“I did, yeah,” said Timothy. “If she had spit out a watermelon seed I would have kept it. You’re thinking I’m nuts. It’s fine.”
“No,” said X. “I’m not thinking that at all.” He worried that he shouldn’t say what he was about to say. “I’m thinking that what Sylvie did for you—pulled you out of yourself?—is exactly what Zoe has done for me. In truth, she’s saved me many times.”
Timothy seemed moved by this.
“You only get one person like that in your lifetime, I think,” he said. “Keep her close.”
X assumed Zoe would be uncomfortable with the praise, that she’d already be formulating a joke.
Instead, Zoe said something kind to Timothy: “I’m sure you took Sylvie out of herself, too. I’m sure you fixed her wiring. Actually, I’m positive that you did. It works both ways or not at all.”
“I want to believe that,” said Timothy. He stood, as if to underline his skepticism. “But I don’t. I can’t.”
“Trust me?” said Zoe.
X knew how much more she wanted to tell Timothy. He longed to say it all, too.
Timothy, just to busy himself in the awkward moment, leaned down to pick up a paper napkin that had fallen to the floor.
“Then why didn’t she stay?” he said. “Why have I been alone twenty years?”
When X and Zoe left, Timothy asked them—awkwardly, which made it seem all the more genuine—to come back sometime and help him finish the food. They promised they would. But the truth was that X didn’t know if he could be that close to his father again without announcing, “I’m your son.” Just hugging Timothy good-bye had been hard—two like objects recognizing each other right when they had to pull apart.
They’d all forgotten to talk about Rufus’s sculpture.
Outside, the sun had sunk low enough to shine straight through the windows and make the house glow. X turned when he and Zoe were halfway down the curving walk. The house looked different to him now. Timothy had told them that he’d begun building it right after Sylvie disappeared, thinking that she’d come back, thinking that they’d live in it together. He had held onto the fantasy even after a year went by, two years, three. Half the books in the house, he said, were things he bought because he thought Sylvie would like them: a book about how mountains are formed; a book about a woman, known only as Agent 355, who spied for George Washington; a book about explorers on a hellish expedition to Antarctica to study penguin eggs.
Of course, Sylvie never saw the books—or the tree house.
Timothy said he thought about selling the place every few years but didn’t think the house would make sense to anyone other than the woman it’d been built for. The image X took away of his father was of an enormously kind, enormously sad man. X pictured him standing on a dock and watching the whole world pull away.
X and Zoe passed the old iron lanterns, not yet lit, as they made their way down to the car. Zoe told X that it’d been brave of him to seek his father out.
“Brave?” said X. “You leaped into a glowing portal to hell. I only ate grapes.”
Zoe laughed.
“I ain’t scared of no portal,” she said.
She drove them toward home, following the river out of the park. X watched the current—the way it crashed against the rocks, then seemed to reassemble and keep going.
“Is wholer a word?” he asked Zoe.
“Holer?” she said. “How would you use it?”
“ ‘Every day, I felt a little bit wholer,’ ” said X.
“I’ll allow it,” said Zoe. She kissed her palm as she drove, then reached out to press it to X’s cheek. “I really, really liked your father.”
“As did I,” said X. “Yet he is so much like me that perhaps I do not see him clearly.”
“Like you?” said Zoe. “You think so?”
“I think he is so much like me that he could be me,” said X.
“I mean, you’ve got his hands,” said Zoe. “And you’re both shy. But he just seems so, I don’t know, decimated? Devastated?”
“That is it precisely,” said X. “That is what struck me hardest as well. I think I haven’t been clear. He is me—if I had lost you.”
thirty
For Zoe, happiness was harder to get used to than anything else—harder to trust. When she couldn’t sleep, she stared out the window at the shed X was living in. She liked seeing the glow of the space heaters under the door. It was one of the only things that soothed her. X was in there. He was safe. They were all safe. No one was coming. No one was going away. Sometimes, just seeing the shed wasn’t enough, so Zoe would pad through Rufus’s soggy backyard in unlaced sneakers. She’d pull open the door of the shed, and look at X as he slept. She had bought him one of the wearable sleeping bags that Timothy had mentioned—so he wouldn’t feel constricted. It made him look like an astronaut, which cracked her up. Zoe would stand in the dark, gazing at him. It was an embarrassing thing to do. Zoe knew it, and didn’t care. One night, she went out there three times.
As for X, he seemed to crave sleep. He hoarded it almost, the way a dragon hoards gold. Even the groaning of the shed door as Zoe came and went didn’t wake him up. Sleep—and food and sunshine—were already healing him. His cheeks were pink. The bruises under his eyes had faded, as if his body knew he’d never hunt another soul.
When Zoe went to school, X and Rufus worked on some secret project of Rufus’s. Zoe couldn’t get any details out of either of them, or even out of Jonah, who helped sometimes. When Zoe and Jonah got home from school, Zoe could always hear X and Rufus laughing in the shed. Jonah would run out to join them, and he’d be in hysterics even before he knew what was funny. Hearing them all laugh: that soothed her, too.
Zoe’s dream, which she didn’t speak aloud, was that Rufus would let X stay after the rest of them moved to Bert and Betty’s house on the lake. That X and Rufus would be roommates. Rufus would only go for it if Zoe’s mom approved, and her mother hadn’t adjusted to X being in their lives. More than once, as Zoe snuck back inside after checking on X, she saw her mom standing sleeplessly at her window, as if the shed were a spaceship that had just landed. To Zoe, X was an astronaut. To her mom, he was an alien.
Everybody else seemed happier with X around—wholer, to use his word. Zoe prayed her mother would see that. X was polite, gracious, kind. He asked what he could do to help so often that her mom and Rufus had started inventing chores, like tightening the lightbulbs and cleaning the inside of the dishwasher.
X was also more relaxed than he’d ever been. He spoke more like somebody from the twenty-first century now, and an endearing goofiness had begun to surface. X started wearing a backpack around—an old one Jonah had given him with a pixilated Minecraft sword on it—even though he didn’t actually have anything to put in it. Zoe smiled whenever she saw him and his empty backpack. He was constantly offering to carry stuff for people, just so he’d have an excuse to unzip it.
The days ticked by. The Bissells began packing to move. A city of boxes grew in the living room, followed by suburbs in Zoe’s and her mom’s bedrooms. To Zoe, the boxes were a reminder that X could very soon have nowhere to live. She felt a pressure that increased daily, as if the boxes were being placed one by one on top of her. Rufus frowned at the sight of the stuff, too, though Zoe knew it was for a different reason: he’d just started to feel like he had a family, and soon they’d be gone.
During breakfast on Friday, Zoe’s mom gave them all a sign that she was warming to X. It was a tiny thing but unmistakable. Everyone at the table stopped speaking when she did it: she put a handful of vitamins on X’s napkin.
A B12, a D3, and a C.
She had to care about him at least a little.
“Holy crap,” said Jonah.
X had never taken a pill before. Everybody shrieked, then laughed, when he put them all in his mouth and started chewing.
That night, there was an even bigger turning point.