When I can see, when the doctors in Boston fix my eyes, I won’t have to go through stupid stuff like this.
This was undoubtedly true, but it was absolutely no help to her right now.
Dinah suddenly remembered that, after they sat down, Aunt Vicky had taken her hand, folded all the fingers but the pointer under, and then guided that one finger to the side of her seat. The controls were there — only a few of them, simple, easy to remember. There were two little wheels you could use once you put on the headphones — one switched around to the different audio channels; the other controlled the volume. The small rectangular switch controlled the light over her seat. You won’t need that one, Aunt Vicky had said with a smile in her voice. At least, not yet. The last one was a square button — when you pushed that one, a flight attendant came.
Dinah’s finger touched this button now, and skated over its slightly convex surface.
Do you really want to do this? she asked herself, and the answer came back at once. Yeah, I do.
She pushed the button and heard the soft chime. Then she waited.
No one came.
There was only the soft, seemingly eternal whisper of the jet engines. No one spoke. No one laughed (Guess that movie isn’t as funny as Aunt Vicky thought it would be, Dinah thought). No one coughed. The seat beside her, Aunt Vicky’s seat, was still empty, and no flight attendant bent over her in a comforting little envelope of perfume and shampoo and faint smells of make-up to ask Dinah if she could get her something — a snack, or maybe that drink of water.
Only the steady soft drone of the jet engines.
The panic animal was yammering louder than ever. To combat it, Dinah concentrated on focussing that radar gadget, making it into a kind of invisible cane she could jab out from her seat here in the middle of the main cabin. She was good at that; at times, when she concentrated very hard, she almost believed she could see through the eyes of others. If she thought about it hard enough, wanted to hard enough. Once she had told Miss Lee about this feeling, and Miss Lee’s response had been uncharacteristically sharp. Sight-sharing is a frequent fantasy of the blind, she’d said. Particularly of blind children. Don’t ever make the mistake of relying on that feeling, Dinah, or you’re apt to find yourself in traction after falling down a flight of stairs or stepping in front of a car.
So she had put aside her efforts to “sight-share,” as Miss Lee had called it, and on the few occasions when the sensation stole over her again — that she was seeing the world, shadowy, wavery, but there — through her mother’s eyes or Aunt Vicky’s eyes, she had tried to get rid of it... as a person who fears he is losing his mind will try to block out the murmur of phantom voices. But now she was afraid and so she felt for others, sensed for others, and did not find them.
Now the terror was very large in her, the yammering of the panic animal very loud. She felt a cry building up in her throat and clamped her teeth against it. Because it would not come out as a cry, or a yell; if she let it out, it would exit her mouth as a firebell scream.
I won’t scream, she told herself fiercely. I won’t scream and embarrass Aunt Vicky. I won’t scream and wake up all the ones who are asleep and scare all the ones who are awake and they’ll all come running and say look at the scared little girl, look at the scared little blind girl.
But now that radar sense — that part of her which evaluated all sorts of vague sensory input and which sometimes did seem to see through the eyes of others (no matter what Miss Lee said) — was adding to her fear rather than alleviating it.
Because that sense was telling her there was nobody within its circle of effectiveness.
Nobody at all.
4
Brian Engle was having a very bad dream. In it, he was once again piloting Flight 7 from Tokyo to LA, but this time the leak was much worse. There was a palpable feeling of doom in the cockpit; Steve Searles was weeping as he ate a Danish pastry.
If you’re so upset, how come you’re eating? Brian asked. A shrill, teakettle whistling had begun to fill the cockpit — the sound of the pressure leak, he reckoned. This was silly, of course — leaks were almost always silent until the blowout occurred — but he supposed in dreams anything was possible.
Because I love these things, and I’m never going to get to eat another one, Steve said, sobbing harder than ever.
Then, suddenly, the shrill whistling sound stopped. A smiling, relieved flight attendant — it was, in fact, Melanie Trevor — appeared to tell him the leak had been found and plugged. Brian got up and followed her through the plane to the main cabin, where Anne Quinlan Engle, his ex-wife, was standing in a little alcove from which the seats had been removed. Written over the window beside her was the cryptic and somehow ominous phrase SHOOTING STARS ONLY. It was written in red, the color of danger.
Anne was dressed in the dark-green uniform of an American Pride flight attendant, which was strange — she was an advertising executive with a Boston agency, and had always looked down her narrow, aristocratic nose at the stews with whom her husband flew. Her hand was pressed against a crack in the fuselage.
See, darling? she said proudly. It’s all taken care of. It doesn’t even matter that you hit me. I have forgiven you.
Don’t do that, Anne! he cried, but it was already too late. A fold appeared in the back of her hand, mimicking the shape of the crack in the fuselage. It grew deeper as the pressure differential sucked her hand relentlessly outward. Her middle finger went through first, then the ring finger, then the first finger and her pinky. There was a brisk popping sound, like a champagne cork being drawn by an overeager waiter, as her entire hand was pulled through the crack in the airplane.
Yet Anne went on smiling.
It’s L’Envoi, darling, she said as her arm began to disappear. Her hair was escaping the clip which held it back and blowing around her face in a misty cloud. It’s what I’ve always worn, don’t you remember?
He did... now he did. But now it didn’t matter.
Anne, come back! he screamed.
She went on smiling as her arm was sucked slowly into the emptiness outside the plane. It doesn’t hurt at all, Brian — believe me.
The sleeve of her green American Pride blazer began to flutter, and Brian saw that her flesh was being pulled out through the crack in a thickish white ooze. It looked like Elmer’s Glue.
L’Envoi, remember? Anne asked as she was sucked out through the crack, and now Brian could hear it again — that sound which the poet James Dickey once called “the vast beast-whistle of space.” It grew steadily louder as the dream darkened, and at the same time it began to broaden. To become not the scream of wind but that of a human voice.
Brian’s eyes snapped open. He was disoriented by the power of the dream for a moment, but only a moment — he was a professional in a high-risk, high-responsibility job, a job where one of the absolute prerequisites was fast reaction time. He was on Flight 29, not Flight 7, not Tokyo to Los Angeles but Los Angeles to Boston, where Anne was already dead — not the victim of a pressure leak but of a fire in her Atlantic Avenue condominium near the waterfront. But the sound was still there.
It was a little girl, screaming shrilly.
5
“Would somebody speak to me, please?” Dinah Bellman asked in a low, clear voice. “I’m sorry, but my aunt is gone and I’m blind.”