She entered when he was awake. Numb with medicine, but he was awake and could recognize how she’d once been before her hair turned gray, shoulders and cheekbones—he didn’t remember them so sharp. She didn’t seem to mind his gaze. His weak body trying to stand up in the room.
Nancy knew he wouldn’t look the same, but time—these years had printed the lines of his face, the hunch of his shoulders, the thin, weathered look of his hair, all these years between them, the years she used to believe they’d never survive. She had pushed down toward the bottom of the ocean, she thought, but she could help her husband through those depths. Here they were, still surviving.
“Murray,” she said, setting the bag she’d brought on the floor. She kept enough distance as they stood there, in silence, for several long moments. He tried to focus on her eyes, the way time was supposed to soften things. Quiet in the way it had been, just after Jean was born, when he’d sat a few feet from Nancy’s bed in the delivery room, Jean asleep by her chest—he’d watched them so peaceful, two breaths rising and falling. Why had it been so hard for him to tell her? That he saw her strength, in all she’d given of herself, to create and sustain their child’s life.
Now Jean was filling the space between them in the room. Wobbling toward his outstretched arms. Smiling at him with gaps in her teeth. She waved at him through the window in a house they all might have lived in together on Orange Street, the house Nancy had picked out one winter. In the daytime, the house had been a simple clapboard, but in the evening, it had scintillated: eaves and windows and tree branches dripping with light.
He saw her older still: passing her driver’s license test, passing other exams. Saw her throwing her hat on graduation day. Saw her stripping tape from boxes on the floor of her college dorm. Time contracting into the moment his arm crooked hers: the slow, long walk down an aisle somewhere. Somewhere where he might have had the chance to let her go.
Last, he was lying on the floor, balancing Jean on his knees: propped by elbows before the television. Jean, no more than one month old, a fuzzy sheen along her forehead and nose, the soft lines of her eyebrows. His baby had been so warm and still on his knees, sleeping there. It had been the Fourth of July, but they’d put the fireworks on mute, so he’d had to imagine the sound of the lights, the smell of gunpowder.
He’d thought, One day I’ll take her to the top of East Rock to watch the lights and name the shapes. One day she might run to the top, too, for a view of East Haven, remembering that sound, her heart like ticker tape at the end of a race he’d be waiting at the end of.
Nancy held him.
He said something she could barely hear, words broken, his body shuddering. She asked him. She said, “Tell me,” as though nineteen years no longer divided them, and she was the one in his place, steadying him the way he had her, in the grieving room.
“I was supposed to go first,” he wept.
He felt the weightlessness of Jean in his arms, in the hospital, holding her that one last time. The doctor had sealed her eyelids: peaceful and sleeping, as if untouched by suffering, the way life started and stopped on its own.
“I know,” Nancy said, tears filling her eyes.
“She could have been anything,” he said. “I would have been proud of her.”
Nancy pulled him closer. “I know,” she wept. “I would have too.”
Minutes passed, then hours, darkness filling the room—just a glimmer of light under the door—unperceivable to anyone.
They left in the car Nancy had rented, back to New Haven. Murray slept most of the drive, only fluttering his eyes a few times.
When they reached Bridgeport, he opened them. She thought about a restaurant in New Haven, but then she drove past New Haven. She pulled into the parking lot outside of a sandwich shop in Mystic.
Inside there were a bunch of high school students buying potato chips. Nancy ordered a grilled vegetable panini and swiss cheese and pastrami on rye. She got the order to go, had it placed in a brown bag with sodas. She carried it for them to a bench on the boardwalk in Ocean Beach Park.
Above, gulls circled. One swooped down, skimming the water. Another approached Nancy’s sandwich. She shooed it away with her napkin. She looked around at the scarcity of passersby, just the occasional jogger or walker. The pastel awnings of abandoned food stands and shops absorbed stillness.
They took a walk and watched gray specks flood the sky. One gull never strayed too far from its flock.
The day they’d met, Nancy had thought it odd Murray was running through Paris alone, how odd for their lives to have felt parallel, him racing a marathon, while she’d spent days holed up in the archives of the National Library, taking breaks only for coffee.
Lucky she’d decided for a longer break that day. That Murray had interrupted her, forcing anew the rhythms of the metro, his map sticky with sweat, his eyes searching, always for a better view.
He had reached for her hand then, but now she reached for his as they neared the end of the pier.
When they were first dating, Nancy remembered how they used to guess what the other was thinking; one person asked a question, while the other imagined often ridiculous possibilities. The game had grown more silent and less ridiculous as the years went on, more like perpetual hide-and-seek, never claiming the thing between them, love and its failure, need and its denial—then the dream and its breaking.
But Jean was here with them, she thought, in the salt of the cool breeze, in Murray, too, when she looked in his eyes; here, their child was more alive than she’d ever been, in all this time.
Nancy paused to lean over the guardrail. She watched the soft, silvery ripples of ocean. After several minutes of waiting, Murray turned to her, her eyes and gray hair, which used to remind him of burnished copper, pennies he’d waited for trains to flatten as a child with his brother, for speed to imprint a given year. He held her hand tighter as the gulls squawked above, and the sun grew dimmer over the water.
He had never told her she made time like that for him, specific and infinite at once: each moment greater than the second it carried, this one breath that had taken him his lifetime to find.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not be possible without the people who first believed in its potential as a short story at Sarah Lawrence College. Thank you to all of my loyal readers: Aliza Bartfield, Jessica Denzer, Olivia Worden, Alicia Schaeffer, Krystal Padley, Yaron Kaver, Carolyn Silveira. I am also grateful for the incredible mentorship I received from David Ryan, Nelly Reifler, Mary La Chappelle, David Hollander, Kathleen Hill, Melissa Febos, and Brian Morton—without your guidance, “Murray” would never have attained the expanse of a novel.
I remain indebted to the support of Alex Levenberg and Stephanie Koven through every stage of my journey as a writer of this story. Alex, you have been the most devoted and enthusiastic of readers, certain Late Air would one day reach bookshelves; you’ve taught me the meaning and beauty of friendship, seeing me through each up and down that is life and always finding room to laugh. Stephanie, thank you for urging me on while I was just starting out at Sarah Lawrence, and for holding me accountable for every draft. Your mentorship affirms how inextricably linked writing is with living—the importance of waking up each day and setting pen to paper because we have to. I am grateful for the brilliance of my agent, Marya Spence, whose vision for this novel allowed it to reach its fullest potential as a human story about love. Your contagious energy propelled me forward through the hardest stages of the process, challenging me to arrive at difficult articulations about marriage and loss, and what it means to translate both experiences most concretely on the page. I am also grateful to Clare Mao for her perceptiveness through each revision, and everyone else at Janklow & Nesbit Associates who helped realize Late Air.
I remain in awe of my editor, Hafizah Geter, whose luminous intuition at the sentence level guided me through the final rounds, probing the text into its deepest emotional truths. Thank you to all those
at Little A who have championed the book: Carmen Johnson, Vivian Lee, and the whole international rights, sales, and publicity teams working restlessly to bring it to market.
I am equally indebted to the community I found at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Sanjay Agnihotri, Megan Weiler, Jenessa Abrams, and Stephen Fishbach: your revelatory insights helped me to deepen my process, to interrogate each graph most honestly as I worked to finish this book. Thank you to all of the other friends and colleagues who have believed in my work: Johanna Van Straaten, Adam Golub, Tim DiGiulio, Jessica Henderson, Ashley Campbell, Betsy Adams, Julie Mackay, Cecile Barendsma, Katy Reedy, Kristina Bicher, Jennifer Convissor, Julie Surbaugh, Spencer Guo, Amy Kvilhaug, and Andrea Burdett—and all of my students who have inspired me to understand writing as a constant state of becoming. Thank you to the generous support of the New York Public Library’s research fellowship program for their overflowing shelves and the quiet space to convene with other writers.
I offer a special thanks to my first writing professor at Yale, Marian Thurm, for planting the seed that I could write a novel that summer of 2005, and to my cross-country coach at Yale, Mark Young, and all my teammates who have been my family away from home. Thank you to my parents, my mother for her steadfast love and encouragement since I was a child writing stories; my stepfather, Dave, who has been my biggest champion through every obstacle course; my sister, Samantha, whose spirit has always inspired me to savor each moment; and my brother-in-law, Michael, for supplying me with journals and pens. Thank you to my grandparents for fostering my passion for books since I could walk, my aunt Marci and Reggie, whose generosity in all things cannot be matched, and my uncle Steve, for sending me my first books on writing and taking me to Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago. Thank you to Kim and Brian for becoming another set of parents, and I cannot forget to send my thanks to my Weimaraner puppy, Phin; thank you for sleeping faithfully by my side while I drafted hundreds of pages that never made it in.
My deepest gratitude I owe to my husband, Jared Gilbert, whose love and faith has changed me in more ways than I can say in words. You have shown me that marriage is a daily gift of understanding, in giving all of ourselves to the greater whole of our being. This is for you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2017 Jared Gilbert
After completing her BA at Yale University, Jaclyn Gilbert went on to receive an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Since then, she has received a research fellowship from the New York Public Library and contributed to the Bread Loaf, Colgate, and Tin House writers’ conferences. Jaclyn has also led writing workshops at the Valhalla Correctional Facility, the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, and Curious-on-Hudson in Dobbs Ferry, New York.
Jaclyn lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog, Phin. Late Air is her first novel. For more information about Jaclyn, visit her website at www.JaclynGilbert.com.
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