Pigs in Heaven

Captain Hook now explains they are passing over the Mississippi River, and that if he can do anything to make the passengers more comfortable they should just let him know. Frankly, although she doubts the captain can help her out here, Taylor doesn’t feel comfortable being intimate with a stranger’s hair loss. She doesn’t even know the top of Jax’s head this well. She’s looked at it, but not for three and a half hours.

Turtle is finally sleeping. She seems to be coming down with a cold, and really needed a nap, but was so excited she sat for hours with her face pressed hard against the window.

When the window turned icy cold, even when there was nothing to see but a vast, frosted field of clouds spread over a continent, rutted evenly as if it had been plowed, Turtle still stared. Everybody else on the plane is behaving as though they are simply sitting in chairs a little too close together, but Turtle is a child in a winged tin box seven miles above Planet Earth.

Taylor hasn’t flown before either, and for the first few hours she felt the same excitement. Especially when they were taking off, and before, buckling up, watching the stewardess show how to put on a yellow oxygen mask without messing up your hair. And before that, leaving the airport: walking behind Turtle down the sloping hallway to the door of the plane, stepping across from solid ground to something unknown, furtively checking the rivets around the door, but what can you do? She has no choice but to follow her daughter into this new life she’s claimed from a fortune cookie.

Chicago is tall on one side of the freeway, open sky on the other, because of the lake. Taylor never thought of Chicago as a beach town, but there they are, hundreds of people in swimsuits throwing Frisbees into the wind. It’s the first week of June. She and Turtle are cruising down the freeway in a long white limousine with smoked-glass windows and baby blue velvet upholstery. As they speed away from the airport, people in other cars turn their heads to try and get a look inside this vehicle of mystery. The driver calls them both

“Miss,” as if they are the types to travel everywhere by limo.

It occurs to Taylor that this would be quite the line of work, driving Oprah Winfrey guests around: some would be royalty and some would be famous murderers or men with a wife in every state, and if you’re only the driver you’d never know which was which. You’d have to play it safe and treat them all politely.

“This is the best-planned city in the nation,” the driver explains. Turtle is glued to the window, still. “It all burned down in the great fire of October 8, 1871. Everything went.

Two hundred million dollars of property damage. So they had the opportunity of starting it over from the ground up.”

“I’ve heard of that fire,” Taylor says. “I heard it was started by a cow”

“No, that is not true, that is a myth. The Great Chicago Fire was not started by a cow.” He hesitates a little, and Taylor realizes she’s blown their cover; bringing up the subject of livestock has put them more on the criminal than the royalty side of the fence.

“Well, it makes a good story,” she says. She doesn’t care if he thinks she and Turtle are serial killers. He still has to take them to their hotel.

For all this city’s famous planning, the traffic is horrible.

As soon as they turn away from the lake toward the tall glass buildings, they are mired in a flock of honking cars. The driver has evidently finished with the glories of his city. Once in a while as they sit there he hits the horn with his fist.

Turtle sneezes. She’s got a cold, there’s no getting around it. Taylor hands her a tissue out of her pocket. “How’re you feeling, Toots?”

“Fine,” she says, blowing her nose carefully, still looking out the window. Turtle almost never complains. Taylor is well aware of how unusual this is. If all you knew about kids came from watching the sitcoms, she thinks, you would never guess there were children on earth like Turtle.

“Mom, look.” She pulls on Taylor’s finger and points at a City of Chicago garbage truck, which is stalled next to them in the traffic jam. A fancy gold seal painted on the side gives it an air of magnificence. The driver smiles down at them from his perch on high. Then he raises one eyebrow and winks.

“Why’d he do that?”

“He thinks you’re cute,” Taylor says, “and he likes my legs.

Also he probably thinks we’re rich.”

“But we’re not, are we?”

“Nope, we’re not.”

“He gets to drive a better truck than Danny’s.”

“Definitely.”