~ ~ ~
ON THE AIRPLANE Thomas brushed thoughts of Adeleine away like mosquitoes in a high-ceilinged room, their buzzing becoming softer but never vanishing. He looked out at the modest oval of sky and considered Edith, who’d been so kind in the months after the stroke, who had brought him meals without any mawkish sympathy and hadn’t stared while he taught himself how to use his body in a different way. Later, she had taken grocery bags from his unsteady grip without discussion while he unlocked the front door or checked his mail, and when he blushed had told him, “Thomas, helping you with what you need isn’t embarrassing for me, so it shouldn’t be embarrassing for you.”
Turned confident by thoughts of his newfound generosity, he had made the mistake of reaching out to his parents to tell them of his plans. He was interrupting a sports game — he was, infallibly, calling in the middle of the competitive event to end all competitive events — and his father had grunted and handed the phone off to his mother. He heard, in the interim, the fumbled transfer of the phone, her surprise at the contact from her faraway son, but she’d called him “honey,” asked how he was doing. He had perched on his locked suitcase and spoken without interruption, bubbling with the wild enthusiasm of a child with money to spend however he pleased.
“I’m just the person to help them,” he offered in summation. “It just sort of… aligned in a way that rang out.” He knew he sounded like someone who waved around tarot cards and looked to crystals for guidance, but the prospect of such concrete usefulness had left him upbeat and serene.
“Dear,” his mother said, “if you need another place to live… isn’t it easy online, now? You just put in your specific, uh…”—a pause as a cheering stadium filtered through and washed over his parents—“you just enter a price range and an area.”
“That’s not—”
“…”
“Thomas, we’ve got — this game is about to—”
“That’s okay, Mom. I’ve got a plane to catch.”
“Take care.”
—
THE CONVERSATION CAME BACK to him like an infection, worse and larger in its return — the distance between them amplified, the futility of his belated attempt to connect obvious — and he tried again to focus his head on the possibility of Jenny. He removed the photos he had taken from Edith’s box and saw, again, a child with a long braid who turned from the camera, her face always directed away: towards a window, a hot dog stand, the flat and gray Atlantic Ocean. Then a teenager wading into a subculture: as the dates scrawled in cursive on the backs of the pictures progressed, Jenny appeared in looser clothing, sitting on the opposite end of the couch as Declan and looking up with eyelids painted blue; on the edge of her unmade bed, surrounded by dried flowers in mason jars and carved wooden incense holders and pinned up photos of people yowling into microphones. On the back of the last, in which Jenny stood on the stoop of the building with a hand gripping a suitcase, looking directly into the camera as though daring it to capture her accurately, Edith had scrawled San Francisco or Bust.
Thomas was rereading the final report from the private investigator Edith and Declan had hired, dated more than thirty-five years prior, when the pleasant ding of the seatbelt sign sounded and the flight attendant chirped of impending descent into San Francisco. The brittle paper revealed nothing more in Thomas’s fifth or sixth review: The man had found several people who had known Jenny casually, and one who’d slept with her once, but none had any idea where she’d gone. The document closed with a quote from one of those interviewed:
She was around a lot, sure, but I couldn’t tell you who she was close to, really. We shared drugs but not much else… that girl was either out of her mind high and dancing all over everything or curled up in a corner or on the fucking move… I would see her walking all around the city. She never talked about any kind of past — I didn’t know where she came from — and I don’t think she had any eye on the future.
~ ~ ~
EDWARD HAD SET OUT cardboard boxes preemptively, to tiptoe around the idea of leaving, so that when the time came to pack he could rise to the occasion without much effort. Meanwhile, he stepped around the empty cubes and cursed, sometimes sent them wheeling with his foot and felt satisfied watching their failed attempts at flight. He had bawled at the thought of moving and run his hand over doorways and faucets, remembering the person he’d been, nearly twenty years before, when he’d first signed the lease.
In those days, he’d spent most of his time in a T-shirt on which he’d drawn, in Sharpie, an empty pizza box. He’d moved in with little furniture and found two orange school chairs on the street, their nubbled plastic coating marred with profane carvings. He had sat on one and rested his feet on the other while he wrote his jokes, blissfully happy, happily alone.
For the first time in his recent memory, Edward was working on something, and the boxes around him, empty but designed for transitions, seemed to urge him forward. He had spent the first day trying to assemble a title for his memoirs and emerged with several possibilities: Friends and Enemas; Not Funny: A Life. The prospect of summing up his years had left him largely in thought-driven repose on the couch, periodically taking breaks from doodling tits to stand barefoot by the open fridge and shovel cold pieces of turkey into his mouth. He knew nothing about writing save the hustle and brevity of the screenplay, but his checking account held enough to pay the rent on possibly a bathroom somewhere in New York City, or to purchase a bus ticket to the Midwestern town where his brother sold life insurance, and so he had decided perhaps it was time to write and sell a book.
He was struggling to nail down words, already exhausted, when he heard the sounds in the hallway. He could tell from the approaching steps — the arrhythmic stabs of high heels worn by someone better suited for all-weather hiking boots — that it was Claudia, and when she knocked he rose from the empty screen, arranged his face as one pleasantly overwhelmed by too many erudite thoughts before opening the door.
Claudia settled her substantial frame horizontally onto Edward’s couch. They had drunk with each other until three in the morning the night before, and he had found himself talking again, in excess, about his late mother, and she had described what it meant to be the sister of Paulie.
“Because honestly,” she had said, gesturing on the crooked back patio of a local bar, a long-thriving dive where the money was always damp and the chairs slightly broken, “why should someone who does the most convincing impression of a Christmas tree, who calls me Rosebud right after I’ve lost my temper and wants to tell me he loves me through the bathroom door even while I’m shitting the worst shit that’s ever been shat — why should that person ever have to be alone?”
At that Edward had snorted into his meaty fingers and chucked her under the chin and cheered his fifth bitter ale at her; they had laughed all over the bar, out the doors, and all the way home. He remembered this fondly as he looked at her now, slumped in the work clothes that clung in unseemly shapes to her body. Two people in the bar had asked whether they were brother and sister, and it was true that they shared a stockiness, as well as deep-set brown eyes and a way of tipping up the chin to smile. Today in his apartment, the afternoon made her hangover visible: the side zipper of her skirt a few inches undone, the bun on her head dramatically crooked.