Jackie put her hand over Emma’s tablet, blocking the screen. “Don’t do a count today.”
Jackie had that perfect smile on her face. Any passenger watching would think flight attendants only ever discussed pleasant things. But there was a tightness around her eyes. “The gate agent did a count, and we’re busy. Don’t worry about it.”
The plane lurched under Emma’s feet as the jet bridge shifted against it, the ground momentarily visible in the gap between tunnel and plane. It was a violation of the rules not to have multiple counts of the passengers on a flight. But Jackie did have a point. It would have been difficult for anyone to sneak unseen onto the jet bridge from the ground, or flee the plane and vanish on the crowded apron.
Emma turned off the screen on her tablet and set it on the counter. Jackie seemed relieved, greeting passengers again, but still with that odd, angled tension in her neck.
It was Emma’s third time flying with Jackie. And Jackie was lovely. But as Emma looked out over the passengers settling into their seats, it seemed impossible not to silently count them. Of course, it was like trying to spot swimmers among waves. The passengers were in constant motion, passing through the aisle, stuffing carry-on luggage into the overhead bins, ducking down to dig into their bags. Emma couldn’t get a reliable count. And then Jackie was back from checking in with Marjo—with the pilot—and Emma had to help secure the cabin for taxiing.
As the plane climbed over the city and settled into a cloud layer, Emma felt an unusual unease. A few moments ago, the ground had been hot and black and far away. Now everything outside was hazy and blank and very close.
When it came time for the drink service, the third flight attendant, Craig, kept his back to the passenger cabin as he prepared the cart, stocking it with cups and cola. His movements were unfocused and shaky. If Emma’s mother were here, in her blue flight attendant heels, she’d have been contemptuous of a cabin crew showing their nerves. Of course, she’d never been on her own up here in the sky. Her husband had always been in the cockpit.
Never fall for pilots’ lines Home is wherever you find yourself, her mother said.
Today in the cockpit the pilot was Marjorie. Marjorie hadn’t used a line on Emma. She’d simply leaned close in the crew lounge, trading conversation while tracing condensation on the edge of her glass, slowly coating her finger in cold water. She wore no wedding ring, so Emma had assumed no ring existed. The truth was the ring sometimes vanished. But it was never going to completely disappear.
During the drink service, the passengers seemed entirely normal, asking for juice or sparkling water, munching on dry little cookies from filmy packages. They had carry-ons, books, headphones, neck pillows, the same as always. And yet, Jackie was clutching the handle of the cart so hard her fingers turned white.
It didn’t help that the drink service created its own tension, worsening the quiet claustrophobia to be found up here in the wide-open sky. A seat on the aisle or near a door of a plane was like a seat anywhere, unremarkable. But a passenger in a window seat would need to wait on two others to move out of their way before even reaching the aisle, and the drink cart made it worse, filling the whole aisle, sealing off entire portions of the cabin as it moved. Today Emma felt like she was constantly on the wrong side of it.
And it was impossible not to count people as they passed by. At the end of the drink service, the problem became clear: the flight was supposed to have 126 passengers. There were 127.
There was a procedure for that. Unauthorized passenger. It involved returning to the airport and being met by a crowd of police and federal agents. The other passengers on the flight would be inconvenienced, to say the least.
The real question, of course, was why Jackie wasn’t doing exactly that. Emma’s mother would surely have sussed out the extra person, zip tied their hands, and had them ready to transfer to security on landing, still with that perfect flight attendant smile.
There was only one explanation, of course: Jackie, or possibly one of the other cabin crew, had sneaked an extra person into the cabin. Probably giving some friend a free flight.
Emma could make a fuss, turn the plane around, piss off the passengers—not to mention getting somebody fired—or she could look the other way while some harmless person sat in an otherwise-unfilled seat and drank a free half-can of cola.
There was no real choice. Emma had caused enough trouble switching crews to avoid Marjorie. Not that it had worked. Someone had called in sick, and now Marjorie was once again in charge of the plane suspending Emma miles above the earth.
Sometimes it felt like Emma’s life was careening toward the ground, ready to end in fire and disaster. She’d tried college. She’d tried boys. She knew happiness existed, she’d seen it once, before her father’s accident. Before The Stepfather, as Emma thought of him, lazy and loud.
Emma’s mother would have hated to have the Stepfather as a passenger, Emma was sure, but he was her father’s replacement nonetheless. As if her father hadn’t fallen out of the sky one day but had just called in sick, and some faceless company had shifted the Stepfather into his place.
The Stepfather had never even been on a plane. Emma’s mother hadn’t been on the one that crashed. Emma’s father was dead-heading, traveling as a passenger on his way to another job. Emma had always wondered whether her father would be alive if he’d been in the cockpit that day.
It was a relief to tuck the drink cart away, leaving the aisle open again. But Emma was startled to feel her shoe sink into the carpet with a wet squelch. She turned to see a trail of liquid leading from the galley into the passenger cabin.
“Crud,” Emma said. “Jackie, I think the cart was leaking.” Hopefully it was melted ice and not sticky cola.
“Oh,” Jackie said, sounding muffled, speaking into a tightly packed cupboard. “Yeah, this cart does that sometimes. Don’t worry about it.”
“I can see wet footprints. One of us must have tracked it back here. There’s probably a puddle in the cabin.” Emma got two steps farther along the trail of wet carpet before Jackie’s hand closed around her wrist.
Jackie spoke with an insistent calm, and Emma watched with a sickened surprise as cracks ran through her lipstick. “We don’t talk about it. Not in flight.”
“We don’t talk about a leaking cart?”
“Just look the other way. Remember that, Emma. If you see it—just look the other way.”
Emma lowered her voice to a whisper. “Jackie, I really don’t care if you’ve brought on an extra passenger.”
“It’s not a passenger,” Jackie hissed, under her breath.
Emma did not get airsick. She’d grown up in the sky. But now her stomach lurched and her knees knocked together like they’d “hit a pocket of rough air.” She watched Jackie start determinedly cleaning counters which were already clean.
“Then what is it?” Emma asked, faintly. “If I see what?”
Marjorie’s voice erupted from the loudspeaker. Emma imagined she could see the words swirling around the cabin like smoke, that smooth voice made staticky. “Folks, we’re beginning our final descent to the airport. Should have you on the ground in about twenty minutes. Flight attendants, please prepare the cabin for landing.”
Before Jackie could say anything, Emma grabbed a trash bag and headed down the aisle, following the wet footprints. If anyone else had noticed them, they didn’t seem to care. Emma stopped at the first row for used tissues fished out of the seat pocket, the next for an empty cola can. The footprints continued, growing less distinct as they moved down the aisle, messier. Emma was heading toward the source of the spill.
“Tray table up, please,” Emma said, flashing her flight attendant smile. She’d bought herself a new shade of pink lipstick. Marjorie liked red. “That bag needs to go under the seat in front of you.”
Squelch went her shoes. By this point, Emma had to look down to make sure there wasn’t standing water in the aisle. It felt harder to move her feet, almost like she was wading instead of walking.
“What’s the weather like on the ground?” a woman asked, as Emma passed.
“Sunny and warm when we left this morning,” Emma said. “It’s the home base for many of our crews, you know, and we like to keep it comfortable for you.” She glanced out the window as the plane banked. They were below the clouds now. She could see the ground. The people in the city lived tightly packed into tall buildings, and in a few minutes, this plane would be at the level of their living rooms. The sun glinted off the surface of the ocean, powerful enough even from this height to make Emma blink.
“Any trash?” Emma asked the next row. She got a stack of used cups. Across the aisle, napkins. Emma dropped one and it immediately soaked up water. When she picked it up, it was ice cold. An odor rose from it, something very out of place in the sky. Emma sniffed at her hands in their transparent plastic gloves. Salt water.
Somewhere, Emma heard a man say, “Oh, thank goodness. I thought the forecast was for snow.”
“Snow?” someone asked. “It’s July.”
Emma stopped walking. She was now standing on a patch of thoroughly soaked carpet. There were no more wet footprints beyond it. This was the source of the spill. Her feet felt chilled up to the ankle. The whole area reeked of the ocean.
Look the other way, Jackie had said.
But this was Emma’s plane. These passengers—126 of them, at least—were in her care. Emma had her own grown-up blue shoes now.
Emma turned around. On her left, the seats were filled by three women who looked enough alike to be family members. They were ignoring Emma, focused on a guidebook to local attractions, with many dog-eared pages.
On the right side of the aisle there were three empty seats. But there had been someone there a moment ago. A dark-haired man. Emma hadn’t gotten a good look at him before, as that was the side Jackie had worked during the drink service.
Marjorie’s voice rang out again. “Flight attendants, please take your seats for landing.”
“Where is the man who was here?” Emma asked the women across the aisle. They turned to look, seeming confused. “Oh. Bathroom, maybe?”
Emma looked down the aisle. The bathrooms at the back both had the green unoccupied tab showing. The bathrooms in the front were too far away to see.
Emma took a hesitant step toward the front. Out of the puddle. Following the footprints again. She could see Jackie and Craig strapping themselves into the jump seats by the front exit.
The aisle seemed to stretch on forever.
Somewhere, a man said, “I don’t like this part.” Emma looked carefully from side to side as she walked, but she couldn’t find the speaker.
“What part?” Emma asked, addressing her passengers in what was hopefully a cheerful tone. “The landing?”
“No,” said the voice. Emma could feel someone lean in close, as if they were behind her in the aisle, crowding into her personal space. “The falling.”
Emma dropped her trash bag and sprinted down the aisle. She doubted her mother had ever done that. “Fuck,” she said, as she strapped herself into her seat. “You could have just told me the plane was haunted.”
Craig was pale as the paneling, but he tried a smile. “He’ll be gone by the time we land. His flight—”
Jackie looked livid. She waved her hand to hush Craig, but he kept talking. “It never made it to the airport. Went down over the water in a snowstorm. But it’s okay. It just makes things a little bumpy. The ocean—the ocean wants him back. That’s what Marjorie says. I don’t know if you’ve met her, but she’s really friendly—”
“Marjorie says it on the ground,” Jackie hissed.
The plane jolted, as if they’d run over something in the sky. There were exclamations from several of the passengers. Emma was too far away to see which ones.
Somewhere in the cabin a call light went on. The plane banked left, more sharply than Emma was expecting. Her blue shoes slid on the carpet.
“Marjorie will get us down,” Craig said, encouragingly, though he was holding tight to his harness.
Emma was finally able to voice the question. “What flight?” She imagined her own lipstick might be cracking. “What flight is he from?”
Jackie and Craig shifted in their seats as the plane bounced. “318,” Craig said. “Went down in 2010.”
As the plane leveled out, Emma unbuckled her seatbelt.
When Emma’s father had died, she’d wished she’d been on the plane with him. In later years, she’d felt the shame of wishing her mother had been.
He wasn’t the saint you remember, her mother said one horrible night, when Emma had been shouting at the Stepfather. He had a girl in every port. Believe me, I know. We worked together.
Emma walked down the aisle. Back into the water. Past the passengers with their hands gripping the arm rests. Past the windows with the shades drawn. Frightened passengers always did that, her mother had said. They didn’t want to see the ground coming up too fast.
The call light was on near the back, the row with the spill. As Emma walked into it, her feet began to go numb with cold.
Emma sat down next to the thing that was not a passenger and buckled her seat belt.
“I don’t like this part,” the man said. He had the dark hair Emma knew, but it was wet now, plastered to his head. He seemed much smaller than she remembered. Emma couldn’t tell if he recognized her, all these years later.
The plane took another jolt and the man clutched at the seat in front of him, getting it wet. “I just want to go home.”
Emma had always believed her father’s last thoughts had been of her and her mother. She’d imagined him sad. Surprised, maybe. Never like this. Never scared.
“It’s okay,” Emma said. Salt water sloshed on her shoes and trailed down her cheeks. “We can be here just a little longer.”