Once we got to the highway, all the familiar points disappeared within minutes. I saw the lake in flashes between the trees, blue gray showing through cracks of green. In Loose River, we drove past the high school just when the sun broke over the tallest roadside trees, turning every surface into a flat knife of light. Stop signs and windows flared as we drove past them. Leo and Patra both wore dark sunglasses, but I just squinted, feeling dizzy and excited. Then we were on the interstate, going seventy, and Leo and Patra were talking quietly about something I couldn’t quite hear. I wanted to roll down the window, feel the speed on my face, but I held back.
Late morning, Paul woke up sluggishly stretching. I gave him one of Patra’s bran muffins, which he held between his knees but didn’t eat. His eyes were slowly unpinking. “Are we there?” he asked. “Hmm mmm,” I said. Outside, the pine forest was unstitching, opening into aspen groves and grassy farms dotted with hay bales. We played a halfhearted game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. We played I Spy with My Little Eye. At one point I said, “I spy a purple water tower,” so Paul craned his neck to look out his window. His pale, sleepy face had a sunken look. “I don’t see it,” he complained, setting his forehead against the window. “Let’s do mental I Spy.”
“Okay.”
He closed his eyes and spied his own purple water tower. He spied his own iron-ore train and Mars. After that, there was a long, indecipherable silence—while Patra fiddled with a car vent, while Leo drove through a brief rain shower—and somewhere just past the last farm it occurred to me that Paul had dozed off again. I couldn’t blame him. The car was warm and rumbling. Quietly, I ate Paul’s muffin and watched the pine come back, rising up along the roadside in a long corridor of green.
We hit construction outside Duluth. After an hour of sitting in traffic and dust, windows up, Leo pulled off the highway for lunch. “See?” he said to Patra. “I stop.” We ate at Denny’s, where I opened the huge glossy menu and ordered—after long deliberation—soup. I was nervous about chewing, about cutting up my food with a fork and a knife. Leo sat with Patra on one side of the booth, and I sat with Paul on the other. Patra guffawed when my French onion soup arrived in a bread bowl as big as my head. Warily, I prodded the thick boat of cheese that floated atop the brown broth. All around the restaurant, there were other families like ours, booths with two parents on one side and two kids on the other. Paul gulped down his glass of milk, so Patra ordered a second, shaking her head, laughing at me as I struggled with my soup.
“Want a bite?” I asked, when she finally reached out and plucked the string of cheese that webbed from my bowl to my mouth.
She wrinkled up her nose, bringing the freckles together into a brown smudge. “Who could manage to eat that without looking like a—a baby bird or something?”
“A baby bird?”
She smiled. “Sucking up worms.”
Leo was a more focused eater, tucking his BLT into his mouth in careful sections. But once he was finished, he turned to me, wiping his moustache with a folded napkin, and within three minutes had asked me more questions than Patra had in three months. I let my soup cool as he spoke. I licked the salty spoon, but did not attempt another bite of the cheese. It suddenly seemed too treacherous.
“What grade will you be in then, Linda?”
“Tenth,” I said. The question felt like a rebuke—of the way I ate my soup, of my childishness.
Leo pushed his plate to the edge of the table. “What college are you considering?”
“College?”
“Or, well, what subject do you like most?” He crossed his arms on the table.
“History.” I couldn’t, at the moment, think of anything else.
“Ah. American or European? What historical period do you like?”
“The history of wolves,” I said, but the minute the answer was out, it sounded foolish. I sipped the tiniest bit of broth from my spoon.
“You mean natural history?”
“Yep.”
“So biology actually?”
“Biology, I guess.”
His two elbows scooted forward, bumping his empty plate. “I had to take some molecular biology courses in graduate school. In my line of work, everyone is always looking for extraterrestrials, as if the universe matters only when endowed with a narrowly carbon-based definition of life.”
“In the Goldilocks zone,” I tried. Repeating what Paul had said—Paul, who’d just left to go to the bathroom clasping Patra’s hand.
“That’s right,” he said, surprised. He folded his hands on the table, and you could see the straight planes on his fingernails where he’d cut them. “I’m not saying the molecular biologists are wrong,” he went on. “That’s not exactly what I’m saying. But I’m a scientist, too, and I think those folks tend to hone in on an extremely limited set of questions.”
He had a way of watching me very closely, and not seeming to watch me at all. He was a teacher, of course, probably a good one. He was one of those teachers who set up hidden traps. Like all teachers, he wanted me caught, but he wanted to lead me there first; he wanted me to go on my own accord; he wanted me to feel like I’d made the discovery myself, that I hadn’t been lured in.
His chin was in his palm. “Let’s do a thought experiment.”
My parka slithered off my lap.