moist brown eyes of yours. I used to love it when Max had to be out of town and he asked me to babysit you—he said I was there to house-sit so that you wouldn’t be offended and think he thought you couldn’t take care of yourself. But it was the same then: when you’re especially happy or sad—or scared—your eyes have the same beguiling quality your father’s eyes have, did you know that?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But all that stuff about ports and loneliness—what was that all about? Some perverse way of… of…?”
“Stuck for words, Charlie?”
“Let’s just forget it, okay?” I said. I picked up the check. “Let’s just forget it and blow this joint.”
“Do you have one?”
“Very funny,” I said. “But you know what?”
“What?”
“You’re not that funny,” I said. “You’re weird—I’ll give you that—and—like some of the characters in your books—with a distinctive mean streak. For sure. But you’re not funny.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.
A short while later, in the car, Seana fell asleep, her head against the window, a rolled up sweater for a pillow. She snored lightly, her mouth open, and I tried to stay angry at her for making me believe, if only for a moment, that my father was living on borrowed time, but then it occurred to me that maybe he really was, and that when she saw my reaction, she had changed course.
I wondered, though: What difference did it make if I knew for sure—if he knew for sure—if he and Seana knew for sure, or if none of us knew anything? I tried to imagine what he might do if he did know—if he’d make any changes in the way he lived, and decided he wouldn’t, which was when I realized that the idea of getting rid of the unused parts of his writing life might have come from the knowledge—and fear—that he wouldn’t be here much longer, though a second later this led to the thought that the tag sale might have only been what it was: the kind of thing Max did now and then for no other reason than that he felt like doing it.
North of Portland, I turned off the main highway—Seana was awake now, but quiet—and took a detour west toward Naples so we could swing by the place where I’d gone to summer camp as a kid—Camp Kingswood—and where I’d been a counselor the first two summers I was at UMass. I’d been to Maine a bunch of times in the years since I’d been a camper and counselor there—Nick and Trish were married in Maine, and the year Nick and I graduated from UMass, we’d gone up there and had a wild few days with a group of friends, eight or ten of us, partying, drinking, and screwing our asses off.
Now, seeing Camp Kingswood again—leaves gone from the trees, you could see the old bunk houses, and the lake beyond, the lake calm, flat, and steel-gray in the autumn chill—I found myself telling Seana about how, starting with my first summer there, I’d fallen in love, not so much with Maine’s lakes or coastline, but with its trees, the evergreens especially—pine, hemlock, juniper, and, my favorite, Norwegian spruce.
What I’d loved about Maine, I said, was what I’d come to love about Borneo, even though the two landscapes had hardly anything in common, and that was how thick and deep the forests were, along with my sense that they were still—evergreen and hardwood here, tropical forests there—the way they might have been millions of years ago.
I talked about the different kinds of mangroves in the coastal regions of Borneo and how their root systems looked like tangles of swollen spider webs, and I talked about peat swamp forests, and how they could burst into flame spontaneously, or be set on fire by people clearing them, and how the fires could rage over hundreds of acres for months at a time and were almost impossible to extinguish because so much of the burning went on below ground, in the deepest layers of the peat. And I talked about forests I’d been to on my most recent visit to Kalimantan—Dipterocarp forests—probably at the same time Seana had been moving in with Max. About every four years—I’d been lucky enough to be there when it happened two years before—the onset of dry weather conditions, combined with El Niño, resulted in an extraordinary explosion of color, where tens of thousands of trees in these forests, many of them a hundred and twenty or thirty feet high, and any single one of them bearing four million flowers, burst into bloom. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.
“Four million?” Seana said. “You counted?”
“Estimated,” I said.
“But these trees are dying—they’re being logged away to make room for your palm oil plantations, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Palm oil was used in the making of napalm, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So you are a shit,” she said.
“Probably. Still, I was wondering if you’d like to visit the forests with me and get to see them before they’re gone?”
“Sure,” she said. And then: “‘ Death is the mother of beauty,’ right?”
“Max used to say the same thing—a line from a poem, right?”
“‘Sunday Morning,’ by Wallace Stevens—I heard the lines from Max the first time too. But you say you don’t feel guilty?”
“About what?”
“About taking pleasure from seeing the beauty of these forests because you know they’re dying.”
“What good would guilt do?”
“Actually,” she said, “and take it from an Irish girl who knows about such matters—when it’s not self-destructive, guilt can be a splendid muse.”
“In some places I’ve been to in Borneo,” I said, “there can be more than seven hundred different species of trees in a twenty-five acre plot, which is more than the total number of tree species in the United States and Canada combined.”
“Impressive.”
“It’s one reason—being able to get to Borneo easily and often—I’ve stayed at the job in Singapore.”
“And you’d go there—to Borneo—if you knew you were dying, yes?”
“Yes.”
Seana was quiet for a while, after which she said she’d come to the conclusion it would be a good idea if I was the one who wrote Charlie’s Story, that she liked listening to me talk—to what she called the sweet, innocent timbre of my voice—and that maybe I could make this voice work on the page.
“I’m not as smart or talented as Max,” I said.
“Neither am I.”
“Not so,” I said.
“Well, who knows, Charlie?” she said. “But you do have the main thing most writers begin with: you loved to read when you were young. Because no matter what other reasons writers may give for why they write, most of them, in the end, will tell you that what made them want to be writers was that they loved to read when they were kids, and that they wanted to be able some day to write books that would be for others
