Acceptance

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Freedom could take you farther from what you sought, not closer. Something he was learning out here, beyond any standard intel, in a wilderness he didn’t understand. About as prepared for Area X, he realized, as for Ghost Bird, and perhaps that was, in the end, the same thing. Because they existed alone together, walked a trail that threaded its way between reed-choked lakes that could be tar-black or as green as the reflected trees that congregated in islands among the reeds … and he was finally free to ask her anything he wanted to, but he didn’t. Because it didn’t really matter.

So, instead, he shoved his hand into his jacket pocket from time to time, clenched his fist around his father’s carving, taken from the mantel in the little house on the hill in Hedley. The smooth lines of it, the way the grain of the wood under the paint threatened a splinter, soothed him. A carving of a cat, chosen to remind him of long-lost Chorry, no doubt blissfully hunting rats among the bushes.

So, instead, he dove, resentful at their pull, into reexamining over and over his rescued Whitby pages, the “terroir pages,” although they were more personal than that. An anchor, a bridge to his memory of the rest of the manuscript, lost at sea. If he used those pages to talk to Ghost Bird, it was in part to bring relief or distraction from the closeness of her and the way that the endless reeds, the fresh air, the blue sky, all conspired to make the real world remote, unimportant, a dream. When it was the most important thing.

Somewhere back there his mother was fighting for her career at Central, that act synonymous with fighting against the encroachment of Area X. Somewhere, too, new fronts had opened up, Area X expanding in ways that might not even match its prior characteristics. How could he know? Planes might be falling from the skies, this non-mission, this following of his, already a failure.

Quoting Whitby’s report as he remembered it, paraphrasing: “Had they, in fact, passed judgment without a trial? Decided there could be no treaty or negotiation?”

“That might be closer to the truth, to a kind of truth,” Ghost Bird replied. It was now early afternoon and the sky had become a deeper blue with long narrow clouds sliding across it. The marsh was alive with rustlings and birdsong.

“Condemned by an alien jury,” Control said.

“Not likely. Indifference.”

“He covers that, too: ‘Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer … reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.’” Another half-remembered phrasing, the real becoming half real. But his father had never valued authenticity so much as boldness of expression.

“See that deer over there, beyond the canal? She’s definitely noticing us.”

“Is she noticing us or is she noticing us?”

Either scenario might have horrified his mother the spy, who had never gotten along with nature. No one in his family had, not really. He couldn’t remember any real outings into the woods, just fishing around lakes and sitting by fireplaces in cabins during the winter. Had he ever even been lost before?