A sharp, acrid sentiment bloomed in Thomas. His understanding of himself—that he’d grown cowardly since the stroke, had forsaken some former virility and honor—appeared, finally and absolutely, as a lie he’d told himself for comfort. Knowing this felt like watching the sand at his feet escaping and returning to the ocean, feeling the divots grow deeper and his balance melt, understanding that soon he’d need to move. He looked around his apartment now, at the few things lying around—two mugs left unwashed; a failing row of potted herbs; a box of childhood photos his mother had sent, which he’d never unpacked—and wondered what kind of life they indicated.
He got up and moved to the kitchen table, where his laptop sat open, displaying articles he’d only half read: an economist’s half-baked ideas about what the on-demand consumption of pop culture meant for minor artists, a biographical entry about a middling starlet, the obituary of a childhood acquaintance who had drowned. He brought the computer screen to full brightness and began his search for an airplane ticket, and the immediacy of it, the options rippling open in new windows, moved through him like a chill.
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.