I stepped into the bustling terminal firmly gripping my shoulder bag while I scanned all the signs. I arrived in plenty of time and stood there, searching each face that passed, waiting for Penny. My anticipation rose and fell during those eternal fifteen minutes. I think it was the closest I’d ever come to a panic attack.
What if Penny doesn’t come? What if she’s waiting for me somewhere else? What if the plane leaves without me? What if this was all a bad joke? What if …?
I realized that for years I had reveled in the sparking wonder of Penny’s “what if” questions. The unknown elevated her. My “what if” questions were suffocating me with fear and pressing me deeper into myself.
At just the right moment, I looked up, and rushing toward me came the one face in all the world I longed to see. Penny’s!
With a bulging bag slung over each arm and tugging a wheeled suitcase behind, Penny came charging toward me in a straight line. Her smile was huge. Her cocoa brown hair bounced with carefully coiffured fullness while her reading glasses slid from their perch on top of her head. She wore wide-legged black pants, a fire engine red turtleneck sweater, and a sleek, black raincoat that flapped open with every long-legged stride she took. She looked as if she did this sort of thing every day.
Dark-eyed Penny, with her gold hoop earrings and her wonderfully wild, sparkling eyes, grabbed me and planted her signature greeting kiss on my right cheekbone.
“Look at you! You’re here! We’re here! Sharon, can you believe we’re doing this? You look great!”
“So do you!” I hugged her again.
“Your hair! I love your hair! You didn’t tell me it was down to your shoulders now. And the color is great! Not a hint of green anywhere,” she said with a wink. “It couldn’t have been as bad as you said. I love your coat. Is it new?”
“No, this is the one you talked me into buying at an after-Christmas sale about six years ago. I just never wear it.”
“It looks great! You look great! I can’t believe you’re here! Come on! We need to hurry. Our gate is this way.”
And we were off. Penny blazed ahead. I trotted to keep up. The galaxy had fallen back into its proper alignment.
“You would not believe the morning I’ve had!” Penny shouted over her shoulder. “I was running so late that I was afraid to check my baggage. I didn’t think they would get it on the plane in time. I’m so glad you checked your suitcase and only have one bag. Would you mind carrying on one of mine so they don’t tell me I have too many pieces?”
With the overhead bin story in mind, I opted for the smaller shoulder bag and let Penny keep her wheeled suitcase and the gym bag.
“How did you get everything in one suitcase?” Penny asked. “I kept thinking of more things to pack. I can see it already—I’m going to have to buy a bigger suitcase the first day there.”
We were in line to check in at the gate and receive our seat assignments when Penny caught her breath. She looked at me, and I knew something was going on.
“What?” I asked her.
“What do you mean, ‘what’?”
“You’re about to spring another surprise on me.”
Penny looked crushed. “How did you know?”
“Your left eyebrow. It goes up whenever you’re about to reveal a secret.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot you were onto that.” She touched her left eyebrow. “You and Dave are the only two who tell me that.”
“So what’s the surprise?”
“I got us in business class,” Penny said. “That’s why I was running late. One of the guys at work offered me his flight upgrade coupons, but I had to go to his house this morning to pick them up.”
As if this whole trip weren’t luxurious enough, Penny and I were among the first group to board the wide-bodied aircraft and settle in with our extra legroom. I was by the window again with a pillow and a blanket. Penny adjusted herself in the aisle seat, and we kept on chattering as comfortably as if we were sitting at my kitchen table.
“I was up all night getting everything together.” Penny shook her head and reached for her reading glasses, as they were sliding down her forehead. “I can’t believe how unorganized I was at the last minute.” She fished in her large purse for her glasses case. “I suppose you were all set to go by eight o’clock and got a good night’s sleep.”
“Are you kidding? Not me. I was packed, but my brain wasn’t ready to shut off. I barely slept.”
“Did you leave notes for your kids?”
“No, I woke them up to say good-bye. Did you leave notes?”
Penny nodded. “I ended up writing long love letters to each of them and Dave, too. My plan was just to leave little one-liners on their pillows. Then I started to write Nicole’s first, thinking that would be the easiest. Was I wrong! What is it with our daughters? Did you feel this way when Kaylee was eleven? I feel as if every step from here on out needs to be guarded carefully. Do you know what I mean? It didn’t feel like that when Noah was eleven.”
“I know. Having only one daughter makes a difference, too, somehow.”
“Exactly!” Penny agreed. “It’s as if I have one shot at reinventing myself—and before you say anything, I know I’m not supposed to project all that on Nicole. She is not my second chance at a happy childhood. It’s just bizarre how much more intense my mothering instincts are with her. The boys are easy. But then, they have a great dad.”
I smiled because she was watching me, waiting for the smile. Dave loved his wife and kids intensely. Penny always wanted everyone to love Dave as much as she loved him.
One time, about five years ago, Penny told me she wondered what it would be like to sail through marriage the way I did with Jeff, rather than take every bump along the road as she had with Dave. She said Jeff amazed her because nothing fazed him. Whenever something disturbing, like Ben’s broken wrist and lost scholarship, would come into our lives, Jeff would burrow deep inside himself. He rarely reacted outwardly. His emotions seemed to churn and sift through a dozen filters. Then one morning he would wake up, and nothing would be left to filter. He would be back to his usual steady pace.
Dave, however, was all out in front. If he had an opinion about something, he would share it. If you needed something, he would go out of his way to get it for you. If he was mad, he would articulate why and quickly forgive. If he loved you, you knew it. And you never doubted it.
The plane had taken off while we were in the midst of our discussion. Penny opened her mouth wide and rubbed behind her left ear. I felt compelled to do the same, even though my ears weren’t popping.
Penny continued to talk about the love notes she had worked on all night. She described how surprised she felt over her last-minute reluctance to leave her family. “I didn’t expect to feel this way. And you know what, Sharon? I have to apologize for a couple of things. First, I want to apologize for being so cold when you were going through the trauma with Ben. I didn’t understand. I think I do now. Sorry I wasn’t more sympathetic.”
“It’s okay. I needed to hear what you said. You were right. I’m glad I didn’t back out of the trip.”
“Really?” Penny’s left eyebrow went up.
“Yes, really. Why do you ask? What’s the surprise?”
“Is my eyebrow up?”
“Yes.”
“Rats! I’m going to have to work on that. I do have another little surprise, and I think you’re going to need to read all my facial quirks when I tell you this.”
I looked hard at her. I’d forgotten how intense Penny’s gaze could be. She had a way of seeing into people as if she were shining a light so the person could search for something lost along the way. I don’t know why I let her do that to me. I could turn away and listen sufficiently without looking. But I didn’t. I allowed her dark eyes to shine their amber-flecked light on me because Penny knew things. She saw things way before I did. Right now she was looking for something. Apparently I had it.
“This is the other thing I was
going to apologize to you about. We don’t exactly have everything lined up in Finland. Which I think is fine because all our options are open. But I didn’t want you to feel …,” Penny searched for the right word, “… uncomfortable.”
“That’s okay. What needs to be worked on? I have the tour book. We could do some planning now.”
“Yes,” Penny said slowly.
“What about your aunt? Did she give you any specifics in her letter about things to do?”
Penny’s finger went up to her lips. “No. You see, I never heard back from my aunt. And before you say anything, Sharon, it’s not that big a deal. We have plenty of money. We can stay at any hotel we want the whole time, if we need to. I wasn’t necessarily planning to stay at my aunt’s house. I just wanted to meet her. But I don’t even know if she’s still alive. It’s not that important, though. We can try to track her down once we arrive. But if we don’t find her, we’ll just have fun exploring.”
I didn’t say anything right away. I’m certain both my eyebrows were down. Penny was watching me carefully.
“So, you’re telling me that we got on this plane and we’re flying halfway across the world, but when we arrive, we don’t have any idea what we’ll do.”
“Yes and no. We’ll take a taxi and find a hotel. Or rent a car. And we’ll find a restaurant and have some dinner. Or lunch, or whatever mealtime it will be then. And,” she added on an upbeat note, “we’ll pray and see what God puts in our path.”
I wanted to scold her. I wanted to say, “Penny, people like us don’t just show up in big foreign cities in the middle of winter and start looking up names of reputable hotels in a phone book!”
Before I could speak, Penny said, “I know I should have said something earlier, but I kept thinking I’d hear from my aunt at the last minute. I brought all the information I have about her with me. We’ll take each step, each day as it comes. Like I said, we’ve got plenty of money.” Penny’s eyes were ablaze with dancing sprinkles of hope. “Whatever happens, I know it will be an adventure.”
I reminded myself that “adventure” had been Penny’s objective all along, even in the church nursery so long ago. And I had told Jeff I didn’t want old age to be the only risky trip I ever took. This was it.
Risky. Adventuresome. Ridiculous.
At this moment, the appropriate adjective didn’t matter because when a person is thirty thousand feet in the air, seat belted in business class, she is, for all practical purposes, committed. Two months ago I never would have dreamed up any of this. Two days ago I was still trying to work up the courage to board that plane in Portland by myself. Two minutes ago, however, Penny’s left eyebrow went up, and secretly I wanted it to. I wanted Penny to surprise me and make me uncomfortable.
“What do you say, Sharon?” Penny looked at me hard. “Are you okay with this? I know you like life to be organized, but the thing is, now we’ll be completely at God’s mercy, and nothing is more adventuresome than that!”
With a deep breath, I gave my dearest friend the gift she had always so freely given me, the gift she was looking for when she looked so deeply into my eyes. I gave her grace. “Sure. I’m fine with this. We’ll figure it out as we go along.”
“Perfect! I was hoping you wouldn’t be mad. This is going to be great; you’ll see. We’re going to have the kind of trip they never write about in the tour books.”
My better sense told me I should mention people had good reasons for not abandoning themselves haphazardly to God’s mercy, and such erratic trips weren’t written about in the tour books for good reasons. But I pressed my lips together and enjoyed the sensation of once again being in the wake of the fabulous, fearless, flying Penny.
Four
With our enthusiasm elevated. Penny and I listed our options. A nice but not too expensive, centrally located hotel in Helsinki would meet our needs. A taxi was preferred over a rental car because it could be snowing, and neither of us had driven much in snow.
We went through the tour book, circling potential hotels and finding a phone number for a taxi company. Until we arrived, we couldn’t do much more.
I bent down to put away the tour book, and something extraordinary happened. The clouds, which had cushioned our flight for the past few hours, cleared, and a burst of sunshine spilled in through the window. I turned to lower the window shade and found myself staring down on snow-covered mountains. They looked like a row of little girls dressed for their first Holy Communion. They seemed to be waiting for their cue to begin the processional march. I’d never seen anything so pure and majestic.
“Penny, look.”
She leaned over. “I wonder if those are the Canadian Rockies. Or would we be past them by now? We’re traveling north, aren’t we? Into the sun. Our winter day will be short. Canada is so beautiful.”
Penny flitted through a recounting of a story I’d heard many times. I guessed it to be one of her favorite memories since she told it often. Two summers before we met, Penny and Dave rode his Harley from California to Banff, Canada. They lived on moose jerky and cheap beer. She wore the same pair of jeans every day for seven weeks and only had two pairs of undies. She never wore a bra, only halter tops. The skin on her shoulders and upper back had become permanently leathered from the sun and wind. One night, when Penny and Dave were sleeping under the stars, a bear ambled within twenty feet of them. The bear licked the gas tank on their motorcycle and then lumbered into the forest.
I listened with my gaze fixed on the magnificent world beneath my window. The world I was watching couldn’t possibly contain lumbering bears or braless women on motorcycles. From my viewpoint, the world below was perfect in every way.
The serving cart arrived at our row, and we received the lunch trays that were offered to us. I noticed the classy-looking woman across the aisle from Penny as, in a British accent, she asked where she might dispose of her “rubbish.”
I subtly observed the way the woman kept her fork in her left hand after she cut her chicken and then took a bite without switching the fork back to her right hand. She wore a honey-colored knit skirt with a matching sweater. The sleeves were pushed up to her elbows, and she wore a gold charm bracelet on her right wrist that shone on her dark, bare arm. Her skin was as dark as obsidian. I’d never been so close to a person who was the opposite of pale, blond, uncultured me.
“Do you want my sourdough roll?” Penny asked me, as she examined the meal in front of her. “I’m trying to keep myself to only one bread a day, and I ate half a bagel on the way to the airport. It was stale; I shouldn’t have eaten it. This roll looks much better. But I’m not going to eat it.”
“I don’t care for it, thanks.”
“I meant to ask you earlier, how’s Gloria? What did the doctor say?”
“He’s going to run some tests on Friday.”
“Did you go see her last night?”
“Yes, for about five minutes. She went off on a tangent about how inconsiderate I was being and how she might not be alive when I returned.”
“What did Grampa Max say?”
“He said he thought she would be okay. I asked him if I could do anything for them, and he said, ‘Yeah, you can get outta here for a few weeks and let us fix our problems for a change. It’s time you went and made a few problems of your own.’ ”
“I’ve always adored that man,” Penny said with a broad smile. “It’s too bad Gloria treats you the way she does.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Yes, it is.”
I shrugged. “I can’t change her, Penny. I’ve reached the point where I’ve decided that she can’t hurt me anymore.”
“Well! That’s a new, improved approach. Good for you.”
“It’s this trip,” I told Penny. “I don’t know exactly what happened that day when Gloria brought over the Styrofoam balls and I stood up to her. But when I saw her last night, I was free. It didn’t bother me that she was still against this trip.’ I didn’t feel guilty at all.??
?
“Good for you.” Penny opened her small packet of salad dressing with her teeth. “We’ll find a really fun souvenir for Gloria, and you’ll come home a hero in her eyes. You’ll see.”
Penny chatted about her kids as we ate. I listened and kept checking the view outside the airplane window.
The waning sun was already behind us, low in the west. We rapidly headed into the night. Layers of thick, ethereal clouds formed a puffy, pink-tinted comforter beneath us as our 747 rose above it all.
I watched the night come. Or perhaps I was watching us race into the night. Every so often a bundle of clouds would open, and far below I could spot tiny gatherings of light, evidence of life.
Then I saw it. The moon. Round and unblinking, that mysterious silver orb seemed to race toward us, riding an invisible, celestial current. I watched the moon peek in the window at me. I imagined I could feel its cool, steady light, more fierce and determined than the glow of any night-light. The plane banked slightly to the right. I turned my head to keep an eye on the moon. I watched and watched and then suddenly, in a blink, it was behind us.
I silently recited Ben’s favorite nursery rhyme, Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon; the little dog laughed to see such sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon.
I looked out the window again and was certain that the moon now was under us. Turning to Penny with what I’m sure was a look of dumbfounded marvel, I said, “Guess what? We just jumped over the moon!”
Penny laughed. “Like the cow?”
“Yes, like the cow. We jumped over the moon!”
The flight attendant reached to clear my tray, and Penny busted up. “Well, don’t look now, but your dish is about to run away with your spoon!”
Our little jokes weren’t that funny, but we were so tired they seemed hilarious. We laughed hard, but then I had to excuse myself and stand in line for the rest room. I shifted from right foot to left and looked around at the immense variety of travelers. Did any of them realize we were on the other side of the moon? None of the faces I scanned seemed amazed. I would have to be amazed for all of us. Amazed and delighted and a little bit nervous about being at God’s mercy, as Penny called it.