Hope
It was raining on the day I ran away from home.
Well, storming, more like. Or let’s tell it like it is. The gods had decided to dump every bit of their accumulated wrath on the southern Pacific, and I was smack in the middle of it. My doom was coming complete with driving rain, lightning, and turbulence that rocked the Air New Zealand Boeing 777 as if it were a crop duster.
Hemi had told me that the silver fern painted hopefully onto the tail of my deathtrap stood for new beginnings and rebirth. As I clutched the armrest and was grabbed painfully by my seatbelt and slammed back down again into the narrow Economy seat, it felt more like the end of everything. At least the end of the breakfast I’d forced down an hour earlier, when my life hadn’t seemed about to end. When it had just seemed miserable.
I’d left my fiancé. I’d left my sister. I’d left both my homes: the we’ll-call-it-a-one-bedroom-and-get-more-for-it Brooklyn apartment that had housed me for twenty-five years and my sister Karen for all her own sixteen, and the however-many-bedroom-I-can’t-count-that-high penthouse on Central Park West where Karen and Hemi still lived. To come here. And, apparently, die. Along with my baby.
Did I mention I was pregnant? Well, I was. I’d run, and I’d taken Hemi’s baby to New Zealand along with me, and he’d be furious, and so upset, and . . . I couldn’t think about that now. I had enough to deal with at the moment. I couldn’t imagine our baby was enjoying the ride, either.
Did eight-week fetuses get airsick? Probably not. But its mother sure was.
You see how I was trying to maintain. To be rational. To be normal. Not to be a hysterical, nauseated, overemotional, terrified wreck. And that—that moment right then, when I was climbing on top of it all, rising above, when we were either going to land or going to die, and nothing I could do would influence the outcome—that was when Sean, the formerly sweet, contented, chubby-cheeked toddler beside me, threw up into my lap.
One second, he was crying. The next, he made a strange choking sound, and then every bit of his breakfast was on my jeans.
“Oh, no,” his mother, Moira, called out over his wails. She was clutching the baby for dear life, hanging on with both arms and the grip of a superhero. Or a mother. And if I was scared, how much more must she be? She’d been a cheerful, organized, ponytailed brunette twelve long hours ago, back in Los Angeles. Twelve hours after I’d taken off from New York. Back when I’d been a human.
“I’m so sorry,” she said now. “I’ll just . . .” She took a hasty hand off the baby even as I tried to tell her not to. I grabbed for him myself, and she reached for a cocktail napkin from her seatback pocket, thrust it at me, then resumed her death grip on Sean while I laid the flimsy square of paper on top of the mess on my leg and swallowed back hysteria along with my nausea.
“It’s fine. We’re fine,” I shouted over the nervous laughter, the occasional shriek, the dull roar of jet engines, and the incessant rattle of baggage trying to escape the overhead bins.
If they didn’t spill out onto our heads, we were doing great. Way to test the latches, guys.
Sean kept crying, not that I could blame him. I’d held him during the flight so Moira could go to the bathroom, could take a nap. When she’d thanked me, I’d told her I was pregnant myself, and I hoped somebody would help me someday. It had been my first pregnancy announcement, and it had felt momentous at the time. I’d laughed a little making it, and I’d wanted to cry, too. Moira had looked at the three carats on my left hand and clearly wondered, Why is somebody with that rock on her finger sitting in the middle section at the bumpy back of the plane? And because she was a Kiwi, she hadn’t asked, for which I’d been profoundly grateful. I’d done enough crying for a lifetime already. Although it was good I’d gotten it all in, if my lifetime was going to be over right now.
Just when I was thinking it, the airplane lurched hard to the right, then back left again, and I clapped a hand on my mouth and thought, Oh, God. Oh, God.
We couldn’t actually crash, despite the pounding of my heart and the useless adrenaline flooding my body and making me shake. The pilots surely wanted to go home as much as we did, and they must know what they were doing. You didn’t get those wings from a cereal box.
And I couldn’t lose my baby. Hemi’s baby. That wasn’t happening. I just didn’t want to throw up myself, because I’d already found out that they didn’t put airsick bags in seatback pockets anymore. You had to go all the way to the toilet for that. Ask me how I knew.
The plane lurched again, then dropped hard, leaving my stomach well behind, and I stopped thinking about death. It was all about the nausea now. All. About. The. Nausea. Sean had gone into full-blown Scream Mode, a woman was moaning steadily across the aisle, and I clutched the seatback in front of me, laid my forehead against it, and tried not to think about the scrambled eggs, potatoes, yogurt, and, worst of all, sausage I’d wolfed down with the ravenous hunger known only to those in the first trimester.
Please, no. Not on the jeans. Not the sausage.
When the plane hit, it was still tilted to the left. Then it slammed down on the right. Hard. And we bounced. One wheel, then two. We were bouncing some more, and then we were coming down.
Somebody was screaming. I thought, Karen. Hemi. My baby. Which was when the lurching stopped, and we were rolling. We were down, we were safe, and the entire plane erupted in cheers and applause, in the exultant relief of three hundred passengers who’d been miraculously delivered, like the Maori adventurers of old, safely onto New Zealand soil.
I put my head back, closed my eyes, swallowed hard, and tried not to cry.
I hadn’t died, and I only had one person’s vomit on my clothes. Bonus.
Hope
Koro wasn’t there.
Hemi’s grandfather, that is. Wiremu Te Mana, the eighty-three-year-old patriarch of the family, who’d promised me the day before—if that had been the day before, because I’d lost track—that he’d be there to meet me at the Auckland Airport without fail. He hadn’t arrived, and I was getting worried.
I stood on an impossibly hard floor and felt as slammed by the voices bouncing off the unforgiving surfaces as if they were actually punching into my weary body. The sound seemed to arrive and recede in waves, and I clutched the handle of my black suitcase just for something to hang onto, looked around, and tried to avoid the word “desperately.”
The arrivals hall wasn’t a big place. It’s not like he could have missed me. Auckland may have boasted the biggest airport in New Zealand, but it wasn’t exactly La Guardia. But then, you’d have to add the sheep to the people just to get New Zealand’s entire population up to New York City levels, so that wasn’t too surprising.
I was trying to think about that, because thinking about anything else was terrifying, and thinking at all was almost beyond me. My brain was doing a slow whirl, and my head felt like a balloon hovering somewhere above my body. I’d fumbled my passport into the scanner, answered the questions from the Customs officer as best I could—Why was I here? Because I hadn’t had anyplace else to go?—claimed my bag from the carousel, ducked hastily into the restroom, and changed my jeans with trembling hands, barely restraining myself from stuffing them into the garbage. The only thing that had stopped me was the knowledge that I was broke again. Or broke still. Broke people didn’t throw away perfectly good jeans just because they had toddler vomit on them and the smell was making their sensitive pregnant selves sick.