BEYOND THE INTERNATIONAL arrivals gate at Heathrow, welcome-to-London fanfare swirls like confetti that’s meant for someone else. Fellow passengers move past me toward families and friends and people holding signs with their names on them.
Only Pop’s memory has shown up to greet me.
He flickers like a hologram in my periphery, parting a sea of people with guitar riffs. A playful grin stretches through his wild, penny-red beard. He opens his mouth and sings off-key: Jojo was a girl who thought she was a loner. It’s on purpose—the changed lyrics and the fact it’s off-key—because of course it’s on purpose. Pop had pipes, and he regularly threw himself on the altar of humiliation to make me smile.
See, that is the Pop I remember. He wasn’t a die-in-a-hotel-room-with-a-needle-in-his-arm kind of guy. And I’ve come here to prove that.
Floor-to-ceiling glass stretches up one side of the terminal, dumping buckets of gray evening light inside. Pop always went on and on about the silver sky, and I get it now. Poof. The past tense in my head makes him disappear. He fades into the secret letter folded in my wallet.
A near-constant pain reverberates along my solar plexus. I try to ignore it, but it has the tinny, extended frequency of a crashed cymbal. Even when the song is over, the residue lingers.
I hobble over and take a seat in a chair next to baggage claim, and while I wait, tilt my phone’s viewfinder until my feet fill the camera screen.
Right foot: tucked snug-as-a-bug in a red ballet flat. Left foot: bare. Click.
Caption: shoe theft at twenty-thousand feet
My left shoe was missing when I woke up on the tarmac. It vanished at some point after I’d fallen asleep. I’d waited until the man-spreader beside me started snoring before I closed my eyes; he had a certain vibe from the moment he harrumphed into the aisle seat and trapped me in. My suspicion was confirmed when he rubbernecked the romance novel Lexie let me borrow for the flight. I always skip to the good parts, and he caught me, as evidenced by his sleazy eyebrow wiggle.
After that, he insisted on calling me little lady while hogging my armrest and regaling me on the success of his biz-niss in Chah-lutt. Frankly, he’s the kind of Southerner that makes the rest of us look bad. Everyone knows the type. It wasn’t what he said, but how he said it, all leering and obnoxious. Former Auburn football coach meets Foghorn Leghorn.
When I woke up, he was gone, along with my shoe.
I knew I wouldn’t find it. Two weeks ago, before I found out I’d be coming here, I dreamed I was standing shoeless in an airport. This odd little psychic dream phenomenon has been happening on and off for three years: I dream it, and then it happens.
Sometimes the details vary a smidge. I’m only missing one shoe; in the dream, I was missing both. And I’m standing on plain gray tile instead of gleaming white marble. I guess my sixth sense assumes European airports are fancier and shoe thieves are more thorough.
There have been times, though, that I’ve relived a dream exactly as it happened while I slept. The first time was right after Pop died. Mama and I had gone to the grocery store one Saturday afternoon, and while I was waiting on her to finish checking out, Pop’s voice whispered: You want some gum? A slant of sunlight broke in through the storefront and bathed the gumball machine in an otherworldly glow. I went to it. Without putting a quarter in, I reached up and turned the handle. It cranked one, two, three times, and then the whole thing poured out in my hands. A few smaller kids ran over and picked up the ones that slipped through my fingers—red and blue and purple hitting the floor in a chorus of pops and tinkles.
I knew I’d leave the store with my pockets full of gumballs before I ever touched the knob that day, because I’d dreamed it the night before. Pop stood on the edge of my periphery, giving me a thumbs-up. When I turned, he was gone.
There have been many of these dreams, but there’s one in particular that I’m desperate to make a reality. The dreams are the real reason I’ve come here, but nobody else knows that. On paper, I’m here to make college visits and skip a senior year elective. I can’t go around telling folks that Pop is sending me winks and nudges and beckoning me to the UK, through psychic dreams, to clear his name. People (like me) who have daily medication regimens know which things to keep zipped up. Faking normal is imperative. Faking normal is how I got my psychiatrist to sign off on five weeks between sessions so I could make this trip.
There’s one other suspicion I can’t tell anyone about—a less likely one—so I just need to disprove it: What if Pop is still somewhere in the UK, alive? And the urn in my carry-on bag is full of dust instead of his remains?