looks proud and embarrassed all at once and says, “You may have to start working out, Margaret… heh heh heh.”
They keep up this nauseating chatter, all interspersed with unnecessary touching until they kiss goodbye before Margaret passes through the scanner without Eddie. Then they both get teary and actually blow each other kisses. I want to scream, but I keep my head down and know I’ll be thirty-five-thousand feet in the air soon enough.
After Margaret walks through, I approach the scanner, but the TSA officer puts his hand up to stop me and asks the punk rocker to walk through my scanner. I explode with anxiety and shout, “My flight is leaving soon!”
I must have screamed really loudly because the immediate area goes still and both the snowboarder and the TSA officer turn around.
The TSA officer looks me up and down and assesses my level of crazy. Is it Christmas crazy or real crazy? That’s what he’s trying to determine.
“Miss, what time is your flight?”
“Four.”
He checks his watch and looks at me strangely. “You have an hour and a half, miss. I suggest you take a deep breath and calm yourself down.”
I bite down harder as I nod and now I’m swallowing blood.
The snowboarder picks up his bag and his board and moves a few feet to the side. I can’t help looking at him. He is stone cold, completely devoid of emotion. His cheekbones are sharp, like they were carved from rock.
“It’s cool,” he says. “Let her go.”
I nod thanks, mostly because I can’t open my mouth. I put up my hands and pass through the scanner and body check. No alarms go off, so I guess there’s no detector for somebody who’s planning to do bodily harm to herself.
I grab my bag from the tray and walk quickly to the first restroom, where I lock myself in a stall and spit out a little blood into the toilet from where I bit my own mouth. I can barely breathe, so I sit down and cover my mouth with my hands, trying to limit the air coming in and out of my lungs. It works. I gather myself and splash some water on my face from the sink. I look at myself in the mirror and am alarmed at the high color in my cheeks. Calm down, I order myself before I walk back out.
I make my way to gate 12 and find a seat. I check the time. Two forty-five. I look at the flight board and pray again that my flight doesn’t get canceled.
I check my watch again, just out of habit; it is still two forty-five. I wonder if I can make it another forty-five minutes. I slide my tongue between my teeth and clamp down. Not too hard, not enough to bleed, but just enough to focus my mind and clear my head. I’m gonna make it. I say it over and over.
Chapter 9
To my relief, West Air actually has their shit together. They board us early and prepare us to lift off early if the controllers will allow it. My seat is three rows from the back and I have a window seat.
I make my way back without incident and without really making eye contact with anybody, including the attendant, whom I naturally don’t trust.
A couple of climbers with large bags come down the aisle, and I pray they don’t sit next to me. They stop in the row in front of me and start unloading their stuff. It’s a lot. And there’s a lot of loud and tedious discussion about a green duffle bag that won’t fit in the overhead compartment, which is finally resolved by stuffing it, with a lot of force, under a seat. Then the captain comes on and asks the flight attendants to prepare the cabin for takeoff.
I finally breathe a sigh of relief: to have a row to myself is simply too good to be true. Then, at the last moment before takeoff, there’s a commotion at the front of the plane. The seat next to me is still empty, though many others are as well. I start muttering to myself, “Please don’t sit next to me, please don’t sit next to me, please don’t sit next to me.” But God giveth and He taketh away.
I look up and find the snowboard punker looming over my row in the aisle. He folds himself into the seat next to mine. I see that he’s even younger than I thought, now that we are face-to-face.
“Sorry, I don’t fit very well,” he apologizes after stepping on my bag and elbowing me on his way down into his seat.
“No worries,” I say so quietly I don’t think he hears me.
I turn away, fingering the netting on the back of the seat in front of me.
The captain comes on shortly after and asks flight attendants to take their seats. I take a deep breath. My dream, my plan is coming true. Some minor bumps and a little anxiety, but I’m on the runway. I smile to myself and look sideways to make sure skate-punk guy didn’t see me.
The plane taxis to the runway, stops, and then does a one-eighty. It slowly picks up speed again, and then the engines roar to life. The g-force pulls me back into my seat and we zip down the runway. I turn to the window and mumble a prayer to God to watch over my flight. It’s instinct, and even as I say it, I know how ridiculous I am. I’m about to hit my own switch and I’m praying for a safe takeoff.
Whenever I fly, I say the same prayer. I call to the dead before me: my father, my grandfather and grandmother, a cousin I only knew one summer who has since died of an infection in his gallbladder, and my English teacher, Miss Lathrop, who had a seizure and choked on a ham sandwich. She died alone in her apartment. It is my private parade of dead angels, and I ask them to carry the wings of the plane, to take me home. I guess I’m asking them to carry me far enough along so I can take my life. Miss Lathrop would have said, “How ironic.” I always wonder what she was thinking just before she died.
The plane skips up and then bends steeply to the left. We hold the trajectory for about ten to fifteen minutes, and then we level off.
“Paul Hart, Cambridge, Mass.,” my neighbor says, extending his hand. He has a muted New England accent and is trim with strong, wiry muscles in his forearms. I accept his hand automatically, but frowning, and withdraw mine almost immediately. His hands are big and rough with calluses.
“They used to be softer.”
“What?”
“My hands. I hadn’t realized how calloused they got until right now.” He nods at my soft, pale hands. “I guess you weren’t here for the climbing.”
I glare at him. He stares back, and we just kind of gaze at each other in a very awkward way. There’s an insult or an assumption in what he just said. I have no idea whether he meant to be rude or if he’s sort of an idiot, but I feel my eyes welling up, so I look down.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
“I didn’t mean anything,” he assures me, “just an observation.”
I look up, having regained my composure. He has thick brown hair and his face is cherubic except for the dark stubble that sandpapers his chin. I can hear the relentless beating of some punk band that probably nobody but he and his snowboard buddies know tinning out from his unplugged earplugs. Annoyingly, he’s still wearing his sunglasses.
“I saw you say a prayer there,” he says, withdrawing a bit as he organizes himself in his seat. His voice sounds like gravel. He’s probably a smoker. “I hope you have wings; it looks like there’s a huge storm coming.”
He laughs a little at his own joke and removes his sunglasses. Baby blues, no surprise-all the jerks have them. I wonder if everything that comes out of his mouth is annoying or if I would find anything anyone did annoying at this moment. I decide it is probably just Paul Hart.
“Yes. God is dead and all that,” I say a little more abruptly than I intended.
“What?” he says. “I don’t understand.”
I realize I was having a conversation in my head that was about three responses ahead of Paul’s innocuous quip. I tend to do that-imagine conversations before they happen. That’s why people sometimes have a tough time understanding me and I them. But Paul’s a bright one and catches up quickly.
“I bet you’re a philosophy major,” he says, if not a tad smugly. “I get it.”
