“What’s so funny, Ken?”
His smirk widened as he popped that earplug back into his ear and snuggled down into the scratchy blue blanket. I thought he was going to ignore my question, but just before he drifted off to some candy-colored, chemically-induced dreamland, he replied, “Maybe if you get woken up on Ambien, you’ll be in your right mind.”
* * *
So, that’s the story I hoped I would be telling people when they asked how our flight to Rome was. I would regale them with the tale of my sexual adventure. Delight them with every humorous, heartwarming detail. Inspire them with my refusal to go quietly into the eternal night of parenthood and wifedom and soul-crushing middle age.
I did not get to tell that story.
And all because of one little discrepancy in the series of events.
In reality, the argument Ken and I’d had on the plane went something like this:
“You know …” Ken reached into his pocket and produced two white, oval-shaped pills. “Your mom gave me some Ambien on our way out the door to help us sleep on the flight. We could take them now and wake up in Rome.”
“First of all, you don’t even drink caffeine. What are you doing, accepting unsolicited drugs from my mother?” I went to snatch the contraband out of Ken’s hand, but he closed his fist around the pills before I could grab them. “And second of all, I didn’t come this far to only come this far.”
“I’m gonna take one.”
“The hell you are! Ken, you can’t go to sleep. You have a job to do.”
“It’s ten o’clock. Bedtime.”
“What about my plan?!” I looked around and lowered my voice to a whisper. “What about my plan?”
“Brooke, I am not—”
“How about this?” I blurted, cutting him off. “What if we do my part of the plan first, as soon as they turn off the Fasten Seat Belt sign, and then we’ll do your part of the plan?”
Ken shook his head. “That’ll take too long. It’s only a nine-hour flight. It takes thirty minutes to kick in and lasts up to eight hours, so we need to take it now so that we’ll be able to function when we land. I heard that if you wake up before it wears off, you’re, like, completely out of your mind.”
“Ugh. You really love your sleep, huh?” I pressed the spot between my eyes, where I could feel a Ken-induced headache coming on. “Okay, how about this? We’ll take it in a few minutes when they turn the Fasten Seat Belt sign off, then we’ll run to the bathroom because of your medical emergency, bang one out, and when we get back to our seats, we’ll fall asleep in time to get a full eight hours.”
Ken gave me one hell of a side-eye, but eventually caved. “Fine.”
“Fine.”
It was not fine. It was not even a little bit fine, you guys.
One minute, I was popping a pill while waiting for the perfect moment to pounce on the restroom, and the next, I was being woken from a dead sleep by my own violent vomiting.
I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. I could hardly see in the darkness of the cabin. But I had definitely just puked all over myself. That much was apparent.
I stared down at my clothes—soaked in something that shone in the ambient emergency exit lights and smelled like stomach acid and rancid champagne—and waited for my brain to produce a solution to this problem. But a solution never came. It was as if every brain cell I’d ever possessed was still tranquilized, except for the five that we must have inherited from the very first lifeforms to ever emerge from the primordial sea. I was a mindless, spineless lump with eyes. And evidently, a stomach that did not appreciate being filled with carbonated alcohol and Ambien while aboard a giant, rocking air ship.
I blinked down at the mess and blinked again.
Nope. No words. No thoughts. Still just eyeballs.
But then I remembered that I could point my eyeballs at different things! And maybe one of the things that I pointed them at would also have eyeballs, and it would see that I needed help!
So, I looked around the cabin, silently pleading for assistance, but there was no one to be seen. No one awake at least. Just rows and rows of unconscious bodies.
Including the one next to me.
“Ken!” His name was the first successful word my brain could produce.
I shook the person whose name was Ken until his eyeballs opened and looked at my eyeballs.
They didn’t look like his eyeballs though. They were wide and crazed and unfocused, like a flesh-eating zombie’s.
“Ken,” I said the word again.
Ken blinked and cocked his head to one side in an uncharacteristically reptilian manner.
“I … threw up.”
Three more words! I was doing it! I was wrestling my brain back from the clutches of Big Pharma!
Ken, on the other hand, could only grunt and stare at me like he was considering taking a bite out of my face.
“I need you to get me some clothes.”
At least, that was what I thought I’d said. In reality, it might have sounded like, Ah ee ah oo et ee um oooooooh.
Whatever language I was speaking, Ken seemed to understand. Or maybe he just understood that whatever I’d said required action on his part. He stood up—or tried to before the seat belt caught and yanked him back down. That was a whole new challenge we had to overcome. Making our drug-soaked brains cough up the instructions for how to unbuckle an airplane seat belt.
Through pure dumb luck, we got it open, and Ken immediately bolted into the aisle, standing at attention like a perfect soldier.
“My suitcase.” I pointed to the compartment above my head. “Suuuuuitcase.”
With a single nod, Ken began patting and pushing and banging on the compartment doors. Then, suddenly, he turned around and opened one behind him, as if he’d done it a thousand times. I hadn’t been paying attention when he put my bag away, so I just assumed that was the right storage area … until Ken pulled down a suitcase that was definitely not mine and began unzipping it in the middle of the aisle.
“No!” I whisper-shouted, shaking my head to violently compensate for my lack of verbal communication skills. “No!”
That finally caught the attention of a flight attendant, who emerged from the back, looking confused.
“Everything okay?”
“I threw up.” Those three syllables took all of the concentration I could muster to produce and enunciate clearly.
“Oh. Okay. Hang on …” The gentleman disappeared into the back, and my shoulders sagged in relief.
Thank God. Help is—
“Here.”
The next thing I knew, a hand was being thrust in my face, containing a wad of shiny black material. I accepted it hesitantly.
The object’s distinctive plastic-like smell triggered the more primitive part of my memory, which immediately produced an image of five-year-old me standing on a playground in a homemade witch costume while my kindergarten classmates teased me mercilessly. They’d called me the “trash lady” because my mom had made the frock out of a shiny black …
“Trash bag?”
“That’s the best I can do, sweetheart,” he said with a shrug. “We don’t deal with”—his eyes flicked down to the front of my ruined dress—“that.”