The stewardess came to stand near them in the aisle and demonstrate the safety equipment, including an inflatable life vest. Life vest! For what? Nobody watched except Willa and the whiskery man beside her. Willa made sure to keep a rapt expression on her face so the stewardess wouldn’t feel ignored.
Then a different stewardess wheeled a cart down the aisle and offered people free drinks. Derek ordered a Coke but Willa said, “Nothing, thanks,” because she would feel shy about asking her seatmate to let her out if she needed to use the bathroom. He didn’t take anything, either, just shook his head and went on staring glumly straight in front of him.
She told Derek, “I wish we were on a flight where they gave us a meal.”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “Believe me.”
“I wanted one of those teeny saltshakers like my roommate got on her trip to New York.”
He gave her an indulgent smile and went back to his magazine.
Willa had brought a paperback, but she didn’t think she could concentrate so she let it stay in her purse. She resumed looking out the window. Thin shreds of clouds passed like wisps of cigarette smoke. She tried to convince herself that these were the pillowy puffs she used to imagine bouncing on when she was a little girl, but they didn’t seem related. Judy Collins came into her head, singing “Both Sides Now.” All at once the lyrics seemed more meaningful.
Willa glanced at Derek again. He was still absorbed in his reading. His face in repose was so serene that it seemed childlike, with his lashes casting a shadow on his velvety cheek. So this was the person she was going to end up marrying! After all her years of wondering. She had to keep trying the notion out, the way she would try out her image in the mirror after she got a new hairdo. Each time she returned to it, she felt a thrill all over again. And yet…Nobody had told her that you could want to marry a person but still have conflicting thoughts about him. (She was sometimes a little put off by his single-minded interest in sports, for instance. Also he had a bit of a temper and twice to her knowledge had got into a shoving match with guys at football games.) Well, but of course you could have such thoughts. This wasn’t a Hollywood movie.
Something nudged hard into her right side, and she drew away, but the nudging object followed her. She looked over at the stranger. “Keep your eyes straight ahead,” he muttered. He was staring straight ahead himself, and his lips were barely moving. Whatever was pressing into her side went on pressing, no matter how she shrank from it.
She blinked and focused on the seat back in front of her.
“This is a gun,” he said quietly, “and it’s loaded. Move and I shoot. You’re not allowed out of your seat, and neither is he.”
In a thin, whimpery voice that didn’t sound like her own, Willa asked, “How am I going to explain to him that he can’t get out of his seat?”
Derek said “Huh?” and looked over at her.
The gun jabbed her harder. She said, “I didn’t say anything,” and Derek returned to his magazine.
A few minutes later the stewardess came down the aisle again. This time she was carrying a plastic bag. “Trash? Any trash?” she asked at each row, and she gave the bag a shake. Willa looked up into the stewardess’s face when she reached them and sent her a silent message: Please. Please. “Trash?” the woman said, shaking her bag. Without taking his eyes from his magazine, Derek held his empty cup out, and Willa raised a hand to pass it along but the gun jabbed her again. She gasped aloud, but Derek just extended his cup slightly farther and the stewardess took it from him and continued on down the aisle.
Willa could see that the stranger’s right arm was folded across his stomach, but his gun was concealed by Willa’s armrest. Her mind was racing. She had heard that phrase often, “mind was racing,” without realizing what it would actually feel like—the skittery, frantic speed of her thoughts. Should she scream? Poke him with her elbow? Jump out of her seat? But then he might shoot Derek.
Derek said, without looking up from his magazine, “My ears are popping; are yours?”
“What?”
“You know to swallow, right?”
“What?”
The jab of the gun was vicious this time, painful and insistent, and she said, “Oh!”
Derek glanced over at her. Then he closed his magazine, leaving a finger inside as a marker, and undid his seat belt and stood up. “Trade places with me,” he said.
Willa gazed up at him imploringly.
“Come on. Move.”
She fumbled for her seat belt. She undid the buckle, holding her breath, and then she clutched her purse and sat forward, wincing as she braced for the slam of the bullet. Nothing happened. Derek took her arm to help her to a standing position and guide her past him to the window, after which he settled in the middle seat and opened his magazine again.
At first she was so tense that her spine didn’t touch her seat back. She was wondering when Derek would feel the gun nosing his ribs. All he did, though, was turn a page, and when she dared to slide her eyes past him she saw that the stranger’s hands were resting loosely on his knees now, and there was nothing in them.
She sat back. She was shaking. She turned her face toward the window, but she was conscious only of Derek’s thigh near her own thigh, and his corduroy sleeve rasping her own sleeve each time he turned another page. She felt deeply grateful for his certainty—his matter-of-fact conviction that he could handle any of the many, many dangers in the universe.
* * *
—
She had been anxious about their landing, back in what seemed that long-ago time before she’d really had something to be anxious about, but in fact she noticed only the mildest bump, followed by a long, hard pulling-back sensation. Then a voice came over the loudspeaker welcoming them and thanking them and hoping to see them again. Outside her window, Willa could see pale lavender mountains far in the distance.
The whiskery man was the first to stand up and the first to step into the aisle, and while Willa and Derek were waiting their turn to step into the aisle themselves he was already pushing past the people ahead of him and making his way to the front of the plane. As soon as he was safely out of hearing, Willa touched Derek’s elbow and asked, “Did you know what he was up to?”
“What who was up to?” Derek asked, turning slightly to look at her.
“That man sitting next to us,” she said, and she tipped her head in the man’s direction. He was sidling past a fat woman now. All they could see of him was his scrawny black-and-red back, and then not even that. “He was pointing a gun at me.”
Derek said, “Say what?,” but at the same time he was entering the stream of passengers moving forward.