Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(3)

He turns his smile on the agent when she takes his ticket. “Thank you,” she says, and he says, “Thank you.” He follows the crooked line of passengers, all of them shouldering the weight of laptops and leaning to one side, as they trudge down the throat of the jet bridge. A cold, damp wind breathes through the cracks of it. He is sweat soaked and he shudders from the chill.

“Nervous flier?” A man’s voice, behind him. He is short and square, with a goatee and a matching ball cap and Windbreaker bearing the black-and-orange OSU logo.

“Little bit.”

The jet bridge elbows to the left, into the open door of the plane. One of the flight attendants stands in the kitchen carrel beyond the doorway. She smiles at him, her mouth heavily lipsticked. “Welcome aboard,” she says, and then he is past her, into the hush of the first-class cabin, stutter-stepping down the aisle with everyone else. Those already seated turn the pages of their newspapers in rustling snaps. The storage compartments are all open, like unhinged mouths gaping at them, waiting to swallow the diaper bags and suitcases that people hoist upward before edging into their seats.

He will not need his briefcase. There is nothing in it except some pens and a day-old newspaper. So he stores it and slips into his seat, 13A. He barely has enough time to raise the window shade and glance outside before the seat next to him shakes with the weight of the body collapsing into it. “Me again,” says the man with the goatee.

He responds by snapping his buckle into place and yanking on the strap to tighten it. He looks out the window—at the puddled asphalt, at the men heaving the last of the luggage onto the conveyor—hoping the man with the goatee won’t say anything more.

But he does. “Where you headed?”

“Portland.”

“Oh, sure. Same as the rest of us. I just wasn’t sure if that’s the end of the road or not.”

“The end of the road.” It is hard for him to make words, to engage in any sort of conversation, because it feels irrelevant and distracting, yes, but also because his mind feels elsewhere, twenty minutes ahead of the plane, already in the sky. “Yes.”

“The Rose City.” He stretches out the word rose. “From there?”

“No.”

“Me either. I’m from Salem.” He whistles a song that fades a moment later. He fingers through the airline magazine and SkyMall catalogue in the seat-back pocket. “I’m Troy, by the way.”

Passengers continue to wobble down the aisle, while outside jets rise into and fall from the gray ceiling of the sky, vanishing one minute, appearing the next, like seaside birds hunting for food, their tails colored red and purple and blue, their brakes squawking along the runway.

The front door is latched shut. The air pressure tightens. His ears pop. The attendant gets on the intercom and welcomes them and fires off some information about the flight before settling into her singsong speech about seat belts and passenger safety. The man tunes out the cheery buzz of her voice. The air vents hiss. The engine grumbles. The plane retreats from the gate and then rolls forward, following a network of forty-five-degree turns until they have found their place on the tarmac and the pilot’s voice barks from the loudspeakers, “Flight attendants, prepare for takeoff.”

The raindrops on the window stream sideways into thin, shivering trails when the plane leaps forward, gaining speed. They roar along and eventually pull away from the ground, and at that first moment of flight, the man, despite the heaviness that presses him into his seat, feels ebullient, weightless. He looks down at the foggy expanse of the city. Right now, in their cars, along sidewalks, people are lifting their faces to watch his plane, he thinks. Probably they are wondering where the plane is heading, who is on board, what adventures lie in store for them—and it makes him feel dizzyingly powerful to know the answer.

Troy leans toward him until their shoulders touch. “Don’t worry so much. Flying’s a piece of cake. I do it all the time.”

The man realizes that his mouth is open, that he is breathing rapidly. He snaps his teeth together with a clack. He blinks at a shutter speed. “I’m fine.”

“Here’s the thing,” Troy says. “Almost all plane crashes happen—I read this for a fact…or maybe I saw it on the TV—but almost all crashes happen when the plane is taking off and when the plane is landing. Now, we’re taking off, I suppose you could say, until we’ve reached our cruising altitude. When that happens, the lady stewardess will say so, will say you can use your computer. And there will be a bong.” He makes his hand open up like a flower when he says bong. “Then you know you’re good. Statistically, I mean.”

For the next few minutes the man stares at the clouds curling around the plane. And then a soft-toned bell sounds from above.

“There it is!” Troy says. “We’re in the clear.”

The flight attendant gets on the intercom again, telling them that it’s now safe to use approved portable electronic devices. They will, however, be experiencing turbulence for the next half hour or so and she asks that everyone please keep their seat belts fastened and move about the cabin only if they must.

The plane is shaking. Or maybe he is shaking. He feels a lurching sensation, as if he is being thrown out of his body. His heart hammers. His breath comes in and out in quick gasps. Troy is saying something—his mouth is moving—but the man can’t hear him.