Maria lost her balance, stumbled and reached out for the seatback behind the prime minister, but she grabbed a fistful of his shirt instead. He pulled her into him, burying her face against his chest, clawing at her, fighting to hold her. She smelled the sweat from under his arms, felt his muscles strain as he fought to keep her from tumbling down the aisle.
She heard someone scream as she wrapped her arms around his chest, straining and struggling to hold on. His knee came up into her stomach, knocking her breath away. She gasped for air, but she was wedged in tightly against the prime minister, her mouth pulled into his clothes. She moaned and felt him relax his hold on her. Then she saw the orange oxygen mask as he wormed it between her face and his chest. She inhaled, quick short breaths, and in seconds she had her wind back.
The noise was deafening, louder than the cranked up volume of any of the Texas honky tonks that Earl liked to take her to, louder than the giant speakers at the Weezer and the Wallflowers concerts she went to with her sister last year, louder than the dragsters at the Southern Texas Speedway, louder than God.
She battled with the prime minister as he tried to turn her around. In her normal, rational mind, she knew what he was doing, but she couldn’t help herself, she fought against him, afraid he was going to take the oxygen away. She pushed against his chest, fighting to get up and out of his lap. Then the plane lurched again, as if a giant boy had a giant fist wrapped around his giant airplane toy, and he was shaking it.
She stopped resisting and squirmed around so that she was sitting in his lap, but she lost the mask as she came around. She offered no resistance as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close, grabbing his hands onto his elbows in an effort to form a locking ring around her waist. She felt herself getting light, then heavy, then light again as the plane plunged toward the ground, lurched itself level, then plunged downward again. She grabbed onto the seatback in front of her for added support. Shivers zapped her body, but she fought to control her shaking. Something was smacking her in the head and she reached up and grabbed it. It was the oxygen mask. Without realizing what she was doing, she jerked on it with a maniac force, snapping the plastic tube, destroying the mask and cutting off any more oxygen for herself or the prime minister.
“ Please, God,” the man next to the prime minister murmured as the plane bucked and slammed through a convulsion from hell. It was a desperate plea, like a puppy dog whine.
She felt the prime minister’s hands slipping.
“ Help me, George,” he yelled, and she felt a second pair of hands wrap around her left arm just as the plane slammed and jerked further to the right. They were still going down. She felt them pull and strain, fighting to keep her in place, as the plane rocked and rolled through the clear sky.
Then the angle of descent slackened and they were flying straight and level again. A collective sigh escaped from first class and Maria felt her breath go out as she sighed, too. She relaxed, her shoulders sagged, her heart slowed its wild pumping. The deafening noise was down to a dull roar.
“ Thank you,” she said, disentangling herself from the two men by pulling up on the seatback in front of her. The attorney general gave her backside a gentle push. She wanted to be back next to the DEA man with the shaved head, safely belted in. She wanted comfort. She wanted a friend. The DEA man was all she had.
“ Sorry folks,” the captain’s voice soothed through the plane, “I had no control over that, but we have the plane back and she seems to be flying okay. I’ve alerted Port of Spain and they will have medical facilities standing by should we need any. We’re still about forty-five minutes behind schedule. I know it’s difficult, but please try and remain calm. We are doing the very best we can.”
“ It was a bomb,” Chandee said. She looked over at the man with the strong voice and the puppy dog whine. He hadn’t offered her any help until the prime minister demanded it and she saw why. Sweat ringed his forehead, his eyes were glazed like a rabbit caught in the headlights, his face was ashen, his hands were shaking and it looked like he’d peed his pants.
“ Shut up, George,” Prime Minister Ramsingh said.
Maria looked down at them. “Thanks again,” she said. “You probably saved my life.” The prime minister was beaming. The attorney general was not. She watched as he slipped out of his light suit coat and laid it in his lap.
“ You should go back to your seat,” the prime minister said. He seemed confident now, gone were the knitted eyebrows and the clenched teeth. His neck was no longer bulging and he seemed to be smiling, almost in a state of grace, she thought.
The attorney general, on the other hand, had bitten into his lower lip and drawn blood. A slight trickle oozed down his chin. That, coupled with his glazed eyes, gave him a crazed vampire kind of look. “Yes,” he said. “The prime minister is right, you should go back to your seat.” The words, whispered above the engine noise, weren’t mean in themselves, but the way he said it, they were threatening. She had seen his fear and he was the kind of man who would never forget it. She wanted to be away from him.
She turned to go back to her seat when she heard the baby cry again. A loud, long wail that seared her soul. There was only one lap child on board. A darling baby girl. She remembered seating them in the forward bulkhead position, right in front of the movie screen in second class. Just on the other side of the curtain. She prayed the child was okay, she had to know.
She turned around, away from her seat next to the DEA man, pushed aside the curtain and stepped into second class and chaos. The overhead luggage lockers had been stuffed to capacity with overweight carry-on bags and many of them had come open during the rapid descent, spilling their contents on the passengers below and out into the aisles.
The baby stopped crying. Her young parents were sharing an oxygen mask, taking turns breathing through it, like a pair of scuba buddies, allowing the baby to wear mom’s mask. She felt like reminding the baby’s father that they were low enough so that he could breathe without it, but she noticed his shaking hands. Sharing the mask with his wife gave him something to do. Made him feel like he was taking care of her.
“ Are we going to make it?” he asked, as his wife was drawing in oxygen.
“ Certainly, but like the captain said we’ll get into Port of Spain a little late.” Maria kept her smile, trying to project an image of calm security to the young couple, just the opposite of how she felt.
The plane lurched to the right and another overhead locker opened. She saw the black bag start to fall and she remembered how heavy it was. Full of bricks, she thought when she’d shoved it up there. She remembered mentally cursing the ground personnel for allowing the passengers to bring aboard carry-on baggage that was obviously too large and too heavy.
She lunged toward the open compartment as the plane careened through more turbulence. Someone screamed. The boy sitting below the falling bag was piercing Maria with innocent blue-eyed trust. The bag was halfway out of the locker. She wanted to scream, tell the boy to move, but she needed all her energy. She slammed her right foot into the deck and dove, hands outstretched. The boy started to look up. The bag was out of the locker. Her stretching fingers tipped it toward the aisle. She tried to loosen her body as she fell, she didn’t want to break anything. She hit the deck and wound up wedged between the bag and a seat stuffed with a large black man. Her right ankle was screaming.
“ Let me help you,” the man said in a rich baritone, and in the fluid movement of a professional athlete he was out of his seat, one hand lifting the bag and the other pulling her off the deck.
Standing, she caught her breath and looked up into his eyes. He looked as if he had played basketball when he was younger.
“ I think I might have sprained my ankle,” she said. She remembered earlier thinking that it was a shame that such a big man had to be folded into one of the cramped second class seats. “There’s an empty seat up in first, if you help me back, you can have it.”
“ No problem.” He looped an arm behind her legs and hefted her off the deck.
“ I didn’t mean you had to carry me.”
“ It’s the best way.” He turned sideways and sidestepped up the aisle toward first class. She pushed the curtain aside as he carried her through.
“ Are you all right?” the prime minister said as they passed his seat.
“ Sprained my ankle.”
“ Ouch,” he said, and she smiled down at him.
“ What happened?” Broxton said, when he looked up and saw her in the arms of the tall man.
“ Sprained my ankle,” she said again, and Broxton scooted over to the window seat as the big man gently put her down in the seat he’d vacated.
“ You can take the seat over there.” She pointed to an empty seat in the second row. He nodded, went forward and took the seat.
She buckled up, then wiggled her ankle.
“ How is it?” Broxton asked.
“ Not sprained, just twisted. It’ll be okay,” she said.
“ That’s good,” he said. He was holding onto both a tight smile and the ring.
“ Squeeze it any tighter and you’ll break it,” she said. Damn, she thought, that came out wrong. She was always putting her foot in her mouth.
He lowered his eyes to the ring, relaxed the tight expression and slipped it back into his pocket. She wondered if it had a case. “You’re right,” he said, looking up and grinning.
“ I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. My mouth is always getting me in trouble.”
“ That what happened to your eye?” he asked.
That got her attention and she bored into his eyes looking for a trace of sarcasm, but found none. She decided to be honest. “Yes,” she said.
“ The cop husband do that?”
“ Yes,” she said. It had been over a week ago and she really thought the makeup covered it.
“ He do it often?”
“ Not so often.” She raised a finger to touch the bruise. She winced and she saw that he noticed.
“ Once is too often,” he said.
“ I’m handling it,” she said.
“ You should leave,” he said. “They never change.”
She broke away from his stare and looked beyond him, out the window. They were flying smoothly now, but the ocean seemed unnaturally close. She saw a sailboat below and wondered what they thought of the big jet flying overhead, so low and so slow.
“ He’ll change,” she said, still looking out the window, but she felt his eyes even as she tried to avoid them.
“ How long have you been waiting?” he asked.
“ Twelve years,” she answered without hesitation. Everyone on the aircraft was worrying about whether or not they were going to live or die this day, including the man sitting next to her, but he was also concerned about her.
“ You could leave,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.
“ And go where?” she said.
“ You’re working. You have a glamorous job. You must have some self esteem left.”
“ I have a lot.” She turned toward him, angry now.
“ Then you could leave,” he repeated.
She bit off her answer by biting into her lower lip. He was right, she had a chance, if only she could be brave enough to take it.
“ What is it?” he asked.
“ I speak Spanish,” she said. “My mother is Mexican.”
“ And?”
“ I have this friend, she works for Iberia, you know, the Spanish Airline. She said I could get on there.”
“ But?”
“ It’d mean moving to Madrid and starting over. No seniority. Less pay.”
“ Do it,” he said.
“ I’m thirty-six, three more years and I’ll have my twenty in. It would be insane. It wouldn’t just mean less money, it’d be a lot less.”
“ How much do you get to keep now?”
That stopped her. How did he know that Earl took all her money, leaving her only a small allowance for food and clothes? It was one of his ways of keeping his fist wrapped around her.
“ Take the Iberia job.”
She looked back into his steady eyes. He didn’t understand. “He’d never let me,” she said. “He’ll come after me.”
“ Maybe, but I doubt it. They get off on the control. If you don’t go back, he’ll most likely look for someone else to dominate.”
“ You make it sound so easy.”
“ It usually is.” His hands were folded in his lap. She noticed that his finger tips were white. He was worried, too, but he did a good job of covering it up.
“ Do you have a picture of your girl?” She wanted to take his mind off his fear and take the conversation away from her problems with Earl.
“ I do,” he said, and she couldn’t help but notice how his blue eyes glowed as he reached toward his back pocket for a wallet. It was a short struggle because the tight fitting Levi’s didn’t want to yield the wallet. He had to shift in the seat in order to get his fingers in the hip pocket and she saw a quick grimace as he pulled it out. From the faded condition of the jeans she’d guessed that he’d had them a long time, and from the way they fit she guessed that he’d been a few pounds lighter when he bought them.
“ My husband never carries anything in his back pocket.” She didn’t know why she said it. She was thinking about the bulge the wallet must have made when he was standing and for some reason she’d pictured Earl standing fully dressed in front of the full length mirror in their bedroom, admiring himself, running his hand over his muscular body, touching his chest, his stomach, his ass.
“ Why not?” Broxton asked.
“ He’s proud of the way he looks. He doesn’t like to break up the lines.”
“ Weightlifter?”
“ How’d you guess?”
“ Weightlifters like to show off.”
“ He doesn’t lift for bulk, he lifts for strength,” she said. For some reason she felt like she had to defend him. “He does all kinds of sports.”
“ Really?”
“ Sure, he hunts.”
“ That figures,” Broxton said.
“ He goes river rafting every chance he gets.”
“ Really? I wouldn’t have guessed it.”
“ He’s on a softball team, they came in second place last year. He bicycles, runs and he swims everyday,” She was rambling and she knew it.
“ All right, he’s into more than body building and killing innocent animals. I still don’t like him.”
“ You don’t know him.” Why was she still defending him.
“ He beats his wife, I don’t need to know anymore.”
“ How about that picture,” she said. Now she really wanted the conversation turned away from her and Earl.
“ Here.” He handed her the open wallet. “It’s my favorite picture of her.”
Maria looked at the picture. It was a black and white photo. The girl staring at her from inside the plastic credit card holder was stunning. She had a model perfect face, not a blemish, a perfect roman nose, perfect wide set eyes, gray in the photo, but she guessed they were blue, perfect blond hair flowing past her shoulders, perfect high cheekbones, perfect chin, perfect woman, perfect girl. “What color are her eyes?” Maria asked.
“ Blue,” Broxton said.
“ Perfect,” Maria said.
“ She sure is,” he said.
“ She looks happy here.”
“ It was taken the day the happiness came back. She went right down to the studio at the mall, no makeup, no fancy hairdo. She wanted her happiness recorded forever, just her happiness, nothing else.”
“ Where’d it go, the happiness?” Maria asked.
“ A drunk driver took it away. She was fifteen and riding in the back seat. That’s why she survived.”
“ Who was in front?”
“ Our mothers. Hers and mine. Their lives were snuffed out in an instant.”
“ I’m sorry,” Maria said.
“ It killed something inside of her, her father too. For over a year they went through the motions of living. Then finally Warren, her father, started to come out of it, but Dani was lost to all of us. I suppose I could have helped, she was my best friend, but I was suffering, too. When we started living again, Dani was a recluse. She failed her sophomore year in high school and had to be sent back a grade and we just sort of lost touch.
“ Warren tried everything-counseling, doctors, shrinks-nothing seemed to help. So he threw himself into his business, built it up, sold it and bought property in the booming Southern California market. He made a fortune, but he still lived next door, in a fifty-year-old home on the edge of the barrio.
“ Then it happened. It was Dani’s eighteenth birthday and she was as glum as ever. I hadn’t seen her in a while, but I knew what day it was, so I went to the pet store and bought a collie puppy. I took it next door after dinner. That pup took one look at her, jumped in her lap, shook his little body like he’d just come in from the ocean and promptly pissed.
“ Warren and I watched in dumb amazement. Then Dani smiled, then she laughed and then the light came back into her eyes. It took three years and a collie puppy.
“ After that she threw herself into school. She majored in French, minored in business and studied Spanish and Japanese in her spare time. She managed her father’s successful Senate campaign before going into business and making a fortune in her own right.”
“ Senate campaign, as in the United States Senate?” Maria asked. She wanted to ask more about Dani, because something about her picture was familiar. She knew her from somewhere, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
“ Yeah, the U.S. Senate. He went in 1980, a Democrat that squeaked through the Reagan landslide. One of the promises he made during his campaign was that he wouldn’t be a career politician. One term only, he promised. He turned control of his real estate empire over to Dani and spent six years on the business of the United States. Nobody could buy him, lobbyists were afraid of him, everybody respected him, because he didn’t take a dime. He had no campaign committee to feed, no exploratory committee for higher office to staff, no image to improve. When his six years were up he quit as one of the richest men in America.”
“ How’d he do that?”
“ While he was in office Dani sold all of his real estate and invested in some computer and software companies. Apple, IBM and Microsoft. She made him wealthy, but in his mind he’s still a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks. He’ll never be anything but an aw shucks kind of guy. He couldn’t get used to all the money, so when the Democrats finally regained the White House and the President called, Warren went back into government. Three years later he had a heart attack. The doctors said rest, at least a year. But Warren couldn’t just lay about and do nothing. The president suggested an ambassadorship, somewhere where he could take it easy but still make a difference. Trinidad was the place. Warren gets a year’s rest with an easy job, then he’ll probably go back and help the president again.”
“ Wow, and that’s your girl’s father?”
“ That’s him.”
They were quiet for awhile, and she took the time to study the other passengers, some staring blankly forward, some lost in their own thoughts, some conversing softly, trying to forget that the plane was flying low and slow. She thought of Rick Nelson and wondered what it was like for him just before his plane plowed into that dark Midwestern ground. She imagined his pure sweet voice singing Hello, Mary Lou. She started singing, just above her breath. “Believe me girl, I just had no choice, wild horses couldn’t make me stay away, it’s all I had to see for me to say…”
“ Hey, hey, hey. Hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart,” he softly sang in answer.
“ I’m embarrassed,” she said.
“ I was thinking of Buddy Holly and Peggy Sue,” he said.
The plane lurched downward and she grabbed his hand without thinking. He felt good and kind and strong and she felt that nothing could go wrong just so long as she held on to him.
“ It’s all right,” the captain’s voice said. “We’re coming into Port of Spain. We should be on the ground in about fifteen minutes.”
Maria heard the landing gear coming down. It locked into place with a slam that sounded like another explosion and the plane jerked to the right again. The wing tipped, straining for the ground below. Someone screamed and Maria knew it wasn’t all right. Then the giant aircraft righted itself and she prayed they had it under control.
And for a few seconds they did. They were flying straight up, landing gear down. She let out a long sigh, and started to say that it looked like they were going to make it, when normal sound was erased by the tearing sound of metal. The sound rocketed through the plane, stealing the hopes and draining the dreams of all on board. Now the left wing tipped toward the ground and the nose arched upward for a second, then rocked to the left, following the wing. They were in an earthward bank, making a downward left turn.
She grabbed onto the hand that was still there and looked past the man sitting next to her and out the window, and all she saw was blue. But it wasn’t the blue of the cloud filled tropical sky, it was the blue of the ocean below.
The plane banked steeper into the turn. Maria was afraid that they were going to go into a spin, but they gradually eased out of the bank. She sighed again when the view turned from ocean back into sky and they were flying level once more.
“ Oh no,” she whimpered.
“ What?” Broxton said, and he turned to look too. “Shit,” he added.
She didn’t say anything, there was nothing to say. They were flying over Chaguaramas Bay, barely skimming over the tall masts of the sailing yachts anchored there. She saw the upturned faces on the boats below, saw the rolling waves as the plane blew out of the bay toward Casper Grande Island, level now, but still turning. She saw the Fantasy Island Resort on Casper Grande and she shivered, because she wasn’t looking down. A woman behind her screamed as the plane whisked by the tall trees. Then they were headed back out to sea, away from Trinidad, the ocean only feet below.
For fifteen minutes that seemed like forever, they flew low over the ocean as the plane made a wide turn, back toward Port of Spain. Maria held tightly to Broxton’s hand and stole a quick look around.
The elderly couple in the center seats across from them were locked in an embrace. The woman in the aisle seat behind was frantically writing in a pocket diary. Probably a goodbye to someone she loves, Maria thought, and for a second she thought about writing her mother a quick note. Just to say she loved her. She hadn’t said it in so long.
But she dropped the thought as the blue ocean disappeared and the green tropical jungle of the Caroni Swamp filled the window. They were skimming the trees and Maria knew they weren’t going to make it. She wondered what lived in the vast swamp below.
“ Bend down and grab your socks!” the captain’s voice screamed over the speaker system. “It might be a rough landing.”
“ He’s going for it,” Broxton said.
“ Good for him,” Maria said, but her thoughts were filled with gators and crocks and she wondered if sharks wouldn’t have been quicker.
Then she felt the plane crash into the ground with a shotgun sound. They seemed to be sliding out of control. She wanted to cry out, to scream at the cruel death only instants away. Then she realized they were rolling to a stop. They hadn’t crashed. They were on the runway. They were safe.
Someone started clapping, then someone else on the other side of the cabin clapped an echo back and she felt a blissful peace and uncanny joy take hold of her as she freed her hand from Broxton’s and joined the applause that filled the aircraft.
“ Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain’s voice broke out over the speakers. “Welcome to Port of Spain and thank you for your appreciation.”
The applause picked up and someone cheered. Then they were all cheering. The door to the cockpit opened and Captain Roger Herra stepped out followed by his copilot and the cheering increased to a deafening crescendo. Then as suddenly as it started, it stopped.
There was no panic. No one screaming, no one pushing, no one fighting to get off. They’d cheated death and they all knew it.
She watched as Broxton flicked open his seatbelt and stood. He stepped over her and bent over and gathered up the contents of the fallen briefcase and filled it. Other passengers were picking up around themselves, standing and stretching, the dangling masks, the only sign that this flight had been any different from any other.
Broxton gave the child a smile and Maria saw the gratitude in the little girl’s eyes. He handed the briefcase to her father and received a smile back for his kindness. Then he pulled his carry-on bag from the overhead locker.
“ I’m staying at the Hilton,” Maria said. “Maybe we could have dinner or something.”
“ I’d like that,” Broxton said. Then he asked her if she needed any help getting off the aircraft. She wiggled her foot. It didn’t really hurt very much anymore, but she nodded anyway. A small kind of fib, but she was still shaken up and she wanted to stay with him just a little longer.
Ten minutes later they were inside the terminal. Broxton had an arm around her waist, even though she didn’t need any help walking. She was dragging her bag on its trolley. He had his bag slung over his right shoulder. Then he froze. She saw him bite into his lower lip, saw the smile slide off his face, felt the spike that must be knifing through his heart.
She turned to see what he was seeing.
He was staring at a rack of newspapers, studying the front page of the Trinidad Guardian, caught by a color picture of a smiling blue-eyed blonde with her arms wrapped around the man from the plane, the prime minister’s body guard, Kevin Underfield. For a second she thought the blonde woman resembled the Barbie doll he’d handed back to the little girl. She was smiling up at the man and he was smiling at the camera, like he was the cat that just swallowed the canary. Then she read the headlines.
ARE THERE WEDDING BELLS IN DANI’S FUTURE?
“ Your girl?” she asked.
“ My girl,” he said.