There were hundreds of layovers and delays, and then, that one windy March evening in Atlanta, seven hours were spent on a runway while the plane was slapped around boorishly in the dark, rain whipping sideways across the windows, only to have the plane turned back to the gate when the flight was canceled.
It had been a full flight, too—the proverbial sardines—with a large number of elderly passengers. There’d been a woman with a black eye sitting in silence beside a man with clenched fists. There’d also been a frat boy with a cat in a pink plastic cage beneath his seat. The cat yowled pitifully, and the frat boy, even more pitifully, kept looking under the seat with a worried expression on his face, saying, “It’s okay, Binky. Zacky’s here.”
That night Jiselle’s job was to rush up the aisle and tell anyone who tried to take off his seat belt and make a break for the bathroom to sit back down.
“Why?” they wanted to know.
“Getting out of your seat is prohibited,” she said, “on the runway.”
“But we’re not going anywhere. The plane’s not moving.”
This was true enough.
Outside, surrounding the plane, was the sense of weather growing vindictive—an accumulating energy with its own agenda. The weather didn’t care that they had connections to make, medication that needed to be taken, appointments that would be missed, vacations that were ruined before they’d even begun.
A baby began to shriek, and then a little girl with a crusty nose, wearing a purple tutu, took up the shriek. Her mother leaned over her, holding the child in her arms. As she passed their seats and looked down, it appeared to Jiselle as if that mother were trying to smother the child or wrestle with her—but, as with the frat boy and his cat, silly endearments were being whispered as she did it.
In the seat in front of the mother and child, a middle-aged man slid his toupee off his head in exasperation and set it on his lap. He stroked it with his right hand while running his left hand nervously over his hairless head.
Then, as if someone were spraying the aircraft with a high-powered hose, rain began to splash against the side of the plane. Wind rocked them harder. There was the sound of heavy breathing coming from the passengers—deep sighs, stifled sobs. Jiselle had the impulse to announce to the cabin that it wasn’t her fault.
But it was nearly unbearable, passing down the aisle, having to endure the glares directed at her. It had happened before, of course, but how could anyone get used to that?
When Captain Dorn’s voice finally came over the intercom and he said they’d been directed back to the terminal, something like a cry of despair and an exhalation of relief rose from the passengers at once, the kind of sound Jiselle imagined a crowd gathered at a mining disaster might make upon receiving news that one of the fifty miners had been found alive. She tried to smile as she passed back down the aisle this time, but the only passengers who would look at her did not smile back—and then an elderly woman reached up and grabbed her wrist.
Jiselle stopped, looking down at her own wrist in this woman’s bony hand, and then into the face of the old woman, who said nothing but who fixed Jiselle with an expression of such bitter rage and contempt that, until all the passengers were off the plane, Jiselle could not stop shaking.
“What did the hag say to you?” Jeremy asked. He was wearing so much ChapStick that his lips shone from the overhead lights. Earlier, she’d watched him applying it, over and over, from the corner of her eyes as they sat strapped beside one another in the bulkhead during the turnaround.
“Nothing,” Jiselle said.
And it was true.
But the old woman’s eyes had been ice blue. Her hair, pure white. She’d hated Jiselle. The expression on her face said it so clearly that the old woman hadn’t needed to speak. Her hatred had been projected so powerfully that Jiselle felt she could read the old woman’s mind, hear the old woman’s voice inside her head, saying:
A curse.
A spell.
Later, at the hotel bar, when Captain Dorn glanced down at her legs crossed on the barstool a few inches away from his, Jiselle took a sip of her wine and tried to will that old woman and her evil eye away.
“What a life,” he said, raising his glass to hers.
She raised hers to his, and they touched the glasses together just lightly enough to make the faintest of sounds—the muffled sound of a very tiny glass bell ringing on the collar of a cat, which might have been rolling in some lush green grass under a warm sun in a country far away.
CHAPTER TWO
The afternoon Jiselle announced her engagement to Captain Dorn, she saw them for the first time:
The white balloons.
She was driving on the Red Arrow Highway, which meandered along the Lake Michigan shoreline, back to Illinois from the small Michigan town in which her mother lived.
She gasped when she glimpsed them.
The balloons must have originated in Chicago. Now they floated in her direction over the lake, which rippled under them in bright brain waves. At least fifty balloons, their strings trailing silver tails behind them.
Jiselle had heard of the groups of volunteers and activists who gathered every Sunday in cities all over the United States to set them loose—a white balloon for every victim of the Phoenix flu—but as yet she’d seen them only on television.
They were controversial. There had been objections. Some said that the balloons served no purpose other than to scare people, that they were really about inciting panic. Not the compassionate expression they pretended to be, but an implicit criticism of the present administration, a political maneuver rather than a commemoration of the dead. Others said they were simply, purely beautiful.
And, seeing them for herself that afternoon as she drove away from her hometown, Jiselle had to agree. The silent, swift, traveling emptiness of those balloons, their strings glistening loosely on the air as they lifted higher in a steady stream toward the sky. They seemed to be lifted in unison by a gust of wind, trembling a little against the backdrop of blue.
Intellectually, Jiselle knew what they stood for, but like so many other things at the beginning of this surprising time, they appeared to her more as a wonder than a sign.
She had never been so happy.
Could she ever be happier?
Even after the sharp words with her mother, and the dead man in his coffin, Jiselle could not help but feel lighthearted.
Jiselle’s mother had asked her, “What kind of a woman agrees to marry a man she’s known for three months? A man with three children? A man whose three children she hasn’t met?”
If Jiselle had been a different kind of daughter, or woman, she might have said, “The kind of woman
