I stood over the terrarium and peered down into it from above, like a god. The fish hung motionless in its small lake. Droplets of condensation were forming on the underside of the glass top. Getting ready to rain in there. I'd grown fond of this miniature world, along with the kids, and had added my own touches: a clump of bright red toadstools that popped up in Emelina's courtyard, and a resurrection fern from the cliff behind my house. The terrarium was like a time capsule. I think everybody was trying to save little bits of Grace.
I slid the glass to one side, hating to disrupt the ecosystem but needing to feed the fish. The humid smells of mud and moss came up to meet my nose, and I thought of Hallie in the tropics. What would she do about these troubles if she were here? Well, stay, for one thing, whereas I wouldn't. I had come here with some sense of its being the end of the line, maybe in a positive way, but I found I had no claim on Grace. Seeing it as "home" was a hopeful construction, fake, like the terrarium. I'd deal with Doc Homer insofar as that was possible in one year, and then I'd rejoin Carlo, or think about another research job; I had no specifics in mind. My future was mapped in negatives. Next year I could be anywhere but here.
I'd told Hallie about my bold, ridiculous little deposition on the pH of the river, and a few days later I'd had to follow up with the news of the river's getting dammed-questions of pH being entirely academic. I felt humiliated. Eventually she wrote back to say: "Think of how we grew up. You can't live through something like that, and not take risks now. There's no getting around it." She was admonishing me, I guess. I should have more loyalty to my hometown. I wasn't brave; I was still trying to get around it. A good citizen of the nation in love with forgetting. I pelleted the surface of the water with goldfish flakes. In nature there are animals that fight and those that flee; I was a flighty beast. Hallie seemed to think I'd crossed over-she claimed I was the one who'd once wanted to dig in and fight to save the coyote pups. Emelina thought I'd been ringleader in campaigns to save stewing hens. In my years of clear recall there was no such picture. When Hallie and I lived in Tucson, in the time of the refugees, she would stay up all night rubbing the backs of people's hands and holding their shell-shocked babies. I couldn't.I would cross my arms over my chest and go to bed. Later, after my second year of med school, I'd been able to address their external wounds but no more than that.
The people of Grace would soon be refugees too, turned out from here like pennies from a pocket. Their history would dissolve as families made their separate ways to Tucson or Phoenix, where there were jobs. I tried to imagine Emelina's bunch in a tract house, her neighbors all keeping a nervous eye on the color coordination of her flowerbeds. And my wonderfully overconfident high-school kids being swallowed alive by city schools where they'd all learn to walk like Barbara, suffering for their small-town accents and inadequate toughness. It was easy to be tough enough in Grace.
Well, at least they'd know how to use condoms. I could give them that to carry through life. I settled the glass lid back over the terrarium and turned out the lights. I would be long gone before the ruination of Grace; I had a one-year contract. Now I'd made sure of it.
Rita Cardenal called me up on the phone. She hesitated for a second before speaking. "I don't think your old man has all his tires on the road."
"It's possible." I sat down in my living-room chair and waited for her to go on.
"Did you tell him about me? About dropping out?"
"Rita, no. I wouldn't do that."
Silence. She didn't believe me. To Rita we were both authority figures-but at least she'd called. "My father and I aren't real close," I said. "I go up to see him every week, but we don't exactly talk." A pregnant teen could surely buy that.
"Well, then, he's got a slightly major problem."
"What did he do?"
"He just sorta went imbalanced. I went in for my five-mouth checkup? And he said the babies were too little, but he was all kind of normal and everything?" She paused. "And then all of a sudden he just loses it and gets all creeped and makes this major scenario. Yelling at me."
"What did he say?"
"Stuff. Like, that I had to eat better and he was going to make sure I did. He said he wasn't going to let me go out of the house till I shaped up. It was like he just totally went mental. He was using that tape measure thing to measure my stomach and then he just puts it down and there's tears in his eyes and he puts his hands on my shoulders and kind of pulls me against his chest. He goes, 'We have to talk about this. Do you have any idea what's inside of you?' I got creeped out."