The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

Author:Karen Thompson Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Published: 2018-05-29T18:11:10+00:00

They do not listen to the news. They do not follow the protocols for contagious disease. If Henry offers him a sip of whisky from his glass, Nathaniel takes it. They do not sleep in separate beds.

Every day, Henry’s walk is more steady, his voice more sure. Here is Henry sitting in his wingback chair with a book. Here Nathaniel, making him tea. Here is Henry, walking at his side in the woods.

These woods: If classes were in session, today is the day Nathaniel would have done his lecture on the pheromones of trees. It’s a way of catching the attention of the undergraduates for a minute with the counterintuitive news that trees, so silent and so still, have ways of reaching out to one another, lines of communication, systems of warning. There is something satisfying in it, that the plain reality of the universe reads to us like magic. Henry might go further. He would point out how much our brains are limited by what we believe already—how once, when people expected to see ghosts, ghosts were what they saw.

Henry’s presence in the house, and in these woods, triggers a second longing, too, a profound need for his daughter to be here, and not just as she is now—a grown woman in San Francisco, whom he calls on the phone to say, yes, yes, it really is amazing—but also as she was once: a six-year-old girl in blue butterfly barrettes, trailing behind him and Henry, as she did on so many evenings back then, out in these same woods, reciting the names of the trees like a catechism, ponderosa, manzanita, white oak, her pockets bulging with pinecones.

His daughter, as she is now, the grown woman in San Francisco, does not seem to understand what he is trying to tell her on the phone. “He’s cured?” she says. “How is that possible?” She has a lot of questions that he does not want to consider.

A rush of anger comes over him, washing everything else away.

“Just leave it,” he says to her. “Just leave it alone.”

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