by her talking.
“No way!” Elijah exhales in admiration.
“Uh-huh.”
Danny tries to fall back to sleep. He can’t believe they’re still awake.
PENELOPE SLEEPS SOUNDLY ON ELIJAH’S SHOULDER. WHICH IS TO say, soundlessly. He doesn’t mind, even though it makes his arm sore. Pins and needles, Elijah thinks, and then he figures that having an arm full of pins and needles would hurt a hell of a lot more than this.
Danny stirs on the other side of him, waking up and turning to Elijah, his eyes unaccustomed to the simulated day. He registers Penelope on Elijah’s shoulder and smiles groggily. It’s not like that, Elijah wants to tell his brother. But he doesn’t want to wake Penelope up.
It’s like comfort, Elijah figures. Being a comfort is itself pretty comforting. Having someone find a place on your shoulder and be able to rest. Not seeing her face, but picturing it from her breath. Like a baby sleeping. Feeling her breath so slightly on his arm. Breathing in time. Comfort.
The quiet times are the ones to hold on to. In the quiet times, Elijah can think of other quiet times. Staring at the ceiling with Cal. Driving home from a concert, the road silent, the music in his head. Sharing a smile – for a moment – with a beautiful stranger passing in a car.
Beside Elijah, Danny shifts in his seat and signals to the flight attendant for another Diet Coke.
Danny would never let a stranger sleep on his shoulder, Elijah thinks. Danny would be afraid of the germs.
He closes his eyes and tries to drift off.
AMAZING. DANNY THINKS IT’S AMAZING TO BE MOVING SO FAST WITHOUT feeling movement. To be sitting in an airplane, travelling as fast as he’s ever travelled, and still it feels like he’s in a car, steadier than a train, not even as fast as sliding down a slide. How can this be? Danny wonders. He wants to ask someone. But who can he ask? Elijah, even if he were awake? The girl on Elijah’s shoulder? (Isn’t she a little old for him?) The pilot? No one. There’s no one to tell him how it can feel so slow to go so fast.
The phone is embedded above the fold-down tray. He could make a collect call from above the Atlantic Ocean. He could slip the corporate card into the proper slot and dial any area code around the world. He does it – slips in the card – just to see what the dials are like. Thinking, Wouldn’t it be funny to slip your credit card into the slot, ten thousand miles in the air, and find a rotary phone? But no – just the usual buttons. He can pretend it’s home. Just a local call.
He pauses before dialing. He pauses too long. He pauses long enough to realise that no one comes instantly to mind. He doesn’t have anyone instant. He doesn’t have anyone worth a twenty-dollar-a-minute call.
Quietly, Danny places the phone back in its receiver. He presses a little too hard, and the woman in front of him rustles in her sleep. Danny looks at Elijah. He looks at Elijah’s eyelids and tries to tell whether he’s awake. He used to do that all the time when they were kids. Elijah would be faking sleep – he didn’t want to leave the car, he didn’t want to go to school – and Danny would catch the small, betraying twitches. He would try to point them out to his mom, and Elijah would mysteriously pop out of sleep before Danny could finish his sentence. Their mom would shake her head, more annoyed with Danny’s tattling than with Elijah’s fakery. Or so it seemed to Danny. Back then, and still.
Now Danny concentrates – staring into his brother’s closed eyes. Waiting for one eye to open, to see if anyone’s looking. Waiting for a telltale giggle of breath, or the twitch of an itching finger. Instead, he observes Elijah and the woman both breathing to the same silent measure. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Rise. Fall. Speed and slowness.
DANNY REMEMBERS THE NIGHTMARES HE WOULD HAVE. THE STRANGERS climbing through the window and stealing Elijah from the crib. He remembers waking the house without waking the baby. Running to Elijah’s room to make sure. Because if Elijah was OK, that meant everything was fine.
ELIJAH TRAVELS IN AND OUT OF SLEEP, LIKE THE AIRPLANE TRAVELLING in and out of clouds. Moments of fleeting wakefulness, dreamlike. The rituals of airline travel, meant to guard against your fears. Words of conversation. The echo of the in-flight movie from too-loud headphones many rows behind. The wheels of the beverage cart and the crisp opening of a soda can. The pad of feet in the aisle. A child’s questions. The flipping of a magazine page. Penelope’s breathing. The sound of speeding air. The realisation that clouds sound no different than air.
He dreams of Cal’s Camaro and of driving to Italy.
Then he wakes up, and he is there.
THE PLANE LANDS IMPECCABLY. DANNY IS UP AND ANGLING FOR THE aisle before the captain’s announcement can tell him to keep his seat belt on. Elijah watches him with a certain degree of embarrassment. He can’t see what the rush is. It’s not like they can leave the plane any faster. All it means is they’ll have their bags in their laps for that much longer. Even the flight attendants are still strapped in; they can’t make Danny sit down. Along with the rest of the passengers, Elijah hopes a sudden stop will jolt Danny to the ground.
Elijah remains in his seat until the plane has come to a complete stop. Danny passes over their carry-ons. Penelope leans over and says she can’t believe she’s finally in Venice.
Elijah nods his head and looks out the window.
Venice.
But not really Venice. The airport.
It is raining outside.
ELIJAH CAN’T HELP IT. HE SCANS THE CROWD AT THE GATE OUTSIDE of customs, looking to see if someone is waiting for him. As if Cal could truly drive the bitchin’ Camaro across the Atlantic Ocean and wait with a lei, just to be inappropriate.
“Let’s go,” Danny says, hiking his bag higher on his shoulder. “And tie your shoelaces.”
Elijah doesn’t care about his shoelaces, but he ties them anyway. He nearly loses Danny in the airport rush. He doesn’t care much about that, either, except for the fact that Danny has the money and the name of the hotel. (Typical.) Elijah nurtures a half-fantasy of disappearing into the crowd, making his own way to Venice, living by his wits for a week and then returning at the end of it all to share the flight home with his brother. He can’t imagine that Danny would mind.
But Danny has stopped. Danny is waiting and watching – watching his watch, tapping his foot, prodding Elijah forward. International crowds huddle-walk between them. Families with suitcases. A girl who drops her Little Mermaid doll.
Elijah returns the doll and makes his way to his waiting brother, who asks, “What took you so long?”
Elijah doesn’t know what to say. Shrugs were invented to answer such questions, so that’s just what Elijah does.
ITALY SHOULD MAKE DANNY FEEL RICH, BUT INSTEAD IT MAKES HIM feel poor. To change 120 (dollars) into 180,000 (lire) should make a man feel like he’s expanded his wealth. But instead it makes the whole
