On the flight back from Zurich to Kennedy, Tony woke to turbulence.
He’d picked up a copy of Vanity Fair in the airport after he spotted the cover, Kate Morris: The Rottweiler of the Climate Crisis. When Holly had taken the position at the Brooklyn office of the climate organization that summer they’d joked about her getting into the family business. Still, Tony had never really believed this incarnation of young people chanting tired slogans and setting papier-mâché Earths on fire would be any different. Activists, for all their passion, usually knew less about earth systems than the oil men. Holly had pestered him to check out this Morris woman, but it sounded more like Holly had a bit of a hero crush than anything else. Reading this piece of hagiography, he could grant that the Morris kid didn’t sound like a total idiot, but if she thought scaring a few Democrats was going to change people’s calculations, she was Pollyanna. Green New Deal politics, the Sunrise Movement, the half-measures of the Biden and Hogan years—it had all been so much hand-waving while the guts of the carbon economy chugged along. When he read Governor Randall’s name he smirked, thinking of the withering look she’d assessed him with as they left the stage. Wow. Even for you, that was something else, Rathbone had texted him.
When he fell asleep on the plane, there was another dream. A dark space, like a Gothic church built into the side of a hill, and he could just see outside, the blue sky and sunlight beyond the buried shadows. Then he woke with a jolt.
The woman beside him was gripping the armrests, white-knuckled. The plane took another abrupt dip before righting itself. There were gasps from the rows ahead. He pulled his seat belt taut. The plane bounced violently again. The pilot came on to say they should all be buckled in at this point, as if he needed to tell them that. Tony knew the odds of a plane going down were insignificant, but that was cold comfort as it lurched side to side and a bag rattled in the overhead compartment, trying to make a prison break.
“I don’t know how you slept that long,” said the woman beside him. Well-heeled, clutching an expensive silk scarf, she looked green. “It’s been like this for twenty minutes.”
“Clear-air turbulence,” said Tony. “The jet stream is getting stronger.”
“What?” she said.
“At high altitudes the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics is growing. I mean, on the ground it’s been shrinking, but at these high altitudes, it’s getting bigger. Eventually, a plane will fall out of the sky when it gets bad enough.”
The woman turned her head to the window and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the flight. When the skies calmed down, Tony fell back asleep.
That week, on their way to pick up Catherine from the airport, Holly gave him an earful about his panel at Davos.
“You realize that just being the biggest ornery asshole you can manage is not going to win people over to your way of thinking?”
“I didn’t say anything I don’t always say.”
“Diversity hire? Dad, you don’t hear how offensive that sounds? Have you even read what they’re saying about you on the internet?”
He gave her a puzzled look. “Oh no, is someone angry about something on the internet? The internet?”
“Daaad,” she growled. “The idea is you change people’s minds, not call them stupid to their faces while your whiteness explodes out of you.”
“You’re the one who pointed out their game to me, Holly! I’m just quoting you! Hire a bunch of brown women to front for you while you burn the planet to ashes and call it progress.”
“I don’t think I put it quite like that,” she said, gritting her teeth. “I’m talking about tact, Father. Tact.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“That woman could be the president in two years! Don’t you think it might have been useful to get on her good side? Then, I don’t know, she’s making some policy, and she thinks, ‘What about that really smart scientist guy I met at Davos?’ Instead of, ‘Oh, that old racist asshole who publicly berated me.’ ”
“You know, Older One, you get more dramatic with every passing year. You’re more of a cranky old white man than me.”
She guffawed a fake laugh, craning her head back so that her long neck stretched to gazelle lengths. “That’s, like, totally hysterical given every acid reflux grumbling I’ve heard come out of your mouth since I was aware of language.”
They were silent for a second and then he laughed. “Acid reflux grumbling?”
“I don’t know. It just came out.”
Catherine was especially ebullient when they picked her up, bouncing around in the back seat even after Holly scolded her to put her seat belt on. They didn’t bring up school, and she seemed happier than she had the last few times they’d been together. After he got both girls situated in the guest room, they went to dinner at his favorite Italian place in downtown New Haven.
“I watched your thing, Dad,” Catherine told him. “On Slapdish. It’s got like two hundred thousand views. Loved it when you gave it cold to those bitches.”
“Don’t encourage him,” said Holly.
“Do you see what everyone’s saying about you?” she asked. “You have your own hashtag. And there’s a deepfake vid of you making out with that lady governor.”
Holly sighed loudly. “Not ‘lady’ governor, Cat. Just ‘governor.’ Jesus.”
Catherine tossed back her wine. She’d already lapped her sister by a glass. “Whatever. I’m not voting for any of them.”
“Cat,” said Holly, who should have known her younger sister was baiting her but, like a fish, could never seem to resist the gleaming bit of tinfoil. “You really want to have this argument?”
“What? They’re all a bunch of jabronis. I’m not taking part in their little stage play.”
Before Holly could go into a full-bore lecture, Tony kept the peace. “You’re voting, Khaleesi,” he told her. “And you’re voting for whoever your sister tells you to vote for.”
The next day it was too cold to do anything other than go to a movie—some claptrap piece of shit with a crumbling Brad Pitt. Then they walked around the mall, and he let them pry whatever they wanted from him. He bought Holly a new dress and Catherine got him for two pairs of jeans, a revealing top he’d prefer not to imagine her wearing, and an extremely expensive Coach handbag.
While they waited for her to come out of another dressing room, Tony asked Holly about work.
“So have you met the Anointed One yet? Has Morris even come to the New York offices?”
“Not yet. I’m still bottom of the pile,” she said, shrugging. “It’s what I expected.”
“Don’t they know your father wrote the book on this subject?”
“I think that’s why I’m not getting any special favors. Why I’m stuck in a VR set asking people in Slapdish worldes for spare change.”
He rubbed her back. “You’re probably already the smartest person in that whole organization.”
She smiled. Holly was still only a glorified canvasser at A Fierce Blue Fire. He knew she felt like her talents, energy, and ambition were spoiling. “Dad, you’re not a reliable source of comfort. Too many biases.”
“Bullshit. I read the Vanity Fair article. You’ll be running that place like it’s your pet goat in no time.”
Holly cracked up. “What?”
“I don’t know. Just came out.” Tony smiled at her. He’d lost his mom as a teenager, his wife in his thirties, and his dad had passed away in ’21. At that point, it felt like his life’s skin was sloughing off, and he’d grown coldly accustomed to the people he loved leaving him. Then at his dad’s funeral, Holly had given the funniest, most moving eulogy about her grandfather, and Tony had gritted through this moment, his few remaining hairs blown back in shock. His daughter was an adult, and she would do things he would never be able to predict.