head felt as if it would balloon up and float away. Queasy, full, she refused the meals when they came. She started a movie and turned it off. She sat washed by waves of guilt, guilt she’d felt many times this past year as she remembered that she and her husband, in truth, had always loved each other best when they were apart. And now it was for always. She closed her eyes.
She felt her computer bag between her feet. She hadn’t even thought yet about the job. What with getting her visa, collecting a sample for Matt from the hospital where he had banked blood, delivering it to the DNA lab, getting the collection kit, packing, speeding to the airport — with all this she had not given the first thought to her interview with the chef. Actually it had been a relief to have to move so fast. Grief, which had become half-comforting to her, almost a companion, had seemed finally to take a step back. She felt like a person again, even if she barely made it to the gate on time with her carry-on.
Then she was strapped in, with her candy corn. She attempted to face the situation. Was it possible? Could the claim be true? She let her mind roll back once again. She lingered over every bump, every moment of discord; she knew where each one was located. They were all inside her, arranged since his death alongside love, rue, and affection. She threaded through them now. Another woman? A child? It just wasn’t possible to believe he could have kept it from her. He was such a confessor. It was a joke among people who knew him. This was the kind of thing he could never, ever have kept to himself.
Especially since the question of children was one that came up between the two of them. Originally they were both in agreement. They did not want children. Halfway through their decade together, though, Matt changed his mind.
At first, when it started, she reminded him of the ways in which parenthood did not suit them. She traveled every month, and so did he. If they had a child, someone would have to stop. That would have be her, clearly; he earned most of the money. The thing was, she didn’t want to stop, not for a while. She loved her column. Let me work another year, she would say. Matt was patient. He was the one, after all, who had changed his mind. But always the subject came back.
He could never have hidden a child. This thought seemed clear to her in the humming silence of the plane. The other passengers were sleeping. After a long time of shifting uncomfortably in her seat she got up and went to the back of the plane, to the hollow where there is always a tiny window. She looked out through the trapped streaks of moisture to the deep darkness, thinking. Finally she crept back to her seat and fell asleep.
When they landed in Beijing she felt a little sick from the sugar, and she dragged her feet past entry agents who stamped her passport and waved her ahead. She stopped at a currency booth to change a few hundred dollars and, thus fortified, stepped out of security into the crowded public area.
Touts swarmed. “Hello?” said one. “You want taxi?”
“No, thank you.”
“Taxi. This way.”
“No.” She rolled her bag toward the glass doors, outside of which she could see people in line for taxis. On her right she passed a European man. “How much into Beijing?” she heard him say to one of the men.
“Three hundred,” the man replied, and the European agreed. She kept walking.
Meanwhile the first man was still following her. “Taxi,” he said, and then to her shock actually wrapped his fingers around her arm.
“Get away from me,” she said, and shook him off with such force that even she was surprised. He stepped back, the loser, his smile derisive. She strolled to her place in the taxi line and felt herself stand a little taller.
Her turn came and she showed the driver the firm’s Beijing business card, which bore the apartment address, then let herself melt in the back seat. She had done it; she was here. A freeway sailed along outside, dotted by lit-up billboards in Chinese and English for software, metals, chemicals, aircraft, coffee, logistics. What was logistics? Not knowing made her feel old.
She still had a few loved ones, at least.