After Alan left, three long weeks passed during which she heard nothing from Charlie. By now he was just Charlie; there was no Otherness to him, none whatsoever. There was not even, to Greenie, a time she could imagine when he had been absent from her soul. There were merely all the years when he might have been a part of her physical, geographically rooted life but, inexplicably now, had not. She saw no shades of infidelity here; wasn’t it fair to say that as you grew older you understood that marriage was not the exclusive domain of emotional attachment, that deep connections formed elsewhere too, with men as well as other women? She told herself that even if Alan had already pulled his act together to move here (which he had assured her now he was doing, though his characteristic caution, so charming once, had become an aggravation), she would still have been glad to see Charlie. She would still have wanted to feel this connection to her youth. The intensity, she reasoned, was also tied to the loss of her parents.
Even the start of school for George did little to distract Greenie; in fact, there was no longer time for him to spend mornings with her at the mansion. Now consistently alone in the kitchen before Ray arrived, Greenie found herself singing along, once again, with Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. No more Julie Andrews or Mary Martin.
Finally, one Saturday morning, he called.
“Hey there,” he said, as if she should have expected this call. “It’s me. I have something to show you. Can I pick you up in fifteen minutes?”
Greenie paused. “I have George, you know.”
“Bring George! I was hoping you would.”
As usual, Ray was at the ranch, McNally in charge of his sustenance. Greenie had spent the early part of the morning playing Go Fish with George. Then Alan had called. He told her he had two new referrals: couples, short-term. Their sessions should end by the new year. Greenie told herself to be patient. They talked about Christmas in New York, what fun it would be for George.
While she spoke with Alan, George had wandered back to his room. She found him there now, reading one of the comic books Alan had sent him.
“We’re going on an adventure,” she said.
George looked up but did not shut the book. “What kind of adventure?”
“It wouldn’t be a true adventure if you knew just what to expect or precisely where you were going.”
“No adventure. I want to stay here.”
“We’ll get ice cream—or some kind of treat,” she said, realizing that she had no idea where they were going, either. “You’ll meet my friend Charlie. I’ve known him almost since we were your age. Since we were Diego’s age, I think.”
George brightened. “Can Diego come?”
“No, sweetie. Not today.”
“Then no.”
Greenie sat down on George’s bed beside him. “Honey, I already said we would go. Please.”
George exhaled the long kind of aaaalll riiighhht that every parent knows will exact a price (later outcries of “You promised!” “You said!”).
“Pick out some toys to bring in the car,” she said.
She packed juice, pretzels, and Oreos. She cajoled him into the bathroom, smoothed sunblock onto his arms and face. By then, Charlie was at the door.
He looked first at George. “I am so glad to meet you.”
George stared at Charlie but said nothing.
The awkward silence did not last. George handed his mother two plastic horses. “Will you carry them?” he said. “Please will you carry them?”
Sometimes she wondered if she ought to be worried about George; he had grown more solemn, less silly, in recent weeks. But he had also grown taller and slimmer, and perhaps these changes were logically aligned. She held the horses in one arm and laid her opposite hand on top of his head as they walked to the car. Perhaps, like his father, he needed a little distance from Greenie. She felt a twinge of loneliness.
“I can’t promise anything,” said Charlie as he pulled away from the curb, “but I have a hunch.”
“Stop with the teasing,” said Greenie. “How’re your clients doing, your little fish?”
“Not well. An upstream battle. Ha ha.” He told her about a panel of federal judges known as the God Squad, who could be asked to override the Endangered Species Act if the consequences of enforcing it meant that people would be adversely affected. “The whole point of the act was to trump this kind of selfishness! No one wants to talk about ‘adversely affecting’ an ecosystem!”
To leave Santa Fe by car was nothing at all like driving out of New York. New York was a city whose reach seemed never-ending, even greedy; for miles and miles, the only perceptible changes as you tried to leave it behind were a diminishing of scale and encroaching grime, as if you were leaving a literal heartland, heading out to the extremities of an old, weary body with poor circulation. But as you drove away from the heart of this town, you might turn your attention from your surroundings for just five minutes and look up to find yourself somewhere altogether different, driving between rustic tin-roofed shacks where goats or chickens loitered in the shadows; crossing empty arroyos, stretches of sagebrush and cowering pine (much of it still visibly singed by the fires). You’d enter and leave villages that, but for their satellite dishes and cars, looked nearly ancient, lost in time. Civilization remained ever-present in the grand houses perched on hills and ridges—haciendas of Old World ranches; glinting glass mansions built by the newly wealthy—yet how far you would feel from the city’s galleries, restaurants, and street shows. In the time it took to get from the Empire State Building to the middle of Queens, you’d find yourself rising toward the arid austerity of pine groves and mountains.
Charlie paid frequent attention to the sky before them, dipping his head and squinting his eyes every minute or so. It looked as if a storm might break—or that was how an easterner would have read this sky; by now, Greenie was accustomed to the false anticipation, the fleeting showers that never became true rain.
She could hear George, in the backseat, muttering some sort of dialogue between his horses. She heard the words buckskin, pinto, and hackamore.
When they passed a horse alone in a field, she said, “Look, George.”
She heard a break in his wordplay, but he did not comment.
She turned around. “Did you see that horse?”
“He’s lonely,” said George. “He needs friends. Actually, you should give animals friends.”
“Yes,” said Charlie before Greenie could equivocate. “That’s true, George. Animals should be kept in twos, at the very least. Maybe except for cats. Cats like their privacy.”
“Yes,” said George. “Cats are hunterers, and hunterers do the best hunting alone.”
“Treehorn’s happy with you and Daddy as friends,” said Greenie.
“Actually, Treehorn gets to meet other dogs on the street, Daddy says. So she can talk to other dogs sometimes. Dog-talk, not real talk.”
“Right. That’s one good thing about the city,” said Greenie.
George did not reply, and Greenie heard the critical echo of her remark, as if there weren’t much to recommend the city at all. For months, Greenie had braced herself for George to be homesick, to say how much he missed not just his father and now Treehorn but his old haunts and friends and other touchstones—yet he hadn’t. And although he’d been told that his father would be moving out soon, he did not ask when this would happen.
Charlie turned off the road, onto a dirt track. “There,” he said. “There we go.” He drove for several yards and stopped at a gate. He got out, and Greenie followed his lead. She expected him to open the gate, but he leaned against it, then beckoned to George.
They were looking at a stretch of rough, meager pasture enclosed in barbed-wire fencing. The vista was still and bleak.
“Where are we?” asked George when Greenie opened his door.
She looked at Charlie, but he was staring at the sky.
“I’m staying here where it’s warm,” George declared.
“Fair enough,” said Charlie, and then, to Greenie, “Look at that.” He was pointing to the horizon—above the horizon. “See those clouds?”
“Hard to miss,” said Greenie. In contrast to the wind-flattened landscape below them, a gathering of elephant-colored clouds stretched upward in towering formations, ominous in their verticality. Their rising force seemed infinite, yet the bottom of the cloud mass was so perfectly planed that it might have been resting on a thousand-acre sheet of glass.
“Cumulonimbus. But what do you see below them?”
“The land. Nothing much.”
“No. Right below them.”
Greenie shaded her eyes, for though the sun was hidden, the very expanse of the sky exerted a milky brilliance all around them. “Haze.”
“Rain,” said Charlie. “That’s rain.” He invoked this ordinary noun like the name of a lover.
“That’s great,” said Greenie. “That’s good news. Isn’t it?”
“Look again. It’s rain, and it’s not rain. It will never reach the ground.”
Greenie could see, then, that the veil stretching from the bottom of the cloud mass dwindled to invisibility. “Why? Why won’t it?”
“Because the air is so impossibly dry. The rain evaporates before it reaches the ground.” He looked at her again. “The other day, you asked me why there’s so little rain. It’s not that there’s so little rain; it’s that we don’t receive that rain. It’s taken back before we can get it. That’s half the story of why this part of the world is the way it is. People wish otherwise—they think they’re wishing for rain when what they ought to pray for is humidity. But that’s not in the nature of this place. If farmers could run acequia straight from the clouds, it might be a different story.”
Greenie shivered. “It’s cold out here.”
“Well, that’s it,” he said sharply. “You asked about the rainfall, why there’s so little. I like to show that to people. It means a lot to see how the rain disappears, how the air just drinks it up.”
“Mommy, I’m hungry,” said George. “You said we’d get a treat.”
“First, how about lunch?” said Charlie as he looked over his shoulder, backing toward the road.
He took them to his apartment. When they arrived, Greenie could tell he had planned their visit beforehand. “I’m very good at grilled cheese,” Charlie told George. “Do you like grilled cheese, maybe with tomato?”
“Not tomato,” said George.
“But the cheese? Is that okay?”
“Yes, I like cheese. Is it cheddar cheese?”
“It is,” said Charlie. “All the way from New York. Nice and sharp. And George, come in here a minute.”
While Greenie looked around the one room that served as everything but kitchen and bathroom, George joined Charlie in the tiny kitchen. “Oh wow!” she heard her son cry out. “Wow, T. rex!”
She wondered what had rekindled his interest in dinosaurs; he ran to her from the kitchen and said, “Mom, he can cutten the cheese into a T. rex!”
Charlie leaned out the kitchen door. “You want a grilled T. rex, too? I have T. rex and stego.” He held up a pair of oversize cookie cutters.
“Mom, choose stego,” urged George.
“That’s fine. I’m a pacifist, so I prefer stego,” she said.
“What’s a pacifist?” asked George.
“Someone who likes things peaceful, who doesn’t like violence.”
“Stegos can fight, Mom. They can crush things with their tail.”
“I’m sure they can. Or could. But…well, I like their shape, too. I like their…fins. Are they called fins, George?”
“Plates. They are called plates,” George said emphatically.
Charlie’s place was spartan yet also, in a quiet way, filled with treasures. His bed—a mattress in a simple frame—took up one corner, covered with a faded patchwork quilt. In the center of the floor lay a single rug, a gray-patterned rug made by local Indians. Stretched across the wall above the bed was a map larger than any she’d ever seen, nearly the size of a garage door: the Grand Canyon, intricately surveyed in pinks, purples, blues, and tropical greens, swarming with infinitesimal numbers and jigsaw lines. At the opposite side of the room stood a couch, a coffee table, and two antique folding chairs with wooden pockets on their backs—chairs from a church, designed to hold hymnals or prayer books. Three small paintings, all desert landscapes, hung on the wall above the couch.
But Charlie’s most interesting possessions were the smallest, laid out evenly on a table against a third wall. The table—a peeling turquoise door laid across a pair of filing cabinets—doubled as a desk and a natural history display. Around a modest clearing that held a laptop computer lay bones, pot shards, fossils, dried seed pods, mysterious tarnished implements—and dozens of stones, each distinctive and striking. There wasn’t a mote of dust on anything.
“Come and get it,” Charlie called from the kitchen. George emerged with his own plate, on it two sandwiches shaped, as promised, like Tyrannosaurus rexes. George looked up at his mother, grinned, and made a loud snarling noise. This was the silliness she had missed.
“Rrraaar yourself!” she said. “Just wait till I get my stegos. They know how to fight; you told me so.”
“But not as good as T. rex. You cannot vanish T. rex.” Carefully, George transferred his plate to the dining table just outside the kitchen.
From Charlie, Greenie took a tray holding their sandwiches (Charlie had chosen T. rex, too), a bowl of sliced pickles, and a dish of baby carrots. Greenie’s stegosauruses looked as if they were bleeding; beneath the cheese, Charlie had tucked slices of tomato. She told him the sandwiches smelled delicious.
“No disingenuous compliments from you.”
“I love grilled cheese,” said Greenie. “My mother taught me how to make it with horseradish and coleslaw.”
“This is what they call one-upsmanship,” Charlie said to George.
“Does she always show off like that?”
George was already eating. He looked up at Charlie and giggled.
Charlie asked George about his new school. Greenie learned more in those fifteen minutes than she had managed to get from quizzing her son for days on end. She learned that his teacher, Mrs. Rodrigo, was teaching them a little Spanish; that she owned twenty-three finches, which she kept in a cage that filled most of her living room; that her husband operated a crane. (She had shown the class photos of the finches and of her husband in his crane.) She learned that Mrs. Rodrigo had read them a book called Owl at Home, which was really, according to George, “a bunch of stories squished into one.”
“I must say,” said Greenie, “Mrs. Rodrigo seems to like birds. I mean, finches…a story about an owl…and even that her husband drives a crane.”
“Mom, not that kind of crane,” George said impatiently.
Greenie glanced at Charlie, who listened with pleasure and amusement to her son’s assertions. She stacked their dishes on the tray and carried it into the kitchen, a stunningly bright little alley of a room, almost completely enclosed in glass. When Charlie joined her, she was taking in the long terra-cotta planter filled with cactuses, the barometer (identical to the one her father had kept in Maine), and the great wooden barrel on the floor by the sink.
“No washing dishes. I do that.”
“Oh please,” said Greenie.
“No, really.” He smiled apologetically. “I have my own eccentric system.”
She noticed that there was no dishwasher. The dish rack beside the sink was rigged to drain through a slot in the lid of the barrel, along with a hose that snaked down from a hole drilled in a window frame. Charlie said, “It comes from the gutter. I get some of my rinse water that way. Not much these days, but some.”
She laughed. “That’s how we got water in Maine.”
He nodded. “And there you have more water than anyone here could ever dream of. That is, if people here were realistic.”
“What is this?” Geor
ge called from the other room. Charlie left the kitchen to join him, but Greenie lingered. Beyond the barrel and its Rube Goldberg riggings, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Three yellowed cookbooks were stacked on the only shelf, next to a framed photograph of Charlie’s parents in front of their house in Massachusetts. On the counter stood an old-fashioned rotary telephone and a wooden pepper mill. Greenie placed an index finger in the aperture framing the zero on the phone. She pulled it around to feel that long-outmoded sensation, of making a phone call back in high school.
“Hey!” Charlie shouted from the other room. “Stop snooping in there!”
George stood at the large table, asking Charlie about his stones, lifting them one by one. On the bottom of each stone, Charlie had inked in white the place it had come from. Champlain–Vt. on a gray egglike stone bisected by a protruding white vein. Wading River, long and smooth and mauve, like a tongue. A lump of black pumice as light as down, Etna; sage green with bits of glitter, Trapalou–Ikaria; a jagged cube of granite, Central Park.
“When were you in Central Park without looking me up?” said Greenie.
“I didn’t know you’d care to have me look you up.”
“I like this one,” said George. He was holding the biggest, in both hands: a hunk of sparkling rose quartz. “Little Compton,” he read aloud from the underside. “Where is that?”
“Rhode Island,” said Charlie. “Would you like to have it?”
“Yes!”
Greenie did not try to discourage this gift or even get George to say please. She was through, for the day, with being the disciplinarian mother. Idly, she picked up a sliver of blackish rock, thin as a piece of cardboard. The perfect skipping stone, she thought, remembering contests with cousins when the tide was low and the swimming cove was placid. She turned the rock over: Circe, Smith’s Rock. She put it back quickly, but not before Charlie noticed.