Page 20 of Just Come Over
She was lingering, though, at another shelf. “Look, you can make a crystal! It’s so, so beautiful. It’s like ajewel.”She was holding that box to her now, too. It made for a juggling act, considering Moana and the sticker book. “It’s the best thing ever. It’s—”
“Pink,” he said. “I noticed. But you can’t grow a crystal on a plane. Once we’re on board, there’ll be movies.” They had a whole section for kids, didn’t they? “You can watch all of them you want.”
“My mommy says only half an hour a day. Except it could be a neck-seption.”
“That’s it,” he said. “Definitely an exception. Everybody gets to watch movies on the plane.” Except coaches who needed to catch up, because they had to hit the ground running the next day. Coaches had work to do.
He bought the crystal thing. You made a night light with it, he’d found on further study, and she was afraid of the dark. It only made sense. He also bought her an enormous book about prehistoric creatures, because it was educational, too, and it was quiet. She could look at the pictures, even if she couldn’t read it. It had two hundred eight pages. There were a lot of pictures. He bought her an Antarctic Dinosaurs T-shirt as well. She was going to need clothes. It was summer in New Zealand, and not much in those bags of hers had been suitable. Her summer clothes had probably been too small for her, he realized, and her unfortunate pink suitcase was three-quarters empty.
The shirt had nothing to do with sparkles, flying horses, or pink. It was black, and she was captivated all the same. The dinosaur was big, it was roaring, and that seemed good enough for her. Which was fortunate, when he came to think about it, since she was going to have to live with him.
He did not, however, buy her a hatching dinosaur egg, grizzly-bear-paw slipper-boots, or a plush gold-sequined snake that was two meters long. Every man had his limit, and a sequined snake was his. “You’re reaching,” he told her when she held it up and opened her mouth to say, “Iloveit. It’s the best snakeever.”He didn’t even need to hear it.
Snake or not, she was set for the flight, at least once he handed over his card and signed away eighty-nine dollars. Problem solved.
Sleep didn’t come gradually that night. That day. Whatever it was, in real time. His body had no idea anymore. Instead, sleep slammed him right between the eyes. The last thing he remembered, he’d been working on his laptop, wearing his noise-canceling headphones and enjoying, in a masochistic sort of way, the feel of a long-haul jetliner at night, the collective weight of hundreds of sleeping bodies and the pleasure of being one of the only souls still awake. He hadn’t made his seat into a bed, because he still felt perfectly alert, despite the beer he’d had before takeoff, once he’d got Casey settled. And the wine he’d had with dinner, once he’d got her settled again, after she’d told him, “Moana’s not scared. She’s just lonesome.” They’d worked out, eventually, that Moana would be less lonesome if Rhys were in the seat in front of Casey rather than behind her, since she’d be able to see his head, at least while he was sitting up. Or, rather, Moana would be able to.
The flight attendants had been awesome, as usual. When he’d told Ilona, a veteran of Business Premier long-haul whom he’d first met in his playing days, “This is my daughter, Casey. It’s her first flight,” she hadn’t blinked. She certainly hadn’t looked like she’d be rushing to alert the media, however interested New Zealand would be in this story. Instead, she’d said, “Hi, Casey. Would you like to come into the cockpit before we take off, and meet the pilots?”
“Yes, please,” Casey said, like somebody who knew what a cockpit was. Casey was nothing if not a quick learner.
“After that,” Ilona said, “maybe we could find you a snack.”
“Do you have any cookies?” A quick learner, indeed.
“I think wedohave a cookie,” Ilona said. “Let’s go see.”
Casey cast a triumphant glance at Rhys as she headed up the aisle with Ilona’s hand on her shoulder, and he had to smile. She was getting another neck-seption, and he was going to finish this beer.
Tomorrow, though, once they got home? The regime would be back in place, as per usual. “Start as you mean to go on,” that was his motto. Tomorrow, it would be back to discipline. A scheduled, organized, orderly life.
Meanwhile, he’d work a bit more, knock this out, and still catch six hours of sleep before breakfast.
That was one second. The next, he was being poked in the arm by a white horse with sparkling wings. It kept shoving its nose into him, no matter how many times he pushed it away.
Wait. It wasn’t a horse. It was a lizard. It opened its mouth, showed its teeth, and poked him again.
Dinosaur.
“Aaargh!”It was a roar, or a yell, except that he couldn’t hear it. His knees knocked into something hard, and his arm bashed against something else. His funny bone, that had been. The shock of the nerve being whacked reverberated all through his body and made his eyes water.
Plane,he realized.Casey.She’d been beside his seat, but when he’d yelled, she’d jumped back. She was hovering almost out of sight behind him, and he got his headphones off and his seatbelt unfastened, shoved his table back, ignored his elbow, twisted around, and asked, “What? Problem?”
Her hair was a tangled mess around her little face, and she was in her stockinged feet, the way she’d been when she’d gone to sleep after dinner, once Ilona had helped her make up her bed. When Rhys had assumed she was set for the night.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.
“Oh.” He shoved his feet into his shoes and got himself out of the seat. His body felt like it weighed four hundred pounds. The last few days of travel had caught up at last, it seemed. Or maybe that was lack of sleep, no workout, two—possibly three, depending how you counted—drinks, and two-thirds of a deep-dish sausage pizza.
He said, “Straight up the aisle. I’m right behind you,” and put a hand on her shoulder for good measure, since the plane was rocking a bit. He stopped at the toilet, and she stopped with him.
A second. Two. She turned around to look at him. He asked, “What?”
He realized what was different. She didn’t have Moana. She stared up at him, and finally, he crouched down to her level and asked again, “What?”
“Where’s the bathroom?” she asked.
“It’s right here,” he said, glad it was nothing more extreme.Why did my mummy die,or some other terrible middle-of-the-night question he wouldn’t be able to answer. “Didn’t you go earlier?”
