”
Timothy paused. X feared he would stop altogether, but the story had a momentum of its own now.
“She came back four times that month,” Timothy said. “Always wearing the same dress. Just seeing her walk toward me through the trees was thrilling. When she smiled … I mean, it was like her body was made of light. Sounds dumb, probably.”
“It doesn’t,” X said gently.
“Later, I figured out we spent about sixty-five hours together,” said Timothy. He looked at them sheepishly. “I like counting stuff,” he said. “Anyway, I bet we spent sixty-two of those hours just hiking the trails and talking. I said things that I’d never said before. To anyone. Not even to myself. Painful stuff. Joyful stuff. I feel foolish saying this because I’m a scientist—I mean, you’re looking at a guy with a doctorate in biology—but the way she listened to me, the things she said, her whole kind of aura … I felt like she healed me in a lot of ways. Fixed some of the messed-up wiring in my head, you know? I don’t know if that makes sense. She never told me a whole lot about herself, in terms of specifics, which was frustrating but also just completely tantalizing. For instance, ask me what her last name was.”
“What was her last name?” said X.
“No idea,” said Timothy.
X realized then that he didn’t know either.
“She was from Montana, but where exactly?” said Timothy. “No idea. Later, I realized that some of what she did tell me about herself didn’t totally compute in terms of a timeline. But being with her—I’d never felt anything like it. I didn’t even know that a feeling like that was on the menu. She picked some plants for me at one point, and I did this goofy Spanish dance for her. You’ve got to understand: I was not the kind of guy who danced. That’s how far she’d pulled me outside myself.” Timothy paused. “Look, I have to stop. The rest of the story is no fun. It’s upsetting even to me, and it’s been a couple decades.”
“She picked plants for you?” said X. “Not flowers?”
Sylvie had told them it was flowers. He needed to know which it was. He needed to know everything he possibly could.
“Yeah, bear grass,” said Timothy. “Technically, it’s a plant. You want to hear two interesting facts about bear grass? It’s not a grass, and bears don’t eat it. Not sure what the botanists were thinking. That’s, uh, that’s the bear grass she picked right there.”
The frame with the white flowers.
Now X understood why it was one of the only decorations in the house.
“Those are the very—sorry, the actual—plants she gave you?” he said. “You kept them all this time?”