She said, “What a nightmare.” She made her face empathic, and then she turned her magazine page. She could’ve said, I’ve got bigger problems than you, buddy. She could’ve said, There are worse things to lose.
When the cabin lights turned off, Fiona curled her body toward the aisle, settled into her thin pillow.
She’d never sleep, but it was nice to go through the motions. She had a million decisions to make in Paris, and the past week had been a frenzy of panicked planning, but for these eight hours, she was mercifully unable to do a thing. Being on an airplane, even in coach, was the closest an adult could come to the splendid helplessness of infancy. She’d always been irrationally jealous when Claire got sick. Fiona would bring her books and tissues and warm Jell-O water and tell her stories, wishing to trade places. Partly to spare her daughter the pain of illness, but also to feel mothered. These were the only times Claire would accept Fiona’s doting, the only times she’d curl up in Fiona’s lap to sleep—her body emanating fever-heat, the soft hair around her forehead and neck curling and sticking to her sweat. Fiona would stroke her hot little ear, her burning calf. When Claire got older, it wasn’t the same—she wanted to be alone with her book or her laptop—but she’d still let Fiona bring her soup, let her perch on the edge of the mattress for a minute. And that was something.
* * *
—
She must have slept a bit, but with the time change and the cabin lights and their flying against the sun, she wasn’t sure if half an hour had passed or five. Her seatmate snored, cheek to shoulder.
The plane lurched, and a flight attendant came through to touch all the overhead bins with two fingertips. Everything secured. Fiona wanted to live on the plane forever.
Her neighbor didn’t wake till breakfast was served. He ordered a coffee, miserably. “What I want,” he said to Fiona, “is a whiskey.” She didn’t offer to buy him one. He pulled up the window shade. Still dark. He said, “I don’t like these planes. The 767s.”
She bit. “Why not?”
“Yeah, in another life, I used to fly these. One of my many previous lives. I don’t like the angle of the landing gear.”
Was this another part of the scam? The beginning of his bad-luck tale, how he lost his job and maybe his wife too? He didn’t look old enough to have had previous lives, or a previous life long enough to fly a plane this big. Didn’t you need years of experience?
She said, “It’s not safe?”
“You know, it’s all completely safe, and it’s all completely unsafe. You’re hurtling through the air, right? What do you expect?”
He seemed sober enough not to vomit in her lap, or put his hand there. Just a little loud. Against her judgment, she kept talking to him. It was something to do. And she was curious what he’d say next, how the scam would unfold.
He told her how he used to name every plane he flew, and she told him her daughter used to name everything—toothbrushes, Lego people, the individual icicles outside her bedroom window.
“That’s wild,” he said, which seemed an overstatement.
On the runway he asked if she’d been to Paris before. “Just once,” she said, “in high school.”
He laughed. “So this’ll be different, right?”
She couldn’t remember much of that trip, beyond the other members of the French Club and the boy she’d hoped to kiss, who instead wound up getting caught in bed with Susanna Marx. She remembered smoking pot and eating nothing but croissants. Sending Nico postcards that wouldn’t reach him till she was home. Waiting in lines at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, feeling she should have a more profound reaction. She’d only taken French to rebel against her mother, who believed she ought to know Spanish.
Fiona asked if he’d been there himself, and then she said, “I guess if you were a pilot—” She’d forgotten because she didn’t believe him.
He said, “Second best city in the world.”
“What’s the first?”
“Chicago,” he said, as if it were obvious. “No Cubs in Paris. You staying Left Bank or Right?”
“Oh. Between them, I guess? My friend has a place on Île Saint-Louis.” She liked how it made the trip sound glamorous rather than desperate.
The man whistled. “Nice friend.”
Maybe she shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t have made herself sound moneyed and scammable. But because it felt so lovely and warm inside this version of the story, she went on. “He’s actually—have you heard of the photographer Richard Campo?”
“Yeah, of course.” He looked at her, waited for the rest. “What, that’s your friend?”
She nodded. “We go way back.”
“Holy,” the man said. “You serious? I’m a big art freak. I get him mixed up with Richard Avedon. But Campo did those deathbed shots?”
“He’s the one. Grittier than Avedon.”
“I didn’t know he was still alive. Wow. Wow.”
“I won’t tell him you said that.” Really, she had no idea what shape Richard was in. He was still working at eighty, and when he passed through Chicago a few years ago for his show at the MCA, he was stooped but energetic, gushing about the twenty-nine-year-old French publicist who was apparently the love of his life.
They waited a long time to approach the gate. He asked if she planned to hit the museums with Richard Campo, and Fiona told him she was really there to visit her daughter. It was true, in the most optimistic sense. “And her daughter too,” she said. “My granddaughter.”
He laughed and then realized she was serious. “You don’t look—”
“Thanks,” she said.
To her relief, the seatbelt light dinged off. No time for the guy to ask questions she didn’t have answers to. (What arrondissement? How old is the grandkid? What’s her name?)
She waited for room to stand. “Your wallet couldn’t be in your suitcase, could it?” She gestured at the overhead bins.
“Checked my bag at O’Hare.”
She believed him more now, but not enough to offer money. She said, “I’ll share my cab, if that would help.”
He grinned, and his teeth were nice. Square and white. “A ride’s the one thing I got.”
There was space for her finally, and she stood, knees popping. She said, “Good luck.” And although he couldn’t have known how much she needed it, he said, “Same to you.”
She hefted down her carry-on. Out the pill-shaped windows, a pink sun was rising.