Every time she sees those men and their kites, she thinks of Von. Would he have been the type to join that club? Would he be watching his granddaughter tomorrow leading her kite into the air? Go get ’em, tiger, he’d say. How can it be he never met Lizzie? How does he not know this new part of her life—the part where she’s a grandmother, the part where she’s a widow, a mother who lost a son?
She lies still and tries to count something: imaginary kites in the sky, a school of fish, one at a time, swimming by. She starts to settle. She pretends Von is in the kitchen, pouring Hershey’s syrup into a tall glass of milk the way he used to do when he got hungry late at night. She pretends she hears the sound of the spoon against the glass, and she can see the white milk turning dark. My God, she can see him so clearly, standing there in his blue pajama pants, his V-neck undershirt. Something about this image of her husband standing there, the light from the refrigerator, the glass he will leave in the sink, soothes her.
She thinks of the kite in its bag sitting on the kitchen table. She likes plans. She likes that Mary Jane and her family will come back to the house afterward （maybe they’ll decide to stay a second night?） and she’ll pour fruit punch for Lizzie and put coffee on for the three of them. She stands now and slips into her robe and walks the hall. She feels like a night watchman at a museum. The house is so silent. She faintly hears Alvin snoring from the bedroom, and tiptoes to the living room where she sees Lizzie sleeping, the dog on the edge of the sofa by her feet. Darcy smiles at how peaceful she looks, her little mouth open, her head back, her wrist moving slightly as if in her dreams she’s already flying a kite.
Lizzie scrunches her closed eyes, and Darcy is startled because there is an echo of someone else in her expression: a little Von, a bit of Luke. The beauty of science. A hint of a feature just continuing on and on and on, and this satisfies her. Her chest heaves, and she is sad, but she feels grateful, too. She will hopefully have years to tell Lizzie all the good things about these men their family lost. She will say they were golden, one of a kind. She will make them unforgettable.
Suddenly, Lizzie’s eyes open, and she looks up to see Darcy standing there. She worries her presence will scare Lizzie, but Lizzie smiles and sits up.
“Grandma, I was supposed to sleep in your bed tonight.”
Darcy reaches down to smooth her messy hair in place. “You were indeed, dear,” she whispers.
“I fell asleep before I could.”
Darcy holds out her hand and Lizzie takes it. “Then let’s get to bed,” she says, and smiles, and side by side, the dog following them, they make their way down the hall, Lizzie asking her questions about the kites. Will there be enough wind? Will the sun shine? Will the kites climb and climb?
“We’ll soon see,” Darcy says, and they settle into bed.
Freddie Tyler holds the wheel of her husband’s Mercedes as she drives in the middle of the night, only big trucks on I-80 West as she switches lanes and sips her coffee. She has the radio on low, and it’s just mumbling the way Darcy Crowley’s radio at the cleaners does, and she stops to think for a second that they are over eight hundred miles from Wharton—eight hundred miles and counting as they breeze through Indiana. She has never seen Indiana before. She tries to look around to get a sense of it, but it looks the same as Connecticut, as the Pennsylvania and Ohio highways looked.
She loves the middle of the night. She loves this open road. Her mind keeps putting phrases together that she could write, and once in a while, she’ll reach her hand into the empty cup holder next to her coffee and pick up her cell phone and record an idea she has: In the last year, I have thought of nothing but highways: their long stretch, their openness, the way they take you away from what you know. She knows the ideas are rough, but she feels a certain accomplishment that she can put these words down. She can say them all now.
She glances back at Addie, her head slumped to the side, her arms so limp, her small stuffed penguin just out of reach. Wizard is curled up beside her, his head resting near her lap. For a second, she thinks of Kitty, their old cat who died two weeks ago. Freddie is surprised how often she thinks she sees the cat now, but it’s just a pillow on the sofa, a bag on the floor. She feels regret that they never gave Kitty a proper name. They meant to, but all of a sudden years had gone by, and she was still Kitty.
Freddie watches Addie’s parted lips, her resting eyelashes as the passing lights illuminate her, and she can’t wait until they get where they are going. Addie has never seen Iowa, and Freddie imagines how exciting it will be to move into the rented town house, to take a walk into the downtown district and sit at a sidewalk café or wander through one of the markets with its umbrellas and fresh produce. Freddie reaches back and squeezes her knee lightly.