Chapter 46: Snakes on a plane. Again.
The mom on my other side catches Amy’s comment and suddenly becomes even more absorbed in whatever she’s looking at with her daughter.
“Okay,” I tell Amy. “If you need me to be quiet for a while, I can be quiet.”
A beat passes. Amy doesn’t turn to look at me. I get the message, reach in front of me and go back to reading the article in the airline magazine about the football player who likes traveling to Asia.
Soon enough, we’re taxiing down the runway, and the little monitor above my tray starts playing a safety video populated by little British cartoon people showing me things like how to buckle my seatbelt, how to use the floatation cushion beneath my seat, which exit to use if we have to evacuate.
I let my eyes slide to the left to see if Amy’s watching the video or doing something else. She makes a good show of watching it; her eyes are glued to the small screen, but her posture is stiff, almost rigid, with her arms still folded tightly against her chest and her lips still pressed into their thin line.
But I can see her pulse vibrating in an artery up her neck, and it seems to me it’s much faster than it should be.
Her breath hitches at the sound of the engines revving; the pulse in her neck looks like it’s getting even faster. She squeezes her eyes shut.
“Amy,” I say softly, turning so that only she can hear me. “Aren’t you supposed to try to relax when a panic attack comes on? It doesn’t help to get stiffer with an attack… does it?”
“Of course I’m trying to relax,” Amy snaps. “What did you think I was trying to do? Panic more?”
I want to say, “Well, you have a weird fucking way of trying to relax,” but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to help the situation.
The engines rev again; we’re starting down the runway now.
“Oh, God,” Amy says, and she moves her hands onto each armrest, white knuckling against plastic and metal as the plane gathers speed.
“Breathe, Amy,” I say when it looks like she isn’t. Then I say something I heard in a movie one time: “Just focus on your breathing, okay? Big, deep breaths, into your belly.”
But instead of breathing, Amy literally fucking stops breathing the moment I feel the plane leave the earth. I pry the hand closest to me from its place on the armrest and put it inside my own big paw. I close my fingers around Amy’s hand.
“If you can’t focus on your breathing, focus on my voice, okay?” I say. I’m still speaking softly, but with the background noise of the plane, I could probably yell and the woman on my other side still wouldn’t hear me. “Listen, Amy. This is a big, bad monster of an airplane. The fucking height of human engineering. It wants to fly. More than anything, that’s what this plane wants to do. It wants to stay in the air and ride the currents. It’s fine; we’re safe.” Amy closes her eyes, seems to relax by about one millimeter. The plane banks; she squeezes my hand harder. “Focus on my voice, Amy, not the plane. Just focus on me. I’ve got you. We’re okay.”
It goes on like this for about five more minutes — Amy squeezing my hand every time the plane turns or its engines change, me rubbing my thumb on the back of her hand and telling her that everything’s going to be fine.
At the end of five minutes, the plane starts to level out, shifts and changes get less dramatic. Amy extracts her hand from mine, lets out a breath.
“Thank you,” she says without looking at me.
“You’re welcome,” I say. “Are you… Does this mean we can talk?”
“No. Not at all.”
This might end up being a long fucking flight.
#
Two hours pass like.
Damn Marty McFly. Why do I ever listen to anything he says? “Talk to her,” he’d said. “She wants you to try harder,” he’d said.
Amy refuses to look at me; she puts in earbuds and begins watching a bad chick flick comedy I’ve never heard of before. When it becomes obvious she really doesn’t plan to acknowledge my presence again, I give up trying to read the airline magazine and turn the entertainment system on myself. I end up picking a cooking show, hoping I can find something I can tweak as a special for Soul Mountain. At one point I think I see Amy glance at my screen in surprise, but if she’s going to ignore me, then I’m more than fucking capable of ignoring her.
At the end of two hours, though, I can’t ignore the urge that I’ve been fighting against any longer. I take my earbuds out, tap Amy on the shoulder.
She ignores me.
I sigh in frustration, tap her on the shoulder again. “I have to pee,” I say, pointing at the aisle at the same time in case she truly can’t hear me with the earbuds in.
She nods curtly, gets out of her seat long enough for me to squeeze past her place and into the aisle.
You think the economy section is bad when you’re almost six-four? Let me tell you what’s even worse: fucking airplane toilets.
Anyway, I wait in line for the bathroom for a while, use the facilities, make my way back up the aisle. I pass the guy I’d swapped seats with on my way back, and sure enough, the window seat never got filled, so he has the whole damned row to himself.
Fucking Marty McFly.
When I get back to my row, Amy gets up again to let me back in. I settle into my seat, doing my best to get my legs comfortable in the cramped space, reaching for my earbuds.
But before I can put them back into my ears, Amy touches my forearm and asks, “How’s your mom? Did the surgery go alright?”
I shake my head. “It didn’t go so well. Turns out her cancer had metastasized, which means it spread to other parts of her body and needs radiation therapy and more chemo.”
Her face scrunches in sympathy. “I’m really sorry to hear that. Truly.”
I shrug. “It’s…” I mean to say “It’s alright,” but obviously it’s fucking not alright. Instead, I say, “It’s like Momma always told us. ‘Getting old definitely ain’t for sissies.’ But she’s definitely not a sissy, so I’m sure she’ll make it out of this.”
“I’m sure she probably will,” Amy says sympathetically.
I hesitate, not sure if I should push my luck, but also not wanting to miss the opportunity to open up a conversation. “So… how was the rest of your trip?”
“It was alright,” she says, looking away from me.
“Did you get to see your dad and your step-mom?”
“Yeah. My dad’s a little like your mom — struggling with health stuff. It’s hard to watch him starting to decline like this.”
“But your dad sounds like he’s as tough as my mom.” I pause, and then add — against my better fucking judgment, “You’ve got to get your stubbornness from somewhere, right?”
“Mmm,” she says noncommittally. She puts the earbuds back in, turns to face her screen.
Oops.
I guess our conversation’s over.
The rest of the flight goes basically in the same way — long periods of silence with occasional strained small-talk. By the time we’re beginning our descent into Heathrow, I’ve only managed to draw about a paragraph’s worth of conversation from her. I tell myself that part of the reason we didn’t talk is that it was an overnight flight, and Amy spent a good third of it either sleeping or pretending to sleep.
I tell myself that. I don’t really believe it, though.
When we land and the fasten seatbelt light goes off for the last time and everyone starts deplaning, I grab her carry-on out of the overhead bin and hand it to her.
“Are you flying to Basel today?” I ask her.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we’ll be on the same flight again. Funny how that works with us, right? Wacky fucking coincidence.” She doesn’t respond. “Hey — do you want to grab some breakfast? I’m buying.”
“No.”
“Are you sure? You know, the English breakfasts they have are pretty — ”
“I said no, Anika.”
“Alright,” I say, and I’m planning to say more, but the line moves, and Amy turns her back to me, heading towards the front of the plane.