“Like exactly what you should be doing. C’mon,” Cameron said, then grabbed Margo’s suitcase and rolled away from the North American Airlines line, toward Pacific Airline’s ticket counter. Roberta hung back.
After getting in line, Cameron said, with a low voice, “You can do this.”
“But our trip.”
“We … I … will be here when you return. We’ll work it out, okay? You can meet us at whatever location we’re stomping through. Until then, we’ll keep going with our TALWAC plans. Maybe you can even do your own photos and videos.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do this. It’s so far away. The expense. It will be too much of a surprise.” She bit the inside of her cheek to try to push down this nagging indescribable feeling. “What if …”
“What if what?”
She spit out the first thing she thought of, trusting her lips and vocal cords and brain. “What if they don’t want me … again.”
He laid a hand on each of her shoulders as he’d done a million times before, and it grounded her. “I don’t have any wise words for this, Margo. I can’t even imagine. But I know that your daughter wants you there, and I know you want to be by her side. So I say, fuck them.”
A laugh burst out of Margo, breaking the tension that had pulled her taut the last few days. She nodded, and then, strengthened by his conviction, echoed, “Fuck them.”
Cameron’s smile grew to the size of New Orleans.
The line in front of Margo jumped forward, and she and Cameron were swept along like a wave.
“Next customer, please,” said an airline attendant. They moved another foot in line.
“Ready, Margo?” he asked.
“I guess?” She darted her gaze from the attendant to Cameron, and with it came a surge of bravado. Roberta was right. He was right. She inhaled deeply. “I am. I’m ready. Thank you, Cam. And please, tell Roberta …”
“Bert will be fine. It’s me who you should feel sorry for. She’s going to be a bear to live with.” His lips quirked, and as if realizing that he still had her bag in hand, he passed the handle to her. “I’ll … I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too.” It dawned on her then that she spoke to or visited with Cameron almost every day, individually and with Roberta. This would be the farthest they’d been apart, and for a moment she was forlorn.
“Next,” the attendant said.
They were now at the front of the line. Cameron shifted, awkward now, and Margo wasn’t sure how to say goodbye. This seemed to warrant more than a wave, so she leaned in, and so did he. She lifted her head to kiss him on the cheek, which wasn’t uncommon. But he tilted his face forward.
And her lips collided with his.
Or was it the other way around?
But she didn’t care. The touch of his lips muted everything else around her. The grumble of the other passengers, the audible sigh of the airline attendant—it all became white noise. There was just her and this man she had known all her life and this kiss that she now realized should have happened long ago.
“Wow.” Cameron’s cheeks pinked after she finally stepped back, though it had been hard to.
“Yeah,” she could only say.
Now that was something they had never done.
Someone behind her cleared their throat, which brought her back to the present. And with a final nod, she rolled her suitcase to the counter and faced the terminal agent.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“I’d like to buy one ticket to Manila, Philippines, please.”
Chapter Fourteen
Diana was running. Her footsteps echoed on the asphalt; her breaths kept half-time with her heartbeat. The sky was onyx though her path was brightly lit by cars and jeepneys—open-mode transportation with two bench seats facing each other, decorated in bling and lights and painted in graffiti—packed in fours across two lanes, with passengers all staring at her.
Her skin burned from their gazes. She could tell that they knew that she didn’t belong here, in Manila, in the Philippines.
Then her surroundings changed like the fall of a curtain at a play, and she was running through the halls of Alexandria Specialty. Looking down, clogs had replaced her running shoes. She was all alone here, and she passed the closed doors of patient rooms with mothers in labor, all pushing at the same time. The one room she had to get into—she could see it right in front of her—fell farther and farther away despite the length of her stride. She didn’t know what was behind that door but only that the answer was there. The truth. But the muscles in her legs began to burn; a cramp radiated up her thighs. The panic escalated in her chest as she reached out for the doorknob; it was so close.
Until it wasn’t, because she was no longer in the hallway but outside, on the Mount Vernon Trail. Cement at her feet. Above her, a plane descended, on its way to Reagan airport, the sound of its engine roaring through her ears. It was close, even too close for Gravelly Point.
As the plane passed, wind whipped through her hair. She shivered at the sudden cold. She looked down at herself; there wasn’t a stitch of clothing on her. She was naked, with her glorious farmer’s tan. The scar from a tumble when she was six years old, her uneven breasts, the sag of nearly forty-year-old skin—despite not having children and pounding the pavement four times a week.
Time stopped. Everything halted: the plane midair; the biker who just passed her; the child midskip, holding a balloon. Time stopped for everyone except her, and her body continued to change, skin sagging so that her breasts dragged with gravity. She lifted her fingers; they were wrinkled like her mother’s. She touched her face, leathered and folded in places. The underside of her chin was another chin. Then the point of view shifted again, and she was out of herself, looking through a fish lens. Still, she recognized the image. Herself, except elderly, back in her home, sitting in a robe but with no one in sight but the dog at her feet.
* * *
Diana jerked upward but was dragged back, constrained by something. Her eyes flew open, and all at once her hearing turned up to high, and she was bombarded with voices and an incessant bell. She blinked to orient herself. Against her neck was a white, fluffy terry-cloth towel. The voices were from a movie playing on the television. And the ringing bell was her phone alarm.
Diana thumbed at her phone to turn off the alarm and swallowed a golf ball–sized lump in her throat. Sitting up, reality returned to her. She was in Las Cruces Hotel. She had taken a shower after settling into her room and ordered room service. Her overfull belly and jet lag had kept her up the whole night, until finally she shut her eyes at 6:00 a.m., as the sun came up. She now squinted at the time on her phone, eyelids still heavy.
Eight p.m.
She had slept a full day away.
She stood then, launched by the volition to do something. Relaxation was not in her vocabulary, and a part of her felt guilty about what she had missed. It was a vicious cycle, sleeping after an exhausting day and then wondering what more she could have accomplished had she stayed up a little longer.
She caught sight of her face as she passed the dresser mirror and jumped back at her wild hair and the dark bags under her eyes. One would’ve thought that taking on-call and night shifts would have had her acclimated to the constant switch from day to night, but with all the decisions she’d had to make—as if everything had all amounted to this one trip—she felt as if she had been hit by a Mack truck. Damn stress dreams. She’d had them growing up, right before each school year started, around college finals or boards. They’d all been some form of her running, of everyone looking at her, of finding herself naked.