Myles Wallace

Baggage Claim

The old man with the wandering, wide-eyed gaze and melted wax features stumbles down the aisle. He carries an over-sized plaid handbag out before him. He stops in front of me~wide, heavy, and swaying~breathing heavily. “Is this 15A?”
	I make to move. “Yes. You have the window seat.”
	He shakes his head. “I might need access to the aisle.”  Straining, the man hefts the bag upwards and slides it halfway into the overhead. The flight attendant, who walks unsteadily because her navy skirt is too tight around the knees, comes to help push it in.
	“I can handle it, sir,” she says from his side. 
	The man persists~pulling out someone’s coat to make room. The flight attendant draws a flat smile for him, takes the coat, and asks him to please get comfortable. She stuffs the coat into the overhead and, after a brief struggle, hands him a baggage claim ticket.
	“Just wait outside the plane once we get to Chicago.”
	The old man settles in beside me, too big to be flying in a plane this small where the flight attendants can’t push the beverage cart down the aisle without bumping people’s elbows. He goes for the armrest, and I reach for a Sky Mall magazine.
	“Those massage chairs are something else, aren’t they,” he says over my shoulder. I can feel his warm breath on the side of my face.
	“Yup.”  I turn the page. Across the aisle, a forty-something woman with wiry brown hair leans over, pulls a half-finished paperback out of her carry-on, tucks its bookmark behind her ear, and kicks the bag underneath the seat.
	“I went shopping with my daughter for a lawn chair last week,” says the old man. “They had one of those in their store. You press those buttons, and it can just jiggle you right to sleep.”
	“Pretty nice, yeah.”
	He nods into his chest, picking a piece of lint from his belly. “That’s why I like going on planes. I try to fly them as often as I can. There’s nothing like being jiggled to sleep. Of course, I used to do trains. Took the Cleveland to Chicago rail every other weekend. Those are even better. They get to rocking and jiggling. Could put you to sleep for a good long time.”
	I nod. The plane turns and stops on the runway. I can see the terminal and the planes lined up outside. “Yeah, speaking of that, I was going to get some shut-eye. I was up all night with the jet lag, you know?”
	“Just come from somewhere?”  His blue-green eyes roll forward as if they’re about to pop out.
	“Miami. Went for the weekend to see family. The lag wouldn’t affect most people, but I’m a bit of an insomniac.”  
	“My wife was an insomniac. Used to get out of bed four times a night to use the bathroom.”
	I turn away and lean up against the window. We’re moving faster. “Really?”
	“Sure,” he says, but more to himself than to me. 

	I drop off for a bit and wake with a start when the captain turns off the fasten seat-belt sign. I stay crammed in the corner where my seat meets the wall for a minute longer, trying to fall back asleep, but it’s useless. My bladder’s ready to burst. 
	I turn to my seatmate and try to decide whether or not to wake him up so I can get out. On plane rides, I sometimes step across the armrests to sneak out, but he’s smothering them with his hefty arms. His head is rolled back onto the headrest, his legs are stretched out in front of him as far as they can reach, and the seatbelt is stuffed up under his belly like a tourniquet. In a way, he looks peaceful. It takes me a moment to realize that something is off. A big man like him would normally be shaking the cabin with his foghorn snore, but he is silent. His belly quivers with the airplane, but otherwise he’s still. My stomach drops and then rises slowly into my throat.
	It takes me a several minutes before I attract the flight attendant’s attention, and she takes her time getting down the aisle. “Yes, sir?”  The woman across the aisle looks up from her book and peeks around the flight attendant.
	“I think there’s something wrong with the man sitting next to me.”  
	She watches the old man for a second, her face paling, a controlled panic settling into her eyes. “I’ll alert the captain.”
	A moment later, the captain comes on the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re just an hour outside of Chicago. Conditions are good out here~beautiful day to fly. It has come to my attention that a request has been made for any passenger who is a medical doctor to please notify the flight attendant. Thank you.”
	I pop up over the seat, scanning the tops of heads for a doctor. I see the flight attendant come out of the cabin, close the door quietly behind her, and walk past me to the back of the cabin. I watch her lips move as she whispers to someone in an aisle seat, and then a short, balding man stands up and follows her up the aisle.
	Approaching my row, he nods in my direction and then watches the old man. “He’s not breathing~that’s no good,” he says. 
	“Please keep your voice down, sir,” says the flight attendant, smoothing her tight skirt over her knees.
	The doctor seizes the man’s flopping wrist, holds his finger underneath it for a long minute. He shrugs. Leaning over, he feels for a pulse on the man’s swollen neck.
	“Yup. He’s dead.”
	The flight attendant shushes him with a hiss and a nervous glance around the cabin~the woman across the aisle ducks back into her book. The flight attendant escorts the doctor back to his seat and comes back with a blanket and pillow. She drapes the blanket over his face, pulls his head back by the hair, and shoves the pillow behind him.   
	“Are we going to land to get him off?” I whisper.
	“We’ll be arriving in Chicago in less than fifty minutes, sir.”  
	“Well, are there any other seats?”  The plane jolts and the blanketed head angles towards me, as though it forgot to tell me something. 
	She shuffles down and back up the aisle, looking for empty seats. “I’m afraid that we can’t accommodate you there, sir. Can I get you a drink instead?”
	I order a Sprite to keep my stomach down. The flight attendant whisks away, leaving me to my drink, when suddenly, from under the blanket, the old man clears his throat. “So, as I was saying, my wife was an insomniac. Died of a hemorrhage in the brain~no one saw it coming.”
	I spill soda across the foldout table and flatten my back to the window.
	“Those kinds of things no one can really predict, and I’ll be the first to admit that waking up next to a dead woman who’s soiled herself is not a great way to start your day.”
	You’re one to talk, I think, but I’m not about to say anything back. The woman across from me has somehow managed to fall asleep and the flight attendant is at the other end of the cabin.
	“That’s how my dog died,” he says. I look over to see if his mouth moves behind the blanket. Thank-fully, all I can see is the peak of the nose. I don’t want to see his blue-green eyes rolled towards me in a dead stare. The blanket starts to slip, and I quickly pull it back over his head.
	There is only one bathroom on the plane. After I have relieved myself, I stay in there a good ten minutes splashing water over my face and thinking about Miami. My mom has just died and seeing her there in the casket was the first time I’d seen her in almost five years. While I delivered my eulogy yesterday, I imagined her sitting up during the funeral and complaining I didn’t call enough~or that last year I hadn’t called at all. She always was a temperamental woman. 

	The night before the funeral, I pulled up along the curb of 4744 Buena Vista Drive, my sister’s house. Checking the address off my printed directions, I switched off the rental car’s engine. I climbed out, got my backpack out of the trunk, and walked up to her door. 
	A wide-shouldered man answered. “Who the hell are you?”
	I had forgotten about the time difference. 11:30. The kids were probably in bed. “Marty. I’m Clarissa’s brother.”
	“Marty?”  His eyes roll over my wrinkled black coat and string tie suspiciously. 
From behind him I hear my sister ask, “Sam, who’s there?”
	“Nobody.”  
She must’ve told him how I’d abandoned the family, how I’d broken her heart and left her alone with Mom, because he turned back to me and said, “There’s a motel down on the intersection of Main and Eighty-fifth. Keep going straight for half a mile and then hang a right. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.”  He closed the door. I began to understand why Mom objected to Clarissa’s marrying him eight years ago~at the time she’d called him a “brute,” which was what she called anyone who didn’t swallow her bullshit and feed her theirs with a silver spoon. I suppose Clarissa and I both needed to distance ourselves from her somehow. 
	It took me an hour to find the motel, and it was all booked. So I drove back to my sister’s house. Their house was dark. I parked the car and leaned back in the driver’s seat. Then I opened the sunroof and counted the stars, waiting to fall asleep.

	The next morning, Sam came out to the car with coffee and an apology.
	“It was late, and I was grumpy, and Clarissa’s been a regular basket-case this week with her mom’s upcoming funeral and all.” He handed me the coffee through the window. “Wanna come inside for breakfast?”   	
He led me up the walkway, through the living room, and into the kitchen where their three kids sat at the table pouring lakes of syrup over burnt pancakes.   
	“Kids,” he announced, “this is your uncle Marty.”  They looked up from their pancakes, none too impressed or curious. “Mom, can I be done?” asked the youngest through sticky lips.
	 I heard Clarissa set a pan down, and she came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. She was big, probably only a month or two away, but her eyes were wide and energetic. “Marty!”  She hugged me hard, and I couldn’t help but feel the bulge of a forming baby press up against me. 
She insisted that I sit down and have some breakfast~and excused her youngest in order to make room. After breakfast I offered to help with the dishes, but she wouldn’t let me. 
	“There’s only room for one at the sink,” she said, pushing hard against the pan with the pancake ashes. 

	As I stand in the airplane bathroom, meditating by the facet, twisting the nozzle on and off and staring into the tiny black drain, a woman pounds the restroom door behind me. “There are four of us waiting. Can you hurry it up in there?”  I dry my hands on a paper towel, squint into the shaking mirror to make sure it’s still me, and step outside. There are only two people waiting in line behind her~what a bitch. 

	I sat in the living room after breakfast talking with Sam and listening to the ruckus upstairs. 
	Sam took a long sip of coffee and set his mug down on the coffee table. “So you live in Chicago, right?” 
	“Yup.”
	“What do you do there?” he asks. Above us, there was a crash, then crying. Water had been running for the last hour.
	“I’m a writer. I freelance for a couple papers.”  I watched the ripples that were growing wider and wider on the surface of the coffee. Above us, it seemed as though someone was walking back and forth.
	He cocked his eyebrows. “How’s that work?”
	“Not very good. I’m trying to get on staff, but they’re not hiring many new people these days.”  Above me, Clarissa shouted and the floor shook as she ran down the hall. I wondered if we should go upstairs and help, but Sam seemed unperturbed. I despised him then for knocking up my sister and then sitting around on his lazy ass as she raised the kids.  
	“I see you’re not married yet.”  He pointed at my left hand.
	“Nope,” I said.
	“Got a girlfriend?”
	“Nope. Haven’t really got the time or the money.”  A scream followed by a chorus of other discordant screams. I clear my throat. “Should we go help out up there?” 
	He looked around towards the staircase, listening for a moment, and then took a sip of coffee. The screams faded. “They should be down in another ten minutes or so.”
	Fifteen minutes later, the boys marched down in matching navy blazers and tan slacks; the girl wore a purple velvet dress; all three looked miserable. Clarissa came slowly after them, a forced smile spanning her face. “Here we are!  Is everyone ready to go?”
	
	The flight attendant finds me hiding in the back next to the emergency exit door. “We’re going to be landing shortly, sir. Please go back to your seat.”  
	“You sure there isn’t another place to sit?”  
	She shakes her head, as if she’s almost sorry for me. 
	So I find my way back to aisle 15 and squeeze past the old man. I bump the blanket, and it almost falls off, but I catch it and pull it over his face.
	“You can’t imagine how much I appreciate that,” he says, once I’ve settled back into my seat. “I’d really hate to give the other passengers a scare.”
	Well, you’re kind of scaring me. I turn away. I feel really tired but know that sleeping now is impossible.
	“And I don’t mean to scare you if I am~I just wanted to tell you something before we landed and you went on with your life.”  He took a long breath. “Get some sleep so you don’t die of a hemorrhage, too.”  The plane jumps and he turns away. The rest of the flight, he is silent.

	That night, after the funeral and reception, after the weeping guests left, after Sam went to the basement to check his email, after the kids~one, two, three~had all been rounded-up, wrestled into pajamas, and tucked underneath spaceship, cowboy, and Diva Starz blankets, after the stacks of “good” dishes had been half scrubbed and crammed into the dishwasher, Clarissa crashed on the couch across the room from me. 
	“Well!” she announced, and I knew what she meant.
	“Well,” I said.
	She picked at a tomato sauce stain on her black blouse. “This isn’t very noticeable, is it?”  Although her belly was wide and firm, her face was soft and hollow. It looked as though she were slowly rotting from the stress of being alone.
	“Nah,” I said. Neither of us had changed all day, and by dinnertime I didn’t dare take off my jacket since I knew the shirt underneath was badly pitted-out. I sweat like a hog, so does Clarissa. I’ll bet she has to put on some pretty tough deodorant since ladies aren’t supposed to sweat. We’ll probably both die of aluminum-induced Alzheimer’s forty years down the road~locked away and asking after each other. Our kids will call us crazy.
	“Hey,” she said, coming to. “Sorry you had to sleep in the car last night.”
	“Don’t worry about it. I slept like a baby.”
	She grinned fiercely. “That’s a lie. You nearly fell asleep in your mashed potatoes tonight at dinner.”
	I loosened my tie, realizing it was still done-up tight. “Well, don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t’ve shown up like I did.”
	She picked at the stain. “I’m really glad to see you again.”  
	“Yeah. Too bad about Mom though.”  I hadn’t really thought of the woman all day. I imagined her standing at the top of the staircase and telling us to get to bed. 
	Clarissa shrugged. “Let’s be honest: she made a crappy grandmother. My kids hated going to see her on the weekends. She used to make them read the Bible aloud and chew with their mouths closed. Never stopped nagging them. I’m really glad to see you though. You have no idea how much I missed you. It tore me up when you disappeared after college.”
	I shifted uncomfortably. “Remember when Mom used to read to us from Psalms and Revelations before bed. If she knew I was an atheist now, I bet she’d climb out of that coffin and beat me to death with the New Testament.”
	“I think she would be glad to see you here.”
	“She drove me crazy, but I loved her,” I continued. “But I guess everybody’s got to die sometime, right?”
	“Marty,” Clarissa got up and walked over to the couch. It looked like she wanted to say something important. She stood before me, her hands clutching and grabbing at each other like quarreling spiders. Her pale fingers reminded me of Mom’s. Her voice was~like Mom’s~harsh, gravel in a tumbler.
	“Yeah?”
	“I’m going to bed,” she said, reluctantly, and stood there a moment longer, watching me, her mouth opening and closing. 
I looked away and studied my big toe, which poked through my black sock. She stared at her belly. “So, you’re leaving tomorrow?” she said.
	“At six.”
	She nodded. “I’ll fix you some breakfast.”
	“You don’t have to.”
	“I will,” she said, and I knew there was no arguing it. She walked over to the base of the stairs, but then turned back and took a step towards me. “This summer, when the kids are out of school, you could fly over here and stay for a little longer.”
	“This summer?  I don’t know. I’m pretty busy,” I said.
	“Well, maybe you can come down~if you’re not busy.”  She rubbed her stomach as though it were a magic lamp.
	“Yeah, maybe,” I said.
	She bit her cheeks into a half-smile and dropped her head. “Well, goodnight.”  The stairs sighed beneath her weight.
	When she was gone and guilt had spread over me like an itchy blanket, I curled up on the couch, my black coat and tie still on~but then I sat back up. There, in the darkness, I wanted to do something to make up for all the years I had been gone. I wanted to be part of the family. I wanted to be her older brother. I’d pay my rent and walk out of that dingy Chicago apartment where I spent my nights staring at the ceiling. I’d leave behind my sometime-job at a newspaper~fuck them~I could freelance anywhere. I’d sell my car for a plane ticket. Then, I’d fly back to Miami and move in with my sister. I’d help her out. She’d dump Sam, dump him like waterlogged driftwood he was. It’d be rough, at first; it’d be hard raising her kids, but I’d do it for her. On weekends I’d go to softball and soccer matches, weekdays I’d pick them up from school. 
	As for Clarissa, she could do whatever she wanted~whatever that was. She’d once wanted to be a ballerina. She couldn’t exactly do that now, but she could do just about anything else. I’d take a world off her shoulders.
	I heard the stairs creak~Sam coming up from downstairs. I considered lying back down and pretending to be asleep, but then I figured I’d face him like a man.
	“Done with the email, Sammy?”
	“You’re up.”  He didn’t seem surprised. I don’t think anything could surprise him.
	“I’m awake.”
	He stood awkwardly, his arm already resting on the banister leading upstairs. “Well, I’m tired.”
	“Yeah?”
	He sighed. “I just spent two hours writing to the lawyer who’s going to handle your mom’s estate. Apparently, she never made an official will and sorting out what belongs to who and making sure the government doesn’t tax us for all she’s worth is going to be a nightmare.”
	“You’re handling that?”  Maybe Clarissa didn’t need my help. 
	He shrugged. “Yeah. It’s a bitch.”  He started to mount the stairs but then stopped. “Do you need a pillow or blanket or anything?”
	“No, I’m okay.”
	“You sure?”
	I nodded, and he proceeded up the stairs. “Get some sleep,” he called. 
I listened to the floorboards creak as he made his way over to the bedroom and climbed in bed. The house was still.

	The next morning, despite the early hour, my sister fixed me eggs. I didn’t thank her for breakfast for fear of upsetting her more, so I ate silently. While I ate, she told me she’d have someone auction off Mom’s things and send me a check for half of the money.
	“That’s really okay. I’m fine.”
	“Well, we’re fine too,” she said, defensively. “So you better just take the check when it comes.”
	Sam and all three kids made it outside just in time to see me pull away at six. 
“See you later,” I said from the curb.
They all waved, but in different directions and at different times. The kids hardly waved at all, still sleepy and probably hating their mother for waking them up to wave to a stranger. Sam’s wave was wide and jerking, as if making up for closing the door on my face the day before last, and Clarissa’s was a slight opening-closing of her cupped hand~hopeful and melancholy. 

*     *     *
The plane lands without incident. The woman across the aisle is out of her seat and waiting by the door as the plane taxis, despite the flight attendant’s objections. A concerned mother squeezes her boy’s hand and yanks him urgently down the aisle as he stares at the dead man. The rest of the passengers shuffle off with hesitant backwards glances. I am the last one to de-plane, considering the effort it takes for me to get out. 
Once in the aisle, I pull the overhead open and carefully pull my backpack down. I think for a moment what I should say to the old man in parting, the man who woke up after death to tell me to get some sleep. At first “see you later” springs to my lips, but those words seem hollow and mean, as if what I really meant to say is “see you never.”  I don’t even know his name. Then I notice that his fat palm, rolled awkwardly into the crook of his legs, still clenches the bag claim ticket. The flight attendant is busy talking to the captain and so in one quick move I snatch the ticket away and walk out of the airplane. Just outside, I claim his bag~the enormous plaid one~and proceed on my way. It’s awfully heavy. 

A recent graduate from Hiram College, Myles Wallace is a writer, web designer, and ballroom dancer. This is his second published work.