Title image by Pam McKnight, It’s Magic, Water-soluble Oil on Canvas, 11″ x 14″, 2025.

Eventually

by Laura Mullen

She sits in a chair against the windows, head bent to search for something in her bag. Behind her head, the tail of the airplane we’ll soon board points skyward. It’s bright outside and her face is backlit and indistinct, but I know every angle of her jawline, the concave hollows of her cheeks, the distinctive cleft of her nose. I know it’s her before she looks up, before I turn away, hoping she hasn’t seen me.

I try to remember when I saw her last but find I can’t. Was it on a visit home, when we had drinks after she spent the day in the hospital with her mother? Or was it on one of our reunion trips?—the ones our friend group takes each year. I remember both, but I mostly remember the morning I looked at my phone and saw a notification: Becca has left the chat. 

We—those of us left on the abandoned text chain—scrambled for answers, piecing together each of our last encounters with her.  Notably, we didn’t call Becca to see why she left. The notification had been shocking but not surprising, the sort of development that feels like a long time coming. It was as though a lead character was killed off on a television show after months of real-world headlines about their feuds with their co-stars, their film ambitions. Theories surfaced and each of us settled on our own version of the story, measured our own sense of loss. 

From the corner of my eye I watch Becca stand now, her legs still longer than most people’s,  her stomach still flat. She’s always been striking, her face angular and confident. She prides herself on her physique, repeating compliments she receives, her voice rich with a hushed delight. She told stories of wild passion, underwear shredded in its removal, bras hanging from light fixtures. She made us feel tame and dull in comparison. No man used his teeth to remove my underwear, to find lust on the bathroom floor.

She still looks good, even now, at forty. We share a bra size but her breasts are buoyant and full, better than mine even before I destroyed them by breastfeeding. She’s wearing a complex outfit, patterned and layered, choices that stretch the imagination. In the last years of our friendship she became a fashion guru, shopping with principle and purpose rather than filling her cart at the nearest chain retail store, delighting over sales. Her style has evolved with the trends and she wears embroidered wide-legged jeans. The sight of them sends a rush of humiliation through my skinny jeans. I feel the familiar rush of comparison, stacking myself up against her, measuring my value next to hers. It’s a habit seeded when we met, freshmen in high school, kids who believed we were grown. 

A voice declares that our plane will begin boarding, and I check my seat assignment. Middle of the plane. Window seat. Maybe if I board last, I won’t have to walk past her. I try to imagine what we’ll do if we find ourselves face to face. Will we pretend not to notice? Will we behave as though we’ve just fallen out of touch, pulled apart by life the way people sometimes are? In some ways, that feels true. The foundation of our relationship fractured, bit by bit, year by year; our loyalties were tested and failed, stinging comments burrowed deep, implanting like a cancer in our memories. At some point we stopped apologizing, stopped repairing. We let our opinions become judgments, our wounds become scars. And then, what may have always been inevitable: an ending. A last hug, a last call. Had she known I hated her husband? I knew she hated mine. At some point I’d realized she no longer liked me, though I wasn’t sure she knew it.

I linger near the Hudson News waiting for her to board. She engages with the person at the gate, and I see the way her head moves, the way she stands and carries things, all as familiar as the movements of my own sister. When she disappears through the door, I walk to the gate myself and stand in line behind an elderly woman, stooped, assisted by a tall, rotund man in a polo shirt. I imagine he’s her son and am touched at the care he takes to step with small steps to avoid rushing her. 

In the plane I imagine the spotlight of Becca’s eyes on me as I walk down the aisle, though I don’t see her. I point my gaze down as I follow the old lady and the large son back to row 16, where they scootch into their seats on the left, stowing their bags. I move on to row 17, on the right, where I tuck myself close to the window and breathe, relief. I read until I grow weary. I close my eyes and hope for sleep. It’s a long flight, and I wonder for the first time why Becca is on it. I was here for work, meeting with customers in Los Angeles. Now I’m flying home to New Jersey, to the same town where Becca and I grew up. I suppose she must return, from time to time, though her mother died a few years ago and none of her siblings still live there. Her dad—I don’t know about him. I find I can’t picture him living anywhere. He’s not the type to travel to see his kids, nor is he the type to hunker down at home. He was married, first and foremost, to his work. Perhaps he got an apartment in Manhattan; maybe he still works. I wonder if Becca’s still mad at him.

I must have dozed off, because I’m disoriented when I hear a voice, increasingly shrill, “Doug. Doug.” Like a mother calling for her toddler to return to her, only the voice is old and warbled, not far from me at all. I stand to find its source and find myself face to face with Becca, who has also risen. She’s seated three rows behind me on the opposite side of the aisle. Our eyes meet and my pulse quickens. I know, on some level, that I feel guilty for the rift, though I can’t pinpoint what I did to cause it, how I could have stopped it. 

“Doug,” the desperation in the voice is suddenly apparent, and I turn towards it as others also pop up in search of its origin. 

It’s the old woman, across the aisle and one row ahead of me, in row 16. She’s still next to the window, but she’s pushing on the arm of the man next to her, the son who must have fallen asleep just as I had. I move to the aisle, glad no one sat next to me during the flight, and touch the man’s arm myself. Their row has three seats, but the middle one is empty. “What’s wrong? I ask.

“He won’t wake. He won’t wake.” She’s still pushing weakly on his arm, as though she will beat him into consciousness with her twig-like arms; his body moves from the pressure. He’s a big man and I’m struck by her strength. But haven’t mothers lifted cars when their children are in danger? I shake his shoulder and his head lolls down from the headrest in an unnatural way.  

“Becca,” I call, and she’s there, next to me, moving past me to squeeze into the row with the man and his mother. In seconds she has laid his torso down on the seat, his head hanging off the end into the aisle where I still crouch. I’m struck by her strength, shifting the bulk of this man on her own. She feels for a pulse and gives no indication as to whether she feels one, but she mounts him, his legs still on the floor. His mother remains seated, trapped against the window, Becca’s butt in her face. On instinct, I put my hands under the man’s head, supporting it as it jerks with each of Becca’s compressions. His eyebrows are thick and he has no stubble. I can feel the eyes of other passengers on me, but I am frozen, my own eyes on Becca, who is laser-focused on the man in front of her.  She pauses to check his pulse, and a voice behind me, a flight attendant, calls to the old woman, asking if she would like to come into the aisle. She shakes her head no, either because she wouldn’t be able to manage it or because she wants to be right where she is. 

“Is she a doctor?” The flight attendant asks. The question is directed at everyone watching, but I answer. Yes, she’s a doctor. She’s the doctor I texted late at night when my kids had a strange rash, when I had unfamiliar pain, when I couldn’t remember the correct dosage for a particular medicine. 

Becca’s hair is tied back tightly against her head, her curls smothered into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. I watch a strand come undone and fight the urge to touch it, to replace it. Minutes pass, Becca doing CPR with the full force of her slim body, pausing to check for a pulse before continuing. It’s violent and startling, the way she pounds his chest without tenderness, again and again and again, inflicting her weight on his ribcage. She looks up at me, eventually, our eyes meeting across the body of this stranger, and I see in her eyes that he is dead. 

She shakes her head imperceptibly, a signal that I read as uncertainty. Maybe she doesn’t want to stop, here, in front of his mother. Maybe she doesn’t know when to stop. There must be some protocol, but I don’t know what applies here, miles above civilization.

“Do you want me to take over?” I ask, aware of how silly this idea is. But I want to help, and I want to let go of the head of this man whose straight hair is both soft and spiky in my hands, the gel from the morning still clinging to the strands. I wonder if he has children, if he’s on his way home.

Becca shakes her head but holds eye contact with me, and another voice interrupts, a man’s voice, low and a little reluctant. “I can take over.”

We both turn towards the voice and see a slender man standing in the aisle. He’s wearing a blue button-down and wrinkled dress slacks. I wonder if he’s been here all along, silent while Becca worked. When neither of us responds, he speaks again. “I’m a physician.”

Becca glances at me before she nods, and the man steps forward, somehow moving around me rather than pushing me aside. In a low voice he speaks to her. “It’s been seventeen minutes by my count,” and I’m relieved someone’s been counting. 

“I can finish,” she says, also quiet, and I’m not surprised. This is her project now. But the old woman says, “Let him.” Becca pauses for only a moment before she nods and allows the man to squeeze into the space, a complicated dance in which his hands replace hers, and she displaces me, claiming for herself the spot where I knelt.  

And so the man, rather than Becca, calls the time of death for Doug. The man is the one who turns to the old woman and offers his condolences before moving into the aisle and allowing the flight attendants to enter the space, to ask the old woman if she would like to move to another seat. Twenty minutes, it turns out, is the amount of time a person must perform CPR before declaring a person dead.

The old woman accepts the proclamation with a flinch, and her veined hand reaches to touch his stomach, not quite reaching to his chest. He remains bent strangely, feet still planted on the ground as they were when he was living, while his head hangs slack over the edge of the seat.  

 “It’s protocol to move the passengers to empty seats.” The flight attendant is firm, authoritative, but the woman shakes her head and doesn’t remove her hand.  

“He’s my nephew. I’ll stay with him.”

They must want to protect her from the ugliness of moving a body. Two flight attendants move in, straining as they return Doug to a seated position, buckling his seat belt. Such a small journey, but they grunt with the effort. It’s surreal, something that would happen in a comedy, a body posed to look alive in the back seat of a car or strapped to the roof on a road trip. 

Over the speakers, everyone is asked to return to their seats, and we do, glad for instructions. I move into my seat near the window and Becca walks back to her seat, not looking at me.  There is silence for a couple of minutes, and then the roar of gossip, whispers floating between seatmates, ambient sound filling the air. So young. But heavy, right? A heart attack, I bet. So sad.

I unbuckle and move to row 16, kneeling again at the end of the row, looking at the woman. 

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Are you okay?”

She looks at me, and I see that she somehow does look okay. “Thank you,” she says. “He’s only forty-eight. He’s taking me to visit my sister.”

Her sister, I imagine, is his mom. His mom will arrive at the airport to this news.  I can’t think of that; I can’t contemplate such pain.

“I haven’t seen her in twenty years,” she says quietly, and I see that this, as much as anything, is weighing on her. Twenty years apart. 

“I’m sure you’ll be a comfort to her.”

The woman nods, still quiet. “Or she’ll blame me.”

“No,” I say it fast, trying to erase the thought from her mind. “How could she?”

The woman shrugs and looks out the window. “He’s such a good boy,” she says quietly, her mind back on Doug. I wait a moment before whispering, again, that I’m sorry for her loss. 

When I stand I see Becca, staring out her window, sunglasses on, though it isn’t bright outside. She’s crying, I know, and I’m flooded with memories of her tear-stained face. The morning of 9/11; after the death of her aunt, years later; her mom, sick and then gone; a child she babysat for struggling through adolescence; a high school friend killed in a crash; a boy whose heart she’d broken, the one who’d broken hers. How many times had we held each other’s sadness? How often did we absorb each other’s pain? She cried more often about indirect pain than that inflicted upon her personally. 

“Hi,” I say. I’ve somehow found my way to her seat, and she turns towards me, glasses still on. Next to her is a young man, his face splotched with acne, his t-shirt printed with an angry font for a band I’ve never heard of. He seems unsure whether to move for me or to feign invisibility, but I look past him and she looks at me, pulling her glasses down to reveal the watery blue of her eyes. 

“Hi.”

I don’t know what to say, and so I say that and she nods. “You don’t have to say anything. It’s fine.” There’s no warmth in her tone and the patient smile she forces is familiar too, a test I’ve failed a hundred times; I’ll fail again today. I stand, mute and dumb, while she puts her glasses back on, dismisses me.

Once, we sat on a couch, hysterical and scandalized by the discovery that penises point up rather than out when they grow hard. Once, we tasted beer and swapped tank tops, experimented with eyeliner, scrubbed vomit from white couches and ran from police in darkened parks. Once, we drove for hours just to pass the time, screaming to songs sung by angry girls, lyrics of heartbreak and hope, of a deep longing for all we believed we’d one day have. We whispered about people we knew, diagnosed ourselves and our families, developed preferences about food and shoes and shampoos. Once, I called her when I needed a home, and she answered and let me in. 

We were intertwined, eyes on each other as we learned what it meant to be a teenager and then an adult. It was later that our paths diverged. That we made choices that led us away from one another, decisions the other disliked. She moved to a city I would never visit. I started a family and became dull. There was no great transgression, no terrible sin. I wonder what story she tells herself that allows her to turn her back so completely. 

Now, I turn away and move the short distance to my own seat, where I pull my own sunglasses over my leaky eyes. I watch the ground rise up before me, the plane landing with a shudder, our journey over. 

I wait for Becca to leave the plane before I get off, dragging my suitcase behind me. I hold my head high as I walk through the familiar airport, scanning for her, though I still have nothing to say. Maybe we’ve said enough in this lifetime. I think of Doug, at forty-eight. Was he from here? Somewhere nearby, his mother waits for devastation. I wonder what words Doug didn’t say, what business was left unfinished. 

Music plays quietly in the corridors, but the lyrics that float through my mind are from songs from those long-ago nights with Becca. 

and so it ends, as it begins, as everything that is infinite ascends, 

into its time, all things pass, all things fade, all things last.  

Josh Joplin was the singer, I think. His words had entered our bloodstream when we were young and wide open, permeating our deepest consciousness. Did we understand the words then? Do we know now? 

I see Becca when I step to the curb. She is climbing into the front seat of a car I don’t recognize. I can’t see the driver, and I find I’m sad about this, sadder than I’ve been all day: I can’t imagine who picks her up at this airport anymore. She lives a life parallel to mine, a chasm between us I cannot cross. 

And yet, I had nothing to say when I was given the chance.  Maybe the relationship ended because it was over, no loose strings, no unspoken words. 

We come to terms, eventually, eventually. 

I watch her car pull away from the curb, surprised by the twinge of possessiveness that flashes through me. There are parts of Becca that once were mine; she still holds bits of me that I can’t get back. 

I wait for a long time before I leave the curb, threading my way through the maze of long-term parking. In the front seat of my car is a stack of library books I need to return, the favorite stories of my children Becca’s never met. The playlist that comes on when I start the car is familiar to me, the soundtrack of my life today. I raise the volume as I drive towards home.

 

Laura Mullen has been published as a regular contributor to The New York Times and in various literary journals including Pangyrus, After Dinner Conversation, Literary Mama, ContempLit and The Rome Review. She chairs the board of the literary arts organization, Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, and she is currently seeking representation for her debut novel. More of her writing can be found at www.lauramullenwrites.com.