The Gift Bag Chronicles (24 page)

He’s right. It is a killer sunset. One of those bone-dry evenings where the sky goes all orange and gold. Reflecting off the Blue Building, the air seems shot with a million colors.

“Yes, it is,” I say. “Let’s hope we have weather like this for your party.”

They all nod and smile. I feel myself nodding and smiling back. I have no idea if they’ve understood a word of what I’ve said. According to Steven, they all speak good English. They should, since the company’s U.S. headquarters are down in Irvine, although I think Steven said some of these guys have flown in from Seoul.

“Wind off the desert,” Mr. Song says. I think it’s Mr. Song. “Very common this time of year.”

“Yes, yes,” I say, nodding. Patrice is clueless, but the Koreans get L.A. right down to the weather patterns.

“Gentlemen, now, if I may,” Oscar says, gesturing toward the Blue Building. “The tour starts with our catering facilities.”

He leads the group off. For the next hour, he’ll map out the physical layout of the party. Locations for the bar and food stations. The Porta-Johns. The tent he’s setting up to create the mood of a Korean temple, right down to a gong and candles. Finally, he’ll get to the arrival area, where Steven and I’ll take over, walk them through the whole red carpet. What celebs we’re expecting and how the photographers will shoot them on the carpet in front of the step-and-repeat emblazoned with the Kia logo and then more shots with the WireImage photographer we’ve hired, who’ll be inside the party shooting the various company execs together with some of the celebrity guests. And finally, we’ll show them the official exit and where we will be distributing the gift bags, which will include Kia mugs, Kia baseball caps, the latest issue of
Car & Driver
, and sets of car keys with Kia key chains — two of which will be for the cars on display at the event.

I’m just about to head for the reflecting pool, check out where Steven thinks the cars should go, when I hear my cell. Probably Patrice or Charles again. I fish my phone out of my bag and check the number. Amy. That’s weird. Not only is it late in Bryn Mawr but Amy never communicates by anything other than e-mail.

“Hey,” I say, clicking on. “What’s up? I’m right in the middle of a walk-through.”

“Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you’d want to know right away.”

“Know what?”

“Mom’s in the hospital.”

“Honey, you really don’t need to come. Everything’s fine. They
just wanted to check her out.”

“Dad, of course I’m coming. I’m already at the airport,” I say, eyeing the line ahead of me — two families with mountains of luggage.

I’m in line at LAX on the phone with Jack waiting to check in with the skycaps for the 10:40 red-eye to Boston. Boston because, as it turns out, Helen and Jack were on the Cape when her heart began its perilous fluttering. Now she’s in the Hyannis hospital — “but not intensive care,” Jack has said so many times I can tell he’s close to panicking — and I’m on my way there because Amy’s stuck on some barrier island off Florida with Bevan and Barkley, who’s attending some legal convention there, and she can’t get a flight — flights — until tomorrow.

“Well, I’m just saying you don’t have to come.”

“Dad, I
want
to come. I want to be there even if she’s fine,” I say, inching my bag forward with my foot. Any fears I had about not making this flight are quickly evaporating. Not only is this line moving fast but the whole trip, getting a seat at the last minute, the limo, even the traffic, has all gone like clockwork. It’s like for once I’m going with the current, not against it. Or maybe it’s like Ritalin; speed calms the hyperactive, a real crisis calms me.

“When do you get to Boston, eight tomorrow morning?” Jack asks for what’s the hundredth time. I know what he’s doing. If he can focus on my itinerary, it’s one more minute when he’s not thinking about his wife lying in a hospital bed hooked up to a million pulsing wires.

“Yes, I get in at eight,” I say, going over it again. “And my flight to Hyannis leaves at nine-thirty. I’ll be there by ten.”

He makes noises about driving to Boston to get me, but I tell him, again, that makes no sense. I’ll get there faster by flying. Up ahead, the line shuffles forward.

“Okay, so I’ll call you from the gate if there’re any delays, otherwise I’ll just call you when I land.” He makes another effort to let him get me in Boston, and I can tell he just wants to keep talking. “Look, call Amy and tell her when I’m arriving and find out when she’s planning to get there and how. I’m pretty sure she has to connect through Atlanta or D.C. or someplace.”

“Okay, honey,” Jack says, and I can tell he’s glad to have a task. I hang up and drop my cell into my bag. I should call people. After Amy reached me at the PDC during the Kia walk-through, I’d just hung up, told Steven my mother had had a heart attack and that I was leaving. And I did. Didn’t speak to anyone, not even Oscar, who was still showing the Koreans around the kitchen. I just walked to my car and left.

Now I should call them. Caitlin. Steven. Charles. Call them with backup plans and contingencies. A number on the Cape. An
idea of my timetable. But it all seems like clutter. Noise I no longer have time to hear.

I hitch my bag up my shoulder and look down the line at the two families in front of me. My fellow travelers, my real companions. I study the woman closest to me. Obviously the mother, about my age. She looks tired but happy in that start-of-vacation way, loaded down with bags, totes, her family’s information center, dispensing tissues and solace, games and instructions. Her husband, dressed in khaki shorts and a polo shirt with a business logo, his uniform announcing that he’s a man on vacation but with a good corporate job waiting at home, is absorbed, too much I note, in moving their luggage forward, a one-man portage system. Their daughter, about five I guess, is also engrossed in her own private drama, hopping from foot to foot while she pushes her stroller, oblivious to everything but the adrenaline flying through her veins. Her brother, older, maybe ten, eleven, but not yet a teenager with that awkward self-consciousness, grips the hand of the gray-haired woman at his side, his grandmother, I assume. He is all eyes, watchful, wary.

We inch along, my little family and me. All of us on our way, our separate itineraries, but travelers together. Up ahead there is a commotion. The skycap, finally. We all lurch forward. Tickets, luggage are handed over, lashed with tags, hoisted onto a cart. The daughter hops faster. Honey, stop that. The son still grips his grandmother’s hand. Here, can you carry that? A station wagon pulls up, and an older man gets out. The grandfather. But what’s he doing with a car? Of course, he isn’t going with them, only dropping them off. The grandmother, too, is staying behind. She starts to disentangle herself from her grandson — I can’t see his face. Hugs and exclamations. The husband shakes hands with the grandfather. Thanks, thanks for everything. The daughter hops faster. Honey, say goodbye. Say thank you. Say goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

“Ma’am, where are you headed this evening?”

I turn. The skycap. It’s my turn with the skycap. I am supposed to hand him something, get this under way, but I can’t think what it is.

“Your ticket?” he says, holding out his hand.

Yes, the ticket. That’s right, my ticket. I am to give him my ticket. And I will, except I just need another minute. I turn back to the line, but they’ve already gone. Where are they? They couldn’t have gone that fast. And then I see them. My little family, slipping through the sliding glass doors. They are hurrying now. Toward their gate. I crane my head. I can still see them if I stand on my toes.

“Ma’am?”

Yes, I know, the ticket, but I just need one more minute. They are going now, moving fast on the other side of the glass, their faces set for the trip, what’s to come.

And then he turns. The son, his face, streaming with tears, searching the crowd for one last look.

It’s dark now. We’ve hit our thirty thousand feet and have leveled off at our cruising altitude. The captain has turned off the seat belt sign, and we are free to move about the cabin. In 6C, I take another sip of wine and close my eyes. I picture them out there in the dark. Helen asleep in her hospital bed, Jack sitting next to her, pretending to watch the news on television, the sound off so as not to wake her. I picture Amy, somewhere in Florida, the blush of sunburn on her cheeks, tucking Bevan into bed in a strange hotel room, handing him his bear, her mind already going over their trip in the morning. I try to picture the others. Where they are, where they are going. Charles, pouring himself a drink, his tie loosened, home after a long day. Steven. Oscar. Brad, in my house, closing up the paint cans, lighting a cigarette the minute he’s shut my front door.

And then I see him. The son. His eyes are closed now, his head curled into his mother’s shoulder, as they speed across the night sky. The wet berry of his mouth slightly open as he sleeps, the salt film on his cheeks the only remnant of his grief. Will he remember this day? When he is the same age as his father is now, will he remember this day, when his world split in two?
Then
and
now. There
and
here. Leaving
and
arriving
. Will he remember? Or will he have grown into another traveler, another one of us hurtling forward, toward the future, what’s to come?

It’s like a fifties movie, I think, blinking in the early, gray-tinged light. The Hyannis airport is like a fifties movie. A small, half-moon curve of a building with a wind sock tugging on its tether above. The air smells of the sea. Cold and salt-tanged, a foretaste of winter. I hunch into my jeans jacket, half-expecting to see men in fedoras and women in seamed stockings stepping off the curb into Packards. I have traveled not across country but back in time.

I reach in my bag and turn off my cell. I checked my messages in Boston, in between flights, and they were all there. Oscar, Charles, Steven. Caitlin. Concern in their voices. I could hear it. If there’s anything they can do. Anything at all. But there’s nothing I need from them. We are untethered from each other now.

I grip my styrofoam cup of airport coffee and turn my collar against the damp sea air. I scan the cars and realize I don’t know which car Jack drove here from Philadelphia. Barely knew they were here. Now I will know every detail. Every beat, every fibrillation, every flutter.

I expected him at the baggage claim. Instead, there was a message on my cell. A test they needed to run at the hospital, and he would leave as soon as he could. Fifteen, twenty minutes, tops. A few cars pull in and disgorge their passengers. Mostly men, tieless,
in khakis and anoraks, carrying monogrammed canvas totes. Architects, retirees, I guess, heading up to Boston for the day. It’s that time of year. The off-season. Only year-rounders now.

And then I see him, in Helen’s silver Volvo, making the turn into the airport, his face white, taut, and with his hair swept back as if it too were in a hurry. I feel a click and am unmoored no longer.

“You know, you used to hate hospitals as a kid.”