The airline had overbooked the plane, and the gate clerks kept asking for volunteers to take another flight. An apparently unmanageable number of people were waiting, the backup of four days without flights. It looked like the whole island wanted out. Through the tall windows opposite where she sat, you could see, beyond the tarmac and a span of grass and low-roofed buildings and skinny palms, Montego Bay.
She sat quite still, fighting sleep, with her purse and a newspaper in her lap. The newspaper was full of images of the destruction, but she could not concentrate on it. She saw the plane taxiing slowly into its place at the gate. It looked like the same kind of plane that had been flown into the towers. Near her, a heavy man—nearly Skinner’s size—was talking to a small woman, worrying aloud about fitting into a coach seat. “I usually always fly first class because of my girth,” he said. “Even though I’m not wealthy.”
“I’m sure it’ll be all right,” the woman muttered. Then: “Where are you seated?”
“Way back. Twenty-three A. The only one I could get. First class was completely booked before the shutdown.”
“Twenty-three A. Is that a window seat?”
Natasha tried to read. The flight had already been delayed an hour out of Dallas. There were so many other people trying to get somewhere, and for most of them, of course, somewhere was home. Home. She felt a blankness for an instant. What was home? Not a dwelling, not even the place of one’s blood relatives, finally. That was not home, not really; that was, in its way, without denying the love that might be there, where you belonged before you went out in the world. Just now, she felt nothing like the settled sense of one place where she belonged. Then she turned in herself and looked directly at what she did feel. Home was Michael Faulk. And she was home for him.
Now a sparse stream of people came from the gate and headed toward customs. They did not appear to be vacationers. Most of them looked Jamaican. It was not long before the last of them had exited. Natasha saw herself arriving fifteen days ago, remembering it like a brief waking dream, how happy she had been, anticipating a good time. Now it felt like remembering some sort of failure. Presently, a slender woman with dark green eyes and a tight blond bun tied at the top of her head took the little microphone from the console at the gate, called the number and destination of the flight, and said people could begin boarding. Natasha stood. Her back hurt. She could not imagine that the plane would fly safely to its destination: Miami. In line in front of her the large man stood, looking tired and worried. They were moving slowly, past the attendant and down a long corridor toward the jetway. As she got close to the entryway, she looked back into the busy high-ceilinged, white-lighted gate area with its blue seats and low tables, the crowd there. It looked like an exodus, people seeking refuge. Yet they seemed calm enough, preoccupied with their bags and their tickets. It was all completely ordinary looking. And then, as two elderly women moved to get into line and a small nattily dressed black man moved to stand where they had been, through the little open space created by their movements, she saw Nicholas Duego. He looked right at her with a surprised expression of intense concentration, a frown tinged with fright. Something dropped inside her. The bones of her legs felt as if they were turning to liquid, and she had to put her hand out to the wall. Evidently he had just seen her. But he did not look away.
She turned, hefted her purse, held it at her middle, feeling the shudder come, the trembling. There was no movement in the line. She thought she might be sick.
The big man in front of her coughed, then moved to the side a little and bent down to reach into his bag, apologizing. Whatever he was looking for was not there. He straightened and looked at her. “I’m sorry, would you happen to have any Kleenex?”
She opened her purse and found a little packet at the bottom. She handed it to him and watched him open it, and she saw the little spiral shapes of white, like facets in marbles, inside the buttons down the front of his shirt. There were two more buttons holding his collar down. She noted them and noted the same spiral shapes. Little details that were solid and dependable. She looked down the line toward the left turn into the jet and saw the others. The heavy man used three Kleenexes out of the packet and then tried to hand the packet back to her.
“You keep it,” she told him, or thought she told him. He stood there holding it out. Finally she pushed his hand away.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, still not certain that the words had actually left her lips.
He pushed the packet into the top of her purse, smiled reassuringly, then went on. She followed in a kind of daze. She did not look back, and when she came to the doorway she put one hand out and held on to the steel frame of it. Waiting there was a square-faced, middle-aged blond woman, the flight attendant, who smiled and greeted her and then caught her as she tumbled forward. It was only a second, but in that second she had lost consciousness. The flight attendant’s grip was strong, and she held her.
“I’m okay,” Natasha said, low. “Please.”
“Looks like you went out for a second, honey. You all right?”
“Fine, yes.”
“Want help to your seat? I think we’ll help you to your seat.”
“I’m fine. No.” She moved into the cabin, past the people staring at her in first class, on down the narrow aisle, stopping to wait while others put bags in the overhead bin. Her own seat was 25C. An aisle seat. A young woman and a child were in the middle and window seats. The child, white as paste and too thin, was at the window. His mother was already reading a book. Natasha took the seat, and the woman turned to smile at her. Natasha saw her brown eyes and the little blemish on her right cheek.
“Hi. At last, we can fly out of here,” the woman said.
Natasha thought she nodded.
“Where’re you from?”
“Wa—,” she began. “I’m sorry. Memphis.”
The woman offered her hand. “Durham, North Carolina.”
Natasha took it, felt the warmth of it, the roughness of the underside of the fingers.
“I’m a sculptor. I work in wood.” It was as though this were an explanation.
Natasha nodded.
“You?”
“I used to work in D.C. Assistant to Senator Norland.”
“That must be wonderful. A senator’s assistant.”
“Well, I’ve quit that.” She was surprised that she could hear her own voice. She thought she might’ve smiled. It was difficult to tell because everything seemed to be taking place in a suspension—somehow the part of her that was watchful and aware was a half second behind everything. She felt light-headed and dizzy just as the woman leaned close and murmured, “Are you as scared as I am?”
Natasha looked at her and couldn’t draw the breath to answer.
“What if somebody decides to take this one and fly it into something, you know what I mean? Oh, God—I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t talk like that.”
She could only nod, fearing the next second—the little distressing increments of time. Now. And now. People were moving past her, and several hit her elbow or rubbed against her shoulder. She turned to the woman, who was now talking to the little boy. “Teddy, you have to wear the seat belt. It’s the rules.”
Natasha touched her wrist. “Excuse me,” she murmured. “Can we talk? I have to—there’s a man coming and I have to be talking to someone.”
The woman seemed faintly alarmed. “Excuse me?”
“Please,” Natasha said. But then she saw that Duego was waiting at a seat just past the demarcation of first class and coach. He put his bag in the overhead bin and said something to the elderly woman sitting in the aisle seat there. His manner was deferential. The woman stood to let him take the middle seat. He turned and spoke to the adolescent boy there, who was wearing a blue bandanna over long brown hair.
“I don’t understand,” the young woman beside Natasha began, and abruptly she appeared to come to herself, and began talking. “My n
ame’s Priscilla, and my family calls me Priss. We’re from Durham, but we moved there from Houston. I couldn’t get the flight to Durham, so Miami it is. My dad was an engineer in the space program.” She went on, nervously trying to supply what Natasha had asked for, chattering about the space shuttle program and the people she knew because her husband had worked at Mission Control.
“Thank you,” Natasha said, and squeezed her wrist. “Thank you. So much. It’s—it’s all right now.”
“Mama,” the boy said. “I want to sit in the middle. I’m afraid.”
“We have to put your seat belt on, Teddy. We’ll move you to the middle after we take off. You want to see out the window, don’t you?”
Natasha watched him pout, folding his thin arms, his lower lip sticking out. His mother sighed. Natasha sat quite still, eyes fixed on the boy’s pinched face. Her heart was running, the air beginning to feel thick, and all of life seemed to bend toward the one moment, nothing else having any reality at all, not her life in Memphis or France or Washington, not the first good days on the island, not her future plans or hopes, not Constance or the bad winter, or even Michael Faulk. It was wiped out, everything, annulled by the criminal act she had suffered, and she looked at the little boy, thinking of him grown, thinking of him forcing someone to the ground, seeing it like part of the coloration in the downy flesh of his skinny freckled white arms; and the shaking commenced deep inside, her hands tight on the ends of the armrests, the freeze expanding behind her heart, and this was how it felt to go insane. The flight attendant went through the routine about the exit doors and the floor lighting, the seat belt and the oxygen masks and the cushions that, in the unlikely event of a water landing, could be used as flotation devices. The words knifed through her. Unlikely event. Unlikely event.
When the plane started down the runway, she gave a little cry, and the woman, Priscilla, leaned over and said, “It’s fine, honey. Really. You’ll see.”
9
The house on Swan Ridge was a small two-bedroom bungalow, with a good yard and a shed in the back that could be converted into a work space. Faulk gave Mr. Rainey a small deposit for it, an amount he could afford to lose if Natasha decided that she didn’t like it. But he felt sure she would. It was very close to Iris’s house on Bilders. Mr. Rainey let him have a key to the place and took the lockbox. The two men shook hands and agreed on a time to meet and finalize things. Mr. Rainey drove away, and Faulk took one more look around, moving through the rooms and imagining life there.
This was the one he would take her to.
After lunch he drove to East Memphis to see a friend in the employment services department of the parole board. The friend had left him a message to come see him. His office was in a small windowless annex behind the main building. Faulk had a little trouble finding the place, walking around in the hot sunlight for long minutes. The door was unmarked. It looked like a warehouse entrance. His friend, the supervisor, was a short, squat good-humored man named Lawrence Watson, who smelled of the unlit cigar he kept like a lollipop in the corner of his mouth and always wore a starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The cigar would be smoked in short breaks all day and then patted out and, as Watson cheerfully expressed it, worn for reassurance indoors. A man with a cigar in his mouth was a more confident, forward-going man, he would say. For him the phrase forward going was synonymous with phrases or words like strong willed, resolute, tough minded, progressive, confident, even stubborn. The shades of meaning in it were there in context when you listened to him holding forth. He liked Faulk, and the two men had spent time over the years working together, Faulk having served as a volunteer for some of the programs the board sponsored, including several halfway houses for paroled prisoners or mental patients, or for people who needed medical rehabilitation. Faulk had also been chaplain at the community center in Midtown. Lawrence Watson was a man whose working life had been spent attempting to have a direct effect doing beneficial things for individual people. His goodwill was both boundless and practical. He possessed an unspoken passionate concern for the less fortunate and the troubled, and about this concern he often made jokes, always undercutting the obvious fact that he was a good and loving man. You could not pin him down or get him to speak earnestly about any of it. It was just his work, the thing he was happy doing, and he had been doing it for thirty years.
A job had opened up in corrections, a position in employment counseling for men on parole. “It’s yours if you want it,” he said to Faulk, chewing on the dead cigar.
“I want it.”
“Doesn’t pay much.”
“I don’t need it to.”
“Can you start Monday?”
“If you want. My fiancée’s coming in from being stuck in Jamaica—”
Wilson gave him a look, grinning crookedly.
“I know. Stuck in Jamaica. Sounds crazy. Anyway, she’s arriving later today, and I was thinking we should take a little time.”
“When’s the wedding?”
“First week in October. That first Saturday. So, three weeks. You’re welcome to come.”
“Never met a wedding I didn’t want to miss.”
“You can miss this one, too—it’s going to be very quick and very small.”
“And Jamaica was where she was when the flights stopped?”
“Yes, and all she talked about was wanting to come home.”
“Well, under the circumstances.”
“I know.”
“Way I feel right now, they can nuke the whole goddamm region,” Watson said.
“Is this you talking?”
He smiled the crooked smile. “Don’t tell anybody I said that. Maybe just hoping for another flood in the general area. How would that be? Another forty days and forty nights of rain to cool them all off.”
“You need me to start Monday?”
“How ’bout Wednesday?”
“Wednesday, sure.”
“You know the drill. Look at the history and try to match it up with whatever’s available.”
“See you Wednesday,” Faulk told him.
He went back to his apartment and saw Mr. Baines sitting out on his front stoop. Mr. Baines waved him over.
“I don’t want to be unkind,” he said. “I think I was unkind earlier.”
“No,” Faulk said. “Not really.”
The other man had a beer and a plate of chicken wings on a small portable table. He held out a wing. “Want one?”
“No, thank you.”
“Settled on a place?”
“I think I’ve found something, yes.”
“Donald Baines never gets in the way of anybody’s happiness if he can help it. And you’re about to be married.”
Faulk thought he heard a note of sarcasm in the voice. Baines, chewing on a wing, gazed at him with a jovial expression and asked, through his chewing, if the younger man would like a cold beer. Barbecue sauce was smeared all over the wide mouth. He looked like a big kid in need of his mother to wipe his face.
“No, thanks anyway,” Faulk said, wanting to feel kindly toward him. “Of course I’ll pay the rent on the place until I can find someone to sublet.”
“Well,” said Baines, noisily slurping the beer. “Of course I’ll have to insist on that. Will you bring your bride here this evening?”
“That depends on how she feels.”
Baines seemed to urge him with a look, as if to say, Go on, there’s more to tell.
“Probably tomorrow,” Faulk said.
“Ah,” said Baines, leaning back. “Tomorrow your life begins.”
10
She had put her head back and closed her eyes, still feeling nearly choked with fright and rage, and her exhaustion took over. Briefly she was in a blankness that, when there was a touch on her arm, she relinquished almost with grief, sitting forward a little and opening her eyes.
Duego was standing over her with that pleading look, the eyes sorrowful, wider and darker than she remembered them.
“I cannot bear this,” he said, taking a step away. “This trouble between us.”
Natasha shouted. “Get away from me!”
“Is he bothering you, honey?” Priscilla said, rising out of her own sleep. Others had looked up from what they were doing.
The blond flight attendant approached. “Go back to your seat, sir.”
Duego returned quickly to his row. He looked back at Natasha before stepping into his seat. The expression on his face was distressed and full of entreaty. She kept her gaze on him, glaring, as full of hatred and fury as she could make it.
The flight attendant said, “You okay?”
Natasha nodded.
“What’s his story,” Priscilla murmured after the attendant had gone.
“He thinks I’m someone else,” Natasha told her. She had begun to cry, and the other woman reached over and took her hand.
“Anything I can do?”
“He was bothering me in the airport. He—he wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“I think we should get them to do something about him.”
Natasha touched the wrist of the hand that held hers and pulled away softly. “Thanks, you’re so kind.” She sniffled. “I just want him to stay away from me.” Reaching into her purse, she brought out the packet of Kleenex, took one, and held it over her eyes.
“Well, it’s good the flight attendants are aware of the situation,” Priscilla said.
“Can you stay close to me when we get off the plane?”
“Where am I gonna go, right? I’m here.”
When the plane landed in Miami, he rose, pulled his bag down from the overhead bin, faced front, and waited for the door to open, without looking back. And when the people around and before him moved, he followed and was gone. Natasha walked behind Priscilla and her son to the opening and out, and along the tunnel to the gate area. Priscilla made a show of being wary. They entered the open area, and she stopped, and Natasha stood at her side. Others moved past them.
Before, During, After Page 18
