“Those yours that were just twirling?” asked Scully.
“That’s what we call ‘windmilling.’” I said. “A new version called ‘Indian windmilling,’ to be exact.” They were being Indians because we’d gone to an Indian museum the day before. They had been patient for about six and a half minutes while my wife and I had looked at pottery and masks and tried to point out things like the symmetry that Kelly had just learned about in school. But as soon as we looked away for a minute, Kelly had built a fort with brochures, and Emmett kicked it over, and she began to screech. I didn’t explain all this to Scully.
Now they came out with my wife, Lena, and so I extended something in the way of introductions. Emmett grabbed onto Lena’s leg. Scully got down on one knee and clapped mittlike hands over Emmett’s tiny ones, as if he’d been getting holiday cards for years and was finally getting to meet him. When Scully released them, Emmett stuck one in his own eye.
“What did we say about that?” I said.
“Wha-ha-hut?” he whimpered.
“What did we say about putting fingers in eyes?”
“I don’t kno-ho-how. . ”
I absently told him he did know, but my attention was back on Scully now. Moving in height order, he’d risen slightly to greet Kelly next, and then made a sweeping mock-chivalrous gesture before rising fully to greet my wife. Around us, people called out to one another, milling every which way. I was trying to watch them all, like I might see someone else I knew, someone who could rescue us. Scully must’ve said something amusing — whatever it was, it made Lena smile. I smiled, too, and then the three of us made a big triangle of grinning. In his smile, I could see his chin’s firmness, its compactness; somewhere over the years, his gelatinous fleshiness had melted away.
We made our way over to the display cases. In front of the crouching skeleton of a bear with a pinched, angular cranium, I hoisted Emmett up for a better view, but he started to kick, so I put him down. It was gift shop time. Scully was showing the kids something, lecturing them about bears, from what I could gather. I watched peripherally while glancing through a couple of calendars and coffee table books about Glacier and the Continental Divide. All the picture books were alike — they were all gorgeous, but who could stop to buy one when the real thing was right behind you? One caught my eye and sucked me in, though, about the Going-to-the-Sun Road: The Pride of the Park. That road had induced two main reactions in me. Yes, I was in awe of the engineering acumen that had created a fifty-two-mile (83.69-kilometer) road at a steady 6 percent grade through a forbidding mountain range between 1921 and 1932. But that awe had turned to queasiness as the air thinned out. My ears had stopped up, and I’d heard my own voice go reedy and remote. Now, glancing at pictures, the sensation came charging back, this time made worse by the bombardment of crowds, lines, and the steady clang of the cash register.
All at once, a lot was happening: Scully was chatting with the girl behind the register, Lena had a pocket-size book on wildflowers, and Kelly came jangling through with a set of bear bells. To Kelly, I said, “Okay, but I don’t want to hear those the whole way down.” Then, to Lena: “How many times will we use it, though?” Kelly began to moan, “How could there be no food here?” Lena shrugged and went to put the book back.
Immediately I regretted the words, feeling like they’d come from some machine and not me. I knew what this trip meant to her. I hadn’t until we’d moved into our new, larger place in Brooklyn and unpacked photo albums that she hadn’t looked at in years. In the midst of all the boxes, she’d stood in a state of suspension, flipping through the binders. I’d peeked over her shoulders, loving her for her gappedtooth smile, her swimsuit, her stick with its impaled marshmallow, all against the backdrops of various rented campers. Her family had crossed the country a dozen times but somehow had never made it to Glacier. Then there were the college pictures — posing with the Outdoors Club at an elevation marker, even rappelling up the side of a cliff, something she’d done a couple of times. It didn’t exactly fit into our lifestyle, climbing up rock walls, but every so often I wondered whether she resented having filed that part of herself away.
“You know what? Get it,” I said.
“No, no, you’re right. It was an impulse thing.”
I went to pay for everything else, and Scully leaned over and whispered something to the girl behind the register. She nodded and handed me too much change, and then with a wink she said, “Not to worry — you got the discount.”
“Thanks,” I said hastily. My heart was pounding like in an anxiety attack. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I clapped my hands, rallied the troops. “Let’s step outside, how ’bout? Get some of that mountain air, what we’re here for.”
It was a relief, that air, as soon as I opened the door. We descended the stairs to an overlook with a railing, and I tried to look casual leaning against it. And there was Scully, still with us, no intention of letting this be a fleeting run-in. He was talking to the kids, pointing. “So, the Continental Divide, huh? Place where the rivers flow in different directions. Where the weather systems change. Two completely different weather reports up here in Glacier, one east and one west.”
As he held forth, he gestured toward the side of a mountain across the road. The air was clear, but in my mind it began to shimmer like those pyramids Lena and I had visited in Mexico on one of our first vacations. Striations of rock alternated with clumps of plants, making it look like something made, with stairs leading up to the flat top. Now I recalled how tawdry and giddy that trip had made us, how it had made us want to clamber up and strip in the Yucatán sun. When we’d gotten back to New York, Lena had announced that she thought she was pregnant, but then her period came along a couple of days late. We chalked it up to the water. Suddenly that felt like a long time ago.
“So how is it that you know each other?” asked Lena.
“Ah!” Scully laughed. “Class of ’89, is it? I don’t exactly think of myself as an alum of the illustrious ‘Tompkins Tech,’ but they did give me a diploma.”
“Wow,” said Lena. “Small world.” She started explaining it to the kids. “Remember the school we visited, the time we drove by Daddy’s old school and pulled over to look? Remember?” Kelly’s “Yes” sounded dazed, and Emmett was curled up near the railing like the marmot we’d seen at one of the turn-offs on the way up. Kelly had singsongily dubbed him “Emmett the Marmot,” and I was on damage control, since I’d been the one to point out the resemblance.
Scully said, “I do my best to avoid thinking about that place. And I do a pretty darned good job!” He laughed. Then, like he was about to embark with us on a private tour, “So. . the Continental Divide, huh? Family vacation?”
“You guessed it,” I said.
“How long you out for? I take it you’re still in New York?”
“Six days,” I said. “Not long enough. Then we head for Seattle to see their aunt and uncle, my brother. Then back in school come Labor Day, of course. She’ll be starting the second grade. Emmett’s going to be in nursery school. Yes, to answer your question, we’re still in New York. We made it to the Slope, though,” I said, and then added, “Park Slope.” I looked around. The mountains made Flatbush Avenue feel like the Visitor Center’s handicapped-accessible ramp.