Part 21 (1/2)

”That night in Guatemala,” he said. ”I guess I just got scared off. I didn't want to fight anymore. We were always fighting.”

”I know,” I said. ”I'm sorry.”

A series of loud pops erupted outside, followed by shouts and laughter. I turned to see a group of teenage girls heading toward Mission, setting off firecrackers in the street. They wore identical black dresses and dark red lipstick, their hair slicked back in pony-tails. At that moment, as if she could sense my gaze, one of the girls turned, met my eyes, and slowed down. I waved at her, and she waved back.

Henry sipped his coffee. ”You seem different.”

”Different how?”

”You were always so nervous, fidgety, always looking over your shoulder.”

”And now?”

”I don't know. You've relaxed.”

”That's another thing I'd forgotten about you.”

”Hmm?”

”You could always see right into me. It made me uncomfortable. You knew me too well.”

”That's a bad thing?” Henry asked.

”At the time, I thought it was.”

We sat for a minute or two in silence, watching the police set up barricades for the parade.

”Remember that time?”

”Yes.” I knew that he was talking about the night, several years ago, when we took part in the Day of the Dead procession-his idea.

”You looked good in your skeleton suit,” he said.

”Did I?” I laughed.

I remembered that the white makeup made my face feel tight. And I had carried a picture of Lila in my pocket. I'd taken the photo with a little point-and-shoot camera at the stable in Montara, not long after she got Dorothy. I'd forgotten to turn off the flash, and in the photograph, Dorothy is startled by the light, rearing up. Lila is leaning forward, hanging on, but she doesn't seem the least bit scared. She looks as if she's having the time of her life.

”Do you remember that picture?” I asked.

”Of course. You put it on the altar. And then, as we were walking away, you took it back.”

”You saw that?”

Henry nodded.

”Why didn't you say anything?”

”I figured you had your reasons.”

”After I put the photograph there, I changed my mind. I didn't want to give her up, even if it was just a picture.”

Through the open door, I could feel the evening growing cooler. The light was fading. ”You were right,” he said finally. ”This should be my trademark coffee. It's amazing.”

I reached across the table and took his hand. He seemed startled, but he didn't pull away. His blue eyes were so unusual, so beautiful. It was the first thing I'd noticed when I met him; I imagined it was the first thing everyone noticed. How could they not? In certain kinds of light, his eyes were so pale they appeared almost clear. Sitting there, I considered the unlikely genetics, the strange combination of his parents' chromosomes that conspired to give him his most striking feature. For my entire adult life, I had believed what Miss Wood, my high school biology teacher, had told me: that one day such eyes would be gone, a distant memory of a faded civilization. Blue eyes resulted from recessive genes, Miss Wood had said; because of this, one day they would no longer exist. One day, the world would be filled with nothing but brown-eyed people, the dominant gene running its course, taking over the planet. It was the doom of mediocrity, she said, dominant genes battling the recessive genes until one day every human would be the same.

I had never really questioned Ms. Wood's reasoning, accepting it like so many other wrong things I learned in high school. And so, for years, with Henry, I always looked into his eyes with a bit of melancholy, a.s.suming that our children would have no chance of inheriting his eyes. They were like a beautiful, pale light coming from a star that had died many years earlier.

Only recently had I discovered that Miss Wood had misunderstood one of the most basic and most important tenets of biology. It was McConnell who explained this to me, during that conversation in his room in Diriomo a couple of weeks before. ”You look so much like her,” he had said. ”Except for your red hair, of course.” And in response, I had said something about how, one hundred years from now, red hair would be obsolete.

”Not true,” McConnell had said. And he'd gone on to tell me the story of the biologist Reginald Punnett, who believed that recessive genes would continue to recur in the population at a steady rate, indefinitely. Unable to come up with any science by which to prove his theory, Punnett turned to his friend, G. H. Hardy. According to Punnett, Hardy thought about it for a few minutes, and then quickly scribbled a simple, elegant equation which proved Punnett's theory beyond doubt. Punnett was amazed. He immediately suggested that Hardy submit his work for publication. Hardy was hesitant at first, believing that such a problem must have already been solved and that it was not his place, as a mathematician, to propose work in a field so completely foreign to him.

”Ultimately,” McConnell had said, ”Hardy relented and submitted the work that is now known as the Hardy-Weinberg Principle and is taught in all of the more reputable high schools and colleges around the world. Blue eyes, red hair-they'll be around as long as humans are. It's a huge deal in biology, but when he wrote his famous A Mathematician's Apology, he didn't even bother to mention it.”

Now, for the first time, I looked into Henry's eyes and felt none of that old melancholy. A hundred years from now, Henry's great-grandchildren might look at photographs of him and understand exactly where they got their beautiful blue eyes.

”Why are you smiling?” Henry said.

”No reason.”

For a couple of minutes we just sat there. I remembered what Don Carroll had told me-”a perfect match is almost as rare as a perfect number.”

”That day at the office,” I said. ”You were about to tell me something, and then Mike walked in. Remember? I'd just asked if you could tell, the first time you met me, what exactly would do us in.”

He leaned closer, wrapped my hand in both of his. There was no hesitation in his voice, and I wondered if he'd been waiting, all this time, to give me an answer. ”When I was a kid I always had this dream where my father finally bought me this bike I'd been desperate for-it was one of those Schwinn five-speeds with the choppers in the front. It was dark green, and it was called the 'Pea Picker.' Anyway, in the dream, whenever I reached out for it, it would start rolling away. I never did catch it. In Guatemala, it occurred to me that you were like that bike. You were there with me, but then you were also just slightly out of reach.”

”So, I'm the Pea Picker?”

”Well...”

More noise in the street, more firecrackers, but this time, neither of us turned to look.

”Do you know the story of the constellation Lyra?”

He shook his head.

I told Henry the tale as Lila had told it to me that night thirty years before. I told him about how Orpheus had gone to the Underworld to bring his wife, Eurydice, back from the dead, and how, in the last moments, he had broken his promise to the G.o.ds and turned back to look at her. ”When he looked at her, she slipped away,” I said. ”After Orpheus died, Zeus tossed his lyre into the sky, forming the constellation Lyra.”

”Sad story.”

”Yes,” I said, ”but the actual facts are rather unsentimental: Lyra has a right ascension of 19 hours and a declination of 40 degrees. It contains the stars Vega, Sheliak, Sulafat, Aladfar, Alathfar, and the double-double star Epsilon. Four of Lyra's stars are known to have planets. The best time to view the constellation is in August.”

Henry smiled. ”I'm not sure I follow.”

”The whole thing about Orpheus and Eurydice, how he made this crucial error and lost her forever-it's just a story. You can take it or leave it. Stories aren't set in stone. It took me the longest time to realize that.”