Life and Other Near-Death Experiences

by Camille Pagán

  Maxine zeroed in on my naked ring finger even as I ogled the engagement boulder teetering off the back of her hand, which I had already seen close-ups of online. “I saw that you and Tom are no more,” she said, making a pouty face. “Are you okay?”

  I smiled stiffly. “I’m peachy. People change.” I didn’t believe this, but given my circumstances, I longed to, and it was a sufficiently vague explanation for why my marriage went the way of the stegosaurus.

  “Do they, though?” she said, opening her anime eyes even wider.

  “Yes, they do,” I said.

  Her half smile dripped with pity. “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. That’s exactly what I say.”

  I kept waiting for her to announce that she had a flight to catch, but she just stood there. Judging me.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I always wondered about Tom. Did he cheat on you?” she asked, raising a penciled-in eyebrow.

  A petite growl escaped from my throat, which Maxine seemed to misinterpret as me struggling not to cry.

  “Oh, Libby,” she said, leaning in to hug me, “I won’t pretend to understand why God has allowed such monumental challenges into your life, but know that I’ll be praying for you.”

  As she attempted to squeeze the stuffing out of me, I decided to invoke my Fourth Amendment–mandated right to protect against unreasonable search and seizure and casually let my teeth rest on her bony shoulder blade.

  She pulled back rather violently. “Jesus Christ, did you just bite me?”

  “Bite you?” I said, flashing my canines pleasantly. “Sheesh, Maxine. Maybe people don’t change.” I shook my head, then sat back down in the massage chair. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to try to unwind for a few minutes before I get on a plane to paradise. I’ll tell Paul to be on the lookout for you on the Upper. West. Side,” I said, slowly enunciating each word. “Adios!”

  She opened her mouth, closed it, and walked away. I really couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.

  Even so, I was a potent combo of sad and irate after Maxine left. People did indeed change, and I was exhibit A. While I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as a fount of charisma, it used to be that you could seat me next to your mumbling grandmother or lecherous uncle at your wedding and know they would later report that I was a model dining companion. But in the past week, almost every human interaction I’d been involved with had taken a wrong turn—and worse, my behavior seemed compulsive. While being blunt and occasionally aggressive was extremely satisfying in the moment, I was ashamed afterward. I had to return to a more pleasant version of myself so that I wouldn’t sully everyone’s good memories. Lord willing, I would find a way on the beaches of Vieques, surrounded by a bunch of strangers who—if they had any sense—would bite back, then forget all about me.

  When I was sure Maxine was nowhere in sight, I wandered over to my gate, and after what seemed an eternity, boarded the plane. I’d requested a window seat, so I pressed my face to the Plexiglas and watched the skyline disappear as we rose above Chicago and headed over Lake Michigan.

  It was amazing, that lake—one of the biggest in the world, so expansive that an air traveler could easily mistake it for the sea if she didn’t know better. When Tom and I moved to the city in our early twenties, I made him drive me up and down Lake Shore Drive night after night, and even though gas sapped our already anemic budget, and Tom’s clunker was constantly threatening to quit, he took me because he was just as enamored as I was. Traffic at all hours of the day; twinkling skyscrapers stacked thick against the sky; the beautiful western coast, which we saw as the right side of the lake because it was everything that our childhoods in the suburbs of Grand Rapids were not. The city was our beginning.

  I had purchased a one-way ticket to San Juan, and from there a one-way ticket to Vieques. When the month was up, I would probably fly directly to New York. If I was able to sell the apartment remotely, as I hoped, it was entirely possible that I would never see Chicago again. As the plane continued to ascend and the lake vanished beneath the clouds, I found myself praying that one day—one day soon—this would no longer feel like a loss.

  Several hours later, the plane descended over vivid blue-green waves and delivered me to the San Juan International Airport.

  A man with a handwritten sign greeted me at the gate. With dark curls and deeply tanned skin, he looked Latino, but didn’t have so much as a hint of a Spanish accent. “You’re Libby Miller? Great,” he said in a way that made it impossible to discern whether he was being sincere or sarcastic. The wraparound shades he wore, even though we were indoors, did not help. He took my carry-on from me. “We’ll get your checked bag, then head to the tarmac.”

  “Tarmac?” I asked. Thanks to my new friend gin and the exhaustion plaguing me, I had fallen asleep shortly after takeoff and slept most of the flight. Now I had cottonmouth, a pounding headache, and the linguistic capacity of a second grader.

  “Private planes use different runways from the commercial carriers, and they usually don’t have gates,” he said. “You did book a charter flight to Vieques, right?”

  “Right,” I said, massaging my temples.

  “Great. Do you have to use the bathroom or anything? There isn’t one on the plane.”

  “I’m good,” I said, though this had not been true for more than a week. I tagged after him to the baggage claim. Once we located my suitcase, we wound through a series of halls, eventually coming to a security checkpoint where a uniformed woman barely glanced at my license. A set of stairs deposited the two of us onto a blazing hot field of cement. The roar of jet engines shot through the air, and I covered my ears. The man pointed at a battered pickup truck at the edge of the lot, indicating that was where we were heading.

  When we reached the truck, he threw my suitcases onto the bed, then opened the passenger door for me. The truck didn’t have the name of the airline on it, and I hesitated as I imagined Paul chiding me for not being more cautious. Eh, I thought as I thanked the man and climbed in. Not that I wanted to miss out on my vacation, but the Grim Reaper was lurking just offstage anyway. If this guy wanted to drive me to a secluded beach and strangle me—which seemed highly unlikely, as he barely seemed to register my presence—then it would probably be no worse than, and possibly preferable to, death by overzealous cell colonization.

  I was hoping for air-conditioning, but the man rolled down the windows and I spent the next few minutes pretending to be entranced by palm trees while wondering if I was sweating hard enough to make it look like I wet my pants. We pulled up near an airstrip where a row of planes was parked. The man grabbed my suitcases and began walking to a small plane. Scratch that—a plane so minuscule you could park it in the average suburban driveway. He pulled down a panel that made up the better part of the right side of the plane and suddenly I understood Paul’s fear of flying all too well: this thing was a tin can with wings, and I was about to allow it to hurl me into the sky.

  The man started up a rickety set of stairs attached to the panel, both suitcases in hand. When he reached the top, he turned. “Coming?”

  I looked at him, confused. There wasn’t a single other person in sight. “Where’s the pilot?” I asked.

  “You’re looking at him,” he said. I was indeed, and he was wearing deck shoes, a pair of khaki shorts, and a linen shirt that was two washes away from becoming a rag. I must have done the disappearing-neck trick because he said, “Hey, look, I’m doing you a favor. It’s my day off and I could have said no when they asked me to fly you, which would mean you would’ve ended up on the ferry. And trust me, unless you want to lose your lunch, you don’t want to take the ferry on a windy day like today.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or irritated. “I didn’t have lunch,” I said. “And thanks, I suppose.” I climbed in after him. “I’m the only passenger?”

  “Yep
,” he said. He turned around to face me and finally lifted his sunglasses. His dark brown eyes met my own, and he stared at me for what seemed to be longer than a socially acceptable length of time (though to his credit, I didn’t look away, either). Something odd in me had just begun to flutter when he pivoted and pulled the glasses back over his eyes. “Sit where you want,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said flatly. There were just a handful of seats to choose from; I took one behind him to the right, which had a decent view out the tiny cockpit window as well as the side window. Shades firmly in place, he swiveled back around and ran me through the emergency procedures, which involved little more than a seat belt and a prayer, then handed me a large pair of noise-blocking headphones. “It’s a quick flight, about twenty-five minutes, but it’s loud. And Puerto Rico gets busy in the fall, so it can take a while to get out of San Juan.”

  He wasn’t kidding. We sat on the runway for the better part of an hour as large sweat stains formed in the pits of my T-shirt, and my jeans papier-mâchéd themselves to my thighs. I cursed myself for not taking two minutes in the terminal to change into a dress, then chided myself for caring. After all, I had bigger fish to fry than body odor, and besides, I would never see this alleged pilot again.

  Even so, I had nothing else to do, so I kept stealing glances at him. I couldn’t tell how old he was; his hairline was just starting to recede and his sideburns were threaded with gray, but acne scars pocked his cheeks slightly, which gave him the air of a teenage boy. He sat facing forward, saying nothing, which was aggravating, although the aggravation itself was grating because my goal was to be left alone and there I was, not even enjoying this rare triumph.

  Finally, he said something into a headset, then yelled back at me, “Green light. We’re going up.”

  Up we went. Once again I found myself over the turquoise sea, staring at the lush green landscape and long yellow beaches that make up Puerto Rico’s northeastern coast. I was curious to learn more—in my haste, I hadn’t even bothered to buy a travel book—but the pilot proved to be a piss-poor tour guide. “You can’t really see the rain forest from here, but it’s out there . . . ,” he droned. “To your right is Fajardo, which is where the ferry runs from . . . that lump of land in the distance is another island called Culebra.”

  Even so, there was something magical about the altitude; we were up in the air, but so close to the water that I could see passengers on the boats we flew over. In spite of Maxine, my headache, and the unpleasant events of the past week, my spirits rose significantly. I had made many wrong decisions recently, but this trip? It couldn’t have been one of them.

  As the plane began to descend, bringing us closer to the water, the pilot looked over his shoulder at me. “Isn’t it great up here?” he shouted.

  “Yes!” I shouted back. “I love being away from the rest of the world!”

  He smiled. “Exactly!”

  Buoyed by my newfound sense of well-being, I was feeling generous. Gregarious, even. “By the way, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Shiloh,” he shouted again.

  That’s an unusual—I didn’t have time to finish my thought, because there was a loud thud-thud-thud, followed immediately by a shredding noise, which coincided with the plane lurching from side to side.

  Adrenaline coursed through my veins as stomach acid surfaced in my gullet. “What was that?” I whimpered as I stared out the window at an inauspicious plume of black smoke billowed out of an unidentified location.

  “Nothing,” he said, but then he started yelling into his headset. “Carib Carrier seven three two. Emergency. Bird strike to air intake. Requesting landing at VQS. May attempt water landing. Alert Coast Guard.”

  We began to drop. Rapidly. At which point I began to freak out ever so subtly. I grabbed my phone from my pocket and texted Paul: I LOVE YOU. XOXO. Then, as further evidence of my mental infirmity, I texted an identical message to Tom, adding, IT’S -OKAY, exonerating him just in time for my demise. I considered calling my father, who didn’t text, but realized that this would amount to him listening to me scream as I flew into the sea.

  The man I now knew as Shiloh yelled at me again. “Tighten your seat belt, tuck your head between your arms, and lean into your lap. Now!”

  As the plane careened toward the water, I had a singular thought, and this thought branded me a liar.

  Because all that stuff I told myself about not caring if I was strangled and being ready to see my mother again? Lies. Damn lies.

  No, as I begged God for a miracle, the truth rang clear through me: I don’t want to die.

  TWELVE

  The plane skidded clumsily and hit something—the ground? the sea?—with a tremendous crack. My head smashed against the back of the seat in front of me, then jerked back as we tipped precariously to the left. I held my breath, waiting for the worst, the engine to explode, the water to seep in and deliver me to a watery grave. But all was silent, save a faint rumbling coming from the front of the plane.

  Shiloh let out a whoop, then turned to me. “We made it! You’re okay?”

  “Am I okay? Are you fudging kidding me?” I spat. To say his celebratory mood ticked me off was pretty much the understatement of the century. “You almost just killed us. We almost just died.”

  He undid his seat belt, then reached back to unlatch mine, like I was a child. “We need to get out of here in case the engine decides to blow. And for the record,” he added, quickly opening the panel door and all but pushing me down the stairs, “the flock of pelicans attempting to get a bird’s-eye view of the propeller almost killed us. I just saved your life. Do you have any idea how hard it is to land a plane like this on the side of a beach with absolutely no warning? If we’d stayed in the air another two minutes while I attempted to make it to the airport, you would be fish food right now.”

  Continuing to yap, he took my hand and pulled me through the shallow water we’d landed in. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the plane was smoking, at which point I yanked my hand away and started to run for the beach—just in case God was still making up his mind about whether I should be granted a few more months on the planet.

  “Hey!” Shiloh yelled, running after me. “Wait up!”

  When the sand turned to patchy grass, I figured I was safe and collapsed onto the ground. Shiloh jogged up, and only then did I realize there was a trickle of blood coming from his face.

  “I think your nose is bleeding,” I said, shielding my face in case he got too close.

  He reached up to touch it. “So it is.” He wiped it with the corner of his shirt, then sat next to me and tilted his head back as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Thanks.”

  I hugged my knees to my chest to try to stop shaking. “Don’t mention it. So . . . now what?”

  “Now we wait. We just landed on the part of the old naval grounds that are still off-limits to the public, and the control tower knew we were about to crash, so you’d better believe we won’t be here by ourselves for long.” He put his head back down and took his sunglasses off to examine me. “Lizzy, are you all right?”

  Our eyes met again, but instead of triggering strange flutterings, it somehow reiterated that my current circumstances were not a bad dream, but instead reality. And reality, as it turned out, did not agree with me. “Libby!” I snapped. “My name is Libby!” Then I sort of stopped breathing.

  I’d never suffered a panic attack before. Had I known mine would have me clawing at my chest in a futile attempt to get air into my lungs, I would have scurried into the brush so I could humiliate myself privately. Alas, I didn’t know what was happening to me. As I gasped and scratched at myself, Shiloh watched me with interest. Not worry. Not amusement. Just interest, like I was a nature documentary he just happened to land on while channel surfing.

  When it became clear I was about to choke on my own terror, he began to pat my back, and
only because this was something Tom did when I was upset did I allow him to continue. “Whoa. Whoa there. It’s okay, Libby,” he said, saying my name as clearly as possible so I would catch that he got it right this time. “Pretty sure I know what’s happening to you. You’re having a panic attack. I’ve been there. That was a bad situation, and I’m really sorry.”

  A panic attack? I thought incredulously, but I couldn’t get the words to come out of my mouth.

  “Look,” he said, continuing to pat me with one hand while pointing at a distant dirt path with the other. I squinted, attempting to focus, which was difficult with so little oxygen making its way to my frontal lobe.

  Then I saw them—the wild horses my father told me about. There were four, galloping majestically through an opening in the trees. They trotted across the narrow path and disappeared into a clearing on the other side, gone as fast as they had come. And at once, so was my panic attack.

  “Wow,” I whispered.

  “You feel better,” Shiloh said. He smiled, and now that his sunglasses were off, the lines around his brown eyes showed that his smile was genuine.

  “I do,” I admitted.

  “Distraction. Works every time. I learned that from an old friend back when I was having trouble coping.”

  I flushed. “Thanks. And sorry for yelling at you. It’s just that I don’t want to die. I lied to myself about it, and I thought it was fine, but now I’m sure I was wrong, and I really just want to live, you know?” I wasn’t really making any sense, but I couldn’t shut up.

  Shiloh looked at me curiously. “But you’re alive. You didn’t die.”

  “I’m going to,” I explained. “I have cancer.” A rush of relief washed over me as I shared the worst news of my life with a stranger.

  “Damn,” he said, and let out a low whistle. “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. And it’s not even ovarian, which is what killed my mom, but some rare super cancer that’s especially lethal for women my age. Twenty-nine,” I added slyly, and then I knew the panic attack had fully passed.