I hate it when Mom calls me sensitive. I’m a guy. I’m almost a teenager. I can’t be a twelve-year-old boy and sensitive at the same time. That’s not possible. But as I stood in that crowd, not a single face familiar to me for as far as I could see, my lifeline cut, fear making my knees weak, and my heart pounding like a basketball rattling hard inside a hoop, I knew she was right on the mark.
I was alone. I had never been so alone. And I had never been so frightened in all my life.
Just two days earlier, I had been safe and sound—sort of. And Grandpa and I were on a plane a million miles above the Atlantic Ocean. That’s the “sort of ” part. How can you even be remotely safe when you are inside a steel object weighing about a trillion pounds that is hanging in the air, or at least hurtling through it, and might at any second fall out of the sky and send every last person inside it to a fiery death, arms and legs ripped off, heads severed and blood splattered all over the place and…perhaps I shouldn’t go on. I won’t even mention the remains-getting-eaten-by-sharks part. Not that I’m sensitive.
Grandpa sure isn’t. I can picture him now, sitting there next to me in our economy-class seats (not a big spender, is David McLean) and looking highly insensitive. That doesn’t sound right, and I don’t think I mean it the way it came out. He’s a good man and a caring grandfather and just about perfect in every way, even though he’s old. Sometimes I actually wish he wasn’t so perfect. I doubt he talks to himself inside his head like this. But at that moment on the plane he looked like he didn’t have a care in the world: a real guy, strong and manly and bold.
We were on our way to Sweden, which, at the time, was a good thing, and I was about to barf, which obviously wasn’t. I had my attention on the throw-up bag in the pocket of the seat in front of me, eyeing it sideways so he couldn’t tell I was looking at it so lovingly. I’m not a good flier. Never was and never will be. Grandpa, on the other hand, is among the best in the history of the world, the universe, the Milky Way and beyond—World War II hero and all that goes with it, pilot of every plane known to mankind and for many years the operator of what he called an import/export business. I could never figure out what that really was and what he really did. But he flew all over the world doing stuff. And now that he’s retired, he’s still flying all over the world…doing stuff. He has lots of friends in all parts of the globe, and he likes to visit them.
A while back he stopped in at our house in Buffalo and offered to take me on one of his trips to celebrate my becoming a man, as he put it, and clapped me so hard on the shoulder that I just about fell over. He’d made similar offers to all six of his grandsons and had already followed through on a few. What he meant by man was a teenager, a thirteen-year-old. I was still a few months from that then, though I’m almost there now. But age was beside the point—the chance he gave me to go far away, to the land of IKEA and the world’s best meatballs and other cool things, was something I was into immediately.
I should have been in school, it being the first week of September and all. That was an added bonus when he made the offer (and maybe helped blind me to the fact that I was going to have to fly in an airplane to go on this trip). From way up there in the plane, the weather outside (or at least down below) appeared amazing. We were high above wispy, white clouds that looked like massive stretched-out cotton balls, and the sky was clear blue all around us. I use the word sky loosely, because as far as I could figure out from the altitude the pilot said we were at, we were basically in space. That meant that when we started to fall, we’d reach terminal velocity really quickly. Maybe we’d die before we even hit the ocean, before the plane ripped into the water like an atomic bomb into concrete, disintegrated and evaporated all of us.
But there was Grandpa, disgustingly calm, sitting beside me with his black beret still on his head, smiling at me every now and then (and each time I gave him my best fake smile back), his earbuds in and music pumping out of them. Yep, I said pumping. This guy is God knows how old—I’ve lost track, but he’s over eighty for sure—and he was listening to the Black Eyed Peas or something like that. It sure sounded like “Boom Boom Pow.” I knew he was a Frank Sinatra fan—he always slapped me hard on the back when he had that sort of historical stuff ramped up on his stereo. My cousins tell me they’ve heard him listening to lots of Elvis too and even the Boss, Bruce Springsteen. This guy is so open-minded it is sickening. He’d obviously found some channel on the music feed on the plane that was giving him newer stuff, and he’d just started getting down. And, of course, he was multitasking. I guess when you’ve flown dangerous missions in a war and been all over the world doing amazing things like climbing mountains in your spare time, you’ve got to have that sort of talent.
He was reading, and he’d been at it just about all the way across the ocean…as he nonchalantly flew in that deadly machine, listening to music and smiling at me.
Reading? Not exactly my idea of a scintillating time. I wished I had my cell phone with me—or at least the cell that would finally be mine on my thirteenth birthday.
Grandpa was some sort of speed reader too, of course. He must have read about three or four books on that flight. He handed me The Little Prince when we boarded (along with another hard clap on the back). That novel was a big fave of his, one he had read to me and all the cousins over the years. I didn’t entirely get it, really—a story, almost like a fable, about this weird person, this small prince, from another planet who was involved in a plane crash. Perfect! A plane crash! I only pretended to read it as I sat there worrying. Grandpa had already read the Sherlock Holmes thriller The Hound of the Baskervilles—which actually sounded kind of cool, with a massive dog with glowing eyes and murder and all that stuff—and had almost finished a Swedish crime novel, which he’d started plowing into about halfway into the flight. He was kind of holding the cover away from me, and I had the feeling that maybe the story inside was a bit inappropriate for someone my age, maybe a tad violent and all. You wouldn’t think the famously happy-go-lucky Swedes would be up to that sort of thing—I certainly didn’t—but they actually were. Big-time. I’d done some research about them on Mom’s laptop the week before we left, and it actually kind of freaked me out.
That should have been my first clue that this trip to Sweden was going to be a whole lot scarier than I ever could have imagined.