Layover

by David Bell

  I held my arms out wide. “How do you know this isn’t my beachwear?”

  “Not quite,” she said with a little laugh. “Not even close.”

  “Okay, you got it. I’m traveling for work. Again. I’m in the air about two hundred thousand miles a year. Multiple times a week.”

  Her eyebrows rose, and her mouth opened. It was the most animation she’d shown since I’d seen her in the gift shop. “Wow. Now, that’s exciting. I’d love to travel that much.”

  “It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” I said. “It’s all for work, and my job is pretty dull. Like you said, the idea of traveling sounds really exciting, but in reality all I see are airports and planes and hotels and conference rooms. It’s just the same, over and over again. I’m not seeing the sights, eating good food, going hiking or scuba diving.” I leaned forward. “Sometimes I look in the mirror, and I feel like I’m turning into my dad.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” she asked.

  “No, not really. He’s a good man. But maybe . . . Here.” I reached into my pants pocket. I brought out a small, round plastic case and held it in my palm. “Do you want to know a secret?”

  She moved ever so slightly toward me. “I’d love to. Everybody has a secret. And here in an airport bar is the perfect place to spill it. Everything here is temporary, isn’t it? We’re all just passing through on the way to somewhere else.”

  Her words brought me up short. “Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. Like I’m a tourist, except the thing I’m observing is my own life. This is my life, right? And I’m just kind of buzzing through it without absorbing anything.”

  “That’s pretty existential for the Keg ’n Craft,” she said, with a real smile this time. “So, what’s that in your hand?”

  “Oh. Right.” I twisted off the lid of the pill case and revealed its contents. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Viagra?”

  “Really?”

  “Just having fun. It looks like it might be Xanax.”

  “Exactly. I hate to fly. I absolutely despise it. Lots of nights, including last night, I have nightmares about a plane crashing and being trapped on board. Do you know why I take one of these and then head to the bar? It’s the only way I can get on a plane every time I have to fly. That’s how much I hate flying. In fact, I took one this morning to get on my first flight. And now that I’m on my layover, I’m going to take another so I can get on the next flight.”

  “And yet you do it that much?” she asked. “You’re afraid that much of the time?”

  Hearing someone else say it made it seem even more absurd. “Yeah. Crazy, right?”

  “Then why do you do it?” she asked. She didn’t seem to be asking the question rhetorically. She seemed genuinely curious about my answer, as though some great mystery would be revealed when I spoke.

  I answered honestly. “Because that’s what my job requires. I make good money doing it.” I paused. “And I really don’t like any of the work I do, but I keep doing it. It’s not exactly what I envisioned for myself when I was in college. I thought . . . I thought it would all be more exciting, you know?”

  Morgan nodded as if she understood. But then she surprised me with what she said. “Can I be honest with you? I feel for you. I do. But I’d trade my problems for yours any day.”

  I started to ask what she meant, but the bartender finally showed up and asked what we wanted. Before she placed her order, Morgan slipped her sunglasses back on.

  4

  After the drinks came—a Bloody Mary for her, a bourbon on the rocks for me—I asked her about the sunglasses, which she still wore.

  “Why did you put them back on before you ordered?”

  She pinched her straw between her thumb and index finger and jabbed it into the drink a few times. The ice rattled against the side of the glass.

  She turned and looked at me when she answered. “Why do you work a job that makes you miserable? Why do you think you’re turning into your dad?”

  First things first: I noted how she evaded my question. I also felt disarmed by the directness of her response. On a couple of occasions, I’d tried to talk to Renee about my job, about feeling unfulfilled. Once we sat at the kitchen table of my small but very nicely furnished apartment, long after our dinner was over, discussing the problem over more and more drinks, and no matter how hard I tried to explain my dissatisfaction, I couldn’t seem to make it clear to Renee. Maybe the failure lay with me and my inability to articulate my unhappiness.

  Or maybe she just couldn’t hear me. Really hear me.

  Renee was practical. She could plan. She could see challenges coming down the road, anticipate them, and adjust. Maybe we were too much alike in that way.

  “Everyone feels this way in their twenties,” Renee told me. “You have a good job. Lots of people would kill for a job like yours. Who knows where it will lead?”

  I couldn’t argue with her. I knew how fortunate I was. I knew most people didn’t have a dad like mine who set me up with a sales territory and greased the wheels for me to start working as soon as I walked off the campus of Indiana University with a diploma in my hand. And Renee was focused on her career too. She worked for an architectural design firm, taking on bigger and bigger projects as the months went by. We were perfect for each other in every way . . . except the way that mattered most.

  Morgan was still staring at me, and I saw the faint outline of my head reflected in her sunglasses.

  “I’d like to quit,” I said. “But that’s tough. Especially when your dad gets you the job. And he’s the boss. My dad made a lot of sacrifices for me when I was growing up. He worked his butt off raising me and building a business. So it’s not easy to walk away.”

  “I quit my job.” She turned back around, facing forward. She leaned down and took a long pull through her straw, her cheeks sucking in as she did so. “But I understand what you’re saying about things not going the way you planned.”

  “How so?”

  “I guess I thought working would be different. That my coworkers would be more mature, more thoughtful, more courageous than the kids I went to college with. I thought there’d be a higher purpose, something more meaningful. But I learned pretty quickly that people in the workforce are just like the college kids I knew. Scared. Impulsive. Deceitful.”

  She sounded cynical, jaded. Almost bitter.

  I understood, even though I tried very hard to avoid giving in to those feelings.

  “Maybe not all places are like that,” I said. “Maybe we just haven’t found the right place yet.”

  “Maybe. It’s a complicated situation, but my mother is sick too. Very sick with cancer.”

  I let out a small, involuntary gasp when she said that. I simply hated to hear it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Thank you.” She seemed to be fighting off the beginning of a quiver in her chin. She looked genuinely touched, almost moved by my words. Her response seemed out of proportion with the blandness of my statement. I meant it, but I wished I’d found something more original or meaningful to say. “It’s okay. Really. But she needs someone to care for her. To just be with her, you know, as things get closer to the end. That’s part of why I quit my job. Not all of it, but some. I had to decide what mattered the most. I had to make a choice.” She seemed to be thinking of something else. “It was an easy decision really.”

  Things grew quiet between us for a moment, but I kept my eyes on her, realizing I hadn’t taken my second Xanax yet. I’d made the mistake once of getting on a flight without it, thinking that I’d been taking it and flying for so many years my body might not notice the difference. But by the time the plane landed, my shirt was soaked with sweat, and my heart pounded in my ears louder than the jet’s engines.

  I needed it. But I also didn’t want my senses to be dulled any more in that moment. The
alcohol, draining its way into my empty stomach, provided a pleasant buzz. And the directness of Morgan’s words, the unvarnished bluntness of a stranger I’d likely never see again, made the hairs on my arms stand up. A possibility opened up before me. I had the sense that the conversation could be going anywhere and could touch on anything. How different it was from the prescribed work conversations I always had, the same sales pitch and negotiation I went through over and over again.

  Morgan was right about the airport—it was all temporary. Maybe that freed me too. Or maybe I just liked her, felt something for her, a spark or a flash I hadn’t experienced in a while. My guard dropped further. My force field weakened. Those cards I’d always clutched so tight were about to be spread on the table.

  “My mother left me when I was seven,” I said as I turned away from her. I hadn’t planned the words. They came out of their own free will. “I’ve seen her maybe three times since then. She didn’t want anything to do with me or my dad after that. Not really.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Thanks. My dad handled both roles. The older I get, the more I realize how tough it was for him. And how well he did it all.”

  Silence lingered again. Two older couples at the front of the bar laughed and toasted, clinking their glasses against each other and saying, “Here’s to Vegas!”

  “You know what I think?” Morgan said, drawing my attention back to her.

  “What?”

  She smiled a broad, genuine smile. The spark I’d felt grew hotter, the embers flaring.

  “I think I need another drink. And so do you.”

  5

  I usually stuck to one drink before each flight. That and the Xanax did the trick, allowing me to doze off—sometimes even before the plane left the ground—but kept me from being so far out of commission that I couldn’t work once I reached my destination.

  But Morgan left little room for argument or discussion. And I’d spent the past few years wishing fervently that something different, something surprising, would occur in the middle of my daily work life, so it would have been absurd for me not to embrace it. A beautiful woman wanted to have another drink with me, so when Morgan called the bartender over I ordered a refill.

  “You’re hard to say no to,” I said when the glass of bourbon was placed in front of me. “Are you like this with everyone? Or am I just lucky?”

  She seemed to take my question seriously and considered her answer before she spoke. “You’re special,” she said. “I can tell.”

  “Am I? You can sense that after one round?”

  “I can.”

  “How?”

  “You’re trying to figure things out. Most people don’t even bother to ask these questions.” Morgan took a long drink, then said, “What would you do if you quit your job? What do you dream of being?”

  Again, her question was so direct, so simple, it took me off guard. I stared into the amber liquid in my glass and gave the question some thought. “Promise not to laugh.”

  “Do I seem like the kind of person to laugh at another person’s dreams?”

  “I guess not.” The liquor had warmed the inside of my body. I felt any remaining inhibitions coming down—and quickly. Morgan smiled while I formed my answer. Her teeth were perfectly straight and white.

  “I’ve always thought about being an illustrator.” It felt strange to give voice to my dreams. I hadn’t mentioned them to anyone in a long time. “I like to draw. I took a few classes in college.”

  “Why didn’t you take more?” she asked.

  “I had to be practical. My mom left us the same year my dad started his business. I guess trouble had been building between them for a long time.”

  “Crazy.”

  “Yeah. So there were some tough times for my dad and me. But we also adopted a ‘you and me against the world’ mentality. We were going to make it no matter what.”

  “Sure.”

  “And my mom leaving taught me a lesson. I just didn’t want to be . . . unprepared for the world. I wanted to know where I was going. I wanted certainty. Or I thought I did.”

  “I hear you,” she said. “Economics, having to make money, parents . . . It’s complicated.”

  “It must be for you, if your mom is sick. Is your dad—?”

  She started to answer but then held her index finger up in the air. “Can you hold that thought? I have to run to the bathroom.”

  “Sure.”

  She took another long sip through the straw, then gathered up her purse and carry-on.

  “I can watch—”

  “It’s okay,” she said. And then she left, walking around the bar and out to the concourse.

  Once she was gone, I looked at my phone again. I saw a text from my dad. I was meeting him in Tampa that afternoon to see a couple of properties for new developments. We didn’t always work side by side, but he saw a great deal of potential in this new project he was developing—a small upscale strip mall in an up-and-coming neighborhood. He hoped to get a couple of restaurants and maybe a craft brewery to go in there, and he thought he needed me along to offer the “young person’s perspective.” He was more than capable of handling everything on his own, as he’d been doing for years. I suspected he wanted me there because he was grooming me to take over the business. He’d been working on that particular project for the past three months, and his text message was typically short and didactic:

  See you at 2. Don’t be late. Remember, don’t oversell these properties. They speak for themselves.

  I wanted to write back and remind him how long I’d been working for him and how many deals I’d handled on my own. But I kept my response to myself.

  When I put the phone away and looked up, I expected to see Morgan returning from the bathroom. It was just across the concourse—where she and I had spoken the second time—but she wasn’t there.

  I did see two airport police officers walking past the Keg ’n Craft, their thumbs tucked into their belts, their leather boots thumping as they moved. It came back to me then that just a week earlier, on a day when I wasn’t flying through Atlanta, there’d been a security scare. A foreign exchange student had left a suitcase—which contained a laptop, iPad, and chargers and cords—unattended on the concourse, prompting an evacuation. The FBI and the bomb squad arrived, shutting down the airport for several hours and delaying hundreds of flights.

  It ended up being nothing, but I’d seen the story trending on Twitter while I was in Pennsylvania, and when it was my turn to fly home, I tossed back two Xanax and an extra bourbon in order to work up the courage to get on the plane. It unnerved me to think of all the things that could go wrong during a flight—bombs, terrorists, mechanical failures, pilot error, weather.

  The increased police presence didn’t necessarily reassure me. In fact, the swaggering cops only served as a reminder of how much I disliked flying. They continued out of sight, and I returned the phone to my pocket.

  And Morgan still hadn’t come back.

  An unreasonable fear set in. Maybe she’d walked off, left me at the bar while she boarded her plane. We owed nothing to each other, and if she wanted to fade from my life as quickly and quietly as possible, she could. I’d have no way to find her.

  But I realized how silly that was. Sometimes people took a long time in the bathroom. Or maybe she’d stopped to make a phone call, reaching out to her own version of Renee in some faraway city. I’ll be there soon. . . . I can’t wait to see you. . . . I miss you. . . .

  And as I thought about that, an unreasonable jealousy crept through me. What did I care if she had someone else? What claim did I have on someone I’d known for just an hour?

  The truth was that her life, despite the problems she’d told me about, sounded better than mine. I was trapped by work and obligation. She was going somewhere she associated with happy memori
es. Her travels sounded uncomplicated and easy.

  But then she was there, walking toward me with her two bags. And still wearing the sunglasses. If I wasn’t mistaken, her cheeks looked a little flushed, almost like she’d been running. Or maybe it was the effects of the alcohol.

  She came close to touching me but kept standing. “I have to go now.”

  The corners of her mouth dropped, but I doubted her sadness was about saying good-bye to me. I wanted to ask if something had happened, if she’d received some news that had unnerved her. But I didn’t.

  “I thought you had more time,” I said, looking at my watch. “And you still have a drink.” I tried to sound light and carefree, but I really felt desperate. I didn’t want her to go yet. I wanted to stay wrapped in the moment we’d been in for the last hour. It was possible to imagine the time we shared at that bar would stretch out forever, that the bubble would never pop.

  But here she was wielding a giant pin, ending our time together and sending me back to my mundane life. Florida. Real estate. Dad.

  She put her bags on the bar, and my heart lifted. She was going to stay. I very much wanted her to stay. I wanted to talk more. I didn’t want to get cheated out of however many minutes we had left.

  But she ignored the drink and took off her sunglasses, putting them on the bar as well. She moved in so close to me that her body slid between my legs. She placed her arms around the back of my neck and leaned in. Her soft skin brushed against mine, cheek against cheek. I couldn’t believe it was happening, even though I’d known all along this was where we were heading.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Really.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I wish I could stay, but I can’t.”

  “I don’t even know your last name.”

  I smelled the tangy Bloody Mary on her breath as she leaned against me, felt her hair against my face.

  She didn’t speak right away. We stayed frozen like that for a drawn-out moment before she said anything.