"It is," I said.
"I wish to God I could give you a proper hello, but you'll get this cough sure as shingles if you get too close to me." The rain fell harder, and Lori and I moved closer to the plane for shelter.
"I'll keep my distance," I said. "Lori, I need to get back home to my grandmother." I could not keep the desperate hoarseness from my words.
She turned to Louis.
"Pilot, you have a load of fewer than eight persons, is that correct?"
"Right now, yes," Louis said. "But with Brynn—"
"Which means you have room for one attendant or copilot filling the crew seat, is that correct?"
"Yes," Louis said, insight dawning on his face. "So she's...?"
"Congratulations, Ms. Tomlin," Lori said, nodding heartily at me. "You've just joined the crew."
Thunder cracked overhead and the skies opened up. I was surprised at how quickly the storm had moved in, but Lori seemed to take it all in stride.
"You don't know how lucky you are," Louis said. I winced internally—I didn't feel lucky at all. Not one solitary atom of luckiness. "We haven't been back in Budapest for days, now have we?"
"Not for days," Lori agreed. "Now get on with you. I've been meaning to have a lunch date with that assemblyman's wife anyway. Even in this darned weather. Reminds me of England, it does. Louis, I'll see you in a few days. Brynn, you take care."
"I will."
I marched up the steps and into the small jet plane, my head held high even though my smile felt plastered on with cheap concrete. I stuffed my backpack into the co-pilot's storage, avoiding the looks of the businessmen. I felt as though all eyes were on me. My jeans stuck awkwardly to all the wrong parts of my h*ps and legs, and the old hoodie I had on reminded me of my college years before I had studied abroad. It reminded me of how young I was.
Bending down, I immediately cracked my skull against the hard plastic ceiling of the cockpit.
"Careful the step in," Louis said.
"Thanks for the warning," I said, leaning myself into the seat. I buckled the seatbelts across my chest. "This is all very Top Gun."
"I've never seen that."
"No?" I said, incredulous. "The one with Tom Cruise as the pilot?"
"Uh-uh," Louis said. He flicked a switch on the plane's dashboard. Was it called a dashboard in a plane? A control panel? That sounded very space-age.
The engine roared to life with the last switch, and my body rocked back against the seat as the plane's wheels began to roll down the jetway. Rain streaked across the windows of the cockpit.
"I suppose that's lucky for all of us," I said.
Louis smiled and flipped the switch.
I had never been in the cockpit of a plane before, and seeing the ground drop away from the plane made my stomach flip. It almost took my mind off of why I was there, flying back home to see my Nagyi before...
Tears sprung to my eyes and I turned my head away, looking out of the window.
The plane was still creeping higher through the air, and wisps of gray trailed from the edges of the plastic windshield panel against the rainy sky. Back on earth, the smooth gray curves of the Danube ran through the city peppered with buildings of black and white granite, the people on the sidewalks crawling like ants on a random walk through the grid of streets, umbrellas opened over their heads. Cars glinted sunlight and a long line of cypress trees stretched out, growing smaller, more toylike. The plane dipped and rolled slightly on the air, and my stomach rose into my throat with the turbulence. The physicality of the sensations made me aware of being emotionally numb. It was strange to think that I even had a body, but there it was, poking my brain for attention.
I imagined taking off my body like a dress, hanging it up somewhere and wandering across the universe as a soul. Was that what death would be? Or nothingness? Or something else?
Thunder rumbled in the clouds, and the sound vibrated the windows. The rainclouds obscured the view, and I was terrified. Louis seemed calm as anything, using his instruments to fly. Then the plane pulled up farther and we were out of the clouds. The sun was bright above the cloud layer, the sky blue. It didn't seem possible that we had left the storm and the rain all below, but looking down I saw the flash of lighting in the gray storm clouds. It blocked out my vision of the city almost completely. No more streets. No more cars. No more people with their black umbrellas on the sidewalk.
The sky seemed darker overhead, as though the rest of the universe outside of the atmosphere was pressing its way into the cockpit. I pulled my knees up to my body and bit my lip, willing myself not to cry. I was leaving Budapest.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Louis asked. I could only nod and whisper a quiet 'yes.'
Yes, it was beautiful. An hour later we were in Paris, the Eiffel Tower spiking the famous skyline of the city of lights. Louis had already made the schedule change, and we took off after just a few minutes of refueling.
The sun pulled west along with us. As we flew on, Louis pulled down a blind to shade our eyes, but after a couple of hours had passed the sun began to drop slowly beneath the horizon. The color of the sky changed to periwinkle and the clouds caught orange and red, burning brightly against the sky. It was like hovering inside of a glass prism that was slowly turning. The Atlantic beneath us was as dark as ink, with only a few flecks of white where the wind whipped the waves into frothy crests.
We followed the sun to New York. I only had eight minutes to make it from one airport terminal to another on the opposite side of the airport. It would be close.
Louis escorted me inside and through customs to speed things along, and he shook my hand at the gate.
"Goodbye, Brynn," he said. "Good luck with everything."
"Thanks," I said, swallowing hard.
I raced through the terminal, bypassing the moving walkways overstuffed with people. Nearly slamming into a businessman texting on his phone, I turned the corner and ran to the other terminal's entrance. Sweat tickled my neck and my leg muscles burned, reminding me that I needed to work out more. Giant screens with arrival and departure times rotated through the flight numbers, but I had no time to stop and look.
From the overhead speakers came a last call for boarding just as I skipped forward into the gate. I showed the airline worker my ticket and glanced up at the television screen in the terminal waiting area while she checked my passport. Then I looked again. The screen showed the Budapest skyline.
"This is an American news station, right?" I asked. The airline worker looked up from my ticket.
"Yes," she said, confusedly.
The news reporter came on screen and began to speak.
"In Budapest, Hungary, a suspected serial killer has been caught."
I moved closer to the screen, riveted.
"Miss? Miss, this is the last boarding call." The airline worker was talking to me, but my attention was elsewhere.
"The suspect allegedly killed eleven women over the past two decades, but Budapest officials say that the details of the murders were never revealed to the public due to the ongoing investigation."
The footage was of a man in handcuffs being escorted out of a worn-down apartment complex. I stepped closer to see his face. He was older than I had imagined, his short hair specked with gray, his face wrinkled. His dark eyes turned toward the camera, and for a moment it seemed as though he was staring straight at me, through the screen, across the world. There was no emotion in those eyes, only a stark coldness that chilled me to the heart. I looked down at his hands handcuffed in front of him. Something was wrong with them. They were dark, too dark.
I strained to hear the Hungarian words underneath the English of the reporter who was translating, but they were speaking too quickly for me to understand.
"Miss? The plane is leaving. You have to board now."
I squinted. There was something wrong with the screen, maybe. The light, or—
"Under pressure from the Assembly after a recent killing, Budapest police redoubled their efforts to find the suspect—"
"Miss!"
"I'm coming," I said, my eyes still glued to the screen. The man was being put into the police car. As he held onto the car door for support, I realized what was wrong, why his hands seemed so dark. His fingers left streaks on the car door that were unmistakable. I was hypnotized by the red.
His hands were covered in blood.
On the television, the policeman put his hand on the suspect's head and guided him into the car. From inside the car window, the murderer looked out toward the news camera. His eyes were still looking at me, or at someone else, perhaps at all of the survivors left behind, the families he had left in ruins. His face was pressed to the window and he was still looking out as the police car drove away from the apartment. The screen switched back to the news reporter.
"Miss!"
I wrenched my attention away from the television and took the boarding pass back from the airline worker. The jetway loomed in front of me, the tunnel bending down and to the left. I wanted to watch the man who was responsible for so much of my life's pain, but no wolf would keep me from going home to see my grandmother. I stepped forward into the maw, leaving my mother's killer behind me for good.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Eliot
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
Einstein
It had started to storm while the board members discussed the mathematical proof, and Eliot cursed the rain as he drove to the airport, his fingers clenched white on the steering wheel. He'd called Otto's pilots, but they hadn't answered. Two hours. That should be plenty of time. He could talk with Brynn and still make it back in time for the board's questions.
Taking a trick he'd learned from Marta, he left his car running next to the curb, ignoring the airport worker who yelled at him as he ran around the side of the terminal to the private tarmac where Otto's jet was kept. He pulled his jacket over his head and ran forward, looking toward the hangar where the airplane was normally kept. The plane wasn't anywhere to be seen outside of the hangar.
The handle of the hangar door was slippery, but Eliot managed to open the aluminum side. He switched on the light.
Empty.
He went back outside and looked down the runway. The sky was dark, and as he watched, he saw Otto's jet taxi down to the other side of the airfield.
He ran.
Eliot was no athlete, and he was dressed for the board presentation. His dress shoes slid on the slick tarmac and he almost fell more than once as he ran along the airport terminal toward the small jet preparing to take off. He could catch it. He knew he could catch it.
Rain dripped down his hair, down the back of his neck. He abandoned the idea of trying to keep dry, his jacket flapping damply in his hand as he pumped his legs. He stepped in a puddle and almost twisted his ankle.
"Sir! Sir, you can't go there!"
The security officer yelled after him as he ran past, but Eliot ignored him. Otto's jet was turning, the engines firing up to take off. Eliot's lungs burned as he ran, but the plane was still a few hundred feet away. He yelled, waving his arms.
"Wait!" Eliot cried, running forward. "Wait! Brynn! Brynn—"
His words were cut off sharply as he was tackled from behind. He fell forward, bracing himself with his hands, and rolled, the security officer still on top of him. He gasped for air.