Larry was drinking to process his trip home too. Charlie got up to fetch two more glasses of gin, and when she stood she noticed she was already feeling the effects of the drinks. She’d become more limber again, as if the alcohol had lightened her pain.
The rumpled blanket and the cushion dented with her weight remained in the seat. She left her shoes on the floor, next to her purse, and Larry spotted the little packet of Kleenex he’d given her in one corner.
She reappeared with two brimming glasses and said, “The first memory I thought of when I heard the news was this one time when I got lost at Disney World. I was five years old, and I was lost for half an hour, terrified with all those people milling around me. But I kept looking for my parents, positive they’d appear at some point. I feel the same way now, except one of them I’m never going to see again.”
She started crying again and tried to console herself with a couple of sips from her glass. Larry shifted in his seat.
“The ‘never’ part is what kills me,” Charlie sobbed.
“Do you have any other siblings?” he asked.
“A sister. Two years younger than me,” she said quietly, with the volume of sadness, of nighttime, her eyes glassy. Then she added, “This is where everything ends. I can’t see anything beyond this moment.”
“Parents leave us so much, but they take something too,” Larry said.
Charlie shook her head, took a long swig, and said, “I feel like he took everything.”
Two fat tears welled up in her eyes, and she swiftly wiped them away with her hand and let out a wail that disarmed Larry.
“Your father’s death,” he said, “obeys the laws of life. My father’s obeys a natural law in Colombia—the law of the jungle.”
“Was he murdered?” Charlie asked, worried she might be prying.
“He was kidnapped,” Larry said.
Charlie raised her eyebrows, opened her swollen eyes wider, and sighed.
“He disappeared one day, and I never saw him again,” Larry said, then fell silent. She didn’t ask anything else.
The airplane shuddered with a couple of powerful jolts. Instinctively, she grabbed Larry’s hand, and he was caught off guard more by the squeeze of her fingers than by the turbulence. Though the flight smoothed out again after a few seconds, Charlie downed the rest of her drink.
“Death gets a kick out of scaring us,” Larry said.