Flight a novel, p.1
Flight: a Novel, page 1
Dedication
For Luisa, Isabel, and Peter
Epigraph
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.
—Jack Gilbert, “Tear It Down”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
December 22: The Cars Tess and Martin
Kate and Josh
Alice and Henry
Quinn and Madeleine
The House 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
The Woods
The Birds
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Lynn Steger Strong
Copyright
About the Publisher
December 22: The Cars
Tess and Martin
“You left them alone in the apartment?” Tess says.
“I’m downstairs, Tess. I’m right out front.”
“And they’re upstairs?”
They moved this year to a high-rise farther from the park but with a washer/dryer in the kitchen, a shared roof deck, a gym. Tess hadn’t expected how scared she’d feel, being up so high. She searches from the sidewalk every weekday morning, walking to the subway, for their specific windows, not sure which of the apartments her children are still in.
“They’re not babies,” Martin says. “You’re the one who wanted to leave by noon, then went to work.”
“I still don’t understand why we have to be gone so many days.”
Martin’s quiet. It’s the twenty-second. Tess didn’t want to go until the twenty-fourth.
“Did you pack the sweaters from your mother? All the presents? The kids can’t see the Santa ones. Stell doesn’t like the strawberry toothpaste; I have that little travel thing of Crest.”
“I’ve packed for trips before.”
“Your sister is going to want to take a thousand pictures.”
“I packed for all of that.”
“The pajamas she sent?”
“Yes. You left them folded by the door.”
“Can you come get me?”
“You know I don’t like driving in the city.”
“We said we wanted to get there before dark.”
“That was when you said you weren’t going into work.”
“Don’t you think we need to make sure one of us still has a job?”
“Oh, fuck you, Tess.”
“Can you please come pick me up?”
The street is quiet, wide and empty; so many of the cars already gone for the long holiday. Martin is surrounded by tall and glinting gray and widely windowed buildings, the one they live in indistinguishable from those on either side. He looks up to find their windows but can’t quite.
He thinks briefly he might call his mother. He wouldn’t talk to her about Tess, about their disagreement—they never talked much about Tess—he’d listen as she listed all the food she’d bought in preparation for the children, the meals and parties she was planning, baking slabs of gingerbread so that the kids could make houses, friends of hers who’d stopped by to bring gifts. She’d ask him what he thought about the side dishes, if she needed an extra pie because the kids were getting so big, the coffee Tess liked. She’d remind him to bring bathing suits and something nice for Christmas dinner, ask about the timing of their flight.
They’re going to Henry and Alice’s house upstate, though, not his mother’s. Kate, her three kids, and Josh will meet them there. The three siblings—Martin, Kate, and Henry—they’ll not be in Florida for Christmas for the first time in their lives because eight months ago their mother died.
Kate and Josh
“We should be hosting,” Kate says.
They drive a dark blue van. It smells like pee and old bananas, a stale peanut butter sandwich. Josh drives, both hands on the wheel. Beneath Kate’s feet is a stack of sweaters, backup toys, a cooler filled with snacks—hard-boiled eggs and cut-up fruit, carrot sticks and hummus, pretzels, Pirate’s Booty. Behind them, all three of their children are on tablets with headphones. Bea, the oldest, plays a dragon game, her right index finger fast, up and down and sideways, on the tablet’s screen.
“We don’t have room for all those people,” Josh says.
“Next year, we could . . .”
“I need you not to get your hopes up.”
Whenever the topic of her mother comes up, he speaks to her as if she is a child. “Mom would have wanted the house to stay with us.”
“She should have made a will, then.”
Kate’s mother died in May. She left behind her house and nothing else: the slow sludge of legalities right after; filing for the death certificate, waiting for the estate to clear. Martin’s wife, Tess, who is a lawyer, found a renter. They agreed to figure out the sale when they came together at Christmas. Which is now.
“I don’t think she liked to think about leaving,” Kate says.
“She left a mess instead.”
Kate looks out the window. The sky is flat and gray. A bright orange square-shaped truck drives past. She thinks of crawling back into their van’s third row to sit quietly with Bea.
“I watched this thing on YouTube about how to build an igloo,” says her husband.
Behind them Jack grabs a chunk of Jamie’s hair, and Jamie screams and swings his leg toward his twin.
“Both of you stop it!” Josh says, reaching behind his seat to grab Jack.
“Don’t yell at them,” Kate says, turning to touch Jamie. “Deep breaths, duck,” she says to Jack. “Squeeze Mommy’s hand.”
He squeezes, and she hears him breathe and, she thinks, both of them feel better.
She faces Josh again, angry but not talking.
“They act like this because you don’t discipline them,” Josh says.
“Yelling isn’t discipline. You have to talk to them.”
“If you aren’t quiet the rest of the drive, I’ll tell Santa to forget the presents,” Josh says, “no TV tomorrow.”
“You can’t threaten that,” Kate says.
“They need consequences.”
“Are you going to sit with them all day while I cook?”
Out the window, next to the highway, the trees are bare, and there’s a light layer of snow on the ground. The road rolls and curves, and Josh keeps his eyes straight ahead. Kate presses her forehead against the window’s cold and tightens her hand steadily on Jack’s foot. She thinks how the foliage should be getting lusher, greener as they drive southward; the land should be flattening out instead of rising up in rocky jags. She thinks of all that warmth—how they should be changing halfway, at the rest stop, into shorts and T-shirts, letting the kids stay up late to go out to the beach as soon as they get there, to swim and wave-chase, feet dug deep in the hot sand. She thinks of the salt air and the smell of going outside barefoot, wet grass on her ankles, cradling her hot cup of coffee, sitting and talking every morning beneath the big banyan in her mom’s backyard. Instead the air is getting thinner, sharper, outside her window; it all looks cold and dead.
She wants to ask her brothers to let her and her family live in their mother’s house until her kids are off to college. They’ve always had money, Josh’s inheritance. If this were two years ago, she’d just offer to buy her siblings out. But Josh went rogue and overinvested in a tech stock that tanked during the last recession. She thinks her brothers might be willing—she’s the youngest. Ten years in which they can fix the house, up the value, sell and split the proceeds. A loan of sorts.
“Tess,” she starts, already envisioning Tess’s forehead creasing.
Josh makes the face he makes when she says “Tess.”
“I feel like Alice, even,” she says, “might understand.”
Alice and Henry
“I thought maybe once she died I’d get Christmas,” says Alice’s mother on the phone from San Francisco.
Alice lights a cigarette, attaches and inserts her earbuds as she pulls out of the Food Town parking lot. “Mother, stop,” she says.
“It’s not like she might hear.”
“You order in lo mein for Christmas.”
“We order lo mein because we’re all alone. Because our only child isn’t here.”
“We got Chinese food every year.”
“The only ritual you ever cared about was that woman’s.”
“Mom. She’s dead. You can say her name.”
“Helen. Fine. You only ever liked Helen and her absurd, simplistic rituals; never me and mine.”
Alice does not plan to but she turns left instead of right, down toward Quinn and Maddie’s condo complex instead of back up toward her and Henry’s house. She parks where she always parks, just out of view of their basement windows, pulls long on her cigarette. She can’t see them; Quinn mostly keeps the curtains closed, but Alice still comes sometimes to sit, to look for them. Alice is Maddie’s social worker. Quinn lost custody for six months after an accidental overdose, and it’s Alice’s job to check on them. She comes here more than to the other families she checks in with. Henry works out in the barn most of every day, and sometimes Alice drives around for hours; she parks out here, tries to get a glimpse of Maddie, as if her vigilance can keep her safe.
Quinn had work today, Alice knows, but Maddie had no school, and s
“Don’t think I don’t know what she thought,” says Alice’s mother, still talking about Helen.
Alice can no longer stomach her mother’s truculence. “How’s Dad, Mom?” she says.
“He’s Dad.”
“Is he home? Can I talk to him?”
“He’s at work.”
An older woman pulls into the spot next to Alice; Alice smiles at her and pulls out. She turns the car back up the long hill to the house. “Henry needs to be with his siblings this year,” she says to her mother.
“Your whole life is built around what Henry needs.”
“Please don’t explain my life to me.”
“I’m trying to make sure you get to live it.”
“You mean like you did?” This is an old fight, too worn out to hit too sharply—shorthand for all the ways that neither woman would have chosen what the other has, for all the ways that neither of them is what the other might have wished she were.
“We’ll see you on the twenty-eighth, then?”
“Henry has to work, but I’ll be there.”
“Did your husband get a job?”
“Henry’s working on his work.”
“So, then, he’s available to come see us for a few days, because he does not get paid for what he does?”
“Can we please not do this?”
“I just think it’s ridiculous that he’s going to miss my New Year’s party because he’s building trinkets in the backyard barn that my dead mother made available to him.”
“He’s an artist, Mother.”
“You’re an artist, Alice. What has Henry ever done with his art?” Her mother says the word “art” like it’s alleged.
“I’m not an artist anymore.”
“Of course. A social worker.”
“I have to go, Mom.”
“The twenty-eighth, then, both of you. I’ll send Dad to pick you up.”
Alice feels too tired. “Merry Christmas, Mom.”
“Of course.”
When she gets back home she walks behind the house, leaving the groceries in the car. She watches Henry’s shadow move as if suspended on the ceiling of the barn. He’s built scaffolding to work up there, though they don’t talk about what he’s constructing. She thinks of going to ask him to come inside and sit with her—to hold her, help her. But she doesn’t; she has a strange fear of going into this space that is now only his, this space she’s not sure she believes in anymore. She lights another cigarette and checks her texts, hoping she might have one from Maddie. Just her sisters-in-law, though: Kate telling her she’s bringing an extra air mattress, asking about blankets, whether or not she needs to bring more flour; Tess reminding her of Colin’s peanut allergy. Alice makes a list, on her phone, of all the work she still has to do to make the house ready for Henry’s siblings, takes a last drag of her cigarette, goes around to get the groceries from the car.
Quinn and Madeleine
“Walrus!” Quinn says. They pop both their teeth out of their mouths as if they’re tusks, flap their arms and hands; they bark, twist their bodies like they’re gliding on the ground.
They walk from Quinn’s work, where they have gone together because there was no school and Quinn didn’t have a sitter. Maddie sat for hours behind Quinn’s law-office reception desk—while Quinn answered phones and greeted people, she read her book, then googled on the phone she got from the social worker when she got bored. Now they play the game they often play on their walk home, Animals. Maddie likes it because she loves animals, Quinn likes it because she likes being the sort of mom who will pretend to be a walrus or a horse out on the street regardless of the people who might watch.
“Spider,” Maddie says, her words mangled because her teeth are still out of her mouth.
Quinn spreads her arms out wide over her head and straightens her back. Maddie goes on tiptoe, bringing her hands close to her chest, fingers working like they’re weaving a web.
“Unicorn,” says Quinn, and Maddie neighs and makes hooves out of her hands; both of them prance, heads up high and bounding down the hill, rolling their necks.
“Dragon,” Maddie says. They spread their arms. Maddie opens her mouth wide and hisses hot air from her throat, spitting fire.
“Octopus,” says Quinn, and they both wiggle, loosening and rolling their bodies and their limbs. “Do octopuses—octopi?—make any sounds?” Quinn asks.
“Octopuses,” Maddie says. “No sound.”
They’re almost home, off the main street. Quinn thinks she sees the social worker’s car parked near their place, but then the car pulls out, drives off. Quinn squints but she can’t tell if the car is Alice’s; her eyes feel worn out from all the time in front of screens at work. She has two bags slung over the same shoulder: all the snacks she packed for Maddie, the books she brought, her wallet, keys, and phone. They pass an older couple, and Quinn stops wobbling her limbs as she notices them watch her and Maddie too close, too long—looking. Imminent danger, she thinks, which is the language that they used the first time they took Maddie from her, the language that runs through her brain a thousand times a day.
“Peregrine falcon!” Maddie says—her favorite. The couple has walked past them. The path is straight down a hill, the sidewalk cleared of snow, and both Quinn and Maddie spread their wings out wide and high and fly straight down.
The House
1
A foot of snow’s stuck to the ground, and the last bit of sun still glints along the wide white fields. Mountains loom behind: a mess of rock and branches, overlapping trunks, mixed with long patches of white. Tess and Martin drive past the Hudson, up the last long hill, toward Alice and Henry’s house. Tess looks back at the kids, Stella six and Colin almost nine; they’re too old to nap but they’ve passed out, and now they’ll wake up grumbling, hungry, less prone to sleep at the actual right time tonight. Tess catches sight of Kate’s van as Martin puts the car in park—Virginia plates, the back piled haphazardly with stuff—and her neck and shoulders clench. She loves but does not like Kate. She often fantasizes about maiming Josh.
Tess reaches into the back seat to collect the trash from the children’s snacks, to pack the books and tablets from beneath their feet into a canvas bag. “We should have left earlier,” she says to Martin.
“We’re here now,” he says.
The house is old and rambling, two stories, chipped white paint, smoke coming from the chimney. Tess looks back again at the kids, still and quiet as they almost never are. She wishes this visit were already over, that they could all be heading back, grateful for the efforts everybody made but relieved to once again be separate. She steels herself instead for all the time they will have together, the forced acts of being a large extended family, something for which she feels constantly so ill-equipped.
She says: “We sure are.”
“Deep breaths,” Martin says, half joking, trying. Martin, who is good and steady, a solid partner, has been called up on review by the university where he was—still is, for now—a full professor. He’s been forced to take a leave as of this month, and he’s less prone right now to look straight at Tess when they talk.
Tess laughs at him. “I’ll get Stell,” she says, opening her door.
Both the children are too big to be carried, but Tess whispers her daughter’s name as she unhooks her from her seat. Stella mumbles, opens her eyes, looks at Tess, and settles herself more firmly into her mother’s arms. Her face and back are wet with sweat, chin-length dark hair stuck to her cheeks. The weight of her is warm and solid, and Tess thinks she might hold Stella like this the whole time that they’re here.
Colin stirs, face slack, skin splotched. He has the same dark hair as his sister, cropped close to his head because he can’t sit still enough to get any cut besides a full-headed, thickly clippered buzz. He shoots both arms over his head. “My neck hurts!”
“You just have to move,” Tess says. “Get out and stretch.”
