Page 18 of Dearly Departed

“I don’t know what it was. Flew through the air. Didn’t see—I didn’t see where it landed, Catherine. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to be sorry.”

“I am. I should have been watching.”

Catherine shushes me. Shadows fall over her face. I’m almost certain they can’t be real. There’s not enough light for them to be so stark. The angle still doesn’t seem right. It changes every time I blink, but Catherine isn’t moving.

Is she?

She takes a deep breath, lets it out, looks into her bag again. I didn’t know she kept a first-aid kit in her bag. While Catherine takes inventory, I guide her hand off my forehead and hold my bloodied sleeve over the gauze. It would be nice if I wasn’t actively bleeding for whatever comes next, but I suppose we can’t have everything.

“Okay.” Catherine looks into my eyes, her face swinging close. I hold perfectly still to avoid knocking my head into hers. It might be overkill. She seems to have decent control over her head and neck. Good for her. “It’s time to get off the plane.”

“You have directions?”

Catherine furrows her eyebrows. “No. Definitely not. I have no idea where we are or where we’re supposed to go, but I know we can’t stay here. There’s a murderer on board who hates you. And he hates me, which is completely unfair. I didn’t do anything to him.”

“My theory is that he’s been driven mad with grief.”

“Probably, yeah.” Catherine sticks her hand into her bag again and comes up with an elastic. She sweeps her hair into an artfully messy bun—chic, effortless, her. “They can get into that when they make the movie. I’m more concerned with not getting murdered.”

“We might have to come back, you know. This might be our only shelter.”

Catherine lowers her hands from her hair. She’s trembling, and my heart fills up like it’s the thing breathing and not my lungs. I want to protect her from all this. I want to have protected her from all this. But now we’re on a plane that was not landed appropriately and I have a head wound.

Those things won’t stop me from protecting her, but they could make it more difficult.

Interesting. They’ll make it more interesting.

“It seems warm outside,” Catherine says after a few beats. “We’re not somewhere freezing. We should at least, like, get out and see how the plane is. If this is our only shelter, we have to know how bad the damage is.”

She glances toward the cockpit.

We also need to know if Raymond Harris is dead.

There’s always the option of approaching the cockpit from inside the plane, but I have no interest in doing that. I can’t imagine Catherine does, either.

“And,” she continues, “he’d probably hear if we made a phone call from in here, so let’s…not do that.”

“Let’s not,” I agree.

The plane’s usual exit is tilted toward the ground, so Catherine and I go with the emergency exit on our side of the plane. It’s over the wing, and we’re in the back, so I take our bags and put them on a closer seat. We each take one of the steak knives. Catherine goes to check on the kettle with the boiled water, using the other seats to balance. The angle of the plane seems even steeper now.

“Ugh,” she whispers. “I’m heating it up again. You get the window open.”

It’s darker by the transitional kitchen, but Catherine’s outfit glows. She’s a bride on her honeymoon. Flawless.

Catherine glances at me and makes the most encouraging hurry the fuck up gesture I have ever seen from anyone.

I return her gesture with one that she’ll hopefully understand to mean getting this exit open is going to make some noise, so we should be prepared with the boiling water.

My wife blinks at me.

All I can do is smile at her, which is an accomplishment. The gauze came off the cut on my head, and it stings, pain thumping out from the wound and all around my head. The healing scratches on my sides sting, too. A larger headache rolls over the top of my skull and falls out the side of the plane.

Finally, Catherine returns with the kettle and puts it down on the floor. She puts her steak knife, along with one of the butter knives, into her bag, then slings it over her head. The strap settles on her chest. My bag goes on the seat in front of me.

“Do you know how to open this thing?” she asks.