Chapter 7
967 Words
Have you ever seen someone die before? I know, I know. Morbid question. Too disturbing. I grew up on a farm. I already told you that. So you can guess that I’m not too squeamish when it comes to blood, birth, the circle of life, all that jazz.
Except I’d never seen a human die. Not until I got on that flight with Kennedy.
I’d certainly never seen anyone murdered. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s see … This is the first time I’ve tried to lay out any of the things that happened to me in any kind of logical order. It’s a lot harder than I imagined. I guess I should just start at the beginning.
Kennedy and I were seated in the back of the plane. I mean the very back. And a few weird things happened right at the start. Well, maybe not totally weird as far as traveling goes, but looking back, they all added up.
So first of all, this Mennonite family got on board. You wouldn’t know it if you’ve never lived here, but Alaska has quite a lot of Mennonites, especially when you get toward Palmer and Wasilla. Most people know the area because that’s where Sarah Palin’s from. You’ve heard of her maybe? Fun fact: Jewel is also from Alaska, but that’s a less well-known piece of trivia unless you’re one of her fans.
So anyway, this Mennonite family came on board. Nothing all that surprising about that, at least to me. If I remember right, this guy in front of me had some kind of problem with them. Made a joke about the Amish not being allowed to fly in airplanes, something ignorant like that. Sadly, not too different than what you might expect.
They seemed like a really nice family too. Quiet kids. Mom was reading to the younger ones if I remember right. But then these two men with Middle Eastern clothing and features came on board. They were sitting toward the front of the plane, but I watched the Mennonite husband and wife exchange a look. I don’t have to describe it to you exactly, do I? You know what I mean don’t you?
The look.
And then the wife told her husband she had a bad feeling about the flight, and she wanted to get off. I was expecting him to tell her everything was fine. Maybe she hadn’t flown much in the past and got nervous. Maybe she’d just watched a documentary recently on 9-11 and hadn’t read the memo that not all people of Middle Eastern descent are terrorists. Who knows?
But instead of calming his wife down, the husband called over the flight attendant. Her name was Tracy. Now, think about how many flights you’ve been on. Not just this year or this decade even, but over your whole life. On a single one of them, can you remember any of the flight attendants’ names?
I didn’t think so.
But Tracy is a woman I will never forget.
Never.
Except I’m getting ahead of myself again. First we need to go back to the Mennonites. The husband told Tracy he and his wife were uncomfortable and wanted to get their family off the plane. At this point, I expected Tracy to say something like, “Oh, we’re perfectly safe here, you have nothing to worry about. Is this your first time flying with us?” If we were ten or fifteen years in the past, she’d probably have offered to give all the kids little wing pins. You remember those, don’t you?
Well, that’s not what Tracy said. She was very polite and very professional and told them that if they wanted to get off the plane, that was totally their right. So of course that obnoxious man in front of me started complaining about delays, but it happened very quickly and smoothly. One minute they were on the plane. The next minute they were off.
At the time, I’ll go ahead and admit it, I thought it had everything to do with racism and xenophobia and that Mennonite woman not wanting to be on a plane with two dark-skinned men wearing turbans. Looking back, I wonder if it was God’s way of warning them. I think about that family sometimes. Think about those kids. Did their parents tell them what almost happened?
And what about the parents? Do they feel survivor’s guilt? Or maybe some sort of arrogant smugness that they had the good sense to get off that plane? I’ll probably never know, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wonder.
There’s a lot of things I wonder about the other victims on that flight. Like Tracy. What did she think about helping that family deboard the plane? Did she think they were being paranoid? Did she begrudge them the extra few minutes of time it took to get them and their luggage back to the terminal? Was she thinking about paperwork she’d have to fill out to explain the change in the passenger list?
Or maybe she wasn’t thinking about them at all. Maybe she was thinking about her two children back home. Or where she’d spend the night once we landed in Detroit. I’ve read everything I could find about Tracy online, but it still doesn’t give a good sense of who she really was. But I think about her escorting that family off the flight. Wonder if she herself had any sort of inkling. Any sort of intuition.
What does a flight attendant do when they don’t feel safe on a flight? They still have to do their job, right?
Which is exactly what Tracy did. Exactly what she’d still be doing right now in fact if things hadn’t taken such a terrible, terrifying turn.
- Writer
