Darkness Creeping (23 page)

With a boarding pass in hand, Jana Martinez walks down a narrow, tilted corridor, toward the 737 at the end of the jetway.

She tries to forget the strange state of cold limbo that fills the gap between her parents behind her and her final destination—Wendingham Prep School.

It is only three hours away now—just a two-hour flight from Chicago to Boston, and then an hour’s bus ride. Still, to Jana, this empty time between two places always seems to last an eternity.

She reaches the door of the plane, stumbling over the lip of the hatch, and a flight attendant grabs her arm too tightly. “Watch your step,” the flight attendant says, trying to help Jana keep her balance.

Now, as she makes her way down the narrow aisle, Jana wonders if the flight attendant’s overly strong grip will leave a bruise on her arm. She is sure the cruel strap of her carry-on bag will leave her black-and-blue.

The plane is divided by a single center aisle, and each row has three seats on either side. Jana finds her seat by the window on the right side of the plane. She has to climb over a heavy, pale woman to get there, and just as she finally settles in, her sense of loneliness settles in deeper than before.

I’m surrounded by strangers
, she thinks.
I’m unknown to all of them . . . and unconnected
.

The plane is filled with people she’s never seen before and will never see again—filled with hundreds of lives that intersect nowhere but on this plane. The feeling is eerie to Jana, and unnatural.

The woman beside her is several sizes too large for the seat, and her large body spreads toward Jana, taking over Jana’s armrest, and forcing her to lean uncomfortably against the cold window.

“Sorry, dearie,” says the woman, with a British accent. “You’d think people have no hips, the way they build these seats.”

Jana sighs, calculates how many seconds there are in a two-hour flight, and begins to count down from seven thousand two hundred. She wonders if a flight could possibly be any worse. Soon she finds out that it can.

A woman with a baby takes the seat next to the large Englishwoman, and the moment the plane leaves the ground, the baby begins an earsplitting screech-fest. The mother tries to console the child, but it does no good. Grimacing, Jana notices an old man sitting across the aisle turn down his hearing aid.

“Why do I always end up on Screaming Baby Airlines?” Jana grumbles to herself, and the large woman in her airspace accidentally overhears. She turns to Jana with a smile.

“It’s the pressure in its ears, the poor thing,” says the large woman, pointing to the wailing baby. Then she adds something curious. “Babies on planes comfort me, actually. I always think, God won’t crash a plane carrying a baby.”

The thought that seems to give so much comfort to the large woman only gives Jana the creeps. She peers out her window, watching as the plane rises above little puffs of clouds that soon look like tiny white specks far below.

“We’ve reached our cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet,” and
blah, blah, blah,
drones the captain, who seems to have the same voice as every other airline pilot in the world. It’s as if they go to some special school that teaches them all how to sound exactly alike.

The baby, having exhausted its screaming machine, can only whimper now, and the plump woman, who has introduced herself as Moira Lester, turns to Jana and asks, “You’ll be visiting someone in Boston, then?”

“School,” says Jana curtly, not feeling like having a conversation with a stranger.

“Boarding school, is it?” asks Moira, not taking the hint. “I went to boarding school. It’s all the rage back in Britain. Not many of them in the States, are there?” And then she begins to spin the never-ending tale of her uninteresting family, all the boarding schools they attended, why they went there, and which classmates have become famous people that Jana has never heard of.

Jana nods as if listening but tries to tune her out by gazing out the window at the specks of clouds below. It is just about then that the feeling comes. It’s a sensation—a
twinge
, like a spark of static electricity darting through her, that causes a tiny, tiny change in air pressure. It’s like a pinprick in her reality—a feeling so slight that it takes a while for Jana to realize that she has felt anything at all.

As she turns from the window to look around her, nothing appears to have changed: Moira is still talking, the baby is still whimpering.

But as for Jana, she has a clear sense that something is suddenly not right.

“Something wrong, dearie?” Moira asks.

But Jana just shakes her head, trying to convince herself that it’s only her imagination.

Then, about ten minutes later, Jana asks, “Where’s the old man?” The sense of something wrong had been growing and growing within her, and now she has finally noticed something different.

The mother, bouncing her baby on her knee, looks at Jana oddly. “What old man?” she asks.

“You know—the old man who was sitting across the aisle from you. He was wearing a hearing aid.”

The mother turns to look. Sitting across the aisle is a businessman with slick black hair. Certainly not old, and definitely not wearing a hearing aid, he sits reading a magazine in seat 16C as if he belongs there.

“Don’t you remember him?” Jana persists. “He turned down his hearing aid when your baby was screaming.”

The mother shrugs. “I didn’t notice,” she says. “Who notices anybody on airplanes these days?”

“Looks like there are some empty seats on the plane,” suggests Moira. “Perhaps this man you’re talking about moved.”

Jana sighs. “Yeah, maybe that’s it,” she concedes, although not really convinced. She would have noticed if the man had gotten up.

“Excuse me,” Jana says, and climbs over Moira and the mother and her baby, then heads down the aisle to the bathroom. There is something wrong, she knows it. Something terribly wrong. She can feel it in the pit of her stomach, like the feeling you get a few minutes before becoming violently ill.

Jana pushes her way through the narrow bathroom doorway and into the tight little compartment. Jana looks in the mirror, then splashes cold water on her face.
Maybe it’s just the excitement of going back to school,
she tells herself.
Maybe it’s just airsickness
.

But where is the man with the hearing aid?

She dries her face with a paper towel and makes her way back to her seat, looking in every row for the old man. She goes to the front of the plane. No old man with a hearing aid. What did he do? Jump off the plane?

When Jana returns to her seat, the mother and baby have moved to where she can lay her baby down on an empty seat—a few rows back on the other side of the plane. As Jana looks around, she notices that there are empty seats, and even empty rows on the plane now—but all the vacant seats appear to be on the side of the plane opposite her.

Jana stands there watching as several people from her side of the plane shift over to make use of the empty rows, making more room for everyone. How odd—the plane seemed crowded when she got on.

When Jana retakes her seat, Moira welcomes her back with a wide friendly smile. Jana forces her own smile, and as she settles in, she happens to glance out the window . . . then freezes.

“Moira,” she says, “everything’s covered in clouds!”

Moira glances out the window at the cotton-thick clouds rolling toward the horizon below. “Why, I suppose it is,” she says.

“Excuse me,” Jana says as she climbs back over Moira and crosses the aisle. She then leans awkwardly over the businessman and two other passengers to get a look out
their
window. She is certain she hadn’t seen the clouds out of the other side of the plane on her way back from the bathroom.

Sure enough, from this window, Jana can see the ground—a patchwork quilt of greens and browns gilded by the afternoon sun.

“It—it’s
different
on this side of the plane,” she says, her voice shaky.

“So what?” asks the businessman, annoyed at the way Jana is still leaning across him. “We must be traveling along the edge of a front. You know—the line where cold air meets warm air, and storm clouds form.”

Jana just stares at him, feeling her hands growing colder by the moment.
It’s a logical explanation
, she thinks,
but it’s wrong
.

Quietly Jana returns to her seat. She pulls out the magazine in the pouch in front of her and tries to read it, but finds nothing can take her attention away from the clouds beneath her window, and the perfectly clear sky on the other side of the plane.

That’s when the captain comes on the loudspeaker again.

“Just thought I’d let you know,” he says in his every-pilot voice, “that we’ll be passing Mount Rushmore shortly. If you look out the right side of the plane, you’ll be able to see it on the horizon.”

Jana doesn’t bother to look, since she’s on the left side. But she does notice that people on her side of the plane are chuckling, as if the pilot has made some kind of joke.

Then it hits her.

Geography was never one of Jana’s best subjects, but she’s sure that Mount Rushmore is not in Michigan—the state they should have been over right now! She turns to Moira. “Where is Mount Rushmore?” she asks, trying not to sound panicked.

“Can’t say for sure,” the heavyset woman replies. “I haven’t been in the States long.”

“This
is
the flight to Boston, isn’t it?”

“As far as I know,” says Moira. “At least that’s what my ticket says.”

Jana uneasily mulls over everything as she goes back to staring out her window . . . at nothing but clouds.

About an hour and a half into the flight, Jana has bitten her nails down to the stubs—a habit she thought she had broken years ago. That tiny tear in the fabric of her world that happened a while back has shred so rapidly, Jana wonders if it can ever be sewn back together again.

It is now dark outside her window. Jana reasons that that is perfectly normal. She has flown enough to know that when you fly east at dusk, the sun always sets behind you incredibly fast. It has to do with the curvature of the earth, and time zones, and that sort of thing. Perfectly natural . . . except that the sun is still shining on the other side of the plane.

The plane is filled with anxious murmurs. Perhaps Jana was the first one to realize things were screwy, but now everyone sees it.

“There’s some explanation,” one person whispers.

“We’ll probably all laugh about it later,” another says.

And indeed, some people are laughing already, as if laughing could make it all better.

Sitting there, with no nails left to bite, Jana wonders if it is always like this when things go wrong in midair. Do people not scream and wail the way they do in the movies? Do they get quiet . . . like this . . . or just whisper, or laugh? And if they do scream, do they only scream on the inside?

Jana calls the flight attendant over.

“Excuse me,” she says, her voice quivering with panic, “but we have to land this plane. We have to land it
now
!”

The flight attendant smiles and speaks with practiced reassurance, as if Jana is nothing more than an anxious flier. “We’ve begun our final descent,” she tells her. “We should be on the ground shortly.”

“Haven’t you looked out the window?” Jana snaps at the flight attendant. “Haven’t you seen what’s happening out there?”

“Weather conditions up here,” says the flight attendant, “aren’t like weather conditions on the ground.”

“Night and day aren’t weather conditions!” shouts Jana. The nervous murmurs can now be heard around the cabin.

The flight attendant looks into Jana’s eyes, grits her teeth furiously, and says, “I’ll have to ask you to sit down, miss.”

That look on the flight attendant’s face says everything. It says,
We have no idea what’s going on, but we can’t admit that, you stupid girl! If we do, everyone will start panicking. So shut your face before we shut it for you!

The flight attendant storms away, and Jana dares to do something she’s been wanting to do since the sky began to change. She looks across the aisle to the businessman and asks him where he’s going.

“Seattle,” he says. “I’m going to Seattle—of course—just like you.”

Several people on Jana’s side of the plane gasp and whisper to one another, as if being quiet about it makes the situation any less horrific than it is.

“I thought this flight was going to Boston,” say Moira.

“She’s right,” says another passenger behind Moira. “This plane is going to Boston.”

The businessman swallows. “There must be some sort of . . . computer mix-up.”

Jana sinks in her seat as the plane passes through the heavy cloud cover—on
her
side of the plane—and as soon as they punch through the clouds, she can see the twinkling lights of a city below. She doesn’t dare look out the windows on the other side of the plane anymore.