Ask the Passengers (15 page)
Read Ask the Passengers Online
Authors: A. S. King
PASSENGER #0098
JOHN KIMBALL, SEAT 22B
FLIGHT #1209
CHARLOTTE TO ALLENTOWN
Jenny is asleep, and I watch her breathing in the seat next to me. I think about what she said last night. I think about what I said last night. I can’t figure out if we were having the same conversation or what.
All I know is that I asked her to marry me and outlined my plan. I told her that we should wait until we’re done with grad school. I told her that we should stay in the area because she has a good chance of getting that job at U of P.
I’d practiced the speech for weeks. I made reservations at the resort for our weekend vacation. I bought the ring in March.
March.
I never guessed in a million years that she’d give it back to me. I touch my pants pocket from the outside and feel the ring there against my leg.
I stare at her beautiful sleeping head and try to extract her reasoning. She wouldn’t answer my questions last night.
Don’t you want to get married? Don’t you love me? Is it the ring? Did I do something wrong? Why aren’t you talking to me?
As I look out the window, I get a feeling of dread in my chest. Like someone is poking me in the throat.
Maybe she doesn’t love you, John. Maybe she’s using you for your car.
That’s my mother. She’s said that all along. And other stuff. But as I look out the window, all I can think is how wrong my mother is about this. Jenny has always loved me. We’re soul mates. It was love at first sight. I know it.
So why’d she say no?
She didn’t even say
maybe
or
let me think about it
. She just said no.
I pretend to cough, and jostle my elbow so she wakes up. This only makes her turn over a little. I do it again and then stroke her head and tell her that we’re landing soon. I give her a minute to stretch and do some neck rolls, but that’s all.
“Can we talk about this?” I ask.
“Here?”
“I can’t drop you off and then drive to my parents’ house without knowing why,” I say. “It’s not fair that you won’t tell me.”
When she looks at me, she looks heartbroken. “I can’t. It’s too hard to talk about,” she says, and tears roll down her face.
“Why are you doing this to us?” I ask. “Why can’t you just say yes?” I reach into my pocket and retrieve the ring. “Just say yes.” I’m sobbing. This would be a first for her—seeing me sobbing—and it seems to flick a switch.
She stares at me seriously. “My mom told me that a Jewish boy marrying a non-Jew is like a mini death for his family. I can’t do that to your family.”
“What? That’s completely insane. Anyway, who cares? It’s not like either of us goes to church, right? Is that all this is about?” I shake my head and feel relief. It’s so good to know that it’s not me or the ring or anything else. It’s just something stupid her mom said.
“That’s not what your mom said to me the last time we were at your house for dinner,” she says. “In fact, your mom seems to agree a hundred percent with my mom. I think that’s where my mom got the idea.”
I say, “What?” but it’s rhetorical and she knows this. She hugs me, and though I have a small feeling of wanting to scream at my mother when I get home tonight, I hug Jenny, and all I can think about is how much I love her and how out of control I feel after all the work I did to make this the most perfect engagement ever. I have no idea what to do. And then… I suddenly know what to do.
My chest tightens with nerves. “Look,” I say, holding the ring up. She has a pained look on her face. Then I stand and face all the people behind me. A planeful of strangers. I hold up the ring. “I am madly in love with Jennifer Ulrich, and I want her to marry me. She is the kindest, smartest, most beautiful woman I have ever met, and I want to live my whole life with her. All she has to do is say yes.”
I look down at Jenny, and she’s partly smiling and partly mortified.
“She’s all freaked out that I’m telling you this, but I want to make something clear. I don’t give a crap where she came from, and I don’t give a crap what my mother said to her. I want to marry her, and I’m not going to let anyone stop us.”
The people on the plane smile at me. Jenny stands up.
I face her and ask again. “Will you marry me?”
When she says yes and I slip the ring onto her finger, the plane erupts with yelling and applause, and it’s as if all of us are possessed by something we will never understand.
MY NAME IS CLAIRE, AND I’LL BE YOUR PILOT TODAY.
CLAIRE IS IN ESPECIALLY ROTTEN FORM
when I get back. When I walk in, she’s mincing Dad into tiny pieces about putting a knife in the wrong drawer. When she sees me, she barks, “Astrid, come here.” I can’t even send my love to her, she’s that bad.
Claire, I am not sending any love to you because you are a horrible person right now. Who made you eat bitch for lunch? Who poured you a tall bitch beer float? Who sprinkled bacon bitch on your salad?
I nearly crack myself up with these but keep a straight face for the interrogation.
“What time did you get in last night?” she asks.
“Just after two.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I say. “Why?”
“Because sometimes teenagers lie, that’s why.” Picture Elizabeth Taylor in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
That acrid, biting, accusatory tone she takes every time she speaks.
“What movie did you see?” she asks. The second she asks it, my brain goes numb, and I can’t even think of one title of one movie ever made. Like, ever. Not even my favorites. All movies are titled
Untitled
in my brain.
“I only saw about half of it. We were late getting there because Jeff’s car broke down, and Justin had to help him get it to the garage.”
Where the hell did that come from? I seem to be a natural liar. Who knew? Up until two weeks ago, I’d gotten by on doing nothing exciting and telling the truth all the time.
“What was wrong with his car?”
“I don’t know,” I say. Then I head up the steps so I can change out of my shrimpy-smelling work clothes, and once I do, I sit on my bed for a minute and stare into space. I don’t feel right about Dee. I don’t feel right about lying about Jeff. I don’t feel right about anything.
I make Frank S. appear. This time he’s on the flat roof outside my window, so I have to open it and let him in. When he gets in, he hovers over the warm radiator a minute and then looks at me and smiles and sits down on my vanity bench.
“Are you ever going to say anything?”
He just looks at me.
I sigh. “I wish more people would be like you, Frank. I need quiet people in my life.”
He keeps looking at me.
“That said, I could really use some advice, you know? Got any advice?”
He doesn’t have any advice, so I ask myself the same question.
Hey Astrid, got any advice?
And the only answer I have is to tackle the problems I
can
tackle. Like lying to Jeff.
I take out my phone to text Kristina about how I can’t do this to Jeff anymore, and when I flip it open, there’s a message waiting for me. From Dee. It says:
I’m sorry for being an ass. How about we agree on a signal? When you’re ready to take it further, you say “Abracadabra” or something. Until then, I’ll be more patient, and I will shut up right before I’m about to say something stupid.
A huge part of me wants to text back
abracadabra
because that would make such a great line in a movie, wouldn’t it? It would be so romantic and make everything perfect.
But this isn’t a movie.
Ellis arrives at my door a few minutes later.
“Hey.”
“Oh, hey,” I say.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Sure. You?”
“Yeah. I guess.” She shrugs. “Some stuff could be better.”
I think she means Claire’s mood, but in case they’re about to go off on a Mommy and Me wine binge/country club
buffet/shopping trip or something, I keep the speculation to myself and continue to reorganize my closet, which is what I’ve been pretending to do since she showed up at my doorway.
“I saw Jeff last night,” she says.
“Oh yeah?”
“He was walking around Main Street. You weren’t with him.”
“So?”
“So you’re lucky Mom and Dad didn’t see him, too.”
I sigh. “God. That kid.”
Ellis sits on my bed, and I sit on my vanity bench, where Frank just was. She says, “You need to watch out because Mom is getting all buddy-buddy with his mom, and they’re, like, joking about weddings and shit.”
At times like these I wish I was a passenger.
At times like these I need an air sickness bag and an oxygen mask and a chair cushion that doubles as a flotation device.
“I think I need to throw up,” I say. We both think I’m joking until I catch a whiff of my shrimpy catering pants on the hamper and I jog to the bathroom and puke. Twice.
When I finish brushing my teeth and go back to my room, Ellis is still sitting on my bed.
“Wow. So I take it you don’t like Jeff Garnet?”
“Yeah.” She smiles at me a little—like she feels bad for me. “Were you serious about Mom talking to his mom? Because that’s just gross. What’s wrong with her?”
“She thinks it’s cool,” Ellis says.
“Would you want her being like that about you?” I ask.
“It’s her way of caring without leaving the house.” She rolls her eyes. “Which is more important than, you know,
everything
.”
Ellis baits the hook, and I know she genuinely wants to talk, and she’s bummed, probably, that Mom can’t make time for her hockey games. But though she’s pissed off right now and needs me to save her from the flying monkeys, there’s the “Mommy and Me” Ellis. The one who might drink too much wine while wearing Mom’s fineries and spill out whatever I say.
“Shit, man. I have to get this load of wash in, or I’ll have nothing to wear this week. You have any whites?” I ask. My brain says:
Ellis, you’re a great kid, and at the moment you are perfect. Enjoy it while it lasts and know that I love you, even though you can’t be trusted. One day you will know the truth, and then we’ll talk.
“Yeah. I have a few whites,” she says, and goes to her room to get them. She puts them in the basket, and we both go downstairs. I go to the laundry room and start the machine, and she flops herself on the couch and flips through the channels.
I see Mom at the kitchen table, her empty lunch plate still in front of her, banging her phone keyboard with her thumbs. She giggles. She texts again. It makes me realize that maybe this is her back door to being accepted in Unity Valley. If she doesn’t leave the house, the gossips-in-charge won’t have anything to say about her. But she can still be involved somehow from her handy smartphone.
I put on a sweatshirt and my coat and my gloves, a hat and
a scarf, and I go to my table and lie down. The sky is biblical today—rays of sun forming straight lines from behind rounded, fluffy clouds. The planes shine like gold stars up high. I ask:
If I unzip my Unity Valley suit and let my happy person out, will she still be happy?
The back door slams, and I look and see it’s Ellis.
“What do you do out here all the time?”
“Just watch the sky, I guess. Think. Dream.”
“Can I talk to you? About stuff?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“Why doesn’t Mom come to my hockey games? Or go anywhere, really?”
I think about this. “She goes out with you all the time on your Mommy and Me trips, right?”
She’s silent. Probably wasn’t a good time to say that. But I really don’t want to talk to perfect Ellis. She should be happy in her bubble. And let me be happy out here on my picnic table.
“Mom says you lie here because it’s what you do to feel normal.”
“What’s normal?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Moms who watch their kids play hockey, for one thing.” She frowns in thought. “And I don’t think you’re that abnormal,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“So? What do you do when you lie here?”
I sigh. “Nothing really. Just watch the sky, like I said.”
“Huh,” she says. She looks at the sky for a minute and then goes back inside.
JEFF THE LEG JIGGLER TALKS, TOO.
MONDAY MORNING SUCKS
. I mean that specifically—not a general comment about how all Monday mornings suck. I’ve always been a fan of Mondays because Mondays get me out of the house and away from Claire. Claire-who-is-beginning-to-make-me-paranoid now that Ellis told me she talks to Jeff’s mom.
The minute I see him, I ask Jeff what movie he told his mom he saw.
“She didn’t ask,” he says.
“Well, I told my mom your car broke down.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I panicked.”
“But my car didn’t break down,” he says.
“Yeah. I know. But if your mom talks to my mom, she might say something about it, and I wanted you to be prepared.”
“Okay,” he says. He has a goofy look on his face—mixed with annoyance. Thank God. Maybe he wants out of this as much as I do.
“I had a lot of fun on Saturday night,” he says. “Are we on again for next weekend? Midnight movies? For real this time?”
