Devil’s Lake

Spring 2016 Issue

Sarah Abbott: Autopilot

If the gate agent says one more time that she can’t get you on the flight, you’ll go ballistic. You know going ballistic is a bad idea. Your wife tells you so every time you slip up, every time your face reddens and your voice rises, but when the world comes at you with both fists clenched, what else can you do? You said to Christy once, “You have to play chicken with life. Go full speed ahead like you’re going to crash, until it caves and gives you what you want.” You imagined she’d look at you, both of your heads inhabiting the same pillow, and you’d kiss her—or she’d kiss you, your imagination wasn’t picky—but she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, stop it.”

“Stop what?” You thought that was a pretty good way to explain it, playing chicken with life. You thought it made sense. When you had your arms wrapped around her, and her chest rose and fell, and your eyelids got heavier and heavier, you found it hard to remember that it had been years since the two of you made sense to each other.

“Pretending you have some deep reason for being a jerk. Sometimes you’re just a jerk.” She flipped over, facing away from you, and pulled her pillow under her chin.

You take a deep breath. If you end up back at the hotel—if the agent won’t let you
on—you’ll have to roll your suitcase, with its sticking zipper and hitching wheel, all the way out of the airport. You’ll have to call the shuttle again. The cheapskate office manager in Charleston won’t pay for a cab, much less a rental car. Every time you ask, you can tell she’s thinking that the firm should hire West Virginians to work in West Virginia. She only said something to that effect once, and offhand, but you remember. “I have to get on this flight.”

The gate agent keeps typing. She hasn’t made eye contact with you for three minutes. “Sir,” she says, “all passengers have checked in for the flight.”

You read her nametag—Jean—and lean both elbows on the counter. “Jean, I’m a Priority member. I fly this route every other week. There has to be a way to get me on.” Going ballistic is an especially bad idea at an airport, surrounded by security guards and loudspeakers warning everyone that their fellow human beings can’t be trusted. “Please report unattended baggage,” a woman murmurs on repeat. Each calm, crisp syllable drops off her computerized lips like she’s giving a weather forecast, not guarding against terrorism.

Christy can do that, too. She can make an emergency sound like it’s only a fire drill. When she told you two hours ago that she wanted a divorce, her exhale transmitted through the phone as a puff of static. You wanted sirens and flashing lights. Some kind of alarm, so you could react with alarm. You used to like that Christy never gets upset. When the two of you first started dating, she stepped too far forward on a bowling lane and slipped and sprained her wrist. You took her to the emergency room. She laughed as she climbed into your beat-up SUV. “This will be a story to tell the kids,” she said, then covered her mouth when you didn’t laugh. “Oh, God, that was a joke. I don’t mean that we’re going to have kids. I’m not one of those women.”

She tried to buckle her seatbelt with her uninjured hand. The polyester webbing kept inching back up, drawing the hem of her shirt with it, and you tried not to notice but you noticed.

You leaned over to buckle her seatbelt. “But we might. We might have kids.” The way you felt about her was already brighter than her bowling ball, more electric than the neon lights from the Mexican restaurant across the street.

She shrugged and let you help her. She cradled her wrist to her chest. “Maybe.” You could see the smile hidden beneath her nonchalance, the relaxed shoulders that followed her shrug. You could see her. She didn’t pull her shirt back down, and her bare skin—even that tame three inches above her hip—seemed new, perfect, irresistible. The night was full of possibility, and possibility smelled like fajitas and the sweat and leather of bowling shoes.

You have to get back to her now, have to get out of this sad excuse for a city so you can fix this. Something’s gone wrong, and you don’t know whether it’s broken or only sprained. You wish you could put all twenty-four years of marriage under an X-ray and tape the film to a screen so you could diagnose it together. Here’s the gap in the tissue that connects you, this ligament she tore when she pointed out that you’d never been to a single one of Emerson’s baseball games, and what kind of father doesn’t go to his son’s baseball games? Here are the fractures from the lies you’ve told her, like “they need me to stay on the West Virginia project.”

If you could get a marital X-ray, if there was a medical term for your life’s disintegration, a doctor could give you a prognosis. He’d tell you how to heal this thing with Christy. He’d tell you if it could be healed.

“It’s a family emergency.” You’ve said that before, maybe even to Jean, and this is the only time it’s been partly true. You wonder if you’re being punished, if this is airport karma.

“Unless someone gets lost on their way to board, sir, there’s nowhere to put you.”

You chuckle, trying for humor, trying to be the kind of person she will want to help. “Where are they going to get lost?” In this tiny airport—one runway, one TSA full-body scanner, one restaurant that serves biscuits in the a.m. and pizza in the p.m.—there’s nowhere to get lost.

Jean stops typing and meets your eyes. “It’s unlikely that you’ll get on this flight.” She sees through you, sees through the nice-guy-funny-guy you’re trying to project, because it’s too little, too late. You should’ve been nicer when you made her leapfrog you to the top of the standby list. You’re in project management. You know how to be nice to people, you know how to say one thing while thinking another, even if Christy thinks you could try harder. You know better than to be a jerk, but you still do it sometimes, because it takes less effort—and maybe because you like getting your way. You like bending the world when it doesn’t want to bend.

The flight boards in five minutes. People cluster around the door, legs and luggage sprawled across the seats adjoining theirs so no one will sit beside them. They tap on phones and keep boarding passes handy, and those white slips of paper taunt you. You accept that maybe, despite your bluster, you really aren’t getting on this flight. You could stay here and attend the meetings you’re supposed to attend tomorrow. You could call Christy from the hotel, and if she doesn’t answer, keep calling. You could rent a car, but it’s a six-hour drive without stops; if you’re going to wait that long to see her, you might as well get some sleep and fly in the morning.

That doesn’t feel like enough. At this point, don’t you have to be grand? Don’t you have to sweep her off her feet, which are always planted so firmly on the ground? If you make it home tonight, that’s proof. She needs proof.

“Okay,” you say, “I get that, Jean, thanks for trying. Is there any other flight that can get me to D.C. tonight? With any airline?”

She yawns. “Delta has a flight to Chicago, but that’s it.”

It does occur to you that it’s nine at night, and Jean must be tired. She must be ready to clock out and unwind that silk scarf from her neck. She’ll probably go home and tell someone about the jerk who made her life difficult today. You wonder, at forty-eight years old, if you should have outgrown being a jerk who makes other people’s lives difficult.

Probably. That’s probably why Christy wants to divorce you. Or it could be that you’re a liar, and she knows you’re a liar. Or that she’s having a midlife crisis and slept with someone and thinks she’s in love with the shiny new man—isn’t that what happens when husbands go off on extended absences like you do? It should make you jealous to think of her sleeping with someone else, but it doesn’t. It might be a relief.

You’re not surprised there’s no other flight, not really. It’s late. Three airlines operate out of Charleston, and they fly to five cities total: Atlanta, Charlotte, D.C., Chicago, and New York. Add Myrtle Beach in the summer. You know this city, and you should; you’ve spent every other week here for five years. The company first sent you to Charleston along with an enormous pay raise. “For two years,” they said. “Three, tops.” The pay raise, you and Christy decided together, would help with Emerson’s college. And the company kept their word—they gave you an option out—but Christy doesn’t know that, so she shot glares at your boss at last year’s Christmas party. You turn and stare at the assembled travelers, none of whom are looking at you—though they can hear your conversation with Jean, they know they have something you want—and you clear your throat. It’s time for a grand gesture. Past time.

“Hello, everyone.” Four or five heads glance your way. It’s a start. “My name is Zach. I live in D.C., and my wife just found out she’s sick. I really need to get home and take care of her, be there for her and my son.” You omit that your son is away at college, probably drunk right now. Let them assume he’s young. Let them assume that at least two people in the world need you. “If there’s any way one of you could give me your seat…” You think: Look, Christy, you always tell me I have too much pride. I’m embarrassing myself, trying to get home to you, and that takes love. I do love you.

No one speaks up. A few people smile—the sympathetic kind of smile that says I hear you, buddy, good luck with that—and go back to their emails and texts. You wait. Surely someone’s heartstrings were pulled. Surely someone feels charitable, or at the very least guilty.

On the tarmac, orange-vested baggage handlers toss suitcases into the cargo hold. Jean starts handing out luggage tags to gate-check bags that won’t fit inside the prop plane’s narrow shelves, and she does not give you a luggage tag.

You wonder if this is karma for not telling the truth, this lack of volunteers willing to sacrifice their seats for your sick wife’s sake. Maybe you should have told the truth. But the truth isn’t a sob story, it’s just pathetic. What should you have said? “My wife wants to leave me, and I have to change her mind.” No one would care.

Jean calls all three boarding zones of the flight in quick succession, and they converge on the door, pointedly not looking at you as you stand on the other side of the red barrier.

Still you wait. You don’t give up. See, Christy? You’re not giving up. You wait until Jean has scanned every last boarding pass, collected every last luggage tag. She turns to you after the door closes. “I’m sorry, sir, but the flight is full.”

You sag against the counter. “One more question.”

She forces a smile. “Sure.”

“The flight to Chicago. Are there any flights from Chicago to D.C. tonight?”

She sets her long fingernails to typing again. She starts to speak. She stops.

You ask, “What is it?”

Her lips purse. “There’s a flight from O’Hare to Reagan at 11:35.”

You grab your suitcase, ready to run for the Delta gate. You don’t know which it is, but since you can do a lap of every gate in two minutes, you’re not going to waste time talking.

She holds up a hand. “I should warn you, there would be a twenty-minute connection. In O’Hare. That’s nearly impossible.”

For Christy, you can do the impossible. “I’ll chance it.” And if you’re going to get stranded somewhere tonight, at least Chicago has better restaurants.

You go to the Delta gate. There’s one seat open on both flights—CRW to ORD, ORD to
DCA—and you take it, company compensation be damned.

The flight boards in fifteen minutes, an eon. It only took one minute and thirty-three seconds for Christy to break your heart. You know because you checked the call history. It seemed too ridiculous that this life-changing moment, this life-destroying moment, could happen faster than the average football timeout.

This is good, you think. This is what tonight should be all about, a trial of endurance, a fight to get home and save your marriage. Noble gestures and rule-breaking for love. How could Christy not love it? How could she not love you?

But she doesn’t love you, not anymore. She said it on the phone. “Are you sitting down?”

“Why?”

Pause. “I’d sit down.”

You frowned and got up from your barstool. Every Thursday, all the out-of-towners at work go to a sports bar down the street. You watch a game and eat and drink. If anyone gets caught checking their email past seven, they have to pick up the tab. When you’re out with them, you don’t feel married. You don’t feel like there’s a son you should text more often, you don’t remember Christy’s worried he isn’t going to his expensive classes. You don’t remember a lot of things Christy says, actually. She likes that even less than she likes your cheesiness and your temper and your need to make everything significant.

For the first few months after you started coming to Charleston, she called you at breakfast. You called her at lunch. It brought you closer together to be apart. It reminded you how nice it was to have someone to call, someone who was thinking about you. After the initial shine wore off—after it sank in to Christy that she had just become a single parent half the time, cooking and cleaning and doing laundry and taking Emerson everywhere—the conversations fell to once a day, usually at night, when you were both tired and ready for bed.

Then the days came when both of you forgot to call, or pretended you forgot. You told her more than once that you fell asleep with your eyes on the TV and a hand hovering over her name, ready to dial. It wasn’t true. You were extra-attentive during your next conversation to make up for it. You missed the sound of her voice, but you should have missed it more.

Tonight, when your pocket vibrated and you saw Christy’s name on the screen, it crossed your mind how easy it would be to let the phone ring, to tell her later you didn’t hear it in the crowded bar. You imagined her sitting at home alone, trying to call you. You tried not to feel victorious that you were better at being alone in this city than she was in hers.

“That better not be an email,” a coworker said beside you.

“Wife,” you said.

He laughed and took a drink. “Even worse.”

You slapped him on the shoulder and hit “accept” right before the call would have gone to voicemail. You should have let it go to voicemail.

The Delta agent calls for preboarding. An older couple approaches the door, the wife pushing her husband in a wheelchair. They’re off on an adventure to Chicago or elsewhere. You can tell they’re not from Chicago. It’s written on the woman’s loose paisley dress, the man’s Mountaineer ball cap. It’s written on their smiles. People in big cities don’t smile at each other like that, like the world is a wonderful place and the people in it are equally wonderful and aren’t we just so lucky to be living. When you’re surrounded by millions of people, everything gets compressed; everything becomes a tightening of time and space and energy. It used to charm you, the naiveté of this little riverside city with its fifty thousand people: the muddy waters of the Kanawha, the skyscrapers sheepish beside taller forests in every direction, the chemical spill alarm that gets tested on the last Wednesday of every month. The first time you heard the siren, you were scarfing down a catered sandwich at a lunch meeting, and the locals laughed at your confusion. “Just a drill,” they shouted over the shriek.

This isn’t a drill, you and Christy. This is the real thing. You’ve been thinking about calling her for the past five minutes. You tap her name and lift the phone to your ear. It rings four, five, six times. Just when you’re convinced she’s not going to answer, she picks up.

“Hello?”

You swallow. “Hi, honey.”

“Hi.” She croaks a bit, like she’s been asleep.

“Did I wake you up?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

You imagine her sitting up in bed, propping both of your pillows behind her back. You think she’s been using your pillow while you’re gone because it’s gotten flatter and flatter over the months—even flatter than hers—though you’ve only been there half the time to use it. You clear your throat. “I’m about to get on a plane.”

“What?”

“I’m about to get on a plane. To Chicago, but there’s a connection to Reagan, if I can make it. I’ll be home in a few hours.”

There’s a long silence before she says, “Why?”

“So we can talk. We can fix this.” You imagine her rubbing a hand over her eyes. She’ll realize she didn’t remove her contacts—you remind her when you’re home—and hold the phone between her ear and shoulder while she pulls her lids open and plucks out the glassy shells.

“Zach…”

The Delta agent calls your boarding zone. You stand and wave for everyone to go in front of you. “We’re boarding.”

“Zach, we can’t fix this.”

You try to pull your suitcase forward, but the wheel sticks. The damn wheel always sticks. “We’ve been married for a quarter of a century. We have to fix it.”

”I don’t want to, and neither do you.”

“Of course I do.” The line of people shortens, boarding pass by scanned boarding pass.

“You don’t.” There’s no heat in her voice, only the faint rasp that happens when she cries or gets a cold. “If you wanted to fix it, you would’ve tried before I told you we’re through.”

“How was I supposed to know how you felt if you never said anything?”

“You knew. Now you’re only mad because you don’t want to be left. You didn’t care until I stopped caring.”

You stare down at your boarding pass. CRW to ORD. Flight time: one hour and thirty minutes. Seat 1A. “We’ve both made mistakes, but I’ve always cared. Think about Emerson. Think about—”

“Don’t bring Emerson into this.” Finally, heat. Finally, a hint of fire. “He’s so used to you not being here, I don’t think he’ll notice.”

You relish the way your stomach drops. You relish the hurt. This is what loss should feel like. The passenger ahead of you walks onto the tarmac and climbs the thin metal stairs to the plane—such a flimsy bridge between the ground and the sky. “Did you meet someone else?”

“Come on.” The static of her sigh is so familiar. Her voice is so familiar. You know every musical note of it, every key.

“Did you?”

“There’s no one else. There isn’t even you. You haven’t been here, Zach.”

The Delta agent holds out his hand. “Pass and ID, please.”

You close your eyes. “Should I get on this flight, Chris?”

“It’s fine if you do. Just don’t expect me to change my mind, because I won’t.”

“I would do anything to fix this.” You have to try one more time. It would be different if you had been the first to admit you were through, if you had been the one to break her heart, but she chose being alone over being with you. So you’re determined to argue until it’s pointless, until the last plane of the night stretches its broad, heavy wings down the runway, until she says “please come home” just in time for you to say that it’s too late. You’re stuck until tomorrow.

She’s silent.

You want to hurt her like she’s hurting you, reject her like she’s rejecting you, except she knows you too well to give you the opportunity. When you married Christy, you thought she would be the cure for everything wrong with you—her honesty, her calm, her capacity to love you in spite of who you are—but she’s not a cure, she’s a blood transfusion. She’s kept you alive, given you the semblance of health for twenty-four years while you drained her.

That’s what you do to people, and you won’t do it to her anymore.

You open your eyes. You shake your head to the Delta agent and walk toward the airport exit, pressing the phone to your ear. “There’s a meeting in the morning. I should be here.”

“Then be there.”

“That’s what you want?”

“That’s what I want.”

You pass under an arch with a stop sign painted on it. Faded letters tell you that after this point, there is no re-entry. “I have to call the shuttle.”

“Okay.”

“I have to hang up.”

“I know.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yes. Guest room okay?”

You like that bed, anyway. Christy picked out the too-soft mattress in your room. “Sure.”

“I’ll make it up.”

“Thanks.”

You stand in the greeting area, the place where families and lovers and friends come to meet travelers at the end of their journey. A janitor vacuums the carpet in long, even stripes, yanking the cord behind him.

“Good night, then,” Christy says.

“Good night.”

You hang up. You don’t know if she beat you to it.

After calling the shuttle, you sit on a bench outside. Headlights flash and disappear down the road. A coal train chugs, hitting the tracks far below with the same hollow thump as your jammed wheel rolling over concrete. You read somewhere, maybe a sign inside, that they pushed two mountains together to construct this airport. They didn’t have enough flat land in all of Charleston to build it, so they carved out millions of yards of dirt and made the mountains into one. And it worked, until the landslide last year. You missed your flight when the earth slipped; no one could get up the mountain. You called Christy. You told her you wouldn’t make it home for the weekend. She said, “You could drive.” And you could, true. But wasn’t that a lot of work, twelve hours round-trip? She said, “You’re right. Don’t do it.”

You check your email. Fourteen new messages. Fourteen new expectations that you’ll do something. You watch for the hotel shuttle’s headlights coming up the hill, and you could think about Christy. You could remember her smooth, narrow fingers, twined through yours as your mother died, and the eulogy she wrote because you had no words of your own to say.

You could remember how her voice shook when, eight months into dating, she called and told you to get to her apartment, right now, and you thought she was dying. On the drive over, you rehearsed what you would say if she had cancer. You would be there for her no matter what. You’d make her laugh and shave your head if need be. So when her roommate pointed to the bathroom and said, “In there,” and you went into the bathroom and saw her sitting on the toilet with a white stick in her hand, you said that you would be there for her no matter what. You’d make her laugh and marry her if need be. Actually, you’d like to marry her even if it wasn’t strictly necessary, and would she marry you? You were balancing on the rim of her bathtub in basketball shorts. Her knees jutted out from the toilet seat to brush yours. For the next twenty-four years, when someone asked how you proposed, she lied.

You could remember Christy’s blue eyes closing as you kissed her the first time. When they opened, you loved her because she looked at you like you could save her. You resented her because she never needed to be saved, except maybe—in a couple of
decades—from you.

Or you could choose to remember none of the above. You do.

SARAH ABBOTT received her MFA from the University of Kentucky. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Citron Review, HeartWood, Rappahannock Review, Easy Street, and Polaris, among others. She loves traveling and coming home. More from this issue >