Page 9 of Dearly Departed

There’s another not-quite-silence between us. I want to argue that it’s not Jacob’s responsibility to fix all the pain our parents caused in the world, but I’ve tried to tell him that before, and I don’t think I got through to him.

And…

I want him to know that I’m…I’m impressed he would try to make amends, even knowing it’s an impossible task. That makes him a better man than his father by far. I wish it hadn’t led us to this murder-plane, but I’ve met a lot of people who cared a lot less about a lot of things.

“If he comes back here—” Jacob starts.

“He won’t.” I think of all the conversations people must have had about Raymond Harris’s wife. And about the companies in the consortium. People must have talked about my father and how afraid they were of what he might do. People must have hidden their fear and their anger so they’d have a better chance to survive. Now Raymond Harris doesn’t have to hide any of it. The men who controlled the consortium are either dead or in prison. They can’t hurt him anymore. His wife is gone, so if she was the kind of woman who’d be horrified if he took a violent revenge, he doesn’t have to worry about disappointing her. “I don’t think that’s what he wants out of this.”

Jacob puts his hand on my arm and squeezes like he can see the flood of memories sweeping through my brain. My father never wanted things done quickly. He wanted the pain he caused to last as long as possible. He wanted it to be unforgettable.

That was one of the first things I learned as a child. I learned that my father was dangerous, and not because he would lash out in a rage. He calculated everything he did down to the last swing of the cane he kept in his office.

My father was like that at home, and he was like that in his businesses, too. Ruthless and calculating and scary.

“He’s been…” More memories stream through my head. I do the best I can to hustle them out. Thinking about my dead, terrible father won’t help me get out of this alive. “Suffering, you know? Since his wife died. It probably seems like forever to him. He wouldn’t get any satisfaction out of just, like, shooting us quickly. He’ll probably land somewhere and torture us so we die slow, painful deaths.”

Once, when I was little, I fell off a dock in the Hamptons and plunged into cold salt water. My pink-and-yellow life jacket pulled me back to the surface, but I went all the way under first. The most shocking part wasn’t the fact that the water was cold or that it surrounded me in a split second. It was that so much water went into my nose and burned down my throat and hurt. I instinctively reached for the surface, my life jacket already tugging in that direction, and I remember thinking there’s water in my nose, it hurts, it hurts! and not a single thing about how, if I wasn’t wearing the jacket, or if the jacket had come off, I could’ve drowned.

Realizing that Raymond Harris is probably going to torture us for hours or days before he finally kills us is like all that water going up my nose.

We might not be able to stop him with the boiling water and our four knives. If we screw up any one thing, it’s horrible prolonged suffering for us. Even if we somehow manage to do several things right, it still might be prolonged suffering for us.

This flight is all we have.

That’s it.

We’re already at the mercy of Raymond Harris, and we have no hope of escape while we’re in mid-flight.

Anger hits me like cold salt water. Frustration boils through it. Panic splashes in, and the kind of fear I can’t give in to, because being that scared means bursting into tears and screaming until I don’t have a voice.

“Kitten.” Jacob rubs my arm, and I look up into his eyes, the blue like the ocean under the sun, sparkling underneath me for a heartbeat until I was choking on it. “Talk to me.”

“We’re newlyweds.” My voice trembles, but the rest of my body is shaking for a different reason. It’s not fear—it’s urgency. It’s that I can practically hear the clock ticking. There might actually be a clock like that on the plane, come to think of it. A sign of luxury, and a sign of all the time we don’t have left. “I thought we would be in bed by now. I thought we would be having sex with each other. We’re supposed to be giving each other orgasms as husband and wife, not boiling water and trying to figure out how to kill a guy with a butter knife.”

“The knife is pretty straightforward,” Jacob says, and makes a stabbing motion with his free hand. “As for the rest, there’s a bed behind that door, and there’s nothing stopping us from using it right now.”

I look him in the eyes, and they’re blazing, just like I must be. Jacob isn’t kidding. He understands me, and that makes me even hotter than I was a few seconds ago.

He bends at the same time I go up on tiptoe, reaching for him. I put my arms around his neck, and his arms go around my waist, and he kisses me like it’s our wedding night as he walks us into the bedroom at the back of the plane, as far as we can get from Raymond Harris, and shuts the door behind us.

4

JACOB

Knowing the odds are very good that we’re both going to die has two redeeming qualities.

A quiet voice in the back of my mind says dying will hurt Catherine a lot, which is not in any way redeeming.

The same voice changes tack a second later. You won’t be able to hurt Catherine again, which is where the redemption starts to take shape.

Not being able to cause Catherine any more pain is undeniably a good thing.

The second redeeming quality of being aware of my probable imminent death is that everything is amplified. Catherine tastes sweeter. She smells sweeter. The wedding band on my left ring finger has more weight, and the weight carries the memory of Catherine sliding it on, happy tears in her eyes and a gorgeous flush to her cheeks and her veil a translucent ivory lace over her red hair, and joy like I’ve never felt expanding the air in my lungs until I could breathe again.

We pause near the bed, Catherine’s hands working quickly at the buttons of my shirt. I concentrate on stripping her top over her head and promptly lose myself in the curve of her shoulder and her delicate skin under my lips and it isn’t until she puts her fingers under my chin and says Jacob, help that I can focus on the task at hand—getting my wife naked and then devouring her until she begs for me to stop.

I can’t say how we make it to the pillows, only that Catherine does, arching over the comforter and spreading her thighs so I can bury my face between them. She’s sweeter here, too, saltier, wetter, and I shouldn’t be proud of that—I shouldn’t be glad that I make her feel this way, unashamedly desperate for me—but I am proud. This, unlike almost everything else I’ve done in my life, is worth taking pride in.