A Different Kind of Summer. Caron Todd
what?” she could imagine her saying. “Leaning? How silly!” When her father came in they’d go over the conversation again. He’d give her a hug and tell her what a great mom she was.
It was harder to know how Duncan would react. They’d barely lived together. Never been parents together. What would he think about his son drawing Earth over and over, fifty times, more? All she could picture was him laughing or wrapping his arms around Chris, or both, and the problem going away.
Not like the man they’d run into by the mammoth painting. He’d made it worse.
Without noticing, she’d gone past her house all the way to the corner. A bus was coming. She decided to zip downtown, tell that David person what he’d done with his measured voice and his kind expression, and zip back before school was out.
She fumed all the way to the museum. At the admissions booth she described the man she and Chris had met during their last visit and was directed to his office. She followed the arrows to the administration section, then walked along the hall reading name plates on doors, stopping when she got to D. Bretton, Ph.D. Climatology.
Ph.D. He could still be wrong.
The door opened almost as soon as she knocked. There he stood, taller than she remembered, eyes darker. After a look of surprise, he smiled. It was a very friendly smile and for a moment she wished she was more disposed to like him.
“They said at the front it was all right for me to come through to the offices.”
“Of course. My door’s always open.” He glanced at it, so recently closed, and gave a little shrug. “Figuratively.”
“My son and I were here about a week ago—”
“On Saturday, looking at the mammoth painting. What can I do for you today?”
Too many answers all involving Chris, his drawings and his weather watching jumbled together in her mind. One emerged. Take back what you said. She waited until something more sensible occurred to her. “It’s about our conversation that day.”
He stood back from the door. “Come in, sit down. I’ve made a fresh pot of coffee. Cream or sugar?”
“No, thanks.”
“Just black?”
“I mean no, I won’t have coffee. But thank you.”
It was a small office, crammed with books, papers, boxes and file cabinets. Three computer monitors sat on the desk, all turned on and showing what she thought were radar and satellite images: colored, swirling shapes, one over an outline of North America, another Europe, the third Asia. Behind his desk a map of Canada nearly covered the wall. Red-tipped pins were stuck in from the western border of Alberta to the eastern border of Manitoba. A few were scattered in the north, and in the central parts of the provinces, but they were concentrated heavily in the south.
“Tornadoes,” Bretton said.
“We’ve had that many?” There were hundreds of pins. Maybe thousands.
“Not all lately. Since 1868.”
“Still—”
“People are always surprised when they see the map. We’ve had more but because so much of the country is sparsely populated they’re not all reported.” He filled his cup, then held the pot in the air. “You’re sure?”
“No, thanks.” Now that she’d got a whiff of the coffee she wouldn’t have minded a cup, but this wasn’t meant to be a friendly visit.
“It’s shade-grown,” he said, as if that might tempt her. “Knowing rain-forest trees haven’t been cut down makes me feel good about ingesting caffeine.” He smiled. Every time he did that she had to remind herself she didn’t want to smile back. “It makes me feel it’s my duty to drink a whole lot more.”
“I prefer tea.”
“Regular or herbal?” He began looking in containers beside the coffeemaker, then in a couple of desk drawers. “I usually have tea bags. My mother must have used them. We should be able to find you something—”
“Dr. Bretton, really, I don’t want a drink.”
“No? I guess you would have gone to the cafeteria if you were thirsty.” He leaned against a filing cabinet, mug in hand. “But you didn’t. You came here.”
“When we talked before you mentioned a change in the weather.”
“In the climate, yes. As I recall, it was unwelcome information.”
“Unwelcome?” He didn’t need to be so relaxed about it. “How could you scare a little kid like that?”
“I didn’t mean to scare him.”
“You basically told him the world as we know it is doomed!”
“Is that what I did?”
“Excessive warming, glaciers melting, permafrost thawing…”
“I’m sorry if I upset you and your son.” He made a wry face. “Driving people from the museum in a panic isn’t part of our mission statement.”
“We told you about the movie he saw, didn’t we?”
Bretton nodded. “When it first came out it stimulated a lot of questions.”
“Why would it? It was a fantasy.”
“A what-if scenario.”
“What if something impossible happened, you mean?”
“There you have the central question. How impossible is it?”
Now he was being silly, or intentionally annoying. She stood straighter and spoke firmly. “Here’s the central answer. Completely. It’s completely impossible. In spite of that it frightened Chris. We came here to reassure him, to help him separate fact from fiction.”
“That dawned on me a bit late. Our goals are different—”
“You like mixing fact and fiction?”
This time his reply didn’t come as quickly. “I’m here to give people information regardless of its power to reassure.”
He sounded so calm. Scientists sounded like that on TV, too. Even when they were talking about galaxies colliding or the sun fizzling out. What about the children who were walking to school when one of their nifty theories happened?
Angrily she said, “I suppose you’re looking at the big picture. The entire biography of planet Earth—”
His face perked up. “That’s a great way to put it—”
“The mammoth had its moment in time and we’re having ours? To everything there is a season? Do you realize that’s not comforting to a five-year-old?”
“Five! I thought he must be a really little eight.”
She wasn’t getting anywhere. Either she wasn’t saying what she meant or he wasn’t listening. “Everything you told us on Saturday about the climate…Chris has connected it to this frozen, doomed animal, to the doomed people in the movie.”
“I didn’t say humans were going the way of the mammoth. Not yet. We don’t anticipate that sudden or extreme a change.”
A tight knot formed in her stomach. He was doing it again. The kind eyes, the friendly face, the frightening message. “You don’t have kids, do you?”
“I work with them every day. Lots of them. All ages and personalities.” He smiled. “And I vaguely recall being one.”
“Maybe you should try to recall it more clearly.”
His smile faded. “I haven’t missed the fact that you’re angry with me.”
“I’m not—well, I am—but this