“A scientist always starts with premises, right?” He twisted the wedding band on his finger. “But so often they start with unsound premises and go awry, like the world is flat, or the human body is made up of four basic humors.”
I wanted to reach for my parka, but resisted.
“But of course we’ve learned that if you want to be a real scientist, Linda, you have to be more rigorous than that. You have to figure out what your premises are first, before you decide what’s true. A good biologist should always start by asking, for instance, what are the conditions we assume are required for life? And why do we assume that and not something else?”
It seemed to be my turn to speak. He was waiting. “You mean—”
“I mean, you have to ask yourself, from the beginning, what do you think you know?”
The twenty acres of land on the east side of Still Lake. That’s what I knew. That’s the one thing I’d always assumed I’d understand. I knew the red and white pine on the hilltop, the quaking aspen and birch closer to shore. I knew the honeysuckle and chipmunks and sunset views of the lake that weren’t worth very much in the end to developers. When I had to sell off pieces of the lot at last, I got less than sixty grand, even though the market wasn’t bad. We only ever had the ten feet of pebbly sand to beach our canoes. The old commune bunkhouse—under a collapsed pine by the road—had long since returned to woods. For years my dad had pilfered its decent boards to patch his shed, fence the garden, repair the outhouse. The cabin was more substantial than the other buildings at least, with its stone foundation and old-growth logs clear-cut in the twenties. We had a rocky meadow behind the cabin and, in summer, a working garden, my mom’s lettuce and potato plants enclosed in rusty globes of chicken wire. We had a cinder block smokehouse and a good well. But the acres of woods were what I knew best, the big trees with their stippled trunks, red pine bark coming off in plates, white pine gouged by age into yawning furrows. We had six perfect black ash. We had one massive cottonwood. We had sumac blanketing the roadside hill, encroaching on the garden, arching over the dirt drive, until the county required that we widen the road and we cut most of it down.
Our hotel rooms in Duluth had bay windows and views of the lift bridge and the harbor, green hills rising up behind. The carpets and walls were a uniform white, and in each room a red silk poppy stood in a vase on a lacquered desk. A mirrored bathroom connected our two rooms, with columns of creamy towels and soaps wrapped like candy bars.
I didn’t have anything to unpack. Instead, I climbed with my backpack onto one of the high, soft beds and watched as Leo and Patra moved between rooms unzipping bags. They were searching for Paul’s socks, for his panda puzzle and hat, and as they did I found my gaze drifting to a book on the bedside table. The Big Fitz it was called. A hotel book. I pulled its cool weight onto my lap, began reading about the taconite ship that sank in 1975. For a half hour, I turned the book’s slick pages, studied black-and-white photos of the ship rising up from the waves, and its eroded lifeboats recovered years later. I was especially interested in a huge diagram of the broken ship, the bow shown upright and turned the other way from the facedown stern.
A lamp clicked on—the afternoon was darkening. I could hear Lake Superior lapping the shore outside, enticing, so I slid off the bed and moved across the room to where Patra was transferring yogurts from her cooler bag into the minifridge. I convinced her to let me take Paul for a walk by promising to be back before five thirty.
“Five fifteen,” I revised, when I saw her glancing anxiously at the clouds out the window.
“Let me get his jacket on, though,” she nodded. “Let me zip him up in case it rains. Let me get his hat.”
Behind the hotel parking lot, I found a rickety wooden staircase that led down the steep, barren bank to the water. As Paul and I descended, step by step, I could see brown waves dragging stones in and out of the rocky cove. Gulls hung overhead. At the shore, lake water misted our knuckles each time a big wave broke. I tried teaching Paul to skip stones, but he just lobbed them in so they sank. “Like this,” I said, curving my wrist and sending one out. Watching it bounce on the water four times. Five. Six. Farther out, away from shore, Lake Superior was a deep blue, almost black near the horizon. The Wisconsin side of the lake was hard to see. My dad was right. Night was arriving early because a thunderhead was advancing to the south. There was the trawl of stones and then a hiss, as a wave withdrew between the tiny pebbles on the shore and another one came in. Paul had his hands in his jacket sleeves, and even so he was trembling. His face was drawn and gray, the color of carp. It occurred to me then, as the waves picked up, that I hadn’t really looked at him since morning. He’d been sleeping in the car. And when he was awake, he’d been turned into something of a pet by Leo, who’d carried him around, who’d talked over his head, who’d given him Lego bricks to play with.