Dad mumbles and picks his remote back off the hutch. "Too busy . . ."
I can tell by his face he doesn't want to hear a lecture. I guess I have been lecturing him a lot this last week. He's lost weight; his clothes are hanging on him. And his face is drawn and pale-even more than usual. I've nearly had to force-feed him potatoes and pasta and microwave dinners, now that I'm the cook in the house. Not that we ever had normal dinners, with both Mom and Dad arriving home at odd hours most nights. The motto around here has always been a bit of "every man for himself," or every woman. I watch him go back out to the car and retrieve a big cardboard box from the passenger seat.
As I hold the screen door open for him, I ask, "What's this?"
He reaches into the box brimming with plastex cases and papers and hands me a vid-binder.
"I cleared out your mom's desk."
My mom's private office was in another building in a different sector of the lab, hence untouched by the accident. I can only imagine how hard that was for Dad to do. I picture him there, tentatively letting his fingers light on her desk, her photos, her chair. Like he does sometimes in the house when he doesn't know I'm watching. Maybe wondering if she had left something tactile there, some residue of her that would tell him she really wasn't gone.
I take the binder, wrap one arm around my dad's shoulder, and give him a kiss on the cheek. He pats my head and strokes my hair, but I let it slide. I realize it comforts him to do this, even though his intention is to comfort me.
When I pull back, I turn on the notebook and tap through the illuminated pages. My eyes widen in awe and a flush of heat rises to my cheeks. My mother's daily journal-with all her notes on her experiments.
"Dad, isn't this top secret? Why wasn't this in the lab that day? How did you-"
He puts a hand to my lips. "She wrote in this every day. All her observations, her tests. The last thing she worked on . . ."
My dad's voice chokes up. He busies himself with some personal items by the door, then mumbles an excuse and disappears into his study. Dylan comes to me and his eyes lock on the notebook. I tap the screen and flip through the pages, eerily unsettled by my mother's handwriting, the digital scribbling appearing as if she had just written the words. Sketches and diagrams fill the pages alongside calculations and an alphabet soup of mathematical formulas. I begin to flip another page when Dylan startles me by placing his hand on mine to stop me.