Landline

The plane returned to the gate. Then taxied out again. Georgie watched the boy play a video game until his phone died.

All the tension and adrenaline she’d felt in the airport drained out through her feet. She was hungry. And sad. She slumped forward in her seat, so she wouldn’t brush against the woman next to her.

Georgie kept thinking about her last phone conversation with Neal, their last fight. Then she started wondering if it might actually be their last fight. If she’d scared him away from proposing, wouldn’t it erase all the fights they’d had since?

By the time the captain came back with good news—“We’ve got a window”—Georgie’d run out of urgency. This is purgatory, she thought. Between places. Between times. Completely out of touch.

Everyone around her cheered.

Georgie wasn’t a good flier. Neal always held her hand during takeoff and turbulence.

Now that there were too many people in their family to sit in one row, they’d sit across from each other two and two—Georgie and Neal in both aisle seats, so he could take her hand if he needed to.

Sometimes he didn’t even look up from his crossword, just reached out for her when the plane started to shake. Georgie always tried not to look scared, for the girls’ sake. But she always was scared. If she made a noise or took too sharp of a breath, Neal would squeeze her hand and look up at her. “Hey. Sunshine. This is nothing. Look at the stewardess over there—she’s dozing. We’ll be fine.”

Georgie’s plane ran into turbulence an hour into the flight to Denver. The woman sitting next to her wasn’t bothered by it, except for when the lurching shifted Georgie’s hips into hers.

Her son had already fallen asleep against Georgie’s right side. Georgie leaned against him, clenched her fists and closed her eyes.

She tried to imagine Neal, driving through this blizzard to get to her.

But there was no blizzard in 1998.

And maybe Neal wasn’t trying to get to her.

She tried again to remember what she’d said to him last night on the phone. She tried to remember what he’d said back.

Neal probably thought she was a maniac. She should have just told him about the magic phone. Full disclosure. Then they could have solved it together. They could have Sherlocked and Watsoned it from both ends of the timeline.

Or Neal could have figured it all out—he was the Sherlock and the Watson in their relationship.

The plane heaved, and Georgie pressed her head back into her seat, forcing herself to hear Neal’s voice. It’s nothing. We’ll be fine.

The sun was setting in Denver. The plane circled (and shook) for forty-five minutes before there was a break in the storm they could land through.

When she finally stepped out onto the jetway, Georgie was sure she was going to throw up, but the feeling quickly passed. It was cold in the tunnel. She hurried by the untouchable lady and her son, and got out her boarding pass for Omaha.

Georgie’d missed her next flight, but there had to be another one—Omaha was the biggest city between Denver and Chicago. (Neal said so.)

She took a few confused steps into the airport. The gate was so full, people were sitting on the floor, leaning against the windows. Every gate, up and down the concourse, was full.

Georgie needed to get to the other side of the terminal. She found a people mover and walked quickly. It felt like time was moving faster for her than for the people she was passing. No one else seemed to be in a hurry. And most of the shops were shuttered and dark, even though it was only six. Christmas Eve, she thought. And then, Snowpocalypse.

When she got to her gate, every seat was taken. People were standing around a muted TV, watching the Weather Channel. There was a sign over the desk with three flight numbers, all delayed. Technically she hadn’t missed her flight—because it had never taken off.

Georgie got in line, just to make sure that staying put was her best bet to get to Omaha.

When she finally got to the desk, the airline employee was surprisingly upbeat. “Your best bet is to Apparate.”

“Sorry?”

“Just a little Harry Potter humor,” he said.

“Right.”

Georgie hadn’t read the Harry Potter books. But she’d gone to see most of the movies with Seth on days when he felt like getting out of the office. She didn’t care about wizards, but she thought Alan Rickman was dreamy.

“When did you start lusting after middle-aged guys?” Seth asked.

“When I became middle-aged.”

“Rein it in, Georgie. We’re still thirty-somethings.”

“God, I loved that show.”

“I know,” he said.

“That’s proof that I’m middle-aged,” she said. “I miss Thirtysomething.”

The Starbucks next to her gate was closed. And the McDonald’s. And the Jamba Juice. Georgie bought a turkey sandwich from one vending machine and an iPhone charger from another. She got terrible coffee at the only place that was open, a Western-themed sports bar, then walked back to the gate and found a spot against the wall to lean against.

The glass behind her was cold. Georgie squinted out the window. She couldn’t see anything—no snow, nothing more than shadows—but she could hear the wind. It sounded like she was still in the airplane.

Across from her, a woman was breaking a cookie in half and splitting it between her kids, two girls small enough to share a seat. They had napkins folded in their laps and boxes of milk. The woman was sitting next to her husband, and his arm hung lazily over the back of her chair, stroking her shoulder absently.

Georgie wanted to move closer to them. She wanted to brush crumbs from the littlest girl’s coat. She wanted to talk to them. “I have this, too,” she’d say to the woman. “This exactly.”

But did she?

Still?

Georgie kept testing herself, cataloging her memories, tracing them backwards. Alice’s seventh birthday. Noomi’s first Disneyland Halloween. Neal mowing the lawn. Neal getting frustrated in traffic. Neal shifting toward her in his sleep when Georgie had insomnia.

“You okay?”

“Can’t sleep.”

“Come here, crazy.”

Neal teaching Alice how to make Jiffy Pop. Neal doodling a sleepy gerbil on Georgie’s arm . . .

Georgie could never remember the difference between a gerbil, a hamster, and a guinea pig—so Neal had taken to drawing them on her when he was bored. “Cheat sheet,” he’d say, writing I am a guinea pig in a word balloon on her elbow.