A Different Kind of Summer

Her phone number, for one thing. The thought came out of nowhere. He had no business wanting her phone number. “The gift shop has a very good book about the mammoth, if you’re interested. Pictures. Maps. Discussion.”

“Does it? Thank you.”

A dismissive smile and she was on her way. She had no intention of going anywhere near the book. Why did she bring the boy to the museum so often if she didn’t want him to understand how the world worked?

They trailed out of the room, the boy speaking in an anxious tone that made it impossible for David to continue feeling guiltless. He’d drawn some conclusions from his brief look at the hibernation display.

“Mom, if we got buried in snow I guess we’d be all right. Because bees and mice and gophers are all right deep down in the snow.”

“There won’t be an ice age, Chris. That’s what the man said. We won’t be buried in snow. Not ever.”

She was good at conveying a mother’s certainty. What she didn’t seem to realize was that her son had grown beyond being helped by it.

THE BOOK David Whoever had recommended was displayed near the front of the gift shop, all one hundred glossy pages of it, with unnecessarily detailed and colorful photos of the frozen animal and its stomach contents. Hard cover. Forty-eight bucks. Gwyn flipped through it, trying to decide if it would be forty-eight dollars well spent, or just an invitation to sleepless nights for Chris.

“Can we go home, Mom?”

Gwyn looked at him with concern. He liked the gift shop almost as much as the museum itself. Since the store’s glow-in-the-dark star charts had first held his attention when he was two she’d found most of his birthday and Christmas presents here. “Sure we can. Don’t you want to get lunch in the cafeteria first?”

He shrugged.

“Just home?”

His shoulders came up again. He looked miserable. Gwyn led him out of the gift shop, wishing that David person could see what he’d done. Chris had nothing to say on the ride home, only showing a spark of interest when she whispered in his ear, “How about Johansson’s?”

They rode a couple of blocks past their usual stop, and got off near a small brick building on the river side of the street. Johansson’s Fine Foods carried gourmet treats, locally grown produce and homemade take-out meals for when people had no time to cook. It had its own small bakery, too, where it made the richest desserts Gwyn had ever tasted. It was a place for special occasions or emergency spirit lifting.

As she’d hoped, the display case of chocolates got Chris’s attention. He considered a dark chocolate car, a milk chocolate hammer and a hazelnut hedgehog, then settled on the one she’d suspected he would, a six-inch-high hollow tyrannosaurus that cost as much as a restaurant lunch.

“Do we want anything else? Oysters?” His head shaking and face screwing increased as she went on, “Snails? Squid?” She looked around the store, hoping to keep going until he laughed. “Parsnips? Fennel bulbs? Oh—”

Strawberries. Tiers of strawberries in pint containers. Picked that morning, the sign said. No pesticides. They were small, lusciously red and smelled sweeter than any berries Gwyn had seen in her entire life. They hardly cost less than the dinosaur chocolate, but she put a pint on the counter anyway, along with two bottles of a fizzy orange drink from Italy that she’d tried before and loved.

“We’d better stop there. My purse is empty.”

Chris looked up from his chocolate, his gaze sharp. Gwyn wished she hadn’t said anything about money.

“Don’t worry. There’s more in the bank. And even more waiting for me at work.”

Outside, pansies grew in window boxes and there were a few round tables by the sidewalk. Gwyn picked a spot partly shaded by a boulevard tree and put the berries in the middle of the table. With all those seeds and hollows she usually scrubbed berries until they were almost jam, but she put her faith in the no pesticides claim. She picked the one on the very top and popped the whole thing in her mouth. Biting into it was a revelation. It was like taking a drink. She couldn’t believe how fresh, how sweet, how juicy the berry was. She looked at Chris, his feet swinging slowly, a faraway expression on his face.

“You’ve got to have a strawberry, Chris.”

Still holding his dinosaur in his right hand, he took a berry with his left. “Mmm.” He took another.

“That’s the taste of sunshine,” she told him.

He frowned. Space was one of his favorite things, and he took it seriously. “The sun is made of gas.” He watched her for a moment, looking ready to argue if she had anything else silly to say. She confined herself to eating berries, and his attention drifted.

Hers did, too. Back to the damp-legged man at the museum. He must be new. She didn’t remember seeing him before, and she couldn’t have seen him and forgotten. It was years since she’d noticed a man, noticed in a way that made looking at his chest to read his name tag uncomfortable. That kind of feeling—the sudden awareness, the catch in the throat—she had thought belonged only to Duncan.

Of course Duncan had noticed her at the same time. He’d given her a slow smile that started small and got bigger until his eyes sparkled. That was it for her, she was a goner. David Whoever, on the other hand, had chosen to talk about mammoth steaks.

Chris was still playing with his dinosaur. He walked it along the table, leaving tiny chocolate footprints on the plastic. It sniffed the berries, and growled, then picked a fight with a paper napkin. Maybe he hadn’t found the museum visit as upsetting as it had seemed. He looked like her pre–DayAfter Tomorrow Chris, all about animals and space. Thanks to the strawberries and the filtered sunlight she felt more cheerful herself.

“That dinosaur’s headed for extinction,” she said when she noticed the footprints getting bigger and stickier. “You’d better eat it while you can.”

Chris bit off its head. He chewed and swallowed, then licked his fingers.

“Well,” he said slowly, after finishing another mouthful, and from his preoccupied tone she knew he hadn’t been thinking about dinosaurs after all, “people live way up north where it’s always winter.”

She had to remind herself not to mention elves or toy shops. “The Inuit.”

“In igloos.”

“I don’t think they live in igloos anymore.”

“But they did. So we could keep warm and get food even if our house was ice.”

She’d never seen so much uncertainty in his eyes. “We can do anything we have to do, sweetheart. But our house will never be ice.” She put the remaining strawberries and drinks back in the shopping bag and handed Chris a napkin to rub the melted chocolate from his hands.

On the way home he went back to telling her the plot of The Day After Tomorrow. She listened more to his voice than to the story. It was higher pitched than usual and every sentence finished with an uncertain upswing, an unasked question. Maybe it would help if they spent the afternoon reading fairy tales. “The Little Mermaid,” “Hansel and Gretel.” He’d heard those often enough without believing they were true. Or maybe a complete change of pace would be better. They could go to the park and try to skip stones on the river.

“That man was a scientist, right?”

She saw the pitfall immediately. “The one who talked to us at the museum? I don’t know what he does there.”

“The actor wasn’t a scientist and the screenwriter wasn’t a scientist but the man we talked to today, he was a scientist.”

“We don’t know,” she repeated. “All kinds of people work there. Even artists, to make the displays. And accountants to work on the budget.”

Chris gave her another of those looks. She didn’t blame him. David Whoever hadn’t sounded like an artist or an accountant. She tried to think of something more convincing. “And tour guides.”

“And scientists, I bet.”

She had to agree. Scientists definitely worked at the museum. Distracting Chris with stories and outings wasn’t going to work.

CHAPTER THREE

TWELVE-THIRTY, and Chris wasn’t ready for school. Wearing only Spider-Man briefs, he stood on top of a brand-new shirt in the middle of his bedroom. A narrow line of red trickled down his heel.

He looked at Gwyn guiltily. “I’m bleeding.”

It was almost a week since their visit to the museum and Gwyn was still wishing they hadn’t gone. She’d tried to keep Chris’s days low-key. They’d walked along the river, curled up on the sofa reading and played games like Snakes and Ladders, but nothing had kept his attention from the idea of an impending ice age.

The point he’d fixated on was that the frozen mammoth from the movie was real. If it was real then maybe other parts of the story were, too. Like the field of ice that collapsed under one of the “scientists,” like glaciers melting and filling the oceans with too much fresh water. If he wasn’t miserable enough trying to get his five-year-old head around those questions, Mrs. Henderson—following Gwyn’s instructions—had encouraged him to play outside a couple of evenings ago, but she had ignored the bottle of mosquito repellent kept by the door. Chris was covered with bites.

He had been cantankerous all morning, scratching fiercely and challenging Gwyn at every opportunity. After falling asleep in the rocker on the porch she wasn’t in the best of shape herself. At five-thirty she’d woken to crickets so loud she couldn’t believe there wasn’t a bylaw against them and a monster kink in her neck that no amount of massaging had fixed.