Dear Edward(63)

They both grin up at the flight attendant, who has just appeared beside their seats with the garbage bag. Linda lifts her tray toward her, permeated with relief.

Mark hates coming down: off drugs, off running a Spartan Race, off sixteen straight hours of tracking patterns in the market. It was the coming down that made him finally kick cocaine last year. The headache, the scratchy sensation inside his skin, the dry eyeballs, the sluggish brain—the fact that these symptoms were the aftermath of every single delicious high became intolerable. He loved getting high, had no access issues—the dealer was one of the assistants in his office, a popular young kid with a bright future—and Mark operated, if he did say so himself, magnificently while intoxicated. He’d seen sloppy users—hell, he saw them every day at work. Guys rubbing their noses, with obnoxiously large pupils, talking so fast they had to repeat themselves three times in order to be understood. No one could even tell when Mark was coked; he prided himself on this fact. Well, his brother could tell, but Jax was a special case and he hardly ever saw him. Mark worked hard on not thinking about him. Thoughts of Jax felt like coming down, and he had built his post-cocaine life around avoiding that feeling at all costs.

Mark feels, buckled into his seat, on the verge of that sensation now. He’s at the top of the mountain, still coursing with sex and adrenaline and a feeling of holy-shit-did-that-really-happen? He has to either keep his engine revved at this level or knock himself out so he can remain unconscious for the decline. He doesn’t have the necessary narcotics in his carry-on to engender that kind of blackout, so his only alternative is to keep going.

He looks around.

“Are you all right?” His seatmate gives him a look of maternal concern.

Jesus, he thinks. No way. Just no. Don’t push that shit on me.

He stands up. He’d like to spar with Crispin again, but the old man’s eyes are closed and his skin looks translucent. His veins are visible through papery skin. Mark shudders. Sickness, old age, decline—unacceptable.

He finds Veronica in the galley kitchen, next to the cockpit door. Actually, he notices—his senses so acute he can’t help but process everything—that he’s surrounded by doors. The massive plane entrance is six paces behind him, the cockpit door to his left, and the first-class bathroom directly to his back.

“Hey,” he says, in what he hopes is a charming voice. He goes for an equally charming smile, but both efforts feel like a throw at a dartboard. It’s hard to hit the bull’s-eye. He gives himself an 80 percent chance now of having missed both marks.

Veronica is crouched down in the corner, folding what look like cellophane squares and placing them in a container. When she hears Mark’s voice, she stands and turns in one movement, and her grace takes his breath away.

His mother used to drag him and Jax to the ballet when they were boys, and though Mark complained, he’d secretly loved watching the singular moments of beauty. A ballerina pirouetting. A leap, which ended in another dancer’s arms. This was the loveliness—the magic—Veronica brought to a small galley kitchen in an airplane thirty thousand feet in the air.

“I’m grateful for you,” he says, and then he thinks, aghast: I’m grateful for you? Jesus Christ, you fucking idiot.

“What did you say?” She looks genuinely confused.

With his slow-motion, super-detailed vision, Mark sees the coolness that had been on her face when she turned, the certainty that she was about to shut him down and send him away, be replaced with this confusion, this vulnerability.

He sees another door. They are now on all sides. He’s just got to push through this one, and he certainly knows how to push.

“You have a job to do,” he says. “I appreciate that. And I promise I won’t bother you again. I would simply like to take you to dinner tomorrow night. In L.A.”

She looks at him, her red lipstick perfect, her eyes divine.

“Please say yes,” he says. “To one date.”

She doesn’t speak right away. He can tell she is a master of pauses. He waits, with a patience unfamiliar to him.

“Yes,” she says finally. “To one date.”

“One date,” he repeats, and the engine in his chest whirs. He’s surprised to realize he’s truly grateful to this woman. The coming down has been postponed. He will coast on this win, until he’s seated across the table from her tomorrow night.

Jordan stares at the open book, willing his mind to focus. His brother and father are working on a sudoku puzzle and keep passing it back and forth in front of his face. He wants no part of their geekery, and he knows that his father would never disturb him while he’s reading. He’s in a safe zone, and the book is good—A Prayer for Owen Meany—but he’s unable to concentrate. His brain keeps peeking forward, toward L.A.

He hadn’t fought the idea of the move, unlike Eddie. His brother had cried and begged to stay in New York. “This is our home,” he’d said. “We can’t live out there. Los Angeles has earthquakes. Everyone drives in cars. We’ll have to wear sunscreen.” Their parents had promised Eddie a piano in their house, and lots of books, but he only gave up arguing when more of his belongings were in moving boxes than out of them.

The idea of sunshine, the beach, and girls in bikinis sounded fine to Jordan, though it was hard to understand the logistics. Did kids his age really show up by the ocean on weekends with towels and a packed lunch? Everyone lived in houses with lawns. There would be no deli on the corner. There would be no Mahira. Jordan realizes that he’d assumed, when he’d kissed her the last time, that a new Mahira would magically appear in L.A. and at every other step in his future.