Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [52]
“You have to sit down, sir,” the attendant snapped. “You have to take your seat right now.”
“My wife’s in there.”
“It’s very dangerous for you to be in the aisle.”
“She’s pregnant. Please, let me get her back to her seat.”
The vibration seemed to intensify. A child was crying.
“I need you to hurry,” she said.
He knocked on the door, interrupted by a prodigious rumble and pitch. What, exactly, made all this noise? Was it the wind? His wonder that a machine so complex could take such punishment and still function amazed any inkling of fear out of his system. He knocked on the door again and called loudly to Alice. When she didn’t answer, he knocked harder and shouted her name. He could hear something inside. She was saying something back to him now.
“Alice,” he said, “are you all right?”
He put his ear to the door; she was speaking.
“Alice,” he said, “let me get you back to your seat.”
The plane fell yet again and for a moment he was weightless, his whole mass drifting toward his head like the bubble in a tilted level, his soles rising just above the floor; then he landed. Both flight attendants had sat back, their eyes closed, each gripping the buckle of her belt’s clasp like the harness in an amusement ride. One of them was exhaling, her lips pursed, pushing steady breaths out, one, two, three. He heard his wife cry out from behind the doors. She was beyond embarrassment, he thought, so perhaps he should be too. She’d given herself over to panic.
“Alice!” He shook the door handle. “Just let me get you to your seat.”
The latch snapped and David folded open the door. And when he did, the lavatory light went out and Alice was sitting there in the dark on top of the toilet, sobbing. Her arms, skirt, and blouse were covered in blood, as if something had exploded in her lap. And splayed out in the crèche of her two hands was a newborn, though it looked more like some rendering of a starved alien. Its large eyes were barely shut, its mouth pulled open by the dangling weight of its head. It was a boy, covered in yellow paste and blood smears, trailing the umbilical cord between its spindly legs—a boy who bore a shocking resemblance to David himself.
“Please,” she cried, holding the baby toward him as if in offering. “Put him back!”
• • •
Two doctors who happened to be on board set up a treatment area in the flight attendants’ station, the curtains drawn closed while they worked. It was a makeshift bed of seat cushions and blankets and pillows on which they laid them, the dead boy swaddled in hand towels from first class and at rest now on Alice’s chest. The young oncologist—Nina Chen—had asked David if he wanted to cut the umbilical cord, and he couldn’t bring himself to say no, though immediately afterward he went lightheaded, and Chen had him sit against the wall with his head propped between his legs. The older doctor, a pathologist named Solomon Green, had removed Alice’s clothes and cleaned her off. There were bloody rags everywhere, which both doctors picked up and bagged without compunction. They had managed Alice’s shock, and Green was now taking her vitals. She was conscious, running a fingertip along her still baby’s cheek and talking to him as if he were alive, oblivious to all else around her, speaking so softly that he couldn’t hear the words over the whine of engine noise, now that they’d finally found better air. She seemed radioactive with grief. David could feel her unspeakable anguish pressing against his internal organs and beaming through the whole plane.
Chen took him outside the curtains. “Your wife is stable,” she said. “She doesn’t seem to have suffered excessive bleeding.”
“Thank you.”
“Does she