Dear Edward(46)

Linda blinks. “Marie?”

“Curie. She discovered radiation with her husband? Surely you’ve heard of her, in your field.”

“Oh God,” Linda says. She thinks she might laugh, but that flash of amusement is swallowed by the muck of her anxiety. She is poor and jobless and has sworn off taking money from her father, and she’s been saturated with radiation her entire career. Her baby will probably be born glowing like a flashlight.

“Of course, Marie died from the stuff. But she carried it around in her pockets and kept it in the nightstand table. Not a good idea, as it turned out.”

It’s raining outside the window. Linda wishes she were outside in the storm, away from this woman’s curly straw of personal history, in the teeming wetness, where she could wash off the radiation and the film and the sonar of the last five years. She wants to be clean.

Benjamin waits on line at the bathroom. He was hoping to avoid using the airplane facilities—he’d drunk as little as possible since waking, with the plan of waiting to pee until California. Although, if he’s honest with himself, he’s done this every day since the surgery. He’s permanently parched, to the point of dehydration. He hates to look at the bag stuck to his side. He hates to unscrew the top and do the awkward maneuver required to pour the contents into the toilet. He used to be the strongest man in the room, any room. Now he carries his insides on his outside, and his skin can no longer contain his organs. Everything’s seeping out.

Benjamin feels someone join the line behind him. “Hey, man,” a male voice says.

Benjamin looks over his shoulder and sees a rich white guy in a button-down shirt. “Hey,” he says, in a tone that discourages further conversation.

But the guy is rolling his neck, eyes half closed, apparently unable, or unwilling, to read cues. He says, “I can’t take all this sitting still.”

“Sure.”

“I could use the first-class bathroom, but I needed the walk.”

Benjamin doesn’t respond to this, just wonders if the guy knows that he sounds like a prick.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Veronica says, and turns sideways to move past them. She pauses mid-step, left hip cocked like a gun, and says to Benjamin, “You all right with this? If you need my help, just let me know.”

“I’m fine,” he says.

She nods and keeps rolling down the aisle.

“You know her?” the white dude says, and his voice cracks mid-sentence. When he looks after the flight attendant, his expression reminds Benjamin of the wolf in one of the Sunday-morning cartoons he used to watch as a kid. His eyes are bugging out, and he’s staring at her as if he’s starving and she’s transmogrified into a whole ham.

Jesus crap, Benjamin thinks, I wish I wanted her. And he knows, in that moment, with the plane rocking gently beneath him and rain spilling against the windows, that if he had to choose between the flight attendant and this guy next to him, he’d choose the guy. He’d been telling himself it was just Gavin, an aberration, possibly a mental break, but the truth goes past Gavin, back at least as far as military boarding school when he was aware that he was glad there were no girls around. Girls had made him feel vaguely sad for as long as he could remember, and this flight attendant, with her boom-boom ass, makes him feel positively desolate.

“No,” he says. “I don’t know her.”

“Your turn,” the guy says, and points at the VACANT sign above the bathroom door.

“You can go first.”

“You sure? You don’t have to tell me twice.” And now he turns sideways, to get by Benjamin. In the process their shoulders touch for a second, and Benjamin registers the jolt that runs through him. The jolt makes him think, Fuck this, and the this includes this Wall Street–looking dude, and Gavin, and the bag taped to his side, and the next operation, and this idea that he’s supposed to go on feeling sad and following the same rules he’s been following ever since Lolly dropped him off at military school. Fuck, he thinks—feeling a new jolt, one that comes from deep inside—this.

Florida takes the last bite of her sandwich and rolls the cellophane wrap into a tiny ball.

“The trick is to add a little turmeric to the meat,” she says, when she notices Linda looking.

“Is that a spice?”

The cellophane in her hand is from her kitchen in Vermont, as are the turkey and tomatoes. She stood in front of the kitchen sink, her favorite spot in the house, where the light streamed in the window and you could see the mountains at the end of the yard, and sliced that tomato. Bobby had passed through the room twice while she constructed the sandwich. He knew she was leaving but not for how long. She’d told him she was going to a wedding shower for a girlfriend in the East Village. The shower was real, and Florida had been invited. But she had a one-way plane ticket to Los Angeles in the bottom of her hiking boots in the back of her closet.

“Yes, it’s a spice.” Florida puts the small ball into her purse. “I’m going to California for the sunshine,” she says, waving her hand at the window. “I like to think that this rain is clearing the path for blue skies.”

“Why are you going there? For a vacation?”

Florida shrugs.

“You know people there?”

“I have a couple old friends I can look up. I’ve never been, is the real thing, and there aren’t that many places that’s true of. I want to rollerblade on that twisty sidewalk that goes along the beach, you know the one you always see in movies?”