Lately, however, he’d been happy. He’d had a string of months—a year or two, probably—without depression. It had been long enough that the memory of the last time had faded, relegated to some washed-out corner of her mind. Things had been so good for him, she could almost convince herself those episodes had never happened at all.
Almost.
She took her coffee to the front porch, a pleasant space just large enough for two wicker chairs on one end and a hanging daybed on the other. As the sky lightened, she stared up at the pale blue porch ceiling, almost mandatory in this section of Charleston. Haint blue, the Victorians had called it, convinced the watery color would deter unruly spirits from entering the home. Vengeful specters from the afterworld ranked low on her current list of worries, however. She needed to start packing. Gulping the rest of the hot coffee, she stood and walked back into the house to find her suitcase.
Converted from an old carriage house, her little dwelling was comprised of one all-purpose room with a sleeping loft. As you might expect, the kitchen/living area space was compact, the kitchen tucked neatly under the loft, which vaulted up to a tall, arched ceiling. The short walls in the loft were lined with bookshelves, separated by both genre and color, so she could easily identify and reach her science books, her well-worn Bible, her biographies and histories and geopolitical texts, along with a smaller contingent of steampunk science fiction and a clandestine smattering of literary romances. It was like sleeping in the middle of a crowd of friends.
The distance between the couch and the kitchen was four steps. When the space was renovated, the designers had inserted all sorts of clever little storage areas and space-saving hacks, basically providing Georgia with a grown-up version of the childhood hidey-holes she’d inhabited all over the college campus in Kentucky where her father had taught. She came home each night to the safest, coziest, most perfect space in all of Charleston. Flowers and potted plants dotted a small, enclosed garden off the back of the house, next to her workshop; Dobby had a dog door so he could zip in and out while she was at work; one wall in the living room was entirely covered with blown-up photographs of Georgia and Jonah and Dobby, all of them—including, seemingly, the dog—appearing young and carefree. She pulled her suitcase from the closet, taking in her perfect little haven, and not for the first time wondered if maybe she should cancel her trip.
* * *
—
Charleston was a world-class city, thronged with five million visitors a year, but it didn’t boast an extensive international airport. Georgia’s flight to Europe was scheduled to depart early in the afternoon from Charlotte, North Carolina. After a three-and-a-half-hour drive to the airport, the second leg—a flight to Frankfurt, Germany—was scheduled to be in the air for eight hours and forty minutes, followed by a train to the Netherlands. After a last gulp of coffee, Georgia finished dressing, loaded up the car, and hit the road.
Midmorning, she pulled over at a gas station deep in the backwoods of South Carolina. The day was clear and breezy and sunshiny, enhanced by flowering trees and chirping birds and all manner of glorious wildlife. Even the acres of pestilential sorrel weeds surrounding the station looked pretty in the morning light, rippling in red waves across a series of barren cotton fields. As she waited for the gas tank to fill, Georgia grabbed her phone, and its screen lit up with an accusatory stack of blue rectangles: texts from Jonah.
Heaving a sigh of relief, she opened the first one and saw an empty blue bubble. Clicking through all of them in rapid succession, she discovered they were all the same. She’d be baffled, except Jonah had done this before. It was his version of a butt dial: he sat on his phone while it was open in text mode.
At least she knew he was alive.
She immediately texted back, to no avail. Possibly he had fallen asleep on top of his phone. She tapped out a message asking him to call her just as a shiny car pulled alongside hers on the other side of the gas pump. A man got out, dressed in an incongruous business suit, his gaze flitting across the island to check her out. After a lingering glance at her breasts, he strode off into the station, ostentatiously clicking the lock button on his Mercedes. Well, really: did he think she was going to burgle his car? Humph-ing to herself, she plunked the nozzle back in the gas pump, jumped in the car, and drove off.
Ten minutes down the road, she found herself stopped at the world’s longest traffic light, inexplicably set at the juncture of two potholed roads in the middle of nowhere. At one corner, a giant Confederate flag crackled in the wind. Both sides of the road were double-laned, although there wasn’t another car to be seen for miles. She’d no sooner made this observation than the car from the gas station roared up beside her, its eight-cylinder engine shrieking in dismay at the abrupt stop. The driver had a cell phone wedged between his shoulder and ear, his steering hand occupied with a cigarette. He barked something into the phone and leaned in the direction of the driver’s-side door. The window glided down and the stump of his cigarette, still glowing red, flew out of the car, pinging off the side of her car before hitting the road. As an afterthought, the man, still talking, tossed a crumpled white paper bag after it.
This was too much. Without thinking, she banged open the door, flew around the back of the car, scooped up the cigarette butt and the trash, and tossed it back through his open window. “You lost something,” she shouted helpfully. The man, his mouth hanging open, stared at her for a moment. This provided a critical few seconds for her to return to her senses. Belatedly, it occurred to her: the kind of person with no qualms about using the world as his personal ashtray might not have any qualms about shooting an obnoxious eco-do-gooder in a Prius. She’d better haul ass.
He decided not to shoot, thankfully, although he did tailgate her for a couple miles before honking away in a cloud of angry fumes. She grinned sheepishly to herself; she hadn’t even left the state of South Carolina and already she’d broken a promise to Jonah not to piss anyone off while she was gone.
* * *
—
The plane began a slow taxi forward as it turned to align with the runway before thrusting itself aloft, engines roaring. “We’re blasting off!” a child shrieked happily.
They ascended to cruising altitude, the ground beneath them transforming from an urban tangle of roadways and buildings to a soothing patchwork of green circles and rectangles. Around her, everyone settled into their routines: high-maintenance types blowing up their little inflatable neck pillows, businessmen retrieving laptops and headphones, moms doling out Cheerios and electronic games encased in bright plastic covers. Opening her computer, Georgia connected to the plane’s Wi-Fi, thinking she’d watch a movie, but then changed her mind and decided to read. She opted for Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which she’d been longing to read for months despite its imposing length.
She was several hundred pages in and had lost all track of time when a faint electronic crackle issued through the air. A woman’s voice echoed through the cabin.