Dear Edward(2)

“Fifteen.”

He makes a sour face. “Hardly ever get kids doing this.”

“Who do you get?”

“Hippies, mostly.” He thinks for a moment. “Or people who used to be hippies.”

Jordan has to force his body to be still. The agent is feeling along the waistline of his jeans, and it tickles. “Maybe I’ll be a hippie when I grow up.”

“I’m finished, fifteen,” the man says. “Get out of here.”

Jordan is smiling when he rejoins his family. He takes his sneakers from his brother. “Let’s get going,” Jordan says. “We don’t want to miss our flight.”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Bruce says.

The two boys lead the way down the hall. There are windows in this corridor, and the skyscrapers of New York City are visible in the distance—man-made mountains of steel and glass piercing a blue sky. Jane and Bruce can’t help but locate the spot where the Twin Towers used to be, the same way the tongue finds the hole where a tooth was pulled. Their sons, who were both toddlers when the towers fell, accept the skyline as it is.

“Eddie,” Jordan says, and the two boys exchange a look.

The brothers are able to read each other effortlessly; their parents are often mystified to find that Jordan and Eddie have conducted an entire conversation and come to a decision without words. They’ve always operated as a unit and done everything together. In the last year, though, Jordan has been pulling away. The way he says his brother’s name now means: I’m still here. I’ll always come back.

Eddie punches his brother in the arm and runs ahead.

Jane walks gingerly. The hand dropped by her younger son tingles at her side.

At the gate, there is more waiting to do. Linda Stollen, a young woman dressed all in white, hurries into a pharmacy. Her palms are sweaty, and her heart thumps like it’s hoping to find a way out. Her flight from Chicago arrived at midnight, and she’d spent the intervening hours on a bench, trying to doze upright, her purse cradled to her chest. She’d booked the cheapest flight possible—hence the detour to Newark—and informed her father on the way to the airport that she would never ask him for money again. He had guffawed, even slapped his knee, like she’d just told the funniest joke he’d ever heard. She was serious, though. At this moment, she knows two things: One, she will never return to Indiana, and two, she will never ask her father and his third wife for anything, ever again.

This is Linda’s second pharmacy visit in twenty-four hours. She reaches into her purse and touches the wrapper of the pregnancy test she bought in South Bend. This time, she chooses a celebrity magazine, a bag of chocolate candies, and a diet soda and carries them to the cashier.

Crispin Cox snores in his wheelchair, his body a gaunt origami of skin and bones. Occasionally, his fingers flutter, like small birds struggling to take flight. His nurse, a middle-aged woman with bushy eyebrows, files her fingernails in a seat nearby.

Jane and Bruce sit side by side in blue airport chairs and argue, although no one around them would suspect it. Their faces are unflustered, their voices low. Their sons call this style of parental fight “DEFCON 4,” and it doesn’t worry them. Their parents are sparring, but it’s more about communication than combat. They are reaching out, not striking.

Bruce says, “That was a dangerous situation.”

Jane shakes her head slightly. “Jordan is a kid. They wouldn’t have done anything to him. He was within his rights.”

“You’re being na?ve. He was mouthing off, and this country doesn’t take kindly to that, regardless of what the Constitution claims.”

“You taught him to speak up.”

Bruce tightens his lips. He wants to argue, but he can’t. He homeschools the boys and has always emphasized critical thinking in their curriculum. He recalls a recent rant about the importance of not taking rules at face value. Question everything, he’d said. Everything. He’d spent weeks obsessing over the idiocy of the blowhards at Columbia for denying him tenure because he didn’t go to their cocktail parties. He’d asked the head of the department: What the hell does boozy repartee have to do with mathematics? He wants his sons to question blowhards too, but not yet. He should have amended the declaration to: Question everything, once you’re grown up and in full command of your powers and no longer living at home, so I don’t have to watch and worry.

“Look at that woman over there,” Jane says. “There are bells sewn into the hem of her skirt. Can you imagine wearing something that makes a jingly sound every time you move?” She shakes her head with what she expects to be mockery, but turns out to be admiration. She imagines walking amid the tinkle of tiny bells. Making music, and drawing attention, with each step. The idea makes her blush. She’s wearing jeans and what she thinks of as her “writing sweater.” She dressed this morning for comfort. What did that woman dress for?

The fear and embarrassment that crackled through Bruce’s body next to the screening machine begins to dissipate. He rubs his temples and offers up a Jewish-atheist prayer of gratitude for the fact that he didn’t develop one of his headaches that make all twenty-two bones in his skull throb. When his doctor asked if he knew what triggered his migraines, Bruce had snorted. The answer was so clear and obvious: his sons. Fatherhood is, for him, one jolt of terror after another. When the boys were babies, Jane used to say that he carried them like live grenades. As far as he’s concerned they were, and still are. The main reason he agreed to move to L.A. is because the movie studio is renting them a house with a yard. Bruce plans to place his grenades within that enclosure, and if they want to go anywhere, they’ll need him to drive them. In New York, they could simply get in the elevator and be gone.