At the forty-five minute mark, hell
broke loose in the form of a screaming girl. She drew every eye on the plane,
and a flight attendant immediately rushed over. It was the little girl across
the aisle from me. The mother was frantically trying to shush her, but she
sobbed and wailed, holding most of a doll. The doll was missing her head. The
head was in the possession of the boy, who bounced it like a ball from hand to
hand until the mother snatched it away from him.
“Ma’am, is everything all right?” Amanda,
the flight attendant I had seen when I boarded, asked. It was a question she
was required to ask, bu tit was clear that there was very little a flight
attendant could do.
The mother had stood up and
physically separated the two kids by sitting between them. The boy protested to
being manhandled by Mom, but she wasn’t having any of it. The girl’s wails
became muffled as she climbed up her mother and buried her face in Mom’s
blouse.
“Ma’am, is there anything I can do?”
Amanda asked again.
The mother’s head whipped around,
completely startled by Amanda’s presence. “What? Uh, I don’t know. God, I wish
my husband was here to help. Tommy, don’t kick the seat!”
The boy stopped, but he had a look,
a look I knew too well. This wasn’t over.
“And how do
you know this?” Nikki interrupted. “I apologize, but you are not exactly up for
parenting awards.”
“Hah! Well,
you’re right on that. I know it because I was a boy who grew up and I had a
brother who could be a real pain. We fought a lot. We had a flight once to a
family reunion. On the flight out we sat as close together as possible to be a
family. On the return flight, Paul sat with Dad ten rows away from Ma and I.
You can’t lock a couple of boys in a tin can for hours without trouble.”
“I see.” She
smiled into her coffee. “I did not appreciate your propensity for attracting
trouble from even an early age. It does much to explain who you are now.”
“Yeah,
well, I notice that my being a trouble magnet brings you by, too.”
“Oh, but I
am not near you because I am trouble, far from it. I simply delight in the
excitement generated by its attraction to you.”
Her smile
had become sweet innocence, while my face had become annoyed because she had
gotten the better out of that volley.
“Anyway, the
kid was trouble. . . .”