Erin was so close, she could almost smell the haggis. Technically, she wasn’t that close; never mind stepping foot in Scotland, she hadn’t even left New Jersey yet. In fact, what she was smelling was the unique petrochemical aroma that lingers in the New Jersey air like forgotten leftovers from yesteryear.
But she was close. Closer than she’d ever been.
Plus she had been blessed by the algorithm with an unusually affable driver. Mind you, years of experience with the apps had lowered her standards quite a bit. Creeps. Jerks. Absolute weirdos. Artan was none of those. Perhaps most importantly, he had not asked her which way she preferred to get to the highway.
This had long been a pet peeve of hers -- who really got in a car dead set on taking one highway or another? Go whichever way the app tells you to go, she felt like saying. Of course, this could only come off as rude and discourteous, and she certainly didn’t want to come off as if she thought these drivers were just the Help, who ought to blindly follow the machinations of an app, especially considering how big a cut the companies took from every fare…
But really, so long as the road was paved, the traffic was moving, and they weren’t likely to fall headlong into a pothole, she could care less which way they took.
Artan had spared her all sorts of trouble. The trouble of navigating, the trouble of small talk, the trouble of having to write your last will and testament in the backseat of a Corolla because your driver has the alacrity of a jackrabbit when it comes to changing lanes.
He kept his lips mostly sealed -- except to make sure the air conditioning was cool enough. He did not treat the speed limit as a lowball offer in a high stakes negotiation between him and his speedometer -- Sixty-five miles per hour? This sixty-five miles per hour is an insult. A joke. Come to me when you've got something to say to me that isn't going to make me laugh. In the meantime, I'll be here switching lanes like a kindergartner giving hopscotch a go.
Erin was very nearly tempted to not just tip him but tip him well. She was contemplating breaching the previously unbreached 30% threshold, a feat no less significant than the shattering of the sound barrier or the moon landing.
He was that good.
Erin could not remember the last time the world seemed so open and full of opportunity. She was going on forty-six years old; yet, she had never felt so young. Yes, her knees were a little wobbly; yes, and her skin betrayed a wrinkle or two. But none of that mattered as much as the freedom she saw on the horizon, just eleven minutes, one demeaning security checkpoint, ninety-three minutes at the gate(more if the flight was delayed to clean bird poop off the windshield), and seven hours in the air, away.
Had it felt this good when she left Tommy? She didn’t think so, though it wasn’t quite the same. Then she had been trading the known for the unknown. She had been taking a risk with no safety net, no parachute, nothing to catch her fall if she came crashing to the Earth. The safe thing would have been to stay with Tommy. Safe and middling and in no way satisfying whatsoever.
Tommy had not, to be clear, changed in any way after they got married. In fact, Tommy’s problem was that he hadn’t changed at all -- not since the day they’d met. What had seemed, as teenagers, as an admirable lack of ambition, presented itself, as adults, as parasitic laziness. He could be compelled to shower daily, if begged; to look for a job, if cajoled; and to fill up the gas tank, if handed the cash and explicitly to do so. He was a man-sized millstone in flannel pajamas and a stained Darth Vader tee shirt. If she hadn’t left when she did, she might still be sitting next to him on his lumpy couch, eating, drinking, and breathing, but barely living at all.
Leaving Tommy gave Erin her freedom, but it also robbed her of nearly everything else in the process. Just months before, they’d decamped from Philadelphia for Dallas and her graduate program. Divorce meant losing her home, losing her stuff, and losing her unshaven security blanket, all in a city and a time zone where she barely knew another soul. That she finished her program on time was no small miracle. She marveled sometimes that she survived at all.
She shuddered.
This time things were different. She was different.
She wasn’t fleeing; she was upgrading. A better job at a better school in a better city in a better apartment -- just steps away from the Royal Botanical Garden, no less. The closest she could get to royalty near her current place was the Dairy Queen. While the new apartment was only temporary housing provided by the university while she got her footing in Edinburgh, she had already spent plenty of time pursuing listings online and went absolutely bananas each time she read the word flat. She would have two weeks to settle in before the term started, plenty of time to discover the best coffee shops, the best book stores, the best running routes….the best her that she had been in years.
The old her? She was leaving that behind in New Jersey, like lint in a dryer, though with less risk of fire. She was taking as little of the old Erin with her to Edinburgh as she could: only what would fit in her one checked luggage and one carry-on. It had been hard to part with some of the rest, especially a great many of her books. But not long after she notified her landlord she wouldn’t be renewing her lease, she began a great purge of all the trappings of the old her. The furniture and the knick-knacks and the forks and spoons and knives. What she couldn’t sell for a pittance she gave away just as easily.
It wasn’t about the money; it was about being committed, fully, to the future. The apartment was empty of her things and the locks would be changed by the morning. She didn’t want anything to have the power to compel her back or hold her down.
Anything or anyone. Not even Andrew.
Artan asked again which airline she was taking. As a girl sitting in the backseat of her parent’s car, she had always fantasized about the places she might go and the people she might be whenever they passed in the vicinity of an airport. Each exit sign, with the logos of the airlines and the terminals they flew out of, seemed to offer a promise of a life she might fulfill.
A chef in Paris via Air France?
A scuba diver in the South Pacific via Fiji Airways?
A reindeer in the Arctic via Aeroflot?
She was a young girl with more imagination than awareness of what people in Russia did. So sue her. What do people in Russia do, anyway?
It should have been harder to break up with Andrew. They hadn’t even called it breaking up, but that’s what had happened, hadn’t it? It wasn’t like they were still together. It wasn’t like they were teenagers, either; they didn’t need to put a name to their situation to make it official. Though they hadn’t said they were breaking up, the fact that they were about to live on two different continents had made it official.
Hadn’t it?
She loved Andrew. He was a good person. He made her happy. Even during this recent rough patch, which was about as fetid an understatement as they come considering Andrew’s role in a global economic collapse, she wanted him to be happy. Now that she was leaving -- very nearly almost gone --, she wanted that same happiness for him still.
The thing was: she wanted happiness for herself, too. Joy for her could not come in New Jersey at Frelinghuysen State College under the auspices of her old life. For him to be happy, she would have to stay. For her to be happy, she would have to leave. It was a take it or leave it kind of thing. Or was it a Catch 22?
She should have felt worse and maybe, in days or weeks ahead when her Scottish honeymoon faded into a Scottish depression as bleak and incomprehensible as the local accent, she would feel worse. Maybe she would remember the good times they had together and miss him by proxy. Maybe she would remember how pleasant it had been to meet such a person just as the doldrums of the pandemic began to ebb. Maybe she would remember how charming his smile was, even behind a mask, and how taken he was by her eyes.
Maybe she would come to terms with all these feelings and memories that she’d otherwise left as unprocessed as next year’s taxes. In the meantime, though, she would enjoy every moment of her sudden windfall of freedom.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Her last thought before getting out of Artan’s car was that the last thing she could have wanted for Andrew was the way he had acted the last time they saw each other. He came to her mostly empty apartment to say goodbye. There was no dinner this time, no naan, and no ceremony. Just farewells and well wishes.
Except that Andrew was, well, a little off.
Erin couldn’t attribute it all to her imminent departure. After all, he had been somewhat involved in a man’s death. Perhaps she shouldn’t have attributed any of it to her leaving. Heck, for all she knew, he wasn’t acting odd at all.
Of course, for that to be possible, she would have to accept that there was a global cabal of pickpockets snatching people’s umbrellas to effect global change and avoid a coming apocalypse.
She didn’t need to be a physics professor to struggle with that one.
She had listened as carefully, as patiently as she could manage. She had listened to every last word and waited until he finished before asking if he had been getting enough sleep and if he was feeling well.
“Of course. I’m feeling fine.”
“Oh, good. Good. Because, I mean you look great,” she had replied, despite the frenzied look on his face and the way excitement seemed to tremble through him like kids in a bounce house.
“I’m a little amped, yeah. But, I mean, you heard me, didn’t you? The parts about the Department of Lost Umbrellas, I mean.”
She nodded a little unsteadily.
Perhaps it would have been less strange if they weren’t so alone in that barren room, only a simple lamp and her sleeping bag to keep them company. If they had been sitting on her couch or out at the movies, if there had been a little bit more in the world than the two of them, it might have felt different. Instead, she stood across from him as he careened through a truly fantastical, utterly unbelievable story that had a little bit of conspiracy theory, a little bit of tall tale, and a little bit of fairy tale but somehow managed to be completely, absolutely crazy.
“Oh, I heard.” It wasn’t her hearing she was worried about.
“I absolutely heard. It’s just,” she paused because, when it came right down to it…‘Just’ implies an exception. ‘Just’ implies that all but one little insignificant word had made sense.
‘Just’ is for corrections for misspellings and typos. Oh, you said flammable but you meant inflammable? Let me just fix that.
“Could you explain again the part, uh, about how you went back to the City for your umbrella? Can we start there?”
It had been no time for just.
“Please, just try one more time.”
“Ma’am, it don’t matter how many times I try. It’s not letting me let you through.”
Ow, Ma’am. That one hurt. It wasn’t the first time she’d been ma’amed, but this one stung worse than the others. She’d gone from feeling like a spry newborn to a haggard old maid with one fell ma’am.
“Look. Sir. Officer…,” it was one of those names that required patience and perseverance to power through. It was no different from her mother’s multisyllabic maiden name, booby-trapped with linguistic trap doors. This was no time to stumble over a vowel or vomit up a consonant: not when her future lay in the hands of a TSA agent with a tricky name. “...Officer Suz-work…”
“Szwarc,” he sighed.
“Damn it, of course. Szwarc. Officer Szwarc. I can’t impress upon you how important it is for me to get on this flight.”
Officer Szwarc didn’t want to be there. That much was obvious with the look of resignation he wore like a second skin. He had all the enthusiasm of a wrinkled bed sheet. Nothing so traumatic had happened throughout Officer Szwarc’s life that would make him want to be a TSA agent: he wasn’t a psychopath. Nor did he want to have to be the bad guy when it came to this seemingly perfectly normal professor.
But the message on the terminal was unequivocal. In fact, it had never been so explicit.
ERIN TROTTIER
SECURITY RISK: HIGH
PERMISSION TO BOARD: NO WAY IN HELL
Usually, the thing just said yes or no…
“I wish there was something I could do for you--”
“I have a flight to catch! I already got rid of all of the stuff in my apartment!”
“--and I understand how this is an inconvenience to you at this time--”
“An inconvenience? An inconvenience? I’m going to be stranded at Newark Airport, the toilet bowl brush of the civilized world because your little computer says I can’t board my flight?”
Officer Szwarc cleared his throat and looked at the line forming behind Erin.
“That’s technically not true, ma’am.”
Erin was long past losing her cool. Her cool was gone. She had catapulted her cool, along with her respectability, her professionalism, and her sense of decency, high up into the stratosphere.
“Oh, no? That’s not true? This airport isn’t like a toilet brush? More like a douche? Or a bidet.”
Officer Szwarc didn’t need any of this. He had gone to Bard. He had studied Proust. He loved watercolors. He wasn’t even from Newark. He grew up on a farm next to a brook with a field full of goats, where the sun shined brighter than his boyhood imagination and where every breath he took took his breath away.
“That’s not the untrue part, Miss Trottier. I was referring to the part about you being stuck at Newark Airport. High-security risks have two options. They can go home or they can turn themselves over to the remand Airport Police for further investigation and processing. Either way, you’re not allowed to stay here in the terminal area.”
Erin stepped back and took and filled her lungs with air. She had once taken a course meant specifically for high-pressure situations like these. It all started with separating yourself from the situation, taking a deep breath, and then…
Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember anything else from the course. Not a single step other than the first. She did know that in the end, the problem would be resolved, she would grow stronger and similar situations in the future would be even easier to overcome. If only she could get to the glory of the finish line without having to do any of the stuff in the middle. If only she knew what to do after she took a deep breath.
Was she supposed to exhale? She probably ought to exhale. What then, though?
“Ms. Trottier, it’s up to you, but I’m going to have to ask you to move out of the way. These people have flights to catch.”
Never mind these people, Erin wanted to say, I have a flight to catch. I have my future to catch!
What she really could have used right then was Artan. Things had been going so smoothly before she stepped out of his car. It wasn’t but a moment after she closed the door that she stepped in a wad of sticky gum, got one of her bags caught in the airport’s automatic door, and bumped into that group of elderly nuns. After her most profuse, loudest apologies, she laughed a little at her unlikely string of bad luck, surely imagining that had been the worst of it.
She hadn’t counted on Officer Szwarc. Of course, she knew, it wasn’t his fault: it was the damned little box that said she couldn’t get on her flight, no matter how many times she had him scan her driver’s license.
And now, here she was, desperate enough to utter the words no good, decent person wants to say, not even in jest. They were only a handful of words but they still managed to carry quite the punch. It didn’t make her happy to say them. It didn’t make her feel good about herself. If she had heard someone else say them, she would have surely rolled her eyes at the obstinance, the classlessness, the sheer buffoonery.
“I’m going to need to see your manager,” she said through gritted teeth, revolted at herself and the depths of her desperation.
“No can do, ma’am,” Officer Szwarc said. Erin couldn’t help but hear in his voice the
the faintest hint of joy, like finding an unwrapped chocolate bar in a sewer.
“What do you mean ‘no can do’?”
“My manager left for the night and, as I said, I can’t have you staying in the terminal. So either you go home and come back to talk to my manager in the morning or I call for someone to escort you to a cell for the rest of the night.”
That was how Erin found herself when, she ought to have been at cruising altitude, waiting outside the terminal for a car to pick her up. If she were another person, she wouldn’t have let up so easily with that Officer Szwarc. She would have stood her ground and then felt summarily ashamed when it was her face as recorded in countless high definition cell phone videos plastered all over the internet as Professor Karen.
She, literally, had nowhere to go. She had left the destination field in the app blank. There were places she could go. She was well-liked. She had friends. Surely, most of them would recognize that some cosmic snafu had ensnared her, a calamity straight out of Kafka or Costanza. She could explain the story; they would commiserate; everything would be, if not better, than certainly corrected by the morning.
It wasn’t shame or embarrassment or confusion that was holding her back. What Erin feared was that this was the beginning of the unraveling of everything. It was better to persist in ignorance, to pretend in defiance of the truth. What she risked by acknowledging this brief hiccup was that the universe might finally recognize her not as a well-qualified, hard-working woman with imposter’s syndrome but as the authentic imposter she had considered herself along.
Better to live in denial. Better to pretend it wasn’t happening. Better to get in the car when the app buzzed her back to attention. Better to not act surprised when it turns out to be the same car you got out of before, driven by the same smiling person. Better to pretend, against all odds, it’s not Artan behind the wheel.