The Last Flight(13)
Eva signaled the bartender and said, “Vodka tonic.” Then, more to herself than to Claire, she said, “I knew this would catch up to me. I just had no idea how quickly.” She took a sip of the drink the bartender deposited in front of her, while next to her, Claire shifted on her stool, away from Eva, the rigid set of her shoulders enough to silence most people. But Eva pinched her eyes closed and worked her hysteria a notch higher, letting her breath grow ragged and uneven. She tried to grab another napkin from a stack just beyond her reach, bumping her shoulder into Claire again, forcing Claire to hand her one.
“Thanks,” Eva said. “I’m sorry I’m such a mess, bursting into your quiet corner. It’s just…” She trailed off, as if gathering courage to say the words. “My husband recently passed away. Cancer.”
Claire hesitated, still not looking at Eva, before finally saying, “I’m sorry.”
“We were together eighteen years. Since high school.” Eva blew her nose and stared into her drink. “His name was David.” She took another sip, letting a piece of ice slip into her mouth and pressing it against the inside of her cheek, willing her heart rate to slow, for the story she was spinning to slow. Too fast and it would sound hollow and false. Lies needed to be doled out carefully. Planted and tended before the next one could be given. “He was wasting away to almost nothing, in excruciating pain. I couldn’t watch it anymore.” She let the image of a dying man shimmer in Claire’s imagination before continuing. “And so, I told the nurse to go home, that I’d take the night shift. I wasn’t very smart about it, but it’s impossible to think clearly when the man you spent your whole life loving is suffering.” Eva looked blankly across the terminal. “Now it seems they have questions. There might be consequences.”
What Eva needed was a compelling reason why she, too, might want to disappear and never go home. Something other than the truth.
She felt the shift in Claire’s body language, a slight turning toward her, no more than an inch, but it was enough. “Who is ‘they’?” Claire asked.
Eva shrugged. “The coroner. The police.” She gestured toward her phone. “That was my husband’s oncologist. He told me they’re asking everyone to go downtown in a week to answer questions.” She looked out the windows toward the tarmac. “Nothing good ever happens downtown.”
“Are you from New York?”
Eva looked back at her and shook her head. “California.” Pause. Breathe. “He’s only been gone twenty-one days, and every day I wake up and relive it. I thought a trip to New York would help. A change of scenery, the opposite of home.”
“Did it?”
“Yes. No.” She looked at Claire with a wry smile. “Can both be true?”
“I suppose.”
“I’ve already lost everything that mattered to me. My husband is gone. I quit my job to take care of him. It was just the two of us—neither of us had any family.” Eva took a deep breath and said the truest thing she’d said so far. “I’m alone in the world, and I don’t want to go back. My flight leaves in an hour, and I don’t want to be on it.”
Eva dug around in her purse and pulled out her boarding pass to Oakland, laying it on the bar in front of them. A prop. A temptation. A silent suggestion. “Maybe I’ll go somewhere else. I have savings. I’ll buy a new ticket to some place I’ve never been and start over.” Eva sat up straighter on her stool, as if the decision she’d just made had released something heavy inside of her. “Where do you think I should go?”
Claire’s voice was quiet next to her. “It won’t take them long to find you. You’d be traceable no matter where you went.”
Eva took a few moments to think about that before saying, “Do you think it’s possible for someone to disappear? Vanish without a trace?”
Claire didn’t answer. The two of them sat in silence, watching people make their way toward their gates or toward baggage claim. Hurried travelers, giving each other wide berth as they avoided eye contact with everyone around them, too absorbed in where they were headed to notice two women sitting side by side at the bar.
In the distance, a child’s wail grew louder as a frustrated mother passed them, pulling her sobbing daughter behind her, saying, “I’m not letting you watch Parent Trap for the hundredth time when you haven’t done your reading for Mrs. Hutchins.”
Eva watched Claire’s eyes track them up the concourse until they were gone. Then she said, “Nice to know a new generation is still appreciating the work of Lindsay Lohan.” She took a sip of her drink. “What was that other one she made? Where the mother and daughter trade bodies and live a day as each other. Do you know it?”
“Freaky Friday. My sister loved that movie,” Claire said, staring down into her drink.
Eva counted to ten inside her head. She’d reached the very edge of where she needed this conversation to go. Then she said, “Who would you trade with? Who would you want to be?”
Claire’s head turned slowly toward Eva and their eyes locked, but Claire didn’t answer.
“Freaky Friday would sure help me right now,” Eva continued, her voice growing distant. “Slipping into someone else’s skin, being able to inhabit a totally different life. I’d still be me, but no one would know it.”