Flight (25 page)

“What'll they do to me?”

“Help with the pain. At least until you can get it seen to.” She pushes down, then twists off the cap. Holds the bottle out to Emily.

Emily holds out her palm.

“I'll give you four.”

“Isn't that a lot?”

“Not at all. Take two now and then another two in twelve hours.”

Emily looks at the pills in her hand. Looks up at Melissa. “What do you take them for?”

“Irritable bowel.”

“Oh.”

“I can eat a whole pack of bacon if I take a couple of these beforehand.” Melissa goes to the sink and pours some water into a Styrofoam cup. Hands it to Emily.

“Thank you.” She pops two in her mouth and takes a sip of water. Hands the cup back and slips the other two pills into her pocket.

Melissa throws the rest of the water down the sink, then drops the cup into the garbage. Goes back to Emily. “Where you headed anyway?”

“Gander.”

“Then where?”

She pauses, then says, “What makes you think I'm going any farther?”

Melissa grabs a few more chips. Chews with her mouth open. “I don't know.” Washes them down with a sip of Crush.

Emily doesn't say where she's going.

Melissa holds out the bag.

Emily shakes her head. “I should get back to the youngsters.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks so much.”

“You're welcome.”

She starts to walk away.

“See you on the way back, probably,” Melissa says.

Emily lifts her good hand in a wave, but doesn't turn around. “Probably.”

* * *

SHE SLIPS HER BAD HAND INTO HER SWEATER POCKET, her fingers on fire from the pain, eyes watering. How long before the codeine kicks in, she wonders?

She retraces her steps through the seating area. The card players are laughing and sipping coffees and rapping their knuckles against the table with each laid ace or queen. Heavy parkas for weather so mild. Unfamiliar to her. Tourists, she bets. Mainlanders. Americans.

The old man lying down has turned onto his side now, his back to her, butt sticking out. Because the three chairs he's taking up are not enough to accommodate his whole length, his feet and ankles hang over.

She freezes in midstride. Holds her breath. Although she can't see for herself, she imagines the colour draining from her face. “Jesus,” she whispers. “No ride to Gander.”
Goddamn it
. In all the panic earlier it had completely slipped her mind to call ahead and have a taxi waiting.

8:35. Flight's at eleven. Over an hour to get to Gander from where the boat lets them off. Longer if the road's bad. So bloody careless. Even if she calls now they'll have to wait an hour. Maybe more. They'll miss their flight.

She scans the room. Looks once more at the group playing cards, thinking that they must be heading Gander way. Where else? She moves towards them, then stops. How, especially if they're all travel- ing in the same vehicle, will they be able to fit three more people? Not to mention their suitcases.

Melissa's brewing more coffee when Emily turns to her. She'll ask to use the cashier's cell phone and call that cab. That's if there's any reception in the middle of the bay. No. There's no time. They won't make it. She imagines clawing at her hair or screaming or banging her fists against the windows. Lashing out at her stupidity, her complete heedlessness at having gotten them this far only to have it all fall apart because she forgot to make a phone call. A Jesus phone call.

She wonders how long it will take to walk to the highway? Start hitching then. What vehicles will be on the road so early? Mostly transport trucks, she figures. Burly men in ball caps listening to the country station and trying to break into the police frequency on their CBs in order to know where the highway patrol might be lurking.

She'll have Lynette stand in front, and Jeremy a few steps behind his sister. She'll stand at the back. Who'll dare pass a sweet-faced thing like Lynette? A face like hers would probably get them a ride right to the airport's terminal.

Someone's calling her name. A voice too deep to be one of the children. Or Melissa. She turns and is shocked to see that the old man lying across the three chairs is not so old after all. “Myles?” she says. “That you?”

“Hope so.” He rubs the corners of his eyes, then does his best to flatten his stuck-up hair.

Perhaps it was the way he'd had his chin tucked towards his chest that made him look three times his age. That and the dark bags she now notices beneath his eyes. She'd only seen him the other day, but she swears his face looks more shrunken, the skin around his cheekbones tighter.

She looks once more through the window at her two children, wondering how she'll explain this to Myles.

She moves to him. “What are you doing here?”

“Same as you, I suspect.” He sits up, resting his palms on his knees. Pumps up his chest and arches his back. Lets his breath out slowly.

How tired he looks. More than her even, she thinks. “Where are you headed?”

“The James Paton.” He rubs his eyes again, then coughs a cigarette cough, the thick sludge in his chest moving upward towards the back of his throat. He swallows it back down.

Kent's in the James Paton
.

She takes another step nearer.

“It's Irene.”

She goes all the way to him.

He slides over.

She sits. “What's happened?”

“Some complication or other.”

His breath is stale. She tries not to breathe through her nose. “What kind of complication?”

“I was all ready to take her home yesterday, then she got these pains. Like someone was cutting her open without anesthetic, she said. She was screeching. The baby screeching and she screeching.” He puts his face into his palms for a second. Takes his hands away. “Afterbirth it was. Stupid fuckers left a whole wad of it inside her.”

“No.”

“Yes they did. I half thought there was another baby in there.” He laughs but there's no happiness in it.

“When will they discharge her?”

“Sunday. If she's doing all right, maybe tomorrow.”

“Thank God it's nothing serious.”

He nods, his face on the floor.

“Where's your boy?” she asks.

“School. He can't afford to be missing any as bad as he's doing. I should throw that goddamn Xbox out the window. Like someone addicted that boy is.” He lifts his eyes from the floor and looks at her. “Your boy got one?”

“Hmm?”

“Xbox?”

She shakes her head. “PlayStation. He's not too bad though. Would rather be lifting weights in the garage.”

“That's good. Healthy at least, weights.”

She looks once again at her children. Then back at Myles. A ride to Gander fallen right in her lap.

“Where are
you
going?” he asks.

He'll know something's up when he sees the suitcases. That and the fact that neither Lynette nor Jeremy are in school.

“Gander too,” she says. “The airport.”

“Oh. Where to?”

“St. John's.”

“The big city. Without the hubby?”

“He's meeting us later.”

“Us?”

She points to the window behind him.

He turns around. “The whole family, eh? That's nice.” He pauses. “I don't remember the last time me and Irene went anywhere.”

“Thing is, we need a ride.”

“A ride?”

“To the airport.”

“You don't have one?”

She shakes her head.

“It's your lucky day then, isn't it?”

“So you will?”

“Of course. Although I'm surprised that Kent hadn't figured that out in advance, him being so organized and all. Mr. Union and everything.” Although he says this with a smile, she thinks there's bitterness there, a tinge of resentment.

“What time's the flight?”

She looks at her watch: 8:42. “Eleven.”

“Have you there in plenty of time,” he says.

“Thank you so much.”

“Nothing to it, my dear. A bit of company never hurt anybody.”

She stands up. I'll let the children know. She turns and walks away but his voice stops her. “No word yet on the plant then? Kent's said nothing?”

It's finished
.
Three months, tops
. She turns back to him. Shakes her head. “Not a thing.”

She continues towards the door, realizing that the pain in her hand is almost gone. A light throbbing now. She'd kept it in her pocket the whole time so Myles wouldn't ask questions. So he wouldn't insist on taking her to have it looked at. She can just imagine Kent and Irene and herself all in the same hospital.

Melissa was right about the codeine though:
Make you forget you
got a hand.

* * *

SHE WALKS ALONG THE DECK TOWARDS THEM, pausing momentarily to look in the other direction. Nothing of Lightning Cove. Vanished. Had it ever existed?

The sun is higher, but small amidst so much blueness – a birthmark on a desert of flawless skin.

She'll have to tell them eventually. Perhaps at the airport. After take-off. That would be better – after take-off. No place to run. Who's she kidding? There's no place more suitable than another, no hour that's more appropriate. He's their dad and they have a right to know. Sooner rather than later. Allowing time to pass makes the things we have to say harder.

The smell of saltwater and gasoline. A breeze she knows will be warmer on land against her face. The rocking of the boat so gentle she wonders if it's rocking at all.

She thinks of Vancouver. Of the pictures she'd browsed on the Internet in the one-room library back in Lightning Cove. Mountains that make the ones here look like bruises. Buildings tall enough to reach the clouds. She imagines herself and the kids taking an elevator all the way to the top of one, then looking out over the strange city, at the ocean that's like the ocean here yet somehow different.
Big trees
and it hardly ever snows
. Lots of rain, though. That's something else the Internet had said. Used to that though, living here in Lightning Cove. Never been bothered by the rain, she thinks.

She resumes her path towards them, empty hot chocolate cups at their feet.

Jeremy turns to her before she makes it all the way. “Me and Lynette saw a baby whale.”

“You did?” She rushes over and dangles her head over the railing. “Where?”

“Gone now,” Jeremy says.

Lynette says, “Swimming with its mother.”

“Was it?”

Lynette manages to take her eyes off the water for a second and looks at her mother. “Just ahead of the boat.”

“Wow.” She stands in between them, a little light-headed, her body numb from fatigue, from codeine. Lays her good hand on Jeremy's shoulder. After a moment she looks towards the bow of the boat, at the approaching shore, their new life getting closer. Fifteen minutes maybe. Ten.

She wonders what Kent will think when he realizes they're not coming for him. And how long afterwards before he puts it together that they've gone.
She said you were going to meet her in St. John's,
she can hear Myles saying. “
He's meeting us later,
”
that's exactly what she said.
But Myles won't know where she is anymore than Kent will, anymore than her parents when Kent asks.
She was supposed to come in on Saturday,
Terry will say, gripping his clipboard so tightly that his knuckles turn white.
Well, she couldn't have just disappeared,
Kent'll say to whoever will listen. But that is exactly what she'll have done.

“The mother's fin came out of the water,” Lynette says.

“Did it?”

“Then they dove deep,” Jeremy adds.

Even though she's certain they've gone, she scans the water's surface, thinking that she'll try to see more from now on. Not be inside her head so much. Look forward to the days instead of wishing them away.

She lets a minute or two pass before saying, “We're going on a plane today.”

“We are?” Lynette says.

She nods. Then, “Who wants the window seat?”

Lynette jumps on the spot, her hand that's holding the giraffe in the air. “Me, me, me!”

She looks at Jeremy.

His eyes are on the sea, not so much downward as they are pointed towards the horizon.

She says to him, “For someone who loves planes you don't seem very excited.”

He won't look at her.

How much his face is like his father's, she thinks: big, barely blinking eyes, tight lips, and hollows of cheeks inward as if he were chewing on their insides. He's right beside her but not too. Close enough to touch, yet miles away.

“Jeremy?”

Finally he looks at her, coming back a little.

“What's wrong?”

More like himself again now.

“Tell me.”

She senses him wanting to speak; yet he's incapable of forming the words somehow. “What is it, Jeremy?
What
?”

When she hears what she does next, it isn't his voice but Lynette's. “Are you leaving Dad?”

Now it's
she
unable to find the words, more numb than the bloodied hand in her pocket.

In her mind, she'd envisioned the three of them on Jackie's chesterfield in Vancouver, light coming through a part in the curtains, and mountains, snowcapped, in the distance. Lynette lying crossways with her tiny legs over her mother's lap, and Jeremy drinking a Dr. Pepper with his hockey cards askew on the coffee table. Neither of them mentioning their father.

Nothing is ever like you think it'll be.

“Who told you that?” she says.

Lynette nudges a finger in her brother's shoulder. “He did.”

She steps closer to him, so that their bodies are almost touching. “Did you, Jeremy?”