Chapter 3 - Thirty-Five Thousand Feet
The regional jet from our small regional airport to Newark was twenty minutes late boarding, which in the old days would have sent my heart into my throat.
Years ago, whenever Charles and I traveled, every delay felt like an impending catastrophe. Charles would stand by the gate counter, checking his watch every ninety seconds, jiggling the change in his pocket until I wanted to reach over and grab his wrist. But as I sat in the hard plastic bucket seat of Gate 4, watching the baggage handlers load luggage into the belly of the Embraer 175, I felt an unnatural, buoyant stillness settle into my chest.
My phone vibrated in my purse.
I pulled it out. It was a text from an international number, routed through an airline Wi-Fi portal.
*Mom, landed for fuel in Anchorage. Heading out over the water now. Make sure Chloe does her math packet before Sunday. Love you.*
It was Caleb.
I looked at the message. In the past, I would have replied instantly: *Packs are done, kids are great, have fun in Japan!* I would have smoothed the water before he even had the chance to look over the gunwale and see the waves.
I locked the screen. I slipped the phone back into the side pocket of my tote bag.
"Boarding Group Two," the gate agent announced into the static-filled microphone.
I stood up, adjusted the strap of my tote, and walked down the jet bridge.
The Newark terminal was a river of noise and bad lighting, but when I found Joyce sitting near Gate 62 with a large plastic cup of iced decaf and a book of crossword puzzles, she looked up and beamed. Joyce was seventy-three, had two artificial hips that set off every magnetometer on the eastern seaboard, and possessed the indestructible cheerfulness of a retired middle-school librarian.
"Myrna!" she shouted, waving a half-chewed pen. "You made it! I told Harold before I left that if you didn't show up, I was going to find an Italian widower and spend all my money on leather jackets."
"Harold would have sent him a thank-you note," I said, sinking into the seat beside her.
Joyce looked at me closely, her smile tilting into that shrewd, diagnostic expression she had used for thirty years to catch eighth-graders passing notes. "You look different. Did you get your hair cut?"
"No," I said, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling glass at the massive Boeing 787 that was being prepped for Lisbon. The belly of the plane was open, a conveyor belt slowly ingesting silver containers of baggage under the gray New Jersey sky. "I dropped the children off at Patrice's."
Joyce stopped chewing her pen. Her mouth formed a small, perfect 'O'. "Tori left them with you?"
"This morning. At six-thirty."
"And you took them to Patrice?"
"I did."
Joyce stared at me for three long seconds. Then she reached into her oversized straw bag, pulled out a small bag of chocolate-covered pretzels, and dropped them into my lap with the reverence of a priest offering communion.
"Myrna Miller," she said quietly, "you are finally becoming a dangerous woman."
We boarded the Dreamliner at six o'clock.
There is an odd, floating unreality to crossing the Atlantic at night. Once the meal trays were cleared and the cabin lights were dimmed to a soft, bruised purple, the world shrank to the hiss of the air nozzles and the low, heavy thrum of the two massive engines hanging beneath the wings. Beside me, Joyce pulled a satin sleep mask over her eyes, tilted her head back, and began a gentle, rhythmic snore that sounded like a cat purring in a cardboard box.
I couldn't sleep.
I stared at the small digital map on the seatback screen in front of me. A little blue airplane icon crawled across an ocean of black pixels. To the west, thousands of miles behind me, another airplane was crawling across the northern arc of the Pacific toward Tokyo.
I thought about Caleb at seven years old, sitting on the counter while I picked splinters out of his knee after he had tried to climb the neighbor's cedar fence. He had been so brave, biting his lower lip until it was white, holding my thumb with both of his small, sticky hands. *You fix everything, Mom,* he had told me then, through a mouthful of tears.
And that was the problem, wasn't it?
I had fixed everything. When he forgot his lunch, I drove it to the middle school. When he missed the deadline for his college deposit, I called the registrar and begged for an exception. When he brought Tori home for Thanksgiving and she criticized the china pattern Charles’s mother had left us, I had pulled Caleb into the pantry and told him she was just nervous, that it was fine, that we would use the modern white plates next time.
I had built the ramp that allowed him to glide through thirty-six years without ever having to feel the jolt of hitting the curb.
May you like
I adjusted my neck pillow and turned my head toward the window. Outside, through the thick layers of acrylic, there was only the immense, terrifying black of the ocean, five miles below, indifferent to our schedules, our folders, and the small, cowardly arrangements of the people who inhabited its shores.
***
