The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (14 page)

Ah, maternal wisdom.

Gran had called two days before, sounding as breathless and agitated as a little girl about to go to her first party. Was she positive she’d put the manila envelope containing the instructions in a safe place? Did she understand how important it was to follow the instructions to the letter? Had she met with Suzanne to discuss working together? It was so important, she emphasized, for the two of them to get along.

Suzanne. She pursed her lips and shook her head. On that score, her conscience was clear. She’d dropped in on her sister several times, dripping helpfulness and goodwill, bearing magazine articles on packing and sun protection, only to be laughed at. She’d arranged for a working lunch, only to have Suzanne show up late with some hard-luck case from the crisis center, whom they both wound up feeding and comforting for close to three hours, their original agenda out the window. And last, but not least, she’d attempted to coordinate their sharing a taxi to the airport that would get them both there in a timely and economical fashion. She’d left long, urgent messages on Suzanne’s answering machine, which Suzanne still hadn’t returned.

That had been the last straw. The girl was on her own.

Francesca lugged her suitcases down the hall, amazed at their weight. She’d tried and failed to imagine what she might need, and so had taken almost everything. Sweating with exertion, she pushed them into the empty elevator.

The taxi was waiting for her promptly in the driveway, as if anticipating her punctuality. She smiled, filled with a wonderful sense of competence. Traveling wasn’t so bad, she encouraged herself, opening her day planner and giving her neat checklist a final once-over: tickets, passport, credit cards, and last, but not least, her grandmother’s precious manila envelope containing her itinerary and a translation of the manuscript pages. With careful planning, you could keep things under control completely. She glanced at her watch. She’d arrive at least two hours prior to departure, as required by security checks.

“It’s okay, driver. We can go now,” she told the cabbie, leaning back comfortably.

Without any warning, she felt herself suddenly propelled with reckless speed into the unknown. This, she thought, clutching the seat, was the true problem with traveling: No matter how much you prepared for it, you were helpless against the selfish cosmic forces bent on moving you through sights and experiences at a pace not of your own choosing. An uprooting—even the smallest journey was that. Though we think we are taking ourselves with us firmly ensconced in the compact soil of our familiar containers—our luggage, our cameras, our pills and lotions, our shoes and stockings and prescription sunglasses. Still, our nourishment—our food and drink and even the amount and intensity of the sunlight itself—will change to something more or less than that to which we are accustomed.

And it is not just the fear of being hungry or thirsty, hot or cold, or sick without a doctor. It is equally (May I admit this to myself? Francesca wondered) a fear of experiencing a generosity and comfort that will cast their painful shadows over our normal life, making it seem drab and petty. It is the fear that we will not be able—or not want—to go home again.

She looked out the back window, watching her Rapunzel tower fade in the distance.

Suzanne stuffed two more unwrinkleable Indian skirts into her army duffel bag, her sole item of luggage. Her friend Jean, who’d just broken up with her abusive Haitian boyfriend, would be moving in that afternoon. She’d been thrilled to sublet. (Well, “sublet” was a bit optimistic. It wasn’t really clear whether Jean would actually be able to
pay
anything. But at least the plants might get watered. Besides, what was the point of leaving it empty for weeks if someone could get some use out of it?)

She looked around the room. All the valuables (the opal earrings from Dad, her stereo and vintage Joan Baez recordings) were at her mother’s for safekeeping. Only Renaldo’s silver bracelet was left. She snapped it around her wrist, feeling a mystical certainty that she wouldn’t lose it, no matter where she roamed.

In the distance she saw the buttery headlights of a yellow cab melt in the morning fog. She put out her hand to hail it. If it stopped, she’d have exactly enough time to make the plane. She slapped her pocket to see if she’d remembered the tickets and her passport. If they weren’t in her pocket, then she was fairly certain they must still be on top of the refrigerator in that brown envelope…No, there they were! Good, she thought, slamming the cab door.

A strange feeling came over Francesca as she unloaded her luggage and watched the cab drive off. She felt as if she had somehow entered a different world, a place where water-cooler gossip and listless commuters had no place. A country of more intense feelings and heightened drama, where partings and reunions, beginnings and endings, were the norm and where even time itself—that dependable regulator of habits and bodily functions—had lost its authority. Planes came and went around the clock, crossing time zones, so that you might arrive even before you’d left!

“Smoking or nonsmoking?”

The question drifted down to her. Two more people to go and then she’d get to pick her seat.

“I always ask them right away for a nonsmoking aisle seat in front of the wing,” a businesswoman just ahead of her turned around to say. She was wearing a fabulous trenchcoat, with an expensive leather attaché slung over her shoulder, both of which Francesca immediately coveted. “It saves time, and that’s really the best place to sit. Personally, I feel like a prisoner when I’m trapped at the window. How many clouds can one look at, after all? And if one needs the lavatory, one has to climb over people, or disturb them, even when they’re sleeping. I hate that, don’t you?”

Francesca, who had been looking forward to looking out at the clouds and hadn’t even considered the bathroom business, nodded. “Of course.”

“An aisle seat in front of the wing in the nonsmoking section, please,” she said dutifully when her turn came.

“Miss Abraham?” The clerk looked up. “You’ve already got a seat.”

“But I just got here…”

“It’s all been arranged by your travel agent. Have a good trip.” She smiled, handing her a boarding pass. “Gate forty-six.”

“Thanks, I think,” Francesca mumbled, looking at the mysterious numbers and letters, trying to figure out if she was going to be a cloud-gazing prisoner for the next five hours.

Divested of her suitcases, her garment bag, and even her heavy hand luggage, which the amenable clerk had agreed to check in despite the excess baggage, Francesca felt a strange weightlessness. As she turned toward the escalators, the feeling grew, making her chest expand and her legs move with a dancer’s lightness.

Away, she thought, looking out the enormous windows that framed the vast city of her birth. Gone was its familiarity, replaced with a strange, touristy kind of charm: the buildings reaching into the sky, which every New Yorker ignored after the age of five, the flashing hard light of a thousand windows.

She placed her purse on the X-ray machine and walked through the metal detector. The idea of strangers looking you over as if you could be dangerous, searching and X-raying you for hidden weapons, made her stomach lurch with a delightful sort of agony. She was almost surprised when nothing rang or buzzed or exploded.

Perhaps this
is
legal, after all, she marveled, stepping onto the moving sidewalk, and willing herself to be transported, luggagelike, into the hands of a fate both foreign and magical, full of pleasures heretofore missed, or simply undiscovered.

Over her shoulder, the city grew more distant. Lovely, in its way, she thought, catching sight of the man-made symmetry, the distant, almost bluish light. Strangely, it no longer seemed like home, but like some foreign place she had visited briefly and was now about to reduce to postcards and souvenirs. As if it were simply only one stop on some joyful, extended journey that would lead eventually toward her real home.

She felt inappropriately hopeful, almost ecstatic, without any reasonable explanation.

It was frightening.

An hour and a half to kill until boarding time, she thought, wandering restlessly through the duty-free shops with a bargain hunter’s eagerness. But as she looked at the mountains of perfumes and soaps and cosmetics, and the outrageously priced designer scarves and purses, she felt a waning interest in the goods, and a growing one in the buyers.

Who are these people? she wondered. Imelda Marcos’s cousins? The wives and teenage daughters of those Japanese moguls who buy Picasso paintings at auctions and hang them over radiators in their offices? And what does one do with a two-hundred-dollar red-black-and-gold scarf?

But if it makes them happy…she shrugged charitably. Hey, weren’t mutually consenting adults entitled to waste their own or their husbands’ or fathers’ hard-earned money any way they pleased? Just to prove she wasn’t a snob, she bought an Elizabeth Arden eyeliner in her usual shade, noting that the duty-free benefit had netted her a grand savings of about fifteen cents.

She wandered around listlessly searching for Suzanne, who was nowhere to be found. Damn! She really was going to cut it to the last minute!

A sudden yawn took her by surprise. She’d been up at five, not to mention half the night, waking at intervals with lists in her head of things she mustn’t forget to take. From somewhere down the brightly lit corridor came the scent of freshly brewed coffee. She bought a cup, then hunted through the crowded cafeteria for a vacant table, hot coffee sloshing over her fingers.

“Are you looking for a place to sit?”

He was good-looking, clean, and clear-jawed, with a really fine set of blue eyes. A guy who—if he cornered you at a party or rang your bell for a blind date—would make your heart give a little
blam
of pleasure.

Nevertheless: New York City. Her eyes scanned the room looking for an escape. But somehow it didn’t feel like the city anymore, with all its harsh, rigid rules of self-preservation. It seemed like a gentler country, calmer and more civilized. Besides, there really wasn’t any other place to sit. She nodded gratefully, watching his long legs move aside to make room for her.

“Such a long flight.” He shook his head. “Three or four hours, okay, but this—what, eighteen, twenty-four? And just for a week?”

“Where are you going?” she couldn’t resist asking.

“Australia. Family wedding.”

“That’s some trip just for a week,” she agreed demurely, afraid to encourage him with more than just a slight smile. She sat basking in his interest, in the expression on his face that seemed to say he’d found something valuable and unexpected.

“But, it’s family, you know. Can’t quite say no…”

“It depends, of course, on how close you are—”

“Yes, exactly.” He was leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his fingers clasped, pointing in her direction. His smile broadened and she began to feel a hot flash deep inside her stomach. Perhaps, she calmed herself, this is the way such things happen—the romances that life was supposed to throw the way of unmarried girls who kept all the magazine commandments: who dieted, exercised, and wore expensive clothes.

“I’d do anything for my family,” he was saying. “Even travel thousands and thousands of miles just to be with them for a few days.”

He had gray in his dark hair, which was short, except for a small braid hanging down on the right side. She stared at it. A little bohemian, yet not alarmingly so, she thought. An architect or an illustrator, perhaps? Something respectable, even if creative, and with a steady income.

“Are you traveling alone?” he asked, interrupting her husband fantasies.

“No. At least, I don’t think so.” She perused the crowds anxiously.

“Late?”

She nodded.

“Boyfriend? Husband?”

“Sister.”

He took a deep, relaxed breath. “You’re lucky. Traveling alone can be awfully depressing. In fact, it’s no fun doing anything alone. Don’t you agree?” His eyes were warm and smiling.

The boarding call for Quantas came through.

“Well…” He cleared his throat. “That’s me.” He stood up.

She studied his face, feeling unwarranted loss. “Have a good flight.”

“You, too. I hope you find your sister.”

She watched him disappear, sipping the rest of her coffee, which was cool and very sweet with just a hint of bitterness.

This is not like me, she thought, sweating lightly, trying to concentrate on her watch. The flight was going to board any minute. Where in heaven’s name…! She got up and wandered around, searching fruitlessly for a flash of coppery-gold hair, disappointment laced with panic shooting through her with surprising harshness.

Perhaps she’d simply changed her mind and wasn’t coming after all. The idea sank like a stone to the pit of her stomach. It really was awful to travel alone. Whatever else Suzanne was, she was certainly never boring.

“Call for passengers boarding Flight three-oh-six to London. The plane is beginning to board.”

The
beginning
, she thought, her heart pounding as she made her way toward the gate.

Bad water and unclean streets and surly strangers.

Romantic hideaways and brilliant, sophisticated men with charming manners, she argued back.

“Last call for all passengers boarding Flight three-oh-six to London.”

Alone, she thought, handing over her boarding pass and walking heavily down the platform to the plane.

“Aisle or window?” she asked the stewardess, handing over her boarding pass. It suddenly seemed portentous.

“Oh, it’s an emergency-exit row.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s means you’re very lucky, miss.”

She hurried down the aisle. When she got to her seat, she knew it was true. It had both lots of leg room so that you could get out without making anyone get up, and a seat near the window with a clear view of the heavens. The best of all worlds, she exulted, settling back. Where divine cloud-gazing is not canceled out by the need to empty your bladder. A good omen. She glanced at the empty seat next to hers. If only…She gripped the handrest.