Where'd You Go, Bernadette(81)

“That’s cool.”

“It’s the same with Straight Gate,” he said. “We’ve discounted the holes in the ceilings, the wet patches in the floors, the cordoned-off rooms. I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how people live.”

“It’s how we lived,” I said.

“It is how we lived.” A long time passed, which was nice. It was just us and the seal and Dad whipping out his ChapStick.

“We were like the Beatles, Dad.”

“I know you think that, sweetie.”

“Seriously. Mom is John, you’re Paul, I’m George, and Ice Cream is Ringo.”

“Ice Cream,” Dad said with a laugh.

“Ice Cream,” I said. “Resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”

“What’s that?” He asked, rubbing his lips together.

“Something Mom read in a book about Ringo Starr. They say that nowadays he’s resentful of the past and fearful of the future. You’ve never seen Mom laugh so hard. Every time we saw Ice Cream sitting there with her mouth open, we’d say, Poor Ice Cream, resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”

Dad smiled a big smile.

“Soo-Lin,” I started to say, but even uttering her name made it difficult to keep talking. “She’s nice. But she’s like poop in the stew.”

“Poop in the stew?” he said.

“Let’s say you make some stew,” I explained, “and it’s really yummy and you want to eat it, right?”

“OK,” Dad said.

“And then someone stirs a little bit of poop in it. Even if it’s just a teeny-tiny amount, and even if you mix it in really well, would you want to eat it?”

“No,” Dad said.

“So that’s what Soo-Lin is. Poop in the stew.”

“Well, I think that’s rather unfair,” he said. And we both had to laugh.

It’s the first time during this whole trip that I let myself really look at Dad. He had on a fleece headband over his ears and zinc oxide on his nose. The rest of his face was shiny from sunblock and moisturizer. He wore dark mountain-climbing glasses with the flaps on the side. The one lens that was taped over didn’t show because the other lens was just as dark. There was really nothing to hate him for.

“So you know,” Dad said, “you’re not the only one with wild ideas about what happened to Mom. I thought maybe she’d gotten off the ship, and when she saw me with Soo-Lin she somehow dodged us. So you know what I did?”

“What?”

“I hired a bounty hunter from Seattle to go to Ushuaia and look for her.”

“You did?” I said. “A real-life bounty hunter?”

“They specialize in finding people far from home,” he said. “Someone at work recommended this guy. He spent two weeks in Ushuaia looking for Bernadette, checking the boats coming in and out, the hotels. He couldn’t find anything. And then we got the captain’s report.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Bee,” he said carefully. “I have something to tell you. Have you noticed I haven’t been frantic about not being able to get email?”

“Not really.” I felt bad because only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t thought about Dad at all. It was true, he’s usually all into his email.

“There’s a huge reorg they’re probably announcing as we sit on these rocks.” He checked his watch. “Is today the tenth?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“As of the tenth, Samantha 2 is canceled.”

“Canceled?” I didn’t even understand how that word could apply.

“It’s over. They’re folding us into games.”

“You mean for, like, the Xbox?”

“Pretty much,” he said. “Walter Reed pulled out because of budget cuts. At Microsoft, you’re nothing if you don’t ship. If Samantha 2 is under games, at least they can ship millions of units.”

“What about all those paraplegics you’ve been working with?”

“I’m in talks with the UW,” he said. “I’m hoping to continue our work over there. It’s complicated because Microsoft owns the patents.”

“I thought you owned the patents,” I said.

“I own the commemorative cubes. Microsoft owns the patents.”

“So, like, you’re going to leave Microsoft?”

“I left Microsoft. I turned in my badge last week.”

I’d never known Dad without his badge. A terrible sadness poured in through my head and filled me to the brim, like I was a honey bear. I thought I might burst of sadness. “That’s so weird,” is all I could say.

“Is now a good time to tell you something even weirder?” he said.

“I guess,” I said.

“Soo-Lin is pregnant.”

“What?”

“You’re too young to understand these things, but it was one night. I’d had too much to drink. It was over the moment it began. I know that probably seems really… what’s a word you would use… gross?”

“I never say gross,” I said.

“You just did,” he said. “That’s what you called the smell at Kennedy’s house.”