Chapter 1123 Mid-Atlantic Time Zone （MST） #2
out what had gone wrong. She heard the door to the stairwell slam, a sound that panicked her slightly, thinking he was going
to leave again, that he would be gone for days this time. She pulled on his T-shirt and went after him.
He was in the stairwell, in his bare feet, with a pack of cigarettes. They were on the fifth floor, a well of concrete steps,
with a waist-high black metal banister looking over the drop. He couldn’t meet her stare. When he tried to shake a smoke out
of the pack, cigarettes spilled onto the floor.
“Go back to bed,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked. “What did I do?”
“Nothing. I just need a smoke. Go to bed now.” His voice was dull and unfamiliar.
“Please,” she said, and reached for his free hand, the hand with the lighter in it. “Please tell me if I did something wrong. Donna, please, I love you so much, just talk to me.”
He shot her a look then, a look that seemed to express some wild grief. “Jesus, you’re doing it again. This is so fucked.
I’m so fucked. Go to bed.”
“I don’t know what I did!” she cried, and he pointed that miserable, grieving stare at her once more, and said, “What’s my
name, Allie?”—a question she didn’t even understand.
She reached for his hand again and this time he shoved her back, only when he shoved her, he tipped off balance himself, and
his hips hit the banister and he tilted over it and in her mind she saw him fall five stories and his head smash open like
a dropped watermelon, and she cried out and grabbed his hands. She pulled him back so hard he lost his footing, a leg wobbled,
and he fell, slid down a flight of steps, flipped and cracked his head. He was unconscious for almost ten minutes, coming
around as the EMTs were strapping him into the gurney to carry him out of the stairwell. When she learned she couldn’t ride
along, she told Van she would follow him to the hospital in his car. He said, “Don’t, don’t worry, go back to bed.” She said
she would call Donna and they would go to the hospital together and he laughed an ugly laugh and said, “You should’ve let
me go over the banister.” She didn’t understand it then and didn’t understand it now.
He was in the hospital for thirty-six hours, and by the time he got out, Allie had moved back to her rarely visited two-bedroom
rental in New Rochelle to hide from her life. She wasn’t sure which of them told their friends first the marriage was off.
She wasn’t sure either of them ever did. Somehow it seemed like something everyone knew without anyone talking about it. Donna
and Gwen and Colin and Arthur knew from what they didn’t say, what they didn’t discuss anymore. They knew because she was
in New Rochelle instead of Park Slope.
“There is an us, you know,” she said now, thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean.
“That us is one of the best things in my life. That us is a fucking dangerous weapon, Van.” And it was true, as true as any of the empirical statistical laws, as true as any of the words of “Amazing Grace.” He would always love her, would never ever quit caring about her, and that was fact.
She would always want his happiness, and that was fact too.
There were some other facts she didn’t care to think about, facts that made her scalp crawl with unease, with worry, but this at least was a good truth, a truth that could be held like a single note in a hymn, a note that was sweet and clear.
“Allison Shiner,” he said, beginning to smile. “Did you just say the F-word? I’m going to get a bar of soap and wash out your
mouth.” His eyes came unfocused slightly. “There’s a bar of soap in my bag. I could put that in a sock and—but the bottle
is better.” He looked across her then, with sudden decision, and caught Robin’s eye. “Let’s have a last splash of that white,
huh?”
Robin craned her neck to stare back at him. She reached for the bottle and swished it out of her purse, the cork forced back
into it to save the last bit, the corkscrew hanging from an emerald ribbon around the neck. Van had crushed his plastic cup
out of nervousness, but Allie’s empty was still intact. Allie poured a last frothy inch into it and handed it to him. He threw
it back like a shot and gasped and exhaled. Put the cup down, then eased the bottle out of Allie’s hands and gave it a considering
look.
“I bet Arthur would like a bottle of this,” Van said. “I bet the whole gang would like a bottle. Maybe for Christmas. If we
see another Christmas. I guess I should find out if they have a recycling bin for something like this?” He unbuckled his belt.
“Van,” Allie said.
“I’ll just put it in my bag,” Robin said. “For God’s sake, don’t get up again, not while the plane is shaking like this. You
want to break your neck?”
“It’s nothing, besides, I have to wee,” he said, already up, climbing awkwardly out over them. The plane jolted and he put
most of his rear into Robin’s face.
“Sorry about my fiancé’s ass,” Allie said.
“I’m an editor, love. Writers expect me to kiss their arses all day long. I’m an old hand.”
Van made his way up the aisle, swaying from side to side, the bottle hanging loosely from his right hand.
Frank Heck turned his head to watch him pass by with great interest. When he was nearly to the galley, Albert Shook unbuckled his belt and propelled himself up, into Van’s path.
Van said something Allie couldn’t hear. The senior flight officer jabbed a finger toward Van’s seat.
Van didn’t move, gestured with his free hand, and tried to get past the tall man.
Shook sidestepped, stopping him again, getting his forearm up and pressing Van gently backward, speaking calmly but firmly, his expression an icy blank.
“I better do something before Van gets arrested,” Allie murmured, unbuckling herself.
But when she was past Robin, in the aisle, she turned in the other direction. She walked swiftly to the rear of the plane,
looking back only once, to see that the little blond flight attendant had joined Albert Shook, creating a bottleneck in the
starboard lane.
There was a small dark nook at the rear of the plane, two more bathrooms back here. Allie crossed to the other side of the
plane. She was about to start up the aisle along the port side when Robin Fellows caught her arm.
“What are you doing?” Robin asked.
“I thought I’d look for another stewardess back here,” Allie said. “Someone who could help de-escalate the situation.”
“Is that why you’re holding my corkscrew? To de-escalate things?”
They both looked at the corkscrew in Allie’s left hand, the silver curl of the screw protruding between her index and middle
finger. She had been careful to remove it before handing the bottle to Donovan.
“What the hell is going on here, Allison?” Robin asked her. “What the hell do you and Van know about this flight that you
aren’t saying?”
Allie was going to reply, opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again and said, “How did you have the courage to—be
a woman?”
Whatever Robin was expecting, it wasn’t that. She drew her head back slightly and then laughed. “I wonder the exact same thing about every woman I meet. Every day.” Her smile faded slightly. “What are you doing? Can you please try to explain?”
“I can’t, but maybe Van can, one of these days. Sit back down, Robin. Sit down and, I don’t know, maybe Van can write you
a book about all of this. God knows it would take a whole book to make sense of tonight. All I can tell you is that I’m trying
to be brave. I can’t be as brave as you, but I don’t need to be. I only need to be brave enough to hang in there until we
land.”
She tugged her wrist free, took two steps down the open and empty aisle on the port side of the plane, looked back, and saw
Robin still standing there. “Go on. Shoo.” Whisking her off with one hand but smiling at the same time. She was glad she had
met Robin at what was probably the end of her own life. Envied her a little. She had the courage to be who she was when Allie
didn’t, and never had. She would rather be married to Van for the rest of their unhappy and unsatisfied lives than be who
she was.
Allie walked swiftly up the aisle, to the waist of the plane, her gaze fixed straight ahead the whole way. She felt somehow
that to glance around would be to attract stares, and that as long as she didn’t look at anyone directly, they couldn’t see
her either: a notion related to an infant’s conception of object permanence.
She heard Van arguing with the senior flight attendant as she reached the forward part of economy.
“Ah, man, don’t make me sit down, I gotta take a piss so bad my eyeballs are floating,” Van said.
“You’ve got an empty bottle,” Albert Shook told him. “Use that.”
Then Allie was into the dark space of the galley, and across it, and climbing the stairs. She paused at the top of the steps.
The old couple in the row across from Horation seemed, at first, to be hugging one another. When she narrowed her eyes, though,
she could see they were both holding a rosary, whispering to one another while they counted the beads together. On the movie
screen, at the far end of the cabin, the credits were rolling. The end had come at last.
Horation had moved to the window seat and had raised the shade partway.
He was staring into the night, but his eyes shifted to her reflection as she sat down.
That was the moment. If she had any sense at all, she would’ve jammed the corkscrew in his ear right then.
Done. Four hundred lives saved and she would take the consequences.
But when she sat down next to him, aware of the corkscrew in her left hand, her insides went watery and weak. Allie got it,
then, the whole Hamlet thing. It was hard to stick someone with a knife. It was hard to imagine doing it with enough force to puncture an eardrum,
to drive the thing into his brain. It was no trouble to kill from a distance. The gang of them did that every year. As long
as it happened offscreen, you could almost not think about it at all.
He turned in his seat, so their knees were almost touching, and the moment was gone.
“I saw him in a flicker of lightning,” he said. “Just now.”
“I didn’t hear anyone scream. Last time they all screamed.”
“I think a lot of them are keeping their shades down. Most people want to do as they’re told. They’re eager to show how well they can obey. What about you, Allie? Do you like to get a gold star
from teacher?”
“Depends on the teacher,” she said.
“The first time King Sorrow spoke to me, he was in the little room under the stairs where I keep the mops. But I knew he wasn’t
really there. He was in my mind, not under the stairs. It was an idea of King Sorrow . . . not the beast himself. It’s satisfying to see him, to see him and know he’s really there. To see the immensity of him.”
“Do you think it would’ve worked?” Allie wanted to know.
“What?”
“This holy well in England? Do you think, if you’d got there in time, you could’ve cleansed your taint?”
“I’m not out of time. It will work.”
“I have a friend, Arthur. I think he’d love to hear your ideas about dragons.
He thinks about dragons a lot himself. He teaches a course on them.
He’s a professor of medieval literature.
He has an interesting theory about fiction.
He says all the good stories are secretly instruction manuals for slaying dragons. He says that’s why we write them.”
Horation’s eyes narrowed, and she wondered if she had said too much, if Arthur’s study of dragons risked giving the game away.
“Did you ask him what to do about your dragon problem?” Horation asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said to find myself a knight,” she said, “who can defend me. Why do you think we’re on a plane together?”
Horation cracked a smile at that. So she wasn’t ready when he said, “I don’t believe you. Not a word. I have daughters and
lots of practice catching them out in lies. One of them, her ears turn pink when she tries to get one over on me. Another
gets angry when she’s telling lies to cover her fear of being found out. My first wife was a habitual liar until I trained
her out of it. If I had time, I could train you out of it too.”
“Allison, you wanna introduce me?” said Frank Heck, three feet away, at the top of the stairs, the gun already in his hands,
but pointed at the floor.
“Who the hell is that?” Horation asked.
“It’s not hell,” Allie said. “It’s Heck.”