Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [115]
“This will be good for Frank,” he would say. “That was a good idea you had.”
“It’ll be good for you too,” Anna would reply; or she would not reply at all and just give him a look.
Actually she would have been completely fine with him going, Charlie thought, if it were not that she still seemed to have some residual worries about Joe. When Charlie realized this by hearing her make some non sequitur that skipped from the one subject to the other, he was surprised; he had thought he was the only one still worrying about Joe. He had assumed Anna would have had her mind put fully at ease by the disappearance of the fever. That had always been the focus of her concern, as opposed to the matters of mood and behavior which had been bothering Charlie.
Now, however, as the time for the mountain trip got closer and closer, he could see on Anna’s face all her expressions of worry, visible in quick flashes when they discussed things, or when she was tired. Charlie could read a great deal on Anna’s face. He didn’t know if this was just the ordinary result of long familiarity or if she was particularly expressive, but certainly her worried looks were very nuanced, and, he had to say, beautiful. Perhaps it was just because they were so legible to him. You could see that life meant something when she was worrying over it; her thoughts flickered over her face like flames over burning coals, as if one were watching some dreamily fine silent-screen actress, able to express anything with looks alone. To read her was to love her. She might be, as Charlie thought she was, slightly crazy about work, but even that was part of what he loved, as just another manifestation of how much she cared about things. One could not care more and remain sane. Mostly sane.
But Anna had never admitted, or even apparently seen, the Khembali connection to the various changes in Joe. To her there was no such thing as a metaphysical illness, because there was no such thing as metaphysics. And there was no such thing as psychosomatic illness in a three-year-old, because a toddler was not old enough to have problems, as his Gymboree friend Ce-celia had put it.
So it had to be a fever. Or so she must have been subconsciously reasoning. Charlie had to intuit or deduce most of this from the kinds of apprehension he saw in her. He wondered what would happen if Anna were the one on hand when Joe went into one of his little trances, or said “Namaste” to a snowman. He wondered if she knew Joe’s daytime behavior well enough to notice the myriad tiny shifts that had occurred in his daily moods since the election-day party at the Khembalis’.
Well, of course she did; but whether she would admit some of these changes were connected to the Khembalis was another matter.
Maybe it was better that she couldn’t be convinced. Charlie himself did not want to think there was anything real to this line of thought. It was one of his own forms of worry, perhaps—trying to find some explanation other than undiagnosed disease or mental problem. Even if the alternative explanation might in some ways be worse. Because it disturbed him, even occasionally freaked him out. He could only think about it glancingly, in brief bursts, and then quickly jump to something else. It was too weird to be true.
But there were more things in heaven and earth, etc.; and without question there were very intelligent people in his life who believed in this stuff, and acted on those beliefs. That in itself made it real, or something with real effects. If Anna had the Khembalis over for dinner while Charlie was gone, maybe she would see this. Even if the only “real” part of it was that the Khembalis believed something was going on, that was enough, potentially, to make for trouble.
In any case, the trouble would not come to a head while he was out in the Sierras. He would only be gone a week, and Joe had been much the same, week to week, all that winter and spring and through the summer so far.
So Charlie made his preparations for the trip without talking openly