32
BRANDON HAND-RAKED a mound of alder leaves, then tossed compact armfuls off a ridgetop overlooking the valley. The same southerly that swept the fog out that morning provided the lift, with the driest, largest leaves taking the longest flights. He did the same thing with sticks, then again with leaves, again and again, his mind freezing images at intervals from multiple angles.
He’d called Madeline again to tell her about the park fiasco. And when she’d called back, he was so excited that her words didn’t sting until after she’d hung up. “Quit calling me,” she’d said in a groggy whine. “I’m not your girlfriend, okay? We’re not even really friends.” Her voice turned husky and distant, the phone slipping from her mouth. “You need to stay away from me.”
What had he missed? Wasn’t her laughter real? And hadn’t she reached across and put her hand on his? But the more he thought about their lunch, the stupider his singing seemed. What was he thinking? We’re not even really friends. Her words moped inside him like a tumor. If he couldn’t read Madeline Rousseau, who could he ever hope to know?
He found a calm stretch high on the Nooksack and waded to his boot tops with a heavy stick that he swung over and over against the flat surface, creating one misty rainbow after another until his feet were numb, his shoulders aching, and he was no longer thinking about Madeline or dead cows.
He sorted riverside maple leaves by color, licking their undersides and sticking them to similarly colored leaves to form an eight-by-three-foot quilt fading from red to yellow. He found piles of orange birch leaves and threaded a hundred together lengthwise by their stems, then attached one end to a steep bank and unfurled the rest into an eddy below, creating what looked like a skinny orange waterfall until it broke apart and looked like nothing. He dug through more maple leaves for the largest yellow ones, unfaded by sunlight, and fixed them next to one another in the riverbed with small stones, fashioning an underwater stripe—the yellow all the brighter through the exaggerated and distorted lens of the clear water.
Seasonal shifts had always unnerved him. Even after he learned how predictable they were, he couldn’t shake the sensation that he’d blink and miss some critical phase. He often heard that barn swallows assembled in massive departure flocks, but he’d never witnessed any grand exodus and feared he’d already missed out again.
He gathered the flattest stones he could find and tried to construct a cone in the shallows, but it kept collapsing midway up. Then he studied the shed-sized boulders upstream and imagined thawing glaciers dropping them from their mile-thick floes, as his mother had described it, huge rocks settling randomly on the land like carrots and charcoal briquettes from melting snowmen. He covered several rocks, head-sized or larger, with wet leaves, and they looked like giant Easter eggs wrapped in tissue paper. He pulled his shirt off and plastered cotton-wood leaves over his damp torso and face until he was nothing but leaves from the hips up.
“Why are you doing this?”
Brandon looked up, startled. He’d forgotten Sophie had followed him out and was still sitting on the bank, silently filming.
“What?”
“Why do you do all this?”
He started coating another rock with red maples. “It relaxes me. And the better I get to know the land, the more it feels like something’s gonna happen. Is this it? No. Is it this? No. Is this—”
“You see things other people don’t see, don’t you?”
“How would I know?”
“I think you do.”
“Reality’s always more complicated than anybody says it is.”
“Who said that?”
Brandon frowned and looked around. “Who’s here but you and me?” He turned back to the river before she asked another question and he’d lost his feel for the rocks. He still couldn’t find enough flat ones for the cone no matter how carefully he assembled them. He tried again, drawn to the moment before collapse, then walked down the river to look for even flatter stones. He was on his eighth failed cone when a Townsend’s warbler broke his concentration with a high buzzy solo and he noticed his hands ached and he was shivering and hungry and it was almost dark. When had Sophie left?
He trolled through downtown Lynden with the heater fan on high, looking for food and a bathroom before remembering it was Sunday and everything was closed. He continued past the windmills; the old barbershop; the post office; the red, white and blue banners; and the stately elms flanking Front Street, noticing how their leaves had begun yellowing on the colder side of the street.
When he got home his mother was staring at photos on the dinner table. She was in all of them. On her father’s shoulders at the beach. Graduating from high school. Getting married. Smiling in her garden. Slow-dancing with Norm at their thirtieth. “I just want to be who I’ve always been,” she said. “Nothing fancy. Just me.”
“You’re still you,” Brandon said, draping a damp arm over her, which was enough to snap her back and tell him to shower while she cooked.
He chewed his pork chops to the bones and downed a bowl of red potatoes and a quart of raw milk before telling her what the leaves looked like underwater and that there were more signs of autumn the farther upriver he went. It was hard to tell if she was still listening. He heard her breathing and glanced at her crossed legs, her top slipper bobbing slightly, keeping time with her heart.
“I know I blew that test,” she said.
“No, you didn’t.” “Yes, Brandon, I did.” “Then it’s because you were nervous.”
After a long pause, she said, “A cat has twenty muscles in each ear.” “That’s right,” he replied. “And sharks have been around longer than trees.”
SOPHIE CAME HOME to two urgent messages from Wayne saying he absolutely had to see her. So she set up the camera and called him over for a drink.
He was twice as manic and bloodshot as usual, overgesticulating and making incomprehensible statements until he told her about getting zapped by the kite. “The world flashed into focus. And I felt no pain. None.”
“You’re a lunatic.”
“No, I’m just getting closer.”
“To death?”
“To what matters! You know what genius is, Soph? It’s the thrill of originality so profound it can surprise you, move you, even lift you. How can anyone hear Glenn Gould, really hear him, and not be moved? He read music before he could read words. Or Coltrane, who spent eleven hours a day doing nothing but scales. Nothing but scales, Sophie. Or Einstein! That weirdo changed our notion of time! Don’t just say it. Feel it! Changed our notion of time. Or Franklin! Ben might have been brighter than the next ten great men combined. These people were all too excited to sleep. Listen to this.” He pulled out a typed sheet of paper, glanced at it for several seconds, then set it aside. “Max Perutz,” he said.
Sophie shrugged behind the camera.
“Max Perutz was an Austrian who accepted the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of hemoglobin. P-e-r-u-t-z. And get this, just found this last night, this ridiculous genius apologized, in his acceptance speech, for not having made a more conclusive report.”
He closed his eyes and delivered the words from memory in a bad Austrian accent. “‘Please forgive me for presenting, on such a great occasion, results which are still in the making. But the glaring sunlight of certain knowledge is dull, and one feels most exhilarated by the twilight and expectancy of the dawn.’” He glanced up, his eyes bulging. “That’s all I want, Soph, the exhilaration of twilight. Even if it’s vicarious! The expectancy of the dawn!” He rose, his hands reaching for the ceiling.
“Sit down.”
“What?”
“Sit.”
“Where?”
“Right there.”
After he sat down, she flicked on the television and started the video.
“What the hell are—”
“Just watch.”
“Oh, please tell me it’s not Brandon. Please. Oh, sweet Jesus.”
“Shush. Just keep your eyes on this while you give me the latest on Madeline.”