Sabine's seat was shaking. She could hear the strain in the hardware that bolted it to the floor. She tried to keep her body relaxed, not to take every jolt in her spine. The plane dropped a hundred feet, as if it had been suddenly seized with the realization that it was deadweight, then just as abruptly it was caught by some invisible upsurge in the air. Sabine's head hit against the window next to her. She touched her temple lightly with her fingertips. She took a deep breath and tried to focus her eyes on the bright white light on the tip of the wing.
"Oh," said the woman across the aisle.
Sabine looked at her and smiled sympathetically, but she did not speak. Even opening her mouth felt dangerous. The woman smiled back. She was, in fact, not much older than Sabine, but she had lived a different kind of life. With her gray hair and wide lap she appeared to be well past fifty. In this particular circumstance of fear, they were very much united. Sabine had never been afraid of flying, but this felt more like a preparation for crashing. From time to time the stewardess made a low moaning sound from the back of the plane.
Sabine was thinking about her parents, the rabbit tucked between them on the sofa in the living room, getting the news. Hadn't they told her not to go? Didn't they cry, both of them, not much, but still a few tears, when she left off the food and the pillow Rabbit used for a bed? Her father had held him in his arms; running his thumb back and forth in the soft dent between his ears. "Sabine is going to a place where they eat nice bunnies like you," he whispered.
They had asked her very pointedly to forget about Nebraska. They had tried their best to be understanding and kind when she decided to go just the same. That would be the story they would always tell. How they begged her not to go, their only child, and how she left.
"Ladies," said a buttery voice over the intercom, dropping the "gentlemen" because it was only Sabine, the one other woman passenger, and the stewardess on board the little plane, "this is your captain speaking. It's a little rocky out there tonight, so we're going to ask the flight attendant to postpone the beverage service. We're hoping you can just bear with us and we'll see if we can't find a better altitude. In the meantime I'm going to leave the seat belt sign illuminated and ask that you please remain in your seats."
"I was really thinking about stretching my legs," the other woman said.
Sabine smiled again in polite acknowledgment. The woman sighed and shook her head. The stewardess was in the center of the very back of the plane, strapped into a jump seat with a crossing shoulder harness. She was flipping through the pages of a magazine, but when the plane pitched sharply to the left for no apparent reason, the magazine flew from her hands. Sabine turned around again and closed her eyes.
Everything would go to her parents. Salvio was staying at the house and she hoped he would have the good sense to take the gay porn videos out of the drawer under the VCR. If she ever got back to Los Angeles, she would make a point of giving them to him. The truth was her parents would deal with the burden of all those possessions much better than she had. They would wait a decent amount of time and then they would go into the house and methodically break it down, save a dozen pictures out of the fox-fur box, and then throw the rest away. They would sell things of value. They would give wisely and generously to charity. They would choose a handful of memorabilia: Sabine's scrapbook of the magic act, one of the model houses she had built from her own designs that proved what a fine architect she could have been, the real pearl necklace they could not afford when they had given it to her for her sixteenth birthday. They would take a few things they simply liked, the extravagant Savonnerie rug from her dining room, which would fit perfectly in their living room; the pair of brass stags whose antlers held candles at different heights; the small foul Klee painting that Phan had bought for Parsifal on their one-year anniversary. The rest of it would go. The house would go, even though they liked it, even though they had greatly admired the yard and had always wanted their own lemon trees; they would not move. What Sabine realized as the commuter plane from Denver to Scottsbluff tossed and dived, the wings shearing through dirty clouds, was that her parents would get on with their lives in a way she had been unable to. In spite of whatever immeasurable grief this would cause them, they were the sort of people who picked up and went on. In a wave of nausea, Sabine felt inestimable love. What greater comfort was there than to know that they wouldn't fold under this potential loss?
When her parents had told her not to leave Los Angeles, she had known they were right. Sabine's best interest was always what they had in mind. It was for Sabine's sake that her parents had left Israel. They looked at the baby in the crib and thought of all that uncertainty. A place that was only for Jews was too new, the world would never permit it. All around them countries were full of anger; and much of it, or so it seemed with this child, was directed towards them. Sabine's father had cousins in Montreal and Sabine's mother spoke French, and so they thought they had found their place. In August, when they arrived and moved into the little apartment over the cousin's garage, they felt sure they had done the right thing, but by December they were not so sure. The winter paralyzed them. There were too many unhappy memories in cold weather. As soon as there was enough saved to make a second trip, just barely enough, with nothing left over, they moved to Los Angeles, a place like Israel, so warm that the citrus fruit stayed on the trees year-round. They went to the Fairfax neighborhood, where the public schools closed down for High Holy Days and the menus came standard in Yiddish. They stayed there even after the neighborhood declined, even after there was money enough for a better house in the Valley, because, as Sabine's mother said, they were through with change. Four countries were more than anyone should suffer in a lifetime. How could one street be so different from the next? If they didn't feel the need to wander, why should she?
For one full second the plane seemed to stop. It hung in the air, motionless, and for that second Sabine could see the snow falling straight down. Then the plane caught on something and sputtered forward. Sabine had a single memory of Canada, and that was of snow. Standing in the snow and seeing white in every direction she looked, up and down, behind her, to the side. She turned and turned and swung her head around until she knew that this was an envelope from which she would never escape. Sabine's mother tells the story of hearing a scream that was the sound only a dying person would make. She thought that a wolf or a bear, animals that had never before come into the city of Montreal, was at that moment in her yard, eating her daughter alive. But when Sabine ran to her, it was only the snow she was screaming at, and her mother said she understood. She had felt like screaming herself. All of Sabine's other memories were of Fairfax, a place where a person could live in America without going to all the trouble of figuring out the country.
"When I was in high school I wanted to be a flight attendant because I thought it was the only way I was ever going to get out of town," the stewardess said blankly from the back of the plane. Sabine and the other woman turned around. The stewardess had bright blond hair and wore her eye makeup like Natalie Wood. "I thought, How else am I ever going to get to go to Europe? Meet a wealthy businessman, get married? Nobody told me that I'd be flying to the same little fucking towns I came from."
"Are you okay back there?" the other woman said.
"These are the planes that go down, girls." The stewardess narrowed her eyes. "It's hardly ever the superjets. Look at the numbers. It doesn't get the big press because it's just a handful of us who get killed. These things are death traps with wings."
The plane could potentially hold eighteen passengers in its moist and tinny walls. Tiny pearls of water shot across the plastic windows, which were etched with delicate patterns of frost. The blue carpet was frayed at the edges and the brighter blue chairs were made shabby by the pieces of white paper Velcroed over every headrest to protect the fabric from the stains of oily hair. The plane pitched so completely to the left that Sabine had to grab onto the armrests while her purse shot across the aisle and lodged itself beneath another seat. The stewardess screamed.