No more empty spaces, p.9
No More Empty Spaces, page 9
Then they rode in silence again. It was quiet, like the hours they used to spend developing film on weekend afternoons. And now, they would have a darkroom here. They’d measured out the space in his father’s bedroom to partition off, and they were on the way to Elazığ to get the materials to build it. His father was handy that way. He’d finished the whole basement at Toll House Lane himself. Kevin and Rob had helped some with that, and Kevin was actually excited to do the darkroom together now. He wouldn’t admit it to Dad, but it was getting a little harder to keep being mad at him for taking them here, though that was less a function of his father and more a function of here.
Kevin pushed his bangs out of his eyes as he gazed out the window at the dry grassy hills, golden in the morning sun. Without thinking, he started to hum the Turkish alphabet song.
“What?” Dad asked.
“Nuthin’.”
“Come on, Kev. What were you saying?” his father pressed.
“It’s stupid,” he said with a sheepish smile. “I didn’t realize I was doing it until you said something. It’s the alphabet song. Only in Turkish. It’s babyish, but it helps me remember the letters and how to pronounce them.”
“Refik’s teaching me. Let’s see . . . the letters we don’t have are the c that sounds like ch, the silent g, and the s that sounds like sh. And three vowels, right?”
Kevin nodded. “Yup, the i without a dot, the o with two dots, and the u with two dots. The song’s helping me remember how to say the letters, so I can sound things out. I like learning a language where I can use it, not like home, where it’s just a class you have to take.”
“You did great with Urdu as a little guy, but you probably don’t remember much of it.”
“Not anymore,” Kevin said.
“Well, I’m glad you’re liking school. Is Paula a good teacher? You’ve got her all day. That’s pretty different from Moorestown High.”
“It’s better than MHS. I know I was only a freshman, and Mom went on and on about how great high school was, but I didn’t fit in there. Except maybe for track. What’s the big deal about going from class to class? Paula gets us started on stuff, and we learn on our own. I like that.”
“Like an old one-room schoolhouse, like my first school, before your grandmother and I left Kansas. I remember Miss Wilson, my teacher there,” Dad said, chuckling. “I was a little in love with her, even if I was only in second grade. Come to think of it, Paula kind of reminds me of Miss Wilson.”
“So you’re in love with Paula?”
Dad laughed. “That wasn’t exactly what I meant. But maybe a little.” He paused a moment, then said, “Hey, Kev, teach me the alphabet song!”
* * *
Paula’s days with the Ross children continued but in the schoolhouse once classes started. She wasn’t surprised to find they were smart and curious students.
She showed Kevin new drawing techniques, and his pencil work was lovely. He seemed to be a natural artist, with his trained photographer’s eye for composition.
She noted that Rob was great in math, but lukewarm on science. She took that more as rebellion against his father than real disinterest. Seemed to be where Rob was—if his father liked it, he didn’t. He couldn’t be bothered with history or art. She created math problems with baseball stats, since she knew he’d be into them, and assigned Jackie Robinson’s My Own Story for his reading, which snuck some history in.
Paula found that Didi bubbled with enthusiasm for learning and was more than eager to please—almost too much so. Paula worried that she’d spend her life pleasing other people and never herself, but Didi was young, and Paula admitted to herself she was probably projecting some of her own emotions onto the little girl. In any case, Didi was the kind of pupil any teacher hoped for, even as a kindergartner.
After the first weekend when they went to Nemrut Dağı, Will pretty much worked seven days a week and often late. Most days, Paula had dinner with the Ross family, cooking at their house or going to the dining hall. If Will worked really late, she slept in the extra bed in Didi’s room. She knew the kids would’ve been fine, but she liked being with them. They seemed to like it too. Paula saw the looks on the neighbors’ faces and imagined the whispering among them, but no one said anything to her directly. Or to Will, as far as she knew. And they weren’t sleeping together.
She kept going back to a passage in Angle of Repose, the novel she’d been reading when she first met Will. The narrator was delving into the relationship between his grandparents. His grandfather was a mining engineer pioneering in the American West, and his grandmother was an artist and writer enamored with New York literati. He stated, “What I find myself held by, in imagination, is their tentativeness, their half-awkward half-willingness to admit their understanding, as they faced each other in the doorway by the light of the lamp she carried. That too is like one of her drawings—narrative, side-lighted, suffused with possibility.” In Paula’s interpretation, the grandparents’ unspoken understanding was that, although they barely knew each other, they would spend their lives together.
Though she and Will had become friends, she was tentative about anything more. The children’s almost constant presence when the two were together helped in keeping some distance, but it certainly felt “suffused with possibility” to Paula. Would she find a metaphorical angle of repose with Will, like the characters in the book? Would it feel solid, the way she thought the best relationships would? Or would it always be on the edge of tumbling? She didn’t know.
She found herself thinking of his stunning blue eyes when she looked at the sky on sunny days. She’d seen that blue deepen in intensity when he talked about earth processes and spark with creativity when he spoke of his work. He was handsome and fit, but his curiosity and confidence were just as attractive to her.
They had only shared three kisses that one night, but they’d shared many conversations—about home, about flying, about what they read and why, and about the way they saw the world—his views as a scientist, a pilot, and a photographer, and hers as a teacher, an athlete, and an artist.
Since Curtis, and the embarrassment and shame that had come, and the trust and dignity that had gone with that relationship, Paula had forgotten how attractive intelligence was to her. She’d sorely missed the exchange of ideas and opinions. Even if Will seemed to think his opinions were facts, smart was sexy. But his “girls” and “gals” and “I’m rights” and “blacks and whites” gave her pause. Was he safe? she wondered. Not in the physical sense, but to her hard-earned, and still fragile, sense of self-respect.
Not that she had much of his time or attention. Will was, first and foremost, in love with his work. Paula reminded him that his kids needed him in the little time he could spare. There was no rush. Paula was hesitant for a reason, and although she pondered the possibility, she was content to let the reality reveal itself slowly. Apparently Will was too.
In stark contrast, she fell in love with the kids fast and hard. Buddy too. How could she not love them?
Evenings around the kitchen table felt cozy—the kids did their homework, and Paula graded papers while Will worked on maps and cross sections, which he explained were like vertical maps that he drew using the data on the logs from drilling.
Paula watched as the Ross family settled into life in Kayakale, each in their own way: Will immersed in his work; Kevin taking and developing pictures and training Buddy; Rob and Timur forging a bond—they were inseparable to the extent they could be, given they attended different schools. Paula spent more time with Didi than the others since Dee didn’t have a Buddy or a Timur of her own. Paula asked if she missed her mother, and the little girl got quiet, then shook her head. She said, “Mommy makes me wear dresses. I don’t like dresses.” That was all she’d say. Paula asked the boys too and got grunts and shrugs for answers.
None of them seemed willing to engage much with the topic, so Paula mostly let it go. She only pushed on one thing—having the kids write weekly letters to their mother.
Being part of their “crew,” as Will called them, was filling the empty spaces in her days. And in her life. She was the happiest she’d been since coming to Kayakale.
* * *
Kevin crumpled the bright pink page and threw it across the room. It ricocheted off the bedroom wall, bounced twice, and rolled to a stop by Buddy’s nose. The dog raised his expressive eyebrows, then chomped it.
For a moment, Kevin felt inclined to let him chew the whole damn thing up. That’s what he thought of his mother’s letter.
Then he commanded Buddy to drop it. He guessed he’d read it one more time. He smoothed the page out on his pant leg. Buddy sat up and placed his snout on Kevin’s other knee, gazing hopefully at his master. He had to laugh; Buddy made everything better. “I’ll get you a biscuit in a minute.”
No letter would be coming for either Rob or Didi. At the end of Kevin’s, his mother said she’d planned on writing each of them, but it took longer than she thought it would and Russell was coming soon. Fucking Russell. And Mom.
He’d tell his brother and sister about the letter, but he would not show it to them. Not with all the bullshit in it. About why she didn’t bother to get on a plane to get them back. Why she needed this time to be wild and free—Kevin nearly gagged at that line. How she never had the time to be young and careless—Kevin figured she meant carefree, as she was plenty careless, if you asked him. Having them so young—like whose fault was that? Like that magically happened? You were careless all right, he thought. He snorted. Now he knew why he’d felt like the adult during their stints with Mom last summer . . . he was.
He scrunched the letter back into a ball and tossed it to Buddy, who made a graceful leap to catch it, then settled in for some serious chewing. The dog ate it, a clichéd excuse Kevin had never used before, but there was a first time for everything.
Like finally understanding that your mother was selfish and immature. Thinking about it, Kevin realized she’d always been that way. He wondered why he’d never recognized it in quite those terms before. Lots of reasons: first, in Pakistan, they had all those servants. Mom could be with the kids pretty much when she good and felt like it. After that, back in Arizona, when Dad was in graduate school, she’d just drop them at Gran’s house. Seemed reasonable enough at the time. Once they got to New Jersey, and then the divorce, Kevin had slipped into being the grown-up degree by degree, like the proverbial frog in a pot.
THIRTEEN
Will’s technical specs were approved, and the field program was underway. He’d proposed comprehensive investigation practices—surface mapping (in undisturbed areas, where they still could), drilling boreholes (both vertical and angled), driving adits, and geophysical logging. He’d also asked for a flyover of the site, the one budget item Borkan turned down.
Weeks went by, then months. Drillers mobilized. New cores were collected and logged. The geology, though not simple to deal with as a dam foundation, was not so hard to understand. Engineers were correct in thinking that most problems could be engineered around, but only if those problems were fully understood. That was Will’s aim: intimate knowledge of Kayakale Dam’s foundation.
All large-scale projects—dams, bridges, tunnels, power plants, even skyscrapers, projects with big footprints and deep foundations—were like huge puzzles. Piecing together a complete picture of the subsurface of the dam’s foundation, an area of more than half a square mile and hundreds of feet deep, was no small task. It engaged Will fully, and some days it consumed him.
Most evenings, Paula asked how his day went. A frequent presence at the Ross home, Will was surprised that he didn’t consider her an intrusion but rather liked it. She was certainly good for the kids. And maybe him too, though he didn’t think much about it, aside from the occasions his hand brushed hers, and when Kevin asked about it on their way to Elazığ.
If he was tired, he might give her a one-word response; other times, excited about the work, he’d launch into a long technical explanation of what they’d done and what they’d learned.
“More mapping today,” he said one night a few weeks in. “There are a lot more faults crisscrossing the dam site than were mapped before. We’re naming them after you gals.”
“Faults? Like the ones you told us about pushing Anatolia west like toothpaste out of a tube?”
“No. Those are plate-bounding faults. They’re regional in scale. But any fracture or joint, where one side’s moved relative to the other, is a fault. There are lots of sizes and orientations and senses of movement on faults. Some are still active, but more of them aren’t, meaning they moved long ago in the geologic past. When faults move, it crushes rock up. We call those areas brecciated zones. Faulting, fracturing, and jointing make the rock weaker than it would be without it, and the rock strength properties are important to the dam design. That’s why we’re mapping all the faults in detail.”
“And you’re naming them after women?” Her voice went up with the question.
“And girls,” he said. “We’re naming them in honor of the gals in our lives. You two each have a fault now.”
“That seems like more of an insult than an honor to me,” Paula said.
“You’re so sensitive. I forget that. I picked a vertical fault for you—straight up, like you are.”
Paula pursed her lips but didn’t say anything else.
* * *
Just as Paula asked about his work, Will quizzed her on what she knew about Gus Browning’s tenure at the dam site. Not much—she’d never met him, only his wife, who had stayed in Kayakale long enough to help Paula take over the schooling of the English-speaking children.
According to his wife, through Paula, Browning was ambitious and had been more than eager to climb up the management ladder and “stop getting his hands dirty” at the site. Will wondered how dirty those hands were, metaphorically, as Paula would say. If the investigation had been behind schedule or over budget or both, would Browning have faked records to look like the success he hoped it would be?
It might have worked at a site with a more forgiving foundation than Kayakale’s. Since the initial study concluded (wrongly) that the geology was more uniform than it actually was, Browning must have thought (wrongly) he could get away with it.
All of this was supposition on Will’s part, but it was a plausible explanation for what he’d observed in the data he inherited and why Browning was so damned defensive.
For the most part, Will was too busy getting his work done, completely and correctly, to spend much time thinking about it, but nagging thoughts about Browning surfaced now and again.
* * *
As the autumn days cooled and shortened, Will rushed his team to finish drilling the new boreholes throughout the footprint of the dam. Many nights, he spread the borehole logs from that day out on the table after dinner and drew cross sections.
“What are you doing?” Paula asked one of those evenings, looking up from grading papers.
“Taking the data from each borehole, which are recorded on these logs, and correlating them from one to the next. Try this,” he said. “Put your hands up in front of your eyes, palms out, close together, about an inch apart, and look through the narrow space between them, then turn and look again, and again, and again. Then from those four narrow views, describe what the whole room looks like. That’s what doing a subsurface investigation is like. Those narrow snapshots are like the boreholes we drill, but sometimes we don’t get a complete sample from every hole. The cross sections I’m working on are like the description of the room.”
She did what he said, and one of her bright hazel eyes peeked through the space between her hands as she turned to get the different views of the room.
“That seems hard—getting the whole picture from just that,” she said.
“It isn’t easy, but it’s always interesting. We locate the boreholes based on our best understanding of the geology at the surface, from the mapping,” he continued, “which you didn’t get from that exercise. Still, it’s a big puzzle we put together, piece by piece by piece.”
As more boreholes were completed, Will drafted cross section after cross section, both parallel and perpendicular to the dam’s alignment. He extrapolated what he couldn’t see from what he could, reading the story in the rocks and reading between the lines of the story into the voids of those same rocks.
And there were voids. Will knew that, of course. That’s what shut construction down in the first place, but each time he thought he had a three-dimensional picture of the foundation, he found more, bigger, and deeper cavities. With each discovery came more questions, and he went back to Borkan for funds several times. The investigation needed to go to the next level, literally. The allocations always came, because every day the construction stood still cost more than the studies did.
The hydrothermal deposits revealed themselves as part of a vast network. Will presumed it started with the syenite porphyry intruded during the Miocene. The intrusion, and the subsequent hydrothermal activity, had formed the lead deposits that were mined several kilometers downstream of the dam site, near Kayakale village. The pinnacle of that hydrothermal network was the towering rock of Kayakale that he and Refik had hiked to on Will’s first day in the field. The faults and fractures that cut across the site provided the pathways where the heated waters had flowed, dissolving the marble and sculpting the spaces that honeycombed the foundation.
He mapped and strength-tested the walls of the adits, then proposed additional drilling from the adits themselves, to explore deeper into the foundation. Will planned to have a winter’s worth of data to compile, correlate, and interpret by the time snow fell.
FOURTEEN
Kevin settled into his seat on the Turkish Airlines DC-3, a plane he now knew all about, because Dad filled them in on its aviation history while they waited for the flight to be called. His father could talk about planes almost as much as he could talk about rocks.
