May 6, 1995
Portland, Oregon
“I am running away from home,” I say to the young woman sitting next to me. She has hair the color of cotton candy and more tattoos than a Hell’s Angel biker, but she is alone like me, in this airport full of busy people. Her name, I have learned, is Felicia. In the past two hours—since the announcement that our flight is delayed—we have become traveling companions. It was a natural thing, our coming together. She saw me picking at the horrible French fries Americans love, and I saw her watching me. She was hungry, that was obvious. Naturally, I called her over and offered to buy her a meal. Once a mother, always a mother.
“Or maybe I’m finally going home after years of running away. It’s hard to know the truth sometimes.”
“I’m running away,” she says, slurping on the shoebox-sized soft drink I bought her. “If Paris isn’t far enough, my next stop is Antarctica.”
I see past the hardware on her face and the defiance in her tattoos, and I feel a strange connection to her, a compatriotism. We are runaways together. “I’m sick,” I say, surprising myself with the admission.
“Sick, like the shingles? My aunt had that. It was gross.” “No, sick like cancer.”
“Oh.” Slurp. Slurp. “So why are you going to Paris? Don’t you need, like, chemo?”
I start to answer her (no, no treatments for me, I’m done with all that) when her question settles in. Why are you going to Paris? And I fall silent.
“I get it. You’re dying.” She shakes her big cup so that the slushy ice rattles inside. “Done with trying. Lost hope and all that.”
“What the hell?”
I am so deep in thought—in the unexpected starkness of her statement (you’re dying) that it takes me a moment to realize that it is Julien who has just spoken. I look up at my son. He is wearing the navy blue silk sport coat I gave him for Christmas this year and trendy, dark-washed jeans. His hair is tousled and he is holding a black leather weekender bag slung over one shoulder. He does not look happy. “Paris, Mom?”
“Air France flight 605 will begin boarding in five minutes.” “That’s us,” Felicia says.
I know what my son is thinking. As a boy, he begged me to take him to Paris. He wanted to see the places I mentioned in bedtime stories—he wanted to know how it felt to walk along the Seine at night or to shop for art in the Place Des Vosges, or to sit in the Tuilleries Garden, eating a butterfly macaron from Ladurée. I said no to every request, saying simply, I am an American now, my place is here.
“We’d like to begin boarding anyone traveling with children under two years of age or anyone who needs a little extra time and our first-class passengers…”
I stand, lifting the extendable handle on my rolling bag. “That’s me.” Julien stands directly in front of me as if to block my access to the gate.
“You’re going to Paris, all of a sudden, by yourself?”
“It was a last-minute decision. What the hell, and all that.” I give him the best smile I can muster under the circumstances. I have hurt his feelings, which was never my intent.
“It’s that invitation,” he says. “And the truth you never told me.”
Why had I said that on the phone? “You make it sound so dramatic,” I say, waving my gnarled hand. “It’s not. And now, I must board. I’ll call you—”
“No need. I’m coming with you.”
I see the surgeon in him suddenly, the man who is used to staring past blood and bone to find what is broken.
Felicia hefts her camo backpack over one shoulder and tosses her empty cup in the wastebasket, where it bounces against the opening and thunks inside. “So much for running away, dude.”
I don’t know which I feel more—relief or disappointment. “Are you
sitting by me?”
“On such short notice? No.”
I clutch the handle of my rolling suitcase and walk toward the nice- looking young woman in the blue-and-white uniform. She takes my boarding pass, tells me to have a nice flight, and I nod absently and keep moving.
The jetway draws me forward. I feel a little claustrophobic suddenly. I can hardly catch my breath, I can’t yank my suitcase’s black wheels into the plane, over the metallic hump.
“I’m here, Mom,” Julien says quietly, taking my suitcase, lifting it easily over the obstruction. The sound of his voice reminds me that I am a mother and mothers don’t have the luxury of falling apart in front of their children, even when they are afraid, even when their children are adults.
A stewardess takes one look at me and makes that here’s an old one who needs help face. Living where I do now, in that shoebox filled with the Q-tips that old people become, I’ve come to recognize it. Usually it irks me, makes me straighten my back and push aside the youngster who is sure that I cannot cope in the world on my own, but just now I’m tired and scared and a little help doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I let her help me to my window seat in the second row of the plane. I have splurged on a first-class ticket. Why not? I don’t see much reason to save my money anymore.
“Thank you,” I say to the stewardess as I sit down. My son is the next one onto the plane. When he smiles at the stewardess, I hear a little sigh, and I think of course. Women have swooned over Julien since before his voice changed.
“Are you two traveling together?” she says, and I know she is giving him points for being a good son.
Julien gives her one of his ice-melting smiles. “Yes, but we couldn’t get seats together. I’m three rows behind her.” He offers her his boarding pass.
“Oh, I’m sure I can solve this for you,” she says as Julien stows my suitcase and his weekender in the bin above my seat.
I stare out the window, expecting to see the tarmac busy with men and women in orange vests waving their arms and unloading suitcases, but what I see is water squiggling down the Plexiglas surface, and woven within the silvered lines is my reflection; my own eyes stare back at me.
“Thank you so much,” I hear Julien say, and then he is sitting down beside me, clamping his seat belt shut, pulling the strap taut across his waist.
“So,” he says after a long enough pause that people have shuffled past us in a steady stream and the pretty stewardess (who has combed her hair and freshened her makeup) has offered us champagne. “The invitation.”
I sigh. “The invitation.” Yes. That’s the start of it. Or the end, depending on your point of view. “It’s a reunion. In Paris.”
“I don’t understand,” he says. “You were never meant to.”
He reaches for my hand. It is so sure and comforting, that healer’s touch of his.
In his face, I see the whole of my life. I see a baby who came to me long after I’d given up … and a hint of the beauty I once had. I see … my life in his eyes.
“I know there’s something you want to tell me and whatever it is, it’s hard for you. Just start at the beginning.”
I can’t help smiling at that. He is such an American, this son of mine. He thinks one’s life can be distilled to a narrative that has a beginning and an end. He knows nothing about the kind of sacrifice that, once made, can never be either fully forgotten or fully borne. And how could he? I have protected him from all of that.
Still. I am here, on a plane heading home, and I have an opportunity to make a different choice than the one I made when my pain was fresh and a future predicated on the past seemed impossible.
“Later,” I say, and I mean it this time. I will tell him the story of my war, and my sister’s. Not all of it, of course, not the worst parts, but some. Enough that he will know a truer version of me. “Not here, though. I’m exhausted.” I lean back into the big first-class chair and close my eyes.
How can I start at the beginning, when all I can think about is the end?
