Chapter 4: In case of emergency, keep the person next to you busy.
I straighten up, adjust my face back into Polite Stranger Mode, pull the edge of my foot further away from the aisle as the stewardess bustles past. “Yeah, fine. What were you saying before the announcement? Die-hard women’s basketball fan…?”
The furrowed brow melts a bit. “Well, yes, actually. I even…” she blushes, leans forward, fishes through a purse at her feet practically as big as she is. She pulls out a hardback book, flashes the cover in my direction. “I got this just before I left yesterday. Ordered it specifically so I could read it on this trip. Have you seen it yet?”
Had I seen it yet. What a question. She’s holding up a book titled Only One Shot, and there on the cover, looking very Head Coach-y, is the girl I’ve called my best friend since we met at the age of eighteen as freshmen basketball players at Rosemont University — Alexis Woods. Had I seen the book? Hell, I’m in that book. I lived that fucking book.
But I don’t say that. I only nod. Polite Stranger Mode and all.
“She mentions you in here a few times, you know,” Jane says. She looks down for a moment before looking back up, laughs nervously. “I hope it doesn’t weird you out that I recognized you right away when we were getting on the plane back in Basel.”
Instead of answering, I kind of lift an eyebrow. I guess I know why she’s been shooting smiles my way all day.
The plane’s engines rev, and we jolt forward. False alarm, though; pilot’s just moving us down the runway, and we stop again a moment later. But next to me, poor Jane Lane is pressed back against her seat, gripping the book in her lap, mouth tighter than it really should be.
“Don’t like flying?” I ask.
She loosens up on the book a little. “It’s not that I don’t like flying. I actually don’t mind it so much on the big transatlantic jets. Except for the takeoff. I hate all takeoffs. And these little propeller planes…” She lets out a long-suffering sigh. “On top of that, it looks like it’s going to storm outside.”
I follow her gaze out the window. Rain beads on plastic, and the wet tarmac reflects back kaleidoscope of orange, red, and blue lights. But it’s barely drizzling — “storm” is pretty much a gigantic fucking overstatement of the situation.
So I decide to do Jane Lane a solid, distract her from her nerves.
“I’ve read the whole thing,” I say, nodding at Only One Shot sitting in her lap. “It’s not bad. Alex made me read the early draft when she got it back from the guy who did all the actual writing. She can’t write worth a fuh… flip herself. Plus she wanted me to okay the parts that I’m in.”
My plan to distract her works. Jane Lane half-turns in her seat, dark eyes twinkling with curiosity, rainstorm forgotten. She pushes some brown hair behind one ear, revealing an earful of silver studs and loops, just like the original Jane Lane had.
“So is it true?” she asks. “All the stuff about her coming to games drunk her junior year?”
I snort. “No, it’s not true.”
She looks disappointed. Deflates.
I grin. “The truth is it was way worse than what she admits to in the book.”
This gets her attention. She sits up straight again, the twinkle’s back. It makes me want to laugh — which is nice because I haven’t felt much like laughing since the moment Dad called to tell me Momma has cancer.
I open my mouth to say something more — basically to throw Alex under the bus (Alex wouldn’t mind, and what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her) — but the plane revs again, accelerates down the runway, and poor Jane Lane, she’s not even holding onto the book anymore, she’s clinging to both armrests, dark eyes staring straight ahead, unblinking, and it looks like she’s either going to barf or scream at any second.
And… liftoff. Out the window, Toronto falls away, a million streetlights and taillights and empty office buildings shrinking against the black, expansive maw of the Earth. We bank left, and the horizon line tilts into a disorienting angle, revealing sepia-colored cloud bottoms tinted with the last rays of the sinking sun.
It’s pretty, really. I’ve always liked taking off at night.
Not that my seat mate sees any of this nighttime beauty. She’s still got her eyes glued to the seat in front of her, still balances Alex’s book in her lap while she hangs onto the armrests.
It’s sort of hard to watch, and I want to pat her on the shoulder, give her arm a squeeze, remind her to breathe, or something, but it seems like a weird thing to do given that she’s a stranger, so I just lean my head back and wait, stretching out my jaw a few times as I try to pop my ears.
When the plane starts to level off five or six minutes later, Jane turns to me and says, “Takeoffs are the scariest part.”
I shrug. “I dunno. I’ve always kind of liked them.”
The plane shudders and dips — hard enough that I feel my body moving down while all my innards seem to move up. We’re climbing again a moment later.
“It’s a good thing you’re here to keep me occupied,” Jane Lane says through clenched teeth. “Otherwise I’d be a total wreck. Or — more of a total wreck.” She lets go of an armrest long enough to tap the book that she somehow managed to keep on her lap this whole time. “Not to sound creepy, but it doesn’t surprise me that you’d like takeoffs. Based on what I know about you — from the book, I mean — it seems to fit.”
A laugh finally escapes my throat. “I’m not as bad as Alex makes me out to be, you know.”
The plane shivers, bounces again. Something in the overhead compartment above us rolls, pops hard against a plastic surface. Another bump and drop come a moment later, followed by the high-pitched ding-ding telling us all to keep our seat belts on. As if we needed the reminder.
I don’t mind turbulence, but this flight’s starting to feel like the stewardess should’ve been holding one of those You must be at least this high to enjoy this ride signs when we boarded. And I know I qualify, but I don’t know about Jane Lane.
“Jesus,” she murmurs under her breath. The way the word comes out, I can’t say for sure if it’s intended as a curse or a prayer.
I turn my head in her direction, determined to get back to distracting her. “So you know my name, obviously. What’s yours?”
She looks at me like she’s completely forgotten I was there, a blank expression on her face. It’s like I’ve asked her for the solution to a complicated physics equation instead of her name. Then she comes back to life again. “Amy,” she says. “Amy Ellis.”
I stick out my hand to shake. She lets go of the armrest long enough to take it, and her hand is so small by comparison, it feels like a child’s in my ginormous paw.
“Nice to meet you, Amy Ellis. And what were you doing in Switzerland that makes you so homesick?”
“I work for a software company,” she says, seeming to unwind a tiny bit as she warms to the idea of conversation. “And they sent me to Basel for what was supposed to be a six-month assignment to sort out our European office, but that was a couple years ago, so…” She shrugs. “At this point, I don’t know how long I’m going to be there. Fortunately, I get the European-style six weeks of vacation every year, instead of the American-style two, so I get to go home for a few weeks every year. But anyway — what about you? I’m surprised to see you headed state-side, given that it’s the middle of the season.”
“Yeah. My team’s not exactly happy with me, but… Family stuff,” I conclude gruffly. There’s a silence that threatens to get awkward, so I fill it with, “So are you from Ohio?”
“No. Went to college there, but I was an army brat, so I don’t really claim any roots anywhere. But I’ve got an old friend from college who’s getting married this weekend. So I’m stopping off in Ohio to see her and be there for the wedding this week, then I’ll do a bit of traveling after that — see some friends and family in different parts of the country — and then it’s back to Basel.”
I open my mouth to ask Where are you traveling to, but the intercom crackles to life and our captain comes on.
“Folks, this is Captain Paul Snider from up here in the cockpit, and I’m joined tonight by First Mate Georgia Halston. We’re just about at our cruising altitude of twenty-two thousand feet… Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve had to fly through a few storm cells this evening and we’re dealing with a pretty strong headwind. Wish I could say that’s the last bit of turbulence we’ll have this evening, but it’s looking like it might be a bit of a rocky ride to Cleveland tonight… That’s the bad news. Good news is, it’s a short flight; we’ll have you there on time or even a little ahead of schedule. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight.”
Amy blanches at the captain’s news.
“Guess you were right about the storm,” I say lamely. I wrack my brain for something else to say but come up empty, and so, a little reluctantly, I say, “Well… I guess I should let you get back to Alex’s book.”
She manages an almost-smile as the plane rolls like a ship out at sea. “Not a chance. Sitting next to Anika Singh in person? That’s so much better than anything I could read about. Besides, if I tried to read right now, I’d probably lose my dinner.”
I smile, a little embarrassed. When we won back-to-back national championships in college, I got used to being in the lime light, occasionally getting recognized in public. (And I do mean “occasionally;” this is women’s basketball, people.) That recognition faded when I was in the WNBA; it ratcheted back up when Alex and I both played for team U.S.A. in the Olympics and took the gold medal, but since moving to Switzerland, I’ve gotten used to invisibility again.
Well — as invisible as you can be in Switzerland when you’re a fucking six-foot, three-and-a-half-inch Godzilla Amazonian who’s half-black, half-Nepalese, and a hundred percent loud-mouthed American. The stares I get don’t have anything to do with playing basketball, trust me. I wish they did.
So Amy recognizing me… it’s unexpected, to say the least. Unexpected, but not necessarily… bad.
The plane suddenly drops again, enough to earn a chorus of “Oh!”s from people around us. Amy looks absolutely terrified, and this time I can’t help myself — I do pat her on the shoulder.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I tell her. “At least there’s no motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane.”
She gives me an odd look.
“Sorry — Samuel L. Jackson? Snakes on a Plane?” When her face doesn’t light up in an Ah, yes, of course recognition, I silently kick myself and forge ahead with, “And it’s like the captain said — it’s a short flight. Right?”
“Right,” she says, but there’s no conviction in it. After a few seconds, she turns her head my way. “Hey — Anika?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you tell me a story? — to distract me, I mean.”
“A story? What, like ‘Once upon a time, in a galaxy far fucking away…?’”
She lets out a nervous laugh again. I kind of like the way it sounds.
“No, not that kind of story. A story about you. Something that’s not in Coach Woods’s book.”
I think for a few seconds, trying to remember what Alex did and didn’t say about me in the book. “Does her book say how we pranked Coach Tynan sophomore year, superglued a basketball to his ass?”
She nods. “Yeah. That’s in there.”
“What about the prank when I told Alex she — ”
“No,” she says again, emphatic and commanding this time. “About you. Your life. Not about pranks.”
I get back to thinking, trying to come up with a story that doesn’t reveal to Amy how much I hate playing basketball in Switzerland, or how much I miss Alex, or how much I’m starting to feel like my four years at Rosemont might’ve been the high point of my life and my career. God, I never wanted to be one of those people, pining for their high school / college glory years that were already well past, but maybe that’s exactly what I’m becoming.
And in particular, I’m trying to think of a story to tell Amy that won’t remind me of Jenny. Being reminded of my ex-wife — especially when I’m about to go back to our hometown, where everything reminds me of her — is the last thing I want right now.
“How about your family?” Amy suggests when I don’t come up with anything on my own after a minute.
“What about them?”
“Well, what are they like?”
“I don’t know. They’re just… a normal family.”
Her eyebrows lift and she gives me a skeptical look. “There’s no such thing as a ‘normal’ family. Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“Yeah. One older sister, two younger brothers.”
Amy lights up, turbulence suddenly forgotten. “Seriously? Same as me! Well — I mean, my older sister is actually my step-sister, but… wow. So we’re both the second of four, two girls, two boys? Crazy. Are you close to them?”
I shake my head. I refrain from saying, Close to them? Why the hell do you think I live in Europe? and instead I say diplomatically, “Not really. This trip home will be the first time I’ve seen them in a while. And my baby brother, Gerry… it’ll be the first time I’ve seen him in a couple years. He’s kind of the black sheep. Or the Blasian sheep, I guess.”
“Blasian…?”
“Yeah — black and Asian. Blasian. That’s what we call ourselves.”
She nods. “That’s right, I remember that now — it’s in the book. Coach Woods says your dad was an immigrant from Nepal — ”
“Yep. It’s true.”
“ — and he married an African American New Yorker. But yet you grew up in Ohio? Now that sounds like a story I’d like to hear.”
I nod, smiling, thinking of all the times I’ve heard one of my parents recount the story of how they first met, fell in love, and moved to Ohio. They tell it differently, of course. I can almost hear Momma shouting “That’s not how it happened, Pathik!” in the background just thinking about it.
“It is a good story, actually,” I say, and I launch into it.