“If we crash in the water,” says Callie, “we should try and get a lifeboat to ourselves.” She has the inflatable vest out from under the seat, she’s checking the clasps and attachments. “I think we’d have a better chance,” she says.
I look out the window of the plane and into the darkness. If people heard they’d think she was serious.
“You really should learn to swim,” she says.
“Perhaps you’ll teach me from the raft,” I say. I imagine Callie floating in a lifeboat, me learning to swim alongside. The fuselage sinking in the distance.
“Dickie swims like an eel,” she says.
“Why an eel?”
“The way they swim,” she says.
Hardly anyone sits near us, those who do are asleep. Callie doesn’t sleep on planes. She says she’s too excited.
“You only came because he’s paying,” I say.
“That’s not altogether true,” she says. “You’re here too.” I lean over and kiss her but she tries to read her magazine around my face. “You kiss too hard,” she whispers.
“What do you mean?”
“Too much mouth and tongue,” she says.
“What about in Mexico?” I say.
“It was different there,” she says. “I felt like I was someone else.”
When I wake up Callie’s gone. We still haven’t flown into daylight. I get up and go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. Through the crack in the curtain I see her kneeling in the aisle. She’s talking to Dickie. He has a more expensive ticket than the ones he bought for us. He got them in Santa Barbara, said he had a travel agent. It was generous and I’m glad he did it but I’m uncertain why he came. I didn’t think he’d want to be reminded of the past. The prospect of him and Darwin unnerves me, and what Callie will think of the farm, the way it’s so primitive there.
I open the curtain to join them but the hostess catches me. “You can’t both be up there at once,” she says. “Wait until your sister comes back.”
I return to my seat and read. Dickie has more to say to Callie. When he talks to me it’s as though he’s afraid to be reminded of the things we have in common.
Callie brings me back a glass of water.
“How come you said you were my sister?”
“I didn’t,” she says. “I said Dickie was my father.”
“Why?”
“So they’d let me up to see him,” she says. The things I like about her most are sometimes those I like the least.
“What did you two talk about?” I ask. She’s filing her nails, they’re already short.
“How he was poor and now he’s rich.”
“How did he get rich?”
“He hasn’t told me yet,” she says.
There’s weather coming into Papeete, the rain looks black against the window, pelting silently. We have to stop to refuel. The lights on the landing track are few and barely visible, even though we’re close to the ground. A sudden windshift has one wing swinging up, people shriek and glasses tumble. I jam my knees and grab Callie’s arm. Her eyes go big and she smiles like this is pretty good, but her hand is tight on mine as though it’s all she has. A revving of engines makes the windows shudder; a camera tripod goes end over end in the aisle as the plane drags upwards, righted, the landing aborted.
“Touch and go,” says Callie as she looks out into the night. “I saw palm trees,” she says. I imagine Dickie sitting rigid up in the front, finishing off his Johnny Walker.
As we come in a second time, everyone is silent, even Callie. I watch a woman praying, the quiver of her lips, her thumbs to her mouth, a rosary bound in her fingers. I stare open eyed at the tartan pattern on the seat back in front of me, think of my mother murmuring prayers, sitting among candles on the dark, bare boards. I breathe again as the wheels touch the tarmac, relief in the screech of the landing gear.
“I’ve never been to the tropics,” Callie says calmly.
“It’s okay to be afraid,” I say.
Out of Auckland, it’s still before dawn. The plane rattles up into the air. Callie takes a photo out the window but you can’t see much.
“What’s Australia going to be like?” she asks.
“A big farm with flies.”
“Is it beautiful?”
“In a bleak sort of way. Heat and open spaces sound attractive, until that’s all there is.”
“Are there waterfalls?” she asks. “A beach?”
“Not where we’re going,” I say. I don’t tell her the desert was once the floor of an ocean.
The filtering light of the morning begins to appear above an orange rim of cloud. I wait for the mass of land on the horizon, hints of green along the edges, the sun already up and over it.