I was entering a state of semicoma when I looked up and saw the stewardess and a small intruder standing there. He was a blond blur clutching a fluorescent green and blue knapsack, who registered briefly in my sleepy Hollywood-coded consciousness as a Macaulay Culkin type. Oh, great, I groaned to myself. He climbed over me, took the seat and turned to the window to watch the takeoff. I went back to sleep, thinking how foolish it was to count your empty seats before the hatch closes tight. I bet he’s a brat, I thought.
The flight was well underway as I came to and saw that my seatmate was watching me wake up slowly. Seeing a grown-up come up from a nap is something I remember from childhood as being slightly more exotic than watching an elephant kneel, and slightly less unnatural than seeing a parent cry. I introduced myself and made the routine inquiries kids suffer through: Name: Kevin. Age: 8. Grade: Third. I asked if his parents were on board, and he said, “No.”
I’ve never had kids, only pets, so I always have to restrain my first, affectionate impulse with children, which is to pat their heads and scratch their ears. Instead, I searched around in my mind’s Adult/Kid Translation Dictionary for the next best thing to say to Kevin. His big, blue-gray eyes were now locked on mine in a very firm hold, forbidding me to turn away for a second. His face was strangely stiff, and I realized that he was trying to control his facial muscles, like an amateur ventriloquist. The harder he tried to hold his chin up, the more it quivered. And the unblinking stare was rapidly melting under the sun that poured through the window onto his yellow hair.
“What’s wrong, Kevin?” I asked. By then tears were no secret between us. His watery gaze unbroken, he answered my question with the rawest, most emotionally naked statement I’ve heard in all my adult years of going to movies, the theater and one bad encounter group. He said, “I want my mommy.”
Kevin had said goodbye to his mother at Kennedy airport and was en route to his father, who had custody. “I just miss her so much,” he said as his little chest quaked with each sob. “She cried, too,” he told me as though to defend his outpouring of emotion by putting himself in the best of all possible company. This explained Kevin’s very late entry onto the plane and conjured up a parting too painful to dwell on.
My usual in-flight preoccupation with assessing the sound of the plane’s engine was replaced now with listening to the heart of an 8-year-old. Despite his sophistication, Kevin had the hardest sort of emotional minefield to talk through in trying to tell his sadness to a stranger. When he recalled the fresh memory of that visit with his mom, it came attached with the awful sting of missing her. But to take the vivid vision of their togetherness and stow it away like a knapsack under the seat must have seemed too much like treason to the little boy.
“This is ridiculous. I can’t cry the whole five hours,” Kevin said, interrupting the sobs that had interrupted his telling me how he and his mom had stayed up late, gone to the Thanksgiving Day parade, had the best turkey dinner, taken taxis, shopped at F.A.O. Schwarz (“Have you ever seen that place?” he asked), blown about $600, including the $ 100 his dad had given him, and seen the movie “The Bodyguard.” “You know that song, don’t you?” he asked. “You know: ‘I will alwaaaays loooove yooo’,” he howled, making fun of such love mush spooned out in digital Dolby sound and acting, relievedly, like a carefree kid carried away with my appreciation of his Whitney Houston. Kevin started accompanying himself on the call-button panel.
But any blessed brattiness always came to a halt with the realization that the plane and our play were taking him farther and farther away from his mom.
“I just wish she were here,” he kept saying over and over. I asked Kevin if he could talk to his dad about the way he was feeling. “He’ll just say, ‘Why do you care?’ He doesn’t even like her,” said Kevin. “I miss her a lot, but I can’t go on crying,” he said, wiping his eyes with the wet sleeve of his brand-new sweater.
Clumsily, I offered Kevin the few truths I know about turbulent times: life can be really, really hard. And you’ll always feel better after you’ve felt really bad. I didn’t know how to tell him that there are no ready palliatives for the sweet sorrows of goodbyes.
Kevin is no doubt one of many children flying solo this time of year, traveling from one home to another, the lost luggage of parents who couldn’t stand each other and now have to divide one or more children between them. As someone who has earned no merit badge in marriage, it takes some nerve on my part to question the domestic arrangements of others. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder if these parents could see this pain on a projection screen they might have tried harder. And I remembered how the notion of “staying together for the sake of the kids” had been laughed off the face of the marital map by the time I was Kevin’s age and was growing up in a broken home. Maybe two adults bowing to someone smaller and something larger than themselves wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Sitting next to Kevin that day, I thought it made a lot of sense.
