“Have fun.”
“Yeah,” she says. “This is real fun.”
This is what they mean when they say words hurt. She sighs heavily and slams the car door once she’s out. I roll the window down to call out to her, but she’s already walking away without a glance back.
I drive over to Lola’s to take her to the airport to pick up Chris. He’s been racking up the frequent-flier miles between LA and Lola. While we’re waiting, she tells me she had a dream where she forgot who he was. Not just that he was the guy on TV, but that when she saw him, she didn’t recognize him as Chris. She said she was searching and searching for him in her dream and even asked him if he’d seen her boyfriend. To which he’d answered, “Of course, yes, it’s me.”
“And then there were huge televisions all around and the commercials were playing on them,” she says as we wait in the baggage claim. “I’m pointing at the screen saying ‘There he is, that’s him,’ but on television, another actor is playing the part and the real Chris was pleading with me to remember him.”
“It was just a dream,” I say, smoothing down her thick, dark hair. “As soon as you see his face, you’ll fly right to him.”
“‘Remember me,’” she says, pleading. “That’s what he kept saying—‘Remember me.’”
“You will,” I say.
“Just don’t let some stranger come up and kiss me.”
“I’d like to promise you that,” I say. “But you know how I am about kissing strangers.”
“Speaking of the OJH,” she says, “how do you feel about Cassie spending so much time at Jack’s place?”
“The OJH?”
“Orange Juice Hottie,” she says and elbows me gently in the ribs.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. And what does that have to do with Cassie going to Jack’s place?”
“Just opening up the door if you want to talk is all,” she says.
I start to tell her what’s going on, but suddenly she’s rereading her flight information and staring at the Arrivals screen.
The baggage claim has always seemed a very anxious place to me. People stake their spot and await their luggage, watching as it circles closer and closer to them. You see them reach out as if to grab it, but it’s still too far away so their hand goes back to their side. Then closer and closer until they jerk forward in a panic to pick it up before it passes them by because what if it doesn’t come back around and the honor system of “take only the bag you brought” breaks down and their underwear is lost forever.
Occasionally a person who can’t bear the strain of it all will weave in and out, looking for their bag, frantic to get it before someone else snatches it up, calling out to no one in particular, “That’s mine there, with the red tag, that’s mine.”
“Oh, look,” Lola says, pointing to a screen and holding up her note page. “His flight is in.”
It’s not long before most of the people standing around us put their cell phones to their ears. All of them, including Lola, getting a call that a loved is now “walking down the hall past the A gates, ok, now I’m passing that panini place I told you about, and I can see the baggage claim sign, ok, now I see you.”
Chris comes into view.
“I do remember him,” Lola says to me and rushes forward to hug him.
I nod at Chris when he sees me, and the three of us stake our spot at the baggage wheel. Surely between the three of us, we’ll be able to retrieve one bag. Lola and Chris are deep in conversation. I know she’s telling him about the dream. He shakes his head and smiles at her. People across the way look at Chris and then back to each other and whisper to a third person who looks up quickly and then away just as quickly.
“That’s why I should do carry-on,” Chris says, having seen them looking.
Lola pokes him in the side, and he smiles. Bags begin to drop out of the hole and people tense up, ready, shifting slightly on their feet like football players at the line of scrimmage.
I picture Oliver slipping down the baggage ramp, sitting cross-legged on the conveyor belt between a big blue Samsonite bag and the hard black case of a tuba. Who plays the tuba? I imagine him riding around toward me. I see him. He sees me. I’m waiting, anxious. He’s almost to me, and then some beautiful, young weaver comes along, pushing me aside, yelling, “That one’s mine. That one there with the nice hands and soft lips. That one’s mine.”
I imagine that I’m about to star in Baggage Claim Cage Fight, but then I look at her and her young skin and trim waist, her perfect hair and teeth, and I realize she’s right. She grabs Oliver off the conveyor belt and off they go.
Guys—someone grabbed my bag at the airport.
On an adjacent belt from another flight, I picture Jack going around. But he’s walking on the belt like it’s a people mover. He steps over a paisley roller bag and finds his way off without someone having to reach out their hands for him. I picture him waving to me and leaving the airport by himself, without need of me or being claimed by anyone else.
“There’s mine,” Chris says, breaking my thoughts.
He lifts his bag off the belt with no detectable anxiety at all, and we head for the door.
I look back at the conveyor belt, trying to see where the imaginary pretty young thing took the imaginary Oliver. I see him, but not her. He’s standing beside the belt alone. He starts lifting the bags off the belt and handing them to
