or whatever sherry does,” he told the old woman. She didn’t answer but continued staring into his eyes. He poured the sherry into the lid, which was meant to double as a cup. Meanwhile the plane gave a creak and started moving down the runway. The old woman drank off the sherry and handed him the cup. He understood that she was not returning it for good. He refilled it. She drank that more slowly and then let her head tip back against her seat.
“Better?” he asked her.
“My name is Mrs. Daniel Bunn,” she told him.
He thought it was her way of saying she was herself again — her formal, dignified self. “How do you do,” he said. “I’m Macon Leary.”
“I know it’s foolish, Mr. Leary,” she said, “but a drink does give the illusion one is doing something to cope, does it not.”
“Absolutely,” Macon said.
He wasn’t convinced, though, that she was coping all that well. As the plane gathered speed, her free hand tightened on the armrest. Her other hand — the one closest to him, clutching the cup — grew white around the nails. All at once the cup popped up in the air, squeezed out of her grip. Macon caught it nimbly and said, “Whoa there!” and screwed it onto the flask. Then he replaced the flask in his bag. “Once we’re off the ground—” he said.
But a glance at her face stopped him. She was swallowing again. The plane was beginning to rise now — the nose was lifting off — and she was pressed back against her seat. She seemed flattened. “Mrs. Bunn?” Macon said. He was scared she was having a heart attack.
Instead of answering, she turned toward him and crumpled onto his shoulder. He put an arm around her. “Never mind,” he said. “Goodness. You’ll be all right. Never mind.”
The plane continued slanting backward. When the landing gear retracted (groaning), Macon felt the shudder through Mrs. Bunn’s body. Her hair smelled like freshly ironed tea cloths. Her back was large and boneless, a mounded shape like the back of a whale.
He was impressed that someone so old still wanted so fiercely to live.
Then the plane leveled off and she pulled herself together — straightening and drawing away from him, brushing at the teardrops that lay in the folds beneath her eyes. She was full of folds, wide and plain and sagging, but valiantly wore two pearl buttons in her long, spongy earlobes and maintained a coat of brave red lipstick on a mouth so wrinkled that it didn’t even have a clear outline.
He asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yes, and I apologize a thousand times,” she said. And she patted the brooch at her throat.
When the drink cart came he ordered her another sherry, which he insisted on paying for, and he ordered one for himself as well, even though he didn’t plan to drink it. He thought it might be needed for Mrs. Bunn. He was right, as things turned out, because their flight was unusually rough. The seatbelt sign stayed lit the whole way, and the plane bounced and grated as if rolling over gravel. Every now and then it dropped sharply and Mrs. Bunn winced, but she went on taking tiny sips of sherry. “This is nothing,” Macon told her. “I’ve been in much worse than this.” He told her how to give with the bumps. “It’s like traveling on a boat,” he said. “Or on wheels, on roller skates. You keep your knees loose. You bend. Do you understand what I’m saying? You go along with it. You ride it out.”
Mrs. Bunn said she’d certainly try.
Not only was the air unsteady, but also little things kept going wrong inside the plane. The drink cart raced away from the stewardess every time she let go of it. Mrs. Bunn’s tray fell into her lap twice without warning. At each new mishap Macon laughed and said, “Ah, me,” and shook his head. “Oh, not again,” he said. Mrs. Bunn’s eyes remained fixed on his face, as if Macon were her only hope. Once there was a bang and she jumped; the door to the cockpit had flung itself open for no good reason. “What? What?” she said, but Macon pointed out that now she could see for herself how unconcerned the pilot was. They were close enough to the front so she could even hear what the pilot was talking about; he was shouting some question to the copilot, asking why any ten-year-old girl with half a grain of sense would wear a metal nightbrace in a sauna room. “You call that a worried man?” Macon asked Mrs. Bunn. “You think a man about to bail out of his plane would be discussing orthodontia?”
“Bail out!” Mrs. Bunn said. “Oh, my, I never thought of that!”
Macon laughed again.
He was reminded of a trip he’d taken alone as a boy, touring colleges. Heady with his new independence, he had lied to the man sitting next to him and said he came from Kenya, where his father led safaris. In the same way he was lying now, presenting himself to Mrs. Bunn as this merry, tolerant person.
But after they had landed (with Mrs. Bunn hardly flinching, bolstered by all those sherries), and she had gone off with her grown daughter, a very small child ran headlong into Macon’s kneecap. This child was followed by another and another, all more or less the same size — some kind of nursery school, Macon supposed, visiting the airport on a field trip — and each child, as if powerless to veer from the course the first had set, careened off Macon’s knees and said, “Oops!” The call ran down the line like little bird cries—“Oops!” “Oops!” “Oops!”—while behind the children, a harassed-looking woman clapped a hand to her cheek. “Sorry,” she said to Macon, and he said, “No harm done.”
Only later, when he passed a mirror and noticed the grin on his face, did he realize that, in fact, he might not have been lying to Mrs. Bunn after all.
“The plumber says it won’t be hard to fix,” Sarah told him. “He says it
“Well, good,” Macon said.
He was not as surprised this time by her call, of course, but he did feel there was something disconcerting about it — standing in an Edmonton hotel room on a weekday afternoon, listening to Sarah’s voice at the other end of the line.
“I went over there this morning and straightened up a little,” she said. “Everything’s so disorganized.”
“Disorganized?”
“Why are some of the sheets sewn in half? And the popcorn popper’s in the bedroom. Were you eating popcorn in the bedroom?”
“I guess I must have been,” he said.
He was near an open window, and he could look out upon a strangely beautiful landscape: an expanse of mathematical flatness, with straight-edged buildings rising in the distance like a child’s toy blocks on a rug. It was difficult, in these surroundings, to remember why he’d had a popcorn popper in the bedroom.
“So how’s the weather there?” Sarah asked.
“Kind of gray.”
“Here it’s sunny. Sunny and humid.”
“Well, it’s certainly not humid here,” he told her. “The air’s so dry that rain disappears before it hits the ground.”
“Really? Then how can you tell it’s raining?”
“You can see it above the plains,” he said. “It looks like stripes that just fade away about halfway down from the sky.”
“I wish I were there to watch it with you,” Sarah said.
Macon swallowed.
Gazing out of the window, he all at once recalled Ethan as an infant. Ethan used to cry unless he was tightly wrapped in a blanket; the pediatrician had explained that new babies have a fear of flying apart. Macon had not been able to imagine that at the time, but now he had no trouble. He could picture himself separating, falling into pieces, his head floating away with terrifying swiftness in the eerie green air of Alberta.
In Vancouver she asked if the rain vanished there as well. “No,” he said.
“No?”
“No, it rains in Vancouver.”
It was raining this minute — a gentle night rain. He could hear it but not see it, except for the cone of illuminated drops spilling beneath a street lamp just outside his hotel room. You could almost suppose it was the lamp itself that was raining.
“Well, I’ve moved back into the house,” she said. “Mostly I just stay upstairs. The cat and I: We camp in the
