Kepler’s Dream (21 page)

Ignacio and Miguel nodded at that. I guess that day, July seventh, was lousy for everyone.

Rosie kept pressing. “And Papí, did you go meet him then? Is that why I woke up and you were gone?”

Adela leaned forward. “No, Rosie, I called your dad. I had some news for him.” She touched Miguel's arm.

“Oh.” Rosie blushed. A kid, however tough, is always going to be glad if their fighting parents seem to like each other again.

“I generally take an evening walk around the property to make sure the place is secure; you know, every now and then we've had bulletins from the Juvenile Facility, not that anything's come of it. But that night, when I was out there, your mom called to tell me that this guy”—Miguel pointed at Ignacio—“had just arrived at the train station. Adela picked him up and brought him by,” Miguel continued, “so I could lay eyes on him at least.”

“They kept me in a running car out on the street,” Ignacio
said, making a face. “As though I were some lowlife not allowed on the premises.”

Rosie scolded her dad about not waking her up for that, but Miguel just shook his head and gave a look right back at his brother, explaining that they all agreed it wasn't a great time for Ignacio to run into Mrs. Von Stern again, after all these years. Not just yet.

“I didn't know any of this, either, by the way,” said my dad. “I was just hunkered down in my mother's crazy, book-crammed
Librerery
at that point.”

“Her ‘mausoleum for dead authors'?” I asked him.

He grinned. “I did call it that once, didn't I? I seem to recall that ticked her off mightily.” He shrugged. “It still seems like that to me. I guess that makes me a philistine. As she'd say.”

“Who
is
Phyllis Stine, anyway?” I wondered, and my dad explained, with not too obnoxious a smile, that
philistine
is a word for a person who doesn't understand books and art. (Oh! Thanks a lot, Grandmother. Back at you: Would you know how to make a recipe out of a Roald Dahl book, if you had to?)

“Though I'm not as much of one as she thinks,” Dad added. “There are some cool things in that
Librerery,
I admit. And I get a buzz seeing those pictures of my father with the astronauts. Especially Michael Collins.”

“Mom always liked him best, too,” I mentioned. “Mom and me both.” I took a breath and kept going. I had to keep up with Rosie, here. “Anyway—while you were in the Library, let me guess. You built a fire.”

“
That's right.” He didn't stop to ask how I knew. “I warmed up and gave myself a little light—it seemed better not to throw the bright overheads on—and then I thought, Well, what the (expletive deleted)? I might as well take a
look
at the Morris Kepler. Mother and I might have had a big blowout argument about that book years ago, when she first bought it—when it seemed like
that
was what she wanted to remember Edward by rather than, you know, her own son. Or, for that matter, her granddaughter.” He looked at me again, more clearly. “But I remember, Ella, that your mom saw the point of the book
.
She thought it was beautiful.”

“It
is
beautiful,” I said. “It's almost like a kids' book, with those pictures. And the way he imagined life on the moon.”

“That's right. And the Morris prints in Kepler's
Dream
are—(expletive deleted!)—they're amazing, the colors, the textures. That gold leaf. Not that I understand all the contents. If you want someone to explain the science of Kepler to you, ask that guy.” My dad gestured to Ignacio, who shrugged modestly.

“It was funny—when we were kids, my dad loved telling Nacio all about astronomy, and his padre, Señor Aguilar, told me all the river lore about the Rio Grande. It was like us two boys traded places. On fishing trips, I learned all these great details about bait and casting, and Dad would spend hours tracing the constellations out for Nacio, here. So he was the one who ended up with his head full of stars.”

“While you,” I said to him, “ended up with your head full of fish.”

I loved making my dad laugh: he had a deep, throaty chortle that made his beard shake. “That's right, Ella. Absolute. A head full of fish.”

“So,” Rosie prodded, “there you were, looking at Kepler's
Dream
…”

“OK, OK.” My dad's focus wasn't as sharp as Rosie's. It was a good thing he wasn't going to middle school. “There I was. And in the firelight, that book seemed almost …
alive
.” He lowered his voice. “This will sound strange, but I started to feel as though my dad—Edward Mackenzie—was nearby.”

“There was something in the air that night,” Miguel agreed. “Adela and I were aware of it, too. Almost from a different world.”

A shiver found my spine and ran down it. Rosie scooched closer to me on the bench.

“Whatever it was, I didn't want to be in that (expletive deleted) mausoleum anymore. I decided I had to get out of there and check out the stars, like my father would have. I doused the fire—thoroughly, I've got camping tricks for that—and got my stuff together. But I held on to the book. It was almost like a talisman or something. A charm.”

The Aguilar adults looked unsurprised, as though my dad were telling a story they had already heard, but Joan and Rosie and I were leaning forward in suspense.

“It was very cool to be out there in the starlight. Man, the stars were bright that night, so I just kept thinking about my father, and not the Old Dragon. I was wandering behind the house, where I used to run around and get into trouble as a kid,
and then I found that familiar tree back there and—you know, almost before I had a chance to think about it, I just clambered onto the roof.”

Ignacio started laughing. “We used to go up there together all the time when we were kids. Remember, Walt? Shoot BB guns from up there? Papí used to get so mad at us!”

“Yeah. I'm not sure the swans were too happy about it either.” My dad laughed, too. “Though we never did hit any.”

“Oh—” Ignacio had a mischievous kid grin. “We weren't really aiming at 'em.”

“Hey, I think I saw you up there that night.” Rosie was speaking to my dad. “That's one of the reasons I was scared. I saw a shadow near the tree when I went back to find Ella.”

I remembered the thumping I'd heard overhead just as I was waking up. My dad was not a small guy. If there's a bear walking on the roof, you hear it—even if you think you're dreaming.

“I was kind of happy on the roof, you know, saying hello to all those crazy peacocks,” he said, “but then I heard something that really gave me the chills. I heard this voice from a distance, and it sounded like—like
Ignacio
.”

“I told you to be quiet.” Miguel gave his brother a light punch on the arm.

“It seemed impossible,” Dad said. “I hadn't seen Nacio since I was a
kid,
you know? As far as I knew, he was in Mexico or Peru or some (expletive deleted) place. I thought I was losing my mind. So I edged over near the front of the roof—”

“And I noticed something in the distance, on the roof. I
thought Walter was a ghost.” Adela tsked at herself. “Or a robber.”

Miguel nodded. “And so I went closer to the house, and fired a warning shot—”

“Not that that would have scared a ghost away,” Adela added.

I was glad the grown-ups were amused—“It's like a scene from a comedy,” said Joan—but they were forgetting something. Rosie and I were on the same track.

Me: OK, but so, Dad—

Rosie: What did you do with the
book
?

Me: —With Kepler's
Dream
?

Dad,
shouting, waving his big hands
: There wasn't time to think about the book! A shot was going off, and suddenly an alarm was yowling, and I just started to—

His big voice dropped suddenly, like it fell off a cliff. “To panic.” There was a silence. “I'm sorry, Ella. The alarm, Ignacio's voice and then the
sirens
—it all brought back that early morning in July a long time ago.”

“The sirens.” Joan, who had mostly been quiet, sounded somber. “Of course. When the police finally found you boys by the river.” Ignacio and my dad nodded. Ignacio took up the telling, saying that when my dad came down, they decided they had better get out of there and let Miguel handle things at the house. My dad would come back later to explain everything, and find the book and give it back.

He had hidden it in the cooler.

And
then
these two grown-up boys stayed up all night talking
to each other, and as dawn broke, they went out to the cemetery together to pay their respects to their lost fathers. Before my dad knew it, his time was up and he had to get on the plane to Colorado to help out his buddies and see how the fish were biting. And by the time he had explained all this to Miguel, who went back to check out the cooler …

“The book was gone.” Miguel shrugged. “Someone else must have found it. I looked all around there, you know, but it was gone.”

Rosie and I looked at each other.
Abercrombie? Jason?

The table was quiet.

After a few minutes Joan stood up and stretched and said she'd heard enough ghost stories for one night, and there were hungry fajita-eaters who deserved our spot. Arrangements were made in Spanish and in English, good-byes were said to Joan before she went off in her VW, and finally Miguel decided to let my dad drive his red truck back so Miguel could stay with Ignacio, Adela and Rosie—a flock of Aguilars. There were hugs good night all around, then my dad and I hit the road.

We didn't say much on the drive back to the GGCF. I think my dad was talked out, and I was listened out. Plus, we were probably both wondering how this reunion was going to go. He pulled in to the long canopied driveway, stirring up a cloud of peacocks. Grandmother's boat-car was there, and I could tell from the way he held on to the steering wheel for an extra minute that he was nervous. Finally we both got out of the truck and he stood, as if braced for a hurricane.

“
Don't worry, Dad,” I said. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”

He looked at me skeptically as he hitched up his jeans. “Are you sure about that?” he asked. “As I recall, the Old Dragon has pretty sharp teeth.”

He took a deep breath. “Mother?” he called out.

It was unusual for my grandmother not to come outside at the sound of cars arriving. I expected her in the doorway, Hildy in her arms, like the first day I met her.

But the only one who came to the screen door was Lou. We let him out, and he was full of licks and moans. Poor dog. No fajitas for him.

“Mother?” Dad called again. He made his way into the house, like an intrepid explorer. When he didn't come back right away, I started imagining he had found my grandmother and they were having a showdown, the way in cartoons the dog and cat end up in the same doghouse and you don't see the actual fighting, just the house bouncing around from the outside, sparks and exclamation points flying.

A few minutes later, though, my dad reappeared. No sparks, no exclamation points. He looked puzzled, but he didn't look beat up.

“She's not in there.” He peered around, as if she might be hiding somewhere in the driveway. “The hacienda is the same crazy clutter as ever, though.”

I thought about whether people ever kidnapped old ladies. Usually it was kids, right? They called it “kidnapping,” not “ladynapping.”

“
Maybe she's in the Library?” I suggested. And so we made the familiar trek out by the brambles and the old skunks' pens, down toward the famous Von Stern
Librerery.

Whose door was open. Hildy trotted out and seemed to nod at us, as if to say,
Yup—she's here
.

“Mother?” my dad tried again. Third time lucky.

“Walter … ?” came an answering voice. Dad didn't move right away, so I gave him an encouraging pat on the back that was maybe even a bit of a push. He went in, and I followed.

“Ah, there you are,” Violet said to her son, exactly as though she hadn't kept him away from her house, or fought with him for a hundred years, or anything. “I wondered when you were coming.”

She stood near a pile of books and papers, tall and straight as ever, but pale and drawn. My dad approached her carefully, the way you might a lion in its cage. But to my amazement, they embraced. I mean, it was more of the stiff GM kind than my dad's bear hug, but still—they weren't killing each other. That was something.

“I've just been out in the Library for a bit, thinking about Edward,” she said in a faraway voice. “I was enjoying some of these old photographs again. I can't think why I don't have one here of you.” That sentence hung in the air for a minute. Then she shook her head. “I know it's futile, but I thought I'd look one more time for Kepler's
Dream
. My lost relic.”

My dad cleared his throat. “Mother, there is something I ought to tell you.” Wow, I thought. Was he going to tell her right now? Talk about brave! “Some nights ago—”

“
You were here,” the GM interrupted. “Well, I knew that. You left me a souvenir. Thank you for returning my copy of
Hamlet.
”

He nodded, and gave a half wave. “You're welcome.” He tried again. He hitched his jeans up, for good luck. “But the other thing was—”

“You left a message on your father's grave. I saw it.”

“Well, not a message, exactly,” he said a bit sheepishly. I started wondering: how weird
were
these Mackenzies? What did my dad do, write a note?

“Those colorful fishing flies,” she said, with a faint twitch of a smile.

“Well, they don't die, like flowers do.” As if that were any kind of explanation. “I brought my father a few of my best. Ignacio and I went to the cemetery together.”