Say Again

Doors to Automatic

The jet bridge smells of cold coffee and de-icing fluid, and Wren is already translating the safety card into four languages out of habit, the way other people crack their knuckles. Fasten and unfasten. Détachez en soulevant. Im Notfall. There is no card in her hands. There is only the shuffling line, the rubber lip of the aircraft door, the cabin-crew face arranged into welcome, and the part of her brain that never stops working — that takes whatever it is given and gives it back, faithfully, in whichever tongue is wanted, adding nothing of its own.

Thirty years of that. She is forty-one and she has spent more of her waking life inside other people's sentences than inside her own.

"Good evening." The flight attendant glances at her boarding pass. "Two-Kilo, just along on the right."

"Thank you," Wren says, in English, because the man said it in English, and you match the register you are given.

Northway 21. Helsinki to Seattle, the long way, over the top of the world. Nine and a half hours of dark. She has done the route enough times that her body already knows the shape of the night ahead: the dinner she won't taste, the film she won't watch, the four or five hours when the cabin goes black and everyone around her sleeps and she does not. She does not sleep on airplanes. She has not properly slept on an airplane in a decade, and there is a small foil card of help for that in the inside pocket of her bag, and she is not going to think about the foil card yet.

What she is going to think about is Sunna.

Two years. Two years of a daughter's face delivered in pieces — a phone propped against a cereal box, a laptop camera that made the kitchen in Seattle look underwater, a sixteen-year-old learning to perform indifference for the woman who was supposed to be raising her and was instead in a booth in Geneva, in The Hague, in Nairobi, rendering other people's emergencies into clean consecutive English. Mum, you're frozen. Mum, say that again. And Wren, the professional repeater, repeating.

She is flying home to do the one thing she has been unable to do through a screen, which is to be in the room. To sit across an actual table and let the silences be real. She has rehearsed it the way she rehearses a difficult speaker — anticipating the idioms, the traps, the places she'll be tempted to soften a hard word into a kinder one and must not. Do not interpret her. Do not improve her. Just be there. Saturday morning, Seattle time, she lands, and there is a window — a narrow, once-only window — before Sunna leaves for a month with her father in Oregon. If Wren misses Saturday she misses all of it.

So: no scenes. No delays she can cause, no fuss, no version of herself that draws an eye. Land quiet, land on time, land invisible. She is very good at invisible. It is, more or less, the job.

She finds 2K, a window on the right, and folds her coat into the bin and sits, and lets the cabin assemble itself around her the way a room assembles before a session — who is here, where, in what mood, speaking to whom.

The forward party is already a small theatre.

They come down the bridge last, after the line has thinned, the way people travel when one of them cannot hurry. A man in a wheelchair, eased up out of it by two ground staff and a flight attendant, and lowered into 2A like something that might spill. Heavy in the shoulders, gone slack. His head lolls and is corrected. He is dressed for arriving somewhere important — good coat, good shoes — and he is not, by any measure, going to arrive anywhere under his own power tonight. Sedated. Wren knows the look from airports the world over: the long-haul medical case, the family bringing someone home to die where the language is right.

A woman follows and takes 2C, across the narrow aisle from Wren and one row up. Fifties, maybe younger under the tiredness. She does not smile at the crew. She does not look at the cabin. She arranges the man — tilts his head off the window, snaps his belt, tugs the blanket to his chest with two flat efficient pulls, the way you'd square a suitcase that kept tipping — and then she sits and faces forward and goes still, and her stillness has weight to it, like a closed door. Whatever the man is to her, she is not enjoying it.

And the third. He boards unhurried, a leather folio under one arm, gray at the temples and warm in the eyes, and he stops at the galley to thank the crew — not generally, but by name, reading the little badges and using them. "Thank you, Niko. Thank you, Dita." A doctor's voice, Wren thinks; she has interpreted for enough of them. The voice that has told a great many people a great many terrible things gently. He takes the aisle seat opposite, 2D, where he can reach across to the man in 2A, and he settles the folio on his knees and lets out a small contented sound, a man relieved to be aboard.

Wren reads the cabin manifest pinned to the galley curtain when the attendant flips it — an old habit, the eyes going to text the way a tongue goes to a chipped tooth. 2A — ADLER. That, then, is the sick man's name. Mr. Adler, going home.

A sad little tableau. A wife who has been doing this too long. A doctor who is kind for a living. A man who is past noticing either of them. Wren has the whole story in four seconds and no reason to want a fifth, and she looks back out the window at the apron lights bleeding in the rain and tells herself, the way she tells herself before every flight, that nothing here is hers to carry.

Up front, the gate agent has come aboard with a clipboard and is murmuring with the purser — the tall composed one, Dita, the one the doctor named — and Wren, who cannot not listen, lets the words arrive.

"...the space-weather desk pushed another advisory while you were boarding," the agent is saying. "G-three, maybe four by the early hours. They've got you on the contingency track already, and the dispatcher wants the crew briefed that HF may be unusable for stretches over the cap. Could be a reroute if it firms up."

"Understood." Dita's pen moves. "We'll plan for radio silence."

We'll plan for radio silence. Wren turns the phrase over without meaning to, the interpreter's reflex of holding a sentence up to the light to see what it really weighs. A geomagnetic storm — she has read about them, the sun throwing its weather a hundred million miles to scramble the long-range radios that airplanes still lean on out here, where there is nothing to bounce a signal off but ice. Say again, she thinks, the words she says a hundred times a working day when a feed drops or a speaker swallows a number — say again — and out over the pole tonight there may be no one to say it to.

The door is coming. She can feel it the way you feel the last person take their seat in a chamber before the gavel.

The captain's voice unspools from the overhead, unhurried, Nordic-accented English laid over a faint Finnish underbed. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Aas from the flight deck. We're going to be a quiet ship tonight on the radios — we're routing high across the pole and there's some space weather up there that may take our long-range communications offline for parts of the crossing. That's entirely normal for this track, nothing to be concerned about. We've a smooth ride forecast once we're north of the weather, a flight time of nine hours and forty minutes, and we'll have you into Seattle in good time for breakfast. Cabin crew, doors for departure."

Nothing to be concerned about. The phrase every professional uses, in every language, precisely when there is a thing one has decided you needn't be concerned about. Wren files it without alarm. She has heard captains soothe through worse.

The seat-back screen in front of her wakes. It blinks past the airline logo and lands, as these always do, on the map — and there it is: the little stylized airplane sitting at the bottom edge of an enormous pale nothing, Helsinki a bright dot beneath it and Seattle impossibly far off the top of the frame, and between the two a long looping arc that bends up and over the white crown of the planet, through Greenland, through the Canadian Arctic, through places named only by the spacing of the latitude lines. One small airplane. A great deal of ice. The distance to anywhere, drawn to scale.

A flight attendant comes through with the tray of welcome drinks, the orange juice and the sparkling wine in the little plastic flutes, and offers, and Wren says, "No, thank you," because she does not drink the complimentary drink, has never once in thirty years drunk the complimentary drink, a small rule she keeps for reasons she could not entirely give you. The man across the aisle, the doctor, takes a sparkling wine for himself and a juice he sets on the tray-table beside the sleeping Mr. Adler, where it will sit untouched all night like an offering.

Then the forward door swings.

She does not see it; she feels it — the change in the air pressure, the soft enormous gather of it — and then the sound, the heavy mechanical thunk of the latches driving home, metal seating into metal with a finality that lands somewhere under her sternum. A sound like a vault. The seal sighs. And the chime sounds, two soft notes, and the purser's voice comes level and bored and absolute over the cabin:

"Doors to automatic and cross-check."

The forward door seals with a sound like a vault, and somewhere a chime says they are no longer anywhere a person can simply get off.

The Night Cabin

Hollis Dunmore takes one look at the dinner menu—heavy card stock, gold foil, Pan-Seared Arctic Char with Celeriac Purée—and says, "I've eaten worse in worse places," and Wren likes her immediately.

"The char, or the room?"

"Both." Hollis snaps the card shut and feeds it back into the seat pocket beside a fat, sun-warped paperback, its foil title rubbed down to a ghost. "Once spent New Year's eating cheese spread out of a foil pouch in a supply closet because the waiting room had a man in it with a machete and opinions. You learn to be grateful for a table." She folds her hands over the buckle. Big hands, blunt-nailed, scrubbed so many times the knuckles have gone pale and permanent. "Thirty-one years of charge nurse. The ER. Nights, mostly. I retired in March and my daughter said treat yourself, so." She lifts her chin at the cabin, the foil, the foolishness of it. "Here I am being treated."

"Wren."

"Like the bird?"

"Like the bird."

"Small thing, big mouth." Hollis says it without unkindness, the way you'd read a chart. "My granny had a rhyme."

The airplane stops taxiing and gathers itself. There's a half-second when the brakes come off and the whole machine seems to inhale, and then the engines come up under Wren's feet, a long climbing thrum that crawls up through the seat and into the back of her teeth, and the runway lights begin to slur past the window faster and faster until they stop being lights at all and become a single drawn line. Rotation. The deck tilts back. Helsinki drops away beneath them in a grid of orange sodium that breaks apart at the coast into black water and the last few lit ships, and then there is only the wing, and the strobe pulsing red against nothing, and the slow pressurized ache in Wren's ears that she clears without thinking, one swallow, two.

Brott, she thinks. Away. The Icelandic comes first, the way it always does in the dark, her mother's language surfacing before the others have their coats on.

She counts her breaths through the climb. It is a thing she does. Four in, hold, four out—a metronome for a body that does not want to be thirty-eight thousand feet over the Gulf of Bothnia with nowhere to put its hands. She is not afraid of flying. She is afraid of the part of flying where there is nothing to do but be carried.

Across the aisle and one row back, a child is not having a good time of it.

He's maybe seven, belted into a window seat too big for him, knees up, and he's working himself toward the kind of crying that has no bottom—the over-tired, ears-popping, why-is-the-floor-tilting kind. His mother has the gray, apologizing look of a woman who has been the only adult for too many hours. She's got a juice box she can't open one-handed and a phone with no signal and the particular stillness of someone bracing for strangers to start hating her.

Wren leans across the gap, into the boy's line of sight, not toward the mother. You don't go over a person's head. Even a small person's.

"I have a game," she says. "It only works on airplanes."

The boy eyes her. Tears banked but holding.

"Pick a thing. Anything you can see. And I'll tell you its secret name—the name it has in another country, where nobody calls it what you call it."

A wet hesitation. Then he points at the dark beyond the glass, at the strobe, at the wing, at all of it. "That."

"The window?"

"The outside."

Smart. "Outside is úti," Wren says. "OO-tee. And the dark out there—when it's night—that's nótt." She lets the long vowel ring. "Try the back of your throat."

"Noh-t."

"Closer than most." She nods at the seat-back screen, at the little stylized icon ghosting along its arc. "And that—the airplane?"

"Flugvél," supplies the mother, surprising them both, a tired laugh getting loose. "I'm sorry. My grandmother. It's the only word I've got."

"It's a good word." Wren keeps her eyes on the boy. "Now you owe me one. Find me a bird."

He frowns. "There's no birds. We're in the sky."

"There's one." Wren taps her own chest, just under the collarbone, where her name is. "Right here. Fugl. That's bird. And a small one, a brown one no bigger than your fist, that hops in the hedge and sings loud enough to embarrass an owl—" she doesn't say that's me, doesn't say that's my name, lets it sit just under the surface where the true things go—"that's a rindill."

"Rin-dill," the boy says, and the crying has gone somewhere else entirely, packed up and left while he wasn't watching.

"Emil," the mother says, the way you introduce a person who has just become a person again. "I'm Maja."

"Wren." She settles back. "If he gets loud later, send him over. I have about four hundred more of these."

Hollis, beside her, has not looked up from the paperback. "That's a neat trick," she says to the page. "Talking to the kid, not the mother. Most people can't do it."

"It's the job," Wren says, before she can decide whether to.

"Which is."

"I interpret. Conferences, mostly." Booth work, headset, the invisible voice. "You learn who you're actually speaking to."

"Mm." Hollis turns a page. "I had a charge nurse rule. Watch who answers when you ask the patient a question." She still doesn't look up. "Tells you the whole family in about four seconds."

Wren files that the way she files everything useful—soundlessly, without expression—and does not say that she has been doing exactly that, all the way up the climb, to the party forward.

Because she can't sleep, and she won't try, and so she does what she does.

Row two, the far aisle. A man in 2A, sunk down and away from the world, a soft cap pulled low, a blanket to his chest, asleep or close to it—the gate agent had a wheelchair waiting for him at boarding, Wren remembers, and the man came up the jet bridge slow and folded, leaning on the doctor's arm. The doctor is in 2B now, leaning in, attentive, a reading light cupped in one hand so it won't spill onto the patient's face. And in 2C, on the aisle, the wife.

The wife has not touched her husband once.

Wren clocks it without deciding to. The woman sits squared to the cabin, spine off the rest, scanning—not nervous, the opposite of nervous, the flat sweep of someone reading exits. She has a coat folded on her lap she does not put in the bin. She has positioned herself, Wren understands, so that the man cannot leave 2A without climbing over her, and she has done it the way you'd set a brake. When the senior flight attendant—a tall woman, purser's stripes—stops to murmur something kind, the wife answers in three words and the attendant moves on.

It's the doctor who handles everything else, and he handles it beautifully.

The purser offers a card for the stowed wheelchair—a tag, a claim, a small administrative kindness—and the doctor declines it with both hands, a warm low sentence Wren can't catch but can read off the shape of him: we've got it, thank you, no need. A younger attendant brings a spare blanket for the patient and the doctor declines that too, smiling, gesturing to the one already there, and somehow the attendant ends up apologizing to him. He refuses the small comforts the way a man closes doors he doesn't want left ajar. Nothing for the record. Nothing extra. No tag, no second blanket, no fuss, nobody's hands on his patient but his own.

It is, Wren thinks, the most competent thing she has watched in a long time, and she has spent her life in rooms full of people being competent at her. There is no friction in it anywhere. Friction is what you get when a person is improvising. There is none.

A flute of champagne comes down the aisle on a tray; Wren lifts a flat hand—no—and the bubbles go on past. She doesn't drink, flying. She wants every channel open.

The meal service starts forward, and in the small shuffle of trays and tables the doctor leans down close to the man in 2A and says something, settling him, and the cabin noise drops just enough at just the right second that Wren hears it clean, the way you sometimes catch one instrument when the orchestra breathes.

A name.

Not Adler.

She had it from the gate display and the boarding scrum—ADLER, the wheelchair pax, priority pre-board. But the word the doctor lays against the sleeping man's ear is two soft syllables that are not that, a thing with a v in the throat of it, Ravn—and then, smooth, without a hitch, without so much as a glance up, he says, louder, for the attendant hovering with the tray: "Mr. Adler will skip the meal. He's resting."

Ravn. Then Adler.

Wren does not move. Her face does the thing it has done in a thousand booths when a minister says increase and means decrease, when a delegate calls a man his friend in the tone you'd use for a tumor: nothing. She renders it true and stores it and shows the room a still pond. A slip. People slip. A pet name, a maiden name, a nickname from another life; she of all people knows a man is rarely only the name on his document. Tomas, Tom, Adler, Ravn. It is nothing. It is the most nothing thing in the world.

She tells herself this twice, which is once more than she would need to if she believed it.

Watch who answers when you ask the patient a question, the nurse beside her said, reading her paperback, and the answer forward is that nobody asks the patient anything at all. The patient is answered for. By a man with frictionless hands who has, in the space of ten minutes, made himself the only door to a sleeping stranger and called him by two different names.

The trays come back. Hollis declares the char "edible, which is high praise from me," and goes back to her book. Maja gets Emil into a nest of blankets and the boy mouths rindill, rindill at the black window until his eyes give out. The engines settle into the long even note of cruise, the note they'll hold for nine hours over the ice.

Then the lights go.

Not off—down. The cabin sinks through amber into a deep, drowned blue, the color of water with no bottom, and the reading lights wink out one by one until the only true brightness left is the cold seam of the moving map glowing on a hundred dimmed screens: one small white airplane, nose-up against a great pale nothing, the coastline gone, the sea gone, only the long featureless face of the north and a thin dotted line drawn across it toward a city that is still most of a night away.

Around her the strangers fold into sleep.

Wren reaches into the seat pocket and draws out her headphones—big, padded, the noise-cancelling kind—and settles them over her ears, and thumbs them on so the engines drop away into a soft sealed hush. She does not play anything. There is nothing she wants to hear.

She closes her eyes most of the way, the way a sleeping woman's eyes close, and behind the headphones, in the blue dark, she keeps them open just enough.

And she watches.