"Hello?" said the other woman to the curtain up ahead of them. "Could somebody up there do something about her?"
There was a pause and then a man leaned back through the soft folds of fabric. "Bad weather," he said, either the pilot or the copilot. Sabine hoped it was the copilot. She did not recognize the voice. "We're perfectly safe."
"Her," the other woman said, pointing to the back of the plane. The stewardess hung limply forward in her shoulder harness, big, inky tears smearing her face.
The pilot or copilot watched for a minute. "Becky," he said, trying to make his voice loud enough to reach the back of the plane, but she didn't seem to hear him. The engines roared against the wind. He looked first to the other woman and then to Sabine, and when neither of them presented an idea he disappeared back behind the curtain. "Becky," his voice came over the intercom. The girl sniffed and raised her stained face to the ceiling. "Pull it together now, we've got passengers."
Exhausted, she nodded at no one. She brushed her hands back and forth across her cheeks and blew her nose on a cocktail napkin. She was quiet.
And in that quiet, Sabine felt very clearly that she would not mind dying on this night, with these people, in this plane. The memory of Los Angeles seemed to pull away from her, thousands of tiny houses on neat curves, their roofs glistening like dimes in the bright sun as she looked out the window after takeoff. It looked like a world she would build herself, the order and neatness of miniature. She thought that maybe she would be lucky if her life ended quickly, like Parsifal's, and once she felt that peace in her heart, she knew just as certainly that the plane would land and they would all be safe and it would be a good thing not to die.
The plane was clearly losing altitude, although this time it seemed to be doing so with a sense of purpose. Sometime later Sabine felt the landing gear move down and lock. The fields below were blowing white, a whiteness interrupted only by the occasional shadow thrown from a drift of snow.
"Ladies," said the pilot, "we are making our final descent into Scottsbluff."
The woman on the other side of the aisle held out her hand, and Sabine took it and squeezed hard. There was a roaring like a tornado when the plane touched down, a roaring and a shaking that threatened to pull their hands apart, but they held on. The warmth in those fingers felt as much like love as anything Sabine had ever known. They were in Nebraska now.
Even when the plane was parked, Sabine still felt the ground moving. A man in blue zip-up coveralls held her hand as she walked down the movable metal staircase into the snow. Immediately snow blew down the neck of her sweater and dampened the bare skin of her wrists between the ends of her coat sleeves and the tops of her gloves. Snow filled her pockets and pressed into her mouth. She had to stop and lean against the jumpsuited man.
"Not much farther," he yelled over the wind, and put his hand beneath her arm in a professional manner. As they walked across the tarmac, sheets of snow pooled and vanished beneath her feet. It was like walking on something boiling. In every direction the snow was banked into high hills. Plows worked on either side, nervously rearranging what could not be made right. The flat, smooth place they were walking across now had been carved out like a swimming pool. The man worked hard to open the heavy metal door, and the wind made a sucking and then howling sound when it, with Sabine, was let into the warm building.
Dot and Bertie Fetters were waiting.
They looked different in Nebraska. Even at the first sight of them in the hallway, Sabine could tell they looked better here. Instead of seeming merely bulky, the heavy coats with toggles made them look confident, prepared. Sabine wondered if she too could buy high boots with rubber covering the feet. When they saw her, they called her name with a kind of joyful wonder that she had never heard in the word Sabine before. They threw themselves together onto her neck. What was lost is now found.
"I half thought you wouldn't be on the plane," Dot said. "I tried and tried to tell myself that you were really coming but I couldn't make myself believe it." She hugged her again, hugged her hard enough to empty out Sabine's lungs. "Have you gotten thinner? It couldn't be possible that you've gotten thinner?"
"Sabine," Bertie said, stepping back to see her fully, "it's so wonderful that you're here. Was the flight okay?"
"Good," Sabine said.
Bertie leaned towards her, her mouth up close to Sabine's ear. "You've got to meet Haas." She held out her hand to a man standing away from everyone, his back pressed against the wall. When she motioned he came to her, the nylon of his blue down coat making a soft shushing noise as his arms moved against his sides.
"Haas," she said quietly, "this is my sister-in-law, Sabine Parsifal." Bertie's face was so hopeful, so eager to please, that Sabine had to look away from her. She shook Haas's hand. "This is my fiancé," Bertie said, "Eugene Haas."
"Nice to-," he said, but was unable to finish the sentence, assuming, perhaps, that what was nice was implied. Haas was older than Bertie. He looked a little overwhelmed, frightened even. Like Sabine, he seemed unsure as to why he was in this airport. He pushed his hand back into his pocket and stepped away.
"Haas drove us over," Bertie said. Sabine looked at the delicate bones of his face, the way his stocking cap was pulled to the top of his glasses, and thought, He worries about you in this weather. He's afraid you'll get stuck in an embankment and freeze to death on the road. He's afraid of someone skidding on a patch of ice and coming into your lane.
"Come on and let's get you home and settled in." Dot took Sabine's arm and steered her with authority to where the bags were being set out by the man in the blue coveralls.
The airport had two gates and Sabine had arrived at the second. In the lobby, orange plastic bucket chairs stood empty and waiting, bolted into two straight lines. There was a vending machine full of brands of candy she had never heard of before. Chuckles. Haas went on ahead to drive the car to the front door from where it was parked, fifty feet away. The woman who had sat beside Sabine on the plane smiled at her shyly now and without speaking, picked up her suitcase and left.
Sabine looked at the woman at the ticket counter, the man and woman who waited patiently at security, the two girls talking at the car rental booth. She looked at the handful of people who milled around through the airport, and she looked at the Fetters. There was something she couldn't put her finger on exactly, a way they resembled each other and yet resembled no group Sabine had seen before. And they had not seen her before, either, because she felt them looking, the way people had looked at her in the marketplace in Tripoli the first time she went and did not know to cover her head. There was a Lucite display box in the baggage claim area that held three five-gallon cans of house paint, VISIT SHERWOOD HARDWARE, the sign said.
"Kitty was going to come, but Haas had to drive," Dot said, "so there wasn't enough room in the car."
"He wanted to come and meet Sabine," Bertie said.
"I've never seen a man so interested in taking care of a woman as Haas is. 'Let me get you coffee.' 'Are you sure you don't want to take a scarf?' I swear, if he wasn't so nice he'd drive me crazy."
"You'd get used to it," Bertie said.
"How long have you been going out?" Sabine asked.
"Six years." Bertie seemed more self-assured in Nebraska. She was older here. You could see it in the way she held her head. "It was seven years ago he came to teach at the school, and we started going out a year later."