Landline (30 page)

“Only child,” he said. “She wanted to get all the memories she could out of me.”

Neal had been a solid, stolid child. Round and wide-eyed as a toddler. Looking frankly at the camera on his fifth birthday. More hobbity than ever during grade school—with his T-shirt tucked over his tummy into his maroon Toughskins, and his shaggy ’70s hair. By middle school, he’d started standing with his feet planted and his shoulders slightly forward. Not daring you to knock him down—he wasn’t that kind of short guy. Just looking like someone who
couldn’t
be knocked down. By high school, he was broad and steely. An immovable object.

Georgie sat on the couch looking through the albums, and Neal sat next to her, idly playing with her hair; he’d seen all these pictures before.

She stopped at a photo of Neal and Dawn dressed up for some high school dance.
Jesus, they really were right out of a John Cougar Mellen-camp video
.

“Yeah,” he said, “but still . . .”

“Still, what?” Georgie smoothed the plastic over the photo.

“He was your dad.”

She looked away from high school Neal, up at the Neal sitting next to her. Neal at twenty-five. Softer than in high school. With less tension around his eyes. Looking like he’d probably kiss her in a minute, when he was done making whatever point he was making.

“What?” Georgie asked.

“I just don’t understand how you could skip your father’s funeral.”

“He didn’t feel like my father,” she said.

Neal waited for her to elaborate.

“He was only married to my mom for ten minutes—I don’t even remember living with him, and he moved to Michigan when I was four.”

“Didn’t you miss him?”

“I didn’t know what I was missing.”

“But didn’t you miss
something
? Like even the idea of him?”

Georgie shrugged. “I guess not. I never felt incomplete or anything, if that’s what you’re asking. I think fathers must be kind of optional.”

“That is a fundamentally wrong statement.”

“Oh, you know what I mean.” Georgie went back to the photo album. There were dozens of photos from Neal’s graduation day. He looked pained in these—like, after eighteen years, he’d finally lost patience with his mom’s photo-vigilance. His dad was in nearly every photo, too, looking much more tolerant.

“I really
don’t
know what you mean,” Neal said.

Georgie turned the page. “Well, they’re nice, if you have one—if you have a good one—but dads aren’t
necessary
.”

Neal sat up straighter, away from her. “They’re absolutely necessary.”

“They must not be,” she said, turning toward him on the couch. “I didn’t have one.”

Neal’s eyebrows were grim and his mouth was flat. “That doesn’t mean you didn’t need one.”

“But I
didn’t
need one. I didn’t have one, and I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

“I am so,” she said. “How am I not fine?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“You’re being uncharacteristically irrational,” Georgie said.

“I’m not being irrational. No one else in the world would argue with me about this. Dads aren’t optional. My dad wasn’t optional.”

“Because he was there,” she said. “But if he wasn’t there, your mom would have filled in the gaps. That’s what moms do.”

“Georgie—” He pulled his arm away from her shoulders and hair. “—you’re being warped.”

She hugged the photo album against herself. “How am I being warped? I’m just sitting here being the product of a perfectly well-adjusted single-parent family.”

“Your mom isn’t well adjusted.”

“Well, that’s true. Maybe kids don’t need moms, either.” She was teasing now.

Neal wasn’t. He stood up from the couch, shaking his head some more.

“Neal . . .”

He walked toward the stairs, away from her.

“Why are you getting so mad about this?” she said. “We don’t even have kids.”

He stopped halfway up the stairs. He had to lean down below the ceiling to make eye contact with her. “Because we don’t even have kids, and you already think I’m optional.”

“Not
you
,” she said, not wanting to admit she was wrong—not really wanting to sort out what she did mean. “Men, in general.”

Neal stood up again, out of sight. “I can’t talk to you right now. I’m going upstairs to help with dinner.”

Georgie pushed the photo album back down into her lap and flipped to the end.

“Where are you flying today?” the woman behind the counter asked without looking up at Georgie.

“Omaha.”

“Last name?”

Georgie spelled out McCool, and the woman started clacking at her console. She frowned. “Do you have your reservation number with you?”

“I don’t have one,” Georgie said. “I need one. That’s why I’m here.”

The ticket agent looked up at Georgie. She was a black woman in her late fifties, early sixties. Her hair was pulled up into a bun, and she was eyeing Georgie over a pair of gold-framed reading glasses. “You don’t have a ticket?”

“Not yet,” Georgie said. She’d walked up to the first counter she came to. She didn’t know if this airline even flew to Omaha. “Can I get one here?”

“Yes . . . You want to fly out today?”

“As soon as possible.”

“It’s Christmas Eve,” the woman said.

“I know.” Georgie nodded.

The woman—her nametag said
ESTELLE
—raised her eyebrows, then looked back down at her console, clacking away again.

“You want to get to Omaha,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Tonight.”

“Yes.”

She clacked some more. Every once in a while, she’d make a discontented
hmmm-
ing noise.

Georgie shifted on her feet and rattled her keys against her leg. She’d already forgotten where she’d parked.

The ticket agent—Estelle—walked away and picked up a phone that was attached to the wall. It seemed like a special phone. There was an orange light built into the wall above it.
Now, that’s what a magic phone should look like
, Georgie thought.

Then Estelle came back to her clackity-clack console. “All right,” she sighed, after a minute.

Georgie licked her lips. They were chapped, but she didn’t have any lip balm.

“I can get you to Denver tonight on United. From there, you’re just going to have to cross your fingers. We’ve got delays across the system.”

“I’ll take it,” Georgie said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Estelle told her. “I’m the lady who’s about to get you stranded in the Denver airport on Christmas Eve. ID?”

Georgie handed over her driver’s license and credit card.

The ticket was exorbitantly expensive, but Georgie didn’t blink.

“You could fly to Singapore for this much,” Estelle said. “Nonstop . . . Do you have anything to check?”

“No,” Georgie said.

Estelle held her hand over a printer, waiting for the tickets. “What’s in Omaha anyway? Besides two feet of snow.”

“My kids,” Georgie said, then felt her heart squeeze. “My husband.”

The other woman’s face softened for the first time since Georgie had stepped up to the counter. She handed Georgie her boarding passes. “Well, I hope you get there sooner than later. Hurry up. You’ve got twenty minutes to get to your gate.”

For the next twenty minutes, Georgie felt like the heroine of a romantic comedy.

She even decided what song would be playing on her soundtrack—Kenny Loggins doing a big, triumphant, live version of “Celebrate Me Home.” (Slow and gentle at the beginning, building up to an irresistible crescendo. Excessive amounts of blue-eyed soul.)

She ran through the airport. No luggage to drag, no kids to hang on to.

She ran by other people’s families. By loving elderly couples. By volunteer carolers wearing red and green sweaters.

With every step, Georgie felt more sure of herself.

This was what she should have done ten minutes after Neal left last week. Flying across the country to reunite with your true love was always the right move. (Always.) (In every case.)

Everything would be all right if Georgie could just get to Neal. If she could hear his voice. If she could feel his arms around her.

Just like everything had been all right when he’d showed up on her doorstep fifteen years ago. (Tomorrow morning.) As soon as she’d seen his face that day, she’d forgiven him.

Her plane was already boarding when Georgie—flushed and breathless—arrived at the gate. A pretty blond flight attendant took her ticket and smiled. “Have a great flight—and Merry Christmas.”

T
he plane didn’t take off.

Everyone got buckled up. They turned off their electronic devices. The pretty flight attendant told them which exit to head for in case of catastrophe or near-certain death. Then the plane taxied for a few minutes.

Then a few minutes more.

There was twenty minutes, probably, of taxiing.

Georgie was sitting between an extremely polished and sanded woman who tensed every time Georgie bumped her thigh and a boy about Alice’s age wearing a
THIS SUUUUUUUCKS
T-shirt. (He was way too young to watch
Jeff’d Up
, in Georgie’s opinion.)

“So, you like Trev?” she asked him.

“Who?”

“Your T-shirt.”

The kid shrugged and turned on his phone. A minute later, the flight attendant came by and asked him to turn it off.

After forty minutes of taxiing, Georgie realized the boy was the up-tight woman’s son. She kept leaning over Georgie to talk to him.

“Would you like to trade seats?” Georgie asked her.

“I always leave an empty seat between us,” the woman said. “Usually that means we end up with extra space because nobody wants to sit by themselves in the middle.”

“Did you want to sit together?” Georgie asked. “I don’t mind moving.”

“No,” the woman answered. “Better stay where we are. They use the seat assignments to identify bodies.”

The captain came on the intercom to apologize because he couldn’t turn the air-conditioning on—and to tell them to just “hang in there, we’re fifth in line to take off.”

Then he came back to say they weren’t in line anymore. They were waiting for news from Denver.

“What’s happening in Denver?” Georgie asked the flight attendant the next time she stopped to tell the boy to turn off his phone.

“Snowpocalypse,” the flight attendant said cheerfully.

“It’s snowing?” Georgie asked. “Doesn’t it always snow in Denver?”

“It’s a blizzard. From Denver to Indianapolis.”

“But we’re still leaving?”

“The storm is shifting,” the flight attendant said. “We’re just waiting for confirmation, then we’ll take off.”

“Oh,” Georgie said. “Thanks.”

The plane returned to the gate. Then taxied out again. Georgie watched the boy play a video game until his phone died.

All the tension and adrenaline she’d felt in the airport drained out through her feet. She was hungry. And sad. She slumped forward in her seat, so she wouldn’t brush against the woman next to her.

Georgie kept thinking about her last phone conversation with Neal, their last fight. Then she started wondering if it might actually
be
their last fight. If she’d scared him away from proposing, wouldn’t it erase all the fights they’d had since?

By the time the captain came back with good news—“We’ve got a window”—Georgie’d run out of urgency.
This is purgatory
, she thought.
Between places. Between times. Completely out of touch.

Everyone around her cheered.

Georgie wasn’t a good flier. Neal always held her hand during takeoff and turbulence.

Now that there were too many people in their family to sit in one row, they’d sit across from each other two and two—Georgie and Neal in both aisle seats, so he could take her hand if he needed to.

Sometimes he didn’t even look up from his crossword, just reached out for her when the plane started to shake. Georgie always tried not to look scared, for the girls’ sake. But she always was scared. If she made a noise or took too sharp of a breath, Neal would squeeze her hand and look up at her.
“Hey. Sunshine. This is nothing. Look at the stewardess over there—she’s dozing. We’ll be fine.”

Georgie’s plane ran into turbulence an hour into the flight to Denver. The woman sitting next to her wasn’t bothered by it, except for when the lurching shifted Georgie’s hips into hers.

Her son had already fallen asleep against Georgie’s right side. Georgie leaned against him, clenched her fists and closed her eyes.

She tried to imagine Neal, driving through this blizzard to get to her.

But there was no blizzard in 1998.

And maybe Neal wasn’t trying to get to her.

She tried again to remember what she’d said to him last night on the phone. She tried to remember what he’d said back.

Neal probably thought she was a maniac. She should have just told him about the magic phone. Full disclosure. Then they could have solved it together. They could have Sherlocked and Watsoned it from both ends of the timeline.

Or Neal could have figured it all out—he was the Sherlock and the Watson in their relationship.

The plane heaved, and Georgie pressed her head back into her seat, forcing herself to hear Neal’s voice.
It’s nothing. We’ll be fine.

The sun was setting in Denver. The plane circled (and shook) for forty-five minutes before there was a break in the storm they could land through.

When she finally stepped out onto the jetway, Georgie was sure she was going to throw up, but the feeling quickly passed. It was cold in the tunnel. She hurried by the untouchable lady and her son, and got out her boarding pass for Omaha.

Georgie’d missed her next flight, but there had to be another one—Omaha was the biggest city between Denver and Chicago. (Neal said so.)

She took a few confused steps into the airport. The gate was so full, people were sitting on the floor, leaning against the windows. Every gate, up and down the concourse, was full.