“Rent a plane? I dunno what Fred gave you in your last performance revue, but I sure as hell can’t afford a private jet.”
“No, not a private jet. Just a small plane. I can fly it.”
“You?” Tom said dubiously. “I didn’t know you could fly.”
“Well, I only just got my licence a few months ago. Mom bought me lessons for my birthday last year.”
“I didn’t know about this…”
“You don’t know everything about me, buddy. Look, do you want to get home or not?” Mike said, impatiently.
“Well, yes,” Tom said. “But I want to get home alive.”
“Hey, I’m a good flyer.”
“How long have you been flying for again?” Tom asked.
Mike looked sheepish. “A couple of months…”
Tom took a deep breath. “Well, we may as well give it a go. What’s our other option? Driving all the way back? That’d take until Friday or Saturday anyway. I don’t think we’re going to get on a flight out of here at this rate.”
“I have to agree with you there,” Mike said, looking around.
The two men left the terminal. It was getting more and more crowded by the minute, but more and more flights were flashing up as Cancelled on the flight information board.
“We should have come last night,” Tom said, looking around.
“You’re probably right there,” Mike said brusquely. “But it is what it is.”
They passed by a young woman sitting on her backpack, crying. She had a South African flag sewn onto her pack. Tom glanced up at the departures board. He couldn’t see any flights to Johannesburg. He shuddered. At least he was still on the same land mass as his family. He didn’t know what he’d do if Claire and the boys had been in Australia at the moment; him being on the other side of the country was bad enough. He hovered for a moment, wanting to somehow help the distraught South African girl, but he couldn’t think of anything useful. Tom rubbed his face, turned his back on her and followed Mike out of the busy terminal.
“Where are we going to rent a plane from?” Tom asked while dodging a determined looking old man with an almost out of control baggage cart.
Mike was looking down, studying his phone.
“There are a couple of places out in Abbotsford that look promising. Does the train go out there?” Mike asked, heading towards the SkyTrain terminal.
Tom shook his head. “Maybe we could ask Emma or one of her friends. Do you think they’d help us again?”
“Yeah, good idea. She said they would. At the worst, we pay an exorbitant rate for a taxi.” Mike shrugged. “Either way, we’ll get out of here and get home.”
The platform heading back into the city was a lot less crowded than the one heading to the airport had been. Mike called Emma while they waited for the next train.
Tom studied the people around them while Mike quickly spoke to her.
There was a small family, a couple with two kids. Two boys. The woman even looked superficially like Claire with her shoulder-length fair hair and slim build, and the boys were about the same age as Noah and Tristan. He wondered where they’d come from and where they were going. Were they coming home, or were they stuck here like him? Tom watched them wistfully. The man looked impatient, and the wife looked worried. The two boys were happily talking to each other in their own form of baby talk — Tom had no idea what they were saying, but that didn’t stop them. Tom wondered what his boys were doing at that exact moment.
He continued watching the two little boys until he noticed the woman glaring at him. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but it mustn’t have worked because she ushered her little family away down to the other end of the platform. Tom sighed and turned his attention back to Mike, who had just hung up his phone.
“She said she’ll do it. She’s got an uncle or something out in Abbotsford anyway, so she said not to worry about making her go out of her way or anything.”
“That’s good.”
The train pulled into the platform and disgorged it’s frantic passengers. Tom stood back as they raced and pushed each other to the exit.
The train was mostly empty on the ride back to Downtown Vancouver. Tom stared out the window, and watched the North Shore mountains get gradually closer.
“What would you do if you were stuck on the other side of the world?” Tom asked after they passed a handful of stations in silence.
“I honestly don’t know,” Mike said. “Try and get back, I guess.”
“But what if you couldn’t? Like that South African girl?”
“What South African girl?”
Tom told him about the girl in the terminal.
“Oh. That sucks for her.”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s not like you can kayak to South Africa from here or anything. There’s got to be millions of people away from home and their families at the moment.”
“Like your wife?”
“Yeah, like Claire. Sort of. Well, she has her family here. I’m her family, my family is her family now.”
“But her parents, and doesn’t she have a little sister?”
“Yeah. Lucy.”
“You wouldn’t let me meet her when she was visiting.”
“For good reason…”
Mike snorted. “I would have taken good care of her.”
Tom rolled his eyes. “Sure you would have, buddy.”
“I’m a gentleman.”
“Uh huh.”
“Anyway. It’s got to be hard being away from part of your family, if not all of it, that’s just what I was getting at.”
Tom sighed and rubbed his head. He could feel a headache coming on.
“I know. I’m worried about her. I hope the internet stays up so she can video chat with them, at least.”
“When’s the last time she saw them?” Mike asked.
“A few months ago. Her mother came to visit. She hasn’t seen her dad since we went over there for a holiday when Noah was one. And you remember when her sister came.”
Mike nodded. Tom was silent for a few minutes.
“We were thinking about moving over there for a few years.”
“Really? You never told me that.” Mike sounded surprised.
“No, we were just thinking about it. Just starting to look into all the paperwork and practicalities. She’s got her Canadian citizenship now, so we thought it might be a good idea for me to get my Aussie, so then we don’t have to worry about visas again and the boys could experience growing up in their mother’s country for a few years…”
Claire had been so excited when Tom had finally consented to the idea. She desperately wanted the boys to experience the kind of carefree childhood she’d had in rural Australia, and she wanted them to know her parents and sister as more than just infrequent visitors and those people they had to talk to on the computer.
Tom thought it was only fair that he spend some extended time in her country — she’d spent the majority of the last eight years in Canada after all. She’d only planned to come for a year in the beginning, but she’d stayed because of him. Now he felt guilty that they hadn’t done it sooner. He’d always thought there would be more time.
Maybe there would still be a chance. Maybe his grandparents were right. Maybe Fred’s son-in-law’s cousin was right. Even if it did hit, maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
It was only once they pulled into Waterfront station that Tom thought to ask Mike where they were meeting Emma.
“Um, Commercial Drive. We can walk there, right?”
Tom shook his head and almost laughed.
“You really don’t know this city very well, do you?”
Mike looked a bit bewildered. “Nope! This is only the third time I’ve been here, so excuse my lack of geographical knowledge if you’ll be so kind.”