I gave her the four-digit number.
“Thank you. I believe you said, ‘six … seven … three … nine.’ Is this correct?”
“Yes!” I said, almost sobbing with exasperation. The people at the end of the deck looked in my direction, then turned away again. It was now three minutes past five.
The automated woman was on again. “Flight six … seven … three … nine departed O’Hare International Airport on time at four … oh … two… .”
I dropped the cell phone in my lap, covered my face with both hands, and cried.
How could this have happened? What was the matter with me? I had gone trotting off to St. Michaels without even checking Patrick’s departure time! My mind was still stuck on the number five—that his departure time was five something. That’s six o’clock eastern time, so I must have thought I’d still have an hour to reach him after I’d returned to the ship. That he’d be sitting in the boarding area and his cell phone would go off and he’d smile when he saw it was from me.
I leaned my head against the base of the funnel and silently sobbed, my chest heaving. Patrick would be gone for a year, and I hadn’t said a real good-bye.
It was only when a sob escaped that I realized someone was watching me. Through my tears, I saw Mitch standing over by the rail, looking at me, concerned.
I wiped one hand over my cheeks and blinked my eyes, but I kept my head down. Then I saw his feet standing beside my chair.
“What’s wrong, Alice?” he asked.
I stifled another sob and glanced toward the little cluster of passengers who were looking at me again. Mitch pulled another chair into the shade, his back to the passengers, and sat down beside me.
“I just …” I began, “I missed telling my boyfriend goodbye before his plane left for Europe. I don’t know how I let this happen… . I thought it was leaving later … and he—he’ll be g-g-gone for a whole year!”
“Oh, jeez.” I could see Mitch shaking his head. “Rotten luck.”
“It’s not luck, it’s stupidity!” I wept. “How c-c-could I remember the flight number but not the departure time? Sane people don’t do that!”
I needed a tissue. Mitch got up, went over to a small table next to the passengers, and returned with a cocktail napkin.
“Was he expecting you to call at a certain time?” he asked, handing it to me.
“Not exactly.” I blew my nose. “I didn’t tell him I’d call, but we haven’t talked for a few days because he’s had exams and he’s packing—but he’d naturally think I’d want to say good-bye.”
I was through crying now, and my hands went limp in my lap.
“Why … why didn’t he call you?” Mitch asked.
“Well, I thought he might have, but there weren’t any messages waiting. He knows I can’t have a cell phone with me when I’m on duty, so I usually call him in the afternoon on my break when I can reach him. But I didn’t this time, and I can’t understand myself.”
“You can’t call him now?”
I looked over at Mitch. “You can’t use a cell phone on a plane.”
“Oh,” said Mitch. “I didn’t know that.” He smiled a little. “Never been on a plane.”
“I’ve only flown a couple of times.” I could feel tears rising again, but I checked them. “It’s just like … like I’m losing my mind. I mean, I’ve been so upset about his going away for a year, you’d think I’d make sure I didn’t forget this. I even rehearsed what I was going to say. And then I didn’t even check the departure time.”
“Well,” Mitch said, “you could always text him now, and he’ll have a nice surprise waiting for him when he gets to wherever he’s going. Where is he going, by the way?”
“Spain.”
“Oh. Well, since you didn’t get a message from him, it probably means he was rushing around like crazy right up to flight time. And if you had been able to reach him, you wouldn’t have had a decent conversation anyway.”
That was amazingly comforting. I smiled a little and blew my nose one last time. “Thanks,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to bother anyone else with this.”
“No bother.” He straightened up, hoisting his shoulders back, the T-shirt expanding across his chest. “The one thing I learned when my uncle died was to talk about it. It really helps.”
I kept smiling at him a second or two longer, then suddenly looked at my watch.
“I’m late!” I said. “Galley duty.”
“They’ll survive,” he said, and gave me a final once-over. “You okay now?”
“I think so,” I said. “Thanks, Mitch.”
6
CONNECTIONS
I went through the motions of work in the galley that night. Thankfully, I wasn’t assigned to clear tables. I was one of the two “galley slaves” who slide uneaten food off the plates into the trash bags, spray the gunk off the plates, and load them in the huge dishwasher.
Natalie was the other slave on duty, and when I saw her dumping all but one grape off a salad plate and setting it aside, I remembered that the terrapin was still a passenger.
“Where is it?” I whispered as we shared the sink. “I didn’t hear it last night.”
“The engine room,” she told me. “Frank won’t say anything if I have it off the ship by Sunday.”
“Is it doing okay?”
“I’ve added grass and water. Gwen donated a little worm this morning, but it’s still there. Terrapins can go a week or more without eating, I read. I just hope the noise of the engine room doesn’t do him in.”
“It’s a he?”
“Haven’t the faintest idea. But Kevin will love it.”
I wondered if there’s always the urge to get something really special for a brother. Never having had a sister, I wouldn’t know if that’s even more special, but I had to smile as I remembered the angst I went through thinking up gifts for Lester over the years: the beer cookbook, the Mickey Mouse boxers, the two half-pound bars of Hershey’s chocolate, and—omigod—his twenty-first birthday present!
“What are you smiling about?” Natalie asked curiously.
“A present that Pam and Liz and I cooked up for my own brother’s birthday a few years ago,” I told her. “They’d had a crush on Lester for as long as I could remember, and they wanted to be in on a surprise. I’d found out from Les that his girlfriend had promised him a surf-and-turf dinner, served by her in the outfit of his choice, which was a leopard-skin bikini and knee-high boots.”
“Wow! Now, that’s creative!” Natalie said.
“So Pam and Liz and I decided to serve him a surprise breakfast in bed in the outfits of our choice.”
Natalie was grinning already. “And?”
“Liz was in a long high-necked dress, I was in my bathing suit with a sweatshirt over it because I was cold, and Pamela was in a skintight cat costume with black net stockings she’d worn at a dance recital. I think we blew his mind.”
Thinking about Les almost pulled me out of my blue funk, but then I was back to figuring out how long it took to fly from Chicago to Spain. Hadn’t Patrick said something about changing planes in New York? If so, this meant he could check his cell phone in New York, and there still wouldn’t be a good-bye message from me. I watched an anchovy slide off a plate onto a half-eaten roll, and my stomach turned. But then I realized that Patrick could try me from New York, and I might still find a message waiting when I got off work.
I was holding the spray nozzle too close to a plate, and water splattered on my face. I wiped my cheek on my sleeve, set the plate on the rack, and went back to figuring out what time he’d reach Spain.
How many time zones would he cross? Was time going backward or forward? Did I even know that? Seven hours came to mind, but where did that come from? The flight number? I was really losing it. I thought of the way I’d been crying up on the top deck and the way Mitch brought me a napkin to blow my nose. And then I remembered what he’d asked—why hadn’t Patrick called me?
And
suddenly I thought of all the excuses I’d made for him: He had exams; he was packing; he knew I couldn’t have my cell phone with me while I worked… . He could have texted me, couldn’t he? He could have left a message.
“Alice!” the chef, Carlo, called. “Incoming.”
I set to work removing plates and silverware from the trays, but my mind wasn’t functioning. Was I just borrowing the seven from the flight number?
The thought that Patrick could have called but didn’t bothered me even more, and I felt tears rising in my eyes again, but I checked them. There’s a moment or two when you feel you can make tears subside without doing a thing. And, just as quickly, you can lose your chance, and water collects beneath your lower lids and won’t go away. Newsflash: They do not evaporate. Either wipe your eyes or wait and wipe your cheeks. I dodged the bullet this time and found myself excusing him once again.
Okay, Patrick’s flying across the Atlantic, so he’s going east. Time gets later and later, so he’s losing time. If it takes seven hours, and he crosses—what? Five, six, seven time zones … No. When Dad flew to England to visit Sylvia before they were married, it was a five-hour difference, wasn’t it? It doesn’t mean that Patrick will get there any later in real time, it just means that it will be later in Spain than it is here. Right?
The fish and garlic smells accumulating in the garbage can as the meal went on were like noxious fumes, and I had to turn my face away when I dumped a plate of food on top of the mess.
Why was I doing this? Patrick was the one who was leaving, not me! Why shouldn’t he be calling me to say good-bye? Why was I putting myself through all the agony of “should have, would have,” as though the whole relationship depended on me doing the thoughtful thing? What was I so afraid would happen if Patrick didn’t get the right kind of farewell?
I didn’t like the thought of separation, I knew. From anyone. Anything. I’d been fighting it all year, just thinking about leaving home for college. Maybe when you lose someone close—your mom, in particular—you go your whole life wanting things not to change. Wanting everyone you love to stay right where they are. But what kind of a life was that to wish on Patrick? On myself?
I almost dropped a water goblet that slipped from my soapy gloves. My thoughts seesawed back and forth. If it was a seven-hour flight, then I had seven hours to get a text message to Patrick before he landed and could turn on his cell phone. There was still time… .
Carlo came over to check out the uneaten food waiting to be dumped.
“Oyster mousse didn’t go over so well, I see,” he said.
“You win some, you lose some,” his assistant said, and Carlo went back to the broiler, where the Cornish hens were spitting fat.
What would I say to Patrick if I texted? My first thought was to let it all hang out—tell him how much I’d fantasized about sending the perfect good-bye message, how mixed up I’d been about his departure time, and how I’d rushed up the gangplank to get to my cell phone and cried when the automated Susan told me the plane had taken off. Did I want him to think of me like that or as a woman of mystery, excitement, surprises, who lived an interesting life with or without him?
But … if two people really truly cared about each other—if you were “soul mates”—why couldn’t you tell each other all your little troubles as well as your big ones? Talk about your feelings? Wasn’t I interested in his? The thing was, I always seemed to be the one with the problems, who worried about everything little thing. Patrick, world traveler, the sophisticate, just knew how to navigate through life without hitting any sandbars.
I reeked when I finished work about ten. Despite the waterproof aprons we wore on galley duty, there were splotches of putrid water on my clothes. I could smell cooking oil on my arms—in my hair, even. But the minute I was off duty, I got my cell phone and sat down at a port-side window. The only other person in the dining room was Curtis, one of the deckhands, the married one, who was vacuuming the floor. How often did he call his wife? I wondered. I propped my feet on the chair beside me to keep out of his way.
Patrick—I don’t know when or where you’re reading this,
but I hope you had a great flight.
Great? Does anybody have even a good flight anymore? I changed it to uneventful, but that was too cold, so I settled for good, then continued:
It’s been an insane day, and I missed telling you good-bye,
but maybe this will be the first message you read when you get off the plane. If it is, I’m glad it’s from me. Tell me
everything!
Short and breezy. Interested in him. Fond but not fawning. I pressed SEND.
I sat at the table a long time, staring out over the dark water, not seeing much because of the reflections on the glass. If this had been a letter, I would have signed it, Hugs, Alice or something.
Is this the way it would be for the next year—worrying and waiting and wondering, revising my messages and e-mails over and over, working to get things just right, not wanting to depress him or annoy him? To show concern but not cling? If we were a couple, didn’t he have a responsibility too? What I really wanted to say in that text message was Why in hell didn’t you call to say good-bye or leave me a message? Weren’t my feelings important? Didn’t I matter?
The thing was, were we really a couple? We hadn’t broken up, like Gwen and Austin, but it was understood from the time Patrick went away to college that there were no strings attached—we could, if we wanted, go out with other people.
Patrick and I had said “I love you” only once—the night of the prom in the limo, after our wild ride to the Bay Bridge and back. But I didn’t want us to say it again unless we were sure of it. And even if we were sure, I didn’t want us to keep on saying it like a mantra at specific times—signing off a phone conversation, for example, or walking to the store to buy fruit. Like if we didn’t say it, we didn’t love each other, and one of us would get run over by a dump truck.
We’d been careful up to this point to say we were special to each other, and we meant it. But we were thousands of miles apart. Was this even natural? To like—love?—someone for so long and yet so tenuously? Was it a mistake not to have slept together? Not to have that to remember?
I could hear Curtis closing up the galley. A thud, a click, a clank. And then it really was quiet. There was relief in knowing that my message was on Patrick’s cell phone, however. I wasn’t asking for promises or commitments or maybes. I was just here for him. Interested in him. And living my own life. Just what he wanted me to do.
Still, I longed to connect with somebody other than my crewmates. It was probably too late to call home—Dad and Sylvia would be in bed. So I punched in Lester’s number and waited.
“Yeah?” came my brother’s voice. “Al?”
“Hi, Les. I just wanted to see how things were going back home,” I said.
“Not bad. How are you? Where are you right now?” He didn’t sound eager to get rid of me, so I guessed he was alone, with time to kill.
“We’re docked at St. Michaels, headed for Annapolis in the morning,” I told him. “It’s been a wild week, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
“Good for you; build some muscles. Having any fun?”
“Yes. Some. I’m making friends. Have you rented your extra room yet?”
Lester lives with another Maryland graduate on the top floor of an elderly man’s house in Takoma Park. They’ve been trying to find a tenant for the third bedroom since a friend of theirs got married and moved out.
“No, we’ll wait till later in the summer to advertise it. Get a grad student.”
“Are you having any fun, Les?” I asked. Meaning, did he have a new girlfriend? Lester used to have so many girls clinging to him, he practically had to swat them off. Now that he’s “matured,” you might say, with a steady job, I tease him that he’s becoming an old stick-in-the-mud.
“Of course I am,” said Les. “But don’t expect all the details.”
 
; Neither of us said anything for a few moments. I knew I had to say something quick or he’d ask what I really wanted to talk about.
“Les,” I said, “I forgot to call Patrick before he left. I mean, I didn’t tell him good-bye.”
“So why are you telling me? Call him up.”
“He was already on the plane, so I sent a text message.”
“And? What’s the big deal?”
“Did you ever screw up big-time over something you should have remembered?”
“Oh, man. Did I ever!”
“What? Tell me.”
“I sent flowers with a Happy Birthday note to a girl when it wasn’t her birthday.”
“That’s not so bad,” I said. “The fact that you gave her flowers should have made up for getting the date wrong.”
“It was another girl’s birthday, and they knew each other,” said Les.
“Oh!” That was definitely worse than my forgetting Patrick’s departure time.
“And … what happened?” I asked.
“They both married someone else,” said Les.
I laughed in spite of myself. Marilyn and Crystal, I’ll bet. “I feel better already,” I told him.
When I woke the next morning, I realized I’d slept all night with my cell phone beside me. I pulled on shorts and a tee, my flip-flops, and ran up four flights of stairs to the sun deck where I could read a text message if there was one. There was:
Got your message. Here at baggage pickup. So far, all
I’ve seen of Barcelona so far are the backsides of fellow
passengers waiting for their luggage.
More later. Patrick
It was enough. The “more later” sustained me. Patrick was going to be busier than he’d ever been, trying to help his professor finish his book before fall classes began. It was like a huge load had lifted. We’d set the standard for text messages—for now, anyway. Short, breezy, informative, interesting, funny … He’d tell me about Spain, I’d tell him about the bay. Deal.
When I got back to crew quarters, there was a drama going on.