Dear Edward(12)

Linda slides both hands into her purse and wriggles the pregnancy test up her sleeve. She waits as long as she can before asking Florida to move.

“You have to pee?” the woman asks.

When Florida stands, her clothes chime. She steps into the aisle, and Linda sidles by. She hurries toward the bathroom and finds herself making accidental eye contact with a soldier sitting in an aisle seat.

“Hi,” Linda says, more a squeak than a word.

He lifts a massive hand in greeting, and then she is past him, feeling even more flustered than when she first stood. There’s a line for the bathroom, which she joins. In front of her, standing sideways in the aisle, is a tall, messy-haired teenager, the one she saw getting patted down earlier. He’s wearing earbuds and jiggling slightly to unheard music. When he rolls his shoulders, even though the movement is slight, its carefreeness makes something inside Linda ache. He looks a little like an ex-boyfriend, one of the early ones. She remembers running her hands through wild hair like his and then brushes the memory away, because the boy in front of her is most definitely underage. She’d observed him with the TSA officer and thought: Why not just go through the machine? She’d never understood people who took a stand. So what if the security machine was pointless? What was the point in making a fuss and irritating the people in charge? The airport wasn’t going to redo its security system because of the opinions of one teenage boy, after all. She couldn’t see the gain.

She fingers her sleeve and feels the crackle of the plastic wrapper. She used to hide test answers in the same spot during high school. She wonders if that piece of skin, right above the wrist on her right arm, is tired of bearing witness to her failures.

“Are you all right?” the boy in front of her asks. “Ma’am?”

“Me? Yes?” Linda wonders what her face was doing, to pull a teenager out of his own orbit. She tries to smooth her features.

“You don’t need to call me ma’am,” she says. “I’m only twenty-five.” But as the words leave her mouth she realizes that, to this boy, twenty-five is ancient, and definitely ma’am-worthy.

The boy smiles politely and walks into a vacated bathroom.

Twenty-five is actually very young, she thinks, in the direction of the closed door.

When Linda was a teenager, she and her best friend decided twenty-five was the oldest acceptable age for a girl to be single. Gary is thirty-three, which is the perfect match for her age. It takes men longer than women to mature; by thirty-three, he’s slept with enough people (nine, he told her, though she assumes that number is lower than the truth) to settle down. She has slept with enough men (sixteen) to want to stop forever. Guy number nine burned her with a cigarette in the middle of an orgasm; number eleven cheated on her with the high school math teacher, who was a man; number fifteen spent their rent money on meth. Only guy thirteen had a decent job and money in the bank, but his way of showing affection was to criticize. For her birthday, he gave her makeup, and for Christmas, weight-loss pills. She broke up with him before Valentine’s Day, but she’d left that relationship second-guessing every facet of herself.

A bathroom becomes available, and Linda scoots inside. She closes and locks the door, which activates the fluorescent lighting overhead. There is only one place to stand: directly between the toilet and the tiny vanity mirror. She pulls the test out from under her sleeve. She puts the top between her teeth and gives a little tug, splitting the wrapper.

She pulls down her white pants, then her underwear, and squats over the toilet seat with her arm between her legs. She takes a deep breath and pees on what she hopes is the stick. She remembers the teenage boy telling the TSA officer that he didn’t like the pose people had to take inside the screening machine—something about it being degrading?—and wonders what he would think of this pose. Her thighs shake, and the plane trembles too.

In first class, Crispin Cox tries to ignore the twinges in his abdomen. Instead, he thinks of his first wife, Louisa, the one who never gave up. That’s her tagline in his head: the one who never gives up. They’ve been divorced for thirty-nine years, much longer than they were married, and yet every few years her lawyer contacts his lawyer with some drummed-up excuse to take more from him. More money, more stock, more real estate. Sometimes in the name of their kids, sometimes for herself. And goddammit if she doesn’t win half the time.

The nurse, next to him, says, “The doctor said that you were in stable condition, sir. But you seem to be in a fair amount of pain. Can you rank the pain on a scale of one to ten for me?”

“I’m fine,” Crispin says. “I just need another pill.”

Why does he remember Louisa so well—he could repeat verbatim their dialogue at Carlino’s that night, when she wore her hair the way he liked and a peacock-blue dress—but he can’t remember where they honeymooned, or the occupation of his youngest son, the bright, squirrelly one? His life is there, with all its characters, but clouds keep passing across the view. What he sees, what he recalls, changes every hour.

The nurse centers the pill on his open palm.

He says, “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Sir, I’m just trying to do my job.”

“Exactly,” he says. “You’re looking at me like I’m your goddamn job. I’m no one’s job—never have been, never will be. Can you get that through your thick, mulish head?”