Ava was fixated on the boy in seat 28D before the engines went silent. Before the oxygen masks deployed above their heads and rebounded on their plastic tubes before settling. He had the height of the boys in her class, yet his puffy cheeks and darting eyes made her consider a younger age. His mother sat to his right, and from Ava’s perspective, only her hand and three-quarters of an arm underneath a maroon sleeve were visible. She handed him sour gummy candies and defeatedly suggested that he cease leaning over the seat to stare at the passengers behind them. He ate the candies with his mouth agape and Ava could see the neon greens and reds and oranges sticking to his gapped teeth. Strands of translucent drool dripped from his bottom lip and fell onto his blue T-shirt with a yellow baseball and bat.
His eyes met hers, and he let out a high-pitched squeal as he rubbed his hands together with steady pressure. She knew then that his age was moot, for whatever days elapsed into memory, he would only reach a certain mental maturity. Whether two, three, or with luck, six, his autistic mind would find its limit and remain, no matter wrinkles nor facial hair. At least, that’s what she was told, or had concluded, when they brought the ‘buddies’ to her fifth-grade classroom and encouraged empathy and understanding. Requirements for being a good human.
The buddies with their forced haircuts, like the boy on the plane. Ava imagined them, their fathers holding them still, and their mothers placing a bowl on their heads. Snipping around the pattern while they scream and thrash, and dirty blond and black and amber strands fall to the kitchen floor.
And on the playground, ‘buddies’ were replaced with ‘retards,’ whispered within grade school clusters on molded plastic bridges and near chain link swings.
Now, in the quiet compartment, where the jet-fueled rotations had brought comfort only moments before, the others had found their obsessions. An obese man remembered Jesus while his seatmate wilted into her arms and sobbed. A woman with a gray-black perm held her husband’s hand and accepted fate without a word or a glance. Perhaps that decades-long relationship only needed something subtler.
A clean-shaven gentleman wore his suit and tie, even though the meeting wasn’t until tomorrow. He was told that from the moment he left his townhouse that morning he was representing the company. He stared at his reflection through black-rimmed spectacles and sensed the razor burn as his dry-cleaned white dress shirt rubbed tight against his neck. It would be alright, he thought, Mason or Dillon could be at the client site the following day was there to be any issue.
Ava’s mother held her hand and dug her nails in slightly so she’d understand that this position was to be alleviated only by her. Death, her mother thought, was a foreign thought to a child of Ava’s age—at least when its arrival was palpably abrupt. Surely, the children in the pediatric cancer wards have consumed the end under fluorescent lights. At least in every moment that a man with a guitar volunteering his time isn’t there or a local sports athlete isn’t telling them how brave they are. Ava, her mother believed, was unprepared for death, and her daughter’s actions lacked the fear that would bring her gently to heaven.
Words in a foreign language screamed repetitiously from the front. The Lord’s Prayer from 7A.
7B covered his ears, he believed that the mere act of saying those words determined the worst. Hear the entire prayer—the plane breaks apart and bursts into flames. Ears covered—the plane glides smoothly through the forest of trees and comes to rest to thunderous applause of death averted. The man pushed his palms to the brink of pain against his ears.
Ava stood up and peered over the rows; the stewardess in the jump seat caught her eye and gave her a reassuring smile without showing her teeth. As quick as the smile, Ava’s mother yanked her back down to her seat and tightened the seatbelts. Ava lurched to her right to spy the boy. His movements calm, eyes alert, and he was repeating something. Something short. Two words, separated by several seconds, but Ava could not make them out and her mother dug her nails into her hand and pulled her back.
There were no announcements from the cockpit. Perhaps the radios were broken, perhaps there was nothing good to say. The plane floated ethereal in the quiet that should have been there had the humans not intervened. A gradual, gentle descent towards the terrain of hills and endless firs and clearings not fit for landing, even if the aircraft could make them.
The obese man figured Jesus had heard him and slammed down the plastic window shade to ward off the outside world. He was safer with reality confined in the tube, and those in window seats slid the plastic covers down so they could be safe, too. The outliers were overruled by the brave middle-seat passengers who reached over to complete the darkened cocoon.
Silence, that odd, unexpected silence, as in a cafeteria when the entire cavernous room loses its conversation at once by happenstance. Pauses to acknowledge the oddity, then resumes. Yet here the words did not return. The prayers played on repeat in minds, sniffles had finalized the tears, and the man in 7B let go of his ears.
“Okay,” uttered the boy in 28D. A beat to dart his eyes left, then above. “Bye.” He held the plastic bag of sour gummy candies in his hand and when he reached in with the other, the plastic crinkled. He pulled a red and green gradient piece from the bag and slid it in his mouth, his eyes still gauging a situation beyond his comprehension. Two chews and the drool saturated the screen print on his shirt. “Okay. Bye.” Crinkle. Chew. Drool. “Okay. Bye.”
The flight attendant reintroduced her faux smile, her position facing the passengers made her the de facto leader of this group. Charged with reassurance in her facial expressions and she thought back to how meticulous she had been with her makeup in the hotel mirror that morning. Had she been careful? Was there perfect symmetry and blend? Were the lines of her maroon lipstick married to the lines of her lips? It hadn’t mattered when the obese man gathered his cellulite to fit in the shrunken economy seat. Nor when the woman pulled her autistic son by a leash wrapped around her wrist and extended to the belt loop of his pants. Yet, now, she felt perfection important in the belly of a flawed, man-made vehicle as it exuded Icarus on its descent. How perfect the women seemed in the black and white photographs on the walls of the lounges she had seen at LAX, ORD, ATL, and LGA. We are mothers to all who fly, she thought, and the antithesis of the ego man possesses at the design of great things they desire other men to admire.
She had brought back her smile, and kept it as the speakers above them chirped to life. A pilot did his best to maintain a composure in his voice to the unseen cabin. She bent over and placed her hands behind her head. Business class, with its aft position, took her cue first and crunched into the demonstrated position. The ensuing rows did as their wealthier counterparts until they reached the obese man who found the position impossible, and therefore, swallowed the ends of the armrests with his imposing palms until his fingertips went white.
The boy’s mother made attempted to place the boy’s hands atop his head. “Okay. Okay,” before he reverted to his impossible curiosity to the left, the right, and above. Ava’s mother released the grip on her daughter’s wrist, mimicked the others, then elbowed Ava until she too put her hands atop her head and bent over. “Okay. Bye.”
Time expanded, and this bored Ava. How can one experience life, she thought, in such a state of internal shadows and mechanical quiet? So, she opened her eyes, relaxed her pose, and proffered a smile to the boy in 28D. For a moment he simply stared at her, through her, she thought. An expression of either deep understanding or thoughtless void, with synapses that couldn’t quite connect. And when he could not determine an appropriate reaction to her facial expression, he resorted to a guttural utterance of glee. A high-pitched, prepubescent squeal as he clapped his hands once, then rubbed them to alleviate any remaining confusion.
The obese man gripped harder when he heard it. The stewardess opened her eyes and kept her gaze on the point where her black skirt met her sheer nylons. They all heard it, and they all dared not move.
The boy’s mother tugged on the leash, then stopped. She had spent the last nine years worrying, chasing, hoping, praying, and considering an end. These next minutes, these were hers. She did not have an autistic son. She wanted to wake up one sunny day to find the boy who was of her gone. Disappeared. She was her, alone, with her hopes and wide-open pastures where she could be anything. Where every milestone her child achieves are met with jealousy over pale red wines on Friday evenings in manicured caucuses on white leather couches while men throw miniature footballs to boys in front yards. A golden retriever. Two cars in the garage and a whiteboard calendar on the refrigerator to keep them moving forwards. These next minutes were hers, and the boy was no longer there.
To Ava, the boy was everything. She had to understand him, right here, right now. What words would he have uttered, had the connections been made? Would he put forth reassurance that this glider would brush the trees and slow as the foliage thickened? On the smooth egress to the forest floor would be waiting the does and stags and the birds singing the song of life. Perhaps he couldn’t comprehend how she could smile at a time of such peril, of such “okay, bye.” How could she not know of their imminent death?
He squealed again, clapped hard twice, then rubbed his hands together. He dug his uneven fingernails into his palms until the dirt that had amassed underneath mixed with the blood he’d drawn.
The stewardess heard and understood the sound below them first. They had arrived at the treetops to where the twigs and branches scraped against the plane’s underbelly and echoed through the cabin.
Ava’s mother reached blindly for her daughter’s head and pulled it down. The boy, whose repeated, “Okay, bye,” had been whispered and uncertain rang above the scratches underneath their feet. “Okay! Bye!” and he pulled up on seatbelt clasp and thrust the two sides away from his body. His mother knew his actions without lifting her head or opening her eyes, yet did not move.
The boy stood in the aisle. “Okay!” He dug his fingers into the seatbacks as the obese man further forwards clutched the armrests and implored the boy to shut his mouth. “Bye!”
Ava raised her head and straightened her body. The plane lurched to the left and right, directed by which tree was more mature, more anchored to its roots. She stared at the wet spot where his drool had pooled on the yellow baseball bat imprinted on his shirt. “Okay!”
“Shut the fuck up!” came a command from someone whose prayer was interrupted.
“Bye!”
The stewardess thought to chastise whoever it was, but had her own prayer to consider. Besides, there was no time to determine the culprit. “Okay!”
Ava turned to her mother and watched her lips move silently.
“Bye!”
The muffled sobs returned with the realization short of acceptance.
The boy clapped his hands, pushed hard, then clapped again. Ava leaned forwards. watched the repetition, and imagined blood pouring out of his ears. With a quick flip, she was free of her seatbelt and grasped the seatbacks to propel herself as the pilots fought for an even keel. The branches, now, had become such that their presence echoed throughout the cabin and drowned out the okay and the bye. The nose of the aircraft lurched upwards until Ava’s grip was left to her fingertips. Downwards and she leaped to the next row. A pull with both hands on 29C and as the plane pitched up, the boy clapped and stumbled into her arms.
She wrapped her arms around his waist and they fell backwards to the aisle floor. They sensed the acceleration as the tree trunks pulled off the wings and sliced through the tailfin. Her eyes opened and found his inches above, inspecting, searching for cues. “Okay,” he whispered in the proximity.
“Okay,” she whispered back and let the corners of her lips rise.
“Bye,” the boy responded, matching her volume.
“Bye.”