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It was time to board. Jane waited for their group to be called. Holding tight to Tam’s hand, she gave their boarding passes to the gate attendant in a blur and walked down the jet way behind the families with smaller children who were boarding first. 

Stepping into the accordion-like jetway, she felt it bounce with each step she took downward toward the plane. Her breaths got shallower as they turned a bend in the passage and she saw the open door of the aircraft. At the entrance, Jane looked down and saw an inch-wide line of nothing between the end of the jetway and the first step onto the plane. She could see the twenty feet or so to the ground in the crevice. With her free hand she touched the painted outside of the plane. Tam was looking at her so she stepped on, nodded to the flight attendant, found their seats, got her bag put up and Tam’s little backpack under the seat. She buckled Tam in, and herself, and sat holding the edges of the wide leather armrests. Tam’s questions were a buzz in her head. She answered them, barely knowing what she said. 

People filed past, filling up the seats in the section behind them. She felt anticipation vibrating along the fine wire of each nerve. The seat in front of her rose up and loomed closer, her eyes blurring as she focused on it instead of the strange, murmuring crowd streaming by. Eyes closing, she felt the seat firm beneath her, the cool leather under her fingers. She remembered the overhead controls and reached up to twist on the cool air. With the air in her face she was able to breathe again, a space opening in front of her. She turned her head and saw Tam looking out the window, for the moment unaware of anything else. Jane hoped none of her fear had transmitted to Tam.

As they sat waiting for takeoff, she flashed back to the incident. When they got married she didn’t have it. They had traveled together, gone everywhere together. Why spend a night apart? It was so much nicer to sleep together; they slept so much better in the same bed. Once they had found one another they both felt there had been long enough before they met when they weren’t together; they wanted to be together now, and in the years that stretched deliciously ahead. That was just how they were. She worked on some of his films.

Twice when an important job had come for her that she wanted, he had come to her set and stayed with her. But in truth, his vocation seemed stronger than hers. It pulled him harder and to more places, so she followed where he led. She hadn’t minded still being a traveler. It was what she knew. But he had a deep desire for a permanent home and a family to come home to. They had found the land, rebuilt the house. She had become pregnant. After the first trimester, Ian started working on
The Times and Trials of Phineas Whigby
, in Bermuda. She had stayed home to work on the nursery, to join him in a couple of weeks. 

Then the flight, pregnant with Tam. It had been a brilliantly clear day, perfect weather for flying, not a cloud in sight. After they reached cruising altitude, she unbuckled her seat belt, as any weight around her lower belly made her already every-ten-minute need to go to the bathroom worse. She closed her eyes, leaned her seat back, and imagined warm sand between her toes.

The Captain’s voice came over the speaker. “Flight attendants return to your seats. I’m putting on the fasten seatbelt sign. We’re coming up on unexpected…”

And quickly as that, while she was fumbling for her belt and two flight attendants were walking down the aisle toward their seats, the plane shuddered and she couldn’t hear the Captain anymore because before Jane could find the belt she felt her stomach float and the plane sink, giving way beneath her. Her bottom rose out of the seat and in the buzzing background noise she heard a passenger cry out. The plane swooped back up and she felt it beneath her again, a bucking horse deciding to settle, and she grappled with the belt, pulling it together and lifting the lever on one side as she tried to fit the other half in place. Just as she was getting the metal piece in position, the bottom dropped out again. Her whole body flew upward. She struck her head on the overhead compartment and crashed down across the seats. She gasped and her eyes watered as she felt under her for the seat belt. Manhandling herself back into her seat, the plane jerked and shook, plastic and metal groaning. She found the straps again, striking the metal pieces together until the belt was safe around her. A phrase from the sixth grade came back to her. Bermuda. Triangle. She hadn’t given it a thought until now. It was a myth. With the belt in irrefutable lock around her waist she felt a hundred, a thousand times better. They seemed to be flying diagonally, the plane contorting to wriggle free from between a monster’s teeth. Clutching her tummy, she murmured to her babe, looking out the window at the impossible cerulean sky. 

“If we make it, I won’t risk you, angel. I won’t risk you.”

Jane looked over at Tam in her window seat. Until now, she never had.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

T
HE
FLAT
WAS
in a tree-lined avenue, off a busy street. The buildings were all the same height, similar pale colors, symmetrical in design. Jane looked up at the large windows and repeating patterns in each building and felt reassured by the permanent quality of the neighborhood. As she fumbled with the key to the ground-floor flat, Tam white and bedraggled by her side, she pushed open the door and waved off the driver, who politely waited until they were inside. 

To be inside somewhere, anywhere that could again be a private sanctuary, was an instant release. Jane pulled their bags into the hallway and Tam ran inside. Jane shut the door and locked it. Dropping the bags, she walked down the hall and peeked around the corner at a cool rectangular room in white, with a small television, two couches facing each other on opposite walls, and slipcovered chairs in the corners. The bay window at one end looked out onto the street. She went in and sat down while she heard pounding feet as Tam raced around exploring. 

“Don’t touch anything yet!”

At last to be somewhere else. To have different thoughts in a different place. To cut the string, or if not to cut it, at least to stretch it farther than it had been stretched in a very long time. She had constrained herself to a tight circle at some point after her marriage. Before she realized it she was living in a small world, a world scarcely larger than the farm and town. How had she bound herself tighter and tighter to that nucleus of home, so tightly she couldn’t step beyond her own safety zone? 

Tam bounded back down the stairs and into the sitting room and Jane’s arms. 

“This place is great!”

“Oh, good.”

“There’s a big bathtub and it has paws.”

“Wow. You’ll have to show me.” Jane let Tam pull her upstairs and down the short hallway to a bathroom with a claw-footed tub.

“It’s kind of dark here.” 

“We have to find the lights.”

“Do I get my own room?”

“Let’s see how many bedrooms.”

They checked out the flat and found three bedrooms. 

“This place is pretty big. I wonder if she has roommates.”

“It’s not very big.” 

“It’s big for an apartment in a city. Apartments and houses are smaller in the city. It’s more expensive to live here.”

“I want to live here when I grow up.”

“You do? You like it that much already?”

Tam nodded. “I’m going to be a veterinarian and live in the city.” 

Jane nodded, mirroring Tam. “I could see you doing that. You could keep the lions in check.” Jane smiled, feeling a little sad for the loss of her baby, seeing an image of the woman she would someday be superimposed for a moment on the child before her.

“Can I take a bath in the
lion
tub?” While being sarcastic to her mother for making fun, Tam was still very much a six-year-old, bouncing up and down on her tippy-toes.

Over the next couple of days they ventured out of the flat. Tam kept tight to Jane’s side, away from the traffic on Edgware Road. The accumulated noise of buses, taxis, cars, horns, music, voices: the great polyphonic wave of sound created by civilization hurt their ears. Their first forays were for food and other necessities. Jane found a grocer and a pharmacy, after the check-out girl told her it was called a chemist. After her stops she hurried back home, for while Tam was chewing on a biscuit Jane felt exposed on the street, as if it were marked on her that she didn’t belong. Opening the door with her key and escaping into the flat, she could close the door and snick the lock home with a sigh. The flat was already safe haven. 

In a small bookcase in the living room Jane found a guide to London with a fold-out map. She spread it out on the cream carpeted floor, searching for blocks of green. Kensington Gardens was indeed around the corner, as Marta had promised. Tam and she could walk there in less than ten minutes, she figured. 

Isolation didn’t seem to be any less in their big city environment than it had in their rural one. The sounds were different, noises seeping in through the windows at night, causing Jane to lie awake listening to the differentness and think about where they were rather than turn over and fall asleep. Tam started out bravely in her own bed every night and every night crept back to Jane’s room with a whispered, “Mommy, I can’t sleep.” At home she would have asked to read a book and would have gone back to her room, turned on the light and sat in bed with Amelia Bedelia or Olivia until she got sleepy and nodded off over it. 

Once Tam was in the double bed with Jane she fell asleep. And Jane felt safer, too, better able to let go and drop off herself. 

Jane woke from a deep sleep; blinking, confused, pulled up from the deep waters of sleep to the surface too soon to understand what it was that had brought her there. Holding her head up off the pillow, she listened. Silence. A car drove by in the distance. She shoved her pillow into a more comfortable position and laid her head down again when she heard a loud banging coming from the vicinity of the front of the flat. She shot upright and groped for the lamp. Her hand brushed against a cool cylinder, followed by a clink and the gushing sound of her water glass tipping over. Cursing under her breath, she swung her feet over the side of the bed and felt for the lamp with both hands to turn it on. She hastily mopped up the water on the night table with tissues, making a bad job of it, and stood up to listen better. No one had ever knocked on their door, so she didn’t know from the sound if the pounding was their door or one on either side. She glanced at the clock. It said 2:14 am. A quick look at Tam showed her deep in slumber. Jane tiptoed out into the dark hall and listened. It was quiet again but she thought she heard someone talking on the doorstep. Lightly, she ran down the steps and got up next to the door.

“BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM!”

Jane jumped back as the door shook in its frame with each slam. Clutching her hands knuckle to knuckle in front of her face she thought what to do. In the quiet, muttering sounds commenced again. She leaned close to the door to hear.

“Bloody hell…got the damn thing…what the fook…”

She heard a splayed metallic jangling sound, like keys hitting pavement. More rustling. A sharp scratching sound. Then her eyes widened in horror as she saw the deadbolt turn and the door swing toward her. She stumbled back, letting out an involuntary yelp. 

The man now standing inside the doorway cried, “Bloody hell!” and tripped backwards over the threshold, his arms windmilling to keep himself upright. As she saw him trying to regain his balance, Jane darted forward to shut the door on him, but he grabbed hold of the doorknob and inserted his hip and leg in the way of the closing door. 

“Hold on.” His face inches was away from hers in the darkness. “I have a key; I have a right to be here, who the fook are you?” She could smell a faint tang of liquor on his breath.

Jane kept the door squeezed on his leg. If he retreated at all she would feel better about letting up the pressure.

“I’m a guest. I don’t know you.” Something about him made her choose in that split second to speak to him rather than shout for help. “It’s two in the morning. Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Beezer.” He spoke with a lilt, as if his name explained everything. “A very good mate of Marta’s, as you can tell from the fact that I have her key. Just couldn’t find it for a moment.” He waved the aforementioned key, having extracted it from the lock, and dangled it over his head in the wedge of the door where his head and leg were lodged. “Keeping out a friend of Marta?”

“I don’t know she gave you that key,” Jane said, her mind darting down dozens of branches of the ways this could play out, how she could affect the different outcomes. That he knew Marta’s name wasn’t enough to let him in.

“If you could get off me bleeding extremities before they’re literally bleeding, that would be most generous of you.” They breathed on each other in a heated silence.

“I need to call Marta before I can let you in. Can you wait on the doorstep so I can call her?”

“Oh, for fook’s sake. Yeah, yeah.” He withdrew his leg and she slammed the door shut and locked it. Of course, he could just unlock it again, but she felt better with the door closed. 

“I’ll call her right now!”

“Take your time, luv!” Undeserved sarcasm, she thought. She ran upstairs, yanked on a robe, found her address book and dug out Marta’s cell number. She needed to program the damn number into her phone. Of course, reason said this fellow probably was a friend, but it would be ridiculous to let a strange man in just because he had a key. She ran out into the hall and dialed the many digits, her eyes swimming in the light as she stared at the numbers. She waited for the connection, praying Marta would answer. It rang and rang. On the seventh ring Marta picked up. 

“Marta, thank God. There’s a strange man here and he says he’s your friend and he was knocking on the door and scared me out of bed. It’s the middle of the night! I don’t know what’s going on.”

“What? Jane, is that you? Slow down. What are you talking about? What man?”