Skid

by Rene Gutteridge

With a flick of his other wrist, James shut the door and asked, “Do you know who the captain is?”

  “Uh…” Danny had glanced at the crew roster on the memo but couldn’t remember the captain’s name now.

  “C. J. Brewster-Yarley!” James said in a whisper.

  Danny nodded, trying to recall why that name sounded familiar. When he flew the regional legs, he knew all the other pilots and flight attendants, but flying international changed all that. Since he was based at the largest hub and busiest airport in the world, with over six thousand international flights leaving every month, it was rare he flew with the same pilots. And if he did, it was long enough ago that he couldn’t remember their names. He kind of liked it, though, because each trip meant he’d get to meet a few new interesting people.

  “She’s the one!”

  “The one?” Danny asked.

  James looked like an explanation might be too exhausting, but he went ahead with it anyway. “Remember? She crash-landed in the Bermuda Triangle nine years ago. It’s the last recorded water landing of a jetliner.”

  He did remember. Who could forget? Everyone survived.

  According to accounts, it happened exactly like it was supposed to. Thanks to the calm voice of the captain directing them, passengers evacuated in a civil manner into lifeboats. It wasn’t until after they were rescued that any of the passengers realized they had been sitting right in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.

  It became a sensational story. Every major news magazine covered it, thanks to footage from a helicopter that was giving tours over the islands. Danny remembered that the captain refused to be interviewed, so all accounts were from the rest of the crew or passengers. He’d wondered why she hadn’t wanted to tell her story.

  “She’s a legend,” James continued, “and not just because of that crash-landing either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve just heard a few stories, that’s all.”

  “What kinds of stories?”

  “You don’t know about the blog?”

  “What blog?”

  “The blog started about her. If you fly with her, you add a comment about your experience. It’s all anonymous. You should read some of them. They are so hilarious.”

  The door swung open, and nine flight attendants streamed in, escorted by a woman whose pursed, fire red, and overly lined lips led the way. Before they even got into the room, the senior flight attendant made an impression that explained the lips.

  “I’m GiGi. Two capital G’s.” She threw up her arms. “We got a memo. Why are we having a meeting?”

  “It’s at the discretion of the captain,” Danny said.

  “Yes, I’m aware of that. But nothing in the memo indicated why and we’ve got plenty of things we need to be doing other than waiting around for a meeting.”

  James leaned in and made a cat noise, but GiGi had cat hearing. Every hair on her body stood on end. Even her eyebrows looked offended.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “No ma’am,” Danny tried.

  “Don’t you dare call me ma’am,” she snarled. “Why in the world do you think I went to the trouble of introducing myself as GiGi?”

  “This is going to be a long flight,” James whispered.

  “Would you shut up?” Danny whispered back, but it was too late. GiGi circled the table like an animal stalking prey, smacking her gum loudly. Danny got the feeling gum wasn’t the only thing going to be smacked.

  “I’m fifty-five years old,” she declared loudly, “and if you think I’m going to take a first officer’s lip for one second, then you’ll want to pack a parachute, because halfway across the Atlantic, you’re going to want to jump out.”

  Danny glanced at the other flight attendants, two men and six women. Two looked amused. The other four, their backs against the whiteboard, stood at attention.

  James cackled. “Whoa, there, little lady. Let me get a lasso and see if we can’t wrestle your hormones to the ground.”

  Instinctively, Danny stepped away from James as GiGi’s aqua-painted eyes widened in preparation for the death rays about to shoot out. But James had moved to the whiteboard. Popping off the lid of a dry-erase marker, he asked, “Do you know what flight number this is?”

  “Nineteen forty-five,” one of the flight attendants said.

  “You are a weird, little man,” GiGi growled from the other side of the room.

  “Don’t you see the connection?” James scribbled the flight number on the board. “This may not mean anything to you all,” he said, addressing the crowd, “but I bet it means something to our captain. Flight 19: five Avenger torpedo bombers disappeared off the coast of Florida, inside the Bermuda Triangle, never to be found again. One of two search planes disappeared as well.” James paused dramatically. “In 1945. Get it? This is Flight 1945.”

  “What does that have to do with us?” GiGi asked.

  “Captain Brewster-Yarley crash-landed inside the Bermuda Triangle and lived to tell about it. Except that’s the thing—she won’t tell about it. And according to the blog, you should never, ever ask her about it.”

  Then, as if she had materialized right into the room, everyone noticed the captain.

  Danny cleared his throat. GiGi turned, regarded the captain with little more than a glance, then stepped aside, her eyes still glued to James. But James’s full attention was on Captain Brewster-Yarley.

  Her coarse, gray blond hair was cut like Princess Diana’s, poofed and frizzed as if it had never seen a hair product. She didn’t make eye contact with anybody as she opened a folder she held, scanning it with tired-looking eyes. Her thin, shapeless lips were colorless to the point that her teeth were the only thing setting them apart from her face. A hint of color on her cheeks might’ve helped her look like she didn’t belong in a coffin, but the only color on her was a shiny, gold tie tack.

  “Weather could be a problem,” she mumbled. “Might hit some turbulence. Could be a storm coming out of Canada, but this comes from people who claimed it would rain this morning.” She closed her folder. Still without making eye contact with anyone, and in a voice Danny strained to hear, she asked, “Anyone have any questions?”

  Danny wasn’t certain James would live long enough to ask any questions if GiGi had anything to do with it.

  If James’s expression was a one-hundred-watt, long-lasting bulb, and if GiGi’s was mood lighting, the captain would be a night-light. Yet even the tiniest movement on her face could be seen by everyone in the room. She looked at the whiteboard.

  “I was born in 1945.”

  Danny wasn’t sure if he should nod as if that was an interesting and ironic bit of trivia, or whether in honor of GiGi, he should pretend that birth year was a moot point. He stood motionless, hoping everybody would focus on James, who looked like he wanted more information. He was nodding eagerly, grinning like it was his birthday or like he might be high on dry-erase fumes.

  The captain glanced back down at her folder. “We’ll have an impaired woman onboard. We’ll also have a Dutch prisoner being escorted back to the Netherlands by the FBI.” She gave the whiteboard a long glance, then her gaze circled the room and she left.

  Danny let out the breath he was holding. James flung his arms wide. “Whoa! Whoa!”

  GiGi marched across the room, her finger pointed at James. “I don’t want any lip from you. Do you understand me? I eat first officers for breakfast.”

  James smirked. “Obviously you’re not missing any meals.”

  A hot, stinging sensation shot through Danny’s chest. He’d never thought one could die from cringing, but for a brief moment he thought he might drop dead.

  James winked. “See you onboard, sweetheart.”

  GiGi spun on her heel, knocked her way through her fellow flight attendants, and marched out of the room. The others, glancing back at James and Danny, followed her out.

  Danny turned to James. “What are you doing?”

  “They’re not
called Slam and Clicks for nothing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Can you believe it? Brewster-Yarley was born in 1945! That’s unbelievable!”

  What was unbelievable was that she hadn’t been bought out by the airline to take early retirement. She was old by airline standards, especially these days. They walked out of the conference room, and James headed toward the stairwell. Danny hung back, hoping James would just keep walking and talking, but after a moment he turned and waited for him.

  “She was born in 1945. This is Flight 1945. It has the number 19 in it. Flight 19 was the most famous Bermuda Triangle disappearance recorded.”

  “Fascinating. Listen, why are you harassing the flight attendants? We’re going to be spending hours and hours with them. The last thing we want is for them to give us a hard time.”

  “Ignore the Slam and Clicks, Danny. They think they’re all that, and they’ll raise Cain, you know? Then we land and what do they want? Dinner. On us. Every one of them thinks they’re entitled to dinner on the pilots. I’ve actually seen them eat lobster dinners, wipe their mouths, and then get up and leave.”

  Danny sighed. It had happened a time or two with him, but not always. Most of the time the group didn’t stick together anyway. He was about to question exactly what “Slam and Click” meant when James started talking again.

  “I won’t lie. This is making me nervous. I mean, I’m not a numbers guy, you know? I watch Lost with the rest of the country, and I do find the Hurley’s number thing fascinating, but I don’t really believe in meaning behind a sequence of numbers.”

  “Unless of course you’re flying, where latitudes and longitudes come in handy.”

  “Funny.” James stopped and turned to him. “It could happen to us.”

  “Murdered by flight attendants? Yeah, I think that’s a real possibility.”

  “No. The curse.”

  “What curse?”

  A look of disbelief crossed James’s face. “Haven’t you heard the stories? About the captain?”

  What was this? The grassy knoll of the skies?

  James groaned and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Danny moved past him and finished the stairs, emerging into the terminal area where he hoped to disappear into the sea of people. But it was early, and there was no sea. Just a sidewalk puddle’s worth of people, hardly enough to get lost in.

  “You have got to read the blog. It’s legendary! Ever since that Bermuda Triangle landing, at least once a year, something really bizarre happens to her. She’s had an eagle hit her windshield. Her landing gear has gotten stuck four times. Remember that London flight where all those people had that strange flulike thing and had to be quarantined on the Tarmac because they thought it was the bird flu? That was her!”

  “If we get lucky, maybe Sasquatch will be onboard.”

  “So you think the Triangle is a crock?”

  “I’ve flown through it hundreds of times. It’s a body of water. Just as many accidents happen everywhere else.”

  “In 1991, a salvage ship found five Avengers in six hundred feet of water off the coast of Florida. But when they went down there, it wasn’t Flight 19.”

  Danny had met his fair share of people. He’d learned to get along with a host of different personalities—captains with a lot to prove, first officers who were atheists, flight attendants who were lonely and hoped not to be by the time they touched down. Every once in a while, though, he had the unfortunate luck of flying with someone who caused his nerves to hum the Close Encounters theme.

  “Huh.” Maybe if he sounded like he was buying it, this guy would back off. It seemed to work. With a satisfied smile, James plopped his hat on top of his dome-shaped head.

  “I hear she’s weird too,” James added after they’d walked a bit.

  By James’s standards, Danny wasn’t sure if weird would have a solid definition to stand on.

  “I mean, like, really weird.”

  Well, that cleared things up.

  “As long as she can fly an airplane, I don’t care if she’s Amelia Earhart reincarnated,” Danny said.

  He wished he’d stuck with “huh,” as James launched into a long explanation of why Amelia’s plane was never recovered.

  Chapter 5

  On any ordinary plane trip, Lucy Meredith would not have chosen to wear stilettos. She wasn’t great at wearing them anyway, and practicing long strides with any kind of elegance while dragging three suitcases and a Jimmy Choo bag made her calf muscles quiver.

  Hoping her off-the-shoulder red polka-dot blouse with matching headband did enough to distract from her imbalance, Lucy struggled to the ticket counter. Parking her sunglasses on the top of her head, she attempted to lift her biggest bag onto the scale.

  The agent behind the counter gave a disapproving scowl as he helped her with it. “Well,” he said, glancing at the scale, “you’re over the weight limit. That will cost an extra seventy-five dollars, unless you want to dump a few things in the garbage can.”

  The symbolism didn’t escape her. She was bringing a lot of baggage on this trip, in more ways than one.

  “I’m going on a two-week trip to the Netherlands,” Lucy stated. “How do they expect you to pack for two weeks with two tiny bags and a carry-on?”

  “Last name?” asked the man, who clearly couldn’t care less.

  “Meredith.”

  “I said your last name.”

  Lucy dug into her purse, found her e-ticket, and handed it over to the agent along with her passport, driver’s license, and a suitable pout.

  Glancing at the bag on the scale he said, “I’ll need a credit card too.”

  “Fine.”

  Why not? She had already racked up a ton of money on her credit cards just to go on this trip. Why not pay a little extra to make sure all her baggage came along?

  Thankfully, her second bag was underweight by one pound. The agent handed over her boarding pass, and she could finally take advantage of the feeling that she looked like a million bucks. Whisking her hair and purse over her shoulder, she wheeled her carry-on toward security.

  With total confidence, she handed the TSA employee her boarding pass, then reached down, pulled her shoes off and flung them over her shoulder, holding them by the straps with a single finger.

  “Ma’am,” the older woman said, “you don’t need to remove your shoes yet. You have a ways to go in the security line.”

  Lucy only smiled and wiggled her beautifully pedicured toes, painted red with small white polka dots.

  It was time to live a little, to let go of convention. Convention said that if you were having a midlife crisis at the age of twenty-six, you should go to Las Vegas or an all-inclusive resort in Mexico. Instead, Lucy decided to go Dutch.

  And not without good reason.

  Go Dutch—the defining moment when Lucy had realized that not once, but twice now, she had been dumped by a man into whom she’d poured her entire life.

  It was a Friday in May when she’d suggested a quaint Italian bistro she’d seen reviewed in a newspaper. Lately, they’d done nothing more than stay in, order pizza, and rent a movie. She’d spent four hours in a department store picking the exact right dress. To her, bistro was Italian for “new outfit.”

  The evening went as planned until the waiter set the bill between them. She watched Jeff’s face strain to remain expressionless, and then, like the cork of a wine bottle, out popped the words, “Let’s go Dutch.”

  At first, she thought he was proposing, since he’d always dreamed of taking her to the Netherlands.

  Turned out he wanted to split more than the bill.

  It made sense to Lucy to travel to the very place that made her realize the man she thought loved her couldn’t invest in her dinner, much less her life.

  She planned the trip carefully. Though she’d never been in therapy, she imagined a therapist would tell her to face the pain in her life, and what better way to say to yourself you’re ready to move on than to take on a
n entire country?

  She’d determined to visit dairy farms, learn to plant tulips, channel Anne Frank, attempt to understand Rembrandt beyond what it did for her teeth, try on at least one pair of clogs, and only read books by dead female authors.

  Jeff would never see her in this outfit, and that, she believed, was what was so empowering about it. She wore it for herself, not Jeff. She wore it just for the sheer joy of what a polka dot can do for your mood.

  Finally making it to the conveyer belt, she placed her carry-on, purse, shoes, and a quart-sized Ziploc bag in a bucket, then flashed a grin at the man waving a wand. Her fairy-godfather. He didn’t smile back, but he was probably trained not to. Very self-disciplined, the man who resists the smile of a woman in polka dots.

  She put her stilettos back on and walked toward her gate, breathing deeply and assuring herself that no matter what, she was not going to fall apart over this. For the first time in her life, she was seeing clearly.

  Lucy pushed open the door to the bathroom near her gate and hauled her bag across the tile toward the first stall. But when she opened the stall door, she yelped.

  So did the man curled up on top of the toilet, clutching his stomach. “What do you want?” he shouted. Thankfully, he was fully clothed.

  Lucy stumbled backward, bumping into the stall door behind her. It flung open, and she lost her balance. She sat on the adjacent toilet, grabbing at the toilet paper to keep herself from falling in.

  After half of the paper unrolled and the door stopped swinging, Lucy tried to compose herself, which was no small thing considering one stiletto lay a foot away and she was, well, sitting on a toilet.

  “Get out,” Lucy said.

  “Me?” the man said. “You get out!”

  “Sir,” Lucy said in a firm but kind tone, “you are in the women’s bathroom.”

  The man sat up a little and leaned forward, his hand still on his stomach. “No, you’re in the men’s bathroom.”

  “Please!” Lucy reached for her shoe. It was inches from her fingers when she got a clear view of the evidence that immediately proved her wrong. Urinals! She quickly gathered her shoe, her suitcase, her bag, and what was left of her dignity. How could she not have noticed this was the men’s bathroom?