“Good. It was good,” I say, my voice swallowed by another announcement and a family pushing a mountainous pile of luggage on a cart with a rattling wheel. I can’t tell if I’m lying or telling the truth.
“I can’t hear you,” Meredith exclaims.
“You’re not inviting Mom?” I ask.
“You know Mom.”
“Yes, we’ve been introduced.” The boy across from me lifts up his nostrils and sticks out his tongue. I make a face in return.
“She’s not one for ceremony. She probably didn’t even want to go to her own wedding.”
“I’m not so sure that’s true.” Although I wonder which wedding my sister is referring to—the one to my father (which I can’t picture because there are no known photographs), or her second, the one to her current husband, which Meredith and I both attended.
“Ted? Can we count on you?”
More noise. “Sure.”
“I can’t hear you!”
I raise my voice. “I’ll see you in San Francisco.”
A woman dressed like the Statue of Liberty stands in the middle of the terminal and I’m curious how she’ll get through security. I wonder if she’s the same Statue of Liberty we saw just yesterday handing out pamphlets when we impulsively hopped in line at the TKTS booth in Times Square. We refused whatever she was selling and were rewarded with front-row seats to the Broadway revival of Hair. At curtain they called up the front few rows to dance onstage to “Let the Sunshine In”—our Broadway debut. As someone who struggles at times not to be seen, it was exhilarating to stand onstage and feel the hot lights on my face, the audience still in darkness (but out there), waving my hands in the air.
Life is around you and in you;
Let the sunshine;
Let the sunshine in.
I could still feel the white heat of stage lights as we exited the Hirschfeld Theatre onto Forty-fifth Street, spilling into Times Square. I could see the sunshine, even though it was dark and had started to snow the lightest, most magical, movielike flakes. Street vendors selling chestnuts, buskers banging on pickle buckets, dancing tickers with holiday stock prices, workers preparing Times Square for New Year’s Eve—everything seemed touched by light. Everything, that is, except Jeffrey. Jeffrey stewed under his own cloud, worried by the snow and the forecast for more. I convinced him to grab a slice of pizza with me by agreeing that we would eat it back in our hotel room. I ate mine perched in the window watching the city receive its gentle dusting. Jeffrey paced and checked the weather. He tried to call the airline, but after forty-five minutes on hold he gave up. I finally got him to come to bed by agreeing we could head to JFK at the crack of dawn.
Now that we’re here, I’m anxious to get home. I miss Lily. If we can get on this flight, we might even get home in time to collect her from the sitter’s and celebrate a little Christmas together. I have a stocking for her at home filled with chews, a stuffed squeaky toy, and a new red ball. Jeffrey is downright agitated. His desire is not to get back to Lily (although I’m sure he misses her, too). His desire is for certainty, for a plan we can execute; his growing need to control every situation is kicking into overdrive. It’s almost laughable, watching him scramble in the face of a storm—I mean, how do you control the weather? C’mon, Jeffrey. Life is all around you and in you. Let the sunshine in!
My phone vibrates on the floor and I look down, thinking it’s Jeffrey texting me flight options. But there’s no message. Then I look over at Jeffrey’s phone. He has a text message from his friend Cliff.
When are you back? I want to play.
Cliff. Do I know a Cliff? I think he’s a friend of Jeffrey’s he met playing online poker. I look over at the airline counter, but Jeffrey is nowhere to be seen. I scan the terminal left and right. No sign of him. I feel almost panicked when a shadow falls over me. It’s Jeffrey holding two coffees and smiling. “Success.”
When we’re in the air Jeffrey pulls earphones out of his backpack and plugs them into his laptop.
“Are you going to watch TV?” I ask, knowing he always has a few episodes of something downloaded for a flight.
I must say it with an accusatory tone because Jeffrey replies hesitantly. “I was going to.”
We never used to watch much TV; we used to talk about our days—commiserate over the things that bothered us most and laugh about the happenings that struck us as odd—but lately it has become a crutch. Our upstairs neighbor pulled me aside at their holiday party to say how happy it made her that she could hear the sound of laughter from our bedroom late at night. How well suited for each other we must be. I bit my lower lip to keep myself from saying it was Jeffrey watching reruns of Frasier.
Jeffrey closes his laptop to appease me and rests his phone on top of it. “Would you rather talk?”
I stare at his phone and think of the text message I saw and suddenly it doesn’t sit so well. When are you back? I want to play. I want to play means poker, surely. That much is innocent enough. But when are you back? Why does he have to be back to play a game that is played online?
“When are you coming back?” Lily would ask me those words every time I had to leave her. The first time was four months or so after I first brought her home. She was fascinated when I pulled my luggage out of
