Page 55 of The Last Flight

It’s Danielle.

With questions about my failures, or things I forgot to do.

It’s Danielle.

Always pressing me, watching me.

It’s Danielle.

And she’s found me. Which means it won’t be long until Rory is on his way. Below me, the can lays on its side, dark-brown liquid pooling out, a growing puddle that resembles blood.

Eva

Berkeley, California

January

Five Weeks before the Crash

The day Liz moved, Eva stayed hidden inside her house, watching from her upstairs office as Liz’s rental furniture got loaded onto the company’s truck. Liz had slipped a note through her mail slot a few days after their argument, just a piece of paper, her neat script slanted, as if from another era.Everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear.Eva had crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash can by her desk.

She knew that when Liz’s apartment was empty and the truck was ready to leave, Liz was going to want to say goodbye. Eva tried to imagine facing Liz on the porch after two weeks of near silence, searching to find the words to apologize, to tell Liz that their friendship had mattered to her, despite the way she’d behaved.

She distracted herself by getting her own affairs in order. She checked her bank account in Singapore. She organized the evidence on Fish she’d been able to gather so far. She’d had all of it notarized the other day, just in case. The bored notary public had cracked her gum—thumbprint here, sign there—not even looking at what Eva had typed up.

But something tugged on her subconscious now, some piece of unfinished business that wouldn’t let go until she looked at it, one last time. Soon, she’d be gone, with a new name and a new life. And once she was, she could never return. The opportunity to see her birth family, maybe even speak to them, would be closed forever.

She entered her grandparents’ names into a Google search and clicked on one of the people-finder websites, quickly entering her credit card information to access the premium options that would give her a phone number and a street address.

It wasn’t hard. All this time, the information had been there, waiting for her to find it. Nancy and Ervin James, and an address just a few miles away in Richmond.

When Liz went to buy sandwiches for the movers, Eva slipped away. She wasn’t cut out for prolonged goodbyes. And there was too much she’d left unsaid to pretend otherwise.

* * *

She drove north, marveling at how close they’d been all this time, and wondered if they ever thought of her. If they ever looked for her. Perhaps they didn’t pay for access to her address like Eva had, but maybe they’d done their own web search.Eva James.And there she’d be, on a list of people who shared her name.Age 32, Berkeley, California.

She exited the freeway and navigated the last few blocks, finally driving down a wide, barren street filled with run-down houses. The yards were filled with junk, dead grass and weeds leaching all the color out of the environment. This was nothing like what she’d imagined, and she was tempted to keep driving, to hang on to the illusion she’d built for herself over the years.

She pulled up outside a faded green house with a broken window in the garage door. Someone had taped a piece of cardboard over it, though the tape looked old and brittle, the cardboard warped from water damage and edged with mold. Across the street, a dog chained in the yard split the silence with its barks.

As she walked up the cracked cement path, her eyes scanned the brown lawn and tattered shrubbery and tried to see herself playing there, but none of it matched what she’d spent so many years picturing. Where were the flower beds she’d imagined her grandmother tending? The well-maintained car in the driveway? Where were the ironed curtains in the windows, the driveway her grandfather power-washed once a year? What she saw was so unexpected, like an out-of-tune piano hitting all the wrong notes, loud and jarring.

Eva stood on the shady porch, trying to breathe through her mouth, the stench of cigarette smoke seeping through the closed door. She knocked, and inside, the sound of footsteps approached, causing her to want to turn around and walk away. She no longer wanted to see what was behind that door.

But before she could move, it was pulled open. An older man stood in loose-fitting jeans and an old T-shirt, his ropy arms covered in tattoos. “Help you?” he asked, looking past her, toward her car parked at the curb. She was struck immediately by his eyes. They were hers. Same shape, same shade, and for a moment, she felt a breathless recognition, like the center piece of a puzzle snapping into place, completing the picture.

“Who is it?” a voice called from inside.

Over the man’s shoulder, Eva could just make out a large, lumpy figure in a chair. The smell of cigarette smoke was overwhelming, and underneath it something else—unwashed bodies and overcooked food.

“Sorry,” Eva said, backing down the steps. “I have the wrong house.”

The man stared at her, and she held her breath, waiting for a flash of recognition in his eyes, to see something shake loose—perhaps he’d see the ghost of her mother—his dead sister—standing before him. But he just shrugged, said “Suit yourself,” and swung the door closed.

She turned and walked down the walkway, her legs and arms uncoordinated and jerking, lurching her from the front path to the sidewalk and into her car. As she started the engine, she chastised herself for ever thinking they might be more than this, angry that she’d believed anything but the lowest possible denominator.

And yet, as she navigated the streets back to the freeway and headed south toward Berkeley, she realized she’d spent her whole life wishing for something she never would have had. All these years, she’d believed that if only they had loved her enough to raise her, she somehow could have avoided what happened to her at Berkeley. She could have finished her degree and built a legitimate life for herself. But now she knew that had she grown up there, she never would have made it to Berkeley in the first place.

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