In the event of a change in cabin pressure, the flight attendant on the video was saying, you put your oxygen mask on first, pulling the cord, and then you helped the others in your party who needed your assistance. The video showed a nice-looking dad tugging the oxygen mask over his own face, his placid daughter sitting quietly beside him, breathing bad air.
What kind of idiot came up with that rule? They didn’t understand human nature at all.
She imagined the compartment filling slowly with smoke and Noah beside her, gasping. Did they really think that she could straighten the mask on her own face and breathe in clean air while her asthmatic son struggled to take a breath? The assumption was that she and her child were two entities with separate hearts and lungs and minds. They didn’t realize that when your child was gasping for air, you felt your own breath trapped in your chest.
And meanwhile, she was lying to her own son, and this was making him howl in distress, disturbing the other passengers on the plane, disrupting their ability to hear how to fasten a seat belt, and seriously addling her already compromised good sense.
Noah wanted to go to Asheville Road, and they were going to Asheville Road, but he couldn’t know that, not yet, not this time. Brooklyn by way of Dayton, that’s what she’d said to him, grateful that he was still too young to make sense of a map. She was not about to make the same mistake twice. She’d make a new mistake instead, if need be.
“I want to see my mama!” Noah was yelling, and the other passengers looked at her as if she were lying to them, too.
The plane readied itself for takeoff and began wheeling forward, barreling down its runway. She had never been afraid of flying, but now she felt something like alarm at the plane’s initial tremors as it rose.
When she was pregnant, she’d read studies that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol could cross through the placenta and into the fetus, affecting fetal development and causing low birth weight. This made sense to her: it wasn’t just the carrots she ate, the vitamins she took: what she felt, her baby felt. She had tried to remain as calm as possible, turning down a plum job with a big corporate firm so as not to adversely impact her developing baby with long hours and maximum stress.
Now she felt the cortisol spiking through her system and wondered if Noah could still somehow feel it, if tiny particles of her stress surrounded the air he breathed and made everything worse. She couldn’t help it, though. The world was more dangerous than it had been a few weeks ago. It was a world that slipped and slid beneath you, where children died because mothers forgot to check the latch. How did you keep your child safe in that kind of a world?
From the moment she’d stepped on the Greyhound bus until the moment she’d walked onto the plane with Noah and Jerry at Dulles Airport, she’d had the feeling of rolling down a steep hill. She couldn’t stop. If she put her hands out on either side to slow the momentum, they would scrape themselves raw.
The plane lifted into the sky. Noah’s voice rose to a high, keening wail. And she was left with herself. What was she doing? How could she revisit this idea, after the fiasco they had so recently encountered? How could she risk hurting yet another mother?
How could she imagine that Noah was not hers and hers alone?
And yet, as if in response, the line came suddenly into her head:
Your children are not your children.
Where had she heard that? Who had said it?
Janie leaned her head briefly against the seat in front of her and patted her shrieking son’s knee.
Your children are not your children.
She remembered now, as she listened to the cries overtaking her in waves of sound and saw the flight attendant frowning down the aisle in her direction: it was a song. A Sweet Honey in the Rock song she’d heard with Noah last summer at a free concert in Prospect Park.
It was an early July evening, the air mild and breezy. She had settled on a blanket with some friends and enough hummus and pita and carrots to feed a small city of preschoolers. The singers’ voices had blended in perfect a cappella harmony (Your children are not your children … though they are with you, they belong not to you), and Janie had taken off her shoes and wriggled her weary toes, listening to her friends’ worries (private vs. public schools, thoughtless husbands). She herself couldn’t afford private school and had no husband to complain of, but she was happy, because the song was wrong, and Noah was hers, and it was a beautiful evening, and she couldn’t imagine having much love left inside of her for anybody else, anyway.
How could she have imagined then that she would be here, barreling faster than breath toward a woman who was not expecting them?
Only last summer, and yet it may as well have been another life.
“I WANT MY MAMA!” Noah shouted again, and the whole plane could hear him: as if she were kidnapping him, as if he hadn’t always been entirely hers.