Darkness Creeping (24 page)

In Seattle,
Jana thinks,
it would still be light out
.

The truth was simple, and at the same time impossible to comprehend. Somehow, some grand computer glitch—not in any simple airline computer—got two flights . . . confused.

A flight like this will never reach the ground,
she tells herself.
How can it?

Suddenly the plane shudders and whines as the landing-gear doors open. People are looking out their windows at the night on the right side of the plane, and then at the day on the left. Cold terror paints their faces a pale white.

Across the aisle and three rows back, the baby screams again as they descend. To Jana, the screams are far less disturbing than the whispers and silences of all the other passengers, but not to everyone.

“Shut that child up!” shouts the businessman.

But the mother can do nothing but hold her baby close to her as they sit across the narrow aisle, waiting for the plane to touch down.

Across the aisle?
Jana’s mind suddenly screams. And then that sickening feeling that began almost two hours ago spreads through her arms and legs, until every part of her body feels weak. Jana glances at the empty seat right next to Moira and erupts with panic. She opens her seat belt, stands and shouts to the mother, yelling louder than the woman’s screaming baby.

“Get up!” Jana shouts. “You have to come back to this seat!”

“But we’re landing,” says the mother nervously. “I shouldn’t unbuckle my seat belt.”

“You’re not
supposed
to be there!” Jana insists. “You started on
this
side. I can’t explain it now—but you have to come back to this side of the plane—NOW!”

Terrified, the mother unbuckles her seat belt and, clutching her screaming baby, crosses the aisle the moment the tires touch the runway. Others who had moved to the empty seats on the left side sense what is about to happen. They race to get out of their seat belts and back to their original seats—but they are not fast enough.

In an instant, there is a burst of flame, and the world seems to end.

“Help me!” screams the mother.

Jana grabs the woman’s hand while Moira grabs the baby. They fall into the seat next to Moira, and the mother shields her baby from the nightmare exploding around them.

Everyone screams as the plane spins and tumbles out of control—everyone but Jana. She glances out her window to see that nothing seems wrong. The plane is landing in Boston, just like planes always land.

But on the other side of the plane, the
left
side of the plane, there is smoke and flames and shredding steel. And, beyond the shattering windows, the ground is rolling over and over. In awe, Jana watches as the smoke billows . . . but
stays
on the other side of the aisle. In fact, Jana can’t even smell it!

Moira leans into Jana. “Don’t look!” she cries. “You mustn’t look at it!”

And Jana knows that Moira is right. So instead, she holds Moira’s hand and turns to look out her own window. Tears rolling down her cheeks, she watches the terminal roll peacefully toward her. She feels the plane calmly slow down, and she tries to ignore the awful wails from the other side of the plane . . . until the last wail trails off.

Then the captain begins to speak, uncertain at first, but then with building confidence. “Uh . . . on behalf of our crew, I’d like to welcome you to . . . Boston. Please remain seated until we are secure at the terminal.”

The screaming has stopped. The only sound now is that of the engines powering down to a low whine. Slowly Jana dares to look across the aisle.

There she finds the man with the hearing aid staring back at her, aghast.

On the other side of the plane are all the people who had been there when they had taken off. Now that Jana sees their faces, she can recognize them.

Someone must have fixed the computer,
Jana thinks, and then she turns to Moira. “Do you suppose that while we were watching the right half of that flight to Seattle—”

“—that the people on the other side were watching the left half?” finishes Moira. “Look at their faces. I can only imagine they were.”

The mother, whose baby has stopped screaming and has fallen asleep, thanks Jana with tears in her eyes. Jana touches the baby’s fine hair, then smiles. Suddenly it seems that all those long stories Moira has told on the plane don’t seem so boring, and in a way Jana longs to hear all of them again. In fact, she longs to hear every story of every person on that plane.
There are so many lives intersecting on an airplane,
she thinks.
So many stories to hear!

Jana walks with Moira to the baggage claim, where suitcases are already flying down the chute and circling on the baggage carousel. There, Jana watches people from her flight greet friends and family who have been waiting for them.

“I just heard that a flight out west didn’t make it,” someone says. “It was the same airline, too.”

But no one from Jana’s flight says anything. How can you tell someone that you saw a plane crash from the inside, but it wasn’t
your
plane?

“It’s good that things ended up back where they belong,” Moira says.

“There’s nothing ‘good’ about it,” says Jana flatly.

“No, I suppose not,” Moira agrees. “But it’s right. Right and proper.”

Together, Jana and Moira wait a long time for their luggage, but it never comes. Jana has to admit that she didn’t expect it to.

Not when all the luggage coming down the chute is ticketed to Seattle.

You probably won’t believe this, but I swear it’s true. It all started with a toothache. It was the kind of toothache you get after eating too much candy on Halloween night, not brushing your teeth for like a million years, and then going to sleep with entire chunks of taffy wedged in the valleys of your molars like snow in the Alps.

Okay, I’ll admit that dental hygiene is not my personal strength. For a while last year, I did actually enjoy brushing my teeth when we had a nanny who bought licorice-flavored toothpaste—but unfortunately my sister, Roxy, and I scared her off. The replacement nanny refused to spring for the licorice stuff, because it was so expensive. Instead she bought this industrial dental solvent that tasted like toilet-bowl cleaner (don’t ask me how I know what toilet-bowl cleaner tastes like—it’s a memory best forgotten). Anyway, one taste of the new stuff and my brushing days were over.

Then came the toothache.

It was just small at first. A little irritation. It wasn’t until a few days later that I noticed the hole. I didn’t see it—I felt it. I mean, your tongue knows the feel of your own teeth the way your eyes know the look of your room. If there’s a single thing out of place, you know it.

From my tongue’s perspective, this wasn’t just a cavity, it was a sinkhole of epic proportions, and my tongue kept poking and exploring it of its own free will, with no orders from me. After a few weeks, the ache became a throb, and my tongue could no longer find the bottom of the hole.

Then I bit into a Now-R-Never.

Now-R-Nevers are these little square, almost-but-not-quite-chewable candies, imported from England. I believe they were invented by a secret society of British dentists back in the murky 1800s, when people were dying in the streets, and Charles Dickens was writing about dirty malnourished children with bad teeth. The bad teeth were because of the Now-R-Nevers, and for more than a hundred years, the dental industry has thrived thanks in no small part to this evil—but amazingly good-tasting—candy.

I knew from the moment I sank my teeth into the vicious little chew that there was a problem. It molded itself around my tooth, and pushed into the cavity until it hit something. Something deep. Something painful. Shock waves of agony pulsated through every inch of my body, radiating out of my fingertips. I reached into my mouth and attempted to dislodge the chew. It took a good ten minutes picking at it until it finally began to release its grip on my tooth. All the while, the pain rebounded through me like a Super Ball bouncing over all the synapses of my nervous system. Fortunately my father, who is often forced to endure pain on his many top secret missions, taught Roxy and me the fine Himalayan art of Kuri-Na—which is the mental control over pain. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at it, and was screaming my guts out.

Roxy came downstairs with Püshpa, our current nanny, and they both watched with mild interest as I writhed on the floor like a demon child in the midst of an exorcism. Finally I pulled the Now-R-Never off, with a deep popping noise. As I lay there catching my breath, Püshpa leaned over me and gave me her cold eye of examination.

“Please to open your mouth,” she said. Püshpa did not speak English all that well. She was from a small Eastern European country that no longer existed, but might exist again in a month or so, she hoped.

I opened my mouth, and Püshpa backed away, crossed herself, and made some gestures to ward off evil spirits. “You have bad hemorrhoid ache,” Püshpa said. “You brush like good Jell-O-mold, your hemorrhoids be all clean and healthy.”

To the untrained ear, this might make no sense, but it does to us. You see, Roxy and I decided that we would teach Püshpa English, but decided to teach it to her wrong. Roxy keeps an entire “Püshpeese” database in her computer so we can be consistent.

“Ha! It serves you left!” Püshpa said.

“Don’t be infective to Ralphy,” Roxy told her. “He’s in a lot of champagne.”

Roxy took a glance in my mouth, too, and raised her eyebrows in thought. “Ooh! Can I do my science-fair project on your tooth?”

I wasn’t too thrilled about the idea, as it would require me to sit at the science fair for three hours with my mouth open, but I owed Roxy big, from the time I crossbred her ChiaPet with a Venus flytrap, and it ate all the neighborhood cats.

Püshpa picked up the yellow pages, and tried to find me a fishmonger (which was Püshpeese for “dentist”). I proceeded to take elephant doses of Tylenol, and Roxy happily prepared her science project. She labeled her experiment “A Fistful of Molars” and made up a whole bunch of impressive but confusing graphs on the correlation between tooth decay and birth order in Western civilization.

The music may have started before the night of the science fair, but I had never noticed it before, since I had never held my mouth open long enough to hear it.

It was actually some little kid who heard it first. As I sat there with my mouth hanging open, next to Roxy’s graphs and PowerPoint presentation, a six-year-old holding an I-heart-science balloon in one hand, and picking his nose with the other, turned to his mother and said, “Mommy, why is that boy singing?”

I wasn’t singing, of course, and I looked at him like he was nuts.

His mother glanced at me with the resigned indifference of a parent forced to endure a child with an overactive but uninteresting imagination. “I’m sure it’s coming from somewhere else, Jimmy.”

“No!” Little Jimmy pointed his nose-finger dangerously close to my open mouth. “It’s coming from there!”

I heard it now, too. It was a distant tinny voice. I thought it was from one of the other projects, but now I could feel the vibration in my jaw. The kid was right! The singing was coming from my cavity. I closed my mouth and the voice went away. I opened my mouth and the voice came back. It was kind of like opening and closing a music box.

The kid laughed. “Do it again! Do it again!”

By now a couple of other people had stopped to observe the “Fistful of Molars” exhibit.

“I know that song!” said one of the passing fathers. “That’s ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ by Patsy Cline. It was my ex-wife’s favorite song!” He leaned closer to listen.

Roxy was in heaven. “This is great!” She grabbed a piece of paper and a Sharpie, and relabeled her science project “The Amazing Human Radio.”

I should point out here that it’s not all that uncommon for dental work to pick up radio signals, and act as a receiver. In fact, on
America’s Lamest Criminals,
there was this guy whose retainer picked up the police frequency, so he always knew how close the police were to the convenience store he was robbing. He got arrested the day he forgot his retainer at home.