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  LIKE WINGS, YOUR HANDS

  LIKE WINGS,

  YOUR HANDS

  a novel

  Elizabeth Earley

  Like Wings, Your Hands

  Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Earley

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Book Design by Mark E. Cull

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Earley, Elizabeth, 1977– author.

  Title: Like wings, your hands : a novel / Elizabeth Earley.

  Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019018068 (print) | LCCN 2019020074 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597098069 | ISBN 9781597098236 (print)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3605.A7586 (ebook) | LCC PS3605.A7586 L55 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018068

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book and its characters have spent so many years (seven now) in my head and the manuscript has taken many forms. So many people along the way have helped shape it. Thank you to my family—Biliana, Nico, Michael, Jerel, Cora, and Jude—for your daily doses of inspiration. Thank you to early readers of this manuscript: Carol Davies, Susan Evans, Michael Sullivan, Corinne Gartner, Carly Leahy, Mary Earley (aka, Mom), Heather Outlaw (aka, bestie), Iudita Harlan, and Caroline Zimmerman. And thank you to that psychic in Sedona who told me that I should re-read Bid Time Return and that it would be an important influence on the final revision. Thank you to my ex-spouse and current friend, Lucy, who had my back during the years I spent conceiving and writing this story. And thank you for your maturity and forgiveness that allows us to harmoniously co-parent. Thanks, too, to my generous blurbers: Gina Frangello, Peter Nichols, Lily Hoang, and Gayle Brandeis.

  Thank you ultimately and eternally to Aimee Bender, who judged this book the winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize. I am humbled and deeply honored.

  Thank you to Kate Gale, Tobi Harper, Monica Fernandez, Natasha McClellan, and the rest of the team at Red Hen Press for your hard work and dedication.

  Thank you to Rosalie Morales Kearns for being a kick-ass publicist and all-around coach for the business side of writing.

  Many unending thanks to Seth Fischer for being a brilliant editor. Thank you for being my secret sauce/ secret guru/ secret weapon who tears my shit up and helps me take it to the next level and then the next—to the level of just killing it.

  And never least, thank you to the love of my life—my soul mate, my seal mate, my best friend—Biliana Angelova, for everything (every single thing).

  for Biliana

  1. May 13, 2015: 20,000 feet

  On the plane to Bulgaria, Marko’s mom had to catheterize him in his seat. She placed a blanket over his lap for privacy. Marko was watching baseball on his iPad but only the games he had saved on the device because he didn’t have Wi-Fi. Sitting beside his mom, he was careful to avoid opening the secret folder where he had his private links and files. Marko noticed how tense and nervous his mom was when she catheterized him. She moved quickly, like a bird. Marko didn’t like to watch her thread the tube into the tip of his penis. He was always disturbed by how far she seemed to push it inside his body—was there really that much space in there?

  Watching made math happen in his head, unwilled. Sometimes he could see sounds, smell colors, taste shapes. And sometimes, when he saw the unfeeling parts of his own body interact with anything—his own hands, his mom’s, objects, the outside world—the math happened. It wasn’t just math; it was a vivid, visceral, sometimes painful experience of numbers. The numbers moved in his mind. Sometimes they’d fly fast—that’s when they hurt. But sometimes they were slow. They could be dark, almost black, or they could be blindingly bright, or somewhere in between. Each number was a three-dimensional shape with a color and a texture. The number seventeen, for example, was mostly blue, a little yellow, round but not perfectly round—more like an ellipsoid—and it had a smooth texture like marble. Nine thousand and fourteen was rough and dry but also soft like wool, diamond shaped, and beige. Every number between zero and ten thousand had color and shape and texture. And because every feeling Marko experienced, physical or emotional, also had shape and color, each corresponded to a number or a set of numbers. So sometimes, when Marko didn’t know what he was feeling in words, he would know in numbers. He would think: I’m feeling 4,372, which is a yellowish-brown, sharp-edged asymmetrical triangle.

  The math happened when his unfeeling parts came in contact with anything that had to do with spatial navigation in the half of his body whose boundaries he couldn’t sense. The numbers came together to give him the perception of the precise location of each point in space where his body ended and another thing began.

  Marko pressed his face into his mom’s hair: long, straight and black threaded with gray. He inhaled her smell—which he associated with home—leaned back, and looked at her. He could see his reflection in her eyes: two tiny hims staring back. His face was long and narrow, his wire-rimmed glasses perpetually slipping down the bridge of his nose. His voice was deeper now that he was fourteen and his pubic hair was thicker. He had a single brown mole sprouting two coarse hairs on one pale cheek, matching similar moles on his mom’s neck and body. His hair was dark blonde and fine, unlike his mom’s thick, black mane. He changed his focus from his reflection to her eyes, their colors like autumn in New England: brown and burnt orange and yellowish green.

  Being 20,000 feet in the sky, trapped inside a metal tube, hurtling forward at hundreds of miles per hour gave Marko an uneasy feeling in his stomach. It wasn’t quite sick but almost. Any time there was turbulence, Marko imagined a gust of strong wind flipping the plane and sending it spiraling down to crash into the ocean below. At this speed the surface tension of water would be the same as that of pavement—he knew because he had looked it up—and he imagined the plane as it smashed apart, all the scraps and all of the people and limbs and Marko’s wheelchair would sink to the bottom of the ocean floor, catching in the dense foliage of kelp plants to gather algae thick as moss.

  “He has spina bifida. Paralyzed from the belly button down,” Marko’s mom said to the woman seated next to them in the three-seat row. The expression on the woman’s face in response was as familiar to Marko as the sound of his own name.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, which was the soundtrack to the familiar facial expression. If it had meaning, it would have been mildly offensive to Marko because it would mean she was sorry about who he was—sorry about his heaviness in her mental notebook, the burden his existence was to the imagi
nations of able-bodied people—but thankfully, it was as hollow as the look of pity it accompanied. Unfortunately, the words didn’t seem to have lost their meaning to his mom, because she looked even more nervous.

  To calm himself and distract himself from his mom’s nervousness, from the tube threaded into his penis, from the potential crashing of the plane, and to counter the swirling math, Marko decided to concentrate on something else. He looked for all of the printed numbers he could see around him and added them all up, dividing the total by three. If it were a clean divide, one that resulted in a whole number, then he was safe and the plane wouldn’t crash. If there were a fraction left over, he would simply add those numbers to the whole number and divide by three again. He would repeat this until he got a whole number as a result.

  In the midst of this mental arithmetic, Marko’s mom pulled his arm down a little roughly. He wasn’t even aware that he’d had his hands up in front of his face again until she yanked on him. He tried to keep them down but they sprung back up involuntarily. He put them down again and kept them at his side, but when he did, he wasn’t able to do the adding and dividing in his head. His thinking was stuck. He started to panic. His hands went back up.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie, can you hold still for just a moment until I’m done here?” His mom’s voice was soothing. He dropped his hands again and tried to relax. But then turbulence happened and he still hadn’t gotten to a whole number!

  He quickly decided on another way to keep the plane safe. He listened for anything he could overhear from people on the plane, any words he could make out from their conversations. If he whispered those same words aloud to himself three times and then did it again with the next words he heard, the plane would stay safe. Marko listened. It was hard to hear voices over the roar of jet engines. He thought he heard “that was funny” after someone nearby finished laughing. Marko lowered his head and whispered, “that was funny” as quietly as possible three times.

  “You okay?” His mom asked. He looked up at her. She smiled. He nodded, listening for the next words. But now she was done catheterizing him and she got up to go throw out the waste. Marko looked at the woman in their row. She was 92 percent uneasy being left alone with him. To make her feel better, he tried to make conversation.

  “I’m going to meet my grandfather for the first time in Bulgaria,” he said. She gave him a nod and a tight, fake smile. Her uneasiness wasn’t reduced. In fact, it went up a few percentage points. He decided to take it up a notch and over-share.

  “It all started six months ago when I found this book and my mom’s journal. And this box that I could lay down in and sort of time travel and have weird dreams.” He pulled out the book and held it up to her. The same strained smile stared back and her uneasiness had now topped out at 100 percent. She got up and walked off down the aisle. He was free to use his hands again, so he went back to the more comfortable task of addition and division.

  2. May 13, 2015: 20,000 feet

  On the plane to Bulgaria, Kali saw the high view of the past nineteen years of her life since she’d left there to come to America. The years contained so much—falling in love, having another abortion, having a baby, falling out of love, getting divorced, watching him leave their child, accepting her mother, Lydia, as the surrogate other parent to her son when she hadn’t even filled that role for Kalina as a child. Only Lydia called her Kalina anymore. In Bulgaria, before 1999, she had always been Kalina. In the States, after 1999, she was Kali.

  When Kali left Sofia, she went to the South Shore of Boston to be a nanny for wealthy children there. Lydia followed her six months later. Kali’s host family let her mother stay there with Kali for a few months until Lydia herself found work as a nanny. Lydia’s wealthy children belonged to a family with a townhouse in Cambridge and a mansion in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

  Kali recalled all of this while she catheterized Marko. She was embarrassed to have to do it right there in his seat, but there was no other option. His wheelchair was gate checked and she couldn’t carry him to the tiny airplane lavatory. She put a blanket over his lap for privacy, even though he seemed oblivious. He was busy with his screen time. He was watching reruns of Red Sox games. Kali knew he’d rather be watching porn, or “kissing videos” as he called them. He had a cache of videos of people kissing, both people and cartoon characters, actually—a vanilla collection that he allowed his mom to know about. But Kali was aware of the harder core stuff he had hidden behind a password-protected folder. She’d thought about making him get rid of it, but decided to let him be. There was the inevitability of it on the one hand, him being a teenage boy much like any teenage boy, but then, on the other, was the heartbreaking part. The part Kali couldn’t bear to think about. What kind of romantic life would he be able to have with no sensation in his pelvis—no sensation anywhere below his waist?

  Kali knew that sex is 95 percent mental—that the pituitary gland is the hub that produces all the chemicals that make the body feel so on fire about it. And Marko’s pituitary gland was alive and functioning, so why couldn’t he have a full and active sexual life, even without the use of his penis? Even without a partner? Thus, the videos. Kali couldn’t deprive him that.

  The woman in the seat next to her in their row was staring unabashedly at Kali prepping the catheter. She looked away when Kali inserted it into Marko’s penis, and then looked back when she re-covered his lap. Kali made eye contact with her and she looked away.

  “He has spina bifida. Paralyzed from the belly button down,” Kali said. The woman gave her that look she knew so well. It was a look of admiration and pity that Kali couldn’t stand. It made her nervous to have it this close to her. She fought the urge to slap the woman, to knock the look right off her face.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. Kali didn’t respond. She went about taking the cath back out, as the bag was nearly full. Marko was moving his hands rapidly and rhythmically, so Kali couldn’t get a steady hand on the tube. She grabbed his arms and pinned them down, which startled Marko. Immediately, she regretted having been so rough with him.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie, can you hold still for just a moment until I’m done here?” she said, apologetic in tone. It worried Kali slightly that Marko held so still and was so quiet while she removed the tube and cleaned him up.

  “You okay?” she asked. He nodded and she smiled. With the used catheter and bag gathered up, she needed to get up and dispose of everything and wash her hands. She gave a look to the woman next to her and started to rise, aware even as she did that it was a simple luxury—this bearing of weight on her legs—that her son would never experience. As the woman stood up and moved aside to let Kali out, that thought made her aware, more intensely than usual, of how completely this basic guilt was woven throughout her life and everything she’d done since Marko had been born fourteen years prior. This brought her thoughts, again, to Lydia and when she first came to the States.

  Kali moved carefully down the plane’s aisle, absorbed in the memory. Lydia had come initially, or so she said, to merely visit Kalina. But after a month and a half lapsed and her mother was still there with no plans of leaving and dwindling money, Kali began helping her look for work. Kali understood that Lydia didn’t want to return to Bulgaria and be alone with her father, Todor, who was chronically depressed and who routinely threatened suicide, to the extent that it no longer had any shock value left. Kali herself had just stopped talking to him shortly after moving away, not wanting to bear the emotional burden of his pain.

  The kind of work that could sponsor a visa and keep Lydia in the United States for longer than six months was abundantly available in New England, given all the rich, white people having kids. After Lydia found a family to nanny for, Kalina didn’t stay at her job long. She left and became a student, going to graduate school for psychology. That’s where she met Marko’s father, Zach, and started that whole journey. Looking back now, Kali could see the inevitability of it all—like a black line running acr
oss the clear sky, its unwavering trajectory carved solidly against a dramatic canvas of deep blue.

  Kali, Zach and Marko spent whole days with Lydia at the mansion in Lincoln, swimming in the pool, lounging in lawn chairs in the family’s acres-big backyard. After the parents divorced, the man promptly remarried a much younger Russian woman who didn’t like Lydia. With the kids grown and off to college, Lydia soon found herself out of the mansion and back on her own in a country that still didn’t feel like home.

  Marko was six at the time and Lydia came to live with them. Kali, having become integrated into the yoga community, connected Lydia with people she knew at the ashram—a spiritual yoga retreat in the suburbs. Lydia was able to get a small apartment there and a job cooking as well as another part-time job at the local Montessori school. This way, Kali was able to visit her at the Ashram and sometimes leave Marko there with her for a few days so she could get away. To Kali’s mind, it was the perfect solution; Lydia could also come to the city to visit Kali and Marko, but they didn’t have to be on top of each other. She loved her mother, but too much time together often led them down a path of buried resentments from older, deeper wounds.

  And now Kali was headed back to Bulgaria for the first time in fifteen years. She opened the door to the little airplane lavatory, disposed of the catheter bag, and washed her hands. She thought of her son. Marko would see Sofia for the first time and meet his grandfather, Todor, who Kali thought might actually, finally, be dying for real. When Lydia had told Kali she was going back to stay with him because he was sick, she had known it must have been serious. Faced with the reality of his death after having been estranged from her father for nearly two decades, she decided, somewhat spontaneously, to return and see him one last time and let him meet his grandson.