"The Chronoliths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

Four

Time passed.

Should I apologize for these lapses — a year here, a year there? History isn’t linear, after all. It runs in shallows and narrows and bayous and bays. (And treacherous undertows and hidden whirlpools.) And even a memoir is a kind of history.

But I suppose it depends on the audience I’m writing for, and that’s still unclear in my mind. Who am I addressing? My own generation, so many of whom have died or are now dying? Our heirs, who may not have experienced these events but who can at least recite them from schoolbooks? Or some more distant generation of men and women who may have been allowed, God willing and impossible as it seems, to forget a little of what passed in this century?

In other words, how much should I explain, and how thoroughly?

But it’s a moot question.

Really, there are only two of us here.

Me. And you. Whoever you are.

Nearly five years passed between my visit to the mall with Kaitlin and the day Arnie Kunderson called me out of a batch-sort test to his office — which was, perhaps, the next significant turning point in my life, if you believe in linear causality and the civilized deference of the future to the past. But taste those years, first: imagine them, if you don’t remember them.

Five summers — warm ones, when the news (between Kuin events) was dominated by the ongoing depletion of the Oglalla Aquifer. New Mexico and Texas had virtually lost the ability to irrigate their dry lands. The Oglalla Aquifer, a body of underground water as large as Lake Huron and a relic of the last ice age, remained essential to agriculture in Nebraska, parts of Wyoming and Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma — and it continued to decline, sucked up from increasing depths by ruthlessly efficient centrifugal pumps. The news feeds featured the farm exodus in repetitive, blunt images: families in battered cargo trucks stalled on the interstates, their sullen children with web toys plugging their ears and masking their eyes. Men and women standing on labor lines in Los Angeles or Detroit, the dark underside of our blossoming economy. Because most of us had work, we allowed ourselves the luxury of pity.

Five winters. Our winters were dry and cold, those years. The well-to-do wore thermally adaptive clothes for the first time, which left the tonier shopping districts looking as if they had been invaded by aliens in polyester jogging suits and respirators, while the rest of us beetled down the street in bulging parkas or stuck as close as possible to the skywalks. Domestic robots (self-guided vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers bright enough not to maim local children) became commonplace; the Sony dogwalker was withdrawn from the market after a well-publicized accident involving a malfunctioning streetlight and a brace of Shi Tzus. In those years, even the elderly stopped calling their entertainment panels “TV sets.” Lux Ebone announced her retirement, twice. Cletus King defeated incumbent Marylin Leahy, giving the White House to the Federal Party, though Democrats continued to control Congress.

Catchphrases of the day, now all but forgotten: “Now give me mine.” “Brutal but nice!” “Like daylight in a drawer.”

Names and places we imagined were important: Doctor Dan Lesser, the Wheeling Courthouse, Beckett and Goldstein, Kwame Finto.

Events: the second wave of lunar landings; the Zairian pandemic; the European currency crisis; and the storming of the Hague.

And Kuin, of course, like a swelling drumbeat.

Pyongyang, then Ho Chi Minh City; eventually Macao, Sapporo, the Kanto Plain, Yichang…

And all the early Kuin mania and fascination, the ten thousand websources with their peculiar and contradictory theories, the endless simmering of the crackpot press, the symposia and the committee reports, the think tanks and the congressional inquiries. The young man in Los Angeles who had his name legally changed to “Kuin,” and all his subsequent imitators.

Kuin, whoever or whatever he might be, had already caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more. For that reason, the name was treated with gravitas in respectable circles. For the same reason, it became popular with comedians and T-shirt designers. “Kuinist” imagery was banned from certain schools, until the ACLU intervened. Because he stood for nothing discernible except destruction and conquest, Kuin became a slate on which the disaffected scrawled their manifestos. None of this was taken terribly seriously in North America. Elsewhere, the seismic rumbling was more ominous.

I followed it all closely.

For two years I worked at the Campion-Miller research facility outside of St. Paul, writing patches into self-evolved commercial-interface code. Then I was transferred to the downtown offices, where I joined a team doing much the same work on much more secure material, Campion-Miller’s own tightly-held source code, the beating heart of our major products. Mostly I drove in from my one-bedroom apartment, but on the worst winter days I rode the new elevated train, an aluminum chamber into which too many commuters shed their heat and moisture, mingled body odors and aftershave, the city a pale scrim on steaming white windows.

(It was on one of those trips that I saw a young woman sitting halfway down the car, wearing a hat with the words “TWENTY AND THREE” printed on it — twenty years and three months, the nominal interval between the appearance of a Chronolith and its predicted conquest. She was reading a tattered copy of Stranger Than Science, which must have been out of print for at least sixty years. I wanted to approach her, to ask her what events had equipped her with these totems, these echoes of my own past, but I was too bashful, and how could I have phrased such a question, anyway? I never saw her again.)

I dated a few times. For most of a year I went out with a woman from the quality-control division of Campion-Miller, Annali Kincaid, who loved turquoise and New Drama and took a lively interest in current events. She dragged me to lectures and readings I would otherwise have ignored. We broke up, finally, because she possessed deep and complex political convictions, and I did not; I was a Kuin-watcher, otherwise politically agnostic.

But I was able to impress her on at least one occasion. She had used someone’s credentials at Campion-Miller to wangle us admission to an academic conference at the university — “The Chronoliths: Scientific and Cultural Issues.” (My idea as much as hers this time. Well, mostly mine. Annali had already voiced her objection to the aerial and orbital photographs of Chronoliths with which I had decorated my bedroom, the Kuinist downloads that littered the apartment.) We sat through the presentation of three papers and most of a pleasant Saturday afternoon, at which point Annali decided the discourse was a little too abstract for her taste. But on our way through the lobby I was hailed by an older woman in loose jeans and an oversized pea-green sweater, beaming at me through monstrous eyeglasses.

Her name was Sulamith Chopra. I had known her at Cornell. Her career had taken her deep into the fundamental-physics end of the Chronolith research.

I introduced Sue to Annali.

Annali was floored. “Ms. Chopra, I know who you are. I mean, they always quote your name in the news stories.”

“Well, I’ve done some work.”

“I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise.” But Sue hadn’t taken her eyes off me. “Strange I should run into you here, Scotty.”

“Is it?”

“Unexpected. Significant, maybe. Or maybe not. We need to catch up on our lives sometime.”

I was flattered. I wanted very much to talk to her. Pathetically, I offered her my business card.

“No need,” she said. “I can find you when I need you, Scotty. Never fear.”

“You can?”

But she was gone in the crowd.

“You’re well connected,” Annali told me on the ride home.

But that wasn’t right. (Sue didn’t call me — not that year — and my attempts to reach her were rebuffed.) I was connected, not well, but not quite randomly, either. Running into Sue Chopra was an omen, like seeing the woman in the commuter car; but the meaning of it was inscrutable, a prophecy in an indecipherable language, a signal buried in noise.

Being called to Arnie Kunderson’s office was never a good sign. He had been my supervisor since I joined Campion-Miller, and I had learned this about Arnie: When the news was good, he would bring it to you. If he called you into his office, prepare for the worst.

I had seen Arnie angry, most recently, when the team I was leading botched an order-sort-and-mail protocol and nearly cost us a contract with a nationwide retailer. But I knew this was something even more serious as soon as I walked into his office. When he was angry, Arnie was ebulliently, floridly angry. Today, worse, he sat behind his desk with the furtive look of a man entrusted with some repellent but necessary duty — an undertaker, say. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I pulled up a chair and waited. We weren’t formal. We had been to each other’s barbecues.

He folded his hands and said. “There’s never a good way to do this. What I have to tell you, Scott, is that Campion-Miller isn’t renewing your contract. We’re canceling it. This is official notice. I know you haven’t had any warning and Christ knows I’m incredibly fucking sorry to drop this on you. You’re entitled to full severance and a generous compensation package for the six months left to run.”

I wasn’t as surprised as Arnie seemed to expect. The Asian economic collapse had cut deeply into Campion-Miller’s foreign markets. Just last year the firm had been acquired by a multinational corporation whose management team laid off a quarter of the staff and cashed in most of C-M’s subsidiary holdings for their real-estate value.

I did, however, feel somewhat blindsided.

Unemployment was up that year. The Oglalla crisis and the collapse of the Asian economies had dumped a lot of people onto the job market. There was a tent city five blocks square down along the riverside. I pictured myself there.

I said, “Are you going to tell the team, or do you want me to do it?”

The team I led was working on predictive market software, one of C-M’s more lucrative lines. In particular, we were factoring genuine as versus perceived randomness into such applications as consumer trending and competitive pricing.

Ask a computer to pick two random numbers between one and ten and the machine will cough up digits in a genuinely random sequence — maybe 2,3; maybe 1,9; and so on. Ask a number of human beings, plot their answers, and you’ll get a distribution curve heavily weighted at 3 and 7. When people think “random” they tend to picture numbers you might call “unobtrusive” — not too near the limits nor precisely in the middle; not part of a presumed sequence (2,4,6), etc.

In other words, there is something you might call intuitive randomness which differs dramatically from the real thing.

Was it possible to exploit this difference to our advantage in high-volume commercial apps, such as stock portfolios or marketing or product price-placement?

We thought so. We’d made a little progress. The work had been going well enough that Arnie’s news seemed (at least) oddly timed.

He cleared his throat. “You misunderstand. The team isn’t leaving.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s not my decision, Scott.”

“You said that. Okay, it’s not your fault. But if the project is going forward—”

“Don’t ask me to justify this. Frankly, I can’t.”

He let that sink in.

“Five years,” I said. “Fuck, Arnie. Five years!”

“Nothing’s guaranteed. Not anymore. You know that as well as I do.”

“It might help if I understood why this was happening.”

He twisted in his chair. “I’m not at liberty to say. Your work has been excellent, and I’ll put that in writing if you like.”

“What are you telling me, I made an enemy in management?”

He halfway nodded. “The work we do here is pretty tightly held. People get nervous. I don’t know if you made an enemy, exactly. Maybe you made the wrong friends.”

But that wasn’t likely. I hadn’t made very many friends.

People I could share lunch with, catch a Twins game with, sure. But no one I confided in. Somehow, by some process of slow emotional attrition, I had become the kind of guy who works hard and smiles amiably and goes home and spends the evening with the video panel and a couple of beers.

Which is what I did the day Arnie Kunderson fired me.

The apartment hadn’t changed much since I moved in. (Barring the one wall of the bedroom I used as a sort of bulletin board. News printouts and photos of Chronolith sites plus my copious notes on the subject.) To the degree that the place had improved, it was mostly Kaitlin’s doing. Kait was ten now, eager to criticize my fashion sense. Probably it made her feel grown up. I had replaced the sofa because I had gotten tired of hearing how “uncontemporary” it was — Kait’s favorite word of derision.

At any rate, the old sofa had gone; in its place was an austere blue padded bench that looked great until you tried to get comfortable on it.

I thought about calling Janice but decided not to. Janice didn’t appreciate spontaneous phone calls. She preferred to hear from me on a regular and predictable schedule. And as for Kaitlin… better not to bother her, either. If I did, she might launch into a discourse on what she had done today with Whit, as she was encouraged to call her stepfather. Whit was a great guy, in Kait’s opinion. Whit made her laugh. Maybe I should talk to Whit, I thought. Maybe Whit would make me laugh.

So I did nothing that evening except nurse a few beers and surf the satellites.

Even the cheap servers carried a number of science-and-nature feeds. One of them was showing fresh video from Thailand, of a genuinely dangerous expedition up the Chao Phrya to the ruins of Bangkok, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and a half-dozen corporate donors whose logos were prominently featured in the start-up credits.

I turned off the sound, let the pictures speak for themselves.

Not much of Bangkok’s urban core had been rebuilt in the years since 2021. No one wanted to live or work too close to the Chronolith — rumors of “proximity sickness” frightened people away, though there was no such diagnosis in the legitimate clinical literature. The bandits and the revolutionary militias, however, were quite real and omnipresent. But despite all this there was still a brisk river trade along the Chao Phrya, even in the shadow of Kuin.

The program began with overflight footage of the city. Crude, canted docks allowed access to rough warehouses, a marketplace, stocks of fresh fruits and vegetables, order emerging from the wreckage, streets reclaimed from the rubble and open to commerce. From a great enough altitude it looked like a story of human perseverance in the face of disaster. The view from the ground was less encouraging.

As the expedition approached the heart of the city the Chronolith was present in every shot: from a distance, dominating the brown river; or closer, towering into a tropical noon.

The monument was conspicuously clean. Even birds and insects avoided it. Airborne dust had collected in the few protected crevices of the sculpted face, faintly softening Kuin’s abstracted gaze. But nothing grew even in that protected soil; the sterility of it was absolute. Where the base of the monument touched ground on one bank of the river a few lianas had attempted to scale the immense octagonal base; but the mirror-smooth surface was ungraspable, unwelcoming.

The expedition anchored mid-river and went ashore for more footage. In one sequence, a storm swirled over the ancient city. Rainwater cascaded from the Chronolith in miniature torrents, small waterfalls churning plumes of silt from the river bottom. The dockside vendors covered their stalls with tarpaulins and sheet plastic and retreated beneath them.

Cut to a shot of a wild monkey on a collapsed Exxon billboard, barking at the sky.

Clouds parting around the promontory of Kuin’s vast head.

The sun emerging near the green horizon, the Chronolith shadowing the city like the gnomon of a great bleak sundial.

There was more, but nothing revelatory. I turned off the monitor and went to bed.

We — the English-speaking world — had by this time agreed on certain terms to describe the Chronoliths. What a Chronolith did, for instance, was to appear or to arrive… though some favored touched down, as if it were a kind of stalled tornado.

The newest of the Chronoliths had appeared (arrived, touched down) more than eighteen months ago, leveling the waterfront of Macao. Only half a year earlier a similar monument had destroyed Taipei.

Both stones marked, as usual, military victories roughly twenty years in the future. Twenty and three: hardly a lifetime, but arguably long enough for Kuin (if he existed, if he was more than a contrived symbol or an abstraction) to mass forces for his putative Asian conquests. Long enough for a young man to become a middle-aged man. Long enough for a young girl to become a young woman.

But no Chronolith had arrived anywhere in the world for more than a year now, and some of us had chosen to believe that the crisis was, if not exactly finished, at least purely Asian — confined by geography, bound by oceans.

Our public discourse was aloof, detached. Much of southern China was in a condition of political and military chaos, a no-man’s-land in which Kuin was perhaps already gathering his nucleus of followers. But an editorial in yesterday’s paper had wondered whether Kuin might not, in the long term, turn out to be a positive force: a Kuinist empire was hardly likely to be a benevolent dictatorship, but it might restore stability to a dangerously destabilized region. What was left of the tattered Beijing bureaucracy had already detonated a tactical nuclear device in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy last year’s so-called Kuin of Yichang. The result had been a breached dam and a flood that carried radioactive mud all the way to the East China Sea. And if crippled Beijing was capable of that, could a Kuin regime be worse?

I had no opinion of my own. We were all whistling through the graveyard in those years, even those of us who paid attention, analyzing the Chronoliths (by date, time, size, implied conquest, and such) so that we could pretend to understand them. But I preferred not to play that game. The Chronoliths had shadowed my life since things went bad with Janice. They were emblematic of every malign and unpredictable force in the world. There were times when I was profoundly afraid of them, and as often as not I admitted that fact to myself.

Is this obsession? Annali had thought so.

I tried to sleep. Sleep that knits the raveled sleeve, etc. Sleep that kills the awkward downtime between midnight and dawn.

But I didn’t get even that. An hour before sunrise, my phone buzzed. I should have let the server pick it up. But I groped for the handset and flipped it open, afraid — as always when the phone rings late at night — that something had happened to Kait. “Hello?”

“Scott,” a coarse male voice said. “Scotty”

I thought for one panicky moment of Hitch Paley. Hitch, with whom I had not spoken since 2021. Hitch Paley, riding out of the past like a pissed-off ghost.

But it wasn’t Hitch.

It was some other ghost.

I listened to the phlegmy breathing, the compression and expansion of night air in a withered bellows. “Dad?”

“Scotty…” he said, as if he couldn’t get past the name.

“Dad, have you been drinking?” I was courteous enough to refrain from adding, again.

“No,” he said angrily. “No, I — ah, well, fuck it, then. This is the kind of — the kind of treatment — well, you know, fuck it.”

And he was gone.

I rolled out of bed.

I watched the sun come up over the agricultural coops to the east, the great corporate collective farms, our bulwark against famine. A dusting of snow had collected in the fields, sparkling white between empty cornrows.

Later I drove to Annali’s apartment, knocked on her door.

We hadn’t dated for more than a year, but we were still friendly when we met in the coffee room or the cafeteria. She took a slightly maternal interest in me these days — inquiring after my health, as if she expected something to go terribly wrong sooner or later. (Maybe that day had come, though I was still healthy as a horse.)

But she was startled when she opened the door and saw me. Startled and obviously dismayed.

She knew I’d been fired. Maybe she knew more than that.

Which was why I had come here: on the off chance that she could help make sense of what had happened.

“Scotty,” she said, “hey, you should have called first.”

“You’re busy?” She didn’t look busy. She was wearing loose culottes and a faded yellow shirt. Cleaning the kitchen, maybe.

“I’m going out in a few minutes. I’d ask you in, but I have to get dressed and all that. What are you doing here?”

She was, I realized, actually afraid of me — or of being seen with me.

“Scott?” She looked up and down the corridor. “Are you in trouble?”

“Why would I be in trouble, Annali?”

“Well — I heard about you being fired.”

“How long ago?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long have you known I was going to be fired?”

“You mean, was it general knowledge? No, Scott. God, that would be humiliating. No. Of course, you hear rumors—”

“What kind of rumors?”

She frowned and chewed her lip. That was a new habit. “The kind of work Campion-Miller does, they don’t need trouble with the government.”

“The fuck does that have to do with me?”

“You know, you don’t have to shout.”

“Annali — trouble with the government?”

“The thing I heard is that some people were asking about you. Like government people.”

“Police?”

“No — are you in trouble with the police? No, just people in suits. Maybe IRS, I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s just people talking, Scott. It could all be bullshit. Really, I don’t know why they fired you. It’s just that CM, they depend on keeping all their permits in order. All that tech stuff they ship overseas. If somebody comes in asking questions about you, it could endanger everybody.”

“Annali, I’m not a security risk.”

“I know, Scott.” She knew nothing of the sort. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Honestly, I’m sure it’s all bullshit. But I really do have to get dressed.” She began to ease the door shut. “Next time, phone me, for God’s sake!”

She lived on the second floor of a little three-story brick building in the old part of Edina. Apartment 203. I stared at the number on the door for a while. Twenty and three.

I never saw Annali Kincaid again. Occasionally I wonder what sort of life she led. How she fared during the long hard years.

I didn’t tell Janice that I had lost my job. Not that I was still trying to prove anything to Janice. To myself, maybe. To Kaitlin, almost certainly.

Not that Kait cared what I did for a living. At ten, Kait still perceived adult business as opaque and uninteresting. She knew only that I “went to work” and that I earned enough money to make me a respectable if not wealthy member of the grownup world. And that was fine. I liked that occasional reflection of myself in Kait’s eyes: Stable. Predictable. Even boring.

But not disappointing.

Certainly not dangerous.

I didn’t want Kait (or Janice or even Whit) to know I’d been fired… at least not immediately, not until I had something to add to the story. If not a happy ending, then at least a second chapter, a what-comes-next…

It came in the form of another unexpected phone call.

Not a happy ending, no. Not an ending at all. Definitely not happy.

Janice and Whit invited me to dinner. They did this on a quarterly basis, the way you might contribute to a pension plan or a worthy charity.

Janice was no longer a single mom in a rent-controlled townhouse. She had shed that stigma when she married her supervisor at the biochem lab where she worked, Whitman Delahunt. Whit was an ambitious guy with serious managerial talent. Clarion Pharmaceuticals had prospered despite the Asian crisis, feeding Western markets suddenly deprived of cut-rate Chinese and Taiwanese biochemical imports. (Whit sometimes referred to the Chronoliths as “God’s little tariff,” which made Janice smile uneasily.) I don’t think Whit liked me much, but he accepted me as a sort of country cousin, attached to Kaitlin by an unpleasant and unmentionable accident of paternity.

To be fair, he tried to make me feel welcome, at least this night. He opened the door of his two-story house, framing himself in warm yellow light. He grinned. Whit was one of those big soft men, teddy-bear-shaped and about as hairy. Not handsome, but the sort women call “cute.” He was ten years older than Janice. Balding, but wearing it well. His grin was expansive if inauthentic, and his teeth were blazing white. Whit almost certainly had the best dentistry, the best radial kariotomy, and the best car on the block. I wondered if it was hard on Janice and Kaitlin, being the best wife and the best daughter.

“Come on in, Scott!” he exclaimed. “Take off those boots, warm yourself by the fire.”

We ate in the spacious dining room, where leaded windows of distinguished provenance rattled in their frames. Kait talked a little about school. (She was having trouble this year, particularly in math.) Whit talked with vastly greater enthusiasm about his work. Janice was still running fairly routine protein syntheses at Clarion and talked about it not at all. She seemed content to let Whit do the bragging.

Kait excused herself first, dashing off to an adjacent room where the television had been mumbling counterpoint to the sound of the wind. Whit brought out a brandy decanter. He served drinks awkwardly, like a Westerner attempting a Japanese tea ceremony. Whit wasn’t much of a drinker.

He said, “I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking. How about you, Scott? How’s life treating you?”

“ ‘Fortune presents gifts not according to the book.’”

“Scotty’s quoting poetry again,” Janice explained.

“What I mean is, I’ve been offered a job.”

“You’re thinking of leaving Campion-Miller?”

“I parted ways with Campion-Miller about two weeks ago.”

“Oh! Gutsy decision, Scott.”

“Thank you, Whit, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.”

Janice said, out of what appeared to be a profounder understanding, “So who are you with now?”

“Well, it’s not for certain, but — you remember Sue Chopra?”

Janice frowned. Then her eyes widened. “Yes! Cornell, right? The junior professor who taught that flaky first-year course?”

Janice and I had met at university. The first time I had seen her she had been walking through the chemistry lab with a bottle of lithium aluminum hydroxide in her hand. If she had dropped it, she might have killed us both. First rule of a stable relationship: Don’t drop the fucking bottle.

It was Janice who had introduced me to Sulamith Chopra when Sue was a ridiculously tall and chunky post-doc building a reputation in the physics department. Sue had been handed (probably as punishment for some academic indiscretion) a second-year interdisciplinary course of the kind offered to English students as a science credit and to science students as an English credit. For which she turned around and wrote a curriculum so intimidating that it scared off everybody but a few naive artsies and confused computer science types. And me. The pleasant surprise was that Sue had no interest in failing anyone. She had put together the course description to scare away parvenus. All she wanted with the rest of us was an interesting conversation.

So “Metaphor and Reality-Modeling in Literature and the Physical Sciences” became a kind of weekly salon, and the only requirement for a passing grade was that we demonstrate that we’d read her syllabus and that she must not be bored with what we said about it. For an easy mark all you had to do was ask Sue about her pet research topics (Calabi-Yau geometry, say, or the difference between prior and contextual forces); she would talk for twenty minutes and grade you on the plausibility of the rapt attention you displayed.

But Sue was fun to bullshit with, too, so mostly her classes were extended bull sessions. And by the end of the semester I had stopped seeing her as this six-foot-four-inch bug-eyed badly-dressed oddity and had begun to perceive the funny, fiercely intelligent woman she was.

I said, “Sue Chopra offered me a job.”

Janice turned to Whit and said, “One of the Cornell profs. Didn’t I see her name in the paper recently?”

Probably so, but that was awkward territory. “She’s part of a federally-funded research group. She has enough clout to hire help.”

“So she got in touch with you?”

Whit said, “That’s maybe not the kindest way to put it.”

“It’s okay, Whit. What Janice means is, what would a high-powered academic like Sulamith Chopra want with a keyboard hack like myself? It’s a fair question.”

Janice said, “And the answer is — ?”

“I guess they wanted one more keyboard hack.”

“You told her you needed work?”

“Well, you know. We stay in touch.”

(I can find you when I need you, Scotty. Never fear.)

“Uh-huh,” Janice said, which was her way of telling me she knew I was lying. But she didn’t press.

“Well, that’s great, Scott,” Whit said. “These are tough times to be out of a job. So, that’s great.”

We said no more about it until the meal was finished and Whit had excused himself. Janice waited until he was out of earshot. “Something you’re not mentioning?”

Several things. I gave her one of them. “The job is in Baltimore.”

“Baltimore?”

“Baltimore. Maryland.”

“You mean you’re moving across the country?”

“If I get the job. It’s not for sure yet.”

“But you haven’t told Kaitlin.”

“No. I haven’t told Kaitlin. I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t know what to say. I mean, this is really sudden. The question is how upset Kait will be. But I can’t answer that. No offense, but she doesn’t talk about you as much as she used to.”

“It’s not like I’ll be out of her life. We can visit.”

“Visiting isn’t parenting, Scott. Visiting is… an uncle thing. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s best. She and Whit are bonding pretty well.”

“Even if I’m out of town, I’m still her father.”

“Insofar as you ever were, yes, that’s true.”

“You sound angry.”

“I’m not. Just wondering whether I should be.”

Whit came back downstairs then, and we chatted some more, but the wind grew louder and hard snow ticked on the windows and Janice fretted out loud over the condition of the streets. So I said goodbye to Whit and Janice and waited at the door for Kait to give me her customary farewell hug.

She came into the foyer but stopped a few feet away. Her eyes were stormy and her lower lip was trembling.

“Kaity-bird?” I said.

“Please don’t call me that. I’m not a baby.”

Then I figured it out. “You were listening.”

Her hearing impairment didn’t prevent her from eavesdropping. If anything, it had made her stealthier and more curious.

“Hey,” she said, “it doesn’t matter. You’re moving away. That’s all right.”

Of all the things I could have said, what I chose was: “You shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations, Kaitlin.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, and turned and ran to her room.