Hands on her hips, Maggie stared down at me as I heaved myself up the last three steps. “I’ve got to say, I am really impressed.”
All she had to do was to kick her booted foot out and connect with my chest or my head. If I were her, I would. I’d kick me right down the steps, and I’d give the pilot an extra thousand (or ten thousand—I wasn’t sure how much this kind of thing cost) to roll away, leaving my body on the tarmac.
But instead, she stepped forward and held out her hand. My head was swimming, and I was panting so much I choked on my own spit. I gripped the step rail more firmly. “I can do it.” My teeth were gritted so hard I doubted she could hear me over the roar of the wind and another plane’s engine as it idled. Her plane seemed to be turned off, not rumbling at all.
“Yeah, I can see that.” She stepped back into the cabin. “I’m so impressed, actually, that I’ll invite you in. Just until my pilots get back.”
She wasn’t doing it out of the kindness of her heart, I knew. She couldn’t risk making a scene outside the plane, couldn’t risk anyone stopping her now. When the pilots returned and were inside the plane, she’d have backup.
I ducked my head as I entered. The interior was shadowy, with only a few window shades open to the early morning light. Dimly, I saw white leather seats and, under the windows, a long table full of precut fruit and juices. I didn’t see a flight attendant.
But there was only one important thing, and it wasn’t my safety. Violet.
My gaze found her. Or at least, I saw the bassinet I assumed she was in. She made no noise—my heart hurt a thousand times more than my body did. “Is she—?”
“She’s fine. You can look at her. But I swear to God, Jillian, don’t touch her, or I will kill you.”
I didn’t doubt she could. I had about two more watts of energy with which to fight her, and I needed to save them for later.
And there she was, my beloved. Round cheeks and tightly shut eyes. Both hands fixed in tiny white-knuckled fists. Her upper lip sucked on her lower one. My breasts ached with need. Every bit of desire I’d had for anything—ever—died in comparison to the way I wanted to touch her. Every drink I’d ever tossed down my throat, every illegal substance I’d ever sniffed or snorted, the way I’d desired sex and food and even air—all of it added up to nothing compared to the way I needed to feel her skin under my fingertips.
Help.
I stepped backward. It was the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my life.
“Good choice.” Her voice was light and sweet again. We were back to the fake-friendship thing. All right. I could do this.
Maggie leaned against a white seat, shaking her head slowly. “Damn, girl. Again. Respect. I didn’t expect this.”
She did, in fact, sound impressed, which made sense. With major bodily damage, no cell phone, and not a dime to my name, I’d managed to get all the way to the airport, through security, and onto her plane.
What came next? Would she kill me? What would a pilot do if he boarded his plane and it was full of my blood? Surely they wouldn’t take off, or was that simply a question of price, too?
“What now?” I needed to accept that she had all the power. I had none.
“How did you get here?”
“Carjacked a junkie.”
Her eyes widened. “You dazzle me. I simply did not see this coming. I’ll ask you the same question. What now?”
Me? I had no fucking clue. I’d gotten here, but I didn’t have a plan. I just shook my head.
“I expect you’ll try to tell the pilots that you’re the mother and that I’ve stolen her from you, but I’ve already paid them a year’s salary each to ignore whatever my alcoholic sister Jillian says if she makes it this far. Which, to be fair, I didn’t know you would, but I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t have everything planned out. Are you the reason the planes aren’t taking off, too? The reason my pilots are trying to bribe someone inside right now?”
“That would be Bree, actually.”
Maggie actually laughed. “Of course it is. Would you like to have a seat?”
I hated myself for it, but I didn’t think I could stand for even thirty more seconds. I sunk slowly, so carefully, into a chair that faced backward, toward the bassinet in which Violet lay sleeping. I ignored the pain and the black sparkles that danced at the edge of my vision. An empty formula bottle was on its side on the table next to it.
I caught my breath.
Maggie turned her head to follow my gaze. “Oh, she’s so good at the bottle already. Such a good little eater. I’m only supplementing. Until, you know.”
She’d faltered a tiny bit. I didn’t allow myself the hope that wanted to push its way into my brain. “Until your milk finishes coming in.”
“Do not fuck with me, Jillian.”
“I’m not.”
“Or humor me.”
“I swear to God, I’m not.” Her delusion was real in her mind, as real as the pain I felt from my engorged nipples, from my massacred groin, from my shredded right hand, from my entire broken-ribbed body. “I get it.”
She melted gracefully into the chair opposite me. Our knees were a good two feet apart. I was grateful for the separation and the fact that I’d have at least a second or two of notice if she launched herself at me.
“Seriously, what did you expect to happen when you boarded?”
I closed my eyes for a second and took another deep breath before opening them again. “I have no idea. I guess you’ll try to finish stealing my child.”
“My child.” She didn’t trust me.
Nor should she.
I said, “In Alien, Ripley never backs down. We’re Ripleys. So I guess we’ll fight some more. One of us will win. The other one might die. That one’ll probably be me.”
Maggie frowned.
“I’m tired, Maggie. I’ll do anything for her; you know I will. But I’m trying to also be realistic here. If I don’t die, but you take her, I’ll want to die, so I guess that’s the same thing.”
She looked down at her lap, then up at me again.
For a split, heart-stopping second, her face was the same face she’d worn in the hospital seven years before, right after she’d opened her belly, before she passed out. I finally truly recognized her. She had the same grief-stricken, disbelieving eyes.
Quietly, Maggie said, “Then you’ll finally know how it feels to lose a baby.”
But I already knew. “It’s like the ocean.”
She frowned. “What?”
When she’d driven away with my daughter, when I lost Violet, I finally knew what it felt like. “It’s like you’ve been dropped out of the sky into the ocean. You have no life preserver. No boat. No one can help you. The ocean is thousands of miles wide, and you’re in the middle of it, and every place where the salt water touches you, you burn. You can never get out. You can never drown, either. You have to stay there. Adrift. Alone in the ocean, nothing around you but the water and the freezing cold and the knowledge that you’ll never feel joy again in any shape or form. Your heart becomes the water, and then your body does, too. You’re still you, but you’re also the ocean, and you know you’re lost forever.”
Her eyes were brimming with tears that refused to fall. I thought mine should be, too, but I couldn’t find where tears lived. So I closed my eyes to say the rest of it. “And that’s just a tiny bit of what it’s felt like to lose Violet. You had it worse than I did because you never got to hold your child. I’m so sorry that happened to you, Maggie. You never deserved that.”
When I opened my eyes, Maggie was staring at me. I hadn’t heard her move, but now she held a knife in her right hand. It was long and vicious-looking, its serrated blade flashing bright as it caught a sliver of sunrise through the window. Civil dawn, I thought.
She leaned forward, remaining in her seat with every muscle tensed. The knife shook in her hand.
I kept my gaze on Maggie’s face. One tear dropped from her left eye, then it was matched by her right eye. Her whole body was trembling. Funny. Mine seemed to have finally stopped shaking.
“I will kill you, Jillian. I didn’t want to. I did everything not to have to. But I will. You know that. You’re making me do it.”
I pulled out the phone and showed it to her. “It’s all recorded. It’s already uploaded to the cloud, in case you grab the phone and try to delete it.” I didn’t know that it was backed up anywhere, but it was all I had.
Maggie panted a breath and leaned forward, propelling the knife forward through the air. It stopped, hovering in her hand in midair, twelve inches from my chest.
I remained completely still. “If you do take her from me, even if I’m not around, she’ll someday find out what you did. I guarantee you that. And she’ll learn that the person she thought loved her most was nothing but a common thief. She’ll end up alone, without parents to love her.” Our eyes locked. “Just like us.”
“Go to hell.” But I could feel Maggie realize I was right, could feel the knowledge move through her body as surely as if I were touching her skin. The knife shook more violently in the air in front of me. I knew if I tried to strike it away, the fight would be on.
Instead, I waited, my breath tight in my chest.
Finally, she said, “It’s not fair, though. It’s not fair!” She sounded like an angry, lost child. I imagined she’d sounded exactly the same on the day her parents’ plane crashed.
“It isn’t,” I agreed. I had never meant anything more deeply in my life. Not my Hippocratic oath, not my wedding vows. This was the deepest truth I held.
Sirens wailed. We both ducked our heads to look out the plane’s windows. A gate in the fence had been opened, and four police cars were racing toward our plane at top speed.
Maggie’s eyes wavered in their tears as she raised the knife high.
I raised my hands to block her first blow.
The blade plunged toward me. I tensed, knowing I would simply fight until I couldn’t fight anymore.
Then the knife stopped in midair for the second time. Maggie’s mouth twisted and she finally managed to say, “I can’t live without her, Jillian.”
Maggie changed the blade’s direction and, with a guttural cry, drove the knife into her own stomach until the blade was sunk to the hilt.