* * *
—
NEXT DOOR AT GATE 23, passengers waited to go to Beirut. They pulled gummy candies out of their leather handbags, adjusted expensive-looking glasses, spread a wool throw over the sleeping baby. A group of thin men punctuated their words with flicks of unlit cigarettes.
My gate smelled foreign. The Indian men had colorful shirts and gray polyester pants. Body odor rode the air like a surfer. An American family passed in safari clothes.
Peter’s flight from LA was delayed and I felt half crazy, alone in this airport on my way to sow the seed of my baby in another woman’s body.
I put my head back, listened to a jet engine roar, listened to the final boarding call for Beirut. Here we all were together, all these strangers waiting. By morning, we would be on every corner of the globe. Waking up to cappuccino, chai. I thought of the blond family opening their eyes in Nairobi, everyone a little afraid and a little thrilled to be in such a scary-sounding city. Their high-end tour operator would serve them breakfast and whisk them away, but they would see Africa out the window. And isn’t that part of the appeal, anyway? Won’t the parents feel proud to be exposing their children to the perils of life below the equator? Shouldn’t it make those children feel more grateful for what they have—the rooms of their own, the air-conditioning, the sedan in which everyone gets his or her own booster seat, rather than piling onto a moped with nothing to protect them but a small Jesus charm glinting on the handlebars? It was leaving that made home so sweet.
* * *
—
I LOOKED UP at the television to see a breaking story about an explosion at Cape Canaveral. A rocket bound for the International Space Station had burst into flames. The video played on a loop: spark, flames, smoke. I thought of Sunshine, who I assumed was back home in Florida, completing each stage of her training—medical or spaceship technology or Mars geography—until she could finally, victoriously, leave her own planet for good. The first unmanned rocket with supplies for a habitable settlement on Mars was scheduled for two years out. The first crew was supposed to leave in four. Sunshine would be thirty. I thought of that fixed point, the countdown, the launch, and everything that could change before then. The loves that would be loved or abandoned, the body’s secrets—illness, desire—come to light. I thought of the stores of freeze-dried sustenance. The explosion was repeated again on the television screen and the pink-lipped newscaster looked grave.
I saw Peter before he saw me. He walked down the long hallway, a coffee in his hand, looking almost peaceful. He was whatever he was to me—my gay ex, my friend, the father of my dreamchild. “Hey, Mama,” he said when he got close. He patted my belly. “Feeling anything kick?”
“Not funny,” I said. But no matter. So much was possible. Here we were, on our way to a life of meaning.
“Are you ready?” Peter asked.
A fat white guy in a cream-colored linen suit sat down in front of us and answered his loudly ringing phone. “Yes,” he said, almost shouting. “Andy, it’s the best, the very best you can get.” Everyone at the gate stared at him. He looked not at Peter and me but through us, like we were an incidental geographic feature on his horizon. “Andy, Andy, Andy,” he said at high volume, “the chrono-layers are socketed. The entire motherboard has astro-filament. It’s the most advanced technology to date. With this in your hands you can do anything. It’s a fucking superpower.”
Peter looked at the fat guy and then at me and we laughed. We two made no sense, but no one else made sense either.
Our plane pulled into the gate, its fuselage winked in the sun. The rocket exploded again on television.
“I’m ready,” I said.
Suddenly the fat guy looked right at me. He winked. “Baby,” he said into the phone, his eyes fixed on me, “Baby, baby, baby. Trust me. You’ll never lose a fucking signal again.”
Remedy
The neighbor man fixed things himself around the house. From her upstairs window, Summer would see him outside in the morning caulking; uprooting small, unwelcome trees; straightening the tiled path from door to driveway. Unemployed, probably. Fatter than the doctors recommended. Summer, looking on, suspected there was an entire refrigerator in the garage filled with the bullets of beer cans. Ammunition against this lonely, cold New England.
Out at sea: a foghorn from the ferry, headed away. Beneath it, the harbor would be thick with ice chips. A slurry of salty cold. Summer loved the sound of the aging ship cutting through the near-frozen water, pushing it away in a V. When she and Kit went somewhere, which was not often, she stood on deck no matter what kind of wind was blowing.
The neighbor man left his garage with a ladder. He huffed to the roof’s edge, clanked the thing up. Stood there a minute, dizzy or admiring the job. As the man climbed the ladder, his jacket and shirt rose up, revealing a thick black pelt beneath. Summer pictured his wife, whom she only ever saw jogging, her head red and exerted, making good time around the town but always ending up at the same old farmhouse with the same cold day ahead of her.
Summer wonders what it feels like for the wife, her face heat-steaming in the winter air, to come up that driveway, the miles she’s covered still humming in her foot bones, and to find that man there. He’d be wearing that same red sweatshirt, the same jeans. Does the woman reach her hands up under the cotton to find his familiar, warm hide?
The neighbor man summits the roof, which makes him seem suddenly much smaller. The sloped black expanse, the single body. From his pocket he takes a beer. He reclines on his elbow and drinks. He lies all the way back. Maybe he is seeing the same black gather of crows on the telephone wires that Summer sees, slick as poured tar. Maybe he is noticing the same crack in the clouds, the slice of almost blue. It all goes still. Summer feels painted into this day.
When the man rolls off, he will do so like a cut log. And when he reaches the edge, his arms will go out and the wind will catch in his jacket and he will look winged. The thud of his body on the ground will surprise Summer, not so much because he is far away, but because it will have seemed to her that he might actually fly.
* * *
—
KIT COMES HOME from his job as a high school English teacher with his hands in his hair. It is dark outside already. This time of year, even day is half night. Summer meets him at the door with a hot cup and cookies. She finds a place for her face in his neck and kisses. He says, “I almost came home at lunch for this,” and kisses her back. She wants to wait, to tell him only how much she loves him, to let him put his bag down in the place he always puts it, to stand in the refrigerator’s glow searching for a salve for this day. She wants to say, “Good day, sweetheart?” and hear the answer. But instead she says, “One of us is going to die first.” All those good knots, tied along the lengths of their lives, but one rope is shorter than the other.
That night, she senses collapse. Kit and Summer together are the answer to any question. The only reason for anything. Because? Because otherwise Summer’s body is made out of ripped wing-metal, the burned leather of four seats, glass shards disappearing in the snow. She is the smell of fire and the smell of pine forest and the smell of a storm. It’s not figurative. Summer is a construction of the disaster that killed her family. Her parents, dead and entwined in the cold, and she walks away with only a scar on her thigh in the shape of South America that has yet to fade.
Kit is a collage, too. His parents went on vacation when he was six, to a Caribbean island so small it didn’t have its own name and the sea around, which was vast, swelled into a sudden lightning storm and though the sea itself hardly noticed the change—what is a little more water when all there is is water?—the island went under. Just like that. Below the surface. Kit imagines two versions. In one, his parents sleep through the storm and drown in a dream. In the other, his mother rigs a sail from their tent and they lie across a downed palm tree, set off on the white-blue waves. Th
ere’s no ending to that story. The sea is shaggy with palmy islands, with non-people-eating natives, with friendly exotic animals. It’s only two lives, he thinks to himself. Two lives to save. More impossible things have happened.
* * *
—
THE NIGHT AFTER the neighbor man dies, Summer and Kit lie stacked in bed, flesh and flesh. The blanket is ancient wool and itchy, but they don’t even consider clothes. They need a solution. “I wouldn’t love anyone else if you died,” Summer says.
“Then why would you stay alive? You’re too young for that. It’s impractical, and a waste of skin.” Summer notes that they could jump off a bridge together, someplace simple or someplace dramatic. “Better,” she says. “Whichever one dies first promises to move into the other, like a house.” She doesn’t know what form the dead take—mist or molecule—but whatever it is should come on in. Get comfortable. It’s good enough for tonight, but in the morning this unenforceable solution will leave Summer wanting.
* * *
—
THE VERY TALK of death makes Summer feel symptomatic. Her arm is a little bit sore. She feels an ache in her guts. She takes a pregnancy test, but only one small line appears. Summer looks at the box again, hoping she misread the instructions. That’s the mutation expected in this part of life—new cells like a smattering of tiny stars beginning to make their own gravity. If not more life, then her discomfort must be a sign of illness. As if Summer has invented her own ending, she begins to feel that her heart has been replaced by a ticking clock. She begins to feel dug up and corpselike. Every part of Summer is marching toward the end and the world around her is made of germs, which only serve to speed the process along. She is dying, she realizes. Maybe it will take time for her to erode completely, a clay cliff eaten away by salt waves, but it could be soon. It feels, from the inside, like it could be very, very soon.
Summer says to her love, “It’s going to be me. I’ll be the one to go.” Kit only nods and kisses her at the exact center of her forehead.
“OK,” he says.
“No. I’m right about this.”
What he doesn’t understand is the relief she feels. Not knowing is worse than any answer, and Summer wants this the same way she remembers wanting other comforts: sweaters knitted by hand from the wool of rare rabbits, tiny landscape paintings with gold frames, important books she’ll never get around to reading.
Summer opens the phone book and looks up “doctor.” She makes an appointment with someone whose name sounds like her father’s.
* * *
—
BEFORE SHE MET KIT, Summer prayed to die every day. She imagined the ghosts of her parents in a living room with leather couches and bookshelves that required ladders. She imagined that her mother would have plenty of yogurt to eat and her father wouldn’t need to bother with food at all. Except the occasional pecan pie, delivered at exactly the right moment, before he even realized he wanted it. There would be a chair for Summer there. A reclining chair, and outside, a garden. Every day with her foster family in the Boston suburbs, she thought of that place, wished for that place.
High school showed up and she started smoking and watched every single meteor shower for four years. She had friends with cars and they’d drive to the top of the mountain, climb onto the roof and let the heavens fall at them. Maybe there were mountain lions nearby, or bears. Maybe there was a mass murderer in the woods—one girl or another always worried about that—but Summer was ready for any of them. She adjusted her flannel shirt and her torn jeans and she asked someone to climb down into the car and turn the radio off, to let night be the only sound. The friends always listened to Summer. Tragedy lends authority, especially with teenagers. There was a whole hierarchy: divorce, absent father, physical abuse, sexual abuse, dead father, dead mother, and then, at the top: dead both. It was the rarest loss, the most terrible, and the sufferer was like a precious gem, pressed by unthinkable forces into shimmering sadness, shimmering beauty.
Summer slept with all the best-looking boys, and even the mean ones were nice to her. She was loveliest naked, white-gold and cold to the touch, and boys found themselves confessing things on fold-out couches, in cars. My uncle is a car thief. My brother is in jail. My mother drinks alone every night. My sister is a stripper. I had sex with my cousin. I might love her. My grandfather does not recognize me.
Summer let them talk. She let them build a little nest of confessions for them to sleep the night in. Down the dark river they floated.
Kit and Summer met a few years later in a bar in Back Bay where they were with other people their own age. It was hot and awful and so loud that everyone heard only their own half of the conversation.
“I love this song!”
“Yes, Jamaica!”
“You look so hot tonight!”
“I’ve never had one!”
They all smiled and half danced and ordered another round. The bar-goers did not care about verbal communication—they had so much time for that, their long lives, the quiet morning ahead when they’d reconstruct the night, their ears ringing, their tongues thick. And anyway, anything that could be said with your mouth could be said better with your body.
There were Kit and Summer, mashed up in the dark bar with all those other boys and girls in the smell of spilled and swallowed drinks. They each felt misfiled until the bodies shuffled and they ended up face-to-face, and without one single word, without a question, they shook hands and then they kissed.
They woke up in the morning in the same bed and Kit said, his hand on the pulse of her neck, “I might already love you.” He paused. “I own a house on Nantucket. My parents are dead and I got a lot of stuff. It’s not tropical, but I have the keys. Do you want to go there and make up for lost time?”
They went with a suitcase each, just clothes and photographs. When Summer had told her roommates that she was leaving to go live on an island with a boy she’d met the night before, the roommates said, “Oh, cool. Do you want to do brunch first?” They made it so easy to leave.
* * *
—
EACH MORNING of that week, Kit gets up before it is light and makes eggs. He puts plenty of butter on his toast and he looks out the window at the place where the neighbor man slipped off the earth. If only that hadn’t happened, he thinks, his girl would not have begun to die. As if death were pollen, airborne. He disagrees with her diagnosis, with the idea that she can suddenly be dying of nothing in particular, but Kit believes Summer. That’s the whole thing of it—believing each other is what makes living feel real. If he were to question it, to question her—he can’t even think down that perilous path before his valves tighten.
He goes upstairs where his love sleeps on, the blanket pulled up to her chin, hair reaching out like sun-seeking vines. If the neighbor man had stayed on his roof, finished his beer, mended the hole he’d climbed there for, maybe the trillions of cells in Summer’s young body would have continued their perfect, coordinated churn. Blood rivering through her, oxygen. The papery folds of lungs, globes of organs. “Forget everything you’ve seen,” Kit whispers to his sleeping love. “You are perfect.”
It becomes the method. Tell Summer’s body over and again how good it is, how healthy, how undying. Summer thinks it’s sweet, how her boy lies to her guts, her thrumming heart. As if lying can make it true. Summer gets in the shower and Kit pulls the curtain back to watch, says, “God, you are beautiful. And so healthy right now.” She makes a pot of beans and Kit says, “Look at that strong body of yours. Keep cooking.” He buys her lots of ingredients and makes requests for complicated dishes, which she executes perfectly. Evidence of how strong she must be, how present tense, how very here. It feels good. It’s a help. But they can only eat so much, and soon, when Kit comes home from work and stands in the refrigerator’s glow, he is looking at a wall of leftovers. Half a cake, half a pie, half a roast duck, a leg of lamb
, homemade cheeses. Ants have discovered the bread loaves on the counter, poured their thankful black bodies across the crust.
* * *
—
THEY GO TO the doctor Summer found in the phone book. He is lying on the exam table when they arrive, his arm draped across his forehead like he’s playing dead. “Sorry,” Kit says. “Do you want us to come back later?” The doctor, big and pale, has his shirt open a button and gray chest hair tufts out. He stands up and rubs his eyes, takes a cleansing breath. “You’re here,” he says, seeming surprised.
Summer does not feel sick today, just as she did not feel sick the days before. She feels good and true and awake after a strong cup of tea. Maybe she’s sleepier than she used to be, before she was dying. Maybe it hurts more than it used to to think of the tragedies of the world—the car bomb in the city that doesn’t expect that kind of thing and the car bomb in the city that does. The woman who carefully swaddled her baby in a hand-knit blanket and left him at the door of a fire station. The orphans, tens of thousands, who feel around the bed for each other’s feet in the dark. Is that a symptom? Summer wonders. Being punched in the heart by the world?
The doctor presses the cool disc to Summer’s chest and listens for a long time, like he needs to hear the whole piece of music, the sonata, all three movements, before he can say anything. In the corner, a stick of incense sends a thin gray spiral up into the room. Above it hangs a piece of silk with the Indian elephant god reaching out. Summer tries to keep her breathing in order. Kit studies his love there on the doctor’s nap-wrinkled table. Her ankles are narrow as a child’s and her feet hang like ornaments. He wants to merge with her, to entwine.
“Yes,” the doctor says.
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