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Terrified that danger was something for which she was partly to blame. Even though her role in Jeb’s disappearance all those years ago was innocent enough and certainly lacking any bad intentions, she still clung to the guilt and shame, even after all these years.
Terrified of getting in that big silver tube and flying.
Trudy had never flown. Not once. The only place she ever really considered flying seriously was Chicago, but the fact that Sam and Marc were always willing to come back home in the summer and at holidays always made the choice easy to stay off a plane and thus, avoid risking her life in a fiery crash.
But her guilt and her protective instincts as a mother placed her at gate number 19, awaiting her flight on American Airlines to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Her friend Punkin had dropped her off three hours before the flight was scheduled to depart. Punkin had scoffed, “Girl, what are you gonna do with yourself for all that time? I understand wanting to get there early, but you’re taking caution to a whole new level.”
Punkin had tried to dissuade Trudy, telling her they could stop for breakfast across the river in Chester, West Virginia, on the way up to the airport via Route 30.
“I couldn’t eat.”
“Okay. Why the sudden urgency to get to Sam? Everything okay?”
Everything was definitelynotokay. She hadn’t slept for two nights. Even though she thought she was well past the age for acne, she’d broken out in pimples on her forehead and across the bridge of her nose. Somehow, even with having no appetite, she’d added five pounds to her already plump frame. She looked like shit. She felt even worse. But she didn’t feel right in confiding to Punkin. Telling her friend why she was so concerned could lead to the slippery slope of admitting her culpability in Jeb Kleber’s disappearance. She’d managed to keep the fact to herself now for more than three decades. Why upset the apple cart now? She breathed out a shaky sigh, keeping her eyes on the road ahead and simply said, “Hon, I just miss him, is all.”
“Isn’t he coming home for Thanksgiving, as usual?”
“Thanksgiving is months away! I’m just hankering for some Sammy love. I need to see him.”
“So much that you’re willing to clean out your savings and buy a last-minute flight?”
It was obvious Punkin wasn’t buying.
That’s her problem.
“Yes, yes, yes. You don’t know what it’s like. You never had a kid.” Trudy regretted the words as soon as they came out of her mouth. Punkin’s most painful memory was an abortion that went bad when she was only fifteen. The botched procedure had rendered her infertile. She made no secret of it and even joked about how much the misfortune had saved her on birth control, but Trudy knew that deep down, Punkin’s heart was broken. She longed for a child with a dark and abiding passion.
She gasped when Trudy spoke, as though Trudy had struck her. “I guess I don’t.” With shaking hands, she lit a cigarette, quickly filling the car with smoke.
Trudy rolled down her window. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Punkin nodded, refusing to look at her.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, which was both a relief and a punch to the gut, amping up Trudy’s nervousness about flying and what she might encounter when she got to Chicago and her son.
Punkin would get over her unkind remark. Although Trudy sincerely regretted making it.
Trudy had bigger things to worry about.
Where was her son-in-law, Marc?
What did this appearance of the imposter—he just had to be—calling himself Jeb mean?
Were the two, as she strongly suspected, related?
Despite the coldness in the car and the lack of conversation, Punkin hugged Trudy and kissed her when she dropped her off at the American entrance at arrivals. “You be careful, sweet lady. I couldn’t bear if anything happened to you. You’re all I have.”
Trudy was touched at how Punkin got a little breathless and the shimmer in her brown eyes. She touched her friend’s face for a moment and then hopped from the car.
II
Trudy was okay as long as they were on the ground. From her window seat near the rear of the plane, she watched as they loaded the luggage. She eavesdropped on the flight attendants’ conversations as they prepared for flight in the galley space behind her. She watched everyone come on board, certain they all had to be more matter-of-fact about flying than she. No one else’s heart was pounding. No one else’s palms were sweating. It was Trudy and only Trudy who was scared out of her wits, as she told her paranoid self.
But once the plane began moving, gathering speed as it taxied down the runway, she found it hard to even draw breath. As the plane jerked and began its ascent, she clung to the seat rests so hard her fingertips went pure white.
“Easy,” said the older woman next to her. She was a grandmotherly type, reminding Trudy of the Jean Smart grandmother in the television miniseries,Dirty John. She had the same kind face, the same bubble of teased and shellacked gray hair. She even wore what Jean’s character in the movie would have—a beige sweater set and neatly pressed white slacks with low heels in beige.
“First time?” The woman regarded her through her big round frames, concern in her hazel eyes.
