Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1)

by Noel J. Hadley

  When she lowered her hands, she was no longer the same person I saw crying for her husband in the stairwell. She was the woman who seemingly levitated like a zombie down nearly a hundred stairs, flesh peeling from her face, green slime dripping from her hair. Eyes of pure white bulged from her socket. She sprung forward moaning something terrible, and her mouth widened, as if she wanted to consume or swallow me whole. I closed my eyes and counted to five.

  When I opened them she was gone and my lungs ached for a breath of the living. Get out of the water, the voice said again. I heeded its warning.

  I climbed out, dried myself off, and poured myself a second glass of Wild Turkey Kentucky Bourbon. Don’t drink that second glass, I heard the voice say.

  This time I didn’t listen to it.

  2

  “Quiet everyone!” I told anyone willing to listen. “That means you.” I slurred my words from the floor of the living room, pointing to the iron poker. It looked rather suspicious, the way it silently leaned there against the fireplace…. smirking at me.

  Shhhh. I pressed a finger to my mouth and slugged down another helping of Wild Turkey Kentucky Bourbon from a whiskey glass. I entered the hall and zeroed in on the black-and-white picture of General Patton, the one my grandfather had taken. He had been eyeing me all night. I didn’t like that.

  “Shut up, you! Thomas Jefferson is sitting by the candlelight to write!” I told General Patton and the clock, and then repeated it, first to the poker and next the black-and-white picture of the soldier with the thousand-yard stare. My grandfather had taken that one too, in Korea. I wished Thousand Yard Stare Guy would keep to his own business.

  I listened to the clink of ice in my glass, wondering why J. Edgar Hoover was glaring into the bathroom mirror and wearing a Sunday dress. “Why ever are you so sad, J?” I asked the man, but he wouldn’t answer me. He just kept putting his lipstick on. The thing is, and I realized it then, I kind of liked J. Edgar Hoover better when I was drunk than sober. He was somewhat of a bastard the rest of the time.

  “Shhhh, don’t disturb the man,” I told the houseplant. “He’s with the F.B.I., you know.” I finished off my fourth…no, fifth glass of whiskey, and moved in for another. “He’ll make you leaf like a tree faster than you can say Judy Garland or Liza Minnelli.” I liked the way Liza Minnelli sounded on my lips. I repeated her name a few times, strumming circles around the coffee table with a bronze ballerina on it.

  “Wait…Quiet, everyone!” I floundered in the middle of the floor, stopping only to catch my balance. “I’ve just thought of something! Harriet Tubman is hiding in the closet eating a late night snack.”

  I leaned in towards the very suspicious-looking clock hung on the wall. “You heard me…. Harriet Tubman.” I repeated her name several times, just to make sure the clock was OK with it. “You wouldn’t happen to be with the confederacy, would you?”

  3

  I set my bottle of Wild Turkey down long enough to dial Elise’s number on my cell phone for the third or fourth time, or perhaps twelfth, maybe even sixteenth, I didn’t know, I’d lost count, and hung up after three consecutive rings. I took another pull of Bourbon and then thumbed through my contact list for her identical twin sister, Josephine.

  She answered halfway through the second ring. I guess all identical twins didn’t think alike.

  “Hi, Joshua,” she said in a serious but somber tone. “How are you making out?”

  “Is my wife staying with you?”

  In the background I could hear what may have proven to be the abominable sound of someone’s butt blowing its organ pipes in nauseas repetitions.

  “No,” she said. “And if she was, I would certainly tell you. I’m really very sorry about all of this.”

  She started to say something but stopped herself, as if taking careful consideration in her words. Josephine was a criminal attorney. I considered asking her to have the man banging my wife locked up.

  “Are you drunk?”

  I quickly hung up the phone.

  “Yes.” I admitted to it after the fact. “I’m drunk.” That was a close one. I looked to the picture of the Korean veteran with the thousand-yard stare. I clinched my fist at him. “If you squeal.”

  I’m drunk. I said it a second time. I’m drunk. I liked the way it rolled off my tongue. I repeated it a fourth and fifth time, just to make sure. Order in the court! I wondered if Harriet Tubman was still in the closet eating a late night snack. After staring at the bottle of Wild Turkey I called Josephine up again.

  “I must have bad reception or something.”

  Mm-hmm, she sighed.

  “Do you know where she’s staying?”

  Josephine took in a deep breath from the other end, as if contemplating her answer. “Yes,” she finally said.

  Ah-ha! Under fierce interrogation, she admitted to it. I thought about taking up the life as a private investigator.

  In the background I could hear what appeared to be someone’s butt hounding wolfish puffs of stuffed piping and likely intended, from the awful sound of it, to finally blow the three pigs house down once and for all.

  “Care to tell me where that is?”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Joshua, and for obvious reasons. Hold on a second….” She set the phone down. “Charlie! Can you get off the saxophone for a second? I’m on the phone with Joshua!”

  Ah, the wolfish butt that brought two of the three piggies house down. Josephine’s fiancée, there it was.

  “I just want to talk with her.” My voice broke up in a poor attempt to mask its drunken slurs and the fact that a tear or two was brewing in the back of my skull. “She won’t take my calls.”

  “Look, Joshua, please be patient and know this. You’ve got a lot of sway amongst Charlie and me. You always have. If the saying is true, that blood is thicker than wine, then you’re as good as blood, in my book.”

  “Thanks, Josephine.”

  “I imagine I’ll be talking to my sister again soon. You have an advocate. But no matter what happens, if you need anything – and I mean anything, a fridge or a couch to sleep on, please don’t hesitate to call.”

  “Thanks, Josephine.”

  “Oh, and one more thing.” She paused to think on her choice of words. “Are you drunk?”

  I hung up the phone, another close one.

  4

  The cosmos took on a completely different animal altogether from the grimy floor of the bathroom. Drool dripped from my lips and everything spun in homicidal circles. Dean Martin once said you’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on. I was definitely drunk. Sweaty cheeks hugged the squatting stump of porcelain where yellow splatter and crumbs of pubic hair assembled, except for all I knew I might have been spinning around on the ceiling. The shower curtain was never ending. Eternal and somehow circular, it stretched its rings incalculably on-and-on-and-on into the after hours of infinity… so dizzy.

  Where did the bed go? It was probably a mile away on the opposite end of the house. I’d forgotten to pack it in my drunken carryon. The toilet moved. Like one of those Darwin fishes, it simply stood up and inched away from my lips. Wouldn’t somebody bring me a glass of water?

  End my misery, Lord.

  My stomach burned with tears. Boiling over, tears. How many glasses of whiskey had I swum in? I lost count. Why couldn’t I just die or vomit already? Was God punishing me? God forgive me. I’ve been bad, Lord. Just end my misery and I’ll never be bad again.

  My phone rang in the other room. I kept my fingers crossed that it was Elise and that this was all a simple miscalculated use of vocabulary from her end. She’d come through the front door at any given moment and hold my trembling body while I exhumed these tears into the bowl. Oh hell, she was never coming back, was she? Why wouldn’t God forgive me already? After four consecutive rings it zipped its lips in silence.

  She’d call again. I knew she would. Josephine probably relayed the message that the defendant was
drunk and she was calling to check up on me like a good wife. I wished Aristotle would stop sniffing my butt while I was down for the count on the floor. I caught sight of him lying in the hall with those emotionless eyes that he maintained whenever he was plotting to kill me.

  Oh God, don’t abandon me in my sins. I repeated it like a mantra while waiting for Elise to call me again, if she even called at all. This time she’d let the phone ring over and over again, even if I couldn’t pick it up to talk, I knew she would. Her rings would be her words of love. She’d call me up, speaking sweet and tender mercies into my ear with each ring. And another thing, why couldn’t I just throw up already?

  5

  “Here’s the thing.” My then-future mother-in-law fiddled her thumbs together. “I know my daughter better than you.”

  I remembered the scene well. It was late summer, the last week of August 2001 or the very first week of September, my memory couldn’t seem to dictate which, and Andrea was keeping her focus on a dozen bread crumbs heaped together on her side of the kitchen table, the Aloha magnet on the fridge, the wagging kitty-clock and the kitty-phone on the wall horizontal to my head.

  “And quite frankly,” she continued after taking in a lungful of air, as though drowning in unwanted emotion and a lack of booze, “she doesn’t exactly, well…. I don’t know how to say it kindly…love you.”

  “And Elise told you this…in person?”

  “Yes,” she said, scratching her nose. Her future fourth x-husband, as she’d drunkenly and rather prophetically called him, sat quiet and distant on the outer rim of the kitchen table and yet somehow omnipresent in our conversation.

  “I could call her.” Twenty Year-Old Self flung fingers into his pocket for his very first cell phone, which he’d only had for a week or two and eager to put to use.

  “No.” She collapsed her fingers over the crumbs. “Not in so many words, no. But I do know my own daughter.”

  “I think what she’s trying to say,” Future-Fourth Ex-Husband finally intervened several minutes into our tableside conversation, “is that we, Elise’s mother and I, don’t like you.”

  The cat clock meowed.

  “And furthermore, we don’t like you hanging around our daughter.” He spread his hands out on the table.

  “Now, now.” Andrea patted his arm. “That’s not entirely true. First off, we don’t know you all that well, and secondly, it’s just…. I know my daughter and…. Elise doesn’t understand what she wants. She’s just come off a bad break up with that sweet boy, what was his name?” She clicked her fingers, looking to Future Fourth for help. “She probably hasn’t told you about him.”

  Ethan, I said from the bathroom floor. Nobody heard me several years in the future. He liked the ladies, a little too much. Elise was attracted to monogamy.

  “Yes, Ethan.” Twenty Year-Old Self forced a grin. “I know him. He’s a nice guy.”

  Andrea opened her mouth an inch then clamped it shut, tightening the corners of her lips. She opened it again, speechless.

  “That break-up happened six months ago. It’s a relationship that lasted only a couple of months, and she’s had plenty of time to get over it. Elise and I, on the other hand, have known each other for many years.”

  “Ethan was going places,” Future-Fourth X-Husband brushed his fingers across the table. “He still is going places…. and you…. well, you don’t even go to the same school, for Christ’s sake.”

  He certainly did go places, White House Photographer. What is it with Elise and photographers? I told them from the spinning floor. Several years in the future, nobody heard me.

  Twenty Year-Old Self ignored him and turned towards Andrea. “So, what you’re telling me is that I don’t and you do.”

  “Don’t and do what?” Andrea shook her head, obviously annoyed by the obnoxious little twerp that sat in her kitchen, twisting the sexually alluring features of her middle-aged face into the dark and ugly place that Elise and her twin sister knew all too well.

  “You said you know what she wants, which has me confused…because she’s made her agenda pretty clear to me.”

  “OK, fine.” Andrea stammered her feet. That’s how she got what she wanted in life. If not her breasts, then raising her voice and pounding her feet usually got the job done. “I was trying to be nice, but see, here’s the thing. We don’t like you, but far more importantly, I don’t like you…. at all.”

  Upon hearing about our conversation, Twenty Year-Old Elise sat on a stool at THE LAB, USC’s local hangout, slurping on a coke from a straw, completely dumbfounded.

  “That’s what Andrea said…word for word?”

  “Yes, pretty much.”

  “That’s Andrea, working hard to get drunk, blow a guy, and destroy my life, twenty-four hours of the day.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “No, that sounds like her…. to the letter. Had she wrapped her arms joyfully around you and offered to pay for our wedding, should you propose, I’d probably call you a liar.”

  Future-Fourth had given me stern warning, and an ultimatum. If Elise didn’t respect her mother’s wishes on the matter, they’d cut off all college admission. My younger self told her about it.

  “Doesn’t surprise me.” Elise sighed, allowing the sledgehammer shock of it all to settle in. “He hates having to pay for my education anyhow. It’s never cheap bopping my mom.”

  An entire decade of torment flushed over the soft tissues of her youth, lobes to fists, peacock eyes swamped in the resonance of pain and anguish from an upbringing temperature convulsed with so much abandonment and abuse that I could never even begin to imagine the psychological ripples within her, some still waiting to be hatched.

  She marched off, sleeves metaphorically rolled, to ignite the biggest argument of her life, leaving my twenty-self sitting on the stool…and my current self sprawled out on the floor while THE LAB spun in maddening circles. It was the last time I would ever see her as my girlfriend in a pre-September Eleventh world.

  Later that night I’d receive a phone call from her mother’s kitchen table. Yes, the kitty phone next to the meowing kitty-clock; snot streaming from her nostrils to my end of the speakers as she explained in self-justifying detail why she needed to break it off in order to concentrate better on her books, seeing as how her grade point average was down and all.

  Hanging up the phone in my college dorm, I wept…. and then I got drunk. It was a first on both accounts, wept and drunk. Now I’d committed both acts twice in my life.

  6

  Early to rise on a Tuesday morning, my Twenty Year-Old Self hooked a fork in his mouth trying not to think about Leah Bishop, the next fundamental heartache of his young adult life. Two or three weeks had passed since that conversation in Andrea’s kitchen, and everything about the world was miserable. From the grimy floor of my bathroom I could still taste the eggs swishing around on his tongue and the aura of coffee settling into his brain. I could re-scramble that particular breakfast with clearer memory filters than all the agonizing years utilized pursuing both women. Closing my eyes, I didn’t want to be here. Not again.

  The place was Windows on the World. The North Tower. A sweeping vista of New York City, with its capitalistic cathedral spires, spread out across the dawn of a new millennium. It was roughly eight o’clock in the morning give or take ten minutes, September of 2001. You likely know the date.

  “But I don’t have a dinner jacket,” Twenty Year-Old Self told Cousin Joe.

  “That’s fine. They’ll seat us at the bar,” he said. “Reservation for two.” He smiled at the lovely hostess. “And afterwards, I’ll take you downstairs for a quick tour of my office.”

  The hostess escorted us to our seats. She was beautiful, and not simply because she was pleasing to the eye. It was her intrinsic value as a human created in God’s image, now that I got a better look at her, and it was like staring at a corpse. Cousin Joe and I were a little further down the hellish inferno, jus
t below the point of impact, when the airliner hit. Did anyone in Windows on the World actually make it out alive after Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower? I thought not. I considered the controversial photograph of the falling man that would appall newspaper readers on the following morning. For millions of Americans who watched constant replays of the tumbling towers on their television, suicide was not an option. But I couldn’t blame him. It must have been so hopeless up there. Given two options for death, some took control of their fate and chose the painless. I think an angel was waiting to embrace him on the bottom.

  “So Joshi-boy. Let me get this straight.” Cousin Joe added cream to his coffee and swished it with a spoon. “You get dumped by one girl, your on-again off-again high school sweetheart.”

  “Elise.” She had a name.

  “Mm-hmm. And you come all the way out to New York pursuing your chances with another. Don’t tell me she’s another on-again off-again high school sweetheart.”

  “Leah. She’s not just any girl.” Twenty-Self craned a spoonful of eggs to his mouth.

  “They never are.”

  “She’s smart, she’s sexy. My throat goes dry and my legs go limp around her, and the men, whenever she walks into the room, they stare at her like she’s a goddess, and then they look at me with those judgmental predator eyes. You know, who’s this guy?”

  For a moment it occurred to Twenty Year-Old Self that he was describing Elise. It was Elise whom he truly loved. Or was it Leah? Was it possible to love two women interchangeably, or at once?

  “Mm-hmm.” Joe grinned. “So you knew her from high school or something. You follow her out here to NYU simply to see if this puppy feeling between the two of you is genuine, and last night, it didn’t go over quite so well.”

  No, it didn’t. There was that heated make-out session, next the blowjob question, and finally the dinosaur killing slap to follow.

  He added more cream to his caffeine.

  “Puppy feeling? Have you ever been in love before?”