Infinite Home (27 page)

T
HE
EXPECTED
ARRIVAL
of the fireflies still long days away, they had little to contend with, save the fixing of simple meals, the constant presence of insects, the application of sunscreen to necks and backs. By dusk of the second day, Paulie showed more mosquito bites than regular skin, and followed Claudia and Edward around with a bottle of calamine lotion, asking they rub it on new itches. Claudia, clad in khaki shorts and a gray T-shirt that she had bought for the occasion and which clung to her body in stiff folds, began three books before finally settling into one. Edward took jogs that quickly turned into walks around the campground loop, and showered frequently in the forever-damp wooden stalls with concrete floors and bright acoustics. Paulie read a fantasy novel in the hammock for fifteen-minute stretches and sang along to music on his headphones and took naps in the tent, where he admired the diffusion of sunlight through the stretched green nylon and the way the sleeping bags looked lying together, like clouds flying low.

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.

I
N
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.

R
ELIEVED
OF
THE
QUESTI
ONS
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.

Wallace, tasked with building a bed for Edith, set up on the porch of Song’s little house, and Thomas helped as best as he could. For two consecutive afternoons, he handed Wallace the lengths of wood and tools at which he pointed, offered encouraging grunts, fetched pitchers of water and plates of steaming polenta from the communal kitchen. When the work was done, Wallace led Thomas to a squat tin-roofed shed, pointed to a row of dusty paint cans, and opened his arms wide in invitation. Pleased to be handed this small authority, Thomas selected a pale yellow, and Wallace squeezed his shoulder and left him to it.

He spent the rest of the sunlight close to the wood, passing the brush repeatedly over bubbles that formed in the color, stepping back into the garden to appraise the thing from a distance as slat by slat, spindle by spindle, it began to glow.

A
S
HE
PASSED
the edge of the campground, the ranger’s hut and the silver-haired woman in her khaki uniform, Edward waved and kept running. He needed to reach the concrete highway, to get out from the cover of trees; he wanted the sun to burn off the shame he felt for snapping at Paulie, and to feel the man-made surface fixed underneath him as he moved.

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