Skid

  He’d packed lightly, not bothering to bring anything to read. Now that he was on the airplane, feeling safer, he regretted that he hadn’t brought a magazine or something. He pulled out SkyMall catalog, flipped through it, and laughed at the idea that on the trip home, he could buy anything in there.

  He’d rather have a new guitar. Except not really. He loved his guitar. It had a lot of character with its dents and gashes. So what did he want?

  Right now, he just wanted to get across the Atlantic.

  All right, Lucy reasoned with herself, maybe the polka dots were a little loud. The pilot probably meant it as a compliment, and she was in a heightened state of sensitivity. Possibly elevated to orange.

  She hoped she played it off well. Smiles, though hard to come by, covered up what any high-priced concealer couldn’t.

  Grasping her stub, she looked for her seat, 20D. She spotted it. In between two men.

  Before she could manage to roll her eyes, the man in 20E—young, with tanned skin and a hair part that looked like it might fall off the side of his head—locked eyes with her, glanced at her ticket, and quickly unfastened his seat belt. “You’re here?” he asked.

  Lucy nodded.

  He grasped a yellow notepad and a pen and, with a gentlemanly gesture, offered her the aisle seat.

  “Oh, you’re kind. Thank you. I’m fine where I am, though.”

  She maneuvered her way into the seat, pushed her Jimmy Choo handbag under the seat in front of her, and adjusted her outfit so it wouldn’t wrinkle too badly. On her other side sat a dull-looking man without much interest in anything but his reading, which was fine with her. She planned to do some reading herself.

  The blond man on her other side sat back down and fastened his seat belt. He smiled, this time a little nervously, but he looked nice enough. She tried to relax, scanning the heads of people all around her, wondering where they were going and why.

  A flight attendant approached and addressed the man in 20E. “Yes?”

  “May I have another blanket?”

  The flight attendant’s eyes widened at the request, but she nodded and left. The man glanced at Lucy. He held the first blanket in his lap. “I get a little cold sometimes.”

  “Sure.”

  “And tired.”

  He spread the blanket over his legs and tapped his pen against the notepad he carried. He jotted something down, turned the notepad over, and then stared forward.

  “Where are you headed?” Lucy asked with a grin.

  She refused to be a man hater, even though she really wanted to be. Men should have the benefit of the doubt, and she realized she had the power to give it to them, to perhaps see them as they couldn’t see themselves. She imagined this man to be kind, caring, and respectful of women. She imagined it over and over in her head as she watched him call for a fluffier pillow.

  Danny felt relieved as they made their way through the preflight checks even as he observed a sticky note with all the flight attendants’ names on it. Despite her eccentricities, the captain appeared to be a capable woman with no particular agenda except to get everyone over the Atlantic to Amsterdam. He wasn’t certain if he’d be called Bubba the entire flight, but watching James being called Boy was fun enough to tolerate his own nickname.

  James, the nonflying pilot on this flight, was already complaining that he wouldn’t log any flying hours, and even hinted that they should turn on the beacon now. Danny had heard this argument a handful of times from pilots who’d become bitter over the years about pay cuts. Since they were paid by the hour, some cheated and turned on the beacon, which was attached to the computer that logged their hours, before they left the gate.

  Danny never worried that much about money, but maybe he should’ve.

  As the captain rattled off the list, Danny checked everything from the fuel gauge to the flight plan loaded into the flight management system. He marveled at her efficiency. Loading the flight plan was cumbersome, but she did it quickly and accurately. Taking her lead, Danny checked the switches as James crushed up four Ambien tablets.

  “Are we ready to push back?” Danny asked.

  “Not yet,” the captain said. “Bubba, you’re going to offer our honored guest some applesauce.” She handed him a small, plastic container of Mott’s. “Dump that Ambien in.”

  Danny peeled back the foil, and James poured the dusty, white contents in, stirring it with his finger. “Are we breaking the law?” Danny asked.

  “No. The animal wouldn’t assist the woman off the airplane in an emergency, and if it gets out of control, it could cause serious problems during an evacuation. She should be just fine with the animal sleeping next to her.”

  “How, exactly, do I do this?”

  “Simply tell Anna Sue that in celebration of having our first pig onboard, we’d like to offer him a special meal. We’ve got to lighten the mood on the craft, make people feel like it’s something special to be flying with a pig. This kind of story can be passed down to the grandchildren. How many people get to fly with a pig?”

  “You should’ve seen the time we served Sloppy Joes onboard,” James quipped.

  Danny stood, carefully cupping the applesauce container. Slipping out the cockpit door, he found GiGi fanning herself and looking flushed.

  “Can we get some air going?” she asked.

  “It’s not hot enough to supplement with the auxiliary power unit,” Danny said.

  “Look at me! My bangs are sweaty!”

  She did look very hot, but she was also dealing with a lot of pressure. A pig. A prisoner. A man who could vomit at any second. With a lot of bodies onboard at 98.6 degrees, the cabin always got a little hot before takeoff.

  “You know it uses fuel,” Danny said as gently as possible. Fuel, with a capital F, seemed involved in every decision at the airline these days. As soon as the wheels left the ground, so did the pilot’s control of the airplane. The company had calculated that pilots who circled the aircraft in order to go the right direction made too wide of a turn, using more fuel than necessary. Since then, the planes made all the fuel-efficient decisions, including turning themselves so precisely that the company saved millions of dollars a year. “Once we get up in the skies, everything will cool off.”

  “Did you just tell me to cool off?”

  “No, I said…I didn’t say—”

  She glared at his applesauce. “You’re snacking?”

  “This is for the pig. Excuse me.”

  Danny pushed past Hot and Bothersome, through a quiet and reserved business class, and to the end of the main cabin, where Chucky sat across two seats next to Anna Sue. Squatting next to her, he smiled warmly and held up the applesauce. “Thought we’d offer our guest a treat before takeoff.”

  Stroking the pig’s ears, Anna Sue looked truly touched. “That is so kind of you. Chucky loves applesauce.” Chucky’s ears perked up, and his nostrils flared. “But I can only feed him a small diet while onboard. He is trained to eat like a Seeing Eye dog. While on duty, he can’t have people food or anything that might cause him stomach trouble. I feed him a small snack once an hour.”

  Danny stretched the smile farther across his face. “Oh. Are you sure—”

  Chucky lunged forward, causing a few people to gasp, and seemed to suck the applesauce right through his snout. Danny and Anna Sue leaned in to find the plastic cup empty.

  Anna Sue smiled. “He does love applesauce.”

  “Maybe that wasn’t enough to cause any, um, problems,” Danny said.

  “I’m prepared. I have Depends.”

  “Okay.”

  Anna Sue’s smile turned shy. “Thank you for your kindness. I know people don’t like pigs. If they just knew Chucky, knew how sweet he is—”

  Chucky did look sweet. Or maybe sleepy. Danny hoped forty milligrams of Ambien would be enough. “He seems very nice.”

  “And he’s protective too. One time, an animal control officer tried to tranquilize him. He became infuriated. It’s
like he knew, sensed what was happening to him. Very, very unhappy.”

  Through the slight glaze that settled into Chucky’s eyes, Danny got the strangest feeling he knew something.

  “Pigs are very smart,” Anna Sue said.

  A few whispers circled around them. Danny leaned toward Anna Sue. “Listen, Anna Sue, I’m sure you’re accustomed to people feeling a little awkward around Chucky.” He chose his words carefully, unsure how an emotionally challenged woman might react to any observation about her pig.

  “If they just got to know him,” Anna Sue replied, “he’s precious.”

  Danny smiled in the direction of Chucky, whose gaze had become fixed on the ceiling. He’d grown very still.

  “I thought I’d try to lighten the atmosphere, maybe tell a few pig jokes or something. You know, just to get people laughing about the situation.” He paused, trying to read Anna Sue while keeping his eye on the pig, who seemed to be regretting the applesauce. “I guess what I’m trying to ask is whether or not that would be okay. How would you feel about that?”

  Anna Sue patted him on the arm. “You’re kind to ask, and pigs are very smart, but I can assure you, he’s not going to understand you’re talking about him.”

  Chucky leaned into the seat, his snout relaxing on the armrest.

  “O…kay. Thanks. We’ll see what we can come up with.”

  Danny rose and returned to the cockpit, wondering how he felt about deceiving such a nice woman and drugging what appeared to be a perfectly reasonable pig.

  GiGi stopped him before the cockpit door. “I don’t know what you have to do to make it happen, but I need air. Do you understand me? Cold air.” She wasn’t finished, but somebody pushed the Call button. “If this is the guy in 20E…” She gasped. “It is!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re not even in the air and he’s asked for an extra blanket and two different pillows!”

  “Just try to accommodate. Remember, we’re trying to reinvent ourselves as the airline that takes care of its—”

  “Shut up.”

  Danny sighed and joined James and the captain in the cockpit. He lowered his voice. “Listen, um, GiGi’s asking if we could turn on the APU to get more air.”

  The captain studied one of her sticky notes, then faced him. “You’re being awfully diplomatic.”

  “I am?”

  “Shut the door for a moment.”

  Danny obeyed as the captain pulled something out of her flight bag. It looked like a metal thermostat one might find in a house.

  “It is my experience, Bubba and Boy, that we’re dealing with hot flashes.”

  Danny couldn’t help it. His eyes widened like those of an eight-year-old who’d just heard something he should’ve heard from a parent first. The captain listed this off like a fact sheet, as if it didn’t occur to her that she was once in this same age bracket. And female. Even James, always poised to be inappropriate, looked speechless.

  “So,” the captain continued, “what we’re going to do is use this. It’s a thermostat.” She held it up and turned it around. “It has a magnet on the back. We’re going to stick it out there on something metal and tell the flight attendants that it controls the air, that we just got it from Boeing.” She handed it to Danny. “Be discreet when you put it up. Don’t let them see you do it.”

  Danny raised an eyebrow. “This will really work?”

  “Like a charm. If they think they’re controlling the air, they’re happy.”

  Danny left the cockpit just as two harried passengers dragged themselves through the door of the craft.

  “Thank you for waiting,” said the guy, out of breath. “I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow.”

  “Our flight attendant, Kim, will be happy to help you to your seats and find a place for your carry-ons,” Danny said.

  The woman grinned as she smoothed her hair into place. “Thank you so much.”

  Danny glanced down the aisle to make sure all the FAs were sufficiently busy, then found a place for the thermostat on the sidewall near the cockpit. It snapped onto the metal with a loud pop, but nobody noticed. He chuckled.

  “What are you doing?”

  He whirled around to find GiGi, who moments before had been at the other end of the aircraft, right behind him.

  “I’m, uh…fiddling with the thermostat.” It nearly came off as a question.

  “What thermostat?”

  “Boeing installed them so the air can be controlled inside the cabin.” Danny pitched a thumb over his shoulder. GiGi rose on her toes to look behind him, staring at the thermostat for a long moment.

  She nudged him out of the way. “Which means we should be controlling it, not you.” She reached for it. “It’s set on seventy-eight! No wonder we’re hot!”

  Afraid he might blow the whole thing with a single word, Danny simply nodded and returned to the cockpit.

  “It’s working,” he whispered excitedly.

  The captain hardly acknowledged him and instead focused her attention on the final checklist. As Danny climbed into his seat, he wondered just how weird—and possibly fun—this flight would get.

  Chapter 9

  It seemed whatever Lucy hoped for and truly believed with all her heart was coming to pass. The man to her right, with a calm laugh like a bashful ten-year-old, came complete with manners, a slight sense of humor, and a need to encourage. It seemed his only downfall was that he kept making up excuses to hit on the flight attendants, except even then, he didn’t so much hit on them as compliment them on their job.

  In all her years of experience with men, starting in fifth grade when she decided Frank Graham’s freckles were beyond adorable, she’d never met anyone like—

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hank.”

  “I’m Lucy.”

  “I like that name.”

  She’d never met anyone like this guy. Slightly shy, yet in a weird way convincingly confident. A simple gentleness filled his eyes, except when he seemed to look right through her. Judging by the small smile that stayed on his lips, maybe he liked what he saw.

  Lucy rested her head against the back of the seat. Only to herself would she admit she doubted the secret in the book she’d been reading—and why it was called The Secret when it didn’t seem that secretive since landing on the New York Times Best Seller list. But something made her want to try. Not a single negative word had left her lips. Well, that wasn’t true. She’d slipped a time or two, but for the most part, she’d managed to exert positive energy, refusing to listen to her mother nag or her boss complain. Instead, just like The Secret told her, she filled her mind with damage-reversing images. She likened it to brain waves by Enya.

  The flight attendant returned with a new set of earphones and a tight smile directed at Hank. “Okay, I checked these out and they seem to be perfectly intact, so you shouldn’t have any problem with one side sitting slightly lower than the other. Okay?”

  “Thank you so much,” Hank said, taking the earphones. “I appreciate that you’d do this for me.”

  Lucy watched the flight attendant start to say something, then leave with a confused look on her face.

  “You’re nice,” Lucy said, gently nudging his shoulder with hers.

  “I am?”

  “Yeah. That’s why she looks confused. It’s rare to find a nice person.”

  Hank wrote something on his notepad, then turned his attention to her. “You’re nice too.”

  “My thoughts are sending out a magnetic signal that draws the parallel back to me.”

  He didn’t respond, probably because a positive attitude came naturally to Hank, which meant she had the good fortune to sit next to someone with favorable karma. She, unfortunately—no, not unfortunately. She had to rid her vocabulary of that word. She fortunately had to work hard to press into existence good things for her life, which meant focusing her energy toward the positive.

  “So what takes you to the Netherlands?” Lucy
asked.

  “Business.”

  “What kind?”

  “Consumer reports. What about you?”

  “I got dumped by a jerk of a guy and I’m trying to put my life back to—” Lucy closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m revisiting the idea that I’m a whole and happy human being, independent and without need of an alpha male.”

  “What’s an alpha male?”

  Lucy smiled. “I like you even more.” These days omega males were becoming attractive. Sizing up Hank, though, he didn’t seem on either end of the spectrum. Perhaps a beta, the kind that could overthrow the alpha but was secure enough not to.

  Lucy reached into her bag and pulled out her book, brushing her hand over it. “Have you read this?”

  Hank leaned over to look at it. “The Secret?”

  “You’ll have to get your hands on a copy. It’s really a—”

  Then Lucy heard a woman’s voice behind her. “Jeff, can you put this up there?”

  “Yeah, just a sec.”

  Lucy whipped around in her seat, clutching the top of the headrest to pull herself up. By the time her eyes cleared the top of the seat, all she could see was the back of a blonde in very tight jeans. She disappeared through the galley.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Hank. The man on her other side gave her a cordial glance but said nothing.

  Lucy turned around, panting as she gave birth to a strong, invisible wall of energy to surround her.

  Hank’s hand shot up, and he pushed the flight attendant’s button.

  “No…no, I’m…I’m…” The plane started to spin.

  The flight attendant started toward them with a mean look on her face. She punched off Hank’s Call light. “What is it? The carpet’s the wrong color?”

  “Something’s wrong with her,” Hank said, pointing at Lucy.

  The flight attendant’s angry gaze shifted to concern as she noticed Lucy. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m…” Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. “I’m fine. I’m just…I’m warm…”

  The flight attendant shook her head. “I knew it. I’ll turn down the thermostat and bring you some water.”