to stay with for the weekend. I don’t think she’s gonna put me up longer than that.”
And suddenly it hit Fiona: This was a scam. This was his sob story. She was supposed to look at him with maternal concern, to hand him a hundred bucks and say, “Perhaps this will help.” If she were his age, he’d have tried to seduce her on top of it.
She said, “What a nightmare.” She made her face empathic, and then she turned her magazine page. She could’ve said, I’ve got bigger problems than you, buddy. She could’ve said, There are worse things to lose.
When the cabin lights turned off, Fiona curled her body toward the aisle, settled into her thin pillow.
She’d never sleep, but it was nice to go through the motions. She had a million decisions to make in Paris, and the past week had been a frenzy of panicked planning, but for these eight hours, she was mercifully unable to do a thing. Being on an airplane, even in coach, was the closest an adult could come to the splendid helplessness of infancy. She’d always been irrationally jealous when Claire got sick. Fiona would bring her books and tissues and warm Jell-O water and tell her stories, wishing to trade places. Partly to spare her daughter the pain of illness, but also to feel mothered. These were the only times Claire would accept Fiona’s doting, the only times she’d curl up in Fiona’s lap to sleep—her body emanating fever-heat, the soft hair around her forehead and neck curling and sticking to her sweat. Fiona would stroke her hot little ear, her burning calf. When Claire got older, it wasn’t the same—she wanted to be alone with her book or her laptop—but she’d still let Fiona bring her soup, let her perch on the edge of the mattress for a minute. And that was something.
* * *
—
She must have slept a bit, but with the time change and the cabin lights and their flying against the sun, she wasn’t sure if half an hour had passed or five. Her seatmate snored, cheek to shoulder.
The plane lurched, and a flight attendant came through to touch all the overhead bins with two fingertips. Everything secured. Fiona wanted to live on the plane forever.
Her neighbor didn’t wake till breakfast was served. He ordered a coffee, miserably. “What I want,” he said to Fiona, “is a whiskey.” She didn’t offer to buy him one. He pulled up the window shade. Still dark. He said, “I don’t like these planes. The 767s.”
She bit. “Why not?”
“Yeah, in another life, I used to fly these. One of my many previous lives. I don’t like the angle of the landing gear.”
Was this another part of the scam? The beginning of his bad-luck tale, how he lost his job and maybe his wife too? He didn’t look old enough to have had previous lives, or a previous life long enough to fly a plane this big. Didn’t you need years of experience?
She said, “It’s not safe?”
“You know, it’s all completely safe, and it’s all completely unsafe. You’re hurtling through the air, right? What do you expect?”
He seemed sober enough not to vomit in her lap, or put his hand there. Just a little loud. Against her judgment, she kept talking to him. It was something to do. And she was curious what he’d say next, how the scam would unfold.
He told her how he used to name every plane he flew, and she told him her daughter used to name everything—toothbrushes, Lego people, the individual icicles outside her bedroom window.
“That’s wild,” he said, which seemed an overstatement.
On the runway he asked if she’d been to Paris before. “Just once,” she said, “in high school.”
He laughed. “So this’ll be different, right?”
She couldn’t remember much of that trip, beyond the other members of the French Club and the boy she’d hoped to kiss, who instead wound up getting caught in bed with Susanna Marx. She remembered smoking pot and eating nothing but croissants. Sending Nico postcards that wouldn’t reach him till she was home. Waiting in lines at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, feeling she should have a more profound reaction. She’d only taken French to rebel against her mother, who believed she ought to know Spanish.
Fiona asked if he’d been there himself, and then she said, “I guess if you were a pilot—” She’d forgotten because she didn’t believe him.