The Infinite Tides (33 page)

“We should take sofa back into your house,” Peter said. “Yes?”

Keith shook his head. “I don’t want that thing.”

“No?”

“No.”

“They will take sofa, though.”

“They will,” he said. “Do you want it?”

Peter did not answer and Keith thought he was likely thinking it over but when he glanced over at him there were fat tears sliding down his face. “Fucking shit,” Peter said. “I am embarrassed.” He wiped at his tears, tried for a moment to control himself and then sobbed violently.

Keith looked back at the vacant lot again. The tractors like awkward insects that had descended there from some planet of yellow metal. “You can find somewhere else,” he said. “There are still vacant lots around somewhere.”

“This one was mine,” Peter said. “I am sorry to be like a girl with crying. I am stupid man.”

“It’s OK.”

“Fucking shit. I hate this country.”

Keith said nothing now, the words meaningless, the sun continuing its descent toward the houses to the west of them, the cul-de-sac already in shadow. Both of them quiet and the distant and constant hiss of the freeway and the million parking spaces being filled and unfilled by a million shoppers the only sound until Peter spoke again. “Look,” he said.

“At what?”

“There.” He pointed a finger above them at the sky and Keith followed the line and there it was. Far up above them, above the tractors and the sofa and the cul-de-sac and the endless sprawl, floating there in the last light before the sun crested those endless houses to
the west and dipped out past the edge of the earth itself was the great dark bird.

“Oh,” Keith said, not a word but an inrush of breath, his eyes wide.

“Your big bird, I think.”

“Yes,” Keith said. “Yes.”

“Not eagle, I think,” Peter said. “Vulture.”

“Vulture?”

“What they call it. Um …” Peter paused and then said, “Buzzard.”

“Buzzard?”

It was no eagle, no bird of prey at all but rather a scavenger. Shit. Fantastic. Even now it turned above them, perhaps peering down at the empty lot, the tractors and the sofa and the two men standing there looking back at it and perhaps it regarded them all as inconsequential to its welfare. There was nothing to eat and so there was no reason to descend. Perhaps it would never change its infinite circle. Perhaps now it would never come down.

“A vulture,” Keith said. “That’s just fantastic.”

Peter said nothing. The two of them stood in much the same aspect as they had for those nights under the stars, side by side, heads tilted back, staring up into the dome of the atmosphere as if it might reveal something of itself that had been held in secret.

“Shit,” Keith said after a moment.

“Shit,” Peter said in response.

Then both of them were silent.

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He had been flying back and forth to Houston, staying during the week in a small apartment he had rented there and returning home for weekends when he was able. At times he was so busy with the training that even sleeping at the apartment became a rare event. There were weeks of flight training aboard a supersonic jet that mirrored the controls of the space shuttle and then a long period of survival training in Maine, in between which he flew home. At first he had attempted to do so each weekend. In the revisionism of his later days he told himself that he had done so in an attempt to maintain his connection with Quinn and to keep her, as gently as he could, on the right path to foster her gift and to continue the conversations they had been having about math and science, but the probable reality was that he simply felt obligated to return home when it was convenient to do so, at first every weekend, then three times per month, then every other week. Soon he was lucky to make it back once in three weeks. He tried not to think about it in too much detail. He was being trained as an astronaut,
after all, and was that not the most important possible activity in his life?

By the time the summer returned, he had finished the flight training and had been strapped into his first space suit and had begun to familiarize himself with the full-scale ISS model submerged in the enormous neutral buoyancy pool at JSC. Maybe he should have recognized the signs that Quinn was already changing, for when he spoke with her on the phone or occasionally in person when he was home she told him she was spending most of her days at the city pool and, in her words, “hanging out.” He talked to her about math from time to time as well but mostly she seemed to be in a great hurry to do something else, always on the way to the mall or the pool or the movie theater so that she was most often gone from the house during the daylight hours and sometimes well into the evenings, even though his own visits home were increasingly rare.

Of course when he did see her, when she was home for dinner or was lingering in the kitchen on some rare afternoon when she was not busy with her friends, she would ask him about his training, about what he was doing in Houston and what kinds of technology he had been able to work with. Had he any concern at all, these moments might have assuaged them. But there was no real concern, for he did not think about her changing, not in any specific or quantifiable way. Instead, he thought about his training and when he returned home he continued to think about his training. After all the long years of study and graduate school and the air force and the exhausting labor of his mind he was becoming an astronaut at last.

In any case, he felt she would soon enough be in good hands, for she had finally agreed to attend the Academy of Arts of Sciences, at least for a year, even though she continued to call it “Nerd School” and spoke of it with a kind of mirthful derision. He did not know if he had simply worn her down or if she now actually agreed with him that the school would provide the best place for her to continue her studies. The reason did not matter because he knew that she would
blossom there and that the first year would turn into a second and a third.

If anything it was Barb who was more strongly opposed to the school. “She’s not like you,” she told him when he first brought up the idea, Quinn in seventh grade then.

“You’ve been telling me for years that she’s
exactly
like me,” he had answered.

“Not the way you think,” she said. “You think you’re going to turn her into an astronaut or something. She’s not like that.”

“OK,” he said. “What’s your point?”

“The point is that she’s happy at the regular school.”

“She’s happiest when she has a challenge to work on,” he said.

She just looked at him then, incredulous, saying nothing.

“Anyway, she wants to go.”

“She wants to go because you want her to go,” Barb said. “Jesus, Keith. Give her a break. She’s just a little girl.”

“This is important, Barb.”

“To who?” She turned toward him, to where he stood unmoving in the center of the bedroom.

“To her,” he said.

“To her?”

He said nothing in response. He knew what she meant. Of course he did. But it was not true that the school was important only to him or at least he believed it was not true and so he had not thought there had been any possibility that she would actually choose the public school over the academy. Such an outcome seemed impossible. Then he had started the training and Quinn was in eighth grade and then summer was upon them again and he had simply assumed that the plan they had discussed and decided upon remained in place, had believed it so strongly that when Barb told him that Quinn had decided not to go to the academy, that she wanted instead to attend the regular high school, the information made so little sense that he did not know how to respond and so responded in the only way that would come to
him, that it was not her decision to make; it was his decision and, perhaps, Barb’s, but if Barb was not going to support it then it would be his decision alone. Had he only been there every day, talking to her about math and science, pushing her along the path of her destiny, then perhaps she would not have drifted away from it the way she had and then he was angry at Barb for allowing her to deviate from that path or, short of this, for failing to keep him better informed. And then when he talked to Quinn he did not even understand what she was saying. She talked about her friends and the clubs and activities she was involved with at the junior high and how much better it would be in high school and he sat and looked at her and wondered where she had gone or how he had so totally failed to understand her or how she had so totally failed to understand herself.

“It’s like you have a choice between Harvard and state college,” he told her, “and you’re choosing state college. I don’t get it. If you can go to Harvard, you go to Harvard.”

She was prone upon her bed, looking at a magazine of some kind—fashion or gossip or something similar—and she continued to stare down at its pages, not looking at him as he stood in the doorway, but not ignoring him either, hearing him even if she did not respond.

“I just want the best for you,” he continued. “I didn’t have this kind of opportunity when I was your age. I had to wait and wait and wait to learn the stuff I wanted to learn. I dreamed of a school like the academy. I really did. But there just wasn’t anything like that then. At least not that I knew of or that we could afford. But you can do this.”

“Maybe you should go to the academy then,” she said. She still did not look at him and then he saw that tears had begun to streak down her face.

“Oh Quinny,” he said.

He reached for her and she said, “Don’t,” her voice quiet even as she shrugged away from him. He was silent for a long time and then he said, just as quietly, “OK.”

He turned out of the doorway now and moved in the direction of
the living room. As he did so he could hear the sound of the door swinging shut behind him, not slammed in anger but closing gently as if in resignation or defeat.

It was well past eight in the evening but the midsummer days were long and yellow sunlight streamed through the kitchen windows and across the living room floor. Still at least a half hour until sunset. Barb out with her girlfriends. In the absence of the closing door there were no sounds anywhere except those he himself made.

He took a beer from the refrigerator and went to the slider and opened it, moving outside in his socks and brushing off one of the lawn chairs there and sitting down. He tried not to think of the conversation he had just had or had failed to have but of course it was impossible not to and he continued to feel irritated and, yes, disappointed, although this latter he still did not want to admit to himself. He opened his beer and took a long drink.

The coming evening surprisingly cool and the light filtering through the mulberry tree shuffled in the faint, thin breeze. A white glow, then green, then white again. The hum of a distant lawnmower. The voices of children somewhere.

The sun was lower in the sky when the slider shushed open behind him. He half turned to see Quinn in the doorway. “Can I sit out here with you?” she said.

“Of course,” he said.

“Can we not talk about stuff?”

“We don’t have to talk about anything.”

Her face showed no expression. She moved forward onto the concrete and pulled a second lawnchair beside his, close enough that it was almost touching, and sat next to him and they watched as the day ended and the light paled to chartreuse and then shifted into a deep radiant blue and then began to yellow into sunset.

They remained together like that for a long while, unmoving, not speaking. At some point he reached out his hand for her in that silence and her fingers wrapped into his own. Her hand so much bigger
than he remembered it. Not the hand of a little girl now but becoming a young woman. And yet the gesture was the same and the feeling of her skin was the same. The air had become the color of night, the sun dropping beyond the mulberry, the light of the town all around them rendering the sky a dusty emptiness devoid of stars, as if some quiet blanket had been pulled over them.

He would have held that moment forever. She would have done the same.

A month later Quinn began her freshman year of high school. He knew that he could not have changed her mind and anything he would now say would simply result in her pulling further away from him. But it felt like a reversal of roles somehow, not between he and his daughter but between he and Barb as her parents, for her willfulness had seldom been directed against him. He remembered that span of days—it had turned out to be nearly a week—in which Barb had flown to Atlanta to attend to the death of her father and how he had been concerned that Quinn might prove difficult to manage. But that had not been the case. It was Barb and Quinn’s teachers who found her difficult to manage; he had always found her willing to accommodate most reasonable requests. He and Quinn had shared some kind of bond then, which he had thought to be permanent because it had been based upon their actual selves, their beings, the people they were, which had fit together with such fluidity that her talent, her gift of numbers, seemed like a natural progression. It was almost to be expected. And yet now she had made up her mind in a direction that made no sense to him, which indeed seemed counter to everything he cared about or desired or believed about her.

It was only her choice of schools and yet it was also much more than that. Indeed it seemed to him that the whole of her had changed while he was away at training and he hardly recognized the new tall brightly dressed teenager she had become. What bothered him even
more was realizing that she had not signed up for any math classes whatsoever and hearing slightly later, from Barb, that Quinn had made the freshman cheerleading squad. He did not know that she had tried out or had even been interested in doing so. Barb had been a cheerleader but Quinn was not like her mother, although now he was not sure he knew his daughter very well at all. Indeed, it was as if the vacant rooms in that infinite hotel they had spoken about had somehow all been filled and no further expansion was possible, the sets of infinity eliminated, cardinality vaporizing all at once into a dull gray mist that drifted, became transparent, and was gone.