by Mary Morris
This is just a formality, I tell myself. Major Lorenzo will be back in a moment and usher me through. But he is nowhere to be seen. My eyes scan the airport, but he is not there. I keep looking, suddenly not sure of whom I am looking for. Then it occurs to me that, of course, I am looking for Isabel. That I expected to find her here once again as I did when I first saw her gaunt features in this same departure lounge scanning the crowd. That somehow I thought I’d find her, seeing me off. Now it is my eyes that are darting over the faces in the room, searching for someone I have lost in the crowd.
“Would you please step aside?” the customs official asks again, his voice more demanding this time.
I smile pleasantly, compliant, trying not to be nervous, to look relaxed. Others walk past me. Tanned tourists in panama hats, overcoats and bottles of rum tucked under their arms. The customs official lets them through one at a time and I watch them, moving past me, smiles on their faces. At last Major Lorenzo returns, an assured lilt back in his stride, and he gives the official a very slight nod, and I am sure it is over now. Soon I will walk through this gate and return to everything I left behind. Life as I know it. Now the customs official puts down the phone. He places his stamp on my tourist visa and hands my passport back to me without looking at my face. Major Lorenzo shakes my hand. “Good luck, Maggie,” he says with a flick of his wrist.
I move away from him toward the throng heading outside. A blast of hot air greets me as my feet sink into the warm tarmac. The plane is packed and the bodies around me smell of salt and lotion, of beach holidays and cool glasses of rum. Glancing around one last time, I look for that face in a crowd and know that in some way I will always be looking, the way she was when I first saw her. I slide into an aisle seat and the liftoff is uneventful and light as a bird’s.
Soon the flight attendant places a napkin on my tray. I am handed a glass of juice, some peanuts, and I think how easily things come to me now. The in-flight entertainment begins but I do not take a headset. Instead I watch a soundless can of soda being popped. Celebrating athletes drink diet Coke. On CNN the disasters I have missed pass before my eyes. An earthquake ravaged Southern California, someone tried to blow up a bridge somewhere. A man opened fire at a Taco Bell in Missouri. Despite global warming, it is the coldest winter in New York’s history. Sports bloopers come on and as two outfielders collide in midair, laughter explodes around me.
I feel as if I’ve been in a capsule, floating through space. Now I close my eyes and I think of what awaits me at the other end. Lunch boxes and a hand pressed into mine. Beds to make, familiar sighs.
Before long the trees will be in bloom. There will be gardening to do, crocuses peaking out of the soil. The screens need repairing. In the red oak out back there will be birds—ordinary gray birds. And I will know that I am home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARY MORRIS was born and raised in Chicago. Her previous books include Vanishing Animals and Other Stories, which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; The Bus of Dreams, a collection of stories that received the Friends of American Writers Award; and the novels Crossroads, The Waiting Room, and A Mother’s Love. She is also the author of two books of travel nonfiction: Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone and Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.
