Lucy (17 page)

“Not at all,” Lucy said, taking the magazine from her. It was
Time
. Lucy’s face was on the cover with the headline “What Does It Mean to Be Human?”

“What’s your granddaughter’s name?”

“Holly.”

Lucy signed the magazine and handed it back. The woman smiled and squeezed Lucy’s hand. Lucy looked down. The old woman had beautiful hands. They reminded Lucy of Leda’s, the skin as delicate as paper.

“Can you give us a lift?” Amanda asked her.

“I would, dear, but I’m afraid I’m merely a guest on the airplane, and in any case, we’re going straight to Rome.”

“Thanks all the same,” Amanda said, and the woman returned to her seat.

People came and went as the private jets taxied in and out, and gradually the lounge emptied. It seemed that the rush hour was over. Lucy and Amanda sat slumped and sullen in plastic chairs, listening to their music. Jenny returned from the restroom and sat between them, patting their hands. “Hey,” she said brightly. “We can always go home on the train.”

Lucy perked up, taking her ear buds out. “Oh, could we? I’ve always wanted to ride on a real train.”

“We could.”

A businessman with a briefcase entered from the street side accompanied by two pilots. They approached the service counter, and one of the pilots began filling out forms. Amanda rose to intercept them as a small white jet was just pulling up beyond the wall of windows. Lucy turned to look because the engines sounded different from those of the other jets, louder and with a whistling tone above the roar.

Jenny got up and joined Amanda at the counter. Lucy watched an elderly man and woman descend the stairs of the small jet that had just landed. A younger man, dressed in jeans, came down behind them. They entered the lounge and approached the counter. For no reason that she could explain, Lucy now joined Amanda and Jenny at the counter.

“I’d gladly take you to Chicago,” the businessman was telling Amanda, “but my company doesn’t allow it.”

“I don’t think our insurance would cover you,” one of the waiting pilots said.

The elderly couple now stood at the counter waiting their turn, accompanied by the younger man. “I understand,” Jenny said. She turned to the girls. “Well, maybe we will take the train.”

The couple had moved up to the counter as the businessman and his pilots stepped away. The man was small and unremarkable in his appearance. He could have been the janitor reporting for duty. He wore the sort of gray cotton slacks and shirt that someone would put on for a Saturday afternoon of puttering in the garage. His gray hair was uncombed, but his gray eyes were clear and sharp. He and the younger man stood at the counter, engaging a young woman in a conversation about fuel.

The elderly woman was tall and thin with gray hair that hung straight to her jaw and tapered down toward her neck, which was cabled with tendons. She had dramatic lines around her mouth and a prominent mole on her left cheek. Her eyes were remarkably blue, and she looked around her with an air of alert curiosity. Lucy’s attention was on the woman, and sensing it, the woman turned to her and smiled. Lucy smiled back. Jenny and Amanda had caught wind of it, and they now turned to watch.

The woman stepped forward and extended her hand. “I’m Ruth Randall. I recognize you.”

Lucy shook her hand. “I’m Lucy.”

“Yes, of course.” She reached out and touched her husband’s back. “Dear. This is the girl who was on the news.”

“Just a moment, sweets.”

“That was a terrible thing they did to you at the airport,” said Ruth Randall. “It’s all over the news. It’s sure to embarrass the agency.”

“This is my mom, Jenny, and my friend Amanda. Mrs. Randall.”

“Ruth, please.” They shook hands.

“Pleased to meet you,” Jenny said. “We’re trying to get home to Chicago.”

“Yes, of course.” The men had completed their business and turned from the counter. “This is my husband, Luke, and our pilot, Roy.”

Luke beamed at them with a jolly smile. “Don’t let those TSA guys get you down,” he said. “Airport security is BS. Just a jobs program. We live in New Mexico. Chicago’s right on the way. We’ll be happy to take you.”

“That would be so generous of you,” Jenny said.

“Sometimes it makes me ashamed to be an American these days. Come on, lemme show you the Saberliner.”

“What’s a Saberliner?” Amanda asked.

“It’s that jet there,” Luke said, pointing.

“I’ll just use the ladies’,” Ruth said, and walked, strong and erect, across the bright room, her white tennis shoes squeaking on the polished floor. A few minutes later, when Ruth had returned, Luke picked up two of the suitcases, the pilot picked up the third, and the group emerged into a bright and windy day and crossed toward the waiting airplane.

“Wow,” Amanda said, “I’ve never been on the tarmac before.”

“Don’t say ‘tarmac,’” Luke said. “There’s no such thing as tarmac. It’s called the ramp, dear.”

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault. Every time a reporter talks about airplanes, it’s tarmac-this and tarmac-that. Buncha knuckleheads.”

They ascended the stairs to find themselves in what appeared to be a small but comfortable sitting room. The décor was ivory colored with dark wood accents. The windows were large for an airplane, and the interior was bright. On either side of the aisle were two cream-colored captain’s chairs facing each other across a table. There was a couch against the rear bulkhead.

“This is great,” Lucy said.

“It’s so kind of you,” Jenny said.

“Yeah,” Amanda said. “This most definitely does not suck.”

“Sit wherever you like,” Ruth said, indicating the chairs. “We’ll have some refreshments once we take off.”

Amanda and Lucy sat across from each other in the starboard chairs. Jenny and Ruth took the other two.

“What about Luke?” Lucy asked, watching Roy retract the stairs and secure the door.

“Oh, Luke flies the plane. Luke and Roy.”

Indeed, the two men were already seated and preparing to go. A moment later, they heard the whistle of the engines powering up. It was much quieter inside than out. Ruth leaned across the aisle and patted Lucy’s hand. Lucy looked over at her and smiled.

“Like my husband says, don’t let those TSA guys get you down. We’re Christians, dear, and I always believed that there was a God, and that he made people to be good caretakers of the earth and all its creatures. As I grew older, I wasn’t quite as certain of all that. I mean, look at the world. And I also learned that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.”

“Duck?” Lucy asked.

Ruth laughed. “It’s an expression. It means that you seem like a perfectly lovely young lady, and that’s good enough for me. I would no more go looking into your genes than you’d go looking into mine. I always believed that what people do in the privacy of their own jeans is their business.” They all laughed and then sat listening to the whistling roar.

“Do you mind my asking what you and your husband do?” Amanda asked. “I hope you don’t mind that I’m curious. I’ve never been in a private jet before. I thought you had to be, like, a movie star or something.”

“I don’t mind at all, dear. We have a chain of retail stores. I say ‘we.’ Luke founded it. I didn’t do much. You’ve heard of them. You may have shopped in them. They’re everywhere now. Denton’s?”

“Oh, my God,” Amanda said. “You guys own Denton’s?”

Ruth smiled modestly and bit her lip. “Well, dear, it’s a publicly traded company now, but yes, we do. Luke is a modest man and doesn’t like to show off. Frugal to a fault. Or as my mother used to say, he can pinch a penny until it squeals.”

They were taxiing now, moving away from the terminal buildings and along the side of the runway. Jenny watched Ruth as she spoke and sensed her strength. She wore a necklace of misshapen freshwater pearls and a thin gold chain that disappeared below the neckline of her pale blue shift. The way her head tilted and her shoulders moved gave an intimate and inviting impression. Her face was mobile and lively, and a half smile played upon her lips, even when the corners were turned down. Every now and then as she spoke, she would pause for a moment and bite her lower lip while thinking.

“Take this airplane, for example,” Ruth continued. “Our accountant told Luke to buy one of those fifty-million-dollar Gulf-stream jets. They have beds and bathrooms, can you imagine that? Luke wouldn’t hear of it. He had to have some sort of transportation, because he visits all the stores in person every year. He’s like that. He bought the cheapest, most practical thing he could find. This airplane is almost forty years old. Refurbished, of course.”

“May I ask you a question, Ruth?” Lucy said.

“Certainly.”

“If you don’t want to spend a lot of money, what’s the point in having it? I hope I’m not being rude.”

“No, not at all. It’s a legitimate question.” Ruth looked off in the distance as if she could see the past somewhere out there. “We didn’t really plan to get rich. Luke was simply, well, I guess you’d have to say that he was obsessed. Obsessed with the minutiae of retail operations. His father and grandfather were retailers. And Luke wanted to perfect all the operations, all the details, like one of these people who build great and intricate ships in bottles. The point wasn’t the end, it was the process.” She pursed her lips, and wrinkles caressed her mouth and eyes. “The money was a side effect of his obsession. I travel with him now, because otherwise I’d scarcely see him at all.”

“So what do you do with the money?” Lucy asked.

Ruth laughed sadly. “I started a foundation. I give it away. That’s our little joke. He makes the money, and I give it away.”

“Why are your stores called Denton’s?” Jenny asked.

“They’re named after our son,” Ruth said, and glanced down into her lap, where her hands were worrying each other.

“That’s nice,” Amanda said.

Ruth lifted a sad smile and played her watery eyes back and forth from Amanda to Lucy and back again. Then she seemed to remember something and busied herself fishing in a pouch attached to the wall beside her. “I almost forgot. When we have guests on the airplane, I’m supposed to give the safety briefing. I feel silly doing it, but it’s a federal law.” She withdrew a card of printed instructions in case of emergency. “There’s not much to it, really. One door. And a small window in the cockpit that pops out. I doubt if I could get through it. Keep your seatbelts fastened, and all that. There are oxygen masks if the cabin loses pressure, which it won’t do, because this airplane is built like a tank. Oh, and unlike the airliners, we provide smoke hoods in case of fire. They’re under your seats. I think that’s it.”

The plane was accelerating down the runway. Less than a minute later, Lucy was being shoved back into her seat as the airplane angled away from the earth. As it climbed away from New York, Ruth smiled at her guests and said, “Do you like tuna salad?”

“Oh, yes,” Lucy said. Amanda and Jenny smiled and nodded.

Ruth looked at her watch. “It’s way past my lunchtime. I get low blood sugar. Makes me feel faint.” She lifted a telephone from its cradle beside her. “Dear, it’s me.” A pause as she bit her lip. “Well, who else would it be?” Another pause. “Do you mind leveling off for a bit while I get some sandwiches? All right, will you and Roy have one?” She listened, smiling at Lucy. “Very well. Love you, too.” She hung up the phone and smiled at Jenny. “It’ll just be a minute. All the air traffic controllers know him. They delight in giving him special treatment. It doesn’t hurt that Luke gives them a twenty percent discount at the stores.”

After climbing for a few more minutes, the plane leveled off. Ruth flipped the catch on her seatbelt and rose to go aft, where she rummaged in a locker. She came back with sandwiches in plastic wrap, obviously homemade, and cans of apple and cranberry juice and bags of potato chips, all bearing the Denton’s logo. She set them on the tables and went back for more. She brought lunch to the cockpit. When she was seated and had fastened her seatbelt again, she looked over the sandwiches. “I hope you like it. I made the tuna salad myself this moring. The other stuff is from the store.” And the engines spooled up as the aircraft continued its climb.

“Papa said there’d be some good ones.”

“Good whats?” Ruth asked.

“Good humans.”

Ruth’s eyes sparkled as she laughed and unwrapped her sandwich. Lucy liked her easy laugh and the way she would sometimes purse her lips and frown to get her words just right. She was not concealing anything. She was in The Stream.

The tuna salad was creamy with crunchy bits of celery in it and the sharp tang of lemon juice and mustard. As they ate, Lucy watched the world out the window, so oddly transformed by distance. In the jungle, there were no such vast distances. Everything was always close at hand.

An hour later, Ruth was sleeping, and the plane had begun its descent. Lucy kept her vigil at the window as the mysterious puzzle of the ground gradually solved itself. And when the wheels barked onto the pavement in Chicago, Ruth startled awake, saying, groggily, “Did I miss my stop?”

They could see the crowd behind the high chain-link fence as the plane taxied to the ramp: Throngs of television and press reporters, along with protesters carrying signs behind police barricades. A number of the signs said things like, “Welcome, Lucy!” or “Down with TSA” and “Smash the Police State.” But many of them bore biblical references like “Ezekiel 16:50” and “Leviticus 18:23” and “Jude 1:7.”

“This is crazy,” Lucy said. “How did they find out?”

“The Internet,” Amanda said. “You use it. It uses you.”

Ruth asked, “What’s your friend’s name? Harry? Is that who’s meeting you?”

“Yes, I see his car,” Jenny said. “Oh, dear. We have to get through all that.”

The plane was parked, and Luke came back from the cockpit. “What’s going on out there? Who are those lunatics?”

He pulled a handle and the door opened. The stairs unfolded and rested on the ramp. The noise grew abruptly louder. Someone was speaking through a bullhorn, a man’s voice: “Leviticus chapter twenty, verse sixteen: ‘And if a woman approach unto any beast and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’”