None of the other kids approached the children. Girl and Brother weren’t the kind of kids that made friends easily anyway. Brother wore glasses and Girl’s hair was never well-combed, and their pants were always a few inches too short for their long, skinny legs. Girl and Brother were kids who read books and played by themselves, not kids who cheered for sports teams and made friends with strangers. They didn’t particularly like other children or want them around. It was better when it was just Girl and Brother.
They had two or three flights to get from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, depending on whether Father had gotten the children a direct flight from Chicago or if they had to first go to Seattle. One and a half hours to Chicago, then a layover for an hour or two; four hours to Seattle, then another layover; three more hours up to Anchorage. It was around eleven or twelve hours altogether, but inside the aluminum tube of the jet, time seemed to dissolve into the static of the engines. Bing! Girl pushed the flight attendant call button to ask how much longer the flight would be. The attendants often stopped answering, so Girl and Brother pushed the button over and over until they got a response. Bing! Bing! Bing! Once a flight attendant gave Girl her watch to hold for the entire flight so she’d stop binging the call button. The watch was slender gold with a tiny metal buckle—nicer than Mother’s silver Timex with the expandable, accordion-like band. Soda pop was free and the children never got to drink it at home, so they’d ring the bell for pop, and more pop, and more peanuts, even though the nuts were honey-roasted and tasted gross. Back then a meal was served on the long flights, too, which was always some sort of inedible meat, but it came with a cookie or dessert of some sort. Brother would race his Matchbox cars down the aisles, and they’d fight and call the stewardess to referee.
There was a train that ran beneath the Seattle-Tacoma airport, and Brother and Girl had to ride it between terminals when they changed planes. Another Unaccompanied Minor told Girl about the passenger that fell on the tracks and was run over by the train. They used sawdust to soak up the blood. Girl thought a lot about this every time they rode the train. It was nearly impossible for passengers to gain access to the tracks. The train was hermetically sealed in its tube, with automatic sliding doors and whatnot. A passenger would have to work very hard to wind up on the tracks and get run over by a train and require someone to soak up their blood with sawdust. It could not have been accidental.
Girl didn’t know why they used sawdust to soak up blood but it seemed feasible. She often saw sawdust in the tunnels of the SEA-TAC subway. What else could it be for? The subway car smelled of oil and unwashed hands, and the carpet was always stained from too many feet.
Brother was nine or ten the year they started flying unaccompanied, and travel transformed him from the family’s problem child to the leader. Brother was not put off by blood-soaked sawdust or changing terminals all alone in strange airports or reading diagrams of the subway stops. They took the train—Girl looking suspiciously out the window, keeping an eye out for sawdust and wondering how someone could get inside the tunnel to get hit by a train anyway—and Brother in his glasses, thinking about being capable or something.
Brother wasn’t made anxious by airports or maps or directions to places they had never been. Girl followed him because she had to. She certainly couldn’t navigate strange places and large airports on her own.
At Mother’s house Brother was always in trouble for things he did or did not do: he did not do his homework, he went to the grocery store after school and someone stole his shoes, he did not do his chores, and he once asked a police officer to give him a ride home when a group of boys were chasing him. Stepmother’s conclusion: Brother was not tough enough and he did not work hard enough and therefore he was a little weenie, and did not deserve respect. It was only Stepmother who thought so, but she was the one who hit the hardest.
Brother’s competence—no, his superiority—started when they boarded that first plane in Rochester and it grew with each connecting flight. By Seattle, he was the one in charge. Girl could not change planes without him.
When they reached their gate, Girl and Brother sat alone on the floor, digging through their suitcases for toys and candy. An adult interrupted them with a grunt and handed Girl a card that read: I am deaf. I am selling these sign language cards to support myself and live independently. Girl didn’t know how to say no, so she bought a card with line drawings for the alphabet. She and Brother studied it during the long layover until they could finger-spell pretty fluently, and they used it as their secret language well into high school.
The Anchorage airport was filled with large taxidermied animals: a mountain goat, a Kodiak bear, maybe an eagle. The carpet was modern and in shades of orange and brown.
Father kept dog biscuits in his pocket for his husky and always offered them to the children as a snack when he picked them up. Girl ate them. Brother did not. The dog bones tasted like grit and shame and nothing. At Father’s house, Brother was the son, and Girl lived in his shadow.
Girl always figured that she’d grow up to be a stewardess. She didn’t want to, but she flew so much that it seemed like she was already training for it. She thought
