A Time Apart by Rebecca N. Caudill

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Flight 716 with service from San Francisco

to Dublin. We ask that you please fasten your seat belts and secure all baggage beneath the

seat in front of you or in the overhead compartments. At this time, please turn all personal

electronic devices to airplane mode so that they cannot transmit a signal. As you know, smoking

is prohibited for the duration of our journey to Dublin, and that includes in the lavatories. Thank

you for choosing Aer Lingus. Enjoy your flight.”

It was usually at this point in any flight where Olivia’s real panic kicked in. Shortly –

terrifyingly – the plane would be airborne with nothing but land and sea below. While she

knew statistically that airplanes were safer than cars, she’d never known anyone – let alone

two anyones – who had been killed, their bodies never recovered, from a freak accident on

the freeway. Not to say that it didn’t happen everyday; she just didn’t know anyone that it had

happened to.

To distract her mind, she listened to the crew outline the plane’s safety procedures and

then the Captain’s welcome, including the weather forecast for Dublin – rainy and brisk, how

shocking. Sipping the champagne the flight attendant had offered her when she boarded, Olivia

felt the combination of the Valium and the alcohol take over her body, but not quite enough that

she gave up the death grip she had on the arm rests. As she felt the tell tale tingle of the Valium

working its magic, she thought – not for the first time – that maybe someday a plane crash

wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen to her. Maybe someday she’d just never wake up from the

self-induced drug and alcohol fueled nothingness she needed just to fly.

Who am I kidding?

Sadly, more and more frequently it wasn’t just plane rides that had her mixing booze and

pills. Most days she wrapped herself in a hazy blur of alcohol like a security blanket, protecting

her in a cocoon of mental fuzziness.

Olivia felt her pulse beginning to race and her breathing accelerate, and she made a conscious

effort not to panic, not to look over at Judgy lest the woman start advocating for professional

psychiatric help. It wouldn’t have been the first time some well-meaning motherly type had tried

to get Olivia into therapy. She stole a quick glance in Judgy’s direction only to find that she

was already engrossed in her novel, Olivia’s neurosis and emotional paralysis the least of her

concerns.

Not too long after she had fought back the near panic attack, the whirring of the engines

lulled Olivia into a stupor that soon resulted in a fitful sleep. For the next ten hours she didn’t

exactly fall into a deep slumber, but she wasn’t fully awake either. Her mind seemed to float

between a dreaming and wakeful state, and she felt strangely separated from her body. She’d see

snippets of things in her head but wasn’t sure if the images were of events or instances that she

was remembering, things she was imagining, or scenarios she was concocting to be used in her

novel.

And then Olivia saw, quite clearly, the face of a man she had never met and yet she felt like

she had known him all of her life – blue eyes, sharp and unnaturally piercing as if he could see

deep into her soul. She saw a field of green that stretched far and wide, rolling hills dotted with

sheep and lined with stacked stone walls. She saw herself as a child chasing a puppy larger than

she was down by a river while laughing that high-pitched squeal that only a child can make as

the dog raced back toward her covered in mud and dripping with water. And then that image

changed as quickly as it came and she saw her mother as a young woman, happy and carefree, in

love with a man who was not Gerald Donnelly.

And as she always did when in one of her fitful states of sleep, Olivia saw all the ways she

could die – car accident; mugging gone horribly wrong after having put up a brave fight; her

house on fire, the flames licking at her feet as she tried to run; her body weak and broken as it

was ravished by cancer; or her heart slowly stopping as she lay in her bed, blind from old age

and hunched with the rigors of time.

And in these dreams she was ready for it – any of it – almost welcoming the vast blackness

that would follow whatever her death would be.

And then she saw that face again – the man she didn’t know but felt so deeply that she

should. He whispered her name, longingly, “Olivia.”