She set him down. There was nothing about the rooster that particularly encouraged sympathy. He had been angry the night before and he was still angry now. Francisco clucked at him, but he strutted away, looking this way and that at the roses. Both father and daughter watched the rooster for several minutes.
“Is there something else on your mind, Beatriz?” Francisco asked eventually.
There was nearly always something else on Beatriz’s mind. She said the easiest of the options first. “Daniel.”
Francisco, too, had been thinking about his nephew—really, nearly his son. When Daniel had lost his parents, he had gained the combined parentage of the surviving adult Sorias at Bicho Raro. Francisco, Antonia, Michael, Rosa, and Nana had all pitched in to care for him, an unusual and excessive amount of love and ownership that led first to Daniel’s extremely bad behavior and then to his extremely good behavior. Francisco had been thinking about it in particular that day because the year had just reached the point where the sun came in bright and multicolored through the window over his desk. This window was unlike any of the other windows in the greenhouse, because when Daniel was still in his hell-sent stage, Francisco had forbidden him to spend all night out joyriding in other people’s cars. This might strike most people as a reasonable rule to make, but Daniel had found it both chafing and unfair, and to demonstrate his feelings, he had spent the night throwing rocks through every single pane in that particular window. The plants inside had perished in the night’s frost. Daniel had been sentenced the task of repairing the window as punishment. Because even that could not be done without rebellion, Daniel had sourced glass from the closest junkyard. Instead of restoring the window to its previous transparent existence, each pane was instead replaced with four or five or even six tiny tinted ones—scrounged from bottles, jars, car windows, vases, flowerpots, pitchers. He had meant to be difficult, but he had not known that in the full sunlight, the ferocity of his rebellion would be dazzling.
Now Francisco nodded as he sat in the church-like light Daniel had inadvertently created all those years ago, and he thought about how Daniel was somewhere in the wilderness with his darkness.
“There must be a way to communicate safely with him,” Beatriz said. Before Daniel had gone, she had been considering telling her father about the radio station, as she thought he would have found it an interesting thought exercise, too. But now that he had vehemently shared Antonia’s feelings about connecting with Daniel, she didn’t feel confident that he would allow them to keep doing it.
“If anyone can come up with a solution, I believe you can,” Francisco said. He had great faith in his daughter’s brain. “But I don’t want you putting yourself in unnecessary danger.”
“I don’t want to put myself in unnecessary danger either,” Beatriz reassured him. “But the doctor still treats the patient.”
This kind of talk would have infuriated Antonia if she had heard it. Francisco often mused about the scientific points of the miracle, but to Antonia, this was not only blasphemy but dangerous blasphemy. To treat it as something contained by logic was to get comfortable around it, which not only made such a thing more dangerous but also made it less holy and thus less important. Antonia’s kind of belief is not uncommon, but it has done both science and religion a disservice. By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability.
“Do you have any thoughts on that in your notebook?” she asked.
Francisco sat back down at his desk, hands crossed over each other, back straight. He was a comely and poised version of his daughter when he sat like this, the same eyes, the same nose, the same obsession with the handsomeness of thought.
“Only that there must have been a better way at some point,” he said. “Or the Sorias would have died out by now.” He turned his cunning eyes upon his daughter. “And is there something else troubling you?”
There was, but Beatriz was less comfortable with sharing this one, as she could not quite sort out its shape. Part of it had to do with Pete and herself. And the other part of it had to do with Francisco and Antonia, and if there had ever been a possible future for them that did not drive Francisco to live in the greenhouse and her mother to live alone. Beatriz wanted to know if people like herself and her father—people supposedly without feelings—could be in love, or if they were not capable of producing the correct quantity of emotion to fill an emotional partner’s glass for very long.
“Do you still love Mama?” she asked. This was a longer sentence in their language than it was in English or Spanish, as Francisco and Beatriz had developed several phrases to indicate all of the different forms of love they had identified in their study of humankind. The musical phrase that Beatriz used roughly translated to need of the sort that can only be fulfilled by one thing.
“Did Judith tell you to ask me?” Francisco inquired.
This was not an improbable question. In fact, through the window, Beatriz could see Pete at work on the stage that Judith had set him on. He was now creating upright pillars for hanging strings of decorations. While Beatriz appreciated Judith’s attempt at strategy, she did not think that either of her parents were so straightforward that they could be tricked into falling back into each other’s arms merely by re-creating the scene of their first moments together. “No. I’m not asking if you will move back in with Mama. I just want to understand why it doesn’t work.”
“Have you asked your mother this same question?”
“No.”
“Would you?”
She imagined this scenario. Antonia, angry, and Beatriz, merely puzzled, both of these expressions feeding the other. It was exactly the kind of conversation that Beatriz spent much time avoiding.
“No.”
“That is why it doesn’t work,” he said.
Beatriz took this information and put it into a projected future. In this projected future, she could not tell if she broke Pete Wyatt’s heart merely by being herself. She could not tell if they would be unable to have conversations because they would both want something from the other that was impossible. She could not tell if it was safer to stop a love story before it ever truly got under way.