Chapter 2
904 Words
Chapter 2
John shifted in the seat, reluctant to get up again but unable to sit still. Branwen and seemingly everyone else in the cabin had fallen asleep over an hour ago. Even the flight attendants had settled in for the long night. He finally stood, hunching to keep from hitting his head on the low ceiling, and stepped carefully over Branwen.
He hadn’t felt anything from her since she fell asleep, no dreams at all. She did seem to be keeping the water down. If all was indeed well, she wouldn’t wake until time for breakfast on the other side of the Atlantic.
He could normally get through a flight with a few aches and a little boredom, drawing upon many years of practice in keeping himself distracted. Tonight though, none of his eBooks held his attention, the movies either dreadful or already seen, and even his own music wouldn’t help him settle in and calm his agitated mind.
John stepped out into the aisle and stretched out to his full height, sighing with pleasure as his muscles moved into different positions. The air wasn’t as stale as it would be in a few hours, but it still held an unpleasant flat dryness.
He wished for his usual fallback of thinking about a research or teaching project. He’d wrapped everything up in St. Louis before they left, and he wouldn’t really get started in the new genetics department in Atlanta until the fall.
Even before Branwen getting sick and then so fiercely angry, the warning signs of a coming storm inside his mind had been clear all day long.
One other person was awake now, reading under the overly bright light built into her seat. Her eyes met John’s, then she nodded and gave a sympathetic smile. No one else moved. John nodded in return as he walked toward the back of the airplane. His hopes of getting through this night calmly had been slim before the flight’s difficult start.
John was in the grips of an insistent memory that wouldn’t let him rest.
He pulled the curtain at the back of the cabin aside to reveal the tiny galley and two chatting flight attendants. The neatly organized but cramped space reminded him of the kitchen in their house in Atlanta. It hadn’t seemed much bigger than this before he and Branwen, then the contractors, started work.
Now it was nothing but a dusty mess. With any luck, everything would be completed long before they returned.
“Can I get you anything, sir?” the closest one said, the same one who had helped him at the beginning of this long, long night. “Your wife seems to be feeling better now.”
“She is, thank you for your help. Just stretching my legs.”
No one was awake in the next cabin, at least no one with a light on. He continued toward the back of the plane, dodging random knees and elbows sprawled in the narrow aisle until he reached the last row of restrooms and cut across.
Moving around wasn’t helping settle his whirling mind. Getting out of his head and into his body worked for a while sometimes. The longer martial arts forms he practiced worked better to calm his mind than anything else until he’d met Branwen. There certainly wasn’t enough space for that.
Their own bed might not have suited him any better than being trapped in an airplane tonight.
Whenever an upsetting memory caught at him like this, especially from his difficult seventeenth year, John had learned long ago it was best not to resist. Something inside would have its way with him. Resisting could only make it worse.
This particular memory hadn’t demanded his attention for so long. Until tonight, he’d dared hope he was done with this one.
The odd solitude of an overnight flight was preferable to a huge family gathering for this sort of ordeal, and certainly better than the twisted filter of his nightmares. At least while he was awake, he knew the worst night of his life was when he’d at last started to take control and change the course he was on.
His dreaming life gave him no such relief.
When John passed through the front galley again, he asked for his own bottle of water. He drank it slowly, letting his surroundings gradually fall away, letting the memory surge up within and take him over.
No longer thirty-three years old, flying across the Atlantic with the half-moon reflecting off of the water. Beside his wife, who was afraid of something he couldn’t yet understand.
He was seventeen, nearly as crowded sitting shoulder to shoulder with his dad in his mother’s small car, dreading reaching his house for reasons that were as clear to him then as they were now.
Because he would have to talk. He would have to tell his parents everything. Even worse, he would have to admit everything to himself.
He would have to face the truth.
John got as comfortable as he could in close quarters with so many strangers. There was no danger of falling asleep and getting too far into that night nearly half his lifetime ago. His first flight by himself, not long after he started to turn his life around, had taught him harsh lessons about sleeping on airplanes.
As he often had over the years since, John hoped this would be the last time he had to go back there.
Maybe this time he would see whatever he was supposed to see, and he could finally put the past behind him.
- Writer
