Robin's Eye

We have plenty of time. We’re taking the mountain roads, the ones that cut through topography like the slow sinews of a snake, coils lying stacked on top of each other. We have a cooler in the trunk with peanut butter crackers and apples and sodas.

Outside is blue, watercolor blue. It’s hard to believe the eyes I was given can capture the whole landscape at once: rolls of earth pillowing a violence of shrubbery and trees, sky, rushing water below. I’m still eight, and the world is grander than I know how to describe. I’m learning coniferous in science, but evergreen is so much lovelier. I want a word that lasts forever, and at least it tries. 

Bear’s in the front seat. He tells me I can’t sit there yet, that I’m too small. I bridle. I want my legs to grow longer, so I can stand up to airbags and height requirements at Disneyland.

Ten minutes up the slope are the broken guardrail and the cow crossing sign that someone spray-painted over. We stop there and throw pebbles over the side of the mountain before Dad tells us not to, sharpening his voice like the midgets of sticks Bear presses and peels against his knife. His voice grows noise into an avalanche, rolling like waterfalls we were promised in pamphlets. Bear yells back once he’s twelve. His voice is spindly and cracked.

Back in the car we sit sullen and uncomfortable. I’m reading French fairy tales because Mom got the book for a dollar, and she promised I’d like them. I don’t think she’s ever read them. It’s hard to read because I’m carsick and because my eyes are still scratchy and dry from crying. The book has scratches in the margins, and someone who held a pen more mightily than a sword crossed through the last paragraphs of every chapter, so I’m left hanging off a cliff.

The lake is the next stop. That’s where Mom gets out her art supplies and paints very badly, but it still makes Dad smile. Bear chases me around the shoreline and promises monsters and giant sea snakes in the muddy brown water. I’m eleven when I finally show him my book of facts and fables, and point to the section on the Loch Ness Monster. I tell him about the purported sightings, and how there was never any proof to begin with. Bear tells me if I like my book so much I can spend all my time with it, and goes off with heavy feet.

Mom calls me over to look at the easel. It’s me, she says.

It’s a brown blob with a splatter of red on its chest—no, not blood, she insists. See, she’s written Robin in the corner. The paintbrush is too thick for writing, so all the paint has bled and made it hard to read.

I keep the paper crumpled in the pocket of the car door. The colors start to fade over time, and Robin, which began muddy and indeterminable, runs into a blob.

Dad drives like he's racing the switchbacks to the top. He swerves when a car comes down around a corner. The road’s barely big enough for two cars side by side, and not big enough at all for two cars trying to hog the middle of the road. He takes up too much space, and plays music too loud. I see Mom wince.

The rain starts with a crackle in the clouds. It falls sharp and fast, not like the gentle rain back at Grandma’s house in Oregon. I can see how the asphalt of the road has become all cracked, caving under the demands of a relentless sun and a rain that knows it only has a slim chance to make its mark. I’m fourteen when Bear goes to school and sends me pictures of the parks, the green grass. I send back mountains and fierce rain, and he doesn’t say I miss you.

I miss him anyways. The backseat is quieter.

Dad talks about his project and incompetent coworkers, and Mom listens. I wonder if she stopped painting because she started seeing the world in the frame of reality, of numbers and spreadsheets, the way he paints it in every conversation.

At last she cuts in: if you’re so busy, why did you say we should come here? Do you wish you stayed at home to work?

He snaps. Don’t be ridiculous.

Time buckles, bends under the weight of his calendar. Time runs off the back of the mountain and pools in the valleys, in the cities where the people are. A lonely backpacker with his head in the air and a green bandana around his neck has no watch or sundial: just the shadows of midafternoon.

I’m sixteen when Dad makes me drive. He’s on the edge of the seat, but I crawl around the corners because I don’t want to be surprised by something I can’t see. Eventually he sits back and his tone builds and builds: go faster, Robin. It’s okay. You won’t hit anyone. I retreat into myself and clutch the wheel like a safety net, but the car isn’t big enough for me and my terror.

We pass campgrounds. A cabin slouches into disrepair, broken windows and a dumpster with a broken lock and trash scattered all across the ground. Summer rains sear new paths into the ground. Trees scorch in wildfires, and branches snap black and lie dead.

Bear comes back to laugh at the way I ride the brake. Mom’s at home trying to build a business out of her jewelry and art. She stays up late at night peering at her website in the dark, screens of blue reflected in her glasses. She sends us links and lots of question marks and emojis, and Dad shakes his head and chuckles and doesn’t answer. He blames the way signal comes and goes on the mountain, like currents in the air.

The air is thinner here, after all. You step outside and feel it curl against your lip, feel the way it trails with the absence of water.

I ask Dad if we can listen to my music, and he jokes that I should have left him behind if I wanted to listen to that banjo crap.

Bear and I stand at the trailhead near the top of the mountain. We lean on the guardrail and look out across the expanse of open hills, romping together like lambs and caving as water wends in between. He tells me about his girlfriend. I’ve never met her.

We don’t have time, but we take the detour to Grandad’s favorite spot. It’s just me and Mom this time. She has streaks of gray in her hair, highlighted by the light that’s starting to glitter and burn on the western edge of the sky. She tells me about how he brought her here when she was a little girl, but that was before he went off to the Vietnam War and came back mute. Now these moments have to be shared in fragments, in silence, in sunsets shared together.

There used to be a swing here. I remember it from when I was five. That’s the only memory I have of Grandad: him pushing me back and forth, my legs sawing through the air, the sound of my giggling. Bear stood stolidly and watched because he was too old to swing.

When Mom and I get back in the car, it’s starting to get dark.

As the sky turns violet, the way a sheet grows darker under a stain of water, headlights appear from far down the mountain. They glow like stars filtered through the canopy of trees. The last clouds melt away, and Venus rises sharp, an eye for an eye.

Dad’s sick. I call him when I phase through the little village near the top of the mountain and my signal comes back. His voice is hoarse, and he tells me that he’s about to go to bed. Love you, he says gruffly. Hope you’re safe.

Bear goes back to school and straggles to the bottom of his class. I hear all about the late-night parties and skipped classes and the games of football with his friends.

Mom’s trying something new. Since the jewelry store didn’t work out, she thought she’d work at a local craft store and spends her days measuring out fabric. She’s going crazy bottling her creativity under the projects and ideas of other people.

The audiobook about Nelson Mandela ends as I crest the top of the mountain, headlights shining paths across the unbroken dark of the muddy road. The grass on either side is tall and crackling, and last time I was here I saw a cow wandering by itself. The insects sing a nocturne for me and me alone.

I set up my tent in the place hollowed out by the weight of twenty summers. My music is soft, and my hands are already tired: I left home too late, and the drive was too long. There’s a rip in my sleeping bag, I notice. I need to buy a new one when I get home.

Bear always told ghost stories starting can you believe, but I’ve forgotten what the name of the mountaintop ghoul was. He’ll be asleep, and there’s no signal: too late to ask now.