There Is a Baby Crying On This Plane

There is a baby crying on the plane.

The baby’s mom is crying too. I look over and she is sobbing in seat 24C. The dad (Boyfriend? Coworker? Random dude?) is staring at his feet and holding on to her hand. His pinched face and bony knuckles are turning white.

I take out my earphones and listen. I notice there are two camps on the plane. One camp includes the people praying. The other one has the people weeping. Okay, maybe there are three camps. Because some people (like me) are doing neither.

My father turns in his seat and whispers in my ear “we’re almost home.” This is a tad strange, because my dad died eighteen months ago. Liver failure. No surprise really. His closest friends all had names that start with “J”—Jim, Jack, Jagermeister. When I leaned over his hospice bed I could still smell his buddies. His sin seeped out of his pores.

“Bye Dad,” I told the emaciated, yellow husk on the bed. He drew a jagged breath and reached for me. A sickly olive branch. No, it wasn’t an apology. But I had given up expecting one. He was a broken man. My dad had tried to play the game fair. But life had knocked his teeth loose and even his most sincere smile had large gaps. It wasn’t until I had lived some life myself that I realized “fair” is only a place where they judge pigs. Demanding the world play “fair” will drive you crazy. Or to the bottle. I could understand why my father chose escape over rebellion. It hurt less to forget. But I wish he had not forgotten about me.

The skin of his hand was paper thin. I thought this skin could tear and everything my dad held in his hand would come falling out. “Love you,” I told him. And I meant it.

“They are here,” he croaked.

“Who dad?”

The veins in his neck appeared in the struggle to bring up the words. “Ellie and Evie.” He lifted a finger and pointed to a corner of the room. There was a rickety bookshelf filled with a collection of shot glasses. The brown remnants of half-remembered contents clung to the rims. But nothing else.

“Okay, dad.”

He smiled and laid his head back on the pillow. I asked the hospice nurse to up his dose of feel-good drugs. Let the man go out without hallucinations of my mom and my sister.

The yellow masks pop out from above our heads. I try to put the mask over the head of my father next me. Like I was instructed to do. Dad waves his muscled arms and prevents me from saving him. “No need, son, no need.”

I put on my plastic mask. One of the flight attendants runs down the aisles. Her makeup is smeared. She looks like a frightened animal running from the hunter’s gun. She is in the camp of people crying.

The air pouch at the end of my mask inflates like a clear balloon. Then deflates. Full and empty. In and out.

Someone is kicking the back of my chair. I lean my head out into the aisle to get a clear look at the perpetrator. I am slightly shocked to see my older sister wearing a mischievous smile and a raised foot, ready to deliver another firm shot to my seat. She looks much better than when I last saw her.

Before my dad buried her in that pretty green cemetery off of Highway 14, we went to identify her body. My sister was laid out on a cold, steel table. Her dead, yellow hair was fanned out underneath her. The man in the white coat said she had been hit by a car while she was riding her pink bike with the rainbow tassels. We could take the bike home, but not her. My sister would stay in that sterile room with the fluorescent lights until they placed her in a coffin. On the drive back, my father stopped at a convenience store. He parked our family car underneath a flickering fluorescent light that reminded me of where of the room we had left moments ago.

“I’ll be right back.” My father said those words without looking at me.

Fifteen minutes he came back to the car. But not all of him.

“Turn around, you dork,” my sister says, and gives my chair a loving kick. I smile and turn back around. I missed Evie.

“Dear God! Please save us!” cries a woman from somewhere near the rear of plane.

From the seat in front of me, a woman’s voice replies: “He already has.” I know that voice. It is my mother. I don’t know what she looks like. The day I entered this world my mom exited. But in a way I don’t understand, I remember her voice. I heard it when I was still inside her. She would sing “Hush little baby, don’t say a word,” and the honeyed notes would float past her growing belly, into the womb, and into my developing ears. She would ask me questions as I grew in that secret place: “Do you feel like an apple or ice cream?” Then I would hear my dad laugh, without the stench of alcohol: “Ellie, that baby is going to give you heartburn either way!”

“No, he is not! He loves his mama, don’t you?” she would coo down to me.

Now she turns around and looks at me from over the top of her seat. “Ready to go home?” she says. There are happy tears in the corner of her eyes. The air is filled with the smell of yellow daffodils.

I take off my mask and settle in. When I look out the small oval window, the black smoke is trying very hard to obscure the light of the rising sun. But the yellow rays still find a way to break through. It feels like that entire plane is glowing. Maybe with fire. Maybe with glory.

“Ready,” I say.

I close my eyes.