by Liza Nelson
Twenty-Five
THIS MORNING’S PLANE was already over an hour late. I was a wreck, a zombie, hair on end like the bride of Frankenstein, sweat on my palms, all nerve endings on red alert. I paced the corridor between the escalator and Gate 22 for God knows how long, going back through my dreams one at a time. For weeks now, I’ve been making notes as soon as I wake up, sometimes several times a night, in my old dream diary which I’ve begun to carry with me at all times, the way I carry my pack of cigarettes.
I was too nervous to sit down, also dying for a cigarette, but my God, with Dylan in the air I did not dare tempt fate. I tried to think about other things, about which clasp to use on the necklace I’d been commissioned to design for one of Cleo’s better customers, about the light in the third-grade classroom that kept shorting out, about what Dylan might like for dinner tonight. Dylan. I couldn’t not think about her. So unlike me, but I kept trying out what I’d say to her. I knew I needed to strike the right balance, let her know, yet not laden her with how worried I’d been. No free lunch but no guilt trip, either.
A man in a three-piece suit asked me the time. Ten years ago, hell six months ago, I would have written him off as an uptight idle-class white guy, but I guess I’ve lost that judgmental edge. Besides, he was carrying one of those giant stuffed pandas they sell at airport gift shops for inflated prices and I liked his looks, kindhearted in a pale, slightly pudgy and self-deprecating way. A man with a sense of humor. But after I took the mint LifeSaver he offered, I turned back to the window, grateful he didn’t push a conversation, half-wishing he would. Beyond the glass wall, the planes rolled past like lumbering giants.
Then the woman at the check-in counter picked up her telephone as if it had just rung, but it hadn’t. I was sure it hadn’t. The woman frowned. I walked nearer, trying to hear, apprehensive, afraid of the obvious, that something had happened to Dylan’s plane. Living out the scenario in my head—the announcement, being herded into some room to be consoled—I found myself strangely becalmed, the horror mitigated by the removal of any need to face the future: If my future were robbed from me, I could live in the past, live and relive those golden years of Dylan’s childhood without the distraction of the present. But then I shook myself. God, what was I doing? What possibility was I creating by even considering such dangerous thoughts?
For once my mind games didn’t matter—thank God—because suddenly, Dylan’s plane was there. One minute it was an idea, a concept, DYLAN’S RETURN, happening completely inside my head, like an inspiration I might take back to my studio and shape into a papier-mâché box. I don’t mean fantasy. More like expectation, real in my head, but not yet decided. Without substance until there was proof.
And then the loudspeaker’s voice was announcing Flight 76 and I heard the roar of the engines as the plane appeared outside the glass, its huge face coming forward as if about to swallow us. When it stopped, there was a flurry of activity beyond the ropes and people, real people, began to shuffle through the arrival door with dazed relief at having made it back to earth.
My friend with the panda waved to a pleasant-looking older woman carrying a plastic bag with knitting needles poking out between the drawstrings. At the sight of the panda, the woman, who had to be his mother, cackled with laughter until she had to grab the man’s arm to keep from toppling over with hilarity.
“Oh Ned,” she wheezed. “You are still the silliest boy in the world.”
Now there was a fresh surge of passengers. Some melted into the crowd heading for the terminal. Others clotted the hallway in chatty groups blocking my view. I gripped the aluminum knob of a guardrail and watched for Dylan. More and more passengers passed, some smiling and waving, some in a grim rush, some in a sluggish lonely fog. I squinted toward the last stragglers as the gate door closed.
A young businessman switched his briefcase from one hand to the other. A woman not that much younger than I am carried a small baby against her chest while dragging a folded stroller behind her. What would that be like, to have a small baby again? She looked anxiously for whoever was not there to meet them. Another young woman, raggedly chic in cowboy boots with a red scarf flapping rakishly against her open jacket, slung a backpack over her shoulder.
Dylan? I had to blink twice to be sure, but it was Dylan, my Dylan, and wouldn’t you know, almost the last one off.
“Dylan!” I shouted.
Her head jerked up, searched over the heads around her. I called out again and waved. I’m not sure, but I think—I want to think—she brightened when she saw me. She definitely nodded and waved back. I rushed forward, although my arms and legs were trembling. When had my mousy pudge of a teenager transformed into this slim girl, her pale locket-shaped face framed by a glossy sweep of bangs? Her eyes were sterner, her expression, her whole demeanor unreadable.
I took a deep breath. Forget the anger I’d felt on and off for days, forget how crazy with worry she’d driven me. Dylan was back with me now, that was what mattered. The next few days were bound to be awkward; we might be a little shy around each other at first. But, I told myself, we’d talk it through until we found some degree of reconciliation. Wouldn’t we? We’d laugh together before long. Maybe. If I am very very lucky.
God, I wanted to grab hold of her and never let her go. It seemed to take forever, but we finally reached each other. When I did press my arms around her, Dylan did not hug me back. Had I really expected her to? No, but I was still hurt, stung, even though I’d been warning myself to take it easy, take it slow. Not that she was hostile, merely stiff and slightly formal. For once, I didn’t push. I dropped my arms.
“No marching band to welcome me home?” she asked with a wry smile.
“Afraid not.” I forced myself to smile back. The Dylan I knew never made sardonic jokes, but this Dylan was different, almost another being. Experiences I would never know about had shaded and molded her into the young woman facing me, compellingly intense yet self-composed. Across my visual memory flashed the image of Evangeline Pinkston in a blue dress, practicing her music, not much older than Dylan. The truth began finally sinking in, the brutal truth.
It was not a matter of tensions easing, of angers and guilts receding with time. It was not even the unsettled question of her father. Whoever that man in New Mexico was, he was gone. Vanished into the mountains or desert or wherever the railroad tracks lead beyond the New Mexico horizon. He could be dead for all anyone knew. But I didn’t want to think of him or what had become of him; there would be plenty of late nights ahead to lie awake wondering at my culpability in sacrificing him. And after all, I had been willing enough to sacrifice him. Dylan and I had that in common at least. Our motives may have differed, but motives are individually exclusive, aren’t they? Like fingerprints except that fingerprints can be recorded. Motives are indecipherable to anyone but the person who acts by them. A mother’s desperation doesn’t cover the why any more than a daughter’s sense of revenge or justice. Who’s to say which is more valid? Law-abiding citizens would say we were both right, wouldn’t they? Even if neither of us was. As for the man in New Mexico, he’d decided to disappear for his own reasons he didn’t choose to share.
Anyway, the matter was no longer Hank Fierstein. Never had been really. The matter was that I had lost the power to shield my little girl from the world. I wasn’t kidding myself anymore about my less-than-perfect record as Dylan’s mother: I had not paid attention. Not only this fall, but all along. How else could it have escaped me that Dylan’s needs might be as different from mine as mine had been from my mother’s? I wasn’t about to absolve myself from that responsibility. Far from it. If anything, I wanted to take more responsibility for my maternal screwing up. Because, in a way, this was worse; the fact that whatever choices I had made over the last sixteen years, however I acted, whatever I did or didn’t do, I still would have lost control over Dylan’s life. Maybe not now, and maybe not so dramatically, but sooner or later, one way or another she would have abandoned me.
Monday they’re yours and Tuesday they’re not. I was no different from every other mother, from Louise Culpepper or Myra Franklin or Mari Rainey. Or Mrs. Pinkston, Evie’s mother, whose first name I never learned. I wondered if she still lived in the old apartment. Still played organ for her church choir. What pictures of Evie hung on her walls? I should have written to her when Dylan was born, should have kept in touch all these years.
Because, my God, I was different from Mrs. Pinkston, and much luckier. Dylan was alive. Dylan was standing there in the airport next to me, alive, stronger in fact than I ever imagined, or to tell the whole truth, probably ever wanted her to be. Not my little girl, but nevertheless my daughter, even if she hated me for the next twenty years. And she might. She just might.
A man in a Hawaiian shirt hurried up to the woman and baby I’d noticed earlier. After a short exchange of words, he took the baby from her arms and they walked off, whether together or separately I wasn’t sure. I stopped watching. Dylan hoisted up her pack, and we made our own way through the thinning crowd as the loudspeaker announced that the next departure from Gate 22 was delayed indefinitely.
About the Author
JACK-OF-ALL-WRITING-TRADES Liza Nelson has been an essayist, editor, reviewer, food writer, newspaper columnist, dramaturge, poet and novelist. Her writing has been featured in a range of publications from the underground paper The Great Speckled Bird to O to Ploughshares to The N.Y. Times. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poetry, and a James Beard Award for her food writing in A Book of Feasts. Years ago she reluctantly followed her husband to a Georgia cattle farm that she admits she now loves, although it no longer raises anything but mosquitoes, wild flowers and the occasional tomato. She currently writes the blog aliceinmemloryland.com about issues in dementia while polishing her second, third and fourth novels.