Up in the Air

“The wedding present wasn’t from me,” I say. “Kara must have sent something in my name. What was it anyway?”

“A lawn mower. It follows these wires you bury in the ground and runs by remote control.”

My mouth goes dry. I can’t swallow my cookie.

“Where was it sent from?”

“Salt Lake City. Here. A store called Vann’s Electronics. You signed the card. You’re saying you don’t remember buying it?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m going to bed.”

I lie in the dark guest room beside a window that frames the spire of the Mormon Temple, as white as aspirin and topped with a gold angel. I’ve set my sleep machine on blowing leaves and swallowed a sedative. My left hand is tucked under the waistband of my boxers and in my other hand I hold my phone.

“Talk to her. Build her up inside,” says Kara. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it? Be tough, though. Don’t tell her she’ll be okay no matter what or that she’s some infinite bundle of creativity. Don’t bullshit her, Ryan. But try to make her feel good. This is a crisis of confidence we’re dealing with.”

The side of my face with the phone against it aches. I switch to the other ear. “I’m on a business trip.”

“Fine. So leave her to run away again. Maybe we’ll hear from her at Christmas. Shit.”

The air on my chest is heavy, hard to lift. I roll up on my side for easier breathing. “You’re saying to keep her with me?”

“In plain sight.”

“A question. When Wendy saw me in Salt Lake last week . . .”

“Yes?”

“She’s sure it was me?”

My sister sighs. “Out with it. Tell me. You lied to me before.”

“I think she was right. I was here. It slipped my mind, though. The cities don’t stick in my head the way they used to.”

“What?”

“There are credit card records. I made a purchase. Kara, I’m not at my best right now.”

A hush. Southerners have an oral tradition, they say. Minnesotans have a silence tradition. Not speaking is our preferred way of communicating.

“You haven’t been eating either,” she says. “Have you?”

“Poorly.”

“Come home. Right now. Come home right now. I know what you’re doing. I know what’s going on here. This is all about earning free tickets. You need your family.”

“My job ends Monday. I’m leaving before they fire me. I have appointments, interviews.”

“Come home.”

“It’s not my home anymore.”

“It’s where your mother is.”

“That’s why it’s not,” I say.

With the earpiece against my cheek I let her rant. One of my nephews opens his bedroom door and I hear him pad down the hallway to the bathroom and tinkle into the bowl. We start so small, and the space we take up as we grow is gone forever. Not everything is recycled. That space is gone.

“I need to sleep,” I tell her when she’s calmer. “I’ll try to talk sense to Julie. I’ll bring her with me. I have a meeting tomorrow, but she can come. I don’t want her vanishing in that van again.”

“ ‘Take’ her with me,” she says.

“I think it’s ‘bring.’ ”

“I’m coming back there. I’ll get her home myself.”

“I said I’ll do it. I’ll bring her down to Phoenix. In the morning I’ll put her on a plane back home.”

“Why do I have to do everything myself? Why am I always the glue?”

“I’m doing it.”

“You’re telling me you’re the glue? You’re not the glue! There’s a wedding on Saturday.”

“And you’re the glue.”

“Die, Ryan. Just get it over with. Goodbye.”

I stopped in Salt Lake last week. I wake, remembering. I remember that there was nothing to remember, except for telling a man who’d lost his job that careers nowadays aren’t ladders, they’re lattices, and then I explained to him what a lattice was and gave him a model résumé to study. I killed time in a store for an hour after the meeting and bought Keith and Julie their gift, which I had shipped. Then I flew off to Boise, I believe, where I gave the same speech to another man. The lattice speech.

There, I remember now. I wasn’t robbed. It turns out that we’ve been together this whole time, all of the Ryans. We just got separated.

This has happened before. I’ve never told a soul. I’ve met myself coming and going. It’s a secret. It’s only because you’ve been such a patient listener, there in your seat with your drink, your nuts, your napkin, prepared to crash with me, if it comes to that—because isn’t that, finally, the contract between us flyers?—that I’m breaking down and telling you.

nine

at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning Asif drives us to the airport in his Mercedes, a long black beauty that ought to have a flag flying from its antenna. The radio plays a conservative talk show whose amped-up host rattles papers into the mike and has mastered the art of speaking without swallowing. Our democracy died in 1960, he says, but he doesn’t provide specifics, unlike my father, whose doomsaying always included clear-cut timelines and definite turning points. The sun crawling up behind the Mormon Temple casts a peculiarly weak and filtered light, and a breeze stirs the surface of the Great Salt Lake, which appears to be filled with old bathwater this morning. Even the seagulls wind-skating its edges seem reluctant to land and wet their bellies.