The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

water?”
    “Not as I noticed, but there was a bunch of ‘em and I couldn’t keep an eye on everybody. If you want to check your old stuff, the box is still there, back of the Buick.”
    Curious and unsettled, I excused myself long enough to step into the unheated garage.
    The box he was talking about contained unsorted detritus from my high-school years. Yearbooks, a couple of academic awards, old novels and DVDs, a few toys and keepsakes. Including, I noticed, the brass Statue of Liberty I had brought home from New York. The green felt base was frayed, the hollow brass body tarnished. I picked it up and tucked it into my jacket pocket. If there was anything missing from this assortment, I couldn’t place it. But the idea of anonymous FBI agents rummaging through boxes in the garage was chilling.
    Beneath this, at the bottom of the box, was a layer of my schoolboy drawings. Art was never my best subject, but my mother had liked these well enough to preserve them. Flaking water-based paints on stiff brown paper the consistency of fallen leaves. Snow scenes, mostly. Bent pines, crude snowbound cabins—lonely things in a large landscape.
    Back in the house my father was nodding in his chair. The coffee cup teetered on the padded arm. I moved it onto the table. He stirred when the telephone rang. An old handset-style telephone with a digital adapter where the cord joined the wall.
    He picked it up, blinked, said, “Yeah,” a couple of times, then offered the receiver. “It’s for you.”
    “For me?”
    “You see anybody else here?”
    The call was Sue Chopra, her voice thin over the old low-bandwidth line.
    “You had us worried, Scotty,” she said.
    “It’s mutual.”
    “You’re wondering how we found you. You should be glad we did. You caused us a lot of anxiety, running away like that.”
    “Sue, I didn’t run away. I’m spending the afternoon with my father.”
    “I understand. It’s just that we could have used some warning up front, before you left town. Morris had you followed.”
    “Morris can fuck himself. Are you telling me I have to ask permission to leave town?”
    “It’s not a written rule, but it would have been nice. Scotty, I know how angry you must feel. I went through the same thing myself. I can’t justify it to you. But times change. Life is more dangerous than it used to be. When are you coming back?”
    “Tonight.”
    “Good. I think we need to talk.”
    I told her I thought so, too.
    I sat with my father a few more minutes, then told him I had to leave. The faint daylight beyond the window had faded altogether. The house was drafty and smelled of dust and dry heat.
    He stirred in his chair and said, “You came a long way just to drink coffee and mumble. Look, I know why you’re here. I’ll tell you, I’m not especially afraid of dying. Or even of talking about it. You wake up, you read the mail, you say to yourself, well, it won’t be today. But that’s not the same as not knowing.”
    “I understand.”
    “No you don’t. But I’m glad you came.”
    It was an astonishing thing for him to say. I couldn’t muster a response.
    He stood up. His pants rode low on his bony hips. “I didn’t always treat your mother the way I should have. But I was there, Scotty. Remember that. Even when she was at the hospital. Even when she was raving. I didn’t take you mere unless I knew she was having a good day. Some of the things she said would peel your skin. And then you were off at college.”
    She had died of complications of pneumonia the year before I graduated. “You could have called me when she got sick.”
    “Why? So you could carry away the memory of your own mother cursing you from her deathbed? What’s the point?”
    “I loved her, too.”
    “It was easy for you. Maybe I loved her and maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember anymore. But I was with her, Scotty. All the time. I wasn’t necessarily nice to her. But I was
with
her.”
    I went to the door. He followed a