“Mom.” I didn’t like how she put that. Like she knew what I was up to when she didn’t, and wouldn’t ask. Like I’d run off to the casino, get high, go off the rails on her four fucking dollars. Like she wanted me to. “I’m just telling you I’ll do the fish tomorrow, okay? I’m telling you to tell Dad, all right?”
She tossed me my blue flannel from her pile, still warm from the sun, still smelling of detergent and cedar. “Go.” She went back to folding. “I’m not going to pry. I’m not going to ask you what she’s doing up here alone with that kid. On one long vacation. Go on and be free.”
In the car, Patra drove with one foot on the gas pedal and one foot on the brake. The whole car shuddered as it ground through gears, then shot forward in rapid bursts. She was trying to rub a spot off her skirt as she drove, and she was listing more instructions than usual: give him two glasses of water before he eats, four crackers at three, tuna on toast at five. I listened but didn’t reply. I was busy thinking about the bills in my pocket, about the mason jar of money on the shelf above the sink. I was thinking about the fishing lures we’d made to sell but never did, the jars of jam we’d filled to peddle at the diner on weekends, the clothes my mother folded that were made from other clothes.
When I stayed silent, Patra’s eyes flicked over to me then back to the road.
“This okay with your mom?”
“Is Patra your real name?” I felt like accusing her of something. I don’t know why. I was suddenly angry at her niceness. And I was angry at the skirt beneath the spot she was rubbing with her finger, at its byzantine floweriness.
She was surprised. “No, actually. I’m Cleopatra, my whole life Cleo for short. Why?”
I snuck a peek at her. One black beaded earring lay flattened across her cheek like a slug. “No reason.”
“After I met Leo, I changed it. Who could be named Leo and Cleo?” She sounded defensive. “In what world would that work?”
It would not. She was right.
“Listen, you’ll like him,” she promised. “He’s one of those people you can hear think. You can see him making all these calculations when he talks. He’s that smart.”
I wondered. I wondered if I could hear him thinking right now all those miles away, up in the air, in his plane, making his calculations, keeping track of his baby stars and their magnetic fields, charting galaxies so far away they were billions of years old before we knew they existed, and arranging the movements of Patra and Paul and me and this car, which, I’d noticed, Patra had rinsed clean of salt for his arrival.
“Sure,” I said.
Patra was nervous about having left Paul asleep in his bed. But when we got back to their house, he was up and making himself a sugar sandwich, which he wanted to pack in his Tonka truck and take to his cabin in the woods. His cabin was a chair overturned, so I suggested we set up a real tent—one from their garage they’d never used—on the living room rug. Only a grayness in his skin made me think of how he’d been the day before, with that engorged drip of sweat on his chin. Patra was thrilled. Before she left, she kept kissing his head, rubbing her face in his hair, taking in his scent, like a dog. “Your dad’s going to be so proud!” she gushed. “So happy to see you. Good job, hon.”
We spent the day setting up camp. I’d promised Patra not to take him out of the house, so to kill the long hours indoors, I taught him everything I knew about fighting off bears, about surviving on bark and berries, about living with just a knife if you had to. Never follow a creek expecting it to lead to civilization, I told him. That’s a myth. Be sure to find a clean water source before two days are up. If you have to, tie your jacket sleeves around your ankles and walk through tall grass to gather dew on the sleeves. Suck it off. (We practiced this, Paul dragging his jacket across the rug.) Don’t be afraid to eat grasshoppers. Avoid plants with milky sap. Avoid white berries.
I taught him how to crawl across the ice when it was thin, how to distribute his weight, how to go like a soldier on his elbows.
“Here comes a bear after you!” I told him.
He crawled for a minute, took a rest.
“Here comes a wolf!”
“Nothing to worry about.” He was panting. His cheeks were bright red. “They’re. Nice.”
“Good,” I said. I lay down on my stomach beside him.