by Joan Barfoot
Poor petrified passengers. Poor Lila, poor Tom, poor survivors left behind on the ground. What a leisurely disaster this is, real, exquisite cruelty. She could almost admire the creative effort involved in devising such a delicate torment.
Someone who hasn’t made it to the washroom has thrown up in the aisle, so that people have to step over and around the mess. Another chore for Sheila and her colleagues; or Lila could offer to clean it up herself, keeping very, very busy.
There are six people ahead of her in what appears to be the washroom line—wouldn’t it be just her luck for the plane to go down the moment she’s finally peeing.
She keeps staring at the skin on her hands. It doesn’t look at all the way she imagined it would when she died. She imagined it deeply lined, and thin as an onion layer. That’s because she expected to die years and years from now, not necessarily happily, or pleasantly, but at least vaguely far off in the future. She also imagined that by that time there’d be some learned grace, some sense made: a tidy gift, with a tidy bow, by the end. That’s how dim and tender the picture was.
Instead here she is, in terrible danger of ending unprepared in the middle, no grace or tidiness or tenderness involved.
An orange-red-coloured vision keeps flaring up, then vanishing; as if there’s a rolling metal shutter in her brain, the kind shop-owners pull down over their storefronts in bad neighbourhoods at the end of the day. Only intruders with welding torches get through.
The flaming wing of the plane is a welding torch. It doesn’t bear looking at.
To this point in her life, terror has been mainly a vicarious matter: a cheap thrill at a bad movie, a horrid thrill in a great book. Those are, as it turns out, nothing at all like the blank, desperate shock of the real thing.
Partly the fault, perhaps, of her too-ardent, old-fashioned attachment to words. Someone younger, like Sheila, more accustomed to visuals, may be seeing quite well: as if this is a movie she has already watched, whose awful pictorial outcome is already showing in some internal screening room. Or it’s a hellish rock video.
The woman ahead of her is also younger than Lila. She looks maybe thirty, and has long hair of a colour people used to call “dirty-blond,” although Lila doesn’t know why, it’s not dirty at all. Her hand, reaching up to brush the hair away from her face, trembles badly, and her wide eyes catch Lila’s.
“Hi,” she says, voice trembling too. She reaches out her hand in what, here, seems a parody of politeness. “I’m Sarah.”
“And I’m Lila. This is something, isn’t it?” Talk about parodies!—but it isn’t easy finding the right thing to say. Etiquette must be devised on the fly, as it were.
The woman looks almost as startled as Tom did by Lila’s giggle, although thankfully not as irritated. “Sorry,” Lila says. “I’m a bit nervous.”
“Yeah, I’m freaked. I can’t fucking believe this.” The voice is harsh and light, an odd combination—it can’t be its normal tone.
“I can’t, either.” This is true, but how—tepid Lila sounds, as if she is a repressed, unpassionate professor of, oh, English literature, what else? Not of anything useful, no clever field that could either explain this or rescue them.
Sarah has, Lila thinks, the narrow, stretched look that predicts a certain ropiness about the neck and arms and thighs by the time she gets to Lila’s age. An age she is now not entirely likely to reach. She has a glorious array of freckles on her face and arms, probably elsewhere as well. A few of the freckles duck back into dimples when she abruptly breaks into a grin.
“Weird, huh? Introducing ourselves like we’re at a party? Shaking hands over a puddle of barf? You in a hurry for the can?”
“Not really. I mostly just wanted to stand up and stretch.”
“Me too. I couldn’t sit still. Now I can’t stand still. I keep wanting to break out. Like”—she grins again—“that’s a good idea. I’ve always got a ton of energy, and usually that’s great because I get a lot done and I don’t get tired, but this is driving me nuts.”
Indeed, she is bouncing on her feet, almost hopping in the aisle. She is very appealing, although Lila can see she is also likely exhausting. Lila spots her wedding ring and wonders if, in her absence, Sarah’s husband is enjoying a restful silence. She feels, beside Sarah, unfrenzied, unoccupied. “What do you do?”
“Receptionist for a doctor. Boy, that gets crazy. I was really looking forward to being away. My little sister’s in England, she’s going to university there and I haven’t seen her for ages.” Her expression crumples. “Oh gosh.” Lila touches her arm. “My husband said I should come, he’s an electrician so he said for a couple of weeks he’d cut back so he could look after the kids after school, stuff like that.” Sarah goes so pale her freckles look ready to leap off her skin. “What’s he going to do?” she cries. “If I don’t come back, what’ll they do?” She clutches at Lila. “Do you think people know? I mean our families, will they be told what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I was wondering that myself. Maybe not. What could anyone say? Even we don’t know what’s happening.”
“Oh, I hope nobody calls him, he’ll be so upset. He’s the kind of guy likes to do things, you know? It’s like me up here, I want to do something, and it’d be even worse in a way for him.” She pauses. “Well, in a way, anyhow. Not really. But you know how it is when you want to help somebody and you can’t? Like when your kid gets sick?”
No; but Lila nods agreeably.
“I always hate that. Like when they’ve got a fever and you can’t make them better? It’s worst when they’re babies and you know something’s wrong because of how they’re screaming, but they can’t tell you what it is and it’s just so fucking scary, right? You got kids?”
Lila shakes her head. Normally not having children is perfectly fine, but Sarah almost makes her feel guilty. Or inadequate. Missing a critical factor of today’s panic and grief.
Sarah shrugs. “Lucky.” She probably means Lila has less to let go of.
“How old are your children?”
“Twelve and nine. Boy and girl. Tim and Tiffany.” She falters again, her eyes fill up. “My poor babies! What’ll happen to them?” Again she grabs at Lila’s arm. “Do you think they’d be okay? Without me? If that’s what happens? What do you think?”
About whether they’d be okay without her, or whether that’s what’s going to happen? “Of course they’d be terribly upset. Naturally. But I’m sure they’d turn out fine in the end. Your husband sounds”—sounds what? Lila has no idea how he sounds—“like a nice man. Helpful.”
“Yeah, he’s okay.” The changeable Sarah grins again. “Pisses me off. You know how long it took me to make him okay? And now maybe I won’t end up getting much out of all that work.”
“You must have married very young.”
“I was eighteen. Knocked up. He was twenty. Boy”—she shakes her head—“that was a shitload of crap from my folks, and then getting used to each other and having kids so quick. I said right then, no more for a while, we need to get sorted out first. So we get sorted out and look what happens! You on your own?”
Lila shakes her head. “No, I’m with a friend.” She never speaks of Tom to anyone but Nell and Patsy, but here, everything’s different. “We were taking a holiday. Two weeks roaming around England, maybe a bit of Wales or Scotland. We’ve been planning for ages.” How lovely this sounds; how remote.
“A guy or a woman friend?”
“A guy.”
“Shit, that stinks. I bet you were really looking forward to it.” They are edging closer to the washroom. Behind Lila, a short, elderly white woman has joined the line and, behind her, a Sikh man, turban knocked slightly sideways.
“I was. We were. We wanted to get away. Have some fun, see new sights.” How tenderly she feels towards that man with whom she planned a holiday; if not towards the on
e who can’t bear dying with her.
“You know, I’ve never been away just with Kevin. Not since the honeymoon, anyway, and that was only four days because we didn’t hardly have any money. After that there’s always been a kid around. Sometimes I’ve thought, if we could only get away, just the two of us, but it’s kind of scary, too. Like, if we did, what would we do? We’re so used to being with the kids, what if it was just us and we didn’t have a clue?”
“Yes, I’ve wondered something along those lines, too.”
“But you’re not married to this guy?”
“No. He’s married, I’m not.”
“Oh.” Sarah perceptibly closes up, draws away. Foolish Lila; what else would a married woman be likely to do? But at least Lila is now someone individual and interesting, and Sarah is regarding her with curiosity. “How does that work? Don’t you mind? Does his wife know? Is it okay, me asking?”
Lila shrugs. “Sure.” On the ground it wouldn’t be okay at all, but on the ground there’d be a future and she would hardly be exchanging confidences with Sarah or anyone else. “Sometimes it’s hard and doesn’t work very well, and sometimes it’s fine. And no, I don’t imagine his wife knows, although who can say? I expect people often know things but don’t want to admit them. To themselves, mainly. Too much disruption.”
It’s tricky, trying to discern just which one of them, Dorothy, Lila or Tom, is most lacking in courage. But Lila doesn’t say that.
Sarah looks thoughtful. “I’ve wondered if I’d know if Kevin was screwing around. Oh, sorry, you probably don’t like that, calling it screwing around. But that’s what I’d call it, I guess because I’m a wife. I guess it depends which spot you’re in, doesn’t it?”
Lila thinks that’s clever of Sarah. With her ability to distinguish varying points of view, she would be a good student of literature. “There are lots of words,” Lila agrees. “You’re right, it’s a matter of perspective.”
“I think I’d know.” Sarah frowns. “But if he was, I don’t know what I’d do. Kill him, likely, but then what? One thing, I wouldn’t pretend I didn’t know. Of course I can’t keep my mouth shut about anything; sometimes Kevin says, ‘For heaven’s sake, Sarah, not everything’s worth talking about.’ But if you don’t say things, how do you know what other people think? I’d just bust if Kevin was screwing around and I didn’t say anything. I’d just bust open all over the kitchen floor like some big old watermelon.”
She pauses, very briefly. “I wonder if Kevin’d get married again. If the worst happens. I guess he would.” She sighs. “He’s only thirty-two. And he’d want somebody for the kids, anyway. Man, that pisses me off. I’m going to haunt him if he does that. I wonder what that’d be like, haunting somebody. Seeing everything.” She shivers. “Weird, thinking dead people might be able to do that. I sure wouldn’t like it, somebody looking and listening all the time. Like, I wouldn’t like some dead person doing that to me, but it’d be interesting to do it myself. Think of the secrets you’d know! Man, that’d be fun.”
She looks cheerful now, and it’s contagious. Lila finds herself wondering who she might haunt, whose secrets she might enjoy intruding on. Well, anyone, really. Not friends, necessarily, or loved ones. Strangers might even be preferable. Everyone has secrets, small and large privacies, and flitting from one to another would be an eternity of entertainment, far better than TV. She might start with Dorothy. Unless Tom got there first. That might overcrowd the room with inquiring spirits.
They could play a dire bedside spin on Dickens, with Lila appearing as ghost of lover past.
A small amusement.
“I wonder,” Sarah says, “what does happen. Or if it’s nothing at all.” Lila, sobering, doesn’t say what naturally leaps to mind, that they may find out very shortly. But of course the words are in the air.
The old woman behind Lila suddenly pipes up. How long has she been listening? “If you have faith,” she says in a clear, quivering voice, “what happens is heavenly. Bliss and salvation. Joy we cannot imagine.”
Lila has nothing to say to that. She is a little surprised that Sarah does, and in a voice turned instantly jeering and bitter. “Yeah? That’d be nice, all that joy. You’d think we’d be in a big rush to get there then, wouldn’t you? But I don’t see anybody praying for the damn plane to crash, do you? So that hardly makes any fucking sense, does it?” She is glaring at the woman.
What does it mean, Lila wonders, that up here, in this situation, outbreaks of affection aren’t occurring at anything like the rate of rage?
Lips and eyes narrowed, Sarah turns back to her. Lila thinks she looks a little like a snake, and wouldn’t be surprised to hear hissing. “I had a bellyful of that crap when I was a kid. Praise the Lord, my ass. More like, you do something bad, the Lord’ll whip you silly. My folks went nuts when I got knocked up, said they’d pray for me but I’d have to repent or I’d be going to hell. Screw that. I told them Kevin and I’d be happy in hell, as long as they weren’t there.”
The old woman makes unhappy little throat sounds, but at least keeps quiet.
“You religious?”
A bit late to ask. Lila smiles. “No, but there’s no telling what I may decide to believe by the end of the day.” She may wind up crying “Jesus save me.” Or, for that matter, “Hallelujah.” She doubts it, but then, she has doubts about practically everything.
“I believe in my babies and Kevin. And me.” Sarah’s shakes her head, as if trying to dislodge some piece of knowledge. “Shit, this sucks. This really sucks.” Lila could not agree more.
“I mean, you get up in the morning and you’re all excited because you’re going to be someplace totally different by the end of the day, and you run around trying to think of everything you need to remember and get everything taken care of—even food. You know, I made six dinners and froze them for everybody? Not for every night I’m gone, and Kevin can cook all right anyway, but just so at supper sometimes they’d be thinking about me? So I’d still be there in a way?
“And I was thinking about seeing my little sister for the first time in ages, and how much we have to talk about and how great it was going to be, showing her pictures of the kids and seeing where she lives and how she’s changed, because she got away even farther than I did, and they pray for her too, I guess.
“So I mean, you’re thinking about the place you’re leaving and the place you’re going to, but you forget to think about the part in the middle, and then it turns out to be the only thing that counts.”
Lila must have thousands of words in her head, many of them capable of being combined in graceful forms to express with elegance various ideas, and here’s skinny, freckled Sarah taking a very few, blunt words and saying pretty much the whole thing.
“How’d you figure what that guy was saying, that co-pilot?” Sarah asks. “Think he was telling us anything like the truth, or just trying to keep everybody quiet?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell either. Both, maybe.” How did Lila come to sound so prim? Five years of keeping an enormous secret may have done the trick. Not speaking about something important for such a long time may have robbed her of passionate speech.
There’d be a sorrow, a loss.
“Great voice, though, didn’t you think?” Sarah looks mischievous. “Sexy. It’d be amazing, hearing that voice coming at you from the next pillow. Kevin’s got a nice voice. I knew him all through school, and I remember when his voice changed, and then it kept getting deeper and deeper. I’m a sucker for voices. What’s your guy’s voice like?”
How can Lila describe something that has so many different tones for different purposes? “It’s quiet most of the time. But he’s a professor, like me, and he used to be a politician, and that’s like acting: you make your voice project more and use it in different ways. In personal circumstances, too, so for instance you can tell another person how angry you ar
e without having to raise your voice at all.”
“Wow, you’re a professor? What do you teach?”
“English literature, I’m afraid.” As with the question of children, Lila feels oddly guilty. Insubstantial, by Sarah’s standards.
“No shit. I used to love English in high school, it was my best subject. Sometimes I wish I had time to read, but having a job and the kids—well, if I did read, it wouldn’t be anything good, likely. But maybe sometime. When the kids are grown up, in a few years. Oh.” Her face tightens again.
“You’ll be reading, don’t worry. Picture yourself curled up in the evening with a book. Do you have a big comfortable chair? A fireplace?” Lila is trying to create a vision, a future.
“No fireplace. I’d like one, though. And I’ve always said, once the kids are grown up and gone we’re going to get whole new furniture, because everything we’ve got’s torn and stained. Well, it’s not that bad, but you know kids. You can’t keep things nice, and there’s no point getting new stuff as long as they’re roaring around.”
It hurts to remember Lila’s own house, where lamps lean over deep, soft chairs, and books can be cherished. Silence. Peace. Except for her heart floundering and flailing over matters to do with Tom; the past few years have been somewhat disruptive in that regard.
Still, just as in a book, the floundering and flailing contribute to plot. She and Tom may lack a common setting, and their characters may not, by some standards, bear very close scrutiny, but they do constitute a plot together.
How’s he doing back there? She cannot, even arching on tiptoe, see past the bodies and heads in the way. “So,” she turns back to Sarah, “you’re travelling all on your own?” That would be lonely, she thinks. Her own journey may be difficult, but at least she has someone besides herself to take into account.
“Yeah. That’s another reason I had to get out of my seat. The guy next to me was making me nuts. Scared me, too.”