Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
This is absurd,” Bunny says as Ellie races the car down the highway. They’ve hit nothing but obstacles—traffic, closed lanes, construction—on this drive. “I can’t just get on a plane and go to Florida! I need to go shopping! I don’t have the right blouses! I need to pick up sunscreen! Plus, your father and I aren’t even speaking!”
Ellie has zero plan. By now, Frank is likely already at his gate and preparing to board. She’s called and messaged him a dozen times from Bunny’s phone. ( What are you doing, Dad? You can’t get on a plane and fly to Florida with no place to stay by yourself! ) But in all his heartache, he has yet to respond. Though she won’t say it to Bunny, Ellie hasn’t a clue what she’ll do once they arrive. Buy her mother a last-minute ticket on the same flight? Beg a TSA agent to let her unticketed elderly parent through to the gate to find her spouse?
Finally, the airport exit appears on the right. Ellie clicks on her blinker, veers the car toward the off-ramp, and then drives into the airport complex. Every few feet, enormous signs are staked alongside the roadway to remind travelers of all the places in the world available for them to see, and all the ways for them to arrive there.
“I don’t care for this car,” Bunny states. The minute the words escape her mouth, so does a hacking cough. “I don’t— cough, cough —I don’t like the way it— cough— drives.”
“Really?” Ellie attempts to swerve into the short-term parking area, though naturally there’s a detour. Based on the completely roundabout manner in which the alternate route loops them, an alien from outer space who shot down to visit might believe airports are places that operate purely by the laws of leisure, and not by very strict timelines. “That’s your big concern at the moment?”
Bunny coughs again. “One of them.”
Ellie peers at her mother over her shoulder. “Are you all right, Mom? I don’t like the sound of that.”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Bunny says, even though she’s still coughing. “It’s only a tickle.” She pulls a hard candy out from her handbag and pops it into her mouth. “See?” she poses through half of a gasp.
Ellie is sweating. With her book bag accosting her back ( thump, thump, thump ), she wheels Bunny’s suitcase behind her, doing her best to get her to hustle to the terminal entrance.
Finally, they step past the electronic glass doors, both of them briefly pausing to catch their breath. Bunny looks around, fluffs her short hair with a hand, then points upward at the digital departures board, looking through her reading glasses to better view it.
“It’s too late,” she announces. “The door on his flight is already closed.” She removes her glasses. “He’s probably already met someone else by now,” she suggests, as if domestic flights are the go-to dating destination for the soon-to-be-divorced, eightysomething set.
Ellie rubs her hands over her face. Think, think, think. She begins to pace.
“You’re limping,” Bunny points out, matter of fact. She wears her dark, quilted spring jacket—the same one she wore on Ellie’s porch when she arrived Monday morning. Her palm tree brooch peeks out from it and sparkles beneath the airport’s artificial light.
“Yes, I know,” Ellie says, cautious not to say too much. “I hurt my back. But I’m fine.”
Bunny’s eyes thin themselves into slivers. She reaches into the pocket of her coat and digs out another hard candy. “What is all this about? Why are we really here? What are we actually doing?”
A memory: a cold winter morning. Ellie was twenty-two or maybe twenty-three. She’d been out of college for well over a year and living at home in her childhood bedroom while commuting back and forth like a pinball into and out of the city. It was early in the morning, the sky still so black it looked like night, and Ellie was seated on her pale-pink comforter, already dressed in a black sweater and shift dress and impossibly uncomfortable black tights.
“Why are you doing this, Ellie?” Bunny asked as she creaked open the bedroom door and watched her daughter struggle to pull on her knee-high boots, which looked exactly like the ones all the other girls in Ellie’s office had been wearing that winter, which was the point. “There’s a blizzard outside,” Bunny said. “There’s a foot of snow on the ground. Are you really going to get on the train right now?”
“The weather’s different in the city, Mom,” Ellie said, a ball of emotion lodged in the base of her throat. She hated that job and the commute and those silly boots she’d spent half a paycheck to buy. “It’ll be fine.”
“This isn’t the right track for you, Ellie,” Bunny, still dressed in her heavy winter pajamas and bathrobe, boldly said.
Ellie finally tugged her boot onto her calf. She looked up at her mother, biting her lip. She was dreading getting on that freezing train and then trudging through the humid corridors of Penn Station and then sloshing along the slush-filled streets along with every other pissed-off commuter in the tristate area. But she couldn’t admit all that to her mother. She had to at least pretend to put up a good fight.
“This is what girls like me do nowadays, Mom,” she said as she yanked on her other overpriced boot. “We graduate college. We get jobs. We change the world, you know?”
Bunny lifted her eyebrows on her pale, makeup-free face. “You’re going to change the world in this snowstorm? Doing what? Slipping on a patch of black ice?”
Ellie threw up her hands. Outside her bedroom window, she saw the headlights on Frank’s car click on. “You know what I mean.”
Mother-daughter relationships are so complicated. It feels like Ellie has known that forever, and yet it seems like it’s something new she’s learning more about every day. She and Bunny have always been close, a fact she loves and usually feels grateful for. But it’s moments like that one—when Bunny seemed to have a superhuman ability to look inside her daughter, as if with some invisible microscope or magical x-ray machine, and see the parts of herself she tried to keep hidden from the world—that their closeness and their relationship in general drive Ellie completely mad.
“I know you don’t want to hear it, Ellie,” Bunny had said. Outside the window, Frank beeped the horn. “But this isn’t the right path for you.”
Ellie stood from the bed, collected her things. “And what makes you think that?”
Bunny sighed, pulled her bathrobe tighter. “Sometimes, a mother just knows these things.”
Now, back in the airport, Bunny sucks on her candy, suppressing another cough. “Well?” she asks. “What is it that you’re doing, dragging us here? What do you think you’re going to change?”
Before Ellie can answer, she sees him: Frank, yelling at an airport employee and haphazardly stabbing his finger against the screen of an electronic kiosk.
“You just need to trust me, Mom,” she says and then grabs Bunny’s hand. She tugs her forward as other travelers zip past. “Whatever has happened recently between you and Dad, well, you have to believe me when I say it’s not the right path.”
“The three of us need to talk.”
Frank looks up from his kiosk, blinks his confusion. “Ellie?” He furrows his brows. “Bunny?” he states in a sharper tone. Behind him, the airport employee, relieved this transaction has been interrupted, slips away. “Wh-what are you both doing here?”
“You’re not running away to Florida by yourself, Dad,” Ellie tells him.
“I sure am!” he insists and then pats his head in search of his glasses, which are not there. “I just need to figure out how to use this machine so I can book myself a new ticket. I misread the time on my last one and missed my flight.”
Bunny remains silent and just shakes her head. She reaches into her jacket pocket, produces a spare pair of drugstore readers, and hands them to him.
He hesitates, but ultimately takes them and slides them on his face. “Anyway,” he says as he turns back to the machine. “If you two are here to try to stop me, you’re wasting your time.” He jabs a finger at the screen again. “I’m leaving today. It’s time for me to start this next chapter of my life!”
Bunny rolls her eyes and huffs loudly. “For God’s sake, Frank, you’re not going any place without these!” She reaches back into her coat pocket and pulls out a plastic bag full of his prescription bottles. “You’ll be dead in a day if you don’t take them!”
“What does it matter to you?” Frank asks, finally giving up on the kiosk. “According to our church, I’m not your husband anymore.” He tosses up his hands. “I’m no one!”
Bunny huffs out an annoyed breath at Frank’s drama. She begins to say something, then stops, then starts again. “I”— cough, cough —“I—I didn’t actually tell Father Donovan.”
“What?” Ellie and Frank say in unison.
“I—I wanted to,” Bunny admits and, not willing to make eye contact with either of them, studies her hand. “But it turns out he was away on retreat this week.”
All around them, the airport terminal buzzes with activity. But right here, for these three people, the world has stopped.
“I don’t understand,” Frank says. “Then why did you say you did?”
Bunny rubs one of her fingernails. “I’m not sure. Perhaps it was a sort of test run. A chance for me to hear how it would sound to finally say it out loud.”
“So Father Donovan was never there?” Ellie asks.
Bunny shakes her head.
Overhead, an announcement chimes through the terminal’s vast speaker system.
“Maybe you weren’t meant to tell him, then,” Ellie suggests.
Bunny pauses, then finally looks up. “I’d thought of that.”
Another traveler steps up beside them, gestures to the machine. Frank moves away from it. “Do you mean it, Bunny?” he asks. “You never told him?”
“No,” Bunny says. “I mean it. I never did.”
Frank nods his understanding.
Bunny tucks the bag of medications back into her pocket. “You know you’d never survive without me, Frank.”
“You think I don’t know that?” he responds.
Bunny tugs at her gold cross. “But if I’m honest,” she says, finally meeting his gaze, “thinking about you leaving—well—I’m not so sure I’d survive without you, either.”
Behind them, the other traveler grabs his printed boarding pass and hurries on his way.
“So, what do we do now?” Bunny asks, though it’s unclear who she’s asking. Ellie? Frank? Herself?
Ellie looks up and notes that Brenda is still working at the airline’s main counter, as if she’s never left. “Give me twenty minutes, and one of your phones,” she says. “I have a plan.”
Together, the three of them move across the slippery white floors, then down the narrow escalators, and finally to the end of the security line.
“I’m not so sure about this,” Bunny admits as she and Frank step forward. “I—I’m not even sure if I packed the correct toiletries!”
“You’re not going to the moon, Mom,” Ellie points out. “You’re going to Florida. The entire state is designed for people who travel there from elsewhere. I assure you that ninety percent of visitors there forget something.”
A few minutes earlier, Ellie used Frank’s phone to book her parents airline tickets and all the other reservations needed to safely get them to where they’re going, to where they need—where they’re supposed —to be. At least until Sunday, which is the date marked on their return tickets—enough time, Ellie hopes, for them to see this fact for themselves.
“I don’t like the way you’re walking,” Bunny points out. “You’re going to be alone in the house with your back like this?”
“What’s the matter with her back?” Frank chimes in. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing, Dad.” Ellie walks beside them as the line moves forward. “I’m okay,” she says, right as what feels like an electrical shock sparks the lower half of her body. “Really.”
“Tell me again, Ellie,” Frank says. “What we do when we get there?”
“I promise,” Ellie insists, believing herself. “Everything will run smoothly. All the reservations I made for you—hotel, car service—are in your email, as well as a list of step-by-step instructions for everything you’ll need to do to get safely to your hotel and then back here again in a few days. Okay?” She leans forward, embraces both her parents, and then kisses each of them on their respective cheeks. “No one here is getting divorced, all right?”
“Well, what are we supposed to do if we need to get in touch with you?” Bunny asks. “You don’t have your phone.”
“I plan to check the lost and found again before I leave,” Ellie declares without thinking.
“The lost and found?” Bunny proclaims. “Here? Oh, good Lord. For what?”
Ellie briefly covers her face with her palm. “Just ... never mind, Mom.”
Ahead of them, the other travelers inch closer to the security checkpoint.
“Listen.” Ellie begins to wrap things up. “I’ll be okay while you’re gone. I promise.” She hesitates before she speaks the next part. “I won’t be alone.” Her parents look at her inquisitively. “I—I think I met someone,” she admits, not knowing how else to put it. “I’ll tell you more when you get back. But in the meantime, I promise you don’t need to sit around and worry about me, okay? I’ll see you both in a few days,” Ellie reassures them. “Now go. It’s time to get your life together back on track,” she says as she starts to walk away.
Before she makes it far, she feels a hand on her shoulder. She turns back.
“Sweetheart,” Frank whispers after Bunny has nudged herself a few paces ahead. He lowers his arm, squeezes his daughter’s hand. “Thank you for this.”