“Dad?” she whispered.
She spotted him sitting at the front of the sailboat, whistling a happy tune. He was barefoot. His feet were just as wide, callused, and workmanlike as his hands. The dark silhouette of his lean, muscular body and his shaggy red hair cut a sharp outline against the brilliant moonlight.
He hadn’t even noticed her. She watched him as if he were farther away than he was. He was fixated on the broken piece of white chalk he was using to draw more of those strange equations, names, and figures on the surface of the deck. In his other hand was a lit cigarette. Its thin, smoky trail spiraled up into the night sky.
Suddenly, he looked up at her. “Hi.” He grinned.
“Hey.” She stepped closer.
Her father was in his early fifties, but he looked younger, and he was handsome, at least according to her friends. He wore faded blue jeans and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt that revealed a lion’s mane of dark-red chest hair. Other than the spark of otherworldly brilliance in his steel-grey eyes, he looked far more like a mechanic or a tanned beach bum than a scientist.
“Having trouble sleeping?” he asked.
“Yeah. Feeling kinda sad, I guess. This summer has been really, really cool. I really like California.”
Dad’s eyes flicked away from her. He took another drag from his cigarette. She closed the distance and sat next to him. For several minutes, they sat in silence, staring out into the inconceivably vast ocean.
“Dad?” She gulped. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Who are you?”
Dad chuckled. “What kind of question is that?”
Melanie giggled nervously. “Okay, it’s just… I mean, when you talk about yourself, you always say you’re a carpenter.”
Dad shrugged. When he smiled at her, his joyfully crinkled crow’s feet formed long, deep lines. “I am a carpenter. I’ve been a carpenter for… what, since the eighties? Something like that, yes.”
Melanie giggled again, and the second that the silly, high-pitched sound left her throat, she felt like a fool. She’d planned the conversation all summer long, and it wasn’t going anything like what she’d expected. Dad always took things so literally.
“I mean… um, philosophically speaking,” she said, thrusting her shoulders back in order to appear more authoritative. “Who are you, Dad? You say you’re a carpenter. All the articles I’ve read about you, you know, all those old articles from the newspapers, they’re all, like, the big hero, Gabriel Schist! And then my teachers at school, every time I mention that I’m your daughter, they go on about how you cured AIDS.”
He stubbed out his cigarette in a soda can. “That’s one way to put it. Technically, what I really did was create a vaccine for HIV. My work did—”
“And then other people, those guys down at the dock, they call you the surfer dude. Some news articles say you’re a hermit; others talk about your partying college days. I can’t tell. It’s like you’ve got friends but no close friends. You don’t have a girlfriend, either, but women look at you a lot. I can tell.”
He squinted. “Do they?”
“Yeah. And yeah, like… I dunno, I have a friend whose mom is a doctor. She knows about you. She says you’re a rebel. And Mom, she… whenever Mom does talk about you, she says you’re a mad genius.”
He scoffed. “Is that what she says?”
Melanie nodded. “Yeah, she does. And you… it… all of it… ” She sighed and slumped over, unsure how to explain what she wanted to know.
Her father wrapped his arm around her, giving her a squeeze. He kissed the top of her head. “What’s wrong?”
Melanie felt tears of frustration in her eyes and tried to blink them away. She knew that her father didn’t understand her emotions. He didn’t get it.
“I don’t know who you are, Dad,” she whispered. “And now I’m realizing that I’ve never known. All of the info about you, it doesn’t fit together. So who are you?”
“The answer is easy, really.” He shrugged. “One just has to look at it more straightforwardly. Take away the abstractions and only look at the basic, honest facts.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Melanie, do you know what tetravalent, nonmetallic chemical element is the key component for all life on Earth?”
“Consciousness?”
“No.” He smiled. “The answer is carbon. I am a carbon-based life-form.”
“Seriously? That’s your answer?”
“What? Should I explain it more in depth?”
Melanie looked at her father’s solemn, concerned face. She shook her head and laughed. Yes, it was a ridiculous answer. But that answer, strange as it was, contained the truth about her dad, who he was, and how he interacted with the world.
She turned to gaze at the moon’s reflection on the dark ocean. She pointed at the glowing trail it cut across the water. “What do you call that trail? The white trail, the one that the moon leaves on the ocean?”
Dad rubbed his stubbly chin. “In Finland, I believe they call it kuunsilta. The Swedish word is, ah, mångata. But that’s not what my father called it.”
She’d never met her grandfather, and Dad rarely spoke of him. “Oh?”
“My father, you know, he was a sailor. A Navy man, back in the war. And he and I, we used to go out sailing in the middle of the night. Like we’re doing right now.” He gave her a tender smile. “He called it the pale highway.”
Summer 1997
