While he tied it their eyes were only a few inches apart. He studied the tiny blond hairs of her mustache and wanted to kiss her lips, painted a brilliant red, but again he was sad to be feeling sexy.
“Why doesn’t it stop bleeding?” Stacy asked him.
“I think it is,” he told her.
Out of the corner of his eye Max saw the co-pilot hurrying back to the forward cabin. Because of his haste Max understood that what the co-pilot had been able to discover from his visual check terrified him. Well, what the fuck did you expect? Max argued with him silently. You said yourself that number three blew up and the hydraulics were out. Did you mink you were going to be able to Krazy Glue it back together?
Max knew enough about planes to understand that if they had lost all the hydraulics, not only was there no way to steer, there was never going to be. Unless a runway happened to be directly in their path, where could they land safely? A highway? An empty field? Max wasn’t even certain that a controlled descent would be possible.
A small, cold welling of fearful saliva blocked his throat: the coward come to life. But when he straightened and saw the packed crowd of kids and businessmen and the occasional mother, he felt sorrier for them. After all he deserved death. He had plotted to avoid it, quit cigarettes, forsaken red meat, jogged and power-walked, loaded up on vitamins so that his urine looked almost psychedelic — yet it had stalked him anyway. And into its bland merciless face what did he have to show as his proof that he deserved to live?
Nothing but that he was afraid to die.
2
Carla’s little boy, two-year-old Leonardo, named for Leonardo da Vinci, but called Leo the Lion by his father, and Lenny by his aunts and uncles, and Bubble by his mother (because as a suckling infant, after a meal of Carla’s milk, he manufactured them by the dozens: little shimmering bubbles that slid along his puffy lips), was asleep in the seat next to her when the explosion happened. He had collapsed only minutes after takeoff, his head sagging onto the spongy armrest, the rest of him crumpled up with the spineless compactability of babies — and Bubble was still a baby, even though two. His sleep was so deep that he drooled out of the side of his mouth, darkening a circle of the light blue fabric into navy. The initial jerk of the explosion lifted his unconscious head up — Carla’s eyes went to him immediately — and then bounced it down again on the armrest.
That woke Leonardo with a meow of complaint. Carla twisted in her seat and used her hands like earmuffs to protect the sides of his head. She peered toward the front of the plane and waited for what was next.
It didn’t occur to her that they might crash. She vaguely assumed they had hit unexpected turbulence, something inconvenient, not tragic. She called out in the direction of the cockpit: “What’s going on!” But there was a lot of noise from the engines and the confusion of other passengers and then…
A big fall. Nothing below. She was dropping and Bubble fell also, sliding out from her grip and down through the seat belt until he was caught by the armpits. He seemed, for one horrible second, to be choking: his legs and torso hung from the seat and the belt was taut across his chest and throat, more a noose than a safety device.
Carla reached to free Bubble. But she couldn’t fight the plane’s roll. It was like trying to walk in water against the ocean’s undertow: her body sank into the foam cushions while her arms seemed to separate from her as they flailed for forward momentum. She struggled as hard as she could to reach her son. Bubble’s dark eyes gleamed with fear. She imagined he called to her, but the noise was too loud to hear him.
At last, with a jolt, she was unstuck from gravity’s quicksand. She yanked Bubble away from the killer seat belt. He bawled into her neck. She clutched him to her, in a rage at the plane and distrustful of allowing any part of it to touch her son.
“What the fuck is going on!” she demanded into the noise of the engines and, almost as if answering, they were abruptly quieter. Their sudden calm, like the end of a temper tantrum, was a profound relief.
But Leo was screaming without surcease or any suggestion that there ever would be. He didn’t like to get up from naps anyway, and this method of waking hardly improved his reaction. She tried to rock him from side to side, but the constraints of the seat limited her swivel. Her comforting did reduce Leo’s hysteria to sobs. While he cried she clutched the back of his sweaty head, kissing the moist skin of his neck, a hot cream she loved to taste. “Stop necking with my boy,” her husband complained from time to time. It pissed her off that he made something sexual out of what was pure and innocent love. After these two years raising Bubble, it seemed to her that was the difference between men and boys: boys understood only love and men understood only sex.
The plane fell again. Jerked backwards and then dropped. She became a cage around her baby: the long muscles of her tall skinny body felt as stiff and as hard as metal. She had a crazy belief that she could cushion him if they hit the ground, that she would die and he would live.
This drop wasn’t so bad. More like what she remembered of turbulence from the time she flew to Florida and they passed through a storm.
“Is your baby hurt?” a flight attendant asked while on the move up to the front of the plane. Her name was Lisa. She had been friendly and helpful during boarding; she figured out how to fold up Bubble’s new stroller, which seemed to get stuck just at the worst times, such as today when Carla was in the aisle trying to manage Bubble and his bag of things and answer his endless questions or notice what he was exclaiming about. Carla nodded no to Lisa, assuming that if Leonardo was able to scream then he was okay.
Bubble yawned some words through his bawling. She couldn’t understand him. She yelled back, trying to puncture his loud grief and also get through the noise of the plane’s engines, its air vents, and the overhead compartments being reclosed. “Stop crying!” she begged and scolded. “Please, Bubble. I can’t understand you. Did you get a big boo-boo? Stop crying, for Chrissake, for one second and talk so I can understand.”
He’s a baby, Carla, shut up and give him a break.
She often talked to herself in a scolding voice to keep her temper in control. She was famous in her family for her sudden and quickly dissipated rages. From when she was a little baby to her maturity as a wife and mother, everyone who knew her had seen her stamp her right foot, flash her black eyes, and clench her fists so that the muscles and veins in her arms popped the smooth skin. “You look like Popeye with tits when you’re pissed off,” her husband, Manny, teased on their honeymoon. That answered a mystery: the wonder of Manny wanting her. Then she understood that her anger — what scared the hell out of most men — actually turned her husband on.
She hugged Bubble tighter, squashing her breasts. She distracted herself from Bubble’s assault on her right ear (he was crying right into it) by scanning what she could see of the passengers. That wasn’t much, given her angle: her sight was narrowed both by her proximity to the window and because her periphery was blocked by Leo’s bobbing red face. Nobody seemed hurt. Someone had thrown up. A couple of people must have crapped: the smell was disgusting. Out her window she saw land, a flat checkerboard of brown and green squares. The captain had come on. She heard the phrase “…emergency landing…” although Bubble continued to bawl, because the speaker was positioned just above and behind her free left ear. She was crowded by all the noise and glare from the window and the rows of pale blue fabric and the low cream-colored ceiling. Also, the whole body of the plane creaked and rattled, as if all the screws were loose. She wanted out.