Flight #116 Is Down (3 page)

“Why is the plane late?” she asked the flight attendant. The woman was old; she should have retired twenty years ago.
Betsey!
said her name plate.

“We’re stacked up,”
Betsey!
said, smiling widely as if being stacked up made
Betsey!
happy. “I’m very sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.”

Darienne pointed out the necessity of taking off on time, explaining that she was going to London for the week, but the hostess concentrated on giving the little Teddie creep a special Flight Pin, and a special Flight Fun Kit, and a special Before Take Off snack.

Teddie, thought Darienne. One of those unisex, all-purpose names for when you can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl. An It.

Teddie was such a dweeb, it actually enjoyed breaking through the plastic wrap to find out what colors the four enclosed crayons were. “Oh, red!” it exclaimed, as if red were the whole reason for being on the plane to start with. “Would you color with me?” it asked Darienne.

I can’t stand this, Darienne thought. “Miss!” she called sharply.

The flight attendant ignored her.

Darienne grabbed the woman’s little military jacket and jerked on it. “Miss, I want to switch seats.”

Betsey!
said the plane was full.

“I don’t like children,” Darienne said.

Teddie wrapped its geeky arms around its geeky stuffed animal, a squishy thing of the sort that crowded second-rate gift shops.

Betsey!
said she was sure that in the course of the flight, the two of them would become friends. She said maybe Darienne could show Teddie how to trace her hand with the crayon and make a pretty picture for Teddie to give Mommy and Daddy when they met Teddie at the airport.
Betsey!
beamed at Teddie, glared at Darienne, and moved on.

A baby several rows behind Darienne began whining: revving its little lung motors and changing gears into a high-pitched shriek. Darienne closed her eyes. Was the whole flight going to be like this? What had happened to the olden days, when only civilized people could afford to fly? Why couldn’t people with screaming babies take the bus?

Darienne pulled out a paperback she had just bought in the airport book shop, the newest by her favorite author: a fat book she could trust to be packed with sex, scandal, and slime. Four pages along, she realized this was not the newest title; it was the oldest, reissued; she had read this stupid book years before. They had ripped her off, putting it on the shelf as if it were new.

I’m stuck on a late plane next to a wimpy little kid. I’m surrounded by fat old people who won’t share their magazines, babies that scream, rude hostesses, and I’ve already read the book I brought on board.

Darienne baked in her own hostility. The plane was an oven, cooking her; she was a custard, she would set, and become solid resentment.

Saturday: 5:25
P.M.

Carly hung onto the armrests as the plane took off, lifting safely into the sky. When the plane lurched, she knew they were going to crash. Prayer expanded in her brain like an egg broken in a skillet, and then the plane evened out.

Nothing was wrong.

Nobody else so much as twitched.

She gave a silly little giggle, and her seat partner, a pleasant-looking businessman older than her parents, smiled understandingly without actually looking at her. He had a laptop computer on which he was busily working. Carly thought it was pretty clever that he could be friendly without using syllables or eye contact.

It would be nice, thought Carly, if there were an incredibly handsome young man on this plane. The boy would develop a crush on her and be so in love that by the end of the flight he would come home with her, stay with her forever, meet her family, woo her. She loved that word “woo.” So nineteenth century. So courteous.

Carly studied the passengers. Babies, kids, families, business people, and a few of those weirdos you saw only when traveling: people with impossible clothes, crazy eyes, or peculiarly shaped bodies.

No cute guys.

What else was new?

The plane tilted. She had a momentary view of dwindling parking lots and housetops, and then there was only sky, which was blue and thin.

Carly had the obligatory worries about plane crashes. She considered the odds (one in two million; she’d looked it up.)

Plane-crash worry was unique. You couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t like the past, about which Carly had said to herself a million times, If I’d done this, if I’d said this, if I’d been a better person, if, if, if …

No, if the plane crashed, it was Their Fault. Carly didn’t have to say, Listen, I’m sorry, I know I should have done ten hundred things differently.

Carly much preferred problems that were somebody else’s fault. That way she could shake her head and sigh, the way she did for acid rain and inner-city warfare, but she didn’t actually have to see where she’d gone wrong and wonder if she’d ever go right again.

I’m going home,
Carly’s heart sang, very country and western, with twangs and tunes,
I’m going home, to say I’m sorry.

You haven’t said you’re sorry yet, she reminded herself. They might not care how sorry you are. They might not even meet the plane.

She shivered slightly. She imagined the airport. Would Shirl be there? Would Mom and Dad? Would they hold out their arms? When she said
I’m sorry,
would they whisper,
It doesn’t matter, we love you?

Or would she stand in the terminal, surrounded by chairs bolted to the floor, while travelers broke around her like tide over a sandbar, and be alone? Would she have to take a bus to the house? What if they didn’t let her in? What if—

I have only one thing to offer, thought Carly. I really am sorry. I have to believe that that matters to them.

Actually, she did have something else to offer.

She had knit her twin a sweater: cable stitches; quite complex. It looked pretty darn good. Carly had enjoyed knitting it. Of course she had started the sweater for herself, just as she had started everything for herself last year; last year Carly had not cared about a single person on earth except herself. She had chosen a heathery wool—rich, rusty purple. She and her twin were fair and looked ill in pastels but fragile and beautiful in dark, intense colors. Shirl would love the color, but Shirl might still be so mad that she’d never wear it, or would trash it, or give it away.

Not much of a peace offering. Considering what Carly had done.

Carly had not packed the sweater in her luggage but wrapped it in sparkly tissue and tucked it into a clear plastic bag. It lay under the seat in front. She smiled down at the shiny package.

The timelessness of flight droned around her; the rituals of ordering a soda, putting down the little white tray on which to set her soda, watching the safety demonstration video, scanning the flight magazine in the pouch—all this was correct. It was right and just that she should have these few hours aloft; literally above her problems and the people she had to face.

She was amazed at her contentment. The year of vicious rebellion seemed as distant as the miles they covered.

When the flight attendant brought the meal, Carly beamed at her.
Betsey!
said the name tag. Carly loved that exclamation point.
Betsey!
looked like the kind of woman who turned everything into an exclamation point. I’d like to be like that, thought Carly. Maybe I could do this when I grow up.

Carly laughed at herself. She was a little behind on the growing-up scale. A little behind on the educational scale, too.

But I’ll catch up, thought Carly. She liked the way
Betsey!
had cut her hair, too: a thick, buoyant cut that looked somehow fluffy and long and yet was really quite short and easy to care for. Carly touched her own shoulder-length hair and thought, Yes. I’m going to cut it. Layers. I’m going to look suburban again, and flight attendant-ish, and have it all together.

How pretty the tray was, with its little dessert sparkling cinnamon on top, its carrots bright orange, and its gravy rich brown. “Lovely,” Carly told
Betsey!
although usually she did not care for airline food.

Carly laughed at herself and then tucked her smile back in, to be a rational, sober copy of the rest of the passengers.

What more beautiful words exist, thought Carly Foyle, than
going home
?

S
ATURDAY: 5:30 P.M.

Laura and Ty had been in the last EMT training class. All one hundred and ninety hours of training had been fascinating. All necessary. Failure to pass the state test was rare, not because the test was simple, but because if you were motivated to start and to stay, you were motivated to learn the techniques and get them right.

Mr. Farquhar was the chief instructor. He was patient and funny and always made you feel special for making the effort at all. “Remember, kids,” he would say, “we’ve got a town full of rich people, estate people, summer people, and they expect to be rescued. They never expect to do the rescuing. We don’t get volunteers from that quarter.”

There were certainly no rich people in the training sessions, nor had Laura come across any on the crew. It was as blue collar as changing tires or bagging groceries.

She had wondered why. A lot of the wealthy townspeople were very community oriented; always serving on this board or that, sponsoring this fund-raiser or that. Mr. Farquhar summed it up with a shrug of his eyebrows. “They don’t like to get their hands dirty,” he said, “and this is a dirty job. People vomit on you and bleed on you. Their houses or their bodies smell bad. You’ll step in car oil and broken glass.”

Laura had fallen mildly in love with Patrick, who assisted his father in the instruction. Everybody had to take turns being victim and being rescuer. Laura wanted to be Patrick’s victim, but of course somebody else got Patrick. Laura ended up, time after time, with Ty Maronn.

Just because you both wanted to be ambulance volunteers didn’t mean you had anything else in common.

Laura and Ty couldn’t abide each other.

Laura said Ty had no personality. “He’s sort of like an undershirt,” she would say. “You could fold him up, or stuff him in a corner, or wear him inside out, and you’d never notice one way or the other.”

Ty felt Laura had far too much personality. “She can’t stand anything unless it’s her show,” he said to any other trainee who would listen. “She has to be in charge. If she’s not in charge, she certainly wants to be the one most seriously hurt, getting the most attention.”

Saturday afternoon was sluggish and gray.

Winter had lasted too long; everybody was sick of it; everybody wanted to be in Florida or the Bahamas. But what with school, and lack of money, all they could do was party.

Laura and Ty were at the same party. This particular party had started too early. It had no purpose and no plan: just a bunch of people in the same living room, drinking sodas right now but getting bored, looking around for more; ready for beer, for cruel gossip instead of chatter, for sex instead of laughter. It was not a particularly nice party. Nice people, Laura thought, I like all these people. But any minute now the party’s going to go bad.

She was not sure what to do about it. She’d come with a girlfriend and therefore didn’t have her own car. The girlfriend had vanished, and it was not the kind of party where Laura felt comfortable poking in dark rooms looking for somebody.

Laura was on call Mondays. It being Saturday, she did not have her scanner with her. She was not thinking of rescues or fires. She was thinking drearily of the paper she and her parents had signed about them coming to get her if there was drinking and drugs, no questions asked. She was thinking—But nothing is happening. I can’t call them when nothing is happening.

Which, perversely, made Laura feel like starting something. Everybody in the room was ready to start something. The group was working itself up, teetering on the edge. The decision was in the air—whether to join in and even goad the others along when trouble started or whether to deflect it.

Saturday: 5:35
P.M.

Heidi was waist-deep in dogs. She was not in a dog mood. Her mother had ankle biters; miniatures with wrinkled bodies like stacked pancakes. Heidi could hardly tolerate Winnie and Clemmie. She didn’t even consider them dogs, just little yippy things she wished would run away and forage in the woods. Her father’s dog was a long, lean, award-winning Irish setter who required brushing, grooming, de-ticking, walking, and love. Fang could not go ten minutes without whining for more attention. (Heidi knew how that felt, but tried to keep herself from actually whimpering out loud.)

“Come, here, Fang,” she said resignedly, and the dog, tail brutally whacking furniture, climbed all over her.

Heidi was sturdier than she wanted to be.

Fashion these days required you to be anorexic. Her short friends were size three, and her tall friends were size eight. Naked or clothed, you couldn’t tell they needed bras. Their clothes fit perfectly. Heidi was dramatically curved. She had read that men liked this, but you couldn’t prove it by Heidi. All she knew was that her clothes did not fit perfectly.

Everybody else took aerobics and jazzercise. They hopped and danced and flung and arched. “I’d need a shelf under my bosom to do that,” Heidi said, and the gym instructor, whose shape was basically inverted, said, “Nonsense, Heidi.”

Heidi never wore makeup. She had naturally red cheeks, long lashes, and bright lips. Her eyes were plain brown, her hair even plainer.

Mrs. Camp’s dog was an elderly mutt named Tally-Ho. Tally-Ho was a great dog; a tan four-legged thing with a great personality. Like me, thought Heidi. If you’d get to know me, I have a wonderful personality. Otherwise I’m just this brown-haired, two-legged thing.

Fang was handsome (his real name was Dove House Prince Albert) and also stupid. Once let outdoors, Fang would go insane and try to explore all Litchfield County in one afternoon. So Fang always had to be on a leash.

Tally, however, was a sensible guy who sniffed only at scents close at hand and never got sufficiently excited to follow them. Tally hated to let Mrs. Camp out of his sight, but when Mrs. Camp’s doors were shut, Tally would accept Heidi.