know. She told me.”
“Sometimes I think she fantasizes that you’re her dad.”
“Oh, no! She wouldn’t do that.”
“Why wouldn’t she? You and your wife—married for years!—make a home for her where everything that’s important to her happens. My home is just where she visits. It makes me sad.”
Francis wanted to avert his eyes. He felt much too vulnerable to be getting into this.
She reached across the table, took his hand as if she’d known him for years. “I’m grateful. To you and your wife. In loco parentis. That’s the phrase, isn’t it? Can’t do that and also find time to be the head. Maybe that’s what Lila meant.”
“Thank you,” Francis murmured. He didn’t know how to tell her it was not what Lila had meant.
“Well, give me a minute to say goodbye to my daughter.” She let go of his hand, and stood and put her dark glasses on again. “Then join us in the driveway, and I’ll wave goodbye to both of you.”
She went out to the driveway to help her daughter put her things in the car. Lila was already finished when she got there. Lila closed the trunk of Francis’s car and turned to hug her mother. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “Thanks for everything.” She meant thanks for escaping. And thanks for letting me go.
Francis was coming down the driveway now. He said, “I guess we’d better say goodbye,” and he and Lila got in the car and closed the doors, and her mother leaned in through the window and said goodbye again. Francis backed the car out of the driveway, and Lila waved to her mother, who lingered in the driveway. She knew her mother would go straight to her studio—and smother her loneliness with her work.
HOURS AND HOURS later, Lila barreled the dented yellow Chevy down Route 80 in Nevada, and Francis sat in the shotgun seat watching her out of the corner of his eye. Her two sturdy arms reached forward, her hands gripped the steering wheel, she stared straight down the road. She drove just like Marjorie Boyd, he thought: Everything gets out of the way. She was going someplace, this kid, blasting forward toward some passion that she would ride on for a lifetime. He thought of Siddy, his son, so different, wandering in Europe, tasting everything, circling, and lonely suddenly, he riffed on the fantasy that Lila’s mother had planted: that he and Peggy had adopted Lila too, Siddy’s younger sister by five years, and the two kids were telepathic, they didn’t need words to understand each other at the core.
He wondered if Lila remembered how much she had disapproved of herself when she arrived at the school three years ago—for her tallness, her thick legs, her braces. Now she liked her tallness, she thought her sturdy legs were just fine, and her braces were gone. In a coed school Lila would be one of the girls whom the boys didn’t want to date. At Miss Oliver’s she was president-elect of the student council; she would have more influence than many of the faculty.
“It’s weird how things happen,” Lila finally said without turning her head. Neither of them had said a word for miles. “If some little man, an archaeologist with a funny name, didn’t show up at school in February and give a speech, I’d still be in Denver now with my mom instead of here.”
“I didn’t think it was a funny name,” Francis said. “Livingstone Mendoza, what’s so funny about that?”
Lila smiled at his little joke. “I knew the minute he started to talk that I was going to sign up,” she said.
“Me too,” Francis murmured, remembering the little man, almost as small as Father Woodward, standing at the lip of the stage, promising that they would find the remains of the village that was there on the side of the mountain for thousands of years before the Europeans came. “So they could see what the Ohlones saw,” he had said, “maybe even dream their dreams.” Blue work shirt, dark tie, brown corduroy pants, and hiking boots. Mendoza’s intensity had made up for his small size, and his voice had filled the auditorium.
“How could I have spent three years at our school and passed up this chance?” Lila asked. “Three years thinking about, and then pass up this chance to be.”
“I guessed that you would sign up,” Francis said. “It didn’t surprise me. Though quite a few of the people on the faculty thought he was a phony. Or a lunatic,” he added, remembering Mendoza’s telling them that the Ohlones were not just outnumbered by the animals but by every species of animal, and claiming in a kind of chant that “if we put one of you and one of them side by side in their world, you would see emptiness and would despair. They would see the majesty of First Things, the nearness of God.”
For the first time, Lila took her eyes off the road, glanced at Francis. “But not you?” she asked. “You didn’t think he was a phony?”
“No, not me.”
“Why not? I mean, he was kind of intense. Sort of overboard.”
Francis hesitated. He’d concede Mendoza’s funny name, but he didn’t think he was overboard at all.
“Like, you’ll be three thousand miles away from home for two months, away from your wife and the school.”
“Yeah, it’s a long way.”
“So why’d you come if it’s so far away?”
“I’m only gone for the summer,” he said, thinking of his conversation with her mother. “You’re away from home from September to June.”
Lila frowned, took one hand off the wheel to push her blond hair away from her forehead. “Now you’re acting just like my mother,” she said. “Whenever she doesn’t want to tell me something I want to know, she changes the subject.”
“All right,” he said, giving in. “It’s like this: Once when I was a little kid, I was fishing with my dad.” He began to speak very fast now that he’d discovered he was going to tell her this amazing thing. “In a canoe. And a huge turtle swam up to the surface of the lake. Came right up beside me where I was in the bow of the canoe. He looked right at me, looked me right in the eyes.” He stopped talking suddenly, aware of how foolish he sounded.
“And you looked back at him,” Lila finished.
“Yes.”
“And then he went away?” Lila’s voice was very quiet.
“Yes. And then he went away.”
“You recognized each other,” she announced, and now he was surprised at how matter-of-fact her voice was. “He chose you,” she said. “He’s your totem. From out of the time when the earth was here and human beings were not.” All Francis could think about was how different this kid’s reaction was from Peggy’s when he tried to tell her what this moment meant to him.
“Thanks for telling me. I know you better now,” Lila said. “I’ve always wanted to know you. Now I do. Thanks.”
LATER, IN A campground near Winnemucca, Lila waited for sleep to come. She’d rather have been out under the stars, but Francis had insisted she put up her tent and sleep in it. Afraid some crazy rapist would come through. “Who knows who comes to public places like this?” he’d asked. Speaking like a dad! He was in his tent too, not far from hers. She imagined she could hear his breathing over the noise of the big trucks on Route 80 half a mile away. She shivered with
