Chapter 625 p.m. EST
She stepped aboard, entering the galley at the waist of the plane and making the unfamiliar right turn into economy. By the
time she got to the airport, her nerves had been too jangled to think about where she sat, and she had just asked for a seat
on the next available flight to Heathrow. No—maybe there had been more to it than that. Some anxious part of her had the wild
thought that somehow Horation Matthews would know her if he saw her, would somehow magically recognize in a glance one of the people who had set the dragon against him. She
did not want to find him on the plane or be found by him, and it seemed to her it would be easier to hide in the crowd of
people in the cheap seats.
She wondered if this was the first time she had ever flown in economy and supposed it was. She was curious to see how else
she’d be willing to debase herself in this desperate hour. Maybe she would drink a Fresca and eat something plebeian, like
a hot dog.
Allie made her way into the rear, along the starboard aisle.
A kid in a black hoodie, with black fingernail polish, occupied the window seat.
The aisle seat contained one of the most striking-looking women Allie had ever seen—not beautiful but arresting, with a wide, bold mouth, lips glossed to a high shine, and hair blown out in the style of late-seventies Farrah Fawcett.
Only when Allie was standing right over her, she saw that the woman in the flower-print dress had an Adam’s apple.
Wouldn’t it be fucked up, she thought, if Horation Matthews had boarded the plane dressed as a woman?
This wasn’t Horation Matthews, though, but a cross-dresser of about forty—did you call them cross-dressers?
She didn’t think so. Other than Van, she had never met a man who would wear a dress in a public place.
Allie’s seat was sandwiched between the goth and the—what?
Transvestite? No, that wasn’t right either.
She had a stern thought, then, in Colin Wren’s voice: He’s not a man in a dress, Allie, she’s a woman in a man’s body.
The woman in the man’s body stood up to let her past and said, in a posh English accent, “Squeeze by, darling, there you are.
Don’t be alarmed if you think you hear a noise like birds getting sucked into the engine on our flight, that’s just how I
sound when I start to snore. Robin Fellows.”
“I won’t mind, I think even snoring sounds more elegant in an English accent,” Allie said, charmed in an instant, the way
she was always charmed by someone who so obviously enjoyed being exactly themselves. She never thought of Robin Fellows as
a man again.
“What’s your thing, love?” Robin asked, leaning into Allie. She had a great scent on, a spicy tingle of wildflowers and whiskey.
“What do you do?”
“Polls,” Allie said, absent-mindedly, glancing around for anyone who resembled Matthews. No one. “Grinding polls.”
Robin arched one eyebrow. “Well, you’ve got the body for it, God bless. There was a time I did a little burlesque myself,
but I didn’t have the body for it even then. Bit embarrassing to remember now. I was a cliché and didn’t know it. If one of
my writers put twenty-five-year-old me in a book, I would’ve told them I was trite.”
“Are you an editor then? What sort of books?”
“Bit of this, bit of that. Mysteries mostly, but I’ve done true crime and a couple of rock bios, which are not so different
from true crime. At least not the good ones—drugs, jailbait, and hopefully a few corpses.”
“I wish my fiancé was here, you’d have so much to talk about.” It had slipped out before she could help herself, calling Van
her fiancé. She wasn’t used to not having a future with him yet. Her thumb found the engagement ring again and began to play
with it. “He writes for Rolling Stone. I promise I won’t pitch you on his work until you’ve had something to drink.”
“And did you meet in the strip club?”
“Hm? I don’t think I’ve ever been in a strip club. No, that’s not true. I went to Chippendales with Donna once. She’s his sister. She looks like him, only sexy.”
Robin frowned. “So do you teach pole-dance then? Are such things taught?”
“Oh,” Allie said. “Oh, I can’t dance. I wish I could. I just flail around and hit people with my elbows. No, I’m a pollster. I grind out surveys for polling firms. I like having a reason to call people up and ask them random questions. It’s amazing
what strangers will tell you. I love calling old women with surveys about sex. Old women can be really dirty, especially if
you get them around wine o’clock. I remember one old lady saying she always thought a Coke tasted better after sucking her
husband off.”
Robin lowered her eyes and coughed into her hand. “I couldn’t offer an opinion.”
A flight attendant appeared beside them and tried to get the slumped goth’s attention. It took a few tries before the kid
in the black hoodie plucked the headphones off his ears.
“Would you be Charlie Schow?” the flight attendant asked. “Mr. Schow, I’m sorry to say we’ve managed to overbook economy and
have to ask you to change seats.” The kid stiffened in alarm and the attendant hurried on: “We’re upgrading a select few passengers
and have a new seat for you up in Club World!”
The goth un-Slinky-ed himself from his seat, the alarm gone in an instant, and almost bounced to his heels. Allie and Robin
half stood to let him squeeze by.
“I’m glad they didn’t come for me,” Robin said, as she sat again. “Traveling in economy builds moral fiber. Like rolling out
of bed and going for a five-kilometer jog first thing in the morning. It’s the discomfort that builds character.”
“I hate running,” Allie said. “If you slow down there are insects, which is bad, and if you don’t slow down, you’re running,
which is worse.”
“So much worse. But we’re happy here. We don’t need their silver platters of chilled crab or their luxurious seats. We’ve got
each other.”
“You wouldn’t rather have chilled crab?”
“The flight is off to such a good start,” Robin said. “Let’s pretend you didn’t ask that.”
A flight attendant wheeled a trolley through the cabin, offering passengers bubbly in plastic flutes. Allie took one and looked
into it at the little fizzing circle of golden champagne and hated the idea of drinking it and knew she had to. It was lonesome
business, getting drunk without Van or Donna. Only, no—she was already drunk. But she was going to have to work at it to stay that way, and the thought of the effort ahead made her very sad. It
was necessary. She needed to stay drunk, because if she didn’t drown her anxiety, she might start shaking.
For a while, on the parkway, she hadn’t been sure she would get on this flight at all, had been terrified she would not arrive
at JFK in time. She had not stopped moving since King Sorrow had grabbed her wrist as she reached into the dryer, had been
moving at eighty miles an hour even before she got in her car. All that speed, that rush, had offered her a kind of mental
security: the acceleration had swept aside any doubts. Now that she was on the flight, she had come to a standstill, and she
felt clammy and a little woozy with dread. Now she had to sit and think her thoughts, and what she kept thinking was that
she had missed something obvious and crucial. It was like wondering if she had left the oven on when she left the house, only
worse.
She had not felt this bad since she let Mona Kennedy kiss her at the Christmas party, let Mona lead her by the hand into the
stairwell, kiss her there, and put a hand under her skirt. She had been so drunk then. It didn’t count—letting Mona finger
her, while people sometimes walked by and paused to watch—because she had been almost too drunk to remember it the next day.
Allie had not felt this bad since she had called Mona to tell her it had to stop, three times was three times too many, and
she had not known Van was in the kitchen, listening in on the extension. I just got engaged and I don’t want to be a cheat, she said and Mona said, You just got engaged and you don’t want to be gay, but you are. I swear you’re wet right now, thinking about what I can do to
you and Allie couldn’t answer because all the breath went out of her and then Van spoke up on the line and said, Hey, Allie, let me know when you’re off the phone, I was going to order pizza. Mona, good luck with your fantasy football team this weekend.
The worst of it was that she cherished Van, who loved her without qualification, who made her waffles when she was hungover
and picked her laundry up off the floor and talked sports with her father and celebrity gossip with her mother and looked
at her, sometimes, the way a child looks at the ocean for the first time: with a wonder that is inseparable from joy. No one
had cherished her since Theo died. After they buried him, she had never expected to be cherished again. She thought the least
she could do for Donovan—for the person who loved her, she supposed, more than anyone ever had or ever would—was to avoid
letting co-workers finger her in the stairwell at office parties. She hated the impulse anyway, had long wanted to rip it
out of herself. In truth, she knew she wasn’t really gay at all, but only self-destructive, and rebelling against Jesus for taking her brother too young . . .
all facts she had learned at the summer camp her parents sent her to, after she sent some silly love letters to a girl in
her English class. A youth pastor named Chuck had helped her see why she was deluding herself she was a homosexual and had
proved she could enjoy natural sex by fucking her several times before the summer was done. She was wishing for Van, for his stoner’s
sangfroid, even more than she was wishing for another glass of champagne—while she was brooding, she had swallowed down the
first—and so when she saw him push through the curtain at the waist of the plane, she thought, for a few moments, she was
imagining him. It was as if she had forced him to materialize by thinking about him, a bit of wizardry every bit as mind-boggling
as summoning a dragon from the Long Dark.
He looked good, in shredded denims and the blue chambray shirt she loved so much.
She had worn that shirt herself sometimes, for a nightdress.
He had his copper hair up in a man bun, which she didn’t love; it was better down.
He had a Nike bag slung over one shoulder, as if he were off to the gym—as if either of them ever went to the gym, hahaha—and wore his trademark smirk.
The flight attendant who had ushered the goth into business class pointed at Allie, and Van’s smirk blossomed into a shit-eating grin.
She rose, surprised to find her legs trembling. Robin noticed as well, looked up in alarm. Allie understood the goth’s business-class
upgrade had been a ploy to open up the seat beside her, one Van had set in motion himself, and she was so glad to see him,
glad not to have to go into the sky alone. She wanted him beside her, had a thousand things to tell him. He reached across
Robin Fellows to take Allie’s hands as Robin looked from one to the other in bewilderment. He leaned in to kiss her; she leaned
in to kiss him; his forehead smacked her nose; his mouth missed and he kissed her chin as her lips found his ear.
“You stupid panhandle hick,” she whispered, clutching him tightly, “what the poop are you doing on this plane?”
“What the poop,” he whispered back. “I adore you and your whole Hallmark card vocabulary. You’re like dating a two-hour Christian
holiday special. Pretend you’re happy.”
“I don’t have to pretend.”
“Pretend you’re even happier.”
“Why?”
“Because we need a cover story, and I’ve got one that’s perfect,” he said. And then he drew away from her and raised his voice
so the whole cabin could hear and said, “I love you so goddamn much, Allison Shiner, say that you’ll elope with me. Let’s
get married tomorrow.”
People laughed. Some rose from their seats for a better look at the excitement. Over Van’s shoulder she saw, for the first
time, Frank Heck, sitting just two rows up on the left, staring back at her with one eyebrow raised in wry amusement.
She had never been able to resist giving a crowd what they wanted. Of course she said yes.