Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [114]
EVERY SUMMER CHARLIE FLEW BACK to California to spend a week in the Sierra Nevada, backpacking with a group of old friends. Most of them were high school friends, and some of them had gone to UC San Diego together, many years before. That they and Frank Vanderwal had been undergraduates at UCSD at the same time had come up at dinner one night at the Quiblers’ the previous winter, causing a moment of surprise, then a shrug. Possibly they had been in classes together—they couldn’t remember. The subject had been dropped, as just one of those coincidences that often cropped up in Washington, D.C. So many people came from somewhere else that sometimes the elsewheres were the same.
This coincidence, however, was certainly a factor in Charlie inviting Frank to join the group for this summer’s trip. Perhaps it played a part in Frank’s acceptance as well; it was hard for Charlie to tell. Frank’s usual reticence had recently scaled new heights.
The invitation had been Anna’s idea. Frank was having an operation on his nose, she said, and if he didn’t go away afterward he would not stop working. He did not particularly like the move from NSF to the White House, she felt, but he certainly worked very long hours there. And since Rudra’s death, he had seemed to her lonely.
This was all news to Charlie, despite his kayaking expeditions with Frank—although anyone could see that the death of Rudra Cakrin had shaken him. When he showed up for the forty-nine-day ceremony, quite late—most of the gazillion prayers over, in fact—he had been obviously distressed. He had arrived in time for the part where everyone there took bites out of little cakes they had been given, then turned the remaining pieces back in, to help sustain Rudra’s spirit—a beautiful idea—but Frank had eaten his piece entirely, having failed to understand. It was always a shock to see someone one regarded as unemotional suddenly become distraught.
So, soon after that Frank had had the surgery to correct problems behind his nose resulting from his accident. “No big deal,” he described it, but Anna just shook her head at that.
“It’s right next to his brain,” she told Charlie.
They all visited him in the hospital, and he said he was fine, that it had gone well, he had been told. And yes, he would like to join the backpacking trip, thanks. It would be good to get away. Would he be okay to go to high altitude? Charlie wondered. He said he would be.
After that everyone got busy with summer daycamp and swim lessons for Nick, the White House for Charlie and Joe, NSF for Anna; and they did not see Frank again for a couple weeks, until suddenly the time for the Sierra trip was upon them.
Charlie’s California friends were fine with the idea of an added member of the trip, which they had done from time to time before, and they were looking forward to meeting him.
“He’s kind of quiet,” Charlie warned them.
This annual trek had been problematized for Charlie on the home front ever since Nick’s birth, him being the stay-at-home parent, and Joe’s arrival had made things more than twice as bad. Two consecutive summers had passed without Charlie being able to make the trip. Anna had seen how despondent he had gotten on the days when his friends were hiking in the high Sierra without him, and she was the one who had suggested he just make whatever kid coverage arrangement it would take, and go. Gratefully Charlie had jumped up and kissed her, and between some logistical help on the Nick summer daycamp front from their old Gymboree friend Asta, and extended White House daycare for Joe, he found they had coverage for both boys for the same several hours a day, which meant Anna could continue to work almost full-time. This was crucial; the loss of even a couple of hours of work a day caused her brow to furrow vertically and her mouth to set in a this-is-not-good expression very particular to work delays.
Charlie knew the look well, but tried not to