Seat 14A #2
He turns to look at me, and for a second his face does something complicated, like he's deciding how much of the truth he can afford to give me. "Not usually."
"Not usually what?"
"Scared of flying."
"You just said no."
"I'm not scared of flying."
I stare at him. "That's not an answer. That's a riddle."
"It's the best I can do."
He goes back to staring at the window. I follow his gaze. The moon is up there, higher now, higher than it was an hour ago, and it's the brightest thing in the sky, and he's watching it like it's a countdown. Like it's a clock he can't stop.
I want to ask him what he's so afraid of.
I want to point out that he's the calmest man on this plane and he's sitting here sweating through his shirt.
But something in the set of his shoulders tells me he's not going to answer, and I'm too tired to fight a stranger's secrets out of him in the dark.
I don't go back to sleep. I keep my screen on and pretend to read, and I watch him out of the corner of my eye.
His hands flex and relax. Flex and relax.
His jaw is tight enough that I can see the muscle jump.
At one point he checks his watch, then the window, then his watch again, and I realize with a cold little start that he's counting the minutes until something.
The captain's voice comes over the intercom at 6:52 p.m.
The cabin is quiet, mostly. A few people stir.
The captain has that practiced tone pilots use for announcements, calm and slightly bored, the voice of a man who has made this exact speech a hundred times.
There's a mechanical indication in one of the aircraft systems, he says.
Nothing to be alarmed about. But out of an abundance of caution, they're going to divert to the nearest suitable airport, which is Red Creek Regional in Montana.
We'll be on the ground shortly. We appreciate your patience.
I've been around enough event logistics to know that "nothing to be alarmed about" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The passengers around me stir, grumble, check their watches.
The man in 14C wakes up long enough to ask what's happening and goes back to sleep when I tell him we're landing early.
I turn to Dean to make a joke about the airline's idea of a convenient arrival time, and the words die in my throat.
He's gone. Not gone as in left his seat, but gone as in somewhere else entirely.
His face is white. His hands are shaking, actually shaking, a fine tremor I can see across the width of the armrest. He's staring at nothing, breathing through his mouth, and he looks like a man who has just heard a death sentence delivered in a friendly voice.
"Dean?"
He doesn't respond.
"Hey. It's just a diversion. We're landing somewhere, they'll put us on another plane. This is annoying, not dangerous."
He turns to look at me, and the expression on his face is the worst thing I've seen in weeks.
It's fear. Not the normal, annoyed-at-my-travel-plans fear everyone else on this plane is wearing.
It's real fear. The kind with teeth. The kind that makes a man's eyes go wide and his hands shake and his whole body lean toward the door like he can will himself through it.
"You're not scared of flying," I say slowly.
"No."
"Then what are you scared of?"
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks at the window, where the moon is riding high and white and enormous, and then back at me, and I watch him choose his words like a man choosing which lie will hurt least.
"I'm scared of what happens when we land."
I don't know what to do with that. I sit with it while the plane starts its descent, while the seatbelt sign dings on, while the flight attendant's voice comes over the intercom asking us to return to our seats and fasten our belts.
The passengers around us are already pulling out phones, calling people, complaining.
The woman in 13C is on the phone with her husband, her voice carrying over the cabin, saying something about a mechanical issue and how she's going to miss her connection and how this is why she hates flying.
Dean isn't doing any of that. He's sitting perfectly still, both hands flat on his thighs again, and he's staring at the moon through the window like it's a predator he's trying to out-stare.
I should say something. I should ask him what he means. Instead I reach over and put my hand on his arm, just for a second, just to see if he's real.
He flinches. Not away from me. I don't know what it is. Like my hand is the last thing he expected, and he doesn't have a protocol for it.
"Whatever it is," I say, "we're in it together. At least until we land."
He looks at me. For a second, something in his face loosens, some tension I didn't know he was holding, and then it's back, harder than before.
"You should sit somewhere else," he says.
"What?"
"When we land. You should sit somewhere else. Stay away from me."
"You're making a lot of sense right now, Dean. Real A-plus communication."
"I mean it."
"You've known me for three hours and you're already trying to get rid of me. I'm flattered, honestly. Most people wait until after dinner."
He doesn't smile. He doesn't even look at me. He just stares at the moon, and the plane keeps descending, and somewhere below us Montana is waiting in the dark, all snow and silence and a hundred miles of nowhere.
Red Creek Regional Airport is the smallest airport I have ever seen.
We land on a runway that looks like it was poured as an afterthought, past a terminal that's basically one long room with a baggage carousel at one end and a departures desk at the other.
Snow is coming down hard, thick flakes blown sideways by a wind that hits the plane's fuselage the second we touch down.
The passengers are already unbuckling, grabbing bags, pushing into the aisle before the seatbelt sign is off.
It's chaos. It's exactly the kind of chaos I'm built for, the kind where forty people are angry and someone needs to be the calm one, and for a second I slip into it out of habit.
By the time I'm in the aisle, Dean is already gone. I watch him move through the crowd, head and shoulders above everyone else, and he's not carrying his bag. He's not doing anything. He's just moving, fast, toward the front of the plane, toward the exit, like the building itself can't hold him.
The terminal is a single fluorescent-lit room with a baggage carousel that hasn't started yet and a vending machine that's older than I am.
The snow piles against the windows in drifts.
Through the glass I can see the runway lights, a single plow moving slow and orange through the white, and not much else.
No other planes. No towers. Just snow and wind and the middle of nowhere.
I make it to the vending machine before the crowd does, the only advantage of arriving with one carry-on and no checked bag.
It's a relic, yellowed plastic, a row of snacks that look like they've been on display since the Carter administration.
It takes my dollar with a cheerful clunk and gives me nothing.
I hit the glass. It hums. I feed it another dollar.
It hums harder and eats that one too, and by the time I'm done arguing with it, it has taken three dollars and my dignity, and I'm standing there slapping the glass while it vibrates like it's laughing at me.
"That machine has probably eaten worse things than your snack money."
I turn. A woman in a sensible coat is watching me, paper cup of coffee in one hand, a dollar in the other. Fifty-something, grey coming in at the temples, the kind of face that has seen a lot of waiting rooms and knows exactly how people come apart in them.
"Denise," she says. "And it's not a loan. Consider it the airline's first payment."
"They owe you too?"
"They owe me a visit with my daughter I had to cut short." She says it without drama, the way nurses say things. "You're from the flight?"
"Three days of a product launch in Seattle. My seatmate said eleven words to me, most of them no, thank you."
"You look like you could sleep for a week."
"I look like that most of the time."
She laughs, a real one, and something in my chest loosens that I didn't know was tight.
Behind her, a man in a coat stands at the window with a phone to his ear, talking over the noise, and I don't listen, because I'm busy being furious about my dollar.
She presses the dollar into my hand and nods at the machine.
"Try the chips. The sandwich has been in there since before the airline existed, and I have a professional eye for these things. "
"What are you, a food inspector?"
"Pediatric nurse. Same skill set, smaller patients." She raises her coffee. "If you need a friend this weekend, you've got one."
"I'm Megan."
"Megan." She nods, like she's filing it away. "Get some sleep when you can. You'll need it."
The airline has one representative on the ground, a woman in a high-vis vest who is clearly outnumbered and handling it about as well as can be expected.
She stands on a chair and announces that replacement aircraft will not be available until morning due to the weather, that the roads are closing, and that the airline has arranged rooms at the Juniper Motor Lodge, twelve miles down the highway.
Buses are on the way. We'll be taken care of.
The room erupts. I hear Omar Haddad before I see him, a voice carrying over the crowd, loud and aggrieved, cataloguing the airline's failures in descending order of importance.
He's a man in his early thirties in a suit that's seen better days, and he's telling anyone who will listen that the airline owes him approximately seventeen million dollars and he has a spreadsheet.
I've met a hundred Omars. I've produced events where half the room was an Omar. I tune him out and look for Dean.
I find him at the rental car counter.