Dear Edward(13)

The nurse looks down, as if her feet have suddenly caught fire and she needs to watch the flames. Jesus, some people are so weak. Blow on them and they fall over. He pictures Louisa again and thinks: She never looked away when I yelled.

The flight attendant with the world-class hips is in front of him. Where did she come from? The pain is abruptly worse. A wave crests.

“Can I help out here at all?” she asks, in a smooth voice. “Would you like a beverage, sir, or a snack?”

But the pain is stuck, the wave fixed, and he can’t speak. Next to him, the nurse is mute. She might even be crying, for Chrissakes. Crispin forces his hand into the air, hoping the gesture will make the flight attendant disappear.

“I’d love a beverage,” a man across the aisle says, and Crispin closes his eyes, the pill safely beneath his tongue.

The plane gives a gentle bounce; Veronica places her hand on a seat as she swivels. It’s quiet on the aircraft; only the overhead vents can be heard clearing their throats. The passengers are pulled into themselves; the long flight has only just begun, and they need to get used to this new space, the silver bullet in which they will spend most of the day. They resign themselves to the new normal, one by one. The prevalent question is: How should I pass this time before my real life resumes?

Jane hides her smile while listening to her seatmate flirt when the flight attendant returns with his drink.

“Where are you from?” he asks.

“Here’s your Bloody Mary, sir.”

“Mark, please.”

“Mark.” Veronica readjusts her hips. “I’m from Kentucky,” she says. “But I live in L.A. now.”

“I’m from Baltimore. I live in New York, though. I couldn’t live anywhere else. How long have you been in the flight industry?”

“Oh, five years, I guess.”

He’s nervous. Jane sees his knee bouncing beneath the tray he’s lowered over his lap. She tries to block the scene out. She has to write. She has to finish polishing this script, which means rewriting most of it, before they land. She can do it; she’s good at focusing when there’s a gun to her head. The problem is that she doesn’t want to. If she was sitting next to Bruce, and he wasn’t annoyed at her, he would ask: What do you want to do? He always goes back to the origin, to the essential question. His brain never gets tied up with tangents and obligations and feelings, like hers does. Sometimes his head tips to the side while he’s looking at her, and she knows he’s thinking: Do I still love her? And then, every time so far, thankfully: Yes.

She’s in first class because she spent weeks obsessively packing their apartment instead of writing. She knows which box Eddie’s elephant is in and the exact location of each of Jordan’s prized books. She numbered the boxes in the order they should be unpacked in L.A. She’d wished, while packing, that there was a competition she could enter for moving a family cross-country with the greatest efficiency, because she would win first prize. When Lacey offered to drive to New York last week to help pull things together, Jane had laughed.

“Forgive me for trying to be helpful,” Lacey said, offended.

“Oh, I know. I’m sorry, I was laughing because of me, not you.”

The exchange fogged up with bruised feelings and their long history of poking and prodding each other, and though they both tried, neither was able to clear the fog before they hung up. Lacey and Jane have different operating systems, which often lands them in trouble. What they care about overlaps, but there are key divergences. Lacey has always, always wanted to fit in, which she believed required a husband, two kids, and a nice house in the suburbs. She wanted her life to look “right.” This has simply never interested Jane much, as a concept. When she wanted something—a relationship, a baby, a job—she tried to get it. She rarely looked to her right or left to check on the progress of other women. She had been amazed once, at Lacey’s house, to find that her sister subscribed to thirteen different women’s magazines. There were subsets, her sister explained. Cooking, housekeeping, fertility, home decor, beauty. “What?” Lacey had said, in response to the look on her sister’s face. “I’m not the weird one here. You are.”

Lacey keeps score in her relationships in a way that is anathema to Jane but that she can use, in a moment like this, to help smooth away any wrinkles between them. I’ll phone her as soon as we get to the house, Jane thinks. Lacey will be touched that she was the first person I called from the landline. That’s the kind of thing that matters to her.

She notices that Veronica is gone and Mark looks forlorn, the Bloody Mary cupped in his hand. His mood settles like a fine mist over her skin, and she starts to type.

The test instructions say that it takes three minutes for the results to show. The white stick stares blankly at Linda. She would like to pace, or even leave the room during this period, but that’s not possible. She has to stand still. Perhaps because her body is stuck, her brain goes scattershot.

She remembers when she drank alcohol for the first time—J?germeister—the night before the SAT. She arrived at the gymnasium to take the test on two hours’ sleep, with what felt like a brain full of discarded engine parts. Six weeks later, her homeroom teacher, who’d always told her that her father was wrong, that she was smart and had a bright future if she’d only fight for it, went dead in the eyes when Linda told her how badly she’d scored. Linda saw her decide, in that moment, to move her hope and attention to a different, younger kid.