Looking at it, I thought about the summer my grandmother died, when she and I were friends again and she’d wanted us to correspond while she was at her art program in San Francisco. When I’d arrived home from Cobalt, there weren’t any letters from Claire waiting for me in our mailbox. None had arrived, either, the remainder of that summer. That fall, I caught a few glimpses of her at the diner with those same friends, but she never acknowledged me, perhaps giving me what I wanted-anonymity. I heard rumors about Claire over the years-that she was a hotshot artist in Baltimore, that she begged some guy to marry her, that she was a lesbian in San Francisco. But I would probably never know the truth about any of them.
I spent five minutes watching TV with my father before I had to leave the TV room, hiding in the Center’s white, plushy-toweled guest bathroom, crying. I wasn’t sure when I’d last cried-it seemed like years. And yet, the tears felt almost perfunctory, offering me no release, no fade to black then credits, no epiphany or happy ending. I felt like something was missing, like I’d taken off a ring I’d been wearing for a long, long time, so long that it had become part of my finger. The bathroom smelled like someone’s floral perfume. An old woman, perhaps a patient, had left a gaudy costume jewelry bracelet on the edge of the sink. I slid it on my wrist and, for the rest of the night, pressed its bumpy surface up to the side of my cheek, feeling like I was, in a very small way, someone else.
I talked to my father on the phone a few hours before my flight to Dublin. I had cleaned the house, I had packed my things, I had taken the dogs to their new owner, a woman down the street my father and I screened together-she loved dogs, and had a lot of room and a lot of time to exercise them. We wanted them to remain in this neighborhood-the smells would be the same for them.
When it got to that winding-down part of the conversation where it was obvious we had nothing else to say and should probably get off the phone, my father made this sigh. In it was the smallest of whimpers. ‘Have a wonderful time,’ he said. I stared out the window, watching the kids rollerblading up and down the Promenade. One World Trade glimmered across the water. Squinting hard, I tried to accurately count twenty-two floors from the top, but the building seemed too far away, the distance between floors too ambiguous. It made me wonder if I had ever been able to tell which office was my mother’s, or if I’d just convinced myself I could.
At the airport, I tried calling my father from the pay phone near the security line, but a nurse answered. I hung up fast.
I sat in front of the arrivals and departures board outside the international terminal. I hadn’t gone through security yet; my bags were still with me, unchecked. The big schedule board said another flight to Dublin would leave a few hours later-it was on Air France, with a stopover in Paris. I flirted with the idea of not going to Dublin at all, but to somewhere else entirely. Madrid, maybe, or Johannesburg-both were leaving at the same time as the Dublin flight. If I hung out for a while, there were late-night planes to Reykjavik or Lima or Geneva. I traced the tweed pattern on the edge of my suitcase. From the bar just past the security gate, someone spoke in what I decided was Finnish. Someone else said, Would you stop it? Someone else laughed.
And then, my flight to Dublin was boarding. I heard the attendant call for first class over the PA, then rows twentyfive through thirty, then rows twenty and higher, then rows fifteen and higher. I imagined the people lining up at the gate: two old ladies, a couple with a baby, a man in a wheelchair. A beautiful boy I might be sitting next to.
All rows for Dublin, the flight attendant called. I pictured old people pressing their hands to their knees and, groaning, standing. The flight attendant would be smiling with all her teeth as she ripped their tickets. She called my name over the PA once, then twice. But I had suddenly become so sure of something: this wasn’t how it was supposed to work. I wished it were, I wished I could have gone, but I knew I couldn’t.
The flight attendant called my name for a final time. I watched the departures board. After a while, the status of the flight to Dublin changed from Boarding to Departed. I ran to the window, dragging my bags. There it was, a big Aer Lingus jet. The massive, capsule-shaped contraption backed away from the gate, the old people and the children and the cute boy inside, their luggage packed in like Tetris pieces. Eventually, it pulled to the runway, hovered there for a while, warming up, and then with a splintering, white sound, it took off, screaming faster and faster, higher and higher, until it was rushing over Manhattan, until it was indistinguishable from the stars.
PART FOUR
Cobalt, PA,
September, 2001
it will kill you
if you’re not looking
Prologue
They encourage me to write letters to everyone I know, even if I’ll never send them in a million years. They say if I’m stuck, I should just start writing. Just go for it, they tell me. Dive right in. Talk about anything.