1976

THE AIRPLANE TOOK A FEW HOURS to cover what had taken five days in the car. Beneath Fern passed the desert, ridges of dinosaur remains in the hillside, cows, weather. The earth looked painted—red jags of canyons rimmed with gold. An hour later the earth was covered in trees. From this high up, time too felt condensed: in those green swaths was coal, steel, money. In those green swaths her people had owned other people; black boys had been hung from the trees; her people had freed their slaves, fought for the freeing of all slaves; her people had moved north, and as privilege allowed them, the memory of what they had done receded; Fern had lived on that same soil on a base where American bodies were taught to kill Vietnamese bodies; the black boys and brown boys went to the jungle and some of the white boys did too. Her twin was down there someplace in the thick green swath, buried in a box. But that was only his bones, and by now those hardly felt true: he was here, always here. Life and love had separated Fern and Ben, but they could not be unjoined.

The clouds had thickened beneath the plane and Fern could not see that they flew right over the sharp jut of the Chicago skyline. Above the prairie where Evelyn had failed at motherhood, a job she had never asked for, and succeeded at art, the job she was meant to do; above the porch swing where her father had rocked through the last headache of his life, through the dazzle of the aura, the beat of pain and the feeling of near weightlessness hours later when he finally opened his eyes, released; above the spot at the base of the stone angel where Ben had sat on the morning before he went away for basic training, wings blocking the wind and a view of the grass grown summer-tall; above the wooded lanes where Edgar’s parents’ house was empty after the summer season, where Mary and Hugh would return over Christmas, the whole landscape transformed by a heavy snowfall, where they would drink hot toddies and let go, for the last time, of the idea of the son they had meant to have. Fern was high above that life, those lives—would always be—and asleep by then, her head on a balled-up sweater. Outside, ice had formed on the window and the sky was white and jagged with light.

—

Fern stood outside her own house. From a distance it looked like a replica. A model of a gracious family home on a nighttime street, the light from within unnaturally warm. Figures inside. A man, sitting at the table, and his children moving around him, bringing dishes. There was no wife in the scene yet. A wife could be upstairs with a headache. Maybe her husband would go to her after he ate, bring her a plate on a tray, a folded napkin, a fork and knife and a glass of water. Maybe he would sit with her while she ate, rub her feet, keep his voice low. A wife could be out for the evening with a friend taking Italian lessons and drinking wine after, pretending to be in Tuscany, in a sundress, in summer. A wife could be in the kitchen taking a pie out of the oven. A wife could be at school, studying the particulars of a dinosaur knuckle. A wife could be at work.

Fern stood on the street. She smoked two cigarettes in a row and then crushed the rest of the pack under foot and put it back in her bag. With her she carried a suitcase within which were pieces of clothing that belonged to the family inside. They were ironed and neatly folded. She also had her own roadworn clothes, dirty and familiar and full of the big country’s dust and grit. Plains dirt and swamp water, desert. She was whole, which she had not understood before. She wanted those others in her arms—when they were it would not be completion but addition. Each of them entire.

Fern waited to go inside. It was such a beautiful family and she wanted to hold the picture still.

The man stood up from the table after a while, and he was unsteady. The eldest child went to him, gave him her wrist to hold and walked him through the house. Though he was being led, this man did not look lost—maybe he never was.

—

Fern and Edgar, awake late that night, would begin to sort through their things to see what they could sell for money. Fern would walk him through the house, describing the offerings. “What about the oak bookshelf? It’s the one piece of furniture we kept from Tennessee.” They went to the kitchen. “I think your mother gave us this crystal bowl. We’ve never used it. Here is the cutting board with our wedding date on it, and the candlesticks. These ivory-handled scissors—careful, here is the safe end—belonged to someone in one of our families, but I don’t remember who.” Edgar could see if he held the objects close enough. In doing so, he looked ancient.

In the yellow kitchen light, she handed him the tiny silver spoon his parents had sent when Cricket was a baby. Edgar pressed his thumb into the cool curve. He remembered that little mouth mashing at a banana, taking one more step towards humanness. On the handle was a small ruby. James’s spoon had a sapphire and Will’s an emerald. Edgar had hated these gifts for their grotesque indulgence: Shouldn’t the babies have been treasure enough?

“I still think my parents were wrong about the objects, the things. But they were right about time. They were right about pleasure. We should go to the Caribbean with them. Before we have to sell the summerhouse we should stay for the year even if we never leave the bedroom with the woodstove in it.”

Fern thought of their own big country, the way her pulse had changed the moment she was outside the range of home. “Are you afraid of losing your parents when your book comes out?”

He was quiet for a long time. “It might not be worth it to publish the book,” he said. He was afraid that Fern would be angry—all those years she had taken care of their life so that he could write his novel. “They are my parents.”

“You spent so long.” It was the last thing she expected him to give up.

“There are more stories,” he said. “There is other work to do.”

He opened a drawer and put his hand inside tentatively, unsure what it contained. It was full of collars. Together, they remembered each one. Rosie and Rufus, both hit by cars; Marty, given away when he could not be housebroken; Lucy, sweet, droop-eyed Lucy, the only one to get old before she died; Tex, Bessie, Flower.

“Maggie did not get lost,” he said, offering her a chance to explain.

Fern told him that she had thought Maggie had been miserable, aged. “Bad hips, bad eyes. I wanted to save her from that.”

“Bad eyes,” he repeated.

Edgar looked older too. His hair had the first grey in it and his eyebrows were longer. “Can I do something?” Fern asked.

Edgar expected to feel her lips on his. He waited for it. His breath changed. They would kiss eventually, but she did not feel ready to give it yet. Instead, she put her hand on his cheek and said, “Careful. Don’t move.” She took something out of the drawer and he heard the high whine of a pair of small scissors, closing over his eyebrow. She blew on his forehead to clear the trimmed hairs and did the other side.

“I thought I could solve everything difficult by loving you,” Fern said.

“I thought I could solve everything difficult by trying to understand it.” They were both half right.

From the back of her closet, Fern produced the small box in which she kept the things she had always been most afraid to lose: locks of her children’s hair, her brother’s last note to her, a photo of her and Edgar on the night they had first danced. He touched them. That was all she wanted from him—to take what mattered to her into his hands.

The things that Edgar wanted to keep, Fern taped a note to. Edgar, the notes said. All over the house, his name. The bookshelf was Edgar, the glass vase—Fern was surprised by the things he cared about, by the resting places for his nostalgia. The bedside table was Edgar, the coatrack, the crystal bowl, two old milk-crates that they had stored magazines in. The collars.

“We can throw them away,” Fern said.

“You don’t want them?”

Fern did not. It was safe to be less loveable now. “The animals are for the children. You all are the ones I’m here to take care of. And myself.”

She took a few steps away from him, let him stand there alone in the house in which they had lived, one of the many attempts they had made at their marriage. She watched her husband, her love, nearly sightless. He looked like a headless flower, just a stem. She forgave him and did not yet. She was more his and less than she had been. Ahead of them were years of pulling closer and years of pushing away and years of pulling closer again. The children would grow up and maybe they would talk every day or maybe years would pass between calls. Will and James would become two men and lead two lives and yet they would always be twins. That was what it was to love someone across the duration, for the entirety.

“Fern?” Edgar asked. She had backed far enough away that he couldn’t see her.

She did not answer him right away. She went to the light switch and flicked it off so that the two of them were standing in the same darkness. She let him ask the question again, until she could tell that it hurt him to say her name, so badly did he want her on the other end of it.