Derek said, “Say what?,” but at the same time he was entering the stream of passengers moving forward.
“He poked a gun in my side,” Willa said, following close behind. “He said don’t move or he’d shoot.”
“What kind of gun?” Derek asked over his shoulder.
“What kind of gun?” she echoed. “How would I know what kind? It was poking into my ribcage! I couldn’t see it.”
Derek sent a sharp glance back at her, but he didn’t comment.
They arrived at the exit door and Derek thanked the stewardess. Willa hadn’t known they should do that; she hurriedly thanked her too. Then they stepped out onto the staircase. It was warm here, and sunny, with a soft breeze brushing their faces. Below them she saw their seatmate—a slouched stick figure loping toward the terminal building, pulling open the glass door before anybody else, vanishing inside without a backward glance.
Derek made no attempt to talk as they descended the stairs, but once they reached the tarmac he said, “I don’t understand. He aimed a gun at you but you couldn’t see it?”
“He had it hidden under the armrest,” she said. They were walking side by side now; she had to take an extra little skip from time to time to keep up with him. “He poked it into my ribs and he said, ‘Move and I shoot.’ And I couldn’t think of any way to tell you! How did you guess that something was wrong, finally?”
“How did I…?”
“What made you say we ought to change places?”
“Well, I was reading and you weren’t,” Derek said. “You were just spacing out, there. I thought it would make more sense for you to take the window seat.”
“You didn’t notice anything odd?”
“Let me get this straight,” Derek said. He stopped walking and turned to look at her. “The guy who was sitting next to us pointed a gun at you.”
“Right.”
“A real, actual gun.”
“I think so.”
“Well…Willa? What was he planning to do? Make you take the controls and fly us to Cuba?”
“I don’t know, Derek!”
“I mean, it doesn’t add up, sweetie. I don’t see how this would have worked. Don’t you think it was maybe a joke?”
“A joke!”
“Okay, so not a very funny one, but—”
“He scared me to death, Derek! I was shaking. I felt it was just him and me alone in this, and I didn’t know how to tell you about it, so I was really glad when you caught on of your own accord. Or I thought you caught on.”
“Oh, well, all’s well that ends well,” Derek said. He was looking around now. The air smelled like flowers, and the afternoon sun was almost hot, and people were trickling out of the terminal to greet the arriving passengers. “Cute little place,” he said. “Do you see your folks anywhere?”
“They’ll be out front,” she said shortly. They would be idling the car at the curb so they wouldn’t have to pay for parking, but she didn’t want to tell Derek that.
She felt a lot less grateful to Derek now than she had when they were on the plane.
They entered the terminal, which did seem very small, and waited beneath the Baggage sign till a worker wheeled in a trolley loaded with suitcases. Other passengers were waiting too, but not their seatmate. Maybe he was hiding until they left the building. Or he’d been traveling with no luggage; that seemed even more likely.
Derek reclaimed his duffel bag and Willa’s blue vinyl suitcase, and then they headed for the exit. Willa spotted her parents’ car almost as soon as they stepped outside—a Chevy her father had bought a few years ago from one of his students. You couldn’t mistake its distinctive finish, which was a hand-painted, nonshiny purple. She said, “There they are,” and deliberately did not look over to see Derek’s reaction.
Both her parents got out of the car when she and Derek approached. “Willa girl!” her father said. He was in his work clothes, but her mother had dressed up a bit. She wore a flowered shirtwaist that Willa hadn’t seen before and her hair was tied back with a floppy bow. Willa said, “Mom and Pop, I’d like you to meet Derek,” and Derek said, “How do you do, Mrs. Drake. Mr. Drake,” and set down Willa’s suitcase to shake hands. They didn’t suggest he use their first names, but they were both smiling and putting in some effort, Willa could tell. This made her feel a little sad for them, in a way that had been happening more and more often since she had started college. While her father loaded their luggage into the trunk her mother hugged her and said, “Welcome home, darling.” Then her father hugged her too, in his usual shy, held-back way, and asked, “Flight go okay?”
“It went fine,” she said.
She and Derek were settled in the rear seat and the car was pulling away from the curb before she added, “But a passenger pointed a gun at me.”
“What!” her mother said, twisting around to stare at her. “A gun?”
“He was sitting right next to me, and I felt something poke into me and he said, ‘Don’t move or I shoot.’ ”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious.”
“Well, my lord,” her father said, while her mother twisted even farther around so that she could see Derek. She said, “What did you do, Derek?”
“Oh, I didn’t even know about it,” Derek said cheerfully.
“Did you call for help?” her mother asked Willa.
“I couldn’t! I didn’t dare open my mouth. Finally Derek said to change seats with him, and that seemed to be the end of it.”
“Merciful heavens,” her mother said. “I hope you reported it afterward.”
“Who to, though?” Willa asked. “I mean, it was the weirdest thing. The whole situation just seemed to get…swept under the rug, finally.”
Derek cleared his throat. “Also,” he said, “it might not have been exactly what it looked like.”
Willa’s mother swiveled toward him again.
“I’m guessing the guy was just some kind of joker,” he said. And then, to Willa, “After all, sweetie, you had only his word for it that there even was a gun. Guy was probably just sitting there bored out of his skull, and he thinks to himself, ‘I know what: I’ll have myself some fun with this snippy little college girl.’ ”
Willa’s mother looked expectantly at Willa.
“Well, maybe,” Willa said after a moment. She wasn’t sure why she felt offended. Finally, changing the subject, she asked her parents, “Where’s Elaine? I was thinking she might come with you.”
“Oh, Elaine,” her mother said, facing forward again. “Elaine wouldn’t be caught dead with us. Wait till you see her, Willa. She gets all her clothes at Goodwill these days and she listens to what I wouldn’t even call music and her friends are downright strange.”
“Now, now,” Willa’s father said. “It’s not as bad as all that.”
“Yesterday,” Willa’s mother told Willa, “I asked her to clean her room because your side of it was completely submerged. I mean, I couldn’t even see your bed for all the clothes piled on it. But later I went up to check and she hadn’t done a thing. She’d gone off by then with her, I don’t know, boyfriend? Friend? Partner in crime? This boy who’s a whole foot shorter than she is, Marcus, his name is, all dressed in black and wearing one earring; has never so much as given me the time of day. So anyhow, when I saw the state of the room do you know what I did? I opened the window and I heaved all her clothes down into the backyard.”
Derek gave a little hiss of amusement, and Willa’s mother sent him an appreciative glance. “Jeans, tops, sweaters,” she told him, “these dead old men’s pajamas she favors…all of it. Out the window. Clean across the yard. Long black skinny tights straggling over the barbecue grill.”
Now Derek laughed aloud.
“My wife is very tempestuous,” Willa’s father told him.
/> Willa hated when he said that. He always made it sound like a virtue. He gave a prideful lilt to the word, and when he sought out Derek’s face in the rearview mirror his eyes were rayed with smile lines.
“Well, I don’t get it,” Willa told her mother flatly. “All you did was spread her mess around further. I don’t know what good that did.”
“Oh, honey, just you wait till you have a teenage daughter yourself and you’ll understand,” her mother said. “My life is a living hell.”
Willa sank into silence. Derek set a hand on top of hers, and she let it stay there, but she kept her face turned toward her window.
The countryside here was much more interesting than Illinois, she felt. She hoped Derek was noticing that. (He always talked as if California were so special.) There were tumbling green hills resembling bunches of fresh parsley, and mysterious hollows already darkening in the late-afternoon shadows, and nearer to the highway little cabins sat surrounded by rickrack fences and ramshackle sheds, washing machines on their front porches, hound dogs splayed in the dirt yards, tractors rusting out back. The trip from the airport took over an hour, and Willa watched the scenery that whole time without speaking while her mother, up front, was all charm and gaiety and hostessy curiosity. Did Derek have brothers and sisters? Yes, two brothers, both younger. And did she understand correctly that he was about to graduate? Right, and not a moment too soon; he was ready to start his real life. What did he plan to do next; did he know? He already had a job back home in San Diego; a friend of his dad’s owned a sporting-goods chain and he had offered Derek an executive position. Willa’s mother said, “Oh, how lovely! Because of your tennis skills, I guess,” which was embarrassing because it revealed that Willa must have discussed him with her family. “Yes, ma’am,” Derek said. Willa had never heard him say “ma’am” before. It seemed he had switched to a foreign language to accommodate the natives. She scowled at a passing pickup with three overalled boys lounging in the rear, their backs slouched against the truck’s cab. How they would have hooted at all this genteel small talk!
* * *
—
The house had been spruced up for their visit, Willa could tell. There was a pot of pansies on the porch that must have been bought within the last couple of days, because her mother could kill off a plant in no time, as she cheerfully admitted herself. In the foyer Willa smelled a combination of lemon Pledge and Mr. Clean, and when she took Derek upstairs to the guest room she could see the fresh vacuum-cleaner tracks on the carpet. “This is where you’ll be sleeping,” she told him, entering first. The window was open and a breeze was stirring the curtains. A vase of daffodils stood on the dresser. Clearly, her mother had gone to a lot of trouble.
Ordinarily the sight of the guest-room bed, with its multiple rows of giant pillows and fussy, overstuffed cushions slanted against the headboard, made Willa’s toes curl in protest as she imagined how her feet would jam against the footboard. But Derek said, “Nice,” and he set his duffel bag on the new foldout luggage stand, and Willa saw that it was nice, actually.
“Where’s your room?” he asked. He took hold of her wrist as he spoke and drew her toward him.
“Oh, down the hall,” she said vaguely.
Now he had her nestled against him, and he murmured, “Do I get to visit in the night?,” with his breath ruffling the top of her head.
“No, silly, I share with my sister,” she said, but she didn’t pull away.
“So you will have to visit me, then.”
“Not a chance!” she said, laughing. Then she looked up to see her sister glancing in as she passed the doorway. She was wearing what looked like a man’s long overcoat, brown tweed and much too warm for the season, and her hair hung in two straight curtains that barely parted to make room for her face. “Oh, Lainey,” Willa said, hastily separating from Derek. Elaine came to a reluctant halt. “I’d like you to meet Derek. Derek, this is my sister, Elaine.”
Elaine raised her left eyebrow—or the part of her left eyebrow that could be seen, at least. Her eyes were so heavily outlined in black that she resembled a pileated woodpecker. “Don’t let me interrupt anything,” she said, and she continued down the hall.
Derek and Willa exchanged a wry look.
“So!” Willa finally said in a bright voice. “Bathroom’s directly across from you, towels are on the shelf above the tub…”
Derek reached out to encircle her wrist again, and she allowed it, but she said, “Let’s go downstairs and see what’s for supper, shall we?”
Downstairs, Willa’s mother was setting a tray of juice tumblers on the coffee table. An uncorked bottle already stood there—cream sherry, Willa saw as her mother began pouring. She was surprised. She was shocked, in fact. Her parents didn’t drink. Her father had never found any liquor he could stand the taste of, he always said, and her mother just didn’t have the habit of it, although she’d been known to accept a flute of champagne at a wedding reception. But now her mother said, “Sherry, Derek?” delicately lifting a brimful glass with just her fingertips, and he said, “Oh, well, thanks,” and accepted it.
“Sherry for you, Willa?”
“Thank you, Mom,” Willa said.
She couldn’t bear for Derek to show any sign he found this laughable: the sweet, thick sherry served just before supper and the squat, slightly sticky juice glasses. But no, he acted perfectly solemn and respectful, holding his glass in front of him without taking a sip until Willa’s father arrived from the kitchen with his own drink (iced tea). Then Derek said, “Cheers, everybody,” and everyone murmured, “Cheers,” and took a sip.
“Shouldn’t we call Lainey?” Willa’s father asked her mother, but her mother gave a grimace and said, “Lots of luck with that.” She told Derek, “Willa’s sister wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with her family these days,” and Derek chuckled.
Willa didn’t know why her mother was putting on such a show. It must be because Willa had finally, finally found herself a boyfriend. (Had her parents been worried about that?) It was true she had not been popular in high school. The only boys who ever asked her out had been geeky, bespectacled misfits whom she had turned down without a thought, preferring instead the back-of-the-room boys—juvenile-delinquent types in leather jackets, lounging almost horizontal at their desks and yawning at the ceiling during class, roaring out of the parking lot in their souped-up trucks as soon as the last bell rang. But none of those boys had ever given her a glance.
Maybe her parents had been asking each other, year after year, “Is she all right? Is something wrong with her? Do you suppose she’ll end up an old maid?”
Derek was telling her mother that he had once been like Elaine himself; used to avoid his parents like the plague (“I find that hard to believe,” her mother murmured), but now look: he couldn’t think of any two people he’d rather spend an evening with.
Willa took another sip of sherry. It coated her throat like cough syrup.
* * *
—
The experience with the man on the plane lurked behind everything, casting a shadow, causing the back of her neck to tingle, surfacing now and then during the most unrelated conversations, but neither Derek nor her parents referred to it again. It seemed her parents had decided to go along with Derek’s interpretation of it.
When she was showering that night she examined her right side for a bruise, but there wasn’t one. When she went to bed she made a conscious effort to focus on other subjects so that she wouldn’t have bad dreams—think of how to entertain Derek tomorrow; think of whether he’d made a good impression on her parents—and it worked, more or less, but then in the middle of a deep sleep she felt a steady, blunt nudge in her ribs, and she woke with her heart pounding so violently that she fancied she could see her top sheet trembling over her breasts in the dark. She searched with her fingers for the spot where she’d felt the n
udge and it seemed to her that it was, in fact, slightly sore, but maybe that was just from her own prodding earlier. After that she lay awake a long time, staring up at the ceiling and listening to her sister’s snuffly breaths across the room.
Okay, then: think of Derek’s proposal.
He had no idea how much he’d asked of her, suggesting she give up her work with Dr. Brogan. The discovery of language had been her great epiphany in college. Not just Spanish and French and such, which she already knew from high school, but the origins of language in general, and what the various languages revealed about the various cultures that spoke them, and—most interesting of all—how many things the different languages had in common. Wasn’t it amazing that most people the world over agreed upon the need to distinguish between “he did” and “he was doing”? And idioms: funny how often the same illogical and unlikely idiom had been arrived at independently by widely separate nationalities. She could listen to Dr. Brogan discuss such issues all day.
Still, it was tempting, just for a moment, to consider the adventurousness of throwing everything over to marry Derek. Ditching all that was familiar, tying herself almost arbitrarily to this whole new person entirely unrelated to her. The suddenness, the extremeness.
Finally she slid back into sleep, and as far as she knew she had no dreams at all, good or bad, either one.
After breakfast the next morning she took Derek on a walk through town, keeping up a stream of chatter. “There’s where the Pearsons live,” she said. The Pearsons were the people she worked for during the summers, tending their two children while the parents took city folk whitewater-rafting. “And here’s Miss Carroll’s house who taught me clarinet, except one day I rang the doorbell and got no answer and it turned out she’d run off with Mr. Surrey from the auto-parts store who was married and had five children.”
Derek said, “I didn’t know you played the clarinet.”
She drew in a breath to speak but then just stared at him, because what? Oh, boys were such foreigners. (Not for the first time, she wished she’d had a brother or two.) A girl would have begged for every detail about Miss Carroll’s running off. “Well, not anymore,” she said finally. “I wasn’t very musical.”