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My stomach flipped familiarly; Liss always did make me nervous.
“Here’s what I’m thinking for our course,” she began evenly, and I marveled again at her nerves.
Her hands twirled and her face lit as she walked me through a plan to integrate our courses.
“…The students can work in small groups on the impacts of various policies with the final grade based on our evaluation of their presentations.” She concluded, as I recalled again the thoroughness with which she both built and dismantled arguments in grad school. Her thesis was a work of art.
“Relax about the details,” I interjected finally. “This is an experiment. We don’t know exactly how the students will respond. We need to allow for flexibility.”
Liss nodded back at me. Something in the tentative movement told me she was as nervous as I was, but had worn the disguise of nonchalance better than I could. Now it began to fall away and I sensed an opening.
“Do you remember the online portfolio?” I asked.
“Oh my God, that was awful. Why are you making me remember that?” Liss replied, laughing.
“Only how you focused on every detail.”
She stuck out her tongue, which I took as a small victory. I capped my pen in a modest attempt to signal the conclusion of shop talk.
“Did you ever find a cat?” I asked.
She blinked, as though weighing whether – or how – to respond.
“You remember,” she replied quietly, a look of warm surprise suffusing her features.
“Everything, yes,” I added, and paused for my meaning to sink in.
“Her name was Penny. She was a lovely copper color.”
“Was.”
“It was a long time ago, Nao Kao. I adopted her before I left Ann Arbor and moved to Chicago. She lived fifteen years – that’s a good life for a cat!”
The false brightness of her words only exacerbated the sadness that crossed her features. Something of the memory made her sad, though as she’d said, it was a good, long life for a cat.
“Do you have any pets?” she asked quickly. She would brook no more questions about herself.
I reached down and scooped up my beloved ginger cat.
“Meet Belle. Her brother is Beast, which is fitting. I’m sure he’s chasing a bird as we speak.”
The sounds of our laughter mingled. “Come,” I wanted to say. “Come teach here with me.”
I spent the hour after our call contemplating the Green Card Lottery.
LISS
Iam nota white-knuckled flyer. I can jounce through the atmosphere with the best of them, and it is a mark of pride that however green I may have felt on occasion, I have never actually been sick.
As with the bumps in life, it helps if you know when they are coming. Fly across the North Atlantic in winter, and you are almost guaranteed a rough ride. The jet stream will get you (almost) every time.
Nothing in my flying history compares, though, to the turbulence of the tropics. Around the belt of the equator, from Singapore to Senegal and back again, the winds from the northern and southern hemispheres collide, resulting in ferocious thunderstorms that have interfered with cabin service on more than a few flights I have known. It is on these flights that I have dreamed my most unusual and most dramatic dreams.
From the flying carpets that carried me to Hong Kong, to the dream on the way down to Dakar that sealed my fate with Jake, my most vivid, my most terrifying, and my most inspiring dreams have always come after the flight attendants have been asked to secure the cabin and take their seats.
Into Dakar, I dreamed I was riding in a city bus, hurtling down a highway, when we smashed head-first into the car in front of us. Glass shattered, passengers screamed, and I was thrown clear to the back of the bus. When I came to, I looked myself over and was no worse for the wear aside from a copious amount of blood on my hands. The universe doesn’t always take out a billboard to tell you what to do. Sometimes it relies on common sense. And failing that, I am certain, it sends dreams. Or sometimes nightmares.
From the moment I awoke and confirmed my hands were blessedly free of blood, when I lifted my shade and watched the sun break open the skies over West Africa, I understood intuitively what I needed to do. The bloody bus crash was the postscript to all those drowning and suffocating dreams. It was the root of that fateful phone call, the one Catherine, and probably others – it was, after all, the shout heard ’round the resort – still reference as evidence that I am not quite as seaworthy as my reputation holds.
