“No, I’m not. I promise. I was actually laughing at myself. It’s just that my daughter is always telling me that I can find the good in anything, including a cardboard box. This might be exactly the kind of thing she’s talking about.”
“A daughter, huh? I didn’t realize. How old is she?”
"She's ten, going on a hundred,” Jess said, smiling. “She's sort of a smart-ass, which is one of the reasons I adore her."
“I bet.” I smiled along with her, trying to figure out how I had so badly misread this situation. “Doesn’t seem like the worst quality a daughter could have. Does she get it from you or from your husband?”
“I don’t know. A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B, I guess.”
“And what does he do?” I asked. “Your husband, I mean.”
“He doesn’t.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“I’m sorry, why would you? That was a cryptic answer if ever there was one. He was an architect. That’s what he did. He passed away, though.”
“Shit,” I said. “Jess, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been prying. I’m sorry to bring up painful things.”
"Please, don't feel bad,” she said. “I don't. I loved him very much, but he passed away a little more than five years ago. I still miss him sometimes, but I've made my peace with it. Cancer is a really ugly thing, and he's better off now. I know that's the kind of thing people always say, which makes it mean a lot less, but I believe it."
There was silence between us then, and one that I was grateful for. I wasn't sure if I had started this conversation off with the intention of flirting, but if that had been the case, I had failed. Far from keeping things light-hearted and showing just enough interest in her to make her feel okay with jumping into my bed, I had taken things to a place I'd never meant to go.
It left me feeling unsure of where I was supposed to steer the conversation next. When I thought about it later, I was sure I wouldn't have been able to dig myself out of the hole. I couldn't ever be sure because I never had to give it a try. A beeping on one of the monitors caught my attention, and when I squinted at the night sky surrounding us, my face broke into a frown.
“Where the fuck is Stevens, anyway?” I asked.
"I'm sorry, I don't know,” Jess said. “He does this sometimes. He'll just disappear into the bathroom for a while. Why what's wrong?"
"Nothing's really wrong, Jess. Everything is going to be okay, but I would suggest strapping in though, all the same. We're flying directly into a storm, and we're going to be hitting some major turbulence any minute now. We're going to have to divert the flight path some, too, but it's going to be okay."
I got on the radio to make a similar, if less informative, announcement to the cabin at large. I kept an eye on Jess as I did so and couldn't help but be surprised, impressed, even. Although flight attendants were supposed to be able to handle things like this, doing so, in reality, was a hell of a lot different from doing so in a simulation.
I had seen plenty of girls fall apart under circumstances such as these, and I fully expected that kind of reaction out of Jess. Instead, she remained calm and silent, doing as I had told her and nothing more. When she noticed me looking at her, she smiled, just as calmly as she would have done passing somebody in the hallway.
“You good?” she asked in a soft, even voice. One of her hands reached out and lighted upon my own briefly.
“I’m fantastic. You?”
“I’m just fine,” she said. “Let’s get ourselves out of this mess so those people out there can enjoy flying as much as the both of us do.”
Wonders never fucking ceased, I thought to myself, smiling grimly. She was right, though. Whether or not Stevens was ever planning on getting his happy ass out of the plane’s tiny bathroom, that was exactly what we needed to do.
Chapter 5: Jess
I was pretty sure I had done a good job of convincing Drew that I wasn't at all afraid, which was good. It was my job to stay calm in this kind of scenario, and that was exactly what I intended to do.
Still, the calm I was hopefully projecting on the outside didn't quite match the way I was feeling on the inside, whether staying calm was my job or not. I had been in bad weather before, of course. Any attendant who had flown for more than a couple of months had to have come up against some less than ideal weather. This was probably the worst I had yet to encounter, however, and my stomach lurched inside of me as if to make sure this point was well known.
My fingers clamped down on the handles of the seat I was in, and my jaw clenched, so hard that I was lucky I hadn't accidentally bit down on my tongue instead of my teeth. The plane dropped violently. Not very far, but enough so that I could hear several of the passengers on the other side of the door cry out in surprise and fear. All the while, Drew maintained his steadfast, calm demeanor.
If any part of this was fazing him, he wasn't showing it. Every time the violent storm beating against our vessel threatened to destroy us all, he would counter the attack and right us again. It was ast
onishing to me that a person could remain that calm in the face of such a powerful storm.
Any person who had worked on a plane or a ship understood that weather wasn't something to be taken lightly. People liked to believe that they were the strongest thing on earth. That as a species, there was nothing that could dominate us. People like me, people who had been at the mercy of a truly terrifying storm, knew that wasn't true. There were things weather could do to us that we couldn't undo. There were some storms some people never made it out of alive. This was something Drew must have known at least as well as I did, but looking at his face, you would never have known it. He looked as calm as he might have if he'd been watching a television show, and I couldn't help but admire it.
“How you doing over there, slugger?” he asked.