Thirteen
Thirteen
I don’t have it.”
Ellie stands at the lost and found window at Newark Liberty International Airport, where she’s been positioned for the last hour. A man in a blue TSA uniform, whom Ellie has begun to feel confident is at least part sloth, has sifted through every relevant bin, or so he says. Who could know? The room behind him looks like it’s sponsored by Rubbermaid. There are plastic boxes in every size and variety full of items—maybe meaningful, maybe not—that other travelers have left behind. There are forgotten toys, abandoned bags, tangles of misplaced cords and chargers, metal rings full of keys, an entire rolling rack of jackets. Humanity is careless, Ellie acknowledges as she takes it all in. People neglect so many things.
“Are you sure?” Ellie asks, even though she’s personally witnessed him sort through his box of lost cell phones multiple times. “ Really sure?”
The man turns away from Ellie. He’s had enough of her, she can tell. “You said you lost it here last night, right?” He sets his bin back on a shelf. “Maybe no one’s turned it in yet,” he suggests as he takes a seat at his cluttered desk. “Could still be where you left it.”
“I’m pretty sure I left it in a bathroom near my gate,” Ellie explains.
“Near your gate?” The man blows out his lips. “That means it’s on the other side of security. The only way you’ll get through there, ma’am, is with a ticket.”
Ellie—angry and frustrated and confused and still without her phone, adjusts her backpack straps and walks away from the window. It’s midday on a Monday and so the crowd inside the airport isn’t bad. Here are the business travelers with their laptop bags and stoic expressions—wherever they’re heading, they just want to go and get back. Here are the families with their overpacked luggage and their strollers and their fussy children and their many snacks—the parents likely having snagged affordable tickets to get ahead of the summer travel months. All around, there are scattered singletons like Ellie, too—people who do not fit into either of the aforementioned categories.
Ellie moves across the shiny floors, past the snack stands and the escalators and the officers with their drug-sniffing dogs. Airports, she notes, are strange places. Dependent upon which traveler you ask, they are both beginnings and endings, starting points for celebrations, final moments before gut-wrenching goodbyes, their corridors home to heartache and happiness, pain and joy, memories some people hope will live in their hearts and minds forever, and other memories different people will wish they could immediately wipe away. They are not, she recognizes, so different from divorce.
Ellie stops in front of the main terminal entrance that will lead her back to long-term parking. The automated doors open, and another round of travelers rushes inside. Think, think, think . If she gets back in her car and drives home, she doesn’t know what will happen, what new catastrophe or surprise guest or weird unforeseen world awaits. Maybe, Ellie thinks, she should just fly away.
On a typical day, Ellie hates airports. The anxiety of flying, the stress of whether or not she’ll have time to make one last bathroom stop, the ruminating about whether she’s remembered to pack all the correct things. But today? Today is different. Ellie is not herself. While the rest of the world carries on normally, her pocket of the universe is no longer right. Now, the thought of getting on a plane, strapping herself in, and arriving someplace else sounds sort of nice.
“I need a ticket,” Ellie says when she approaches the airline’s desk.
A woman in a navy-blue skirt-suit looks at Ellie like one of them is malfunctioning. Her name is Brenda, according to her wing-shaped nameplate. “You want to buy a ticket ... here?”
“Yes.” Ellie looks up at the departures board. “Whatever the next available flight is to Orlando, I guess,” she decides, knowing someplace vaguely familiar might be a good thing.
Brenda’s eyes widen, like she’s not sure if this interaction is a nothing or one that requires a fast call-in to security. “You ... guess?”
Ellie pushes away a strand of frizzed-out hair that has come loose from her black tie. Maybe going away is what she should have done for herself from the start. Over the years, Ellie has dedicated her entire life to her family, Jonah and Maggie specifically. And for what? Did Ellie think there’d be some reward waiting for her at the end? No one needs her in the same way anymore. What would it matter if she and Jonah split up, get divorced, and go their separate ways, if he knows her anymore or not? What would it matter if she flew away?
“You know you can do this from your phone, right?” Brenda punches her fingers across her computer keyboard, peers up at Ellie through a wisp of dark hair. “That’s how most people do it nowadays.”
Ellie nods. “I’ve heard this.”
Brenda looks down at her computer. “There’s a seat available on a flight to Orlando that begins boarding in about an hour.”
“I’ll take it.” Ellie digs through her backpack, thinking about what she’ll do when she arrives. Find a taxi. Pop off somewhere to buy a few simple outfits and hygiene products. Book a hotel, call her parents and Maggie from her room phone to explain her whereabouts (or maybe place the call from her cell phone, if she can find it near her gate before she leaves). She pulls out her credit card and ID, hands both items over.
“Return flight?” Brenda lifts Ellie’s license and types in her information.
Ellie chews her lip. “No thank you,” she decides. “I don’t know when I’m coming back.”
Brenda’s expression does nothing to disguise her judgment. She drums her fingers across her keyboard, pulls Ellie’s boarding pass from the mouth of her countertop printer, and hands it to her.
Ellie slips her credit card back into her wallet, then shoves her ID and boarding pass into her pocket so they’ll be easily accessible for security.
“Have a safe flight, Ms. Adams,” Brenda says.
Ellie’s head snaps up. “What did you say?”
“Ms. Adams? That’s what’s written on your ID.” She lifts a thin brow toward the ceiling. “Did I get it right? Because if not, I’ll need to type your information in again. You’ll never get through TSA otherwise.”
Ellie pulls out her license, the day’s events quickly transforming from something illogical to something almost clear, like swirling a finger through muddy water and then watching as the sediment settles.
“Is there a problem?” Brenda asks.
She feels it again. That out-of-body sensation she’s had too many times already today. Out of all the unexplainable situations she’s faced since waking up this morning, this is the one that rattles her the most and makes her think she is not just dreaming or dealing with the trauma of a divorce or going through the motions of a brain that no longer quite works. It is something else. Something much worse.
“Ms. Adams?”
“I—I’m sorry.” Ellie’s mouth has gone dry, as if she’s swallowed a bucket of sand. “I just—I haven’t heard someone call me by my maiden name in a while.”
She steps out of line, looks down at her ID.
And here it is:
Eleanor Grace Adams
116 Cherry Lane
Great.
Ellie Adams—not Ellie Baker—is seated at her gate, turning her ID in her hand like a bouncer on the hunt for fakes. On her way here, she discovered that the bathroom she used last night is closed for renovation, any hope of finding her phone now gone. She sets her license on her lap, not knowing what to make of it. She only knows that, somehow, in a dozen different ways, she’s no longer the same person living the same life as she was yesterday. She is herself, reset. Or herself, after everything. She doesn’t know which yet.
“Good afternoon, travelers on flight 2017, with direct service from Newark to Orlando,” a voice pipes through the overhead speakers. Around Ellie, other travelers start to gather their belongings and stand. “We’re ready to begin our boarding process and now welcome group one passengers as well as active military and families traveling with small children.”
Through the window, Ellie sees the planes on the tarmac. Since marrying Jonah, she has not traveled any place more than an hour or two away from home by herself. Vacations? Jonah was always at her side. Trips to see Bunny and Frank? He was always the person seated next to her on the plane.
“We now welcome groups two and three to begin the boarding process,” a member of the flight crew announces a few minutes later. “Please remember to place your smaller personal items under the seat in front of you to help us speed up the boarding process.”
Ellie pushes herself up from her chair and makes her way toward the line. She thinks about the flight, about navigating the turbulence without Jonah at her side, as well as the turbulence they’ve already survived. She thumbs her ring finger, noticing for the first time all day that her slim gold wedding band—the one she’s hardly removed in years—is gone.
“All remaining passengers are now welcome to begin the boarding process,” a staticky voice announces. Nearby, the last groups of travelers wheel their carry-ons to the gate.
Ellie’s pack is back on her shoulders. Her paper boarding pass and ID are in her hand. This is her moment. The one perhaps she didn’t know she was waiting for until right now, when she actually arrived at it. She can leave behind this whole confused, out-of-order day and all her choices that have led her to it. She can fly away, start over, make new decisions, try again.
“Any luck finding it?”
A few minutes later, Ellie sees the man from lost and found on the escalator. The boarding pass is shoved in her bag, her car keys now dangling from her fingers. She steps off and heads into the baggage claim area. “I think I left it at home, actually,” she lies.
The man shakes his head at her and then goes off on his separate way.
For the second time in twenty-four hours, Ellie finds herself standing alone in this public space. From the corner of her eye, she catches a glimpse of a digital clock overhead, the same one she saw last night. She rubs her bare finger, a highlight reel of the day playing in her mind.
In front of Ellie, the airport’s automatic doors open, then close, then open again.
She doesn’t know what will happen when she arrives home, who or what will be waiting. From a place deep within her, she only knows she needs to get back. That, while here in this baggage claim last night, she broke something. Or that, months ago, that night on their bedroom floor with the laundry when she’d said that word—“divorce”—she’d broken something, too.
Now, for better or worse, she needs to figure out what exactly.
And then she has to try to fix it.