The Red-Eye

She met her father for the first time on a red-eye flight to Chicago. 

Ariel shuffled her way down the aisle of the plane, half asleep, bags thrown over her shoulder like the Junk Lady in Labyrinth. Her mom and step-dad had dropped her off at the airport a few hours prior, with hugs and kisses and coffees and well wishes for her senior year at Chicago’s School of the Arts. They didn’t cry this time. This time, eyes dry, they shooed her off into the abyss of terminals alone. Muscle memory took her all the way to her gate, and the last dregs of her coffee now took her to her seat. 32A. By the window. 

She fumbled her duffle when she tried to stuff it into the overhead bin. Her backpack, perilously perched on one shoulder rather than both, swung around to hit her in the face. Her water bottle tumbled to the ground, rolling down the aisle of the plane like an old Chef Boyardee commercial can, back to her childhood and away from her future. Ariel hoisted the duffle over her head one last time, closing the latch of the bin with a click. She threw her bookbag into her seat and turned, tired eyes full of embarrassment, to look for it. A younger man at the front of the plane was holding it, looking for the owner. Ariel swallowed her prideful embarrassment, walking up to the first few aisles, apologizing to the sleepy passengers she had to step over. The man held the bottle out to her with a smile, trying to lean over a seat so she didn’t have to clamber over any more people. 

Her eyes met his for a split second. She grabbed the bottle, and the seat in front of her as she tripped over a woman’s purse. He stared at her as she righted herself. Ariel gave a half-smile of gratitude as she slipped back to her seat. Her neck prickled, each hair on end, with the feel of his gaze on her back. She tried to place his face in her memory. She knew she knew him. Somewhere. Was he at her gate? Obviously. He’s on the same plane. She sunk into her seat and tried to take a second glimpse at the stranger on the other side of the plane. He’d sat back down, hidden among the navy blue of the seats and the bush of people’s hair. She couldn’t even pick out the back of his head among the herd. So she gave up, slinking down into her seat.

The flight attendant walked the aisles, checking overhead bins and shuffling bags under seats. Ariel laid her head against the window, the glass cold on her temple. Closing her eyes, she tried to shift in her seat, bringing her right ear and cheek onto the glass. Her summers in Florida were always hot. Testy. Bad-tempered. Heat and humidity have a funny way of making people irritable. Pools and beaches and sticky park benches were inevitable growing up. It’s just what you did. You watched the waves come up off the concrete when you got bored. Summer after summer she spent watching other children in her apartment complex run around outdoors with parents or sitters or older siblings. Her single mother worked two jobs, and there were no older children. It was always just Ariel, alone. Her mother never married until she met Tom, her stepfather. Tom was cool, but at age thirteen Ariel had grown out of wanting to hang out with parents on summer days. She never grew out of wanting a father though. Summers always reminded her of that. 

Her mom was young when she got pregnant with Ariel. She was the popular girl in high school. Prom queen. On Homecoming Court. One of the Elites. And then Ariel happened and things changed. Popularity paid for dates, not diapers. Her mom never complained, but also never really mentioned her father. She learned not to ask questions. He was probably a jerk anyway, she thought. Most of the popular boys at her high school were, although there was nearly two decades between her mother’s high school experience and her own. And she went to a private arts academy in the Windy City, not her mother’s little podunk high school near her house (her mother never moved away, too close with her mother to bear living further than just down the street). 

As the plane took off, Ariel closed her eyes and dreamed of spending a summer in Chicago. The cabin lights turned off. Her cheek was still cool against the window, her legs pulled underneath her, feet spilling out over the seat. She tried to sleep, but kept returning to the man from the front of the plane. Was he a teacher from school? Or an alumnus she’d met at a networking event? She couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew him from somewhere and should be able to recall his name. Rolling onto her back, she rocked her head against the top of her headrest, as if trying to massage a memory from her brain. 

The plane reached coasting altitude and plateaued, leveling out to a slow roll across the sky. The seatbelt sign flickered off. Ariel took out her laptop, placing it on the tray in front of her as quietly as possible. She flipped open the screen. Instead of lighting up automatically, it stayed black. She’d forgotten to charge it before she left. She laid her head down on the keyboard with a quiet, dramatic sigh. Her arms dangled down to the floor, defeated. With a yawn, she slowly pulled herself up, elbows coming to the sides of her computer, cheeks resting on fists, staring deep into the black screen, thinking of what to do next. Letting her eyes focus, she found herself looking straight into a familiar pair of eyes. It clicked. The man on the plane was a stranger, but his eyes looked like her’s. Funny. She furrowed her brow and tried her best to emulate his face. 

Rummaging through her backpack, she brought out her sketchpad and pencil. Using her laptop as a mirror she drew the man from the plane, his confused expression, eyes looking out for the owner of the wandering waterbottle, lips puckered slightly as if deciding whether or not to speak. She sketched until the flight attendant came around again, telling her to put up her tray for the descent. She threw her laptop back into her bag, curling up in her seat so she could use her knees as her table. She pressed her face against the window for the last time, squishing her cheek into the glass to try and get a last look at the man across the plane. She spent her descent looking towards the first few rows, wondering if he thought of her as well. 

When the plane hit the runway she signed the portrait, blowing on the graphite so it wouldn’t smear when she closed the sketchbook. She took one last look around the plane for him before putting her things away. Eventually, as people moved past her down the aisles, she lost track of who was in front of her versus who was behind. They were all zombies, going through the motions of deboarding - collecting their belongings, fumbling with the luggage in the bins above their heads, shuffling down the aisle with their next boarding pass clutched at their chest. Ariel let them all go, wanting to be the last one on the plane to avoid the embarrassment of possibly hitting someone with her duffle as it tumbled from its bin. She slung her backpack onto her shoulder in the aisle, hoisting the duffle under her arm with a little jump. She trudged towards the exit like the rest of them, sketchbook clutched close to her chest instead. 

The man was gone when she left the plane. She never saw him again, aside from the portrait she made for her senior exhibition titled Finders, which was a collection of sketches of strangers Ariel encountered her senior year. Her mother came to that show, Tom by her side. She stopped in front of a larger than life oil painting of the man from the plane. Ariel never saw the pained look across her face, or the way she slid her arm through Tom’s when they walked away. She never learned his name, but she met her father for the first time on a red-eye flight to Chicago.