“What’s your name?” the General asked.
“Tracy,” she answered. And I wanted more than anything to look away, but I was too scared of the uncertainty. I had to watch.
He asked if she had children. That’s how I knew about her two kids even before I saw their family photo in the news.
“Would you like to see your children again?” General asked. Tracy nodded. And in that moment she stopped being a flight attendant. She stopped being an airline employee. This was a woman. A fellow human being. A mother with children she loved, with teeth that rattled, with a voice that cracked as she answered General’s questions.
She could have been any of us.
She could have been me.
General wanted to make sure all the cameras were still rolling, that we were all streaming our images and footage to the news-frenzied masses down on solid ground.
Wanted to be sure that everybody knew the exact reason for this woman’s death.
“It’s the superintendent’s fault,” he said. “He now has two orphans on his conscience.”
And he pulled the trigger.
I don’t remember screaming, but I’m sure I must have. Everyone did. Because even though we saw the gun, even though we identified the crazed rage in General’s eyes, we couldn’t bring ourselves to believe he would actually do it. That he would actually kill that flight attendant.
“You have five more minutes, Mr. Superintendent,” General told the cameras. Five minutes until what? Another one of us died?
If you haven’t been in a cabin full of terrified passengers and a man bent on terrorizing you all, you maybe would expect me to behave differently. To think differently. I already told you I wasn’t a Christian at this point in my life, but I’d lived with one for over a year and kind of knew the basic tenets. Love your neighbors. Pray daily. Ask Jesus to forgive your sins.
And maybe you’ll expect me to jump in now and say that’s just what I did. Dropped to my knees. Told God I was a sinner. All that jazz.
But while General was waving around his gun and pacing up and down the aisles, I wasn’t thinking about God or heaven or my sins or my need of a Savior. Do you know what I was thinking?
That the dead woman lying crumpled in the aisle could have been me.
And that in order to survive, I needed to make myself far more inconspicuous than how I normally appear. For the first time in my life, I cursed my obsession with dying my hair. Who would want to stand out in a situation like this?
But stand out I did. And when General’s five-minute timer buzzed, his eyes locked onto mine, and he strode deliberately toward the back of the cabin and stopped right in front of me.