Coq, page 7
“What the hell, Dad?” Emma mumbles.
There are no overhead bins available anywhere near our assigned seats. The boys and Joan sit in a row together. Behind them are Dan and Emma, while Dad and I are in a centre row with a stranger. I help Dad into his middle seat, arrange his airline blanket and pillow, and shove his carry-on under the seat in front of him. My face is hot from bending over.
A flight attendant materializes to help. She hates the bumbling assholes holding up take-off: us. She rearranges the bins to find room for most of our luggage. All except for mine. She takes my case.
“I’ll find a place to store it for the duration of the flight.” She disappears down the aisle, expertly dragging my suitcase behind her. I’m convinced she’s going to open the rear door and toss it outside. I have a moment of panic, remembering what it was like to watch my suitcase accidentally be removed from my flight and sent away with a labouring Mallory. I want to ensure that my bag makes into an overhead bin, but another flight attendant arrives and wants me to sit down.
I slide in beside my father, fasten my seatbelt, and close my eyes. A feeling of joy and trepidation zips through my body. We are on our way.
thirteen
Minutes after take-off, things are not right with Dad. He’s yanked down his mask, which remains twisted on his chin, and he’s gripping the armrests. He is ghostly, sweating, diminutive. I touch his hand.
“Dad?”
He turns toward me, his breath shallow, eyes frightened. I think heart attack, but he doesn’t claw at his chest, double over or try to speak. I consider the facts. He just ate so he can’t be hungry or low on calories. I made sure he had enough to drink and that he’d taken all his meds. He doesn’t seem confused. I rack my brain for an explanation and then everything comes into alarming focus. It’s the first time he’s been on a plane since Mom died.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You’re going to be okay. Focus on breathing.”
I squeeze his hand and we breathe together, deep, fragmented breaths. Dad tries to unbuckle. The seatbelt sign is still on. I place a firm hand on his leg.
“I have to get up.” His voice is shaky, thin.
“Not yet.” I gesture to the seatbelt sign. There’s no point in trying to engage Dan or anyone else. We need to get through the next few minutes. Once we hit cruising altitude, I can get him moving. I need to distract him.
“What was that song Mom used to sing when we were little?”
Dad shakes his head and I wonder if it was a mistake to bring her up, if it will only make things worse.
“The one she sang whenever we were stuck in line. Remember? Remember the long lines to get on the PEI ferry? Or the winding queues to feed the goats at the Christmas market?”
The memories come swift and desperate until I find myself transported back in time, standing in the funeral home receiving line, distraught that no one had mentioned how much my mom loved gingerbread or that she had a hidden talent for mental math. How unjust to have these details of her life dishonoured and forgotten.
Instead of calming my father down, my own heart gathers speed, dangerously, a bike travelling too fast downhill. I lean in and unclip Dad’s seatbelt, hoping to give him the illusion of space, of safety, but the opposite happens and he springs up like a man half his age, making a beeline for the aisle, clambering over and crushing me in his wake.
The commotion alerts the flight attendant, who’s still strapped in her take-off seat. She frowns and shouts something inaudible. I grab what I can of my father and try to wrestle him back into the row.
Dan unbuckles, dives into the aisle and takes my father’s elbow.
“Does he need a doctor?”
I don’t know who asks this. I’m hot with adrenaline and can’t see much through my father’s bent torso and flailing limbs. In the chaos I hear the telltale ding of the overhead light indicating the seatbelt sign has been turned off.
Dad is partially on my lap, and partway in the aisle, flanked awkwardly by Dan and the flight attendant. Another attendant asks over the PA system if there’s a doctor on board. No one steps forward.
Dan manages to get my father to stand. Someone suggests that my dad place his hands behind his head. That this position will somehow help him. Dad obeys, but he still breathes in disturbing clips. I climb out of my seat and rest my hand on the small of his back.
“Panic attack,” I whisper to the flight attendant, who nods sympathetically. He’s middle-aged and square with hairy arms and faded tattoos. Un-flight attendant-like, but he’s brought my dad water and a cool cloth, and he administers care like an army medic, direct and urgent. I brace myself despairingly between two seat backs, furious for forgetting that it’s Dad’s first time on an airplane since the accident. There’ve been a few road trips over the years, and a harbour cruise for Dan’s fortieth, but the closest Dad’s come to flying was chaperoning Joan’s grade two field trip to an aviation museum.
My dad remains unsettled, unsteady.
“Gerald?”
We all turn around. Dad, Dan, the un-flight attendant.
Mona is standing in the aisle, her red blouse a super hero’s cape. Before I can signal my body to let her through, Dad is pushing me out of the way. I move into the kids’ row and watch him fall into her arms, weeping. My knees buckle.
Mona doesn’t stumble. She holds their combined weight and his grief with unflinching strength. I watch, fascinated. Dan does too. After a minute, my dad resettles in his seat.
“Can you get off me, now?”
I look down at Wes, who I’m squishing. “Sorry,” I mumble, collecting myself, finding my balance. Mona and I make eye contact. It’s brief and loaded. I move into the aisle. Mona makes space and I lean in to kiss my dad’s forehead. His skin is warm and he exudes an almost supernatural peace. I gather my pillow and blanket, and my purse from under the seat, and look to the back of the plane. The un-flight attendant agrees to fetch Mona’s carry-on so she can stay with my dad.
We hit a patch of turbulence and the seatbelt sign turns on. After a few words with Dan and the kids, I’m forced to stumble down the aisle towards my new seat. It’s easy to find because it’s at the very back of the plane, the last row on the left by the washroom. The perfect place to hide when you’ve hijacked someone else’s memorial trip. When you’re travelling to Pairs, uninvited and unwelcomed.
The bearded man in the aisle seat stands to let me in.
The perfect place to process the hijacking and to consider that you might be wrong. You should’ve just invited her in the first place.
The plane is not full as the airline claimed. I’m relieved when the man in the aisle seat says there’s no one in the middle. Lucky, he says. We’re lucky.
I don’t feel lucky. I feel tricked and grateful, nauseous and ashamed. What were we thinking, going to Paris? Planning excursions. Excluding Mona. Why didn’t we choose something simple like a Sable Island picnic? A candlelight service by the old armoury. A long walk in the rain.
I don’t like that the middle seat is empty. I want it to be full as a clown car. Packed with empathy and bulk and limbs. Give me a soft arm to brush up against, a thick shoulder to lean on, a knee to touch. In the quiet loneliness of row forty-two, give me Glen.
fourteen
“Can I get you anything from the cart?” A bug-eyed flight attendant leans into the row.
I search for the seat menu, but it’s gone. Mona probably stole it. My seatmate notices, hands me his. I thank him, scan the menu options, order a glass of white wine. I stare out the window into nothingness, a black sky, and somewhere thousands of metres below, the black ocean, frigid and swollen, dotted, I suspect, with container ships bludgeoning their way to New York under the light of the moon.
“You see anything?”
My seatmate is scrambling for a view. I attempt to put my chair back but forget we’re in the last row. The seat positions are as fixed as toilets. I won’t be able to sleep. None of this would have happened if I’d just invited Mona in the first place. If I’d been kind.
I take a sip of my wine. “I see dead people.”
“Right, well, if you see my granny, tell her to bugger off, will you? I missed her funeral and she won’t let it go.”
A Brit. He raises his brows and takes a long swig of his drink, a Pilsner, and smiles. I make eye contact for the first time since landing in the back row. He’s older than I thought, unmarried, his skin weathered, hair long and unruly and as gold as his beer.
“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” I reply, surprised and slightly ashamed by the ease, the elderliness of my banter. “What possible excuse could you have had to warrant missing Granny’s funeral?”
“I was trapped in the ice on a cargo vessel off the coast of Greenland.”
“Granny says that’s a lie.”
“You can see her now?”
I stare out the window. Still black. “I can. She’s riding a horse. Chestnut. Blond mane.”
He’s quiet for a second. Dabs at a spill on his tray table with an airline napkin. “That’s how she died,” he finally says. “Fell off a horse. Hit her head.”
I stare, trying to decipher whether he’s being serious. He swallows.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“I’m pulling your leg.” His laugh is hearty, his smile mischievous.
I return his smile, sink back into my unmoving chair, take another sip of wine. The tension in my shoulders begins to wane and for a moment I forget about Dad’s panic attack, Mona’s sudden and timely appearance, the disaster trip I’ve initiated and have only just begun.
In the silence, my seatmate is pensive. He runs his finger around the rim of his glass. A science magazine flaps from the seat pocket in front of him. A scar bisects his right hand like a serpent mound. There’s a small hole in the elbow of his shirt sleeve and I wonder if he knows. If there’s not someone close enough to him who might’ve pointed it out when he got dressed this morning.
“She actually died of a stroke,” he says, quietly. “My granny.”
“That’s how my mom went.” Though I’ve said the words a thousand times, tonight they get caught in my throat, as if they’ve been altered by the plane’s grim circulating air, or stiffened by the cabin’s coarse lighting. “On a plane,” I add.
“On a plane?” he says. “A curious place to go.”
Curious is the correct word. I’ve both loathed and delighted over the details of Mom’s death. The peculiarity, the odds of it happening on a plane, the publicness of it, the whimsy and horror. Her proximity to heaven. A place I still believe in if only to get through the day.
“She was only sixty.”
“One always dies too soon or too late,” he says.
Yes, I think, remembering not only my mother’s funeral but of Cathy’s and the cruel experience of seeing her parents draped on either end of her coffin, their grief so physical it took a team of attendees to help them back to their feet, to help them exit the church, to help them breathe.
“You know Sable Island?” I ask.
His eyes brighten. “Of course, I do. It’s where my Granny learned to ride horses. Wild ones.” He winks and then adjusts in his seat to face me, as if he’s about to tell me a schoolyard secret. “I’ve been several times. You?”
I shake my head. I don’t share with him the island’s significance. That the location of my mother’s plane was tracked precisely to Sable Island at the time of her stroke. That fact has always made her death somehow more tolerable, more poetic.
“It’s a magic place,” he says. “Sable Island is what brought me to Canada. I read about it in an old National Geographic I found at a doctor’s surgery when I was eleven. It’s why I became an oceanographer.”
I remember the issue — Dad collected them — though there were us Air Force Planes on the cover, not scientists or seals or rogue horses. I’d found the soiled magazine while cleaning out my father’s horde. It had been wedged beneath the faulty leg of a dining room chair. How absurd, I’d thought, that Dad had taken the time to make sure the chair was stable, comfortable, safe, despite the fact that it was nestled against a table piled high with food waste, winter coats, waybills, plants, and unopened mail. A platoon of mice.
Wes is standing in the aisle and my cheeks flush as though he’s caught me doing something inappropriate. He makes it worse by shifting his gaze back and forth between me and my seatmate.
“What’s up, Bud?”
“You got any headphones?”
I glance at the Beats folded around his neck. Wes notices, tugs them off.
“They’re dead,” he says. “Dad borrowed them and forgot to charge them.”
At the mention of “Dad” my seatmate glances up from the magazine now spread on his tray table. Wes looks at him, then at me. He’s obviously not brought the charger. I slither from my seat to fish a pair of earbuds from my carry-on and hand them to him. He thanks me. His eyes linger on my seatmate before he heads back to his seat.
I’m restless. Before stuffing my carry-on back under the seat, I yank my laptop from its sleeve and bring up a report I’d gotten halfway through reading before leaving for the airport. The report, conducted by a team of Finnish researchers, is from an architectural publication and examines sustainable design and best practices in the food sector from the building to the food itself. AI. HVAC. 3D Food Printing. Modular storage. Nano-fertilizers.
My seatmate orders another beer, and I get a second glass of wine. A vent is blasting hot air and I tear off my sweater, flap my shirt.
“Felix,” my seatmate says.
“Claudia.”
This is how it starts. All over. An exchange of names and somehow, saying it in the low light of the plane’s overheated tail section while the rest of the passengers drift off feels bold and rebellious. Strangers no longer talk on planes. But Felix and I whisper: life histories, facts, confessions.
I learn that he’s both childless and parentless. No siblings. Parents died in a bus accident in Italy. He’s on his way to a climate conference. He studies currents, spent time in an ashram in his twenties. Former rugby player, divorcee, scared of the dark. A Japanese exchange student taught him origami and he folds me a little horse from a page of his ocean magazine. A galloping one with lean muscle, sharp hooves, a wavy mane.
He asks me about Glen, and the brazenness of his questions scares and thrills me. When did you fall in love? How did he show he loved you? Do you still love him? How private and inappropriate. How refreshing. He stops to retrieve a trio of pills from a sleek black pill organizer, swishes them down with bottled water.
In a few hours we’ll part ways and I’ll regret my honesty, my outrageous vulnerability. And his. In a few days I’ll stand under the Arc de Triomphe with a satchel of my mom’s belongings, recite a poem, speak of her gingerbread, her ability to solve for “x” and polish a doorknob, and I will know the quiet virtue of these things.
Lavender light fills the cabin. The sun is rising and Felix and I fall asleep, our bodies collapsing inward, over the vacant middle seat. I dream of my mother. It’s so vivid I can smell her favourite nail polish, hear the musicality of her voice when she treated a split lip, a fractured heart. It’s so real that when the flight attendant plunks down a tray of pale, jittery scrambled eggs somewhere off the English coast, I nearly reach for her hand.
After breakfast, Felix and I hold hands. Our grip is tight and primal as if we are trying to commit the experience to memory or biology. Fingerprint to fingerprint. Lifeline to lifeline. I check the map to see how far we are from Paris. Just under five hundred miles.
“Not much time left,” Felix says, though his eyes are closed.
When Joan lines up to use the washroom at the back of the plane and sees me clutching a stranger’s hand, I don’t let go. If she finds it awkward, she doesn’t let on. She only smiles, her un-makeupped face fresh and alive.
By the time she’s out of the washroom, I panic, follow her halfway up the aisle, and tell her not to say anything to Grandpa or Wes. She nods. I’m embarrassed that she feels sorry for me, for my shame and desperation. Before I have to ask, she assures me my dad is okay.
When I get back to my seat, the breakfast tray is gone and the origami horse stands proudly in its place, gaze fixed on the window as if it knows we’ll be landing soon and it will be free to roam the streets of Paris like an equine Joan of Arc.
I steal a glance at Felix’s beautiful scarred hand and feel a dizzying loneliness I’ve never acknowledged before. I miss the brawn of a man’s hand on my hip, clutching the back of my head, grazing the small of my back. I miss the chivalry, the dominance, the energy, the masculinity. Maybe it’s the fatigue, or the emotional fallout of the trip, the pending jet lag, the anniversary of mom’s death, or the strenuous act of being woman, but on some level, part of me wants a man just so I can stop having to be one. Let him chop the wood, scrape the windshield, change the oil, ship off to war. And let me, even if for a day, be she.
The plane touches down and taxis. We pack our belongings. I tuck the horse inside my purse. When the plane comes to a complete stop at the gate, it feels jarring and disappointing. Like the lights coming on at a bar. Closing time. I power on my cell phone and remember such a moment with Glen. Slow dancing on a rum-soaked floor on a snowy Saturday night. The lights coming on to reveal that we were the only ones there. What was the song? I push the memory away.
There’s movement in the aisle. The doors are open and people are beginning to deplane. I hope my father remains seated and gives me a chance to catch up, to help him off. I find my suitcase, confiscated by the flight attendant when we first boarded.
Sensing the end, Felix says, “Thank you.” It’s a loaded statement. So lovely and true I imagine the horse whinnying in agreement from my purse. Felix has already told me he has no checked bags. From passport control he will bypass baggage claim and head straight through customs, where he’ll meet an Uber to take him to the conference hotel and out of my life.
