Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (28 page)

Edgar’s mother had set the roomful of people to the work of closure, that untrue moment. She watched the boy’s parents, her brother and sister-in-law, to see if the cure was working. Edgar’s mother’s makeup was right all day, no streaks, no smudges. The guests ate and ate and all of them cried when people stood to remember the dead boy. All except Mary. And in the morning,
his mother had baked a breakfast cake, poured fresh juice from a frosted pitcher and sat down beneath the hum of a violin concerto to scrub clean the silver that had touched the lips of the grieving.

Edgar opened his eyes to the unfocus of the world and closed them again. Opened, closed. “I am basically blind,” he said. He had never thought this before, his eyesight so fixable in the modern world. He couldn’t see detail in anything more than a few inches from his face, and he was in the middle of the ocean. Edgar’s heart sped up and he did not have enough air and he wanted to sit but couldn’t in the tight space of the bunk. He jumped out, clambered upstairs and, dizzy, lay down on the deck of his boat.

The boat rocked. Beneath him was everything—the depths and depths, the cold blue a mile down and thousands of miles across. He could have rolled quietly off the
Ever Land
, let his body take water in, sunk or floated, and the sea would have made no sound. The birds would not have changed their pattern. Above him was the vast expanse of pale sky, the entire universe, now just a blue light. Land seemed very, very far away. His form was so small that it might as well not even have existed. Edgar, never seasick in his life, was seasick now. He reached his hands out and grabbed at the wood and what he wanted to find there was grass, leaves, soil. Fern—the earthen thing he wanted to find was Fern. “What have I done?” he said to the blue above and the blue below. There were things he wanted to see again: Cricket performing a dance in the living room, the boys trenching on the beach. All those elements he had gone seeking, all that wide-open, but what he needed was the landscape of his own life. What he felt could not be described as missing—one person wishing to be nearer to another. Instead, Edgar, sea-tossed and gripping the wooden deck with his fingertips to keep from throwing up—understood that his body, his self, was not individual but shared, that to put too
much distance between himself and his wife, his children, was to disassemble something whole. He was sightless now, and what would go next if he stayed away? He was just a body, a million tiny mechanisms, any of which could go wrong. Water slapped at the hull of the tiny craft. Edgar could hear Glory washing dishes in the cabin. He imagined full black and then soundlessness too.

Edgar would have done anything to hold Fern’s hands over his closed eyes. Just for the feel of her particular palms. He knelt and then stood and that’s when darkness fell over him.

The next thing Edgar knew he was in the water and Glory was throwing the life preserver in and diving in after him and he was fine, spitting but fine, and he took the ring but pushed the woman away. “Don’t fucking push me, you asshole, you fucking asshole. Were you trying to
drown
yourself? What the fuck is this? I come out here for a few weeks of fun and you won’t even fuck me anymore and then I have to save your life? I don’t know how to fucking sail. What the fuck am I supposed to do if you die?”

Edgar said, “I didn’t mean to. I think I fell.” He was pale.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, but fuck.”

“It’s time to turn back,” Edgar said, holding on to the ring. He was still dizzy and he still couldn’t see and he still felt cored out.

“Which shore are we closer to?” she asked. “I’m sure they have optometrists in Bermuda.”

“We’re about halfway. But I want to go home.”

Glory would have preferred to keep sailing east. Her skin was thirsty for the pale blue water they had been traveling towards. An unreached island was a special kind of disappointment. “Fine. Can you do it?” It was the question they had both been asking themselves. They were surrounded by many miles of water and the only sailor on board was hardly sighted.

“You’ll have to help,” Edgar said.

They swam to the ladder and pulled themselves up. Glory settled Edgar in a deck chair with water and a sliced apple and bread and butter. He breathed in and he breathed out, and none of it made it less scary to be nearly blind. She smoked. Edgar and Glory floated. They were anchored, unmoving, and far.

—

Edgar began to unfasten and untie. Glory listened to his instructions and did as he asked. He could sail, sailing was known in his body, and he could still see colors and vague shapes, but he felt better knowing that there was one good set of eyes on board. They were a quiet and unaffectionate team. He had wanted sun and distance and she had wanted the knots two bodies can make of each other. Disability was a third party. How quickly the pull could weaken.

—

Though the view was the same, it felt entirely different to travel in the opposite direction. Bermuda receded. The powder sand, the gin-clear water, the tiny satellite islands believed to hold both pirate treasure and the ghosts of the crew that had been killed to haunt that treasure. There was no fantasy ahead of Edgar and Glory. The only unknown was the future, the damage they had done to their own lives.

Edgar did not realize it, but his parents were also sailing, and not far away. Hugh and Mary had wanted the same thing Edgar did: away. Theirs was a weekend excursion. At the moment that Edgar and Glory turned towards home, Mary was squeezing limes to put into their cocktails. She was marinating the meat they would grill. Hugh was reading a magazine article about the upcoming elections and smoking a cigar. He looked up every few minutes to survey the horizon, to admire the taut mainsail, sweeping them outward.

The two boats might have crossed paths if Edgar and Glory had
continued on, if the wind had pushed them a few degrees southwest, if they had caught up to a particular current that a school of striped bass was also riding, if Mary had insisted on an after-lunch swim. It could have happened that Edgar and his parents would have found themselves in the exact same spot on the Atlantic Ocean. Edgar would either have had to explain Glory or hide her, both of which would have made something go flat in him. He would have seen his shirtless father, his neck just beginning to show the sunburn that would keep him awake all night, his legs shimmering with dry salt just as Edgar’s legs were, his hands ready to tie or release or tighten a rope just as Edgar’s hands were, and maybe seeing that would have felt like proof of the thought that had entered Edgar’s mind—that he could take over his father’s life. That it was worth it. He had written his book just like he had said he wanted to and he knew that it was good enough to be published and maybe those things were enough. Maybe the doing was what mattered. He had people to care for. He had a lived life and maybe that was bigger than the imagined one, bigger than the one he led in his head.

And maybe watching his mother come up from below and holler with joy at the sight of her son like a mirage would have had the same effect on Edgar that his faded eyesight did: a skeletal want for his wife, for the person who loved him like that. The tack-sharp feeling that he was at sea with the wrong woman, that there was a story without his family but not a life.

But the two boats grew farther apart instead of nearer. None of them would ever know that they had brushed so close.

—

Edgar knew there would be a storm before the clouds or the wind or the rain. The air changed. The water hummed. Edgar kept the sheet tight, trying to make time before they couldn’t anymore.
Maybe they would die out there, he thought. Maybe that was the design of this trip—to quietly extinguish them, the dangerous flames of them, in the saltsea. Hero or villain or slave, the lungs fill with water, the body falls deeper, the fish come. On another day there might have been a small part of Edgar that wanted this. To fall not to the small, suburban unhappiness of a particular decade, a particular generation, but to nature.

The storm battered. Glory, finally, got sick. She didn’t want or not want; she couldn’t. She said, “This is the worst feeling I have ever felt,” hung, like laundry, over the edge, a rope around her waist so the whole of her did not pour overboard. Edgar never would have found her again in all this seafoam.

“This is not a terrible storm,” he said. “It will be over in a few hours.” She looked at him with contempt.

“Who are you?” she asked. “I hate you.”

“Do you want to smoke?” he asked.

“I want to die,” she said.

Edgar knew they had to ride the storm out. There was no way to flee. To be tossed was their job.

They went belowdecks when Glory could. The cabin was dark and musky and Edgar was aware of the press of that small space. Right then floating and tossing, he was a husband, he was a father, he was a son. He felt the distance, the terrible miles and miles he had gone. His life was too far. Even the horizon was unclear.

When the storm died down, Glory reported that there were two silver fish swimming in the caught water. “We should eat them,” he said. Glory netted and Edgar held them down on deck while she bashed. He could help bail, but first he would heat the grill and they would eat. That, at least. He remembered playing by the river as a boy, catching frogs. One spring, there were babies, weightless but sticky in the hand. Edgar, once, needing to
know the feeling, crushed one of the tiny creatures in his fist. It went so easily. Not even the bones held.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Glory, who was washing her face, running freshwater through her hair.

“Some days I do believe in God. I want to,” she said.

“You want someone powerful who can release you,” he said, understanding perfectly.

“Maybe that’s who He will turn out to be. Or else the other kind.”

They grilled the fish and there was even a lemon. When cut, the fragrance was so earthly, so terrestrial, it made Edgar ache. It was the kindest feeling, this homesickness, this desire for the very thing that actually belonged to him. It was good to be a land creature in love with the land.

“Are you getting used to not being able to see?” Glory asked. She rubbed her hands together to warm them, and reached out to Edgar’s face.

“Not at all.”

“Luckily there’s nothing actually wrong.”

“Sure.” He paused. “Tell me something about yourself. Tell me something you have done that you like,” he said. As if they’d only just met, as if they had not already saved and ruined each other’s lives.

“In junior high school, I tried out for the cheerleading team. I had these bangs. I was not well-liked. The only reason anyone was nice to me was because my parents were unspeakably rich. I thought, what if? I made up a routine and practiced in my room. I can’t imagine what it looked like, I actually cannot imagine. I was not chosen. I’m sort of proud of myself for doing that. For being so oblivious as to think I might make it.”

“You could have been good.”

“I was not good.”

There was a pause. “Will he take you back?” Edgar asked.

They had nothing to offer each other after this journey was over. Neither of them, Edgar realized, had ever thought so.

“He’ll take me back and he’ll forgive me eventually. That will probably be my project for a while.” This was Edgar’s first leaving but not Glory’s. Like an experienced doctor, she knew what wounds to expect from this particular kind of explosion. She knew how to sew them closed and keep them clean, how to pour tonic over. She also knew that the scars were worse, and permanent.

Glory smoked and imagined that John had felt it the moment the sloop on which his beloved sailed had turned back towards the homeshore. She pictured him sweeping his mother’s floor and kissing her on the forehead and getting into his car. As Glory made her way, so did John. The forests, which they had driven through together dozens of times, were maple, oak. He would listen to cello concertos and leave the windows open when he went into the diner for a tuna sandwich and a coffee. He too would know what work was ahead—the understanding that would come quickly and the understanding that would never come.

John would be at home when Glory arrived. He would be sitting in his armchair not reading, not watching television, just waiting. She would look at him and he would be just as boring as ever, but he would be hers.

“Do you want to go to Mexico?” she would ask. “On anything other than a boat?”

Both of them were still packed from their journeys so all they would have to do was turn off the lights and lock the door behind them. On the airplane, Glory would take John’s hand and put her head on his shoulder while they waited to rise.

—

Edgar slept on deck that night and let Glory have the berth. Her sympathy and touch would have cost him something. A well man could wake up in another woman’s bed, but a helpless man was too sad to. The tug towards home was as strong as a thick line, woven through his ribs and tied tight. He thought of the sights he had to look forward to: the twins at nineteen years old, their faces longer, a shadow of beard on their cheeks, about to turn into the people they would always be. He thought of Cricket at thirty, married to someone of her own choosing. He thought of Fern. He wanted his wife to see him get old and for him to know all the versions of her face. That night, lying on the deck of the
Ever Land
, Edgar looked up at the dark. Above him, the blurred scuff of the Milky Way.

“Land ho,” Glory said in the morning. Edgar looked out but the shape was inexact. He squinted, and it did not come clear.

“Do you have glasses at your house? Do you need a ride?”

“No. I’ll take a taxi. You should go home.”

“It was fun. At least it started out being fun,” Glory said.

“Should we say goodbye here?” Edgar asked, wanting some space in which to seal this opening they had made. The water churned below them. Their arms around each other were cool and they did not hold long.

For Edgar, the city in which he lived, the coastline that he had sailed towards for the last several years of his life, disappeared the closer they got.