the play of morning light and shadows on her face, on the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She knows this face nearly as well as she knew her mother’s, before Addie grew so gaunt, if still achingly beautiful, over the past few months, and she knows this comfortable old house nearly as well as she knows the cottage on Haupt Bridge Road. No wonder Addie wanted to die here, she thinks now, with Cora’s soothing presence filling every room—the smells of her baking, the fresh salt air blowing through her windows, the dark glazed surfaces of her pots and vases and mugs, beckoning one to grasp and stroke.
And for a moment she is ashamed of her peevish reaction to Addie’s asking to be brought here, six weeks ago. “Why not at home?” she’d whined to Tom. At the time she’d felt strangely jealous, reluctant to share both her dying mother and Cora in this way.
“So somehow we got going on animal reproduction,” Cora says, “and suddenly we were back in Tom’s class, learning about k-selected and r-selected species. Do you remember when we used to talk about that? We would tease Addie when you were four or five, and she would say she couldn’t imagine sharing her love with any more children. ‘You’re the ultimate k-selected mom,’ Lou would say, missing the point about species of birds altogether, of course. But Addie loved that. ‘Yes!’ she’d say, ‘I’m a wood warbler! Sharing the planet, taking less space, only taking what my child and I need. No competitive exclusion principle, no intraspecific competition for me!’ ”
Cora seems lost in the memory. “Then Lou would say, ‘But watch out for that Tom, he’s a strutting blue jay, don’t you think? Don’t blue jays have babies everywhere and then leave them to fend for themselves? Or is that grackles? Cowbirds?’ ” Cora isn’t a particularly good mimic, yet Scarlet can hear Lou saying this, the edginess, the whiff of sarcasm always there in her voice.
“Addie’d correct her,” Cora goes on. “ ‘No, no,’ she’d say. ‘Cowbirds are brood parasites. Which just means they don’t build their own nests. They leave them for someone else to raise.’
“And then one of us would make that silly joke about phoebes. ‘For phoebes! They leave them for the phoebes!’ ” Cora’s eyes are dancing now, glittering. “ ‘Phoebes are acceptors!’ And we’d all cackle then because of course at Burnham there was a girl named Phoebe we didn’t like, and so we all scribbled that down in our notes right away the day Tom said it in a lecture, and then after that, every time we saw that poor girl—well, I say ‘poor girl,’ but really she was a horrible snob, truly a nasty person, it was more her nastiness that bothered us than her reputation for sleeping with everyone on the football team—every time we saw her, we’d whisper, ‘Phoebes are acceptors—oh yes, phoebes are acceptors!’
“And then we’d howl. Just like a pack of twelve-year-olds or something. Good Lord.” She laughs a little sadly and wipes her eyes.
Scarlet smiles; she has heard this story many times, and she’s always loved it—this image of Addie and her friends being trivial and petty, human. A side of Addie she rarely saw. The whole idea of Tom as a strutting jay is mysterious to her, though. Scarlet has always been puzzled by this view of her father, the notion that he was the restless one, the one prone to wander. An Irish rover. That seems to have been his image, in lots of people’s eyes, but it’s always seemed to her that it was Addie who grew restless, not Tom.
Cora is staring at the table, still picturing the past. “Of course at this point Lou would be off and running, making some off-color joke of some kind, something about cowbirds and deadbeat dads. Something racist or something, you know, faking a Southern drawl. ‘Down where ah come from they like to say the cowbirds live over there, over on that side of the tracks.’ As if she lived in the heart of Alabama or something, instead of the suburbs of Washington.
“She’d do it to get your mother started, of course. And it always worked. ‘See?’ Addie would say. ‘That’s what scientists do. Make so-called impartial observations and then let the rest of the world go to hell with them, segregating schools, dropping bombs, dumping chemicals all over rice paddies.’ ”
Scarlet shimmies out of the sleeping bag she’d kept wrapped around her legs; the sun is growing brighter, reaching in to warm the porch. “She’d say things like that even back then, even that early on?” she asks.
“Oh, sure. I was always glad Karl wasn’t around to hear her, working up steam and maligning everybody from Einstein to Oppenheimer. Never mind that the whole thing started with our completely distorting scientific terms to suit our own ends. K-selected species are just animals that mature later and care more intensely for their young because they have to compete more for resources. ‘K’ and ‘r’ are just mathematical symbols that zoologists use to talk about animal populations. As far as I know, they’ve got nothing to do with how many children a human mother decides to have.”
Cora smiles, a little sheepishly. “I’m amazed I still remember that,” she says. “See how well your father taught me? Anyway, understand that we were just joking around back then. We’d all be laughing the whole time—even Addie. Back then.”
“Right,” Scarlet says. “That was the difference, wasn’t it?”
Eventually Addie didn’t find it funny anymore. Scarlet too can remember her mother’s raging against what she called k-selected humans acting like r-selected beasts, squandering resources, sending their young off to die in wars. Tom had always hated it when she’d used scientific theory like that. Turning science into sociology, he called it.
“Tom has always said that scientists are far more optimistic than artists,” she says, remembering her parents’ endless debates. “He’s certainly more of an optimist than Addie was, which I guess isn’t saying that much. More optimistic than I am too—as he’s always reminding me. ‘Poets, painters, musicians, all of them—artists are horrible cynics beneath that pretty facade,’ he says.”
“And what do you say when he says things like that?” Cora asks. She is staring pointedly at Scarlet.
“Oh, I usually just agree with him.” Scarlet feels tired of this conversation suddenly, unnerved by Cora’s curiosity. Actually, I think I may be more of a cynic than even Addie was, she considers saying, but doesn’t. And that frightens me, now.
“You know,” she says instead, maybe just to change the subject, maybe because of all the questions she herself has now, “all those conversations and jokes about k-selected species always kind of puzzled me. Maybe this was just a kid’s egotism, but it always seemed like those remarks were somehow about me. About the fact that Addie and Tom didn’t have more children, about how everyone assumed I was dying for a brother or sister. And I didn’t really see why. Or was I missing something?”
Cora looks puzzled. Understandably, Scarlet thinks; she knows she’s being vague. She takes a breath and tries again. “I guess I’m asking if there was more going on there. More than Addie’s personal quest to save the planet, I mean—you know, doing her part to stem the tide of overpopulation.” She pauses again, but still there is no response from Cora.
“Okay. Here’s what I’m asking. Did Addie want another child, maybe? Or, maybe I’m asking this: Did having me make her decide she really didn’t want more children? Was it all too much somehow? Was there some kind of secret I never got to hear about?” Scarlet stares at Cora now, forcing herself to stop, to hold back from revealing more than she’s ready to reveal. She tries to decipher the look on Cora’s face. Is it changing subtly? Is there some hint of realization there behind her furrowed brow?
After a moment Cora shakes her head slowly. “No, no,” she says. “No secrets that I know of.” She continues to stare at Scarlet, her eyes full
