by Joan Barfoot
One thing about fate is that it’s a very grand concept. A huge idea to fit oversized characters. Far too big to apply to someone like her. Or to Tom, for that matter. There must be someone else on this plane great enough to warrant fate.
Or maybe it’s a cumulative thing, and this is a whole planeload of ordinary people who’ve been tempting fate in smallish ways, being brought down together. How efficient.
Nobody good with facts would have spent her career fiddling about with ideas and stories whose reality, unlike Tom’s, was only in the mind.
She notices her own past tense. As a teacher, she knows that is a significant alteration in style.
She’s so goddamned cold. This can’t be happening. There is nothing she can think about, or do, that can make this not be happening.
“Look,” says Tom, touching her arm. Yes, there’s Sheila, she’s made it to the front of their set of rows in this frenzied cabin, and she’s standing on something, a seat, waving her arms in broad sweeps like one of those ground crew people guiding a plane to a halt at an airport terminal. In night landings, Lila recalls, there are lights at the ends of those wide, sweeping arms.
And there are terminals. Ground. Warmth and lights. Long waits at customs and at luggage carousels. The slightly odd, stiff feeling of legs moving, feet touching, after so long in the air. The small disorientation of being in one place after so recently being elsewhere.
Barely imaginable. Infinitely desirable.
Not everyone is quick to abandon panic. How ungainly and inelegant people become when they’re frightened—where exactly do they think they can scramble to, with everyone sealed up in this soup can? What do they think would happen if they did get out? Are they in such a hurry for that dark, frozen instant? It’s a few moments before Sheila, and presumably the other attendants elsewhere, gain some silence and order. Sheila looks, to Lila’s eye, scared but holding on. No doubt flight attendants are trained in crisis and control; but the classroom, as Lila well knows herself, isn’t preparation for much of anything beyond more classrooms.
If Sheila is scared, must this not be real?
Susie is sobbing, that’s one of the remaining sounds. Her mother is stroking her hair and rocking her but looks inattentive, staring blankly ahead. Can Susie tell that her mother isn’t quite with her? Does she know there are limits to her protection?
Even so, it would be nice to curl up in protecting arms. Tom’s arms would be nice. Ideally, they could cradle each other.
“I’m scared,” Susie is wailing. “Make it stop.” She speaks, no doubt, for everyone, but Lila wishes she’d be quiet. Some things, it’s too much, hearing them said out loud.
“Please,” Sheila is calling out, in a carefully non-panicky way. “May I have your attention, please. Could everyone take your seats, please, and listen.”
How polite, all those pleases. What a nice child Sheila must have been, so well brought up by, Lila imagines, doting, careful parents. Did they, unlike Tom, want their daughter to be a flight attendant, or would they have preferred law or medicine or motherhood? Were they disappointed by her choice, or proud? How sad they will be to have trained their daughter to such responsible politeness, and to have it come to this.
So many people don’t hear authority in the voices of nice women. Would it help if Lila stood up and shouted, “Everybody, shut fucking up”? Lila had a fairly dainty upbringing herself, but has overcome it.
Still, Sheila’s labours have their effect. Most people, both eager and fearful for word, do settle well enough. Lila’s hands tremble and Tom takes one of them, it hardly matters whether to comfort or be comforted himself.
Everyone is looking at Sheila, but the voice, when it comes, is not hers. Nor is it the thin voice of the pilot that they heard after takeoff. What’s happened to him, is he just very busy?
No, this voice is deep, soothing and calm. Disembodied. Like God beginning to speak all around them.
Well, whoever is up there in the cockpit will have to be pretty god-like, that’s for sure. All those hands will need to be terribly adept, their brains unclouded and sharp. They will require a keen sense of reality indeed. Lila is glad she hasn’t met or even seen them. It leaves her free to hope and imagine they are much smarter and more powerful and shrewd and rational than anyone she knows.
Anyone who gets them out of this is more than welcome in her living room. They could be her best friends. Anything. She no longer has frivolous criteria, such as affection, for who may enter her house. She just longs to be there herself. Given the chance, she would never leave it again.
“Ladies and gentleman,” the voice is saying, slowly and firmly, “may I have your attention.” Lila notices he doesn’t say please. Most people are quiet, and some, like the big man by the emergency exit, even tip their heads towards the sound. Still, there’s whimpering and sobbing here and there, and away on the other side of the cabin and off to the back, somebody is crying out, “No, no, no,” over and over. It sounds like an elderly, tremulous, female voice, but might well, in these circumstances, belong to a young, muscular man.
Lila imagines all sorts of appearances boiling away, leaving behind only essences.
“Ladies and gentlemen. This is your co-pilot, Frank McLean, speaking. As you are aware by now, we are experiencing some difficulties.” Difficulties! Does he think they are fools? Still, how would Lila put it, in his place? He can hardly say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a nasty little fire going here, and we’re about to plummet ten thousand metres, and if the fall doesn’t kill you, the landing certainly will.”
Oops. “Lila!” Tom is frowning. Did she laugh out loud again?
Sheila has stopped waving her arms and appears to be listening herself. How young she is, at least compared with Lila, if not, say, with Susie. Lila ought to feel grateful to have had so much more time.
Sheila must be pretty brave to stand on that seat, surveying the passengers, probably trying to gauge where trouble may erupt, who is most upset, and in what ways, and how they may have to be dealt with. Trying to look calm and strong herself; although she must also be assessing her own chances, wishing for lost joys, mourning lost years.
Maybe this morning, she was pulling herself slowly from the arms of a suitably young, ardent man, and dressing quietly in the dark, sorry to leave him, trying not to wake him, already missing him.
Or maybe she leapt up happily from her solitary sheets, turning on lights and the radio, dressing quickly, buttoning her blouse and drawing on her stockings, tying that vivid red scarf around her throat with eager fingers, anticipating love in another country at the end of this day.
Or there’s Susie, just a little kid, with breasts and pleasures and choices and disasters and passions and pains and regrets all ahead of her. “My ears hurt,” she cries from the sanctuary of her mother’s arms. “My head hurts. Make it stop.” How touching, that sort of faith.
Again, Susie is speaking for everyone, and again, Lila thinks it might be better for some things not to be put right out into the air like that.
It’s true there’s a drumming, and a kind of heavy sharpness. She sees a few people shaking their heads as if trying to dislodge an irritant, others poking fingers into their ears. Some are yawning, which usually works when pressures are changing. This feeling, whatever it is, isn’t actually painful, despite Susie’s complaints, but it does seem to create a sort of buzzing. Tom is also frowning and shaking his head. What’s on his mind? Their thoughts, his and Lila’s, are almost certain to be different in these circumstances.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the deep, dark voice is saying again. It must be nice, Lila thinks, to have so many people hanging on every word. Certainly different from standing in front of a classroom. Of course, this man has a captive audience. Nobody’s likely to get bored and wander off.
This time, Tom pokes her. He is really getting annoying. It’s her turn
to frown. Any relationship is much more than love. It also, if it has any life to it, involves delicate balancings, little tugs and pulls of power, shiftings of position. Briefly, she glares at him, because in love, it’s more than love that people need to be alert to.
Still, this is no time to fall out of touch. “Listen,” she says, and grips his hand hard.
five
The voice fills the air of the cabin. Or sucks it out. “What we are dealing with, as most of you are already aware, involves one of our engines.”
Engines? Lila almost turns to look again: it seemed to her the trouble was the fire on the wing. But then, engines are probably attached to wings, so any problems with one will be shared, willy-nilly, with the other. Like herself and Tom: a disagreement with his wife, or for that matter a moment of tenderness, naturally slips into Lila’s existence in some unspoken, barely discernible fashion. Or a truculent student, a difficult paper, an evening or weekend of missing him, naturally ripples out of her, tipping into him.
And unlike her and Tom (actually more like Tom and his wife), parts of planes are bolted and welded together. So of course they affect each other, how stupid of her.
“What some of you have been able to see is a very small amount of fire”—does fire come in amounts?—“and there are several connected issues relating to stability and pressure. Your crew wants to reassure you that these circumstances may appear more serious than they are.” May, implying, just as easily, may not. “The important thing at the moment is to remain calm.”
Not necessarily. Calm is good, but keeping the plane in the air until it can land safely and peacefully where it’s supposed to would be infinitely preferable; which doesn’t mean bedlam isn’t also dangerous.
“As those of you familiar with this type of aircraft will know,” and this does not include Lila, who has no idea what sort of plane they’re flying in, except it’s big and, she hopes, sturdy, “we have four engines, which means we have flexibility in dealing with that aspect of our current difficulty. So that a problem with one, while unusual and unfortunate, would not be a unique occurrence.”
Really? Lila bets it’s a unique occurrence to everyone in this cabin, and likely unique to those in the cockpit, as well, unless they’ve had exceptionally unlucky careers. Some people (her mother was one) find comfort in the notion that at least others are enduring similar, or worse, misfortunes. Lila, on the other hand, considers “I’m not the only one” an odd proposition. It’s no help to her if Tom, or Susie and her mother, or the big guy by the emergency exit, go down with her, and her own destination hardly improves theirs. How on earth would it?
“As to the fire itself, we are confident the aircraft’s normal design and safety features will deal with that.” And what, exactly, does “deal with” mean? This whole speech strikes Lila as ominously padded and fluffy, with too many vague, rolling words and too few crisp-edged, clear ones. She would personally prefer to hear words like “extinguish” or “douse” or simply “put out.”
“We also want to assure you that your flight crew is highly experienced and dedicated to the safety of each one of you. Your captain, Luke Thomas, who spoke to you earlier, has been a pilot for eighteen years, and has asked me to advise you that he has every confidence in achieving a safe conclusion to this flight.”
Luke Thomas—now there’s a solid name, a name to be trusted and reckoned with, a name with hair on its chest, and maybe even its back. Pity about his voice. Lila wonders, do his skills more resemble his name or his voice?
“As well, we are in communication with advisers at our departure location and also with those at several potential destinations, and we are continuing to evaluate a number of alternatives. You will be told of any decisions that affect you, for instance if a different landing location, such as Reykjavik in Iceland, is determined to be preferable to Heathrow.” Small subsidiary sounds of discontent rise up among the listeners; the thought of Iceland as distressing as the ocean? Surely not.
“Meanwhile, rest assured everything possible is being done.” Lila hears mournful medical tones trying to cushion bad news: “We’re doing everything possible,” a sentence, in her small experience, of virtually certain doom.
That small experience came during three brief, endless days between the morning her brother’s child was hit by a car and the late afternoon he died—doctors and nurses repeating and repeating those words, necessary but unbearable to hear.
Unbearable, also, watching over the tiny blond three-year-old who had been lively and glinting but now was abruptly broken and wired, tubed and wrecked. Lila, leaning over him, recalled with regret her irritation at his loud, high voice and his recklessness with delicate objects. His gravest recklessness, it now turned out, was with himself.
Poor helpless Sam, gazing up, wondering why the people he trusted didn’t just fix him; as Susie, wrapped whimpering in her mother’s arms, may be wondering much the same thing.
No one could fix anything. Don and his wife, Alice, couldn’t fix themselves or each other, both blaming Alice, although more or less silently, for their darting child’s impulse to dodge between parked cars into the street. The horrified, trembling driver of the car that hit him said, and the police agreed, that there was nothing that could have been done.
The only thing that could have been done was to keep him safer, hold him closer, not let the eye wander for even an instant, and this his mother had failed to do. Naturally his mother. Lila thought it could as easily have been his father, Don, her brother, except he was at work and free of keeping an eye, keeping near.
Lila loves her brother, although she doesn’t always entirely like him, and imagines he feels similarly about her. She liked Alice well enough, a nice woman of modest, ruined hopes. She had struck Lila before this event as wispy and undefined, but her suffering turned out to be not wispy at all. It was loud and terrible and could not be helped, her grief rolling far beyond words into raw, howling purity. Don just rocked, arms clutching only himself.
If Lila could hardly contain herself and her helplessness to repair or undo, it must have been immeasurably worse for Alice and Don. Each of them. They remained separate in the aftermath, too, Alice with her splayed anguish, Don with his pale, silent mourning and evident blame.
In the long hospital hours, Alice and Don waited, waited, refusing to change clothes, or to eat, or to rest; whereas to Lila it seemed urgent to go home and then reappear showered and clean, in sharply ironed outfits, as if order of even that ordinary sort could restore order in the rest of their disrupted universe.
Everything was vivid beyond endurance; nothing could be muted, dimmed, turned down. The moment Lila stepped off the elevator at Sam’s hospital floor, piercing smells cut at her nostrils, and high, remote lights began assaulting her eyes. The crispness of starched uniforms on nurses hurrying through corridors came to her ears as rasping, maddening static.
The words she mainly remembers are: “We’re doing everything we can,” and “Everything possible is being done.”
“These awful things happen,” people said. “Tragic, just a terrible, tragic accident.” All true words. Obviously there are limits to what true words can repair.
Like Don, Lila was furious with grief; but while his rage was mainly at Alice, Lila’s was at unfairness, the betrayal of assumptions and hopes, and at sorrow itself: Don’s, Alice’s and, most profoundly, Sam’s.
Lila hasn’t seen Alice since the divorce twelve years ago. She often sees Don and his second wife, Anne, and their three children, two daughters and a little boy. They are lovely kids, friendly as puppies. Lila is a more patient and attentive aunt than she used to be, as Don is a more patient and attentive father.
Robbie’s four now, so has already outlived Sam. There’s no forgetting, but life does go on, reconfiguring itself, patching over even the worst leaks and gaps that occur.
As it would go on without Lila, no question.<
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Who would miss her?
Tom, she hopes, would top the mourning list, if he weren’t right here beside her. Otherwise, mainly, Patsy and Nell, sturdy comrades of years of laughter, achievements, sorrows, misunderstandings, secrets, and gallons of chocolate, oceans of wine.
Tears come to her own eyes, preparing to miss them.
But that’s stupid. If she dies, she’ll be gone and won’t miss a thing. She hopes they’d miss her, though. And she’d have gone in such a spectacular way, there’d be that to remember as well. She would be an actual story, a character in a lively, public event, not merely a fond, personal memory.
Poor Tom, he must be considering entirely different family matters.
“At the same time,” the voice is continuing, “since we should be prepared for all eventualities, our flight attendants will shortly be repeating and augmenting their earlier safety instructions and pointing out emergency precautions and equipment. They would be grateful for your complete attention.” No problem this time, Lila bets. Everyone will be riveted, and no one will consider the attendants’ gestures outlandish.
“Again, let me assure you we have full confidence in landing safely, and ask that everyone continue to act in a calm and responsible fashion. There is nothing to be gained by becoming overly concerned about difficulties that will almost certainly be resolved.”
He sounds to Lila like a man hedging his bets, that “almost” a dead giveaway.
So to speak. But she mustn’t laugh.
Tom’s hand is no longer exactly holding hers, it’s just kind of lying there, limp. Sometimes, on those rare occasions they’ve been able to sleep together overnight, she has wakened with a feeling of being smothered, controlled by an arm or a leg slung heavily across her, and has needed frantically, carefully, to ease herself free.
Perhaps instead, she should have cultivated the ability to endure being pinned.
“Please stay in your seats and ensure your seatbelts are fastened. After their safety demonstration, your flight attendants will be offering soft drinks, coffee and tea, compliments of the airline. They will not be serving further alcoholic beverages, as we’re sure you will understand. The attendants will also endeavour to answer any questions you may have, but they may not be fully able to do so. The aircraft is complex and so, of course, are some of the measures being taken to ensure our safe arrival.”
