Julie seems unaware of anyone but the woman in front of her. She has caught Audrey’s gaze and bobs her head to maintain it as Audrey’s eyes try to escape.
“You were still young when you had me, Mom. You and Dad knew you weren’t ready, you were just a couple of broke artists in a studio apartment in an abandoned corner of New York, and you argued about it for weeks. Dad said it was wrong to bring a child into this fucked-up world, you said it was wrong not to. You said the kid you’d make was exactly what this fucked-up world needed.”
Julie laughs and wipes at her eyes. Audrey’s have stopped darting and have settled on the floor. Julie bends low, trying to catch them again. “You were my age, Mom. I just turned twenty. Can you wish me happy birthday?”
Audrey hunches inward, making soft, inscrutable noises. Then she shoots to her feet and rips off her lab coat, tossing it away like it’s on fire. She stands naked in the middle of the empty cabin, the hopeless ruin of her body on full display.
“Oh, Jules . . . ,” Nora murmurs sadly.
Julie looks up at her mother, freshly stricken by the sight. The tears in her eyes have never really dried, they’ve just ebbed and flowed, and now they’re flowing again.
Audrey looks down at the gaping hole in her side. She passes a hand through it. Her exposed lung inflates, and a mournful howl escapes her slack mouth.
“Mom,” Julie whimpers, a meaningless, ineffectual noise. “Mom, please.”
Abram shakes his head and returns to the cockpit. The impossibility of Julie’s Icelandic hopes is too obvious for comment. No matter what science-fiction utopia we may find there, her mother is going to die.
I notice Sprout peeking through the gap in the curtain. She hesitates. She watches Julie for a moment before following her father.
“On our left,” Abram announces over the PA in a tired drone, “as far away as possible, you’ll see Axiom corporate headquarters, aka Branch 1, aka New York City. If you’d like to be distracted from sad thoughts, feel free to be frightened now.”
Julie is beyond any comfort I can give. A clumsy pat on the back won’t help and may hurt. I can’t begin to imagine what she needs right now, so I decide to give her space.
I push through the curtain and wander up the aisle, watching New York through the windows. The high-rises resemble a grove of burnt trees in the hazy distance. The setting sun reflects off them like fire. We are many miles away, safe above the glittering Atlantic, but I can feel eyes on me. Scopes and targeting lasers. Perhaps a new LOTUS segment calling for us to be shot down with a less-than-subtle montage of famous plane crashes. None of this will matter. We are beyond their reach, and soon we’ll be outside their world altogether, removed from their savage ecosystem.
Struggling to find the peace this should bring me, I move to the western window and watch the sun fall into the ocean, breaking into a thousand pieces on the water. For a moment, I feel it. A sense of ground swept clean, of new possibilities poking through the loam. Then, as I always do, I keep looking, and I find something that kills my reverie. I blink and I squint, but it doesn’t disappear. I run to the plane’s midsection, the window closest to the wing, and I look out at the engines.
A man looks back at me.
“Abram?” I shout toward the cockpit.
Abram doesn’t respond. Perhaps he has no room in his head for what I want to tell him. And how can I tell him? How can I express to him this absurdity: that there’s a huge, musclebound Dead man clinging to one of the engine posts. His blue-gray skin is covered in frost, but he’s not frozen solid. He’s moving. He’s inching forward.
“Abram!”
I hear him grumble and stir in the cockpit; I hear his belt unlatch, but the Dead man has grasped the rim of the engine. He is pulling himself toward some inscrutable goal, perhaps the scent of the tiny family in the cockpit ahead, willfully unaware of the chasm of sky between them.
Abram steps out of the cockpit. He registers the urgency on my face and opens his mouth to ask. Then the man slips over the rim of the engine.
There are two explosions. The first is a reddish-black burst from the back of the engine as the bodybuilder’s hard-earned mass is spread across Long Island like crop duster spray. The second is an eruption of fire that completely engulfs the wing, and when it clears, the engine is gone. So is a large chunk of the wing. Burning fuel streams from the hole in long snakes of flame.
As the plane begins to bank, as Abram disappears into the cockpit and everyone else rushes up from the rear, shouting and screaming, my mind is stuck on the least useful thought:
We never named it. I grew the seeds of my third life in this plane. Julie and I closed our vast distance in it. It rescued us and carried us around the country, and we never gave it a name.