Adventures with Max and Louise (38 page)

Angeli has awakened. She and Martin break into applause. My delighted family follows suit.

“Well done, luvey!” Max coos.

“That is not what I meant, and you know it. Just look at—” Liz responds, but I cut her off.

“You don’t get it, do you? You yell at people. You belittle them. I mean, sure, you’re good at your job, but everyone hates you!”

“I’m not here to be loved!” Her voice reaches a shrill crescendo. A crowd of diners walk past, staring at us.

“Well, then, you’re a roaring success.” I pat her on the back. “Walking out of the dining area, I grab Denise by the elbow.

Liz digs through her purse, flabbergasted. “But I got her on fucking Leno!” she mutters. She lights a cigarette, waving it in the air. “Can I get a drink?” she asks the nose ring waiter, eyeing my amused family before adding, “Please?”

I follow Denise down the block to her junk heap of a car. Not surprisingly, it’s unlocked. She climbs in, buckling herself in with the speed of a sloth. After she’s pointedly waited for me to buckle up, she carefully adjusts her rear- and side-view mirrors, rolling and unrolling her window by hand.

“Denise, I’m in kind of hurry here!”

She faces me, twisting in the cracked vinyl. “One thing you should remember about me, Molly: I’m a very safe driver. I will
not
speed.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

O
NE THING
I
’VE
forgotten about Denise: she is a really, really bad driver. As a teen, in an effort to save the planet, she refused to learn to drive. As a newly christened adult driver, she takes the whole thing way too seriously.

“Holy shit, Denise, hurry it up!” I scream, watching the cars whizzing past us on I-5. Annoyed drivers glance back, surprised we are both under eighty.

“Sixty miles an hour is far too fast.” She flips off the driver, who lays on his horn for what seems a full minute. “Fifty conserves gas and saves lives,” she sighs.

“Not if I strangle you,” I mutter as other cars continue to stream around us. We are the lone tortoise in a field of hares.

“All these other people might as well be driving coffins,” Denise says primly.

How had I forgotten that my sister sees cars as weapons of death to be handled accordingly? That her passenger seat is pitted with the fingernail marks of first-time passengers who vowed never to venture a second trip?

Mom always worried about Denise more than she did her other daughters. Now I know why.

I glance at my watch, realizing that Wolf’s plane will leave long before Ms. Safety even gets us close to the airport.

“It’s time to take the wheel, sweetie,” Louise says.

I think it’s Louise. I’m not sure who is speaking. Max’s and Louise’s voices have become so faint it is hard to distinguish them. I want to ask them why they’re fading, but I’m too busy trying to figure out how to make it to the airport before retirement age. For the first time in my life since the accident, it occurs to me: I don’t have to be the passenger. I can drive. At least, I think I remember.

“Pull over!” I shout.

“What?!” Denise shrieks over the clanking engine. Her car has the sound insulation of a piñata. If I felt safe enough to shut my eyes for a second, it would be like standing on the interstate.

“Pull over, I’m driving. We’ll never get there with you at the wheel.”

“I can’t just pull over. It’s a freeway!”

I put my hand on the door handle. “Pull over, or I’ll jump!” I threaten.

“You wouldn’t!”

“We’re going slow enough,” I hiss, opening the door a crack.

Terrified, Denise pulls across three lanes of traffic onto the shoulder. Miraculously, she hits no one, although she leaves quite a tangle of cars behind us.

Moving with the calm obedience of someone being hijacked, she slides over to let me take over the driver’s seat. I grip the wheel, familiarizing myself with her crappy little Ford Fiesta.

I give her what I hope is a reassuring look. “Thank you.”

“You haven’t driven in ten years,” she says shakily.

“I wouldn’t call what you do driving!” I flip on the turn indicator. “Besides, it’s like a riding a bike.” I try to forget that I barely knew how to drive in the first place and never passed my driver’s test. I begin to lose my nerve.

“You know, I didn’t kill Mom,” I say quietly.
Where’d that come from?

“Of course you didn’t. Nobody thinks that! Is that what this is about? Proving you can drive? Why don’t we do this later? I know a great driving instructor. He’s very good at helping adult drivers.”

A vision of Wolf walking down that boarding ramp flashes in front of me. “No, I don’t have time for that.”

Keeping one eye on the rearview mirror and another on the freeway, I wait for an opening in traffic and press my foot onto the accelerator. The car jumps forward with the power of an electric toothbrush.

“No wonder you drive so slowly.” The car lurches ahead. “Your car would fall apart if you hit sixty.”

“Ohhhhhhhhhh. Slow down!” Denise howls as we pass sixty miles an hour and head for seventy. “Slow down!”

At sixty-eight miles an hour, my self-assured, artsy sister slides down into the front passenger seat well under the glove compartment. At seventy-three miles an hour, something in the car begins to moan.

It’s Denise. “Mmmmm. Mmmmm.”

“Get in the backseat!” I’m afraid she’s going to go bonkers and grab my ankle or something worse.

Miraculously, she listens to me just as I swerve to the right for the exit to Sea-Tac Airport. She sails over the seat and hits the passenger rear door, which flies open. I manage to see what’s going on in the rearview mirror, twist over the center armrest, and grab her ankle before she falls out the door. I have the foresight and opportunity to veer into the left lane, which slams the open door shut. Checking my rearview mirror, I see my stunned sister, wide-eyed and upright in the backseat directly behind me.

“You okay?” I keep an eye on the road. We are out of second chances.

She nods numbly. Swinging the car to the right, I’m too late. I miss the airport exit.

“Shit!” I scream. I loop around surface roads, past a wasteland of cheap motels, a refurbished Denny’s, and several sleazy used car lots, to get safely back on the freeway.

Once we are back on the airport freeway, I find Denise in the rearview mirror. “You take a cab home, all right?”

She’s white, trembling, and has all the motor functions of a heavily sedated dog. She nods, but I’m not even sure she’s even heard me. “I saw the pavement, I saw the pavement,” she repeats softly.

While I drive up the hill toward the main entrance to Sea-Tac Airport, I run through the features on my cell phone, looking for missed incoming calls. The first one must be Wolf’s number. I debate trying to call him but decide that he’s probably shut off his phone. But mostly, I just really need to see him.

I drive pass the Port Authority digital sign flashing the weather and time. On our right is a line of Alaska Airline airplanes, each with its painted Eskimo on the tail. I wonder if Wolf is on one of them. I am driving past the ramp to departures when I hear Max and Louise talking at the same time. Their voices have a soft, distant quality.

“You drove,” they say.

“I drove,” I repeat, pulling the car into the curb. Turning off the motor, it sinks in. “I drove.”

One look at Denise, and I’m snapped back into reality. She’s in no shape to drive. Outside the car a loudspeaker blares, telling me it’s Officer Dole, and I’d better move the car, or I’m going to get a ticket. I dial Trina’s cell. She answers on the first ring. “Hi, Molls, we’re finally on our way home. That was soooo much fun. We had drinks with that Liz woman. I think you were a little hard on her. She’s not that—”

“Trina, put Hami on.”

T
EN MINUTES LATER
I drop Denise’s car with a valet in the airport parking lot. She sits, pale and shaken, on a bench in the parking lot. She bites her cuticles, slowly recovering. I hand her the receipt for her car and sit down beside her.

“Just give this to Hami or Trina. I’m really sorry for scaring you.”

She waves her hand and gives me a crooked smile. “It’s going to make a great story.” She looks at her watch. “When’ll they get here?”

I check my watch, anxious to run. “Fifteen minutes.”

Her face lights up. “Trina’s going to die if she ends up having to drive my junker car home. Won’t that be great?”

I wrap my arm around her and squeeze. “Yes, it will. Are you okay?”

She hugs me back. “Don’t you have to talk some guy off his plane?”

After I dash into the airport, heels clicking on the polished granite, it takes me a minute to find the Alaska Airlines departure information. I locate flight 102 to Anchorage: boarding. My pace quickens as I race toward the gates. A security line snakes its way through the large foyer leading to the gates. I spin around, back toward the counter, removing my credit card from my wallet as I locate the purchase ticket line, three people deep. Crossing my arms, I scan the departures schedule: still boarding. There’s no way to talk to Wolf unless I hurriedly buy a ticket and run out the gate. Maybe I can talk him off the plane. Maybe he’s going to look at me like the biggest embarrassment in his life and suggest that the ground crew remove me.

Three people ahead of me drag their luggage along at a glacial pace. Maybe I could bribe them with a $20 bill to let me cut in line. “Tell ’em you ’ave a medical emergency,” Max faintly suggests.

“I think you have to show them the wound to qualify, although a few more minutes of this, and I will stab myself,” I snort. The small woman in front of me clutches her purse and steps away.

A burley man at the e-ticket kiosk in front of us kicks the machine. “Stupid goddamned thing!” he bellows. “I am not checking the fishing pole; it’s a carry-on. Can I talk to a real person, please?”

A smiling Alaska Airlines employee reaches out from behind the ticket desk. “Right this way, sir.” He grabs his fishing pole and follows.

The small woman steps aside carefully as if I’m wielding a knife. “You go on ahead. I’ve got plenty of time.”

Thanking her, I punch in the information on Wolf’s flight as quickly as I can, sliding my credit card through the scanner. The moment the ticket is spit out of the kiosk I grab it and rush to the security line. The line is fifteen people deep. I take my place in the middle of a gaggle of freakishly tall girls, some in matching sweats. They joke and sip their lattes with the awkward, loose-limbed grace of athletes. Seattle Storm, our local WNBA basketball team.

While I shuffle my way toward the metal detector, I start making bargains with God.
If I catch this flight, I promise to go to church every Sunday.
No, God cares about good deeds.
I’ll train homeless people to cook. I’ll cater a delicious gourmet turkey dinner every year that will make the Millionaires’ Club annual feast look like dog food.
By the time I am taking off Trina’s heels and walking barefoot through the metal detector, I’ve decided to make Angelina Jolie and Mia Farrow look mean-hearted. The three children I’ll adopt from third world countries will not only be orphans, they’ll be disabled.

When I finally reach the gate, I climb over rows of adjoining seats just in time to see the boarding ramp disengage from the front of the airplane. The plane, lit up in the dark sky, is pushed out of the gate and into the taxiway. Standing with my forehead cool on the window, I watch the tail of the plane disappear around the corner. My panting breath fogs the window. The terminal smells like floor polish, dirty socks, and stale coffee. There goes Wolf.

I watch the stoic Eskimo on the plane’s tail as it lifts off the ground. It ascends sharply until it banks to the left over the winking lights of suburban Renton, disappearing into the darkness over Elliott Bay. I want to lie down on a chair and cry. Instead I find a chair and lean back, taking the weight off my heels. I stare at the useless $626 ticket in my hand, nearly double what I would have paid a week ago.

Two gate attendants chat as they organize tickets and peck on their keyboards. One of them leaves the desk, clattering onto the stone hallway. “Okay, Bill, go ahead and shut it down. See you Tuesday.”

“Wait!” I yell, running across the room to the remaining attendant, a swarthy man with a crew cut and one earring. “I missed my flight. I need to change my ticket to the next flight to Anchorage.”

The attendant quickly types into the computer. “Sorry, that flight at 10:20 to Anchorage is booked solid, stand-by only.”

Hope drains out of me. I rake my hands through my hair. “Isn’t there anything I can do? I have to get on that flight.”

He shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says. He shuts off the computer and flips the sign on the desk to “closed.” “There’s space available on the morning flight. They can help you back at the front desk.” He slips his arms into his navy blazer. “Good luck.” He grabs his coffee and leaves.

I flop onto a stiff chair to gather my strength to think about tomorrow when Louise whispers, “Call him back. Tell him to wait. This is an emergency.”

“Oh, come on Louise, I’m exhausted, and so are you. You’re losing your voice.”

“Call ’im back,” Max orders. His voice is a flicker but dead serious. “Give it one more shot, luv.”

With a final burst of energy, I jump up and chase down the gate attendant. “Hey, wait!” He’s on the moving concourse, so I walk beside him as he holds the black plastic side rail.

He sips his latte, giving me an end-of-the-shift-dead-man-walking stare. “What?”

I have to stroll very slowly to keep pace with the snail-like creeping concourse. “I didn’t tell you why I need to get on that flight. It’s my sister. She’s in the hospital in Anchorage.”
God, forgive me.
“She’s dying, and I just want to say goodbye.”

He exhales and purses his lips. “Really? What hospital?”

“Saint, um, no wait, it’s not . . . it’s Group Health. That’s it . . .”

He leans back to drain his latte. “You sure? ’Cause I’m a born and bred Anchorage boy.”

“Okay, I’m lying.” He smiles, and the truth spills out of me in a muddy torrent. “All right, I just blew off the most amazing man in the world today and he just got on that plane to Alaska thinking that I’m with another guy. I just realized about an hour ago that I have to follow him because for the first time in my life I really and truly love a man.”