by Rea Frey
In my condo, after I changed into pajamas, ordered takeout, and drank too many glasses of wine, my cell rang.
“Hi, Dad. Right on time.”
“Am I that predictable?”
“Yes. You’re like the news. Except less depressing.”
He chuckled, which reminded me of sandpaper against gritty wood. All the years of crying had left his voice weaker than it should have been.
“So, what’s up?”
“Just want to see what my favorite daughter is doing.”
“That joke never gets old.” I stretched and stifled a yawn. “Just traveling the world, working myself toward an early retirement. You?”
“Oh, you know…” A shuffle of papers filled the silence, perhaps the collection of bills he kept neatly stacked by the telephone, or the daily newspaper, folded into thirds. “Busy too.”
We both knew that busy meant spending nights on the couch or occasionally taking a walk around his neighborhood. My father no longer worked long hours, or very much. His zest for sales had waned with his zest for life. He lived the simplest way one could, his mortgage wiped clean from a Christmas present after my second year in business. The only real expenses in his life were utilities, the upkeep for his beloved Mustang, and whiskey. I checked the time, knowing he was probably a third of a handle in.
“I want to come see you soon, okay? I’ve just got a big trip coming up, but then I can come visit for a few days. How does that sound? Or you can always come here…” It was the same suggestion I made every time he called. Come to Portland. Get out of your comfort zone.
“I can’t get away anytime soon, but I’d love it if you could make it here.” His tone shifted. “I thought since you and Ethan broke up, you’d visit a bit more.”
“Well, you know, I’ve got a business to run, Dad.” The defensiveness sliced across the line, and I immediately retracted it. “Sorry. You know what I mean. It’s just filling all my time.”
He didn’t respond, but I could feel him nodding on the other end. Filling time had been his entire life’s work after my mother. He was an expert at it. We both were.
“Well, kiddo, I hope to see you soon.”
“Me too, Dad. Love you.”
“Love you too. Be safe.”
I hung up, no more satisfied than before he’d called. Every time the phone rang, I expected something to be different: for him to go overboard with his last drink, to have a wild night out and get arrested, to commit sloppy suicide, to tell me he’d met someone. But the years passed in the same linear pattern, only my successes dictating the difference between yesterday and today. Despite all of my efforts to improve his life, nothing ever changed.
* * *
My flight for Ethiopia left Thursday. I’d told Madison to book the cheapest flight, not realizing that cheap meant indirect. I was flying from PDX to Calgary. Then from Calgary, I’d head to Toronto, and after an interminable layover, I’d finally descend into Addis Ababa after a twenty-eight-hour flight. It wasn’t the first time I’d done it, but as I looked at my ticket, I realized it would be the first time I wasn’t in first class.
I edged through the security line and plucked a gray bin from the pile, shoving my shoes and computer into separate containers. I hated this part, how cumbersome travel had become, how invasive. I organized my bag on the belt, mentally running through my to-do list when I touched down in Ethiopia.
Once, Ethan and I had talked about adopting a girl from Ethiopia due to the extreme local sex trafficking—how our daughter would wear her heritage like a badge, how we’d visit her native country, make authentic Ethiopian cuisine, and expose her to all sorts of cultures and customs. Was he ever serious about any of it, about me? Did I somehow miss some giant, obvious sign?
I shook my head. I was always looking for signs. A bit superstitious, I made constant deals with myself, as though these deals would culminate in some life-changing event: If there are five babies on the plane, it won’t crash. If I just say yes to this client, I’ll get into Forbes. If the light turns green when I count to three, I won’t complain for the rest of the day. If I don’t eat dessert today, I can have Mexican tomorrow.
I yawned and waited for the people beside me to get situated and keep the line going by pushing their bins into the machine. My mind was already somewhere else—on a huge, generic coffee and the gossipy magazine I’d buy—when I saw her.
Something inside me wrenched. A little girl, not more than five or six, stood in a red dress with shiny sequins attached to a full skirt that swished when she moved. A red bow perched on her mousy brown ponytail. Slippers that could have been a match for Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz hugged compact, white feet. She looked like Christmas. I watched her with a smile on my lips and felt, foolishly, like I recognized her; she was so familiar, she could have been my very own.
“Emma, stop! What are you doing? I said stop it!”
To my right, a short, overweight woman in a navy shirt and tight jeans was yelling at her daughter. Her face bloomed with angry red sores (acne? eczema? rosacea?), and she exhaled as she adjusted an exhausted-looking toddler on her hip. Behind her stood the girl in red. She stepped forward, shoes sparkling, but her mother shoved her out of the way, as if she were an attacker on the street and not her own flesh and blood. The girl stumbled back, and I instinctively reached out to catch her.
The father stood beside them, lean and pasty, oblivious to what his wife had just done. He was busy shooting off a text, then pocketed his phone. Their bags spilled around their feet. The mother struggled to lift a suitcase onto the conveyor belt while still holding the toddler, and the dad grabbed the same bag in an attempt to help.
“That’s my arm! What are you doing?”
“I was just helping you. Jesus.”
“Let go of my arm, Richard.” The woman stared accusingly at my bins. “We don’t have any bins. Now we’re not going to make our flight because we have no bins.”
“Well, what do you want me to do about the bins, Amy? Invent more bins?”
“I don’t know. Just stop talking. Stop saying bins like that! For the love of God, just please, please, please, stop talking.” Amy turned, her pocked jaw pulsing as she clenched her teeth. “Emma, I said stop it. What is wrong with you?” The girl was rocking back and forth on her heels, reaching for her mother’s fingers. Every time the mother knocked her fingers away, Emma would come back and touch a different part of her mother’s body: her waist, her elbow, her hips. Her small cuticles were chewed and bloody, and I noticed a faded bruise on the girl’s left wrist.
“Do you even want to try and make this flight, Richard?”
“Oh, stop right there. Don’t even try and blame me. This is your fault and you know it.”
“What’s my fault? The line? Not having bins? Not getting the kids out the door on time? This is an important day for me—”
“Yes, all of that. Your fault. Not mine.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Excuse me?”
He lifted his flimsy arms in surrender. “I’m just saying.”
They slopped the rest of their luggage on the belt and snatched a fresh stack of bins brought over by a worker. “Emma, go!” Emma was busy adjusting her parents’ gray bin, her brain having made the connection that they had turned it a different way from everyone else’s. “Stop touching that and go!” The mother reached one thick palm, fingers flexed, and pushed into the thin crease between the girl’s shoulder blades, forcing her arms to flap like wings. She continued to shove the little girl through the X-ray machine, where an airport guard motioned them over to have the mother’s hands swiped.
I stepped through the full-body scanner, my arms held above my head as they searched my body for hidden weapons. While I waited for confirmation that I wasn’t smuggling anything illegal, I saw Emma reach for her brother’s toes. Her mother wrenched her fingers backward, prying them free. She turned her back to the girl, but Emma c
lutched her sore hand and jumped up and down in an attempt to get her mother’s attention. The woman fussed with the toddler and snapped at the dad. And the girl, truly unable to get her mother to notice, finally gave up and stared off into space, disconnected, her hand folded protectively in the skirt of her red dress.
On the other side, I collected my belongings and looked at the guards, who were too busy directing, swiping, and yawning to notice. I waited for someone to acknowledge the mother’s aggressive behavior, while my boots and laptop sagged in my fingers.
I remembered so much about my mother then, the way she always walked ahead of me in parking lots, at the grocery store, or even crossing the street. I never knew if she was embarrassed by me or if she simply didn’t care. I always trailed behind her as an afterthought, trying to pepper her with compliments: “Mama, you look so beautiful today. Mama, I love your hair. Mama, I love that skirt.”
She would sigh in disgust and insist the only reason I was saying those things was because I was afraid of getting in trouble and not because I meant them. I could never do anything right, and it’s something I recognized in this little girl now, as she dragged her feet, kicked at the airport carpet, and waited for someone to just pay her some attention.
Having worked with children for years, I knew parents had off days. I knew the airport was the definition of family stress. I knew how little beings could take hold of your psyche and ravage you. I knew there were rare breaks and little explanation as to how they could suddenly, without warning, push you to the edge and shift you from pleasant to monstrous. I knew all of that, but seeing this outright act of cruelty for no apparent reason made me want to punch this woman in the face.
I moved out of the way, zipped my boots, and replaced my computer in my bag. I walked past the foursome, the dad busy pulling their bags from the conveyor belt. I slowed even more as I passed, my fingers so close I could touch the girl’s head. “I like your red bow,” I said. The three of them turned, the baby’s reflexes not yet up to par with his family’s. In that moment, Emma’s face relaxed back into a little girl’s, and she began to smile. “It’s so pretty,” I said. I kept walking, not looking back, trying to shake these people from my conscience.
After waiting in a line that snaked around the Starbucks kiosk, the brain fog disappeared as I took my first hurried sip. I bought a few magazines to go along with my novel, checked to make sure the flight wasn’t delayed, and let myself sink into ridiculous celebrity gossip. Halfway through my coffee and an article about Hollywood women caught on camera without makeup, I looked up. There, at the gate to the left of mine, stood the couple. Arguing.
“Go!” Amy pushed Emma. She snagged her red shoe on the carpet and pitched forward, skidding to a stop on her knees and elbows.
The mother, rolling her eyes, hoisted the baby higher and jerked Emma up by her elbow. I watched the red splotches erupt on her arm, splotches that would later bruise and turn purple. Emma pulled herself up and rubbed her sore elbow and carpet-burned knees.
The couple harrumphed about and sat in chairs on the other side of the gate. They moved around each other with such agitation, it was as though someone were on the verge of detonating. Only Emma, the victim in all of this, seemed unruffled, humming and playing with her shoes, while her mother sighed so loudly, you could hear it across the terminal. She bounced the baby up and down until he looked sick.
I flipped through the glossy magazine pages, my mind fixated on the girl. I checked my phone. Still thirty minutes to board. As though on cue, the mother grabbed Emma by the wrist and started yanking her to the bathroom. Emma half-walked, half-ran behind her as the woman balanced the baby on one side and her daughter on the other. I waited a few beats, shouldered my carry-on bag, and followed.
Emma’s red shoes swung back and forth under one stall, her mother and brother at the end of the shotgun space, a dirty diaper being ripped off and shoved to the side of the fold-out changing table.
“Emma, hurry up.”
“Okay, Mama.”
I eyed the stalls—mostly empty—and ducked into one. The tops of the girl’s shoes strained to touch the ground. She kicked the front of the toilet with her dainty heels and hummed, which made me smile. After some maneuvering with the toilet paper dispenser, Emma flushed.
“Come into this stall. I need to go too. Watch Robert. Make sure he doesn’t hit his head or touch anything. I cannot afford for either one of you to get sick right now.”
They piled into the handicap stall on the end, the family’s shoes shuffling and shifting against the dirty tile. I flushed and prepared to exit, then stopped.
“Watch out for his foot, Emma! You almost stepped on him.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.” The little boy began to cry, and I could hear the mother struggling to pee and handle her two children. “Can you—Jesus, get him, Emma! He’s falling! Get out of the way!” A loud bang rattled the stall, and then Emma’s voice morphed into a whine.
“Listen to me right this instant, young lady! I have had it with you today, do you hear me? Stop this dramatic behavior, or we are going to cancel our trip. Do you understand?”
I leaned over the sink and started washing my hands. The door swung open and slammed against the wall. Emma’s face was red, her bow askew, her breath coming in shudders. I scanned her body for physical wounds but just saw the tears. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”
The mother jerked her head at me, jowls quivering. “Emma Grace, stop talking to strangers and wash your hands.”
We all washed our hands, and I locked eyes with the mother. She had sad eyes, as if her whole life were a lie. She looked away first, and I watched them go, hoisting my carry-on higher, unsure of what to do. A woman moved to the sink beside me and pumped the soap a few times.
“Did you hear any of that? Or did I just imagine it?”
The woman, older, tattooed, shook her head and rinsed her hands. “I heard it, but hey, it’s not your child, right? What can you do?”
What could I do? Report her to airport officials? Child Protective Services? Even I wasn’t that idiotic to think an incident in an airport bathroom stall under stressful conditions would warrant anything other than a mother’s right to scold—or possibly spank—her own child. I nodded at the woman and returned to the concourse, waiting for my group to board. I busied myself with my magazine, but I could still hear the mom, could see her pushing and pulling her daughter like an unwanted puppy on a fraying leash.
When it was time to board, I waited for them to call my seat. At the next gate, the family was lining up for their own flight, all of us going our separate ways.
I glanced once more at Emma, who looked almost glassy-eyed, her mother bumping her from behind to move faster, walk faster, go faster. A few heads swiveled as the family corralled at the boarding line, obviously surprised at the woman’s brash behavior and the girl’s tear-stained face.
I handed over my paper ticket—I refused to use my phone for any sort of travel in case of technological malfunctions—and craned my neck to the left to see Emma, waiting behind her mother to board a big steel bird and go to who knows where. Home? A vacation? Boarding school? I strained to see the destination listed on the board with her flight number, but couldn’t quite make it out.
I kept sight of her as long as I could before turning back toward my own gate, the temperature shifting as I walked closer toward the open mouth of the plane. But I couldn’t get that red bow out of my mind, or the girl’s eyes, or her sore elbow, or the loud bang, or her mother’s crusted, hateful face.
I couldn’t forget Emma.
I couldn’t forget.
during
My fingers tremble as I struggle to unlock the car doors, wedging open the back and then the driver’s side.
Emma peeks inside, high on her toes like a ballerina. “Where’s the car seat?”
I shove my bag into the back and look at her. “The what?”
“The car seat. Wh
ere is it?” A perfectly normal question under circumstances that are anything but.
I eye the naked backseat. “Oh shit.” The keys dangle by my side as Emma inhales.
“You said shit,” she whispers.
“I did. I did say shit. You’re right. I didn’t mean to. It’s just … I don’t have a car seat.” I look around, feeling time closing in. I prime my ears for police sirens. Beads of sweat cluster at my hairline. “Let’s just buckle you in really well and then we’ll figure it out, okay?” She nods as I help her up into the Tahoe, moving her behind the passenger seat so I can see her better while driving. I get in, hit the locks, locate the child lock, and press that too. “Okay. Think, think. It’s going to be okay.”
“Who are you talking to?”
I crane around to look at Emma, hope buzzing in my chest like a small swarm of bees. She is here, in my car! I did it! She’s safe! I soften my jaw until my face feels like putty and manage to mold my lips into a flimsy smile. “I’m just being silly and talking to myself.”
“What’s okay?”
“Everything’s okay. Is your seatbelt tight?” She nods. I throw the car into drive and release the parking brake. Before stepping on the gas, I punch in the directions to home. Longview is only an hour from my condo—probably too close for comfort. Should I take her somewhere else? The directions appear, and I follow the robotic voice. We drive in silence, Emma occasionally sniffling from the back. “Are you sick or anything, Emma? Do you have a cold?”
She wipes her nose with her palm and shakes her head no.
“Just stuffy?”
She nods, and her lips work into a small, chapped frown.
“Are you thirsty?” I dig into my bag for bottled water—courtesy of the hotel—and pass it back to her. She takes it, unscrews the lid, and drinks. The crackle of plastic fills the car as she guzzles the last drops of water and squeezes out all the bottle’s air.
