The Flight

Watching the news every night was getting to be too much for Alison. George, now retired, had it going all day—formerly a no no, but now somehow permitted. And given the pandemic, they were both home nearly 24/7. The bombing of the children’s hospital, the desperate people packed onto buses and trains, the ones left behind because there was no more room or they were too old or stubborn or disabled to leave, the men who couldn’t leave but had to and in many cases wanted to stay back and fight.

           “Gas is more than $4.00 a gallon now. This is insane!” cried Liza, her friend who tended to breathe anxiety as others breathed air. She also specialized in outrage, which Alison loved about her.

           “At least we have a home and aren’t fleeing as bombs are dropping, like those poor Ukrainians,” Alison said, who was also concerned about the price of fuel but was playing devil’s advocate. “It’s beyond tragic. Can you imagine? Count our blessings.”

           “True,” retorted Liza, for she was not without compassion and was also mindful of political correctness. “I just won’t drive as much as usual, if possible, and will keep my heat a bit lower this winter.” It was good she added this (though not without a sigh of resignation and angst, which did not escape Alison’s attention), for Alison had noticed her Facebook post, where she suggested this was an opportunity for everyone to get out their bikes and begin considering how much gas they burned every day.  Why did people have to be so damn complicated?

           But now Alison began to wonder what it would be like—if they had to flee their home in the hills of exurban Connecticut. And to where? Canada? She had a pang of guilt, thinking about herself and her family when the people in Ukraine were dealing with this unthinkable crisis—where it was real, and happening not only on her TV screen but in their lives. Yet for that very reason, she could not help herself.

            We’d  drive north through Massachusetts, then Vermont, finally up to Maine, she calculated, and then . . . She Googled it. No, forget Maine. They would cross into Canada from Derby Line, Vermont, to Rock Island, in the town of Standstead, in Quebec Province. It was starting to sound exotic. Her mind flashed back to the vacation she and George had taken in Quebec City years ago, and the childhood trip before it had been “discovered”—the steep streets with actual stone stairways, the croissants, all the French flying so musically out of people’s mouths.  The quaintness. She zoomed in on the map on her screen.

           The closest big city was Montreal. It would take six hours to get there. But did she know anyone there? How was her high school French? Where would they go? To a refugee camp?  She did have a close friend in northern Ontario. How far was that? And then there were all the Canadian relatives, the cousins. Did she know any of them at this point? Well, at least she had kept her maiden name and it was an unusual one. Surely they would welcome her? After all, her father’s father had emigrated to Canada from Hungary in the early 1900s along with a general exodus of Jews once again seeking a less persecuted life, he along with his seven brothers—or was it six? No matter, she had the family tree somewhere. The point was, there were a lot of descendants of those six or seven brothers who, it was rumored, had kept pawning and buying back the same pearl necklace to all settle in Canada. She even thought she maybe had it—the necklace, and kept meaning to haul it out from under her sweaters and have a jeweler tell her if it was real and could be from that era.

           They had visited those cousins from her dad’s side in Ottawa when she was a kid. Where was Ottawa? Anywhere near Montreal? Or closer to Toronto? It had been a highlight of her childhood, she and the cousins doing cartwheels in the living room, the dad who was a vet and so they had lots of dogs and cats and even his practice right in the same house. Her mom flirting with him. Her mind flashing back to her mom having nearly married someone who was in veterinarian school. She would not have been born, but there would have been lots of dogs and cats in the house. She could hear the dogs who were boarding there, in Ottawa, yipping and crying out for their dinner. It all felt magical, romantic—the Canadian cousins, the pets, the laughter of her parents and the Ottawa adults. Everyone seemed happy that day. It had only been a day, but it was sharp in her memory.

           And her mom’s dad had been Canadian as well. She even had his Canadian army papers. Would that help at all? Maybe only for getting across the border when everyone else was also trying to. She was not in touch with anyone from her mom’s dad’s side of the family, the Irish descendants who claimed they were English. She had never known him and so did not even think of him as a grandfather, as he had killed himself when her mom was eight, ostensibly suffering from PTSD from being buried alive in the trenches in the First World War in France.

           Maybe Marta, her friend and former roommate who lived in Keene, Ontario, was the best bet. Google Maps said 7 hours and 58 minutes by car. Longer, but still—there was Marta. Forget driving up to Vermont. A whole different route, through New York State, crossing the border in Buffalo, where she had been born and grown up. Home. That might be perfect, touching base on the way—but a longer ride, and she knew that border crossing, the Peace Bridge, was not easy, not since 9/11.

           Marta and Mike lived in a converted church, where he tuned and restored pianos for a living and she designed dresses.  They had had grand pianos in their loft in Toronto hanging like Louise Nevelson sculptures on the walls with their tops removed to almost indelicately expose their magnificent innards—the strings and hammers, and the occasional otherworldly overtone that would emerge if and when the movements of the people in the room were just right. And Marta had one, an old Steinway grand, repurposed as her fabric-cutting table. Pianos were everywhere. That had been a good visit, with her mother and her daughter, a pre-teener, at the time. This time mom had flirted with Mike, and he had flirted back. A harmless bit of fun. No matter that he was maybe thirty years younger than she.

           What fun Alison and Marta had had sharing that apartment on West 72^nd Street in Manhattan in the late 1970s. She thought back to how she had interviewed maybe twenty people for roommates when Marta walked in the door. It had seemed a hard decision before that moment, as she had liked nearly everyone who came by—the skinny Julliard student, the serious one studying sociology at Columbia, the flamboyant dancer, the aspiring actor. But as soon as Marta walked in, the decision was made. And the times they had! Hanging out at the Tap A Keg on Columbus Avenue, where Marta, a properly raised Estonian young woman, became an unlikely pinball expert and they could dance even though the place had no cabaret license. Here it was more than forty years later, and Marta would welcome the two of them if they arrived at her doorstep, Alison was sure.

           Is this what happens, Alison thought, when you have to flee your home? Do memories start rushing back? Does your life flash before you? Is this how the people on her TV screen—the Ukrainians fleeing to Poland and elsewhere—feel? Does it turn out that what matters are those cartwheels you turned with cousins you barely knew, a pearl necklace you never think about, how your mom liked to flirt . . . dancing at the Tap A Keg ?

           Marta and Mike were having problems heating the church properly, but so what.  Alison and George had been wanting to visit them for several years anyhow, and their friends had been begging them to come. But then the pandemic had hit and not only did they not want to travel, but the border had been closed for some time. That might be the answer—where they would head if the Russians were coming. And conveniently, even though Alison never really did, they could all pray.