He had not expected that leaving New York would feel somehow like going without food, that watching Paulie and Claudia day in and day out would primarily serve to prod at old losses, as a reminder of the family he didn’t have. He didn’t have his mother, who had spent the last years of her life wheezing in the glow of unsolved murder reenactments; he didn’t have his father, who had regarded his sons as poor returns on investment and squinted at them, waiting for their value to rise. He certainly didn’t have his brother, who had finally buckled under their mother’s neurotic legacy: he had begun coming home from his insurance job, locking three deadbolts, ignoring most phone calls, and showering with bleach.
Once, he’d had Helena, but couldn’t understand that romantic commitment was, contrary to myth, built on the conditional, a rolling system that noted each person’s deficiencies until they congealed into the untenable. He had gone to great lengths to test the limits of her love, and dared her to fail, and then she had.
The details of it came back to walk with him sometimes: how he had turned, on so many nights, towards the wall, and let her sleep alone on a wide expanse of bed; how she had begged him to open and to excavate, and he had snorted at her self-help speak and dismissed her genuine efforts as affect. Even on the morning she’d gathered her last small things—a wooden box of seldom-worn jewelry, a stainless steel pepper shaker—she’d appealed to him. Standing in the doorframe with the items in her hands, she’d said, “You know, I would go on putting your life ahead of mine forever, probably, if you gave the slightest indication that was truly what you wanted.” He hadn’t even glanced up from where he’d been lying on the couch—he’d known how she would look, her skin impassioned with uneven color, her hair pinned back to mirror the severity of her face—until he saw her shadow move and knew she was finally gone.
In the heat of the road’s shoulder, he tried to attach these memories to the cars that passed, visualized a steel-blue sedan towing away the image of his misery growing stale on the couch, saw a Wonder Bread truck whisking Helena away to somewhere effortless and warm. Moved by a boozy spirit of generosity five months before, their mutual friend Martin had given him Helena’s new phone number. “You should call her,” he’d said. “Maybe it’s been long enough. People get older, you know, and they’re more willing to forgive. It’s almost never easier to forget someone totally.” He had reached for Edward’s phone and programmed her name into the contact list in capital letters. Since then he had taken to scrolling through furiously until he reached H, then staring at the digitized representation of the life he had missed—a minute, then two—for as long as he could endure it. It had become a day-ruining thrill, an overdose that required concentrated efforts at recovery. And then, on the side of the road in Tennessee, in running shoes the color of dishwater, with sweat dripping from a hairline that crept farther back daily, with no clear plans for middle age, Edward pressed the little green icon of a telephone. As the rings multiplied, he scrambled farther into the brush, looking for some thicket in which to lie and suffer.
What had he expected? That she would answer and speak his name with wind chimes in her voice? Her outgoing message was simply her recorded name spoken cheerfully, like the answer to a riddle. When the tone came, he took a fistful of grass and weeds between his fingers and gathered, with no small shock, that he was speaking.
“Hey, Edward! I mean, Edward, it’s hey. Goddamnit—”
He didn’t get the chance to resolve his blunder. The protracted beep of a call on the other line sounded, and her name flashed in bold, spectral rhythm.
HELENA
HELENA
HELENA
BECAUSE WALLACE’S TRUCK, gray like wet gravel, could fit only three, and Thomas’s rental had been mysteriously returned on his behalf, he had to stay behind while Song’s son drove the two hours to the tiny municipal airport. Thomas sent with him a hand-painted sign, oil on plywood, that featured their names. His right hand, competent now but never assured, had trembled as he added a flourish to the “A” in “Adeleine” and “E” in “Edith.” He had kissed two fingers, tapped them on Wallace’s side mirror, and watched the truck bump along the untended land until the trees obscured it.
Outside the arrivals terminal, there was no shade, everything cut away for the shimmering parking lot, and the heat rose in abundance from the concrete, uncut by any wind. Wallace leaned on the hood, whistling long notes under his straw cowboy hat, holding up the sign though the plane still sat on the runway, full of passengers.
The people who began filtering out ten minutes later were rumpled and squinting in the white push of heat. Some, met by relatives in shorts who waved halfheartedly before turning back to their cars, crossed the lot at a clip, rolling suitcases at their heels. Others, solitary, navigated the parking lot like those emerging from a long matinee, not yet accustomed to the changed light. When the last of them had slipped through the sieve of warmth into air-conditioned cars, the slow automatic doors revealed Adeleine and Edith, the younger woman in a broad sun hat that cast checkered shadows on her milky shoulders, the elder in a pinstriped dress that drooped from her body. He pressed his Stetson to his chest and approached.
“You must be Edith.”
Their eyes were similar, the blue-green patterned in symmetry, and the lids slightly hooded, folds like loosely made beds.