Martin Dolan

Five Thousand Feet Over Fort Lauderdale

As the plane climbs, she studies the people around her. The college kids, underdressed in shorts and sweat-stained t-shirts, sleeping off the week’s damage. And the snowbirds, trying to outrun the winter, came prepared with sleep masks and blankets. Compared to the airport, sticky and stuffed full of strangers, the air inside the cabin is cool with quiet. They’ve only been in the air for fifteen minutes, but except for the flight attendants half-smiling down the aisles, she must be the only one still awake. 

Part of her wishes she could pass out, too. Pop someone else’s Xanax and wake up in New York. She never could sleep on airplanes. As a little girl, it was because she was terrified. Strapped into a rollercoaster without rails, miles in the sky. The pressurized air was a time bomb no one else could tear hear ticking. 

But there’s something about the sun setting all around them, casting its long, lazy rays in impossible angles across the sleeping passengers’ faces. She can’t tell if the light’s warmth on her skin is real or imagined but she welcomes the sensation all the same. It’s almost cozy.

Her friend, the one she’s been traveling with all week, is asleep in the next seat over. Upright, head bobbing left and right with each tilt of the plane. They pass through one cloud, then another, each one thin and fluffy enough that instead of blocking the sunlight it only softens it. A bump of turbulence knocks her friend’s head onto her shoulder. Somehow, her friend stays asleep. She doesn’t wake her. The warmth outweighs any discomfort.

Open on her lap is the type of book that normally she’d never read. A borrowed, battered Emily Henry paperback passed down from a friend. A Target price sticker, absentmindedly picked at and rolled, is still stuck to the cover. The dog-eared page, the one she’s been reading for the past hour, is in the single digits. She smiles at her lack of progress. It feels like progress. That maybe, despite herself, she’s managed to relax. 

Tomorrow, she’ll be back at school, back to the job applications and the bullshit with boys and the dirty dishes left in the sink. But for now, at least, she’s above it. Five thousand feet and climbing over the swamps of central Florida, the rumble of the air outside like a warm car engine rocking a baby to sleep.

 Out the tiny plexiglass window, she watches what’s left of the sunset slip away. The beaches, the swamps, the awkward angles of lit-up city streets, all of it shrinking by the second. Already the narrow white strips of sand are so thin that she can barely see them. They disappear into a murky blend of blue and green where the water and land meet. The lines between the colors grow fuzzier and fuzzier until eventually there’s no line at all, just a mass of color far, far away.   

But there’s a difference, she realizes, between the nothingness of the ocean and the nothingness of the land. The stretch she knows must be a swamp is dark and solid, nearly black, but the water surrounding it, locking it in place, is lighter, almost gray, and ripples with movement. A splash of color that betrayed so much more. It was almost as if, from a different angle, she could peer right down over the ledge of the land and into the beating heart of the ocean, see whatever it was that made the world tick. The slightest difference, yet somehow so massive that she could only wrap her head around it from a mile away. 

Across the Street from Our Old Apartment

Years later, on his way to drop their daughter off at school, he’ll hit a patch of road work and, to avoid it, dive into a maze of cracked one-ways he won’t have navigated since his twenties. Without meaning to, he’ll end up on Hamilton Street. Even with the fresh coat of paint, and the new trim, he’ll recognize the building immediately. The same crooked sidewalk, the same ratty set of stairs.

He’ll nudge their daughter, strapped in the backseat, watching her videos. “Do you know what this place is?”

She’ll look up, more confused by the interruption than annoyed, and shake her head no.

“Mom and I used to live here.” He’ll point at the beat-up brownstone, already ancient when they’d lived in it a lifetime ago. Even from across the street, he’ll be able to see patches of color poking through the sloppy paint job on the trim. The brick won’t have been washed in years.

“Oh,” his daughter will say, then look back down. Her disinterest will disappoint him, just a little. But he’ll know not to take it personally. That to her, his past—the past—is abstract. Confusingly out of frame. Despite that thought, or maybe because of it, he’ll take out his cell phone and snap a photo of the apartment before he pulls away. Its old, weathered exterior will look out of place, anachronistic, on the sharp, digital screen.

That afternoon, from his office on the other side of town, the nice side of town, he’ll study the photo. Zoom in on the cracks in the paint, the hints of the light blue he’ll remember as home. How, years earlier, the landlord’s handyman had roped him into an afternoon of holding his ladder and paintbrushes when he should have been applying for jobs. The cold, discouraging feel of the forty bucks pushed into his hands. He won’t have thought of those days—when his ex-wife, then his girlfriend, worked while he sat alone in the apartment—for years. They’ll come with alternating waves of nostalgia, embarrassment, and guilt. None of the clarity the future is supposed to bring.

He’ll be tempted to send the photo to his daughter’s mother, his ex-wife, if only for someone to reminisce with. But he’ll know that, to her, the memories won’t be the same. He’ll look at their old apartment and get flashes of house parties before bar crawls, of half-forgotten friends, of warm sex in rooms reeking of radiators. She’ll see screaming matches and storming out into the snow. Coming home from work just to see the entire days he’d wasted with his bong and video games he’d played before. A pregnancy test they’d argued about before she’d even opened the box. 

Deciding whether to send her the photo or not, he’ll scroll through their old messages still saved on his phone. All of them, it’ll seem, will be logistics. Scheduling pickups and drop-offs. Who will pay for what lessons and when. There will still be a few birthday wishes and questions about each other’s parents. But not many. Though after all those years, he’ll know to appreciate the civility, the pattern of their conversations will strike him as depressingly mundane.

Soon it will be a few minutes before five o’clock, the last hours of his workday wasted away in memory. In his mind, he’ll have toured the whole house—the tiny kitchen with its stick vinyl counters piled high with cereal, the smoky-smelling couch they’d pulled in off the street. And while his coworkers wave their goodbyes, and scurry back out to their lives, he’ll fumble with his cellphone, take one last look at the photo, and delete it. Then he’ll grab his car keys to pick their daughter up from school. 

Martin Dolan is a writer from Upstate NY. His writing is in The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Full Stop. He’s online at dolanmart.in.