The Anomaly(20)

“And I stared at him, thinking…‘Seriously? You escalated that whole thing’—he hadn’t, of course, he’d been calm throughout, or pretty calm—‘so you could get a hot beverage?’ I said all this. And more. I ripped into him about how it was all about him and Mom, all the time, and they didn’t care about me, and on and on and on.”

“What’d he say?”

“He listened, and nodded, and said, ‘Okay, if that’s how you feel.’ He told me that he loved me and to have a good day, and I flounced into school aflame with self-righteous ire.”

She stopped talking and looked away. I waited.

“Cancer,” she said. “He died ten months later. The ‘meeting’ was to get his results. He had a pretty good idea what was coming.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. But all that was okay, weirdly. As okay as it could be. I mean, we had time. I wised the hell up very quickly. I’d been focusing on the shortfalls—he got too wrapped up in his work, could be distant, impatient, blah blah blah. Luckily I had enough time to get that where it counted, he rocked. And I realized he genuinely liked me, too. We parted on very good terms.”

“But…”

“It’s not even the fact that’s the day he got the news. It’s just, you know, he wanted a damned coffee. A half hour to sit while he still hoped he might live forever. I stole that from him. Can’t ever give it back.”

“Nobody gets through life without being an asshole,” I said. “Once in a while you’re going to dig in over something and get it wrong and make a scratch on the world you’ll never polish off. Those scratches will define you more than anything else.”

“Bingo. Because guess what my dad did? He was a journalist. A good one. Important stuff on Big Pharma and AIDS. He did his best to put the world right. He fought for truth. He made a mark on the world.”

“Aha.”

“So does that answer your question? Including the unspoken one about why I always want facts, not made-up shit?”

“I guess so. How do you get on with your mom?”

She poured herself another drink. “Not at all these days. Something else I hadn’t realized about my dad was that he was skilled at hiding the fact my mom drank. Our relationship got patchy after. She died in a car accident when I was twenty.”

“Christ, seriously?”

“No,” she said. “They’re both alive and well and I’ve just been pulling your chain.”

She got up and walked away.



Ken watched her go.

“She’s fucking with you,” he said when she was zipped up inside her tent. “And not in a good way.”

I sighed. “I know.”

“Hey,” Feather said.

Ken and I turned our heads, not having realized she was there, sitting on the sand a little way behind us. She got up and wandered over, looking diffident.

“Could I have a look? At the Newspaper Rock thing?”

I handed her the phone. She clicked on it inexpertly. “Wow. You’ve got a lot of notes. Do you mind if…”

“Help yourself.”

She scrolled up and down for a while, clicking things, reading, moving on.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “my grandma used to tell me, ‘Everyone needs something to believe in.’ And that’s what you do, Nolan. You give people something to believe in. But I realized years ago that not everyone’s like us. Some people are only happy when they’ve got something to disbelieve.”

She handed back the phone. “I feel sorry for them.”



Once again I found myself awake in the middle of the night.

I stuck my head out of the bag and shuffled myself to a position where I could sit with my back against the wall of the canyon. There were no signs of life from the rest of the gang, and no sound but for water slipping by in the river, coursing from A to B as it had for untold years, with a persistence that had gouged out this bizarre environment.

After a while I realized: I was nervous. Partly it was a reprise of what I’d felt the previous night, a sense that this wasn’t necessarily a good or safe place to be. There was also the prospect of the climb. I’m not super fond of heights. They can be very high. And there was also the prospect of not failing, for once. Of actually having found a thing, and having to deal with what came next.

I tried to shrug all this off, but then realized there was something I wanted to do about my nerves, something that would have been my first course of action for a long time.

I wanted to talk to Kristy.

My mother died when I was thirty. In the years that followed I realized that in addition to losing her, I’d lost a chunk of myself. My dad simply hadn’t retained a lot of material about my early years—so it was now gone. If losing your mother is the burning down of your personal Library of Alexandria, no longer having the counsel of your wife is akin to losing contact with the fellow war correspondent with whom you spent years deep in-country, witnessing the bad times but also the good, together with the long, rich quiet of just-another-day. There will be serious journalistic bias in her notes, of course, and flawed recollection (which you won’t be able to prove is flawed, because yours is so much worse), but afterward it can feel like losing the third dimension, or a second soul. With anybody else I’d have to explain what I was feeling, and by the end of that process would have decided it was dumb or unimportant.