Wow. I think I've managed to kill my own thread.
COOL.Anyhow: Nothing to see here, folks. The mellowness continues. Contentment (uncharacteristically, I know) holds sway. Those waiting for all hell to break loose--
-- heh!--
-- may feel free to linger in the lobby.
(For a moment or two, anyway....
)
*****
When they flew, he trusted her implicitly. If Cassie wasn’t worried, Capa wasn’t worried. On a regional jump-flight from San Diego to Sault Ste. Marie, they crossed the Rockies in a pocket of low pressure, just cresting a seventy-thousand-foot-high mountain of storm clouds, and next to her Capa saved his comments for the address he was to give for the opening of the new science facility at Northern Michigan U, shut off his data pad, rested his head against his seatback, and closed his eyes with a sigh. He took his clues from her. His face was peaceful, his expression utterly trusting.
Fine, Cassie thought, smiling affectionately, as thunder rumbled through the cabin. She shut her book-- a tattered paperback copy of
Tess of the d’Urbervilles-- leaned up, switched off her reading lamp, rested her head near Capa’s, and drifted off to sleep.
*****
On the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, resurrected sun or no, winter still dictated her own schedule in the month of March. It was sleeting when their flight landed, and they ducked their heads against the cold wet pelting as Marjory Capa ushered them, post-hugs, after Capa had loaded their bags in the back, into what his mother had affectionately named the Behemoth, a big black hydrofuel SUV, not a rich man’s toy but a working beast, a vehicle essential to her career as a field med-tech with the Michigan State Police, muddy and tending toward rust and sensibly low-slung on its nubbly tires, which said automotive monstrosity was at present parked illegally on the wet pavement just outside the sliding glass doors of SSM International’s main terminal.
“Where the hell’s Charlie, you two?” Marge asked of her son, seated and reaching for his seatbelt in the back, of her daughter-in-law, likewise belting herself in in the front.
“Told you, Mom: late August, early September. That’s when we’re bringing him.” Capa leaned forward, against the draw of his shoulder-belt, to plant another kiss on his mother’s cheek. “The baby’ll be along then, too.”
“Right.” His mother shot a sharp, brown-eyed glance between the two of them, her son and his wife. “So what’s it to be? Boy or girl?”
Cassie exchanged a sly look with Capa. “Yes,” she said.
Marjory sighed. “Still want to play it the hard way, eh?” Behind the Behemoth, a cab sounded its horn, its driver obviously not buying into the idea that luggage-loading, teary greetings, and prolonged embraces constituted official police business. “Okay, okay--” she muttered, glaring in the rear-view screen, “-- we’re
moving.”
*****
“Thought this was all in the past,” Capa said, looking out at the snowy forest, the fields of white spiked with brown tufts of grass, as they drove. Despite the fact that he’d grown up here, the snowiest region in the continental United States, where winter could last six months or-- in his young lifetime, when the sun had begun to fade-- even more, his tone suggested that for him, now, March meant the buds and tender green of spring.
Marjory Capa glanced at her son in the rear-view screen. “This is normal now, honey. You know that. Winter still comes; sometimes it lingers.”
Capa settled back against the seat, smiled at the close-cropped hair, as dark as his but glinting with gray, on the back of his mother’s head. “I know, Mom.”
“Going soft, living in California, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Soft-staters,” Marjory echoed gently, smiling. She glanced at Cassie, at the dark coat covering her belly. “How’s it coming? Been sick much?”
“No,” Cassie replied. “I’m lucky that way. Think it comes from being a pilot. I’ve never been prone to stomach trouble.”
The slightest of frowns flickered on Marge’s brow, a mother’s uncritical concern. “Do they still have you flying now?”
Cassie shook her head, looking out through the wet ice splotching the windshield. “No. I’m on administrative leave for the duration. They have me training recruits.”
“That’s good.”
“It is, actually.” Cassie smiled. “I get first crack at all the latest sims. It’s like being paid to take a continuing-ed course.”
“Is Dad teaching today?” Capa asked, as Marjory steered their black rumbling monster onto Seventh Street, the main entrance route to the Northern Michigan campus.
“Believe he’s lecturing in Jamrich,” his mom replied, easing into a slushy left turn. Cassie watched out the side window. Snow on the ground, banked against red brick buildings. Multi-paned windows on stories above and below, reflecting squares of gray daylight. A dense population of tall trees, currently bare, catching triangular pockets of snow and sleet in the crooks of their black branches. Students in boots and heavy shoes, in a rainbow of parkas and jackets and caps, shouldered messenger bags and lumpy backpacks as they jostled down the wet sidewalks.
“They’re expecting me to check in at Seaborg around two. That’s right next door.” Capa looked at his watch. “I’ve got time--” He leaned forward, between the front seats. “Want to stop and say hi to Dad, Cass?”
Cassie smiled. “Sure.”
******
From his mother, Capa had inherited the color of his hair, the generous set of his mouth, his compact frame. Nearly everything else seemed to come from his father. Taller by possibly four inches than his boy, John Capa might have been his son’s fair-haired older brother. As a family, they were, he liked to say, a combination that did not occur in nature: John came from a line of blonde, blue-eyed Hungarians; Marjory’s family were brown-eyed southern Irish. The name Capa itself was an invention on the part of an overworked if dourly pragmatic Ellis Island clerk some two hundred years earlier, who’d seen fit to trim a thicket of Magyar consonants and syllables down to something more manageable. This led their early neighbors in the United States, mostly immigrants, like John’s great-something grandparents, from Budapest, to wonder how a nominally Italian family that spoke perfect Hungarian had come to settle in their midst; John himself still spoke his ancestral language, and half a dozen other languages besides. He loved words. He spoke English with a clipped but gentle precision, an old-school clarity that was well suited to the lecture hall.
NMU was not a large school. Nestled (or huddling, depending on how one viewed the big lake’s tempestuous temper) on the south shore of Lake Superior, it had nowhere near the student population of the mega-universities, the nation’s large public colleges. When Cassie walked in ahead of Capa, through the half of a double oak door that he politely held open for her, John Capa was holding court over possibly three dozen students, scattered in half-desks on the hall’s Formica tiers. Cassie gleaned, from Capa the elder’s elegant voice and from the glowing touchboard spanning the breadth of the wall behind him, that Milton was the subject of the day.
Paradise Lost.
Or found, given the expression on Professor Capa’s face as he followed the looks of his students to the two trespassing in his lecture. He made no effort to hide his delight.
“Robert--! Cassie!” He greeted both of them openly with hugs; he lingered over Capa, holding his son close for a moment longer, maybe, than propriety before a university class might dictate. But Cassie, watching, seeing the hint of tears in John’s eyes, the trace of wonder that tempered his happiness, understood exactly how he felt. Less than two years ago, they’d both believed Robert Capa lost, dead and gone. Having him back could still feel like a miracle.
“My son, Robert,” said Professor Capa, finally releasing Capa and turning to face his class. “Those of you with a taste for scientific trivia might remember him: he lobbed a bomb into the sun a year or so ago.” Chuckles from the tiers; Capa himself smiled, stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets, shuffled in amiable embarrassment. His father gestured toward Cassie. “And his wife, Lieutenant-- no, it’s ‘Captain’ now, isn’t ?-- Cassidy.”
Cassie looked out at the class as Professor Capa did. “Captain,” he said, “Robert. Welcome to Jacobean Literature two-oh-one.” He flicked the sleeve of his jacket, a tweed in taupe and gray, away from a slim wristwatch with a black rectangular face. “We’ve just over forty minutes to go.
Paradise Lost, books nine and ten. Would you care to sit in?”
Capa looked slightly alarmed. “I, uh--”
“I’d love to,” Cassie said, truthfully.
“Please, my dear: have a seat.” To his son, John Capa said, “I imagine you have associates waiting for you in one of the science buildings, Professor Capa.”
“You imagine correctly, Professor Capa,” Capa replied.
“Then you may make good your escape, sir.” More privately, John added: “You can meet us in my office when you’ve finished.”
“Are you still in Gries Hall?”
“Mm hm. One-oh-eight.”
“I’ll see you there.” Capa leaned in, kissed Cassie on the cheek. “Have fun.”
Cassie squeezed his hand. “I will.”
She made her way up into the tiers, exchanging smiles and hellos with John Capa’s students as she went, while Capa’s father saw him to the dark double doors. She was just seating herself, watching as Capa turned to leave, when a young woman called out: “Professor Capa?” A clarification, as both Capas turned: “Robert--?”
Cassie turned toward the source of the voice; most of the rest of the class did, too. One young man pointedly did not. He had light brown hair and very pale skin; he was long and thin in old jeans and a red sweatshirt that might once have shared a wash cycle with something that bled in blue, and he was writing in longhand in a spiralbound notebook. He was slouched in his desk at an angle that made it seem as though he were trying to push away from the words he was setting down.
The girl herself, the owner of the voice, was standing. She was very thin, very beautiful, also pale (as Cassie was reminding herself, given where and when they were, that was to say on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan just easing clear of winter, a profuseness of “pale” only made sense). Her hair shone a deep gold in the light of the overheads; she was nineteen, possibly twenty, years old.
Capa frowned up at her politely. “Yes?”
“Who may sit at God’s right hand?”
“I, umm--” Understandably, Capa looked more than a little caught out. He shook his head. “I’m sorry-- uh, this isn’t exactly my area of specialty--”
“The Son,” Cassie said. Her voice sounded too loud in her ears; it echoed off the auditorium’s white walls. But Capa looked up at her with open relief. She smiled at him. “Only the Son. Anyone else commits the sin of pride by doing so. Or by attempting to do so.” She looked to Capa the elder a little shyly, suddenly self-aware, for confirmation. “Roughly? Approximately...?”
“You have your answer, Miss Markham,” John Capa called up to the blonde girl. “Brief but fairly accurate.”
Capa was still looking at Cassie.
Thank you, he mouthed.
“Miss Markham wrote a paper earlier in the unit in which she-- creatively-- set the
Icarus missions side-by-side with the malfeasance of Lucifer,” Professor Capa continued. “Very interesting reading.”
“Perhaps you’d like to see it,” said Miss Markham, still looking down at Capa.
The malfeasance or the paper? Cassie felt her nape-hairs stir. The girl was flirting, and that was bad enough, even if Capa, by his cool expression, was having none of it: something very awkward, very odd, was happening here--
“Thank you; I would. Cass, could you--”
“You can leave a copy of it with me,” Cassie said to the girl, catching her attention as Capa slipped out the door.
“I’ll do that,” the girl said. Her eyes were a deep shale gray set with sparks and cold focus. Cassie nodded to her politely and settled into her seat. Below and to her right, seemingly paying no heed, the young man with light brown hair was working, pushing words with the brisk muscularity of a sketch artist, not a writer, onto the pages of his notebook.
*****
“The Sisyphean ascent toward spring,” John Capa intoned, watching from the window as the sleet outside turned to snow. “Sometimes there are setbacks.”
He turned toward the interior of the long, high, cozy cavern he called his office. On the scarred battlefield of his ancient oaken desk, Cassie was stirring sugar into a large cardboard cup of tea.
“No refreshments
in situ,” he’d said, steering her from their slushy walk westward, toward the tea cafe in the student service center. “We’ll need to stop.”
He’d bought tea for himself and for Cassie, and a cup of coffee for Capa, on the off chance that he reached Gries Hall before they did. He bought the morning’s remaining two croissants and two scones from the bakery case, too. Cassie caught him looking approvingly at her boots as they continued on their way: California might be her preferred abode, but she was still military-minded, and sensible at any rate, and she understood the virtues of Thinsulate, waterproofing, and freeze-proof soles.
Now she was breaking a piece from one of the scones while John Capa tried unsuccessfully to find his radio. A Vivaldi oboe concerto was playing from
somewhere on one of his lower bookshelves--
Cassie laughed, watching him peer behind, around, beyond clutter, stacks of papers, the spines of books double-parked on the heavy wooden shelves. Befuddled, he looked amazingly like Capa.
“John, don’t bother. It’s nice.”
“I know, I know--” He made a move almost like a pounce for the spot behind the waste basket beside his desk. The radio wasn’t there. “I’d just like to know where it hides itself. I’d swear the thing is sentient....”
“Come on: your tea’s getting cold.”
John Capa scratched the back of his neck, absently smiling his son’s bemused smile as he abandoned his search. From its secret somewhere, the radio played on.
*****
He took from the shelves books, papers, monographs, portfolios, and folders. Professor Capa brought the resulting stack to the desk, and Cassie cleared a starting spot and moved their cups. Then they stood shoulder-by-shoulder and looked over the treasures he’d acquired since her last visit to Marquette, careful with the food and drink, though nothing was of museum quality (any mint-condition volumes and editions were in his library back home, though even those weren’t solely for reverence or show: in John’s mind, printed matter was meant to be handled, read, and enjoyed). He chuckled as Cassie, mesmerized, brushed crumbs from a lithograph.
“You should finish your degree.”
She smiled. “I’d like to.”
“Do it. There aren’t many of us left, you know.”
She knew what he meant without having to ask. Words spoke differently from a printed page than they did from a screen. Their tones were richer, their timber more mellow, their cadences more graceful. Try as he might-- and she knew he tried, for her sake-- Capa couldn’t absorb that. Graciously, he admitted as much. It was a gulf between them, if a minor one and harmless: he no more understood her love for fixed type than she understood more than half of what he’d write on a touchpad, working through an equation.
She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if I married the wrong one.”
“Stop right there.” John sipped his tea. “You know the rules, Cassandra: this being my office, all flirting rights are, by default, mine as well.”
Cassie looked at him devilishly. “Who said I was flirting...?”
“Oh, God-- I caught you. I
caught you.”
They turned. Capa was standing in the doorway, his face stricken, a hand vise-gripped on each side of the frame. He glared from Cassie to his father--
-- who gallantly said: “The lady, sir, is blameless. The fault, I assure you, is entirely mine.”
Capa stalked into the office, glowering. His eyes locked on Cassie like cold blue fire. His nostrils flared.
He reached around her and rummaged a croissant from the bakery bag.
“Mmm-- tasty,” he said, taking a bite. He smiled as Cassie flicked crumbs from the front of his jacket.
“All finished with the science department?” his father asked.
“Mm hm.” Capa drank from the cup Cassie offered him, glanced down at the printed treasures spread across his father’s desk. “’Til tomorrow, anyway.”
“Good. Let’s go see what your mother has planned for dinner.”
*****
Capa didn’t ask about Beth Markham’s paper. That was her name-- Beth: she’d told Cassie over a handshake, a more formal introduction, as the paper file copied itself to Cassie’s flashpad following John Capa’s lecture. Her grip was bony and tight; Cassie thought she could see something predatory in the girl’s expression. Her eyes seemed a little too bright. The boy who’d spent the class writing was waiting for her down the hall outside the double doors; they walked off together, talking. He glanced over his shoulder, just once, only briefly, at Cassie, where she stood outside the lecture hall, waiting for Capa’s father to gather his things; something in his face made her shudder--
“Shall we--?” John Capa had said, touching her elbow.
“Sure. Yes.” She smiled for him. She was thinking, though, of what she’d glimpsed on the screen of her flashpad--
Fallen Son, Fallen Sun: Project Icarus and the Sin of Pride in Milton’s Paradise Lost
Now Capa wasn’t asking after it. Relaxed, by all appearances thoroughly content, he was chatting with his father as they pulled out into the snow falling on southbound Seventh. Flakes like ash, as large as quarters. Cassie had offered to sit in the back this time, in John Capa’s car, some forty percent smaller than the Behemoth and yet as season-capable. She looked out at the late Michigan winter as they drove, and she listened to her husband’s father talk happily with his son.
All the way home, to the house like a big two-story cabin just south of Carver Lake, Capa didn’t ask about Beth Markham’s paper.
Cassie didn’t remind him.
*****
and if I disappear then I shall return, no fear...though I doubt you're fearing
