LILY
Aviophobia is the overwhelming fear of flying. About 20 percent of the total population has some version of it because, obviously, humans do not belong in the sky! Of that 20 percent, about 1 percent has an acute and paralyzing case that does not seem to respond to treatment, that gets worse with age, and that makes air travel not just uncomfortable . . . but utterly impossible.
Hello. My name is Lily. I am the poster child for the land-bound 1 percent.
I really and truly had tried to overcome it, with talk therapy and virtual reality visualizations, with Xanax and horrible kava teas, with essential oils and Valium. I’d tried exposure therapy and hypnosis and mindfulness. Everything. But none of it worked, and even after something as innocuous as a ride on the kiddie Ferris wheel at the fair, I ended up with my head between my legs, panting into a paper bag while my sister did Lamaze breathing next to me and stroked my hair.
Sexy!
Like phobias tend to do, mine had shaped who I was and the way I lived. Every responsibility I had—the General, my sister and Ivan, our house, my job—was one more tethered stake that kept me grounded, one more reason I couldn’t leave, even if I’d wanted to . . . which I didn’t. I was cozy and safe in my happy little bubble. Everything I needed and everybody I loved was inside it with me, which meant that there was no need—ever!—for me to even look at an airplane.
Until Gabe Powers sauntered into my life and asked me to go forty-five hundred miles away with him like it was no big deal at all.
“Lily!” snapped my sister, accompanied by a series of actual snaps by my ear. “Earth to Lily. I’m giving you some pro baby tips!” she said as she lurched into a parking space. Even though she was only going to be away for the night—buying secondhand antiques off Craigslist was a very quick and dirty affair—she had insisted on taking me grocery shopping with her to make sure I had everything I needed for Ivan. “I was saying that you don’t wanna know what happens when you run out of diapers during a blowout! The joys of motherhood!”
Desperately trying not to get stuck on the thought of flaming airplanes cartwheeling through the sky, I helped Daisy get Ivan out of his car seat, freeing his chubby little legs from the nylon straps. I tried to take comfort in his baby goodness and carried him through the rolling doors, watching his three hairs blow in the gust of air-conditioning that greeted us. We grabbed one of the kid-friendly carts, with a big red plastic booster seat in the front, and I buckled him in.
But as we approached the bananas, Daisy came to a screeching halt. She dug through her purse and patted herself down. With each pat, her face got more and more angry. “Don’t tell me I did it again . . .”
I didn’t even have to ask what it was. My sister had a whole lot of very admirable qualities, but keeping track of her keys wasn’t one of them. When Ivan was born, Daisy bought a hybrid minivan . . . with a push-button ignition. As we had learned from a lot of experience, it was entirely possible to start and drive it while the keys were still hanging on the key hook. And not be able to start it again whenever you got to wherever you were going. Fortunately, we had figured out a fail-safe for this. She had two key fobs, and I always kept one with me. I patted my purse. “Gotcha covered, as usual,” I said as I gripped the bar on the cart and stared at a Mylar balloon in the shape of cartoon airplane in the floral department. It was slightly deflated, not unlike the Hindenburg before it burst into a ball of flames.
Daisy let out a sigh of relief, reached into my purse, and double-checked for my keys. As soon as she jingled them, Ivan started making grabby hands and she handed them over. He gummed my frequent shopper card and pressed my van key into his chubby, drooly cheek.
On we went through floral to produce. “I think there might be a coupon for apples,” Daisy said. “I better check.”
Then she did something that had never, ever been a problem before. Everything we had was pretty much interchangeable, including our phones. As she had a hundred times, she grabbed mine from the outside pocket of my purse. She typed in the code, which she knew, same as I knew hers. But as she hit the last digit, I realized that there was a very real possibility that she was in for a surprise. I hadn’t closed out my apps when I jammed my phone into my purse before we left for the store. That meant that she was about to be met with something that was a whole lot naughtier than BOGO apple coupons: the video I’d taken of Gabe. I’d been watching it when she came banging on my door to go grocery shopping in a desperate attempt to get myself to think of something, anything, besides enormous and rickety tubes of metal whizzing through the upper atmosphere at five hundred miles an hour. How could they be sure the wings would stay on? How?
“Lily!” she gasped, her eyes wide and her mouth gaping. She didn’t seem shocked as much as amazed. She clapped my phone to her chest and gave me a little shove. “Lily!”
I pressed my hands to my mouth. “Sorry,” I said into my palm. “Should have warned you.”
She steadied herself on the side of the grocery cart. “What have you been up to!”
I considered some dusty-looking grapes, but through my fog of sudden embarrassment, they felt really far away. I had encountered quite a number of awkward situations with Daisy over the years—her tendency to lose keys also applied to the key for a pair of handcuffs she’d once used on Boris, and she’d had to call me for help—but never, not ever, had they involved nude videos of me and a famous television host. Or anybody else. Clearly!
“I’ve been . . .” What in the world was I planning to say here? Having a torrid romance with the sexiest man on the planet? She’d think I was delusional! Best to keep it simple. One step at a time. “Do you know that show The Powers of Suggestion?” I said as we headed toward the kale.
She gave me another shove. “I knew it!” she whisper-barked. “It’s him, isn’t it! It’s him!”
I tried to get busy with a bunch of broccoli, but I was so flustered and my hands were still so sweaty from the thought of airplanes that it was a bit difficult for me to get the bag open. So I clutched the broccoli to my chest like a bouquet. “It is. And he’s . . .” I looked out at the produce somewhat dreamily, thinking about him as I gazed from fruit to fruit. Tasty. Delicious. Hard. “He’s wonderful. But Daisy. He’s asked me to go on a trip with him. To Brazil.”
“Oh sh . . .” Daisy stopped herself before she dropped the S-bomb on Ivan. “Oh, salamander!”
“I know.”
She cringed. “What the helllll . . . man’s mayonnaise are you going to do?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” I said and maneuvered the cart toward the baby aisle, jostling along with one stuck wheel honking on the linoleum.
When I got home from the grocery store, I tried to keep myself and my swirling thoughts occupied as I tidied up my apartment and prepared dinner for my date with Gabe. The problem was that with his invitation, he hadn’t just gotten me worrying about planes—he’d also catapulted whatever was happening between us to the next level, and it made my head whirl like a cheap tabletop globe spun by a sticky-fingered toddler. Brazil. Brazil. Never had such a pretty word sounded so stinking terrifying.
The problem with fear and anxiety was that it didn’t behave in any predictable way; one stray what-if attracted other stray what-ifs, and soon enough I was in the What-If Whirlwind. It reminded me of being in a vacuum canister when you sucked up something really noisy that banged around in there like crazy. Rice or lentils or couscous.
Of course, I could just give him a big fat no. But I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t interested. I was very interested. And yet what if I was just reading too much into this? What if he hadn’t really meant it? Or what if Brazil or wherever else was what he suggested to all the girls? And speaking of which, what if there were other girls? What if there were lots of other girls? What if there were lots of other girls he’d met on lots of other shoots and who had been working themselves up into tizzies over international travel, only to get their poor fangirl hearts split apart like cheap Valentine’s Day lollipops?
Except that wasn’t the Gabe I was getting to know. He didn’t have a constantly buzzing cell phone that made me think he had twenty girls named Lauren sniffing around him like fluffy little terriers with pink ribbons in their hair. The Gabe I knew seemed both genuine and genuinely interested in me, which meant that his offer to me—however off the cuff—was heartfelt.
But even if it was heartfelt, what if I was just being silly about this whole thing? What if I was putting the cart miles and miles before the horse? What if he had some bummer of a habit that would end up being a deal breaker for me, like correcting people’s grammar when they spoke or talking during movies? What if we ended up being totally incompatible and I eventually looked back on these hazy, lusty days with a chuckle as I thought, Oh, if only he hadn’t been such a dreadful asshat?
That wasn’t the Gabe I was getting to know either. He wasn’t an asshat. He was lovely, and I was . . . smitten. Definitely smitten. If there was one thing that the last few days had made abundantly clear, it was that we had a special sort of spark between us—the sort of thing that can’t be learned or practiced. Already I could see that our personalities and our passion made sense together . . . even if he did lack my encyclopedic knowledge of air-travel accidents. Twenty-two in Brazilian airspace since 1939!
Once I got dinner prepared—yellow-beet salad with gorgonzola and pecans, salmon on puff pastry with pesto, and peach tartlets à la mode for dessert—I took a shower, dried my hair, and put on my favorite summer dress. I went downstairs to get Ivan and saw my sister off on her trip. I played with Ivan and put him down for a nap. Still, it was only four thirty.
Scratch that—4:31.
That was the other thing about anxiety. It made time crawl by.
I grabbed my needles and yarn. Even the knitting obsession was phobia related; it had been suggested to me by a therapist who was big on both dopamine reuptake and also hats and scarves. In the past, when I’d gotten myself worked up over the thought of flying or when I got a news alert that yet another plane had tumbled out of the sky, knitting hadn’t been nearly enough to calm me down. This time, though, the knitting actually did help a little bit, and I was at least able to get my mind back on a more even keel. Knit, purl, knit, purl. Calming breaths. Calming thoughts. The hat was far too big for Ivan, but I thought it might be just perfect for Gabe.
A photograph on my mantel caught my eye. It was my sister on her wedding day. She’d been so very happy when that photo had been taken; even now, I could almost feel her joy when I’d hugged her before walking down the aisle in front of her. She’d been brimming over with possibility and hope. But it hadn’t lasted. And now Boris was only barely visible at the left edge of the frame. Or, more precisely, his elbow.
When he vamoosed without so much as a do svidaniya, Daisy had ripped all her wedding photographs in half in a ritual ceremony at my kitchen table that was heavy on boxed chardonnay and light on sentimentality. I remembered that day just as well as her wedding day. Better even, because of the swearing and never-ending pints of ice cream. And as I had with quite a number of things—from overzealous home bang trims to accidentally using the diesel pump at the gas station—I’d learned my lesson through her. She had been down this road of falling for a man who shot into our world like a meteor into a swimming pool. It had ended with heartbreak, complications, and chaos. On the day I’d written ABSENT on the line on the divorce papers where Boris’s signature should have been, I’d promised myself that I would never get entangled with a man who wasn’t firmly, fully, and permanently rooted in Savannah. I would not get involved with a man would eventually become nothing but an elbow in the frame.
And now here I was.
Was I getting ahead of myself? Probably. But even still, Brazil was a big problem. The issue wasn’t that I’d fall to pieces if he jetted off to Brazil for two weeks. Of course not. The issue was that he’d suggested traveling together as a solution. But for me it was the problem. I couldn’t go away with him. Not to do the audio for him for his show or for anything else. Not even to visit him in LA.
If that was what he wanted—some easy, breezy girl who could hop on a plane at the drop of a hat, who didn’t have responsibilities and family and reasons she had to stay put—well, then, I definitely was not the girl for him. But if he’d be willing to settle for a girl who could, with ample prior advanced scheduling notice, go on short trips to any location within driving distance of Savannah, then maybe I was.
Riiiight, Lily, I thought, as my needles ticked along. You might be cute. But you’re not that cute.
When my hands started to feel crampy, I checked the time on the cable box. I’d gotten so used to focusing on the yarn up close that it took me a second to make out the fuzzy numbers. But when I did see the time, I couldn’t believe it. It was 6:46.
“Oh my God,” I gasped and stashed my needles and yarn in my knitting basket. Gabe would be here in fourteen minutes. Or maybe even less. Without meaning to, I had let Ivan nap all the way through his normal nap time and straight into cranky-baby territory. He was just waking up in my bedroom, and his yawns and murmurs spilled out of the video monitor. I scurried to the bedroom and scooped him up from his crib, a warm ball of sweaty baby wonderfulness. I bounced him in my arms and brought him to his high chair in the kitchen. In record time, I got him fed and the General too. I put an apron over my head and preheated the oven. I made sure everything was set on the table, and I heard a door slam outside.
I peeked out between the curtains. It was him. And he looked so handsome in his crisp gray shirt, sleeves rolled up his tanned forearms. In his hand was a bouquet of red roses, long stemmed and lush, with glossy leaves. He was on the phone, pacing in my driveway. He looked impatient, like he was trying to wrap up the call. His voice, low and strong, carried through the single-paned windows. That was when the room was filled with a low and throaty growl.
Fear of airplanes was one thing, but I had another airborne object to deal with at the moment. The General. We’d tried having Gabe walk right into the apartment, and it had ended in the Noise. So I decided to go for a more drastic approach: removing the General from the battlefield for a while. I placed my hands on the sides of his cage, which I had fastened to an old metal bar cart that I’d never used. With my foot I undid the wheel brake and began to push him out of the main room.
“Aaaaaah!” he shrieked.
“It’s OK!” I said, as reassuringly as possible. “We’re not going to the vet!”
“Noooooo!” he screamed, because obviously he was a parrot—his brain was the size of a shelled walnut—and the only thing he’d understood from that entire sentence was vet.
“No vet!” I repeated as I maneuvered him down the hallway and into my spare bedroom. I felt like a television doctor hurrying down a hallway as I pushed a rattling gurney. “No vet!”
There was a crazy panic in his eyes, and he plucked a feather from his chest, letting it dangle from his beak as he stared at me. There were whole chapters in my parrot books dedicated to understanding the complexity of feather plucking. All I really knew for sure about it was that it foreshadowed a total meltdown that would end in either my having to replace pretty much everything in his cage, or a round of squawks and shrieks that would positively ruin Ivan for the evening. And maybe bring the police knocking. But for the moment, he was silent. Worryingly silent.
In the silence, I heard the sound of Gabe coming up my stairway. It was time to pull out the heavy artillery.
It was a strategy that I only resorted to in times of total parrot-soothing emergency. It was a vinyl record that my grandma had played for him when she found herself in dire General straits, which she had purchased from the same estate sale where she’d found the General himself. Twenty-Six Civil War Favorites for Slide Guitar and Ukulele. Blowing the dust off the record, I opened the turntable. I placed the record on the spindle, dropped the needle, and turned to check on the General.
As the ukulele filled the room, he dropped his feather and began gently swaying side to side.
I crept out of the bedroom and closed the door just as Gabe gave a few firm knocks on the door. Manly knocks, even.
Oh boy. I was really in trouble here. Even his knocks were making me quiver.
I smoothed my dress, put on my sandals, flung open the door, and smiled. “Hi!”
He looked freshly showered—his thick hair still slightly damp. As soon as he saw me, he blew out a whoa breath, giving me a slow up-and-down. “Hey there.” He leaned in for a kiss, and the floral plastic on the big bouquet of roses crinkled between us. “These are for you,” he said and handed over the flowers with their satinlike petals and rich scent. He slid his bag off his shoulder and set it down next to my purse on the floor.
I clutched the flowers to me, feeling a touch like Miss America. “I just preheated the oven. It might be a little while. And Ivan slept longer than I’d planned. So we might have to have some company for dinner.”
Gabe didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the change in plans or the fact that I’d begun to babble. It was almost as if he didn’t notice what I’d said at all—he seemed utterly mesmerized by Ivan and went right over to him. “Hey, little man!” He crouched to bring himself down to Ivan’s level.
Ivan tried to clap his hands but ended up throwing Cheerios all over Gabe’s shoes. Much to my utter amazement, Gabe knelt down, picked up a few of the Cheerios from the floor . . . and ate them. Which made Ivan shove a few in his mouth too.
Oh my God, who was this man?
I didn’t have a vase big enough for the roses, so I used the beautiful old china washbasin pitcher that my grandma had left me. As I filled it with water, Gabe came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me, pulling my hips into his. It made my knees wobble, and I held on to the sink for support as the pitcher overflowed with water. He brushed my hair aside from the nape of my neck and kissed me there as he slid his hand down past my lower belly, holding me possessively by the thigh. He reached past me and turned off the water and then turned me in his arms. He nudged my cheek with his nose, and I looped my arms around his neck. Then he slid his hands down my hips, onto my ass, and hoisted me up onto the edge of the sink. He dipped me as he kissed me, and I wrapped my legs around him.
How I loved his lips on mine. But before I let myself get carried away, I put my hand on Gabe’s chest. He pulled away with that fire in his eyes, and I wiped my lips on the back of my hand. “Listen,” I said, trying to approach this whole issue in the most straightforward way that I could—not with my very convincing litany of reasons about why nobody should ever set foot on an airplane but rather simply why I would never be able to. “I need to tell you something.”
“Anything,” he said, holding me firmly by the shoulders. “You can tell me anything.”
He looked so patient and so understanding. I inhaled slowly for a count of eight and took as much strength as possible from his grip. I steadied myself and quieted my thoughts, focusing on the way my feet felt in my sandals, the way my dress straps felt against my shoulders. The way he really did make me feel safe in his arms. “The thing is . . .” I inhaled deeply through my nose. “It probably sounds crazy but . . .” And exhaaaaale. “But see, I’m, I’ve always been . . .”
Just as I began to find the words, there was the sharp raa-raa-raa of my phone buzzing on the counter. I ignored it. “It’s that I’m absolutely . . .”
Yet again, Raa-raa-raa. RAA-RAA-RAA.
I eyed my phone. I could have sworn I put it on Do Not Disturb, but there it was, rattling away. “Let me get that.” I slid off the counter and scurried across the kitchen, grabbing my phone from its charger.
My sister was calling. My sister, who had left hours ago. My sister, who knew I was having dinner with Gabe and who wouldn’t be calling unless it was urgent. Which gave me a sinking feeling that my explaining the finer points of aviophobia was going to have to wait.
I clenched my eyes shut and answered. “Don’t tell me.”
“Why, though? Why?” she growled. I was pretty sure I could hear her pounding on the steering wheel. “Would it be so freaking hard for there to be some system? Like, I don’t know, a goddamned keyhole? Fuckers!”
Daisy hardly ever swore since Ivan had been born. But when she did, she let loose like a seventeenth-century schooner captain after three helpings of grog.
“How far?” I asked, wincing and envisioning a GPS driving map in my head. The longer the little blue line of her route was, the less time I’d have with Gabe.
“I’d been on the road for two hours. I stopped at Cinnabon, turned off the car, and now I’m up shit creek! Before you ask, yes. I have called everybody else in creation. Aunt Jennifer is at the shop. My friends from yoga are out having a girls’ night. Mom and Dad are still on that goddamned interminable Alaskan cruise—how many polar bears does anybody need to see? So it’s just you, Lily. I’m so sorry.”
I scrunched my knuckle into my eye but then realized I had makeup on—idiot! I rubbed my knuckle into my palm and did some cursory under-the-eye cleanup. Probably looked like an NFL linebacker now. Fabulous.
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Gabe was once again engrossed in Ivan. He held a stuffed penguin by the little loop on its head while Ivan batted at it like a piñata.
The problem was that Ivan had just eaten and he had just gotten up from a really long nap. One plus one equaled the obvious: poops. I’d been so eager to talk about real life with Gabe, but this was all a slightly larger helping of real life than I’d planned on serving.
Gabe unbuckled Ivan from his high chair and scooped him up into the air, blowing a kiss on his belly. In my head, I envisioned the comments section under his cliff-diving video and saw myself responding to the lady whose ovaries exploded. You have no idea, sister!
That was when I remembered that way back after I almost poked out his eye at the Willows, he’d said he loved to look after his nieces. It was worth a try. I placed my hand over the lower part of my phone. “Do you think, by any chance, you’d be willing to do a little . . . light babysitting? Just for a bit? My sister forgot her keys. She’s two hours from here.” As soon as I said it, I realized how absolutely ridiculous it sounded. Which of course, it was! “See, she drives . . .”
Gabe hoisted Ivan up in the air, with his sexy biceps pulling his shirt tight. From between Ivan’s parted, kicking legs, Gabe asked, “Push-button ignition? I always wondered if that could happen.”
“It can. And does. Often.”
“Lily!” roared my sister into my ear. “Don’t key-fob shame me! I haven’t even met him yet!”
Gabe bounced Ivan in his arms, and Ivan pressed a chubby hand into Gabe’s chiseled cheekbone. Kaboom! “I’d love to watch him.”
But a tubby baby was only half the battle. Less than half. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and also a one-pound parrot. “And the General?” I asked, slapping a grimace-smile on my face.
“And the General,” Gabe added, without hesitation, glancing meaningfully at the back bedroom, where the General was now cawing along to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the style of “Aloha Oe.”
Before I could even gasp out a thank-you, my sister let out a long swoon in my ear and said, “Marry him, Lily. ASAP. We’ll figure out the airplane thing. I’ll pay the city hall fees. I’ll make the cake. Just don’t you dare let go of that man.”