When I got back she was just getting out of the bath and came out of the bathroom wrapped up to the chin in these huge pink towels so you couldn't see anything of her but feet and face, and her hair tied up on the top of her head all wet and curly, and she said something like, You know, Jake, you're doing really well here in Paris pretending not to miss your dragons every minute and only me to keep your attention . . . and she dropped the towels. I will remember that sight of her — the long golden afternoon light through the window blinds streaming over her like golden ribbons with every curve and hollow highlighted, and the white light from the chandelier in the bathroom haloing her from behind — I'll remember the picture she made when I'm on my deathbed and die happy. Oh yes, and she liked the ring. She wears it all the time. I'm still wearing the ring Katie bought.
It's true I was really glad to see my dragons again. Even after Paris. So we got back to Smokehill and then Dad released the news and everybody outside was pissed off that we hadn't let our wedding be turned into a circus, and we went off to Dragon Central till the uproar quieted down. And then we got a cabin of our own outside the Institute — a new one (and yes, our Rangers came and sang for us, and I sang, well "sang," a little bit too because Whiteoak has been teaching me some Arkhola), beyond the fortress, which has become office and official dragon-studying visitor space, although everyone calls it The Fortress — which was great, having our own house, although we still spent most of our time at Dragon Central and Nearcamp.
We pack in some human food and a change of clothing, but that's all. The dragon caves remain dragon. Which among other things means you have to be fit and strong enough to climb up and down the dragon "stairs." They're mostly okay at Nearcamp, but the ones at Dragon Central, while they aren't as bad as I'd thought when Gulp was transporting Lois and me, are still pretty hairy for us midgets, and at the foot of a few of the cliffs I still had to ask for some tactfully-placed boulders for scrambling. Once you get to the big main fireplace room there are always plenty of shed scales if you don't feel like sitting — or lying — on rock. And warm water in the sulfur pools.
And the answer to drafts in caverns full of dragons is to a dragon. Of course you have to choose one who'll remember not to roll over on you — and you say "please" first. Bud will uolirld :c wing a little and let you — well, Martha and me — sleep under that, which is pretty amazing. A dragon wingtip is surprisingly light, but you ran IM the hot blood whooshing through it. Like sleeping under a waterbe, l. The first time we got stranded by a blizzard it was maybe a little dark — I will never learn to love windowless underground caves and purple firelight — but we were plenty warm enough. And there was plenty of toasted sheep to go around.
Sleeping with dragons is useful too — you know your brain waves change when you're asleep. You pick up dragon stuff when you're asleep that you can't when you're awake — well, I knew that, from that first time I spent with Lois at Dragon Central with probably every dragon there except Bud and Gulp (and Lois) wanting me somewhere else. But the wanting-me-out-of-there, and the mortal terror, made the subtler stuff hard to recognize. Especially through the Headache. And then in the early days of Farcamp when I was spending every minute I could get with the dragons it sometimes got to be a little too much — well, I mentioned it five years ago, about not wanting to wake up some day and discover I'd started growing spinal plates. But with Martha with me it was suddenly okay — it was good. I stopped losing being human, you know? No matter how far into the dragon labyrinth I went.
And it also makes sense, about brain waves, in a way that a lot of stuff about dragons does not. But this doesn't mean we're going to start having a human dormitory at Nearcamp, so don't bother asking. You'd never sleep through the headaches anyway.
Martha and I got married two and a half years ago. That's a really good time to remember. Back a little farther, to when I finished writing this book the last time, that isn't so good. Five years ago is about the start of the really rough year or so I had learning to let go of Lois — and her to let go of me. There's some of that starting to happen at the end of what I wrote back then.
It was sort of easier in a gruesomely traumatic sort of way than it might have been because as soon as the world found out about Lois — as soon as the tape loop with me prancing around on Bud's head started playing around the world — our lives changed so drastically that we didn't know which way was up and which way was down (although if I'd fallen off Bud's head ninety feet up I'm sure it would have hurt, ha ha). So I spent a lot of that first year after the World Found Out feeling torn apart anyway and "losing" Lois was . . . it was, as I think about it now, not even the most shocking thing, which made it worse, if you follow me, how could anything be more shocking than losing Lois? Even if all that was happening was that she was growing up and that was good?
But what happened to Smokehill — all that attention and all that money, suddenly, after we'd been this goofy fringy theme-park kind of thing — the theme being our endangered invisible but smelly dragons — counting every penny, and yeah, okay, paranoid from the beginning, but we had cause, didn't we? Whatever Eric says about what growing up as the center of the Smokehill universe did to me, it did to me what it did to me because that's how it was. And then Smokehill changed. Smokehill changed. Lois and I were just the detonator for the Big Bang and the new universe. It was not so surprising that we lost each other in the process . . . even if we were going to have to lose each other anyway. So that Lois could have the life she should have. And I could have a life at all.
Well, you don't need to know a lot about that, and if Eric's right, then I don't really want to tell you about what even I know isn't me at my best, but it's one of those things I feel I should mention, because it's a big thing.
So by the time Martha and I got married Lois was spending most of her time at Dragon Central, which meant she was spending at least a major minority of her time without me, and she'd had a growth about a year after we met Gulp so the idea of touring her died the death a lot more easily than it might have if she'd stayed little longer (although a couple times a year we still get some enterprising head case who wants to provide the specially designed airplane to carry a dragon, and take us around to all the football fields in America, but Dad gives 'em short shrift). And then Martha and I did get married and after that it was a whole lot more okay that Lois had her own dragon family and her own life without me.
We still don't know where Lois actually fits in the family, by the way. The weird thing is that as the new post-Big-Bang hierarchy settled down, Lois got kind of taken over by Gulp while Bud kind of took me over. Oh, Lois and I saw and see a lot of each other, a lot by anybody's standards but ours, and when I was with the dragons she turned up pretty fast and stuck pretty close, and sometimes at first she still came back to the human world with me for a little while.
Grace — and Eleanor — who rarely got out to Farcamp, were always really glad to see her, although "glad" is easier to identify with Grace. Eleanor tended to say things like, "The bigger you get the more you smell." Or, "Nobody's going to respect a pink dragon. I hope you're going to turn green or something soon." Although I think it wasn't only that I understood what the words meant that I was the one who got pissed off when Eleanor said stuff like this. Eleanor gets better at aggravating me as she gets older. And Lois isn't really pink anyway. Not pink pink. Also I tell myself that Eleanor is just developing useful skills by practicing on me and it'll all be worth it when she hits the campaign trail and makes hash of her opponents during the debates ("and furthermore you smell.").