The Last Flight(27)

I bypass the request for a PIN and select credit, my heart beating out a frantic rhythm I’m certain this kid can hear through whatever music pounds in his ears.

But then the register does something I can’t see, drawing the kid’s attention back. “Credit? I gotta see your ID,” he says.

I freeze as if I’ve been caught in a bright headlight, every vulnerable inch of me exposed. Thirty seconds. One minute. An eternity.

“You okay, lady?” he asks.

Then I snap back. “Sure,” I say, and pretend to search through my wallet, finally saying, “I must have left it at home. Sorry.” I tuck the card back into my wallet and quickly pull out cash to cover the cost. When he hands me my receipt, I scramble out of the store as fast as I can, my entire body vibrating with tension and fear.

*

The brisk walk back to Eva’s steadies me, and when I get there, I take everything upstairs to the bathroom and strip off my clothes, propping the directions to the hair clippers against the mirror, noticing for the first time the expensive hand lotions that line the counter. I open the cap on one and sniff—roses, with a hint of lavender. Then I peek in the medicine cabinet, expecting to see numerous prescriptions leftover from her husband’s illness. Painkillers. Sleeping pills. But it’s empty. Just a box of tampons and an old razor. I close it with a soft click, uneasiness poking at me, like a minuscule burr in my sock, a flash of warning and then gone, impossible to locate.

I take a last look at myself in the mirror, the way my hair tumbles and curls around my face, and take a deep breath before attaching the medium-sized comb to the clippers and turning them on. I remind myself that even if I mess up, it won’t matter. Eva’s words about Berkeley come back to me. It’s easy to blend in because everybody’s a little weirder than you are. No one will look twice at a bad haircut.

I’m surprised by how easy it comes off, leaving an inch and a half of hair resting against my scalp. My eyes look bigger. My cheekbones more pronounced. My neck longer. I turn one way, and then another, admiring my profile, before turning to the box of hair color. Not done yet.

*

The dye has to stay on for forty-five minutes, so while I wait, I spread the newspapers open on the coffee table and read, my scalp tingling and burning, the sharp smell of chemicals making me dizzy. The articles are filled with details of the crash, though they’re incomplete, gleaned only from radio communication with the air traffic controllers. But it’s enough to chill me, to force me to reckon with what I’ve done. Approximately two hours into the flight, after they’d crossed Florida and were over the Atlantic, one of the plane’s engines went out. The pilots tried to turn around and radioed Miami, requesting an emergency landing. But the plane didn’t make it, instead crashing into the water thirty-five miles off the coast. The article is filled with statements from NTSB officials, and of course, Rory’s representative on behalf of the families. No details are given yet about recovery, other than to say it’s ongoing.

I try to imagine my bag, my phone, my pink sweater, torn from Eva’s body and floating in the water, waiting for someone to scoop them out and identify them. Or nestling onto the sandy bottom of the ocean, where they’ll soon be lost forever. I wonder whether they will try to recover remains, or if that’s even possible. And what might happen if they come across someone whose dental records don’t match anyone on the flight manifest.

I take several deep breaths, focusing on the biology of it. Oxygen entering my bloodstream, feeding my cells, then releasing carbon dioxide into the quiet space that surrounds me. In and out, again and again, each breath a reminder: I made it out. I survived.

*

Forty-five minutes later I stare at myself in the mirror of Eva’s bathroom, astonished. Taken on their own—my eyes, my nose, my smile—I can still see my old self, looking back at me. But as a whole? I’m someone completely new. If I seem familiar to anyone, they’re going to search different corners of their mind, different parts of their life—someone from work or college. Perhaps the daughter of a former neighbor. They won’t see Rory Cook’s wife, who died in a plane crash.

The look suits me, and I love the freedom it offers. Rory always insisted I keep my hair long, so that I could wear it up for formal events and down for casual ones, arguing it was more feminine. I grin, and am surprised to see flashes of my mother, of Violet, smiling back at me.

*

On the nightstand next to Eva’s bed, the clock flips to seven o’clock, and I can’t help but think about what I’d be doing right now if I were still living my old life in New York. I’d be sitting across from Danielle in my office, outlining our schedule for the day. Morning Meeting, she called it. We’d discuss the calendar—meetings, lunches, evening events—and I’d give her the tasks I needed her to work on for the day. But if my plan had worked, I’d be somewhere in Canada. Maybe on a train, heading west. I’d be scouring the news for any hint of my disappearance, the plane crash just a sad story that might have caught my attention for a moment. Instead, it’s the turning point for my entire life.

I return to my computer and pull up the CNN home page, clicking on a short human-interest piece titled “Rory Cook’s Second Heartbreak,” with my photo alongside Maggie Moretti’s. They rehash her death over twenty-five years ago and the subsequent investigation into Rory’s involvement, and for the first time I realize how similar Maggie and I are. Some of the information I’d already known about her—she’d been a track star at Yale, where she’d met Rory, and she, too, had come from a small town. But I hadn’t known that her parents had also died, when she was even younger than I was. Looking at us side by side, it makes me wonder if Rory had a type, zeroing in on women alone in the world who might be eager to join an established family like the Cooks. I know I was at first.