WE FIND A pavilion that has Burger King and Sbarro and Starbucks. We’re all grateful to be stopping to eat and rest, and plus Bobby’s buying. It really seems like Bobby wants us to like him. Imagine that.
Bobby tells us he’s a linguist. He “got into the field” after something happened to his little brother, Alex, who was incredibly close to Greta, who is currently disassembling her salad on the plate and then reassembling it, piece by piece, on her fork. It’s not really clear what happened with his brother, the way he tells it.
And what he keeps repeating, really stressing, is how inseparable Alex and Greta used to be. He tells us a story about how, one day, when Alex and Greta were around eight or nine years old, they wandered off to the greenhouse. After a few hours, their mom asked Bobby to go check on them. And when he did, there was just Greta. But she wasn’t at the greenhouse. She was about a mile away, in the woods. Bobby’d seen the start of their tracks and followed them easily enough, but then the wind carried them away. “They found Alex a few hours later,” he says, but exactly how they found him, Bobby doesn’t seem to want—or be able—to say.
“I’d rather not talk more about that, if that’s all right,” he says, but then after a few deep breaths during which he stares down at his plate in front of him, he starts talking about it more. “It was winter. I couldn’t see their tracks because of the fresh snow, so we had no idea where to start looking for them. All we knew was they got at least twenty feet from the greenhouse. When we got to Greta, she was warm. No frostbite. No hypothermia, no shaking, no loss of color. Nothing. She looked like she always looks. She didn’t have a jacket on. It was the strangest thing,” he says so quietly, then looks away.
I look over at Callie. “Hey, kid sister,” I say. She doesn’t turn to look at me; instead she gulps down her Sprite, closes her eyes, then smiles quietly to herself.
Bobby tells us he misses his brother. “Every day, I miss him. And it’s weird how you hold on to memories. You know? How you start to wonder if the things that happened happened exactly how you remembered them or if that’s just the story you tell yourself to keep going. But I get Greta. And she and Alex were so close, it’s almost like there’s a piece of him still here as long as she’s around. So that’s something.” He stops, then takes a long gulp of his iced tea, the ice at the bottom of the glass rattling around.
It’s hard to tell, only spending the greater part of an hour with her, but Greta seems to be somewhere between Ted and Callie, temperament-wise. If Callie is shy yet sociable, and if Ted is antisocial and rather aggressive when provoked, then Greta’d be categorized as relatively sociable and mildly assertive. She eats more slowly and with more patience than Ted and Callie, who tend to approach their meals in random bursts of hunger. We used to keep track of Callie’s eating patterns on these worksheets we got from Jane, which were, apparently, for the freaking government to use to determine whether or not my sister is a monster.
And seeing the three of them together, they look like siblings. Like fraternal triplets. It’s weird. Weirder than how it was when I first saw Callie and Ted together. There were so many similarities, but I didn’t think of them as brother and sister. But now, the three of them . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of this.
Bobby finishes his drink and starts telling us how his interest in language and linguistics stemmed from the questions Alex used to ask when he was a kid, about how to better try to talk to Greta. Hearing him talk about it, I realize that Bobby’s approach to those questions is something I wish I’d thought of, honestly.
“It just made me think, you know?” says Bobby. “About the roots of language, why we need it, how and why it works. So in the time that I’ve been the sole brother taking care of Greta, my Iceling—real great neologism, by the way, I’m really cottoning to it—I’ve tried every sort of base language and permutations I can think of, writing programs to cycle through them endlessly, getting Greta to sit and listen to them with headphones on, electrodes to her temples, her butt in a chair in the living room of the apartment we share, checking to see if anything lights up. She watches a lot of plant docs on YouTube and Netflix and whatever. I started renting some from libraries too, playing them for her one after the other, sometimes keeping the electrodes on and wishing that I had any idea how to quantify, let alone name or navigate or define or even begin to get a glimpse of, the responses behind her eyes.”