Their fourth morning there, his knees moving high in inverted V’s as he ran, Paulie made the mistake of following Edward on his jog.
“Hi, Eddy.”
“Hey, Paulie.”
“Where you running?”
“Nowhere. Just running. A pointless pastime I have bought into for reasons unknown to me.”
“Having fun?
“Eddy, are you having fun?”
“Medium.”
“Medium fun, huh?
“How you doing, Eddy?”
Edward stopped moving and bent over, put his hands on his knees and tried to breathe without sputtering. The humidity felt like some windowless waiting room, and the cardiovascular exertion seemed to have run him up some cliff rather than talking him down.
“Are you okay?”
“Paulie.” Edward snapped up from his curved position. “I need to be alone. I have thoughts to think, and they’re not perky or sparkly or good. I need you to not be here. Okay?”
Without gauging his effect, Edward turned and headed in the opposite direction, past a campsite where a large group of men, all clad in baseball hats, were eating hot dogs under an awning attached to their RV. They had looked up at the sound of his voice breaking, and they watched him pass as they chewed, at the patches of sweat that looked parenthetical on his shoulder blades, at his palms daubing at his eyes in jerky movements as he gained speed. There was nothing, he thought, more humiliating than weeping before an RV barbecue party.
Left behind, Paulie let the numb weight of his body carry him back to their site, and it may have appeared, to the few people sitting out in mesh chairs, that he was carried, the load of his head held by some invisible rope. When he reached his sister where she lay in her hammock, he clambered in, set it swinging. Claudia wrapped her arms around him, then wove her fingers through the cotton grid, securing the embrace, soothing him still, and they felt the diminishing rocking together.
“What is it, Paul?”
“Eddy didn’t want me around because he had thoughts he wanted to be with and he ran away crying.”
“Sweetie. Edward is, besides being entertaining and generous, an emotionally fucked-up individual. Imagine a broken radio that only plays one station, which is an asshole DJ who makes a greatest-hits playlist of your black days and worst mistakes.”
Paulie smiled slightly at this, as profanity had always felt to him like a seal of understanding, a shortcut to extreme feeling that people used when they needed it most.
“You know how his job used to be to make people laugh? That was because he wanted to make them laugh, but also, mostly, because he needed to make himself laugh, because it’s pretty dark and nasty inside his brain.”
“Dark like a tunnel or dark like the sky in the country?”
“Tunnel. Definitely, tunnel. As a for-instance, when he was a little boy, his parents used to keep him inside for days. And so he was sort of bad at being with other people. There was someone he loved very much, and he wasn’t able to hang on to her. And he is mostly good at keeping that to himself but sometimes not. It’s real quiet here, and there aren’t a bunch of competing noises to distract him. Have you noticed how quiet it is?”
“You could hear a bug cough.”
“Exactly. So maybe it is our job as friends to be extra nice to Edward, even when he is acting slightly like a monster.”
“Like a fucky monster made of gangrene who is rotting all over everyone.”
Laughing into her brother’s hair, Claudia brought one leg to touch the ground, guiding the hammock into a sway that was slow and even, and soon they found a sleep that seemed to promise something as they fell into it, a cleaning of the body or an adjusting of the mind.
~ ~ ~
IN THE TAXI Edith dismissed the congestion of cars with a fluttery hand.
“It’s always like this Christmas weekend.” The man behind the wheel narrowed his eyes in the rearview mirror, poised to correct her mistake, but saw something in the impotent way she poured her sight out the window, and stopped.
Adeleine kept her eyes closed and her right hand fixed on the door handle. The driver spoke in a sonorous voice into a Bluetooth earpiece, his syllables so attenuated they seemed coded. Outside the speeding taxi one borough rushed into another, Brooklyn finally replaced by the low plastic-sided houses and dim restaurants and suspect quiet of Queens.
“Declan says it’s important to dress to the nines when you’re flying. He says, if you can’t show your best self when defying man’s God-given abilities, then when? It’s a crime to cruise the heavens in anything but your finest suit, because what would St. Peter say about blue jeans? He might send you to hell to change!”
Adeleine’s body sank lower and lower, like litter discarded in a bay searching for its resting point. Eventually her knees on the back of the seat were set higher than her cheeks, and pieces of hair moved above her on the upholstery, held hostage by static.
“You know, we took Jenny on a plane. Seven months she was. And some friends of mine, they said, what are you thinking, babies should stay safe at home where they belong. And Declan said, nope, our girl’s a flyer, I know it. I dressed her in a little corduroy jumper and she stood on my lap, tensing and untensing her toes. We were by the window and Declan said, better keep the shade down, she’ll be calmer that way. But she kept reaching for it. She wanted that thing open! She wanted to see where we were! Once I pulled it up she was glued to that patch of blue, would not look away for anything. There was another baby on the flight and it cried like it was starved, and when it would start up wailing, Jenny would stiffen and blink, like she recognized the sound but couldn’t remember from where, and then turn back to the business of cloud watching. She’d forgotten everything else, didn’t care if we never landed, couldn’t imagine any other place.”
Adeleine’s fingers darted and groped for the window button. She turned her face into the rushing air and arched her shoulders, but her vomit only made it as far as the back windshield, and Edith began to shriek.
“Sir! A young lady has just become ill in the back of your cab! Do something at once!” For the duration of the ride, the driver muttered hard consonants in Gujarati, then some of the profane variety in English. As they careened into the airport under the brash white signs of different airlines, their suitcases shifted audibly in the trunk, and the crepuscular sky fought viciously to keep its color, the violets and blues now thin and strained.
~ ~ ~
RELIEVED OF THE QUESTIONS that had propelled him, Thomas tried to restore his lost sense of purpose by familiarizing himself with the mechanics of Edith’s final home. He followed one of Song’s sons, Wallace, a tall man with a lopsided smile and prominent canines, on his rounds. He watched as Wallace affectionately chucked the red throat of a hen, then lifted the bird to retrieve her eggs; as he culled worn sheets from various beds and placed them inside a frail washing machine that sat on the outskirts of the main circle of buildings, alone and painted blue; as he scooped out cat food into a series of wooden bowls with the patience of a priest, and tugged the tips of tails as the felines appeared, one by one, to circle his feet.
Thomas had intended to sit with Wallace during the evening hour in which people spoke, to ask him plainly whether these routines, this place, gave him happiness, but it was evident even in the way the man walked, turning his head frequently to survey the bounty: the familiar faces napping in hanging chairs, the untamed sun-washed herb garden, the one-room homes built for simple lives, the well-worn paths that led to water.