“We’re conserving water, Pip.”
“Right. Sorry.” Ripley turns off the tap, grabs the worn tea towel from the oven handle, and dries between her fingers as she walks to the table.
Across each side of the oversize mailer is a red stamp:Do Not Bend. Underneath the printed label, she can see the faint outline of her address in proper, upright handwriting.
“You don’t have to open it in front of me. You can take it to your room, and I can stay here with Mr. Bean,” her dad says, tapping a two-page spread of deeply discounted madras shorts. “No hard feelings.”
“Here is fine.” She sits down opposite him. She’ll get this over with, then eat something to settle her stomach. After that, she’ll go back out to the garden. There must be something she can do out there.
The pull tab tears through the paper padding, scattering soft brown fibers over the table. She shakes out eight pieces of thick, stiff paper, each one sealed in clear cellophane. A cream-colored envelope hits the table with a substantial sound, like there’s more than a few sheets of heavy stationery inside.
She turns over the first piece of paper, and her dad lets out a low whistle.
It’s Beauty poised over her eggs, her baleful eye staring out from a long-lost world. James has added a sheer tint of watercolor: dark gold for her back, pale cream for her belly, inky blackfor her eyes. The eggs are a luminous blue against the brown of her nest. Ripley runs her fingers along the cellophane over Beauty’s wing. The vestigial claw is so lifelike, she almost expects it to draw blood.
One by one, she reveals the rest of the original sketches of Beauty and their matching watercolor versions.
Steve picks up the drawing of Beauty in flight. “That’s…” He pauses.
“Incredible?Amazing?Beautiful?” Ripley suggests, not sure how to feel.
He shakes his head. “That’s a man dying for forgiveness if I ever saw one.”
Her heart never stops hurting, but there are times, like now, when it hurts more. “Dad. You’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I am. But have you looked at these, Pip? Not the drawings. Well, yes, those, but less his talent and more how they’re done, if you know what I mean.”
She has, in fact, looked at his drawings. All of them. They say a lot about the artist. How much he cares about everything he does. How he gives himself so generously to everyone, even complete strangers. How he trulyseeshis subjects—people, animals, creatures long extinct—in a world where a lot of people don’t bother to look, much less see.
Still.
“I don’t know if I can forgive him, Dad. Even if I could, I don’t know if I can change anything that would make a difference.”
James needs to be in England; she needs to be here. They both love their families. Neither of them is in a position to give up their work.
“Hmm,” Steve says, considering. “You don’t have to forgive anyone, Pip. I just say that because it sounds like you want to, andif there’s anything I know about my girl, it’s that she can do whatever she puts her mind to.” He reaches across the table and lays his hand on hers.
She shakes her head, eyes burning. “I haven’t achieved a single thing I’ve put my mind to or that you wanted for me. You gave up your dreams of being a paleontologist, and I got kicked out of school. I let you down, Daddy. I can’t even help you when you’re sick. I can’t give you a betterlife—”
She can’t stop her voice from breaking, because what comes aftera better lifeisa better death.
She drops her head onto her folded arms and keens out a long, high, hurt sound, the kind of sound wounded mammals have made for hundreds of millions of years. She cries harder than she can remember crying since she fell down Mr. Selassie’s front steps while selling Girl Scout cookies and knew from how much it hurt that her arm was broken and the fun was over. She cries until she feels the firm, steady pressure of her dad’s hand on her shoulder.
“Ripley,” he says, shocking her into halting sniffles.
He only uses her full name when she’s done something truly terrible. Like the time he caught her coming home from the corner store in the Charger a year after he taught her to drive stick but a year before she was old enough to get her license. Or when, at age six, she sneaked so much icing off her birthday cake that it ended up readinglappy Birthdau Ripleand he had to pay for a rush replacement on the day of her party.
“Yes?” she says, waiting for the dressing-down.
“I was never going to be a paleontologist.”
“Don’t say that,” she whimpers into the cave she’s made with her arms.
“It’s true,” he says, rubbing between her shoulder blades in theway that’s always slowed down her sobs. “By the time you came along, I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a scientist. I loved finding fossils, but the math, the picky-picky technical writing…” He makes a disgusted sound. “The professors were always stressed out. Hustling for grants. The whole business seemed awful. But, you know. A good parent tries not to crush their child’s irrational fantasies.”
A crack of wet laughter escapes Ripley’s chest. She sits up, wiping her eyes. “It is kind of awful. Sometimes. But there are good parts too. Maybe you would have figured that out if you’d kept going.”
He shakes his head. “It wasn’t for me. And even if it was, it’s not the kid’s job to catch the grown-ups’ dreams for them. It’s the other way around, sweetheart. Makes me feel like I made a mistake in there somewhere, that you’d think you had to do that for me.”
