Another gate agent materializes, and I slowly rise to a stand, my knees popping. “I dropped my purse,” I explain, pulling it back onto my shoulder, feeling the slight tremor of a closing door. A missed opportunity.
“Since you’re scanned onto the flight, I’m going to need you to stay in line,” the gate agent says.
I reclaim my spot in front of the women who were complaining about the wait, the slope of the Jetway pulling me forward. Somewhere, Claire is already in the air, flying toward California, and I feel a stab of guilt. Not for the lies I told, but perhaps I should have at least warned her to be careful.
As the line to board the plane inches forward, I wonder if I’d met Claire under different circumstances whether we might have been friends. It feels wrong to be the last person to speak to her before she disappears, to be the only person in the world who knows what happened to her and still not know anything of substance about her. Who she loves. What matters to her, or what she believes in when she needs to believe in something. The specifics of the circumstances that have narrowed down to this single, outrageous option.
We have one thing in common. Each of us is desperate enough to take the risk. To turn our backs on who the world demands we be. It isn’t just what has been done to each of us—by Dex, by Claire’s husband—it’s a system that tells women we are unreliable, and then expendable. That our truths don’t matter when set side by side with a man’s.
I try to clear my mind. To focus on what will come next for me. Liz will worry when I don’t call as promised, but it has to be this way. When Castro arrives on her doorstep, Liz needs to be able to say with confidence that I returned to do the right thing.
Perhaps a few months from now, Liz might get a small package in the mail. A Christmas ornament—with no card, no return address—from the ripe vineyards of Italy or the crowded streets of Mumbai. And she’ll know that I’m sorry. That I’m happy. That I’ve finally forgiven myself.
As soon as I board, I’m going to ask to have my aisle seat changed to a window. I want to view the world—its wide vista expanding in a graceful arc below me—and imagine myself in it. My true self, the person Liz showed me I can be.
I hope that when the plane takes off, we’ll fly straight into the sun, the light so bright it will burn away the last vestiges of everything and everyone I’m leaving behind. That it will carry me forward, higher than I’ve ever been, above the fear and the lies, tearing away a page filled with mistakes, the fragments scattering behind me like confetti.
And in its place, I’ll create a new life built from the scraps of memory—some true, some the wished-for imaginings of a little girl who never found her place—constructed with luck and wide beams of gratitude holding it all together.
Maybe someday I’ll dream of my life in Berkeley. Not the one I lived, with its dark corners and deceitful shadows, but the one I conjured up years ago, in a narrow bed above a dusty church in San Francisco. I’ll visit again the light-dappled trails of Strawberry Canyon, high above the old stadium, with its view of a city skyline that seems to rise straight out of the bay. In my mind I’ll walk along campus paths that wind among the redwoods, smell the damp bark and moss soft beneath my feet, listen to the stream tumble and jump across the rocks.
Ahead of me, the line starts moving again, space opening up between people, allowing me to breathe easier. Whatever was wrong has been fixed, and I can feel everyone around me relax, anticipating the vacation that waits for them on the other side of the four-hour flight south.
As I make my way down the Jetway, I feel as if I’m shedding my old self, piece by piece, growing lighter the closer I get to the plane. Pretty soon, I might not weigh anything at all. A laugh bubbles up, light and crisp, carrying none of the debris it usually does. In this moment, I have all I ever wanted. And for the first time, for the only time, it’s enough. I hitch Claire’s purse tighter over my shoulder and touch